He scanned the room. “I see no container of any kind.”
“Then we will carry them on this desk.”
“Eve, they could falloff.”
“We will walk slowly.”
Only Avery saw them carry the desk slowly through the city streets. He hadn’t usually paid much attention to furniture-moving robots on Spacer planets. With their strength and meticulous sense of caution, they were expert at it, able to keep their load level, never bumping the item against anything, and delivering it undamaged.
It seemed to him that robots regularly performed miracles, as a matter of course. In fact, he thought, only robots could perform miracles nowadays. Whatever capacity humans may have had for such feats was long gone.
The more he watched robots in general, the more he knew he needed to become one. And he would. He could feel himself transform more and more into a robot as the days went by. He had convinced himself there were microprocessors in all his limbs and that his senses were now controlled by sensory circuits. All he needed was the positronic brain. That would come, he was sure. He would find a way to turn the inefficient lump in his head to a perfectly functioning, spongelike, positronic entity.
In a dim back part of his mind, he recalled an old Earth story where a primitive robot had wanted a human heart put inside his body so he could be more human. Of course, he really wanted human emotion. a useless prize if there ever was one, Avery thought. The story was so vague in his memory that he could not remember whether the robot had gotten a heart. Probably it had. Earth stories could be dreadfully sentimental about such things. (He did not. of course, know it. but Timestep could dance a musical number from a film adaptation of that story. And Bogie could have told him how the tale came out.)
As Avery moved closer to the desk-toting robots, he noticed the living creatures cowering at the center of the desktop. They seemed puzzled by the city, as if they thought they had passed over into another dimension.
His excitement grew as he saw how nicely formed these tiny humans or androids were. They might be just the experimental rats he needed. The body he’d taken from the vacant lot had been too decayed by the time he’d carried it to his laboratory several levels beneath the city.
He had been able to put it through only a few tests before discarding it. Under a microscope-scanner he saw that a simple microchip had been implanted in its brain and that there appeared to be patterns of circuitry that might control the body’s movements, the way a puppetmaster gave false life to the wooden figures attached to strings.
However, nothing was conclusive. The creatures did not appear all that robotic, either. He suspected they had been genetically engineered, then activated by the implanted technology. At any rate, he was certain they were not actual laboratory-grown humans. No, they were more like dolls, formed from genetic materials but given a kind of life through robotic means. It was even possible they had a minimal awareness.
He had to find more specimens and had been seeking them out when he saw Derec’s odd robots taking that desk down a Robot City street. The runty creatures on the desktop were the specimens he needed.
The robots were of special interest to him, also. He had recognized immediately, when he saw them back at the vacant lot, that they had not been constructed from his own designs. They were definitely not Avery robots. Where had they come from, and whose design were they?
Avery nearly laughed from happiness. (Derec would certainly have been surprised to know that his father could actually laugh.) There was much to study here, and he was never happier than when he was engaged in theorizing or conducting experiments.
Watching Avery watch the robots (who, in this chain of spying, were keeping a close watch on their diminutive charges), the Watchful Eye was puzzled by the new turn of events. How, it wondered, did Avery keep appearing from out of nowhere? He seemed to have an uncommon knowledge of the labyrinthine routes through the city and particularly of the hiding places that removed him from the Watchful Eye’s surveillance.
And why were the new arrivals carrying a desk? And what were the experimental subjects (from Series C, Batch 21) doing on top of the desk?
Too many mysteries, too much disorder.
It seemed as if Derec and his cohorts had, since their arrival in Robot City, thrown much of what the Watchful Eye had done into confusion. They had, in fact, become a serious threat to his domain. It believed it should just eliminate them -but it could not. That was also a mystery to it. What was it that held it back from simply disposing of the intruders?
It sometimes appeared that it, too, had to respond to the demands of First Law, just the way a robot might. But it could not be a robot, it was sure of that. Robots could not do what it could do. Also, it knew it was different from the so-called humans who were now interfering with his design. It could not be a human, either.
There was a sound outside the computer chamber. It reassembled itself and waited for Derec to enter.
Chapter 11. Counterpoints
Ariel slammed her fist against the keyboard, making it bounce and slide backward. “There’s no help in this Frosted computer,” she yelled. “It isn’t functioning any better than anything else around here.”
Wolruf, who had been reacquainting herself with the layout of the medical facility, studying scanning systems and trays of medical instruments, came to Ariel and asked, “Iss something wrrong?”
Her gentle tone and phrasing calmed Ariel down. Wolruf’s kindness, as well as her directness, would always make her a good friend.
“Something’s wrong, all right. I ask this computer for suggestions on how to treat Avery, and it tells me to give him two aspirins and put him to bed.”
Wolruf squinted at the screen. “Doess it rreally rrecommend that? Perhapss-”
“No, Wolruf, it didn’t say that in so many words. It’s just that no matter how hard I try to track a hypothesis, the computer leads me to a dead end or loops me back to some sector I’ve already seen. All of its essential information has apparently been cached away somewhere in inaccessible data banks.”
Ariel was about to turn back to the computer and fight the damned machine again when an abrupt sound from outside the room startled her. Wolruf’s head turned toward the noise.
“What was that?” Ariel said, standing up, looking around for a weapon to use to repel invasion.
“Someone iss outside,” Wolruf said, wrinkling her nose.
The noises on the other side of the door did sound something like footsteps, Ariel thought, but of someone moving very slowly and with a very heavy tread. She nodded to Wolruf, signalling her to open the door while Ariel moved to the other side, ready to react to an attack if it came.
When the door opened, it revealed a somewhat bent Adam Silverside, his back to the room, his arms clutching his end of a desk that would have sold for a pretty penny back on Aurora. Ariel had seen one like it in her mother’s home, and Juliana Welsh bought only the most expensive items. Her money went into self-indulgent luxuries or to finance fanatics with crazy schemes, like Dr. Avery and his grand city-forming experiment.
As Ariel went to the doorway, she saw Eve on the other end of the desk, standing straight on a lower stair and holding her end of the piece of furniture aloft. They smoothly eased the desk into the room and gently set it on the floor. For the first time Ariel saw the group of tiny people on the desk’s surface.
“Where’d you find these?” she asked. Eve told her about her adventures in exploring the city.