Phule sat and fiddled with his Port-a-Brain. He’d called up the data on Old Earth, the next stop in his search for Beeker and Laverna. It felt as if the search had been stretching out for months, now-although he knew it couldn’t be that long. Travel by starship was always disorienting, of course, and strange things could happen to time when you ducked through the shortcuts between distant stars. It was widely rumored that a space traveler sometimes arrived at his destination after several hyperspace jumps, placed a call to the home office back on the planet he’d started from, and found himself answering his own call…
Phule had never heard of a documented case of someone arriving back home before he left, although old space hands were always ready to tell tales to groundlings. Phule didn’t like to think about it. All he really wanted was to find his missing butler and get him to hand over the Port-a-Brain. He knew there was a chance he might lose the butler’s trail, and the security chip would throw him into hibernation.
Phule leaned back and sighed, then punched a fist softly into his cupped hand. Time to face reality. Old Earth was going to be his last stop. He’d put all the time and money and energy at his command into the job.
A confident grin came to his face. He wasn’t going to give up the game without putting on a good show. He had more resources on this world than anywhere else he’d been so far-in fact, Old Earth was one of the centers of the family munitions business. Normally, he tried not to take undue advantage of his family connections. But this wasn’t a normal situation-not after he’d searched three planets without so much as a sight of his butler. First thing off the ship, he’d call the local offices of Phule-Pruf Munitions and see what they could do to shorten his search. Unless there’d been unusual friction between the branch office and the community, a request for help from a well-established local business ought to carry some weight with the authorities. What else? He’d need to find somebody with the local knowledge to expedite his search-looking back, he had to admit that the various “native guides” he’d picked up on the other worlds he’d visited hadn’t been a whole lot of help. Here, at least, there was a family member in charge of the local branch office of Phule-Pruf Munitions. He hadn’t seen his uncle in years, but Phule knew without asking that the fellow had to be more reliable than Buck Short or Perry Sodden…
He realized with a start that there had only been one really reliable person in his entire life-good old Beeker, who despite his ill-concealed disapproval of Phule’s behavior on many occasions, had always been there with sound advice and an unfailing fund of practical know-how in the most surprisingly diverse areas. The real irony was that Phule was trying to find his one reliable servant-and falling on his face because he didn’t have anyone reliable to help him in the search! If only he could call on Beeker to help him find Beeker…
In fact, there was a way-or at least in theory there was a way. Unfortunately, it depended entirely on Beeker’s being willing to give up the mad pursuit and come back to his employer. Right here on the Port-a-Brain was a direct link to Beeker’s corresponding machine, which Phule could punch up to send a near-instant message to his absent employee from halfway across the galaxy.
It had one significant shortcoming: There was no way to force Beeker to pay attention to messages he didn’t want to read. In fact, Phule thought, even Beeker might be reluctant to take time on his vacation to read a message from his boss. So until Beeker decided he wanted to hear from his employer, paging him was going to be about as effective as attaching a paper note to a bird’s wings and asking it to deliver it to someone on another planet.
Phule sighed. He’d promised himself he wasn’t going to get sidetracked by pessimism. Not that it was all that easy-especially times like now, when it seemed like the only sane attitude to have…
“What’s wrong with hi- er, it?” asked Gears, looking at the Andromatic robot simulacrum of Phule. In the absence of Sushi, the company’s closest thing to a computer expert, Lieutenants Rembrandt and Armstrong had decided that Gears might be their best bet for a diagnosis of the robot’s problem. At least, Gears was good with other kinds of machines…
“Hit on the forehead with a golf ball,” said Armstrong. “There’s no visible damage, but then it started acting strangely.”
“And in this outfit, how’d you notice?” said Gears, with enough of a straight face that Armstrong nearly answered him. “Seriously, though, what’s it acting like? Maybe that’ll give me some kind of clue. Although it’d be nice to have a schematic of this baby’s brain.”
“If the captain ever had a schematic, it’s probably back at the casino offices on Lorelei,” said Rembrandt. “But to answer your question, the best way to describe the problem is, the robot’s trying to do everything by the book, the way General Blitzkrieg wants the company run. It’s acting just like that Major Botchup they sent to run the company the last time the captain was away.”
“Whoa, that’s scary,” said Gears. His face turned serious, and he said, “I hate to tell you this, Lieutenant, but I’m afraid this robot’s broke.”
“You’re kidding,” said Armstrong.
“No, really, it’s pretty messed up,” said Gears.
“All right, I believe you, Gears,” said Rembrandt. “Question is, can you fix it so the general can’t tell?-and I mean really fast?”
Gears shrugged. “Robot repair’s a real specialized field. I guess I know my way around the innards of a hoverjeep about as well as anybody in the Legion. I’m not going to tell nobody otherwise. If you want me to fix something else… well, no promises. Maybe Sushi could figure out what’s wrong with it, if he was around. But if this was my robot, I wouldn’t even open the cover. I’d send it right back to the factory. These Andromatic models are supposed to come with lifetime guarantees, I hear tell. You know Captain Jester always buys the best.“
“Yeah, too bad the factory’s a couple dozen parsecs away,” said Armstrong, drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair. “How about a quick fix? It just has to keep working until the general goes away…”
“Which he isn’t showing any signs of doing, thanks to all the golf matches,” said Rembrandt. “You’d think he’d get tired of the game.”
“He enjoys beating the captain,” said Armstrong, shrugging. “The robot, really, but the general doesn’t know that. Actually, I think the general’s spent so long thinking of Captain Jester as the adversary that winning-and taking a bit of the captain’s money, as well-is a special treat, even if it’s only a game.”
“Makes sense,” admitted Rembrandt, frowning. “But wait a minute… what if the robot started winning all the time?‘
“Well, the robot has been winning, every now and then,” said Armstrong. “Just enough to keep the general from figuring out it’s letting him win the matches.” He gave the robot a long stare, then said, “I’m not sure just what it’s likely to do now. Today it started playing like a world champion. The general’s not going to appreciate that. So we’ve got to fix it…”
“Yeah,” said Rembrandt. “The question is, can we?”
It took Major Sparrowhawk about three milliseconds to notice that General Blitzkrieg was boiling mad. It didn’t take a lot of thought; he pretty much gave it away when he burst in the door, bellowed out a string of curses, and threw his golf bag halfway across the office they’d been assigned on Zenobia Base.
Sparrowhawk wasn’t upset. She’d seen her boss in that condition plenty of times before. Some might even argue that it was the general’s normal mood. Whether it was or not, he’d been in an abnormally pleasant state for nearly two weeks.