So: eventually they would be found and rescued.
Wolruf finished her meal by opening her bowl and licking it clean efficiently. “I wass thinking,” she said. “Maybe Jump-wave shock shifted things in ‘ou’rr hyperwave antenna.”
“Shifted the elements?” Derec nodded uncertainly. He had no idea where he had been educated, but he had a good general technical background with a strong specialty in robotics-not unusual for a Spacer youth, as he assumed himself to be. But hyperwave technology was a whole other and, if anything, even more difficult school of knowledge.
“Do ‘ou have-’ou know-things to measure them with?”
Derec had seen a toolbox on the ship’s schematic that he had accessed before going out to set up the recycling system…There might be.”
There was. A few minutes later, with Ariel listless at the detectors and Wolruf at the communicator, Derec carefully strode forward outside, followed by Mandelbrot.
The hyperwave antenna could have been put in any part of the ship, since the hyperatomo didn’t kowtow to the laws of space-time, but it would have had to have been well shielded lest its backlash in the small ship damage the instruments. or even the crew. So in these Star Seeker models it was in a blister on the bow, as far from everything as possible.
The antenna looked like a series of odd-shaped chunks of metal and coils of wire, and the testing gear simply shot current through each element in turn. The readouts were within normal range, as nearly as he could tell from the manual he had accessed before coming out.
“I don’t get it,” Derec complained, thinking of the classical definition of Helclass="underline" the place where all the instruments test out to be perfect, but none of them work. “How can I fix it if it isn’t broken?”
“I think,” said Wolruf slowly, “that Dr. Avery hass retuned the antenna. “
“Retuned?” Derec had never heard of such a thing, but knew little about the subject. “I thought all Spacer talk was in the same range. Is he trying to pick up-Settlers? Or what?”
“Maybe Aranimass.”
Maybe,Derec thought, chilled. Maybe, indeed. That long-armed pirate was definitely interested in Dr. Avery’s doings, though he might not know who or what Dr. Avery was.
Derec stood, looking around the warm room generated by Kappa Whale, and shivered. For the first time the thought came to him: What if the first ship that showed up was Aranimas’s? He must be systematically searching the beacon stars -
A touch on his arm nearly made Derec jump off the hull.
Chapter 2. Perihelion
The burnished, enigmatic face of Mandelbrot approached his. The robot gripped him with his normal left arm. His Avery-construct right arm bent impossibly, reached around Derec and switched off his communicator.
Derec had had nightmares about that arm. It was a piece of scrap from an Avery robot, which Aranimas had had picked up from the ice asteroid where Derec had first awakened. “Build me a robot,” the alien had said. Derec had put pieces together to build the robot he called Alpha. It wasn’t a good job, but it worked.
Then, weeks later, the crudely attached right arm seated itself firmly and made a few modifications in Alpha’s brain: Alpha informed them that he was now known as Mandelbrot. Derec had observed the fine structure of the arm: a series of tiny chips, or scales, that gripped each other and could therefore mold the arm to any shape that might be desired.
Each unit was a sort of robotic cell; together, they were a brain. And having integrated themselves, they had-to a degree-taken over Alpha. Derec’s nightmare was that the cells were eating the robot out from the inside, that his interior was one solid mass of them, and he was about to become something -horrifying.
Impossible; the cells couldn’t eat. Also, all the brains were robotic, Mandelbrot’s normal positronic brain and the units in the cells. The Three Laws compelled them all. But dreams are not logical.
At the moment, the worst nightmare had come true, until Mandelbrot put his head against Derec’s helmet. It would have looked to an observer as if the robot were kissing his cheek: his microphone touched Derec’s helmet and Mandelbrot spoke.
“Derec, I am worried about Ariel.”
They had been careful to conceal from Mandelbrot the worst of Ariel’s condition. The robot knew only that she was sick, not that the disease was usually fatal. The effect on his positronic brain was more than they cared to risk; the First Law left no loophole for incurable diseases.
“Ariel is bored, as well as ill,” Derec said.
He looked away uneasily from the robot’s expressionless but intense face. The stars beckoned, promising and threatening; somewhere out there, perhaps, he might recover his memory. He remembered Jeff Leong, who had crashed on Robot City after an accident while on his way to college. In a few years, Derec would have been thinking about college, if this fantastic thing hadn’t happened to him.
“Ariel is very sick,” said Mandelbrot. “Her eating pattern has altered markedly. She suffers from fever most of the time. Her attention span is abnormally low, she is sensitive to light, she moves about only with effort-”
“All right,” said Derec, feeling that he would ossify before the robot finished its catalog if he didn’t interrupt. “It’s true that Ariel is ill. But I am not worried about her.”
That wasn’t true, especially now that it had been brought out into the open.
“You should worry. I fear for her safety if something is not done for her.”
“What do you suggest we do?”
“You may have to use the Key to Perihelion.”
After scouring Robot City for weeks for a Key to Perihelion, the mysterious device that would transport them instantly off the planet, they had managed to steal Dr. Avery’s ship when he had come to investigate their “interference.” On the ship they had found the Key, but Derec’s investigation of Dr. Avery’s office had shown him where the Key would probably take him.
Derec said, “That would take us back to Robot City-with no way of escape and Dr. Avery after us. Surely that’s less safe than this mild illness.”
Mandelbrot was silent for a moment. Then he said, “That is true. I hope you are right and that this is a mild illness. But she has suffered many of these symptoms for many days now. Mild illnesses usually subside within this time.”
The robot fell silent but did not move away.
“‘Ou might as well come back in,” said Wolruf, startling Derec. “I do not think we can find the problem out therre. I wish I knew more about dense energy fieldss…”
Derec turned, and at his first motion the robot released him, first turning his communicator back on. The motion was as much an indicator of Derec’s will as a command, and the Second Law of Robotics forced the robot to comply with his desire.
“Right, I’m coming back,” Derec said, as if there had been no hiatus in their communications.
He returned reluctantly. There was free-fall within the cabin-and three times as much space as there had been under acceleration-but there were decks and bulkheads and overheads. Out here he was in his element. It was like floating in warm salt water. Even the cumbersome suit didn’t detract from the feeling of freedom he got from letting his gaze rove out and on out, from star to ever-more-distant star. All of them waiting, just beyond this red-lit room.
Stars beyond stars, with their waiting worlds, which now only the Earth Settlers were opening up. And beyond, other intelligent races, other adventures…A member of one of those races waited now in the ship. Derec had again a moment of intense wonder that he of all people should be among the first to meet aliens. Most of those who had met the pirate Aranimas hadn’t survived…