"Al-lo?" he shouted. The gun strap slapped against his thigh as he re-gripped the weapon more firmly. Laura rose to her feet to follow, and her chair scraped noisily along the floor.
The soldier spun toward her, raising the gun but quickly turning back to the empty room. He wasn't just ill at ease; he was coiled and ready for danger. Laura wondered what kind of briefing he'd gotten from Hoblenz or what rumors were going around among the troops.
She wound her way among the tables. There was no sign of any disturbance. The trays were all piled neatly in their racks by the cafeteria line. There was no trash on the tables — no overturned cups, no chairs lying on their backs, no sign of any hasty flight.
Laura took up a position just behind the soldier. Her ears were now clear, but the cavern was deathly silent. There were several passageways out of the cafeteria — each dark, each menacing. All, she noticed, were much taller than the tallest human.
"Whoo!" the soldier shouted into a cupped hand. There was no echo, but the booming sound of his shout in the enclosed space served to remind Laura where she was. Just how deep underground she was, and how thick the black stone walls around her were.
"Down here!" came a distant call. The soldier turned to Laura and flicked his head toward the corridor from which they'd heard a reply.
They passed vending machines. Then came a large white board on which were posted a hodgepodge of messages, notices about [unclear], and new manual updates. Laura stopped in front of one notice. It was bordered by a red box and handwritten in crisp, feminine penmanship, "Does anyone have a kite? 1.3.04 wants one. Kate M."
"Don't fall behind," the soldier snapped, and Laura hurried down the corridor to catch up.
Their footsteps on the flat concrete floor were soundless. The hallway was featureless save the several doors they passed that had been cut into the rough stone walls. Most were normal human-head-height and labeled with words like "Authorized Personnel Only" or "Danger! High Voltage." Some, however, were larger. Like garage doors, they were composed of folding panels. On the push of some unseen button, they would rise into the walls above and reveal… What? Laura wondered.
The sounds of life drifted faintly down the corridor from up ahead. They were the normal voices of people at work. The soldier reslung the gun over his shoulder.
When they rounded a bend in the tunnel, another cavern opened up before them. A half dozen lab-coated technicians sat or stood about a large and messy work area. The room was bounded by the walls of the corridor on one side and three sets of large windows on the other. One window was brightly lit, another dim, the third dark. The corridor led on, but the soldier and Laura had arrived at their destination.
Dr. Griffith stood behind two of the seated technicians. He looked up and said "Oh!" on seeing Laura and her escort. Every one of the dozen or so busy people, Laura noticed, also turned to look their way. Some twisted around in their chairs, both hands gripping the armrests in tense and watchful poses. But all quickly relaxed and resumed their work. The new arrivals were human.
"Look out for the cables," Griffith said as he wove his way through the maze of consoles to greet Laura. They had rigged up some sort of temporary control room, and there were easily twice as many workstations as there were people. Laura watched one of the techs roll from console to console without getting up from his chair.
It appeared they were working two or more jobs at once.
"Sorry about all the mess," Griffith said, smiling broadly. "We've sort of consolidated our work group here. Come on. Let me introduce you to the team."
He led her carefully across the room, stopping her at each of the cables to ensure she stepped safely over. She shook hands with the men and women of the cavern, who were friendly and talkative and hospitable. They seemed as glad to make contact with the outside world as Laura had been to find them.
When the introductions were finished, Laura's attention was drawn to a monitor. A Model Eight moved slowly across a room.
The floor and walls were white and antiseptic, but everywhere was strewn the debris of crushed and broken household objects. A coffeemaker lay on its side. The tattered remains of a lampshade sat tenuously atop a large clock. Torn clothes and twisted cookware and the shards of less resilient goods lay in random piles all about.
The camera followed the robot automatically. A casual collision sent a chair flying across the room, and it landed missing one of its four wooden legs. The Model Eight held two halves of a book, one half in each hand. It paused to watch the chair as it rattled to a stop in the corner.
"I take it this is some sort of finishing school for robots," Laura said.
"We call it 'charm school,' actually," Griffith replied.
Laura nodded. She remembered John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and imagined the Model Eight in the jungle "playing" too rough with the poor soldier.
"Dr. Aldridge?" Griffith asked. "Are you all right? Was the elevator ride down too rough?"
Laura tried to compose herself and her thoughts. "It was a little on the radical side."
Griffith laughed. "We all just use the surface entrance. I don't know anyone who takes that thing — except Mr. Gray, of course."
"I wish I'd known that. Does Mr. Gray come down here often?"
Griffith shrugged. "Off and on. A lot more recently — since we started having our troubles." He looked up at her quickly. "With the computer, I mean." He turned to face away from her immediately.
"Well, anyway, I apologize that I can't give you the grand tour."
"That's all right. It has to be difficult running a facility of this size when you're not fully staffed."
"Oh, we don't 'run' this place from here or anywhere else. Everything is completely automated. Or, given what I understand of your theories, you could say it's being run by another of the company's 'employees.'"
"You mean… the main computer?"
"Of course."
"But… but the computer claims not to know what's going on down here. It claims it can't 'see' into the Model Eights' facilities or tell what they're doing."
Griffith looked at her as if she were speaking in tongues. Laura glanced at the two technicians nearest her, who quickly returned to their work before she made eye contact. "Well," Griffith said awkwardly, "that's just not the case."
Laura looked around. At every one of the workstations there glowed a computer monitor. Lights on the surrounding panels lit and went dark, and lines of text and windows filled with charts and graphs popped onto the screens in a never-ending parade of workflow. It was all the computer's work, she realized.
"I can assure you, Dr. Aldridge — Laura — that the computer is very much in charge of things down here." Griffith chuckled. "As a representative of Homo sapiens everywhere, I would hate to admit it, but there is absolutely no way any one human, or any group of humans, for that matter, could ever operate a complex of facilities as extensive as the Model Eight workshops down here. Oh, not that we don't monitor things and make some decisions every once in a while. But as far as what you would call 'running' the place…?"
He shook his head.
Laura surveyed the busy room, her eyes ending up on the large observation windows. "What are those?" she asked.
Griffith led her to the leftmost and most brightly lit of the three identical windows, which formed a rough semicircle along one wall of the room. The middle window was dimly lit, and the rightmost was dark.
"This is one of the tactile rooms," he said. Below she saw a white concrete room filled with objects stacked neatly on shelves or piled in large bins that looked like toy boxes. There were place settings on a table, clothes on hangers, a sink with a dishrag beside it. Everything was in order.