"Do you know that for sure?" Laura asked.
Griffith nodded. "All the Model Eights were accounted for last night. But even more telling was the little boy's description of what he saw. Now I know he's only eight, but his science teacher stood up and raved that the boy was some sort of whiz. And he's got a rich gene pool. His mother works in Krantz's virtual-reality section, and his father is in space operations. But he got it all wrong. The Model Eights don't run in a crouch. They don't run at all!"
Griffith looked over his shoulder after raising his voice, but then turned back to Laura. "You've seen them. It's a goddamn scientific miracle that they can walk, much less run! And they never, not once, have gotten into a crouch. They're either completely erect, or they're flat on their big tin asses! Now that's simple, Newtonian physics, and I offered to prove it to Gray with as many tests as he'd like. I came straight down here this morning before we opened up and went to Hightop. If any of 'em can crouch, Hightop can. And he fell straight on his butt ten times in a row!"
"You don't man the facilities down here twenty-four hours?" Laura asked.
Griffith shook his head. "No need to. It's fully automated. All we're doing here this morning is monitoring. 'Big brother,' like I said before. Gray ordered human monitoring of all Model Eight activity beginning today, which is yet another overreaction to that little boy's story, if you ask me."
"And you're absolutely sure the boy didn't see a Model Eight?"
"He couldn't have. The human operators leave here every night at ten o'clock. We open up at six A.M. That's one eight-hour shift during which there are no humans down here. But since the robots don't sleep, the place is operational twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Now I have eight hours of video recordings of every last one of those robots for this and every night since we opened shop down here. The first thing we do when we get in every morning is look at that video!"
"And you've got a videotape from last night."
"Yes! From every night. But it's not taped. It's recorded digitally on an off-board computer."
"But the computer controls all the off-board computers, doesn't it?"
"Yes, but—" He clearly registered, the point she was making. "Look. You want to know why I'm sure that little boy's story is wrong? Why I'm absolutely positive? He described the thing he saw as not as tall as the dumpsters in back of the grocery store. I must've asked him twenty different ways, and every time that boy was completely, positively sure that whatever he saw didn't come close to being as tall as the trash container he saw it next to. That dumpster is only six feet, eight inches tall. You've seen how big the Eights are! At a hundred feet away is there any chance you could fail to tell that a Model Eight isn't more than six eight? They're ten feet tall, for Christ's sake!"
"Was it well lit in the parking lot?"
"No. But what does it matter? It was just some hoodlum breaking curfew, that's all. We've had problems with vandalism, you know."
"Vandalism of trash bins?"
"There's been some gang of little punks running around this island for months. They've knocked over streetlamps, dragged a weather station down by the launch pads out into the jungle, chipped off pieces of the base of the statue up at the top of the Village's main boulevard, things like that. Some kind of initiation ceremony or ritual, that's Hoblenz's guess."
Laura shook her head in disbelief. "Are you people all blind? You're just so convinced that your precious robots are under control that you come up with some ridiculous explanation for what's going on like 'gang initiation ritual?'"
He was taken aback by her outburst. "You sound just like all the rest of them," he said.
"Like all the rest of whom?"
"The people at the town meeting! Mass hysteria! By the time they all stormed out of the gymnasium I swear I could've convinced 'em that a UFO had just landed on the roof."
"Are you saying that everyone stormed out of that meeting last night over rumors of robots running loose, and not over the asteroid?"
"Stormed out of that meeting and right off the island, if what I'm hearing is true. Some of my own people, too — people who should know better! The damn asteroid is probably what held on to the few hundred who stayed — that and Gray's talk. You should've heard him. What it's going to be like after a ten-thousand-fold increase in human productivity. Humanity relieved from drudgery and dangerous jobs. There were people with tears in their eyes. I would've thought more would want to stay and be a part of it."
"A part of what?"
"Of phase two," Griffith said as if she was missing the most elementary of his points. "Of the expansion."
"Of the colonization?" Laura asked, feeding him Janet's word.
He frowned. "It's not exactly colonization. It's more of a natural… progression. An expansion, like I said. Building on everything that has come before."
"A tower to the sky," Laura said under her breath, but Griffith paid no attention to the comment.
"It's like we take everything known right now and… grow it. Information grows exponentially, you know." He shook his head. "You really should have heard the speech. It's too bad nobody recorded it."
"Well, maybe somebody did."
Griffith shook his head. "It was the first time I ever saw metal detectors on this island. Hoblenz's men ran 'em like airport security. Wouldn't let any recording devices — camcorders, recorders, anything — inside the gym." Griffith shook his head and said, "Anyway, I'm sorry. As I said, this has to be a short tour of necessity." He headed back toward the work area, and Laura followed.
They passed by the last [unclear] darkened one.
"What's this room?" she asked, pausing at the thick glass.
"Oh?" Griffith replied, stopping but not turning fully to face her. "That's another tactile room."
It was pitch-dark inside. "Can I see?"
He clearly didn't want to show her. "I wish I had enough time to explain all we go through in a course — how much we have to teach these robots before we can dare set them loose in the world."
He looked down, shuffling his feet.
"Why don't you just show me the room?"
"But you won't understand," he said in a plaintive tone. "You can't. You haven't had to make all the discoveries we've made or design the programs necessary to deal with—"
"I know you're busy, Phil," Laura interrupted, "and I don't have all day either, so if you'll just turn on the lights down there I'll be out of your hair."
He frowned, but after a moment's hesitation walked over to a panel just below the window. With a flick of his wrist he threw a switch.
The room below was flooded with light. The empty chamber was about the size of the tactile room on the far side of the [garbled] area.
"Like all young… creatures," Griffith continued in a voice drained of inflection, "the robots are fascinated by moving things. There were two doors leading into the room — one large enough for the robots, the other too small even for humans. The room was empty save a huge drain in the middle of the floor and thick metal sprinkler heads protruding from the ceiling. The white concrete had clearly been scrubbed, but no amount of detergent seemed capable of removing the faint but indelible brown stains.
"It's absolutely essential that we let them get the curiosity out of their system."
"Whose are those bloodstains," Laura said.
"There's no other way. They're just fascinated, absolutely fascinated, by animals. Goats and sheep, mostly, but dogs, cats, other wildlife."
"My God," Laura said. "They rip them limb from limb."
"Not on purpose, Laura," Griffith said with true emotion. "They don't mean to hurt their toys. They're really quite gentle, as much as they can be. And" — he shook his head—"it's not a pleasant part of the course for any of us, or for them. Some of the robots get quite distraught after… after they've broken one of the animals. But that's what we want, don't you see? The experience is so traumatic that the connections their nets develop are strong and long-lasting. I swear after this course you could put them in a room full of babies and they wouldn't move till they dropped to the ground with dead batteries."