There had to be a way to make the robot yield, Bolzano thought, as he guided his small ship down the broad barren plain. Using the computer had been a good idea, whose only defect was that it hadn’t worked. The records were uncertain, but it appeared that in the past men had died when they finally gave a wrong answer after a series of right ones. Lipescu had given no wrong answers. Yet he too had died. It was inconceivable that the robot understood some relationship of the squares on the hypotenuse and on the other two sides that was different from the relationship Lipescu had expressed.
Bolzano wondered what method would work.
He plodded leadenly across the plain toward the gate and its guardian. The germ of an idea formed in him as he walked doggedly on.
He was, he knew, condemned to death by his own greed. Only extreme agility of mind would save him from sharing Lipescu’s fate. Ordinary intelligence would not work. Odyssean cleverness was the only salvation.
Bolzano approached the robot. Bones lay everywhere. Lipescu weltered in his own blood. Against that vast dead chest lay the computer, Bolzano knew. But he shrank from reaching for it. He would do without it. He looked away, unwilling to let the sight of Lipescu’s severed body interfere with the coolness of his thoughts.
He collected his courage. The robot showed no interest in him.
“Give ground,” Bolzano said. “I am here. I come for the treasure.”
“Win your right to it.”
“What must I do?”
“Demonstrate truth,” the robot said. “Reveal inwardness. Display understanding.”
“I am ready,” said Bolzano.
The robot offered a question. “What is the excretory unit of the vertebrate kidney called?”
Bolzano contemplated. He had no idea. The computer could tell him, but the computer lay strapped to fallen Lipescu. No matter. The robot wanted truth, inwardness, understanding. Lipescu had offered information. Lipescu had perished.
“The frog in the pond,” Bolzano said, “utters an azure cry.”
There was silence. Bolzano watched the robot’s front, waiting for the panel to slide open, the sinuous something to chop him in half.
The robot said, “During the War of Dogs on Vanderveer LX, the embattled colonists drew up thirty-eight dogmas of defiance. Quote the third, the ninth, the twenty-second, and the thirty-fifth.”
Bolzano pondered. This was an alien robot, product of unknown hand. How did its maker’s mind work? Did it respect knowledge?—Did it treasure facts for their own sake? Or did it recognize that information is meaningless, insight a nonlogical process?
Lipescu had been logical. He lay in pieces.
“The mereness of pain,” Bolzano responded, “is ineffable and refreshing.”
The robot said, “The monastery of Kwaisen was besieged by the soldiers of Oda Nobunaga on the third of April, 1582. What words of wisdom did the abbot utter?”
Bolzano spoke quickly and buoyantly. “Eleven, forty-one, elephant, voluminous.”
The last word slipped from his lips despite an effort to retrieve it. Elephants were voluminous, he thought. A fatal slip? The robot did not appear to notice.
Sonorously, ponderously, the great machine clevered the next question.
“What is the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere of Muldonar VII?”
“False witness bears a swift sword,” Bolzano replied.
The robot made an odd humming sound. Abruptly it rolled on massive tracks, moving some six feet to its left. The gate of the treasure trove stood wide, beckoning.
“You may enter,” the robot said.
Bolzano’s heart leaped. He had won! He had gained the high prize!
Others had failed, most recently less than an hour before, and their bones glistened on the plain. They had tried to answer the robot, sometimes giving right answers, sometimes giving wrong ones, and they had died. Bolzano lived.
It was a miracle, he thought. Luck? Shrewdness? Some of each, he told himself. He had watched a man give eighteen right answers and die. So the accuracy of the responses did not matter to the robot. What did? Inwardness. Understanding. Truth.
There could be inwardness and understanding and truth in random answers, Bolzano realized. Where earnest striving had failed, mockery had succeeded. He had staked his life on nonsense, and the prize was his.
He staggered forward, into the treasure trove. Even in the light gravity, his feet were like leaden weights. Tension ebbed in him. He knelt among the treasures.
The tapes, the sharp-eyed televector scanners, had not begun to indicate the splendor of what lay here. Bolzano stared in awe and rapture at a tiny disk, no greater in diameter than a man’s eye, on which myriad coiling lines writhed and twisted in patterns of rare beauty. He caught his breath, sobbing with the pain of perception as a gleaming marble spire, angled in mysterious swerves, came into view. Here, a bright beetle of some fragile waxy substance rested on a pedestal of yellow jade. There, a tangle of metallic cloth spurted dizzying patterns of luminescence. And over there—and beyond—and there.
The ransom of a universe, Bolzano thought.
It would take many trips to carry all this to his ship. Perhaps it would be better to bring the ship to the hoard, eh? He wondered, though, if he would lose his advantage if he stepped back through the gate. Was it possible that he would have to win entrance all over again? And would the robot accept his answers as willingly the second time?
It was something he would have to chance, Bolzano decided. If is nimble mind worked out a plan. He would select a dozen, two dozen of the finest treasures, as much as he could comfortably carry, and take them back to the ship. Then he would lift the ship and set it down next to the gate. If the robot raised objections about his entering, Bolzano would simply depart, taking what he had already secured. There was no point in running undue risks. When he had sold this cargo, and felt pinched for money, he could always return and try to win admission once again. Certainly, no one else would steal the horde if he abandoned it.
Selection, that was the key now.
Crouching, Bolzano picked through the treasure, choosing for portability and easy marketability. The marble spire? Too big. But the coiling disk, yes, certainly, and the beetle, of course, and this small statuette of dull hue, and the cameos showing scenes no human eye had ever beheld, and this, and this, and this—
His pulse raced. His heart thundered. He saw himself traveling from world to world, vending his wares. Collectors, museums, governments would vie with one another to have these prizes. He would let them bid each object up into the millions before he sold. And, of course, he would keep one or two for himself—or perhaps three or four—souvenirs of this great adventure.
And someday when wealth bored him he would return and face the challenge again. And he would dare the robot to question him, and he would reply with random absurdities, demonstrating his grasp on the fundamental insight that in knowledge there is only hollow merit, and the robot would admit him once more to the treasure trove.
Bolzano rose. He cradled his lovelies in his arms. Carefully, carefully, he thought. Turning, he made his way through the gate.
The robot had not moved. It had shown no interest as Bolzano plundered the hoard. The small man walked calmly past it.
The robot said, “Why have you taken those? What do you want with them?”
Bolzano smiled. Nonchalantly he replied, “I’ve taken them because they’re beautiful. Because I want them. Is there a better reason?”
“No,” the robot said, and the panel slid open in its ponderous black chest.
Too late, Bolzano realized that the test had not yet ended, that the robot’s question had arisen out of no idle curiosity. And this time he had replied in earnest, speaking in rational terms.