Allan considered. That did sound serious. “Did you ask him if he’s feeling that you and I travel too much? That we should make an effort to be all together more often as a family?” He and Cathy had worried this before.
“Yes. But he said no, that wasn’t it at all, his friends’ parents were just the same. So I asked him what was it, and he only said, ‘When it’s steamship time, it’s steamship time,’ and sank into one of those motionless trances of his. Allan, I couldn’t get him to even answer me for half an hour, no matter what I did. It’s like he was someplace else, sitting right there in front of me!”
Allan gazed out the window. Far below, the New York traffic sounds hummed dimly, reassuringly. Allan said slowly, “I got the names of two good child psychologists, one in Denver and one in San Francisco.”
“Well, that won’t do a lot of good, since we’re not going to be in Oakland after a few more weeks. We’re all leasing in Kansas City for the Shephard trial. Can’t you take the trouble to memorize our schedule?”
After a minute she added, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” Allan said. “I know you’re worried about Charlie, too. Listen, I’ll find a psychologist in…” he blanked for a moment—“Kansas City.”
“Okay.” Cathy smiled wanly, then clung to him. He could feel the tension in her bare back.
Charlie had always been such an easy kid. Suzette had been the temperamental one. That’s why they were concerned, Allan told himself; it was all relative. Still, for Charlie to just sit and go into a trance where he didn’t even answer people… that couldn’t be normal, could it? To be so cut off?
Why, he wouldn’t even be tuned into the Net. Anything could develop, and Charlie wouldn’t even know it!
Allan held his wife tighter. “I’ll re-route to see him tomorrow.”
Re-routing wasn’t easy. Neither Jon nor Patti were pleased. Jon had to go himself to check out bone-marrow scanning in Raleigh. The director of a firm making low-cost orbiting solar panels in Dallas wouldn’t be available for another two weeks if Allan missed that appointment, because the director would be in Tokyo. Videoconferencing, the director said sniffily, was not an acceptable substitute. Allan told Patti to tell the director to go to hell. He got a flight to the new apartment in Kansas City.
But then Paul Sanderson called from Novation. Skaka Gupta must again be somewhere else. “You said… I mean, you seemed to indicate last time you were here, Allan… uh, Mr. Haller… that if something noteworthy happened with the bots you wanted to see it right away, so—”
“And something has? Unfortunately, the timing couldn’t be worse. Can you describe the development to me?”
“Oh, sure,” Sanderson said, with such relief in his voice that Allan decided he better go to Novation himself after all. The data smelled important. If he took a flight almost immediately to Boston, even flying standby if he had to… shit, he hated flying standby, if only developments in transferring people could keep up with innovations in transferring data!—if he flew standby, and then could book a flight getting him to the Kansas City lease by at least midnight…
“Never mind explaining. I’ll be there this afternoon.”
“Okay,” Sanderson said unhappily. “We’ll be expecting you.”
We. Him and the robots? Did Sanderson identify with them that much? Maybe; engineer types never seemed to have any real life. Just endless tinkering with software, in the same subroutines, same location, same days.
Suddenly Allan was hit with a memory. So vivid, so visceral, it almost seemed as if he no longer stood in the middle of a frantic metropolitan airport but instead was in the cool woods behind the house where he’d grown up, lying on his back on a carpet of pine needles. Billy Goldman, his best friend, lay beside him, both of them gazing upward at the sun-dabbled branches lacing the sky, smelling the sweet tangy pines, and Billy saying, “Why would anyone want to kiss a girl? Yuuccckkk!”
Now, where had that come from? Astonished, Allan shook his head to clear it. The mind was a strange thing. Tossing in the unrelated, the pointless, the unprofitable, the irrelevant. The distracting.
By the time he reached Boston, he had a headache no pills could touch.
He arrived at Novation in a foul mood. Sanderson met him nervously. “This way, Mr. Haller, we’ll go right to Prime-Eight Two, unless you want some, um, coffee, or maybe—”
“No. Let’s go.”
Sanderson walked past Prime-Eight One without turning his head, but Allan stopped to study the robots. It seemed to him that they gathered their chips a little more smoothly, with less fumbling. He thought he even saw Processed Corn start forward, then swerve abruptly to miss crashing into Ocean Spray Cacheberries. They were starting to cooperate.
Prime-Eight Two, on the other hand, looked no different. The bots stood motionless on the complex terrain. Allan and Sanderson stood outside the enclosure, Sanderson fidgeting. “Chip fall in seven minutes. We don’t want to alter the schedule, you know, because even though then you wouldn’t have to wait, you wouldn’t really be seeing the exact same phenomenon we’ve been observing, so it isn’t—”
“I understand,” Allan said. “I can wait.”
But he had to do something to fill in seven minutes, besides intimidating Sanderson. The heavy data fire meant he couldn’t access his meshNet. Instead, Allan repeated to himself the personal-notes tablet on his son’s Twenty-Two. He had accessed the tablet from the plane, telling himself that parental duty outweighed teenage privacy.
Age of Reason… Age of Reason… Information Age… Age of Reasoning… Enlightenment? No no no… Start again Stone Age Iron Age Bronze Age… no no NO NO it’s here someplace—TO DO: do sections 84-86 homework for Tuesday find three examples of igneous rock buy mom a birthday present… AGE OF REASON… The girl I saw in the park was not wearing underwear!!!!!!… Age of Reason—
The robots behind the plastic wall lumbered into position, a moment before chips scattered from the ceiling. “They’ve learned to cut the anticipation pretty fine,” Sanderson said. Allan didn’t reply. He watched as the bots efficiently gathered all the chips. They seemed no faster than before, but no slower either. His meshNet had gone dead, presumably from the bots’ intense occupation of all available bandwidths to the Net. What exactly were they downloading? And what use were their biochip brains making of it? They didn’t need the Net’s vast libraries of information to gather chips efficiently.
“Have you traced their download sources yet?”
“Some of them,” Sanderson said. He didn’t look at Allan, and his tone was evasive. “Watch—here it comes.”
But what “came” was… nothing. Literally. The robots dumped all the chips into their bucket, held in the graspers of Techs/Mex Chili, and then went motionless.
Sanderson began to talk very fast. “They’ve been doing that for twenty-four hours now. Gathering the chips the way they’re programmed to, but then just not depositing them through the wall. Nobody’s tinkered with their programming. They just… don’t do it.”
Allan studied Techs/Mex Chili. “What do your download-source traces show?”
“Not much,” Sanderson said, and Allan saw that his previous evasiveness had been embarrassment. Programmers hated not knowing what was going on in their programs. “Or, rather, too much. They’re apparently accessing all sorts of stuff, bits of everything on the Net, maybe even at random. At least, we haven’t found any patterns yet.”
“Umm,” Allan said noncommittally. “Squirt the full trace files to my office. Our people will look at it as well.”