The Sun was well up as they came within hailing distance of the Navy Yard.
Robots were hard at work; the Yard was bustling with activity. An overhead traveling crane, eight feet tall, laboriously lowered a prefabricated fighting top onto an 11-foot aircraft carrier.
A motor torpedo boat—full-sized, this one was, not to scale —rocked at anchor just before the bow of their launch. Kadiryn steered around it, ignoring the hail from the robot lieutenant-j.g. at its rail.
She glanced at Garrick over her shoulder, her face taut. "It's—it's all mixed up."
Garrick nodded. The battleships were model-sized, the small boats full-scale. In the city beyond the Yard, the pinnacle of the Empire State Building barely cleared the Pentagon, right next door. A soaring suspension bridge leaped out from the shore a quarter of a mile away and stopped short a thousand yards out, over empty water.
It was easy to understand—even for a psychist just out of school, on his first real assignment. Trumie was trying to run a world singlehanded, and where there were gaps in his conception of what his world should be, the results showed.
"Get me battleships!" he ordered his robot supply clerks, and they found the only battleships there were in the world to copy, the child-sized, toy-scaled play battleships that still delighted kids.
"Get me an Air Force!" And a thousand model bombers were hastily put together.
"Build me a bridge!" But perhaps he had forgotten to say to where.
Garrick shook his head and focused on the world around him. Kathryn Pender was standing on a gray steel stage, the mooring line from their launch secured to what looked like a coast defense cannon—but only about four feet long. Garrick picked up the little box and leaped up to the stage beside her. She turned to look at the city.
"Hold on a second." He was opening the box, taking out two little cardboard placards. He turned her by the shoulder and, with pins from the box, attached one of the cards to her back. "Now me," he said, turning his back to her.
She read the placard dubiously:
I AM A SPY!
"Garrick," she said, "you're sure you know what you're doing?"
"Put it on!" She shrugged and pinned it to the back of his jacket.
Side by side, they entered the citadel of the enemy.
According to the fisherman robot, Trumie lived in a gingerbread castle south of the Pentagon. Most of the robots got no chance to enter it. The city outside the castle was Trumie's kingdom, and he roamed about it, overseeing, changing, destroying, rebuilding. But inside the castle was his Private
Place; the only robots that had both an inside- and outside-the-castle existence were the two bodyguards of his youth, Davey Crockett and Long John Silver.
'That," said Garrick, "must be the Private Place."
It was decidedly a gingerbread castle. The "gingerbread" was stonework, gargoyles, and columns; there were a moat and a drawbridge, and there were robot guards with crooked little rifles, wearing scarlet tunics and fur shakos three feet tall. The drawbridge was up and the guards stood at stiff attention.
"Let's reconnoiter," said Garrick. He was unpleasantly conscious of the fact that every robot they passed—and they had passed thousands—had turned to look at the signs on their backs.
Yet it was right, wasn't it? There was no hope of avoiding observation in any event. The only hope was to fit somehow into the pattern—and spies would certainly be a part of the military pattern.
Wouldn't they?
Garrick turned his back on doubts and led the way around the gingerbread palace.
The only entrance was the drawbridge.
They stopped out of sight of the ramrod-sdff guards. Garrick said: "We'll go in. As soon as we get inside, you put on your costume." He handed her the box. "You know what to do. All you have to do is keep him quiet for a while and let me talk to him."
"Garrick, will this work?"
Garrick exploded: "How the devil do I know? I had Trumie's dossier to work with. I know everything that happened to him when he was a kid—when this trouble started. But to reach him takes a long time, Kathryn. And we don't have a long time. So—"
He took her elbow and marched her toward the guards. "So you know what to do," he said.
"I hope so," breathed Kathryn Pender, looking very small and very young.
They marched down the wide white pavement, past the motionless guards—
Something was coming toward them. Kathryn held back.
"Come on!" Garrick muttered.
"No, look!" she whispered. "Is that—is that Trumie?"
He looked, then stared.
It was Trumie, larger than life. It was Anderson Trumie, the entire human population of the most-congested-island-for-its-population in the world. On one side of him was a tall dark figure, on the other side a squat dark figure, helping him along. His face was horror, drowned in fat. The bloated cheeks shook damply, wet with tears. The eyes squinted out with fright on the world he had made.
Trumie and his bodyguards rolled up to them and past. And then Anderson Trumie stopped.
He turned the blubbery head and read the sign on the back of the girl. I AM A SPY. Panting heavily, clutching the shoulder of the Crockett robot, he gaped wildly at her.
Garrick cleared his throat. This far his plan had gone, and then there was a gap. There had to be a gap. Trumie's history, in the folder that Roosenburg had supplied, had told him what to do with Trumie; and Garrick's own ingenuity had told him how to reach the man. But a link was missing. Here was the subject, and here was the psychist who could cure him, and it was up to Garrick to start the cure.
Trumie cried out in a staccato bleat: "You! What are you? Where do you belong?"
He was talking to the girl. Beside him, the Crockett robot murmured: "Reckon she's a spy, Mistuh Trumie. See thet sign a-hangin' on her back?"
"Spy? Spy?" The quivering lips pouted. "Curse you, are you Mata Hari? What are you doing out here? It's changed its face," Trumie complained to the Crockett robot. "It doesn't belong here. It's supposed to be in the harem. Go on, Crockett, get her back!"
"Wait!" said Garrick, but the Crockett robot was ahead of him. It took Kathryn Pender by the arm.
"Come along thar," it said soothingly, and urged her across the drawbridge. She glanced back at Garrick, and for a moment it looked as though she were going to speak. Then she shook her head, as if giving an order.
"Kathryn!" yelled Garrick. "Trumie, wait a minute! That isn't Mata Hari!"
No one was listening. Kathryn Pender disappeared into the Private Place. Trumie, leaning heavily on the hobbling Long John Silver robot, followed.
Garrick, coming back to life, leaped after them.
The scarlet-coated guards jumped before him, their shakos bobbing, their crooked little rifles crossed to bar his way.
He ordered: "One side! Out of my way! I'm a human, don't you understand? You've got to let me pass!"
They didn't even look at him; trying to get by them was like trying to walk through a wall of moving, thrusting steel. He shoved and they pushed him back; he tried to dodge and they were before him. It was hopeless.
And then it was hopeless indeed, because behind them, he saw, the drawbridge had gone up.
VI
Sonny Trumie collapsed into a chair like a mound of blubber falling to the deck of a whaler.
Though he made no signal, the procession of serving robots started at once. In minced the maitre d', bowing and waving its graceful hands. In marched the sommelier, clanking its necklace of keys, bearing its wines in their buckets of ice. In came the lovely waitress robots and the sturdy steward robots, with the platters and tureens, the plates and bowls and cups.