"So Gray gave people the option of what course they wanted to take, and everybody chose some kind of astronaut training?" Laura hit Enter with a growing sense of discovery — of finding another piece of the puzzle.
<Not everybody. The most popular courses like Microgravity Construction Techniques were booked solid, so some people got stuck with Art History, The Greek Tragedies, The Role of the Individual in Classic Fiction — courses like that.>
Laura smiled, shaking her head as she typed, "And people never suspected what Gray was doing?"
<What do you mean?>
"You know what I mean! He's training an army of astronauts! And nobody ever guessed? So many geniuses on this island and they just rush like lemmings toward Gray's final frontier?"
<You understand that I'm not at liberty to comment on such things.>
"You just did," Laura typed. "By the way, I would've been a terrible subject for Mr. Gray. I would have taken all the wrong courses. But I'm curious. Why did Mr. Gray even offer the liberal arts curriculum? Why not just add more shop classes to his '[unclear]-tech' school for the outward-bound?"
ACCESS RESTRICTED.
"That was just a joke," Laura mumbled. She sighed in frustration. Every time she made progress in putting the puzzle together, she was handed yet another unexplained piece.
Laura found Filatov in the control room outside. "So," she said as she walked up to him, "Gray is training a whole army of people to be astronauts and nobody had any idea." He looked up at her but said nothing. "You've got three launch pads, space launches a couple of times a week lighting off down there like gigantic Roman candles, and it never occurred to anyone that he was planning on, you know…" She made flapping motions with her hands as though she were flying away.
Filatov looked around to confirm that they were alone. "I don't know if you've noticed," Filatov said in a lowered voice, "but Mr. Gray is fairly good at keeping a secret. He may or may not be the most intelligent man in history, but I'm sure about one thing. He's as hung up on the whole concept of 'intellectual property' as anybody I've ever met. He doesn't like people talking about this stuff, and the only way to pry him open is to get him drunk."
"He gets drunk?"
Filatov smiled. "Not easily. He can hang in there with the best of 'em, and on this island that's me! But when he does get smashed, he'll go on and on about this idea of…" He shook his head. "I don't even know what you'd call it. It was the whole point of his speech at the town meeting, last night — phase two and all that. It represents the… growth of the collective body of all knowledge. A different" — he was struggling with the words—"stage into which that body will evolve."
"Finally a somewhat consistent answer!" Laura said. "I had been told this phase two of his was about colonization of space, and about war, but Griffith gave me more or less the same description as you."
"Well, I could see colonization and war fitting into it," Filatov said. "When you colonize some place, you take your knowledge with you. That represents growth. And colonization could certainly lead to war, although I got the impression the conflict Gray was alluding to was more…" He seemed at a loss for words.
"More what?"
"More apocalyptic!" Filatov replied.
When Laura passed Dorothy's office, she saw the girl was slumped over at her desk — oblivious to the glowing screens that surrounded her.
"You okay, Dorothy?" Laura asked.
Dorothy looked up at Laura, the corners of her small mouth drooping into what could have been a pout. She heaved a sigh, burying her hands between her thighs and sitting on them, further folding her shoulders into their slump.
"I don't know why I'm even wasting my time."
Laura went up to her desk. "What do you mean?"
"I mean…" Again she heaved a deep huff, this time glancing at the door. "I can't stop it," she said in a soft, reedy voice.
"Stop what?"
"The virus." The way she spoke, the word conveyed a menace of great proportion. And the tone in her voice betrayed something more: intense stress.
"Dorothy, nobody's putting any special pressure on you to solve all the system's problems."
"It's my job!" she shot back too quickly, and Laura realized she'd struck the girl's worries dead-center.
"But what's happening is beyond any one person's ability to solve."
"I told him I could do it," she said, her voice distant and her head sagging.
"You told Mr. Gray you could fix the computer all by yourself?"
"No-o-o. Way back, when he was considering me for this job. He came to a recital… a piano recital." Her eyes were unfocused, her head tilted to one side. She was in a dreamy state, obviously in great need of rest. "He explained that he was going to build the computer, and that he was looking for an immunobiologist. He asked if I thought I could handle the job. I said yes." Her lower lip began to quiver.
"Dorothy," Laura said gently, rounding the desk to kneel beside her chair. She rubbed her hand across the girl's back. Her bones stuck through the jersey. "You've done a great job. Nobody expects you to do any more than you've been doing. Even Mr. Gray doesn't have a clue what's wrong."
Dorothy's chin was tucked into her chest. "Don't be so sure," she whispered.
Laura took her hand from the girl's back. "What do you mean?"
Dorothy sniffed and straightened. Again she glanced at the open door. "Nothing," she said, not looking Laura in the eye.
"You think Mr. Gray knows what's going on, and he's not telling us?"
"Mr. Gray always knows what's going on!" she snapped, her teeth clenched. "Haven't you figured that out already?" Dorothy looked at the door for a third time.
Laura followed the girl eyes to the empty doorway. "There's something you're not telling me," she said quietly.
"Laura, you can't tell anybody, okay?" Dorothy whispered, and Laura nodded. The young girl leaned forward and spoke urgently, with fear evident in her voice. "You want to know what I think is happening? It's a pandemic. A plague that started out in the computer and spread to the robots. It's communicable through one of the normal data ports like the tap the robots make into the computer's world model. That's why we can't kill it with the computer's antiviral programs. As soon as the virus is swept from the computer, it gets infected again by a robot when the data link is established. The clipped versions of the antiviral programs in the robots' mini-nets just aren't capable enough to kill the spores of the virus that they carry."
"Well, if you're right, what's going to happen?"
Dorothy looked ashen. Her voice was distant and weak, she spoke in a monotone. "The computer and the robots are going to get sicker and sicker. Their behavior is going to become more erratic. Then, when the delirium sets in… all hell's going to break loose."
Laura had to swallow before she could speak with any confidence in how she would sound. "Dorothy, if that's what you think's happening, why don't you tell Mr. Gray?"
The girl looked up at Laura. "I did." She swallowed hard — rushing to continue before the effort was complete. "He listened to me without saying a word or asking a single question!" She drifted off again, lost in the retelling. "Then he looked at me — you know, really looked right at me the way he does — and said, 'That's very good work, Dorothy. I can't tell you how proud I am of you. Now, I don't want you ever to breathe a word of this to anybody.'" The girl looked up at Laura — suddenly alarmed. "Please don't tell anybody! You promise?" Laura assured her she wouldn't tell, and Dorothy sank again into her morass of worry. "It's a pandemic," she muttered.