“No. Mandelbrot would have phoned me,” Derec said, not quite truthfully, for he did feel just a shade anxious as he got out of the small vehicle. Mandelbrot and SilverSide didn't seem to understand one another. Perhaps he should not have left a robot to babysit another robot.
But everything seemed normal when they walked into the small two-bedroom apartment on the second floor. Mandelbrot was standing in his storage niche in the wall near the door. SilverSide was plugged into Derec's terminal and didn't even turn around when they came in.
“Impressive,” Wolruf said, her eyes going wide as she stared at the robot at the terminal. “ 'e's certainly got 'urrr scrawny shape.”
SilverSide's lustrous silvery exterior only approximated the details of Derec's appearance, but in size and proportions, it was, indeed, an excellent approximation.
Wolruf was exaggerating, of course. Derec was not scrawny. He was thin, but well endowed with sinewy biceps and with the hard plates of muscle across chest and abdomen typical of an older teen's torso.
But with that humorous barb, Wolruf had hit that sensitive nerve again. Derec did feel inadequate whenever he thought of Jacob Winterson.
“Everything under control, Mandelbrot?” Derec asked. He had walked to the center of the room, hesitated when SilverSide did not respond to their entrance, and then turned to address Mandelbrot.
He got no answer from the robot in the niche.
“Mandelbrot!” he repeated.
“Oh, yes, Master Derec.” SilverSide unplugged and turned to face them. “Everything is under control.”
Derec glanced at SilverSide and then turned to walk toward the niche as he said again, “Mandelbrot, you okay?”
“He's fine,” SilverSide said. “I deactivated him.”
“You what?” Derec's voice reflected his astonishment that SilverSide would have had the temerity to shut down Mandelbrot's microfusion reactor, risking partial loss of positronic memory.
“When you're not around, he tends to give me unwanted advice,” SilverSide explained. “Here, I'll bring him back up, since it apparently displeases you to have him down.”
“It does a lot more than displease me.” Derec's voice shook with anger. “And stand back, I'll reactivate him myself.”
SilverSide stopped. He had started walking toward Mandelbrot's niche.
“Don't you ever-I repeat-” and now Derec's voice was strident, grating, “don't you ever deactivate Mandelbrot again.”
“Certainly not,” SilverSide said, “if that is your wish, Master Derec.”
“That is most certainly my wish.”
“Very well, Master Derec.”
Derec had walked to the niche, and now reached around to swing open a plate set flush in Mandelbrot's back that covered a switch panel. Carefully, watching for Mandelbrot's reactions at each step, he reactivated the robot by flicking switches in a definite sequence.
Stabilizing the microfusion reactor was the most delicate part of the activation procedure and took the most time-almost half an hour. The robot's eyes were designed to guide that operation, changing color in the spectral sequence whenever it was safe to move on to the next phase-from black through purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and finally back to colorless black-Mandelbrot's switch-induced standby state.
Completely ignoring Wolruf, SilverSide had gone back to the terminal and plugged himself in again after his exchange with Derec.
Wolruf had curled up on the davenport and was fast asleep when Derec finished.
Battery backup should have provided the low power needed to protect Mandelbrot's positronic brain from serious harm, but there was always the possibility of a loss of long-term memory during the nanoseconds required to effect the switch from one power source to the other. Derec would never know until the gap revealed itself, perhaps at some juncture when that particular memory would be urgently needed.
As he pressed the power-reset button, he cursed himself for having left the two robots alone together. Mandelbrot's eyes lit up with a red glow that pulsed rhythmically.
“How do you feel now, Mandelbrot?” Derec asked.
“Normal. The wild one deactivated me. I didn't realize what he was doing until too late.”
The robot gave a small shudder.
“Was that a Third Law reaction just now?” Derec asked.
“I believe so, Master. I didn't protect myself properly as the Third Law directs. I felt a momentary disturbance upon reaching that conclusion, which must have sent an associated potential wave through my motor control system. Is that the way it appeared?”
“Yes. I just wanted to be sure that it was not some damage from deactivation,” Derec said. “Ah, Wolruf, you're awake.”
Wolruf yawned and stretched. “Mandelbrot okay?”
“It would appear so, except for a normal Third Law reaction,” Derec replied.
“It looks ass though anotherrr imprinting may not be ass likely ass 'u 'ad thought,” Wolruf observed.
The small hairy alien was looking at SilverSide, who was hunched over the terminal and seemingly absorbed in the information that was flowing into his brain.
“SilverSide has apparently put you down as an inferior,” Derec replied, “a variation on this planet's wolf species.”
“That was my conclusion,” SilverSide said as he unplugged and swung around in the swivel chair to face them, “and I have been unable to find any 'Wolruf' biographical file or anything to contradict that conclusion.
“Would you tell me all about yourself, Mistress Wolruf?” SilverSide requested.
“No!” Derec said emphatically. “Not now. Plug back into the library. The rest of us have got some things we must take care of now.”
SilverSide turned back to the terminal, and Derec motioned for the other two to follow him outside.
When they were standing by the runabout at street level, Derec explained.
“As I suggested to you earlier, Wolruf, he's coming along too fast now. Deactivating Mandelbrot confirmed that in my mind. 1'd consider that a violation of a sort of corollary to the Third Law. How does a robot view that, Mandelbrot?”
“The Laws are not infinitely rigid,” Mandelbrot said. “They are surrounded by side potentials that create what I can only call soft boundaries, foothill potentials that lead to the ultimate peak. The First Law has the hardest and sharpest boundaries of all, but even so, those boundaries are not absolutely and infinitely sharp.”
“Are you saying he violated the Third Law?” Derec asked.
“No, but he did something I would never do except to protect a human or myself.”
“Maybe 'e was protecting 'imself from 'urn ideass, Mandelbrot,” Wolruf said.
“Not likely,” Mandelbrot said. “I do not consider words and ideas to be a source of injury to a robot.”
“But he is in a very sensitive and impressionable state right now,” Derec said. “And that's another reason I want to get him out of the city and back to the forest where I found him, where he's apt to be more comfortable and less perturbed by strange stimuli.
“We'll take the runabout to the east exit and walk the rest of the way. It's only a couple of miles to the place I have in mind; there's a small grassy clearing in the forest near a clear pebbly brook-very peaceful and quiet. You and the wild one can trot along behind until we get to the east exit, Mandelbrot. Then we'll all walk.”
“Very well, Master Derec. Shall I get the tent and other Survival gear from the storage locker?”
“Yes.”
Derec could not remember his childhood. He knew that somehow it must have been different from that of other children on Aurora, for he did not have the natural feel and easy, confident way of handling robots that was so much a part of a normal Spacer's personality, something acquired beginning in earliest childhood. In all the nurseries and homes, robots were the only nannies to be found. On Aurora, for instance, the closest any adult ever got to a child was the human who supervised the nursery nannies.
Had he been raised by a human nanny, maybe even his own mother? Had that been a still earlier experiment of his eccentric father, Dr. Avery? Derec knew in intimate technical detail how robots worked-he was an expert roboticist-but he did not have that natural insight into the positronic brain that almost all Auroran children had by the age of five.