“Prohibition from who? Who’s in charge here? And who’d he send the message to?”
“I may not-”
“-reveal any information about your mission here, yes.” Grimacing, Derec closed his eyes and tried to shut out the world.
“Are you ill?” Monitor 5 asked, concerned.
“No,” Derec said in an unsteady voice. “I’m just back to square one again, that’s all.”
Chapter 5. Reply
Dispirited, Derec retreated to the E-cell, his illusion of being even partially in control of his own fate destroyed. There was no chance of his reconstructing the pod himself. He might leave the community using one of the augmented worksuits, but there was no way he could leave the asteroid. It seemed that all he could do was stay out of the robots’ way and wait for whoever Analyst 17 had signalled to respond.
As though the robots had decided that he needed something to keep him occupied and safely out of their way, Derec found the wardroom com center unlocked and displaying the word “READY.” When Derec touched the “Help” key, a short menu popped up on the screen. It offered him a choice between something called Scratchpad and a library index.
Scratchpad proved to be a cross between a notebook and an engineer’s sketch pad. He amused himself for a while with its graphics capabilities by drawing a map of the part of the complex he knew firsthand. The system made it easy for him, converting his unsteady movements with the tracer into straight lines, copying duplicate sections, performing fills and rotations.
When drawing deteriorated into doodling, Derec shifted mental gears and decided to make a diary of what had happened since he had awoken in the pod. But his first entry was self-conscious and self-indulgent, and he ended his log with a short sarcastic note:
Dear Mom,
I got no friends here. Can I come home?
Embarrassed by his own self-pity, Derec purged the Scratchpad memory and pushed his chair away from the terminal. But the terrible feeling of separateness which underlay the thought was not so easily banished. Without family, friends, an ally of any sort, Derec’s little world was a lonely place.
The book-film library was Derec’s last defense against maudlin thoughts. Scanning the directory, he was struck by the unusual mix of entries. There was a whole subdirectory of texts from Earth’s Classical Age, including a few whose authors or titles Derec was intrigued to discover he recognized: Lucretius’De Rerum Natura, Newton’sPrincipia, Darwin’sThe Origin of Species.
Another large subdirectory consisted of architectural drawings and photographs. Again, a few names struck chords in Derec’s memory-Mies van der Rohe, Buckminster Fuller, Frank Lloyd Wright. But when he asked the system to sample those files at one image every few seconds, he found the images were of places that he could not remember ever being and structures he could not remember seeing. It left him wondering why he knew the names in the first place.
Conspicuously absent was any sort of current technical reference on such topics as microelectronics, robotics, process design, and the like. Derec assumed that they were in a separate technical library not available to him.
But there were other sections which under other circumstances would probably have appealed to him-a biography of robotics pioneer Susan Calvin;Genesis, Marvin Eller’s anecdotal history of twentieth-century computer science; a screenful of titles on astronomy and astrography.
But Derec was not interested in being educated, or in anything that required thinking. He wanted to be a spectator to someone else’s problems, to disengage his mind and surrender himself to the spell of the storyteller.
Yet when he turned to the fiction subdirectory, he found the pickings sparse. Aside from a few interactive mysteries and a half-dozen text novels, all of which would require too much work on his part, Derec’s choice was limited to the world of theater.Faust,Waiting for Godot,Daedalus and Icarus,Sweeney Todd -the titles meant nothing to Derec. But Shakespeare he knew, and Shakespeare was well represented on the list.
Feeling a need for laughter, Derec chose the comedyA Midsummer Night’s Dream. Then he retreated to a comfortable chair, propped his feet up on the conference table, and let the recording carry him away to ancient Greece, to a woods near the city of Athens, where hemight amuse himself with the love-crossed confusion of human and fairy kings, and the pranks of the devilish sprite Puck.
“Up and down, up and down,” Puck vowed. “I will lead them up and down. I am feared in field and town. Goblin, lead them up and down-”
In the middle of Puck’s declamation, Derec heard the unmistakable sound of the inner door of the airlock opening. He came to his feet as a Supervisor entered the wardroom and crossed toward the com center.
“What do you want?” Derec demanded, following.
The robot ignored Derec. “Priority interrupt,” the robot said to the com center. The screen went black and the speakers silent.
The robot’s fingers flew over the keypad in a blur, but nothing appeared on the screenexcept the instruction PROCEED.
Without hesitation, the robot began to hammer at the keys again. Even standing only an arm’s length away, Derec had no clue to what the robot was entering. The steady staccato of keyclicks lasted perhaps twenty seconds-three or four hundred characters. Then the robot raised his hand and stepped back.
MESSAGE TRANSMITTED, the screen acknowledged.
“Resume,” the robot said, and turned to go.
“Cancel,” Derec said, moving quickly to place his body between the robot and the door. “Identify yourself.”
“I am Analyst 9.”
“What’s happening? What did you just do?”
“Please stand aside,” Analyst 9 said. “I have urgent duties elsewhere.”
“The last time one of you was in here, it was to send a distress message. What’s up now? Is aship here? Is that it? I have a right to know what’s going on-”
For an answer, Analyst 9 raised his arm and pushed Derec firmly out of the way. He stumbled back toward the conference table and sat down hard in one of the chairs.
“Do not interfere,” the Supervisor said, and left the room.
Though his shock at the robot’s physical treatment of him slowed him for an instant, Derec scrambled to his feet and followed.
Out in the chamber, Derec found frenzied activity bordering on chaos. Dozens of porter and picker robots were streaming off the lifts, as if some massive exodus were underway. Scores more were scurrying through the aisles gathering up components and carrying them toward the west wall and the recycling smelter located there.
To Derec’s astonishment, instead of depositing what they held and turning back to get more, the pickers and porters queued up at the smelter carried their burdens directly into the heart of the smelter and never appeared again. For some reason, the robots were systematically destroying selected items in their storehouse-and themselves at the same time.
Distracted by the parade of suicidal robots, Derec had lost track of Analyst 9. Now, as he scanned the chamber to try to find it, he saw something else extraordinary. There were no Supervisors anywhere in the warehouse. The various manufacturing centers were standing silent and abandoned.
On a hunch, Derec fought his way through to the lift and commandeered a platform to carry him up to Level Zero. There he found a gathering of twenty Supervisors. They were standing motionless in a circle, with hands linked as though in some sort of direct conference.
They took no notice of his arrival, and so Derec crossed the room to where two other Supervisors sat at the giant command console.
“Monitor 5?”
“Yes, Derec,” one of the robots said with a nod of acknowledgment.
“Can you tell me what’s happening?”