Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, page 15
The robots looked back and forth, as though they needed to compare notes, and then the one in back said, “We have another twenty-two hours and fifty minutes of work to complete.”
Dash took another look over the construction site. “Yeah, that sounds about right. How are you going to make up those ten minutes?”
The robots were shuffling around now. He still couldn’t have pushed through them to the door, but they seemed a little less sure of themselves.
“We can accelerate drilling by diverting units from the riveting squads, and then accelerate riveting through a similar method,” said the robot, “but it is unlikely that this would be sufficient.”
“Tick, tock,” said Dash.
“What?” the robot asked. He was starting to sound nervous.
“Time’s moving on,” Dash observed. “That’s all I’m saying. The longer you stand here, the more impossible it’ll be to finish the job on schedule.”
He pretended to have an interesting thought. “That’s probably all planned for, though, isn’t it? Some kind of padding, or, like, overage?”
There was a significant pause.
“You know, I know a few robots, as you might say, upstairs,” Dash said. “Maybe they could pitch in and give you a hand down here.”
“The tasks are not complex,” said the robot. He shouldered his way forward and peered down into Dash’s face. The label R-54KG was stenciled on the robot foreman’s chest. “But there are just so many of them to complete!”
“There’s no end to it. I know,” Dash commiserated. “Don’t get me started on plumbing. You cut out six inches of one of those old pipes, and before you know it, you end up replacing five feet of ’em, on account of they’re just so corroded. You think it’s going to take you an hour, and then you’re swimming in dishwater all day long.”
The robot looked uncertain. “I have never modified ancient plumbing,” he admitted. “That sounds very trying.”
“And then the leaks get into the floors, and that means the ceilings on the floor below,” Dash said. “Sometimes it seems like you’re going to keep going all the way down to the basement.”
The robots had now gathered into a crowd around him.
“We are very satisfied with riveting and welding,” their foreman said. “It is not normally difficult to keep to the schedule.”
Dash thought that Pitt’s voice, echoing off the ceiling, was beginning to go a bit raspy.
“Yeah, stay away from plumbing,” Dash told the robots. “It’s a nightmare.”
He cocked his head. “About how long do you have, now?”
“We have lost another minute and forty-three seconds,” said the robot.
“Well, here’s the thing. You did a bang-up job of blocking the doorway; really, it’s aces. Nobody could complain about that. But since your, what you might call your primary task is…” He hooked his thumb over his shoulder. “… that thing back there.…”
“… the Projectile.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Since the Projectile is your main order for the day, I’m thinking that maybe I could go on up there…” Dash pointed through the doorway. “… and get you some, like, reinforcements. ’Cause without some more help, I just don’t see how you can get the job done on time.”
He looked up toward the ceiling. Pitt had attracted the attention of another flying robot.
“I’m thinking that one might not be the most understanding boss you could ask for.”
The robots’ shoulders shook up and down. “He is very exacting,” admitted the foreman.
The foreman looked from robot to robot. “How many of these additional workers do you think we might expect?”
Dash made up a number. “Oh, at least a hundred, maybe even two hundred.”
The robots’ heads swung as one to look at the Projectile where it bobbed, in its chains and scaffolds, frighteningly behind schedule.
“Their help would be invaluable,” said the robot foreman. He motioned to his crew.
They parted in front of Dash and formed a sort of gauntlet between him and the doorway. He took the time to shake a few hands on his way through. “Okay,” he said from the door, “let me see who I can round up to help, and I’ll send ’em on down.”
The robots waved as they headed back to their work. “Good luck with the plumbing!”
FRIDAY, 7:43 PM
Under the damaged dome of its brain case the world’s smallest giant robot was feeling depressed. Not that it had any idea what depression was; it had no name for the way it was feeling, and that was frightening. Come to think of it, fear itself was another new experience.
Above all it just wanted this job to be finished. It had a driving need to apprehend or destroy the intruders, whoever they were, and it was unable to rest until that job was done. And how it did want a rest. Even a moment’s rest would be a relief. But until it could apprehend its quarry it knew that it had to go on. And on. And on.
Some way down the tunnel it heard something move.
“PLEASE.”
The sound grew: it sounded like many small feet scurrying this way.
“PLEASE SURRENDER.”
Three rats darted into the robot’s field of view.
“SURGACK. OR BE. DISIGLLTAP.”
They poured over the tunnel floor like so much water.
“GACK.”
The robot’s tiny cannon pulsed. Three smoking heaps continued to flow across the floor until they slurped to a halt.
“WHY WON’T YOU JUST SURRENDER.”
Six more rats appeared, tried to pass the robot, and became smoking skidmarks.
There was a louder sound.
Then the flood arrived.
* * *
Evan and Evvie slid to a stop when they saw the mound of smoking rat flesh. The tunnel’s smell, if anything, had improved.
A tiny robot had just finished off the last of the rats. Its little shoulders slumped for a moment; then the beacons of its eyes rose to meet theirs. It stepped past the remains of the rats and tilted its chest-mounted cannon to face them.
It glared at them.
“SURRENDIK OR YAK BE DISIN, DISIK, DIK.”
“Uh, sorry?” said Evan.
“GIVE UP NOW.”
Evan looked over at Evvie’s thoughtful face. She raised one eyebrow.
He looked back down at the world’s smallest giant robot.
“We surrender,” he said.
It sank to the floor and sat in a weary pile of itself. Then it slumped a little farther.
“THAK YOU.”
FRIDAY, 8:04 PM
Edward J. Bellin left his office and started for home (or for what he called home) with his briefcase held tight against his side. There were several contractual documents and items of correspondence in the briefcase. But in his mind he was picturing the checklist of story titles and magazines. He’d nearly run out of chances for Harem of the Seamstress of Outer Space.
He paused in front of a Transport Pod. Its light was showing red. Stop.
Well, should he? Edward had been submitting his stories for fourteen years and he had yet to have one published. No one seemed to grasp what he was trying to do; but lately Edward had started wondering about that himself. What was he trying to do? It wasn’t even about writing anymore. It was all about sending those fat envelopes out, in black and white, and then getting them back, in black and white and red. Over the years, the red notations had started to end in exclamation marks.
Maybe he should stop. Maybe he should hire someone to open up his storage unit and haul it all away, the stories, the rejection slips, the typewriter: all of it, gone at last and for good. Maybe he should.
“Mister, you wanna go, or should I?”
Edward’s eyes settled on the Pod door. Its light was green now. “Oh, very sorry,” he said. He pressed a button and the door slid open, ready to take him back to his cold, blue, lonely tube at Tubular Belle’s.
He stepped inside.
10
ESCAPE FROM THE DUNGEON OF DESPAIR
FRIDAY, 8:31 PM
Nola led her herd of operators up the stairs toward Dash’s roof, pausing from time to time to point out the building’s interesting features or to wave at Miss Roth, who’d buzzed them in, and to introduce the herd to Princess Fedora, who was somewhat out of sorts as a result of her confinement.
The herd had thinned somewhat since their meeting at the Astro; but Mrs. Broadvine, Rhonda, Freda, and a half dozen others had answered Nola’s call, possibly out of a spirit of camaraderie, though Nola suspected the operators may have been more interested in meeting Dash Kent, the swashbuckling plumber and plasterer.
She led the herd up to the last flight of stairs only to find Rusty in the doorway of his attic apartment with a sleeping ornithopter in his hands. The door to the roof was swinging shut overhead. “Hi, Rusty,” called Nola. “Is Dash up there?”
The little robot shook his head.
“Oh, pickles,” she said. She turned to the others. “I’m afraid he might really be in trouble this time,” she told them.
She hadn’t really had a chance to tell them much about her day: just the broadest possible strokes about her investigations with Dash, their flight from the giant robot, and Dash’s disappearance at the site of the new power station.
Freda, however, was more interested in the view through Rusty’s doorway. “How nice! Look at all the books, and the houseplants!”
Rusty stood to the side and beckoned them indoors.
It really was a nice little apartment, Nola agreed. Very homey. The other operators ooh’ed and ahh’ed over Rusty’s collection of mosses and his aquarium, bubbling softly in the corner. She didn’t really think this was the best time, though, for getting acquainted. She cleared her throat a couple of times; but it looked as though sterner measures would be needed.
“You must have wonderful natural light in the daytime,” said Mrs. Broadvine. She had wandered over to the window, stepping aside to avoid a motionless robot sitting at Rusty’s workbench. “And who might this be?” she asked, with one eyebrow raised in what she must have thought was a knowing kind of way.
Rusty set the ornithopter down on a bookshelf. It rearranged its wings and curled up with a dozy ping ping ping.
Nola said, “I think Dash must be in trouble.…”
“Yes,” Mrs. Broadvine said absently. “The poor boy could use a hand, I’m sure.”
Mrs. Broadvine turned. “So how did you meet our Nola, Rusty?”
Rusty pointed up to the roof, and then downstairs, and then he knelt down to fiddle with the drain pipe under the sink. He looked up.
“That must be young Mr. Kent, then,” Mrs. Broadvine said, and he nodded.
“Well we’re all very well acquainted,” said the former supervisor. “We were all switchboard operators together at the Info-Slate offices, until recent events…”
Rusty tilted his head.
“The switchboard. It’s where we all worked together. Have you never seen an Info-Slate?”
Rusty’s head swiveled side to side. Mrs. Broadvine took out her Slate out and began a demonstration.
Nola sidled over to Rhonda. “We really need to find out what’s happened to Dash,” she insisted.
“Oh!” Rhonda said. “But this is all his line of work, isn’t it? Won’t he be dashing back here to report back to us, with all kinds of stories to tell?”
“That would be nice, of course.” Nola kept her voice even. “But I’m afraid that he might not be able to … to dash back, as you say, without a little…”
Rhonda was paying more attention to Mrs. Broadvine’s Info-Slate demonstration. Rusty seemed a little puzzled.
“No,” Rhonda said. She walked away from Nola and over to Rusty. “You see, this is what the Info-Slate owner sees. But we’re all back at the switchboard, connecting up the cables that control the display. Here, it’s like this.”
Rhonda sat down near the work bench and started to pull imaginary wires out of their sockets. Then she plugged them back in to their new positions.
“So when they try to call up the Zoning Ordinances, like this, you see, I pull the main pane’s cable and then I reconnect it.…”
On the stool next to her the silent robot reached out to pull an imaginary wire from one position; then she moved it to another with a practiced flick of her fingers.
Rhonda froze.
“And then…” Nola said, “for a search in the Private Vehicle Registry…”
The seated robot lifted her imaginary cable from its new position, clicked its imaginary release, and socketed it into position where the vehicle registries feed would be. With her other hand she flicked the equally imaginary switch that would have toggled an Info-Slate’s display to the Private Registry.
The operators stared. Then, all at once, they started to describe other switches and feeds. The little robot obediently pulled one invisible wire after another and turned all of the correct switches that were not there. The operators in the room could tell that she was working flawlessly.
And pretty darn quickly, too, Nola realized.
“She’s a switchboard operator,” she said.
“And a very good one,” Mrs. Broadvine added. “She’s…”
Rusty was looking intently at the little robot, who—now that her instructions had stopped—was again sitting motionless in front of the window.
Nola put her hands on her hips. “She’s one of our replacements.”
The entire herd of operators turned on Rusty with so many rapid questions that the little ornithopter on the bookshelf looked up, chuffed to itself angrily, and then launched from its perch to fly out of the transom and back up to its peaceful cote on the roof.
FRIDAY, 8:45 PM
“This doesn’t want to surrender, either,” said one of the giants.
The world’s smallest giant robot examined the new intruder. Like the thirty-seven previous intruders, this one looked a lot like a rock.
Pssszzzzt.
And now, like all those others, it looked like a slowly cooling puddle of lava.
The world’s smallest giant robot looked up at its new masters. They seemed pleased.
Life was so much simpler now.
FRIDAY, 8:48 PM
Pitt tugged at the brim of his hat. It had taken a ridiculous amount of time, he calculated, to get himself down from the ceiling of the cavern; he considered whether his next generation of robots ought to be more intelligent. It was a precarious balance: whenever he made them too intelligent they always started to show the same kind of inefficiency as human beings. The robots that had been guarding the doorway were an irritating example. Why had they all decided to go back to work on the Projectile?
If he gave them too much intelligence they would end up being just as big a problem as human people were. Then what would he do? Build a new Projectile to get rid of them?
He strode down the hallways between the cavern and his control center. He had to check on the project’s status first, but then he’d go straight to Perkins’s cell and one way or another he would learn who D. Kent was, and where to find him; and then Pitt would put a stop to whatever it was the young man was doing. Kent had already seen far too much. He could not be tolerated.
Pitt ran a hand along the length of his slide rule. Interference at this stage of the project was dangerous: until the Projectile was complete he had to concentrate on security. And on retribution.
He stopped. Retribution? Really?
He gave his head a shake. His hat slid across his glossy scalp; he straightened it again. Retribution was counterproductive. It was a waste of resources. How could such an … emotional idea have taken hold of him?
The threat to the project needed to be eliminated: that was all. Nothing else was necessary.
He rested one hand on his holstered slide rule and set off again toward the control center. He would do what was necessary, and then he would be done.
FRIDAY, 8:49 PM
Abner startled himself awake. It took a moment before he understood that he’d been snoring. A weary look around his cell showed him that nothing had changed. It might be noon or midnight: he had no way to know in the cell’s dim light.
He sat up on his pallet.
He had accepted Pitt’s statement that the Transport Pod had been removed from the main lines of the system. This was completely believable. The cell walls were burnished steel; the door, he had found, was impregnable; its lock was inaccessible from this side.
That left the Transport Tube’s passage, if he could reach it. This seemed every bit as unlikely as anything else; but he had nothing else to do with his time, so he started an examination of the smooth, cylindrical housing around the Pod.
It was flawless.
He tapped on it, frustrated.
A moment later, something tapped back.
FRIDAY, 9:04 PM
Rusty was practically bouncing up and down in front of the videophone while the operators huddled around the operator robot, giving her new imaginary instructions and timing her responses. They had her simulating six different clients on six Info-Slates.
“She’s really good,” Freda said again.
Nola’s eyes were on the televideo screen. It was displaying a graphic that read OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT, RETROPOLIS FRATERNAL LEAGUE OF ROBOTIC PERSONS.
Rusty hung up. His shoulders drooped.
Then he seemed to have a thought and he dialed another number. Another placeholder graphic flickered on. This one read THE FERRISS MOTO-MAN COMPANY: HARRY ROY, SHIFT SUPERVISOR.
He hung up again and looked out the window.
Nola put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s after business hours,” she told him. “They probably won’t be back till Monday.”
He raised his glassy eyes to hers.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I just don’t understand. Why do you want to talk to them?”
Rusty seemed to think this over. He gestured at the robot operator. For once it seemed that he just couldn’t mime what he meant to say.
“I hope you work it out,” Nola told him. “But nobody else seems to be doing anything about Dash and I’m sure he’s in trouble. I really need to find him.”
Dash took another look over the construction site. “Yeah, that sounds about right. How are you going to make up those ten minutes?”
The robots were shuffling around now. He still couldn’t have pushed through them to the door, but they seemed a little less sure of themselves.
“We can accelerate drilling by diverting units from the riveting squads, and then accelerate riveting through a similar method,” said the robot, “but it is unlikely that this would be sufficient.”
“Tick, tock,” said Dash.
“What?” the robot asked. He was starting to sound nervous.
“Time’s moving on,” Dash observed. “That’s all I’m saying. The longer you stand here, the more impossible it’ll be to finish the job on schedule.”
He pretended to have an interesting thought. “That’s probably all planned for, though, isn’t it? Some kind of padding, or, like, overage?”
There was a significant pause.
“You know, I know a few robots, as you might say, upstairs,” Dash said. “Maybe they could pitch in and give you a hand down here.”
“The tasks are not complex,” said the robot. He shouldered his way forward and peered down into Dash’s face. The label R-54KG was stenciled on the robot foreman’s chest. “But there are just so many of them to complete!”
“There’s no end to it. I know,” Dash commiserated. “Don’t get me started on plumbing. You cut out six inches of one of those old pipes, and before you know it, you end up replacing five feet of ’em, on account of they’re just so corroded. You think it’s going to take you an hour, and then you’re swimming in dishwater all day long.”
The robot looked uncertain. “I have never modified ancient plumbing,” he admitted. “That sounds very trying.”
“And then the leaks get into the floors, and that means the ceilings on the floor below,” Dash said. “Sometimes it seems like you’re going to keep going all the way down to the basement.”
The robots had now gathered into a crowd around him.
“We are very satisfied with riveting and welding,” their foreman said. “It is not normally difficult to keep to the schedule.”
Dash thought that Pitt’s voice, echoing off the ceiling, was beginning to go a bit raspy.
“Yeah, stay away from plumbing,” Dash told the robots. “It’s a nightmare.”
He cocked his head. “About how long do you have, now?”
“We have lost another minute and forty-three seconds,” said the robot.
“Well, here’s the thing. You did a bang-up job of blocking the doorway; really, it’s aces. Nobody could complain about that. But since your, what you might call your primary task is…” He hooked his thumb over his shoulder. “… that thing back there.…”
“… the Projectile.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Since the Projectile is your main order for the day, I’m thinking that maybe I could go on up there…” Dash pointed through the doorway. “… and get you some, like, reinforcements. ’Cause without some more help, I just don’t see how you can get the job done on time.”
He looked up toward the ceiling. Pitt had attracted the attention of another flying robot.
“I’m thinking that one might not be the most understanding boss you could ask for.”
The robots’ shoulders shook up and down. “He is very exacting,” admitted the foreman.
The foreman looked from robot to robot. “How many of these additional workers do you think we might expect?”
Dash made up a number. “Oh, at least a hundred, maybe even two hundred.”
The robots’ heads swung as one to look at the Projectile where it bobbed, in its chains and scaffolds, frighteningly behind schedule.
“Their help would be invaluable,” said the robot foreman. He motioned to his crew.
They parted in front of Dash and formed a sort of gauntlet between him and the doorway. He took the time to shake a few hands on his way through. “Okay,” he said from the door, “let me see who I can round up to help, and I’ll send ’em on down.”
The robots waved as they headed back to their work. “Good luck with the plumbing!”
FRIDAY, 7:43 PM
Under the damaged dome of its brain case the world’s smallest giant robot was feeling depressed. Not that it had any idea what depression was; it had no name for the way it was feeling, and that was frightening. Come to think of it, fear itself was another new experience.
Above all it just wanted this job to be finished. It had a driving need to apprehend or destroy the intruders, whoever they were, and it was unable to rest until that job was done. And how it did want a rest. Even a moment’s rest would be a relief. But until it could apprehend its quarry it knew that it had to go on. And on. And on.
Some way down the tunnel it heard something move.
“PLEASE.”
The sound grew: it sounded like many small feet scurrying this way.
“PLEASE SURRENDER.”
Three rats darted into the robot’s field of view.
“SURGACK. OR BE. DISIGLLTAP.”
They poured over the tunnel floor like so much water.
“GACK.”
The robot’s tiny cannon pulsed. Three smoking heaps continued to flow across the floor until they slurped to a halt.
“WHY WON’T YOU JUST SURRENDER.”
Six more rats appeared, tried to pass the robot, and became smoking skidmarks.
There was a louder sound.
Then the flood arrived.
* * *
Evan and Evvie slid to a stop when they saw the mound of smoking rat flesh. The tunnel’s smell, if anything, had improved.
A tiny robot had just finished off the last of the rats. Its little shoulders slumped for a moment; then the beacons of its eyes rose to meet theirs. It stepped past the remains of the rats and tilted its chest-mounted cannon to face them.
It glared at them.
“SURRENDIK OR YAK BE DISIN, DISIK, DIK.”
“Uh, sorry?” said Evan.
“GIVE UP NOW.”
Evan looked over at Evvie’s thoughtful face. She raised one eyebrow.
He looked back down at the world’s smallest giant robot.
“We surrender,” he said.
It sank to the floor and sat in a weary pile of itself. Then it slumped a little farther.
“THAK YOU.”
FRIDAY, 8:04 PM
Edward J. Bellin left his office and started for home (or for what he called home) with his briefcase held tight against his side. There were several contractual documents and items of correspondence in the briefcase. But in his mind he was picturing the checklist of story titles and magazines. He’d nearly run out of chances for Harem of the Seamstress of Outer Space.
He paused in front of a Transport Pod. Its light was showing red. Stop.
Well, should he? Edward had been submitting his stories for fourteen years and he had yet to have one published. No one seemed to grasp what he was trying to do; but lately Edward had started wondering about that himself. What was he trying to do? It wasn’t even about writing anymore. It was all about sending those fat envelopes out, in black and white, and then getting them back, in black and white and red. Over the years, the red notations had started to end in exclamation marks.
Maybe he should stop. Maybe he should hire someone to open up his storage unit and haul it all away, the stories, the rejection slips, the typewriter: all of it, gone at last and for good. Maybe he should.
“Mister, you wanna go, or should I?”
Edward’s eyes settled on the Pod door. Its light was green now. “Oh, very sorry,” he said. He pressed a button and the door slid open, ready to take him back to his cold, blue, lonely tube at Tubular Belle’s.
He stepped inside.
10
ESCAPE FROM THE DUNGEON OF DESPAIR
FRIDAY, 8:31 PM
Nola led her herd of operators up the stairs toward Dash’s roof, pausing from time to time to point out the building’s interesting features or to wave at Miss Roth, who’d buzzed them in, and to introduce the herd to Princess Fedora, who was somewhat out of sorts as a result of her confinement.
The herd had thinned somewhat since their meeting at the Astro; but Mrs. Broadvine, Rhonda, Freda, and a half dozen others had answered Nola’s call, possibly out of a spirit of camaraderie, though Nola suspected the operators may have been more interested in meeting Dash Kent, the swashbuckling plumber and plasterer.
She led the herd up to the last flight of stairs only to find Rusty in the doorway of his attic apartment with a sleeping ornithopter in his hands. The door to the roof was swinging shut overhead. “Hi, Rusty,” called Nola. “Is Dash up there?”
The little robot shook his head.
“Oh, pickles,” she said. She turned to the others. “I’m afraid he might really be in trouble this time,” she told them.
She hadn’t really had a chance to tell them much about her day: just the broadest possible strokes about her investigations with Dash, their flight from the giant robot, and Dash’s disappearance at the site of the new power station.
Freda, however, was more interested in the view through Rusty’s doorway. “How nice! Look at all the books, and the houseplants!”
Rusty stood to the side and beckoned them indoors.
It really was a nice little apartment, Nola agreed. Very homey. The other operators ooh’ed and ahh’ed over Rusty’s collection of mosses and his aquarium, bubbling softly in the corner. She didn’t really think this was the best time, though, for getting acquainted. She cleared her throat a couple of times; but it looked as though sterner measures would be needed.
“You must have wonderful natural light in the daytime,” said Mrs. Broadvine. She had wandered over to the window, stepping aside to avoid a motionless robot sitting at Rusty’s workbench. “And who might this be?” she asked, with one eyebrow raised in what she must have thought was a knowing kind of way.
Rusty set the ornithopter down on a bookshelf. It rearranged its wings and curled up with a dozy ping ping ping.
Nola said, “I think Dash must be in trouble.…”
“Yes,” Mrs. Broadvine said absently. “The poor boy could use a hand, I’m sure.”
Mrs. Broadvine turned. “So how did you meet our Nola, Rusty?”
Rusty pointed up to the roof, and then downstairs, and then he knelt down to fiddle with the drain pipe under the sink. He looked up.
“That must be young Mr. Kent, then,” Mrs. Broadvine said, and he nodded.
“Well we’re all very well acquainted,” said the former supervisor. “We were all switchboard operators together at the Info-Slate offices, until recent events…”
Rusty tilted his head.
“The switchboard. It’s where we all worked together. Have you never seen an Info-Slate?”
Rusty’s head swiveled side to side. Mrs. Broadvine took out her Slate out and began a demonstration.
Nola sidled over to Rhonda. “We really need to find out what’s happened to Dash,” she insisted.
“Oh!” Rhonda said. “But this is all his line of work, isn’t it? Won’t he be dashing back here to report back to us, with all kinds of stories to tell?”
“That would be nice, of course.” Nola kept her voice even. “But I’m afraid that he might not be able to … to dash back, as you say, without a little…”
Rhonda was paying more attention to Mrs. Broadvine’s Info-Slate demonstration. Rusty seemed a little puzzled.
“No,” Rhonda said. She walked away from Nola and over to Rusty. “You see, this is what the Info-Slate owner sees. But we’re all back at the switchboard, connecting up the cables that control the display. Here, it’s like this.”
Rhonda sat down near the work bench and started to pull imaginary wires out of their sockets. Then she plugged them back in to their new positions.
“So when they try to call up the Zoning Ordinances, like this, you see, I pull the main pane’s cable and then I reconnect it.…”
On the stool next to her the silent robot reached out to pull an imaginary wire from one position; then she moved it to another with a practiced flick of her fingers.
Rhonda froze.
“And then…” Nola said, “for a search in the Private Vehicle Registry…”
The seated robot lifted her imaginary cable from its new position, clicked its imaginary release, and socketed it into position where the vehicle registries feed would be. With her other hand she flicked the equally imaginary switch that would have toggled an Info-Slate’s display to the Private Registry.
The operators stared. Then, all at once, they started to describe other switches and feeds. The little robot obediently pulled one invisible wire after another and turned all of the correct switches that were not there. The operators in the room could tell that she was working flawlessly.
And pretty darn quickly, too, Nola realized.
“She’s a switchboard operator,” she said.
“And a very good one,” Mrs. Broadvine added. “She’s…”
Rusty was looking intently at the little robot, who—now that her instructions had stopped—was again sitting motionless in front of the window.
Nola put her hands on her hips. “She’s one of our replacements.”
The entire herd of operators turned on Rusty with so many rapid questions that the little ornithopter on the bookshelf looked up, chuffed to itself angrily, and then launched from its perch to fly out of the transom and back up to its peaceful cote on the roof.
FRIDAY, 8:45 PM
“This doesn’t want to surrender, either,” said one of the giants.
The world’s smallest giant robot examined the new intruder. Like the thirty-seven previous intruders, this one looked a lot like a rock.
Pssszzzzt.
And now, like all those others, it looked like a slowly cooling puddle of lava.
The world’s smallest giant robot looked up at its new masters. They seemed pleased.
Life was so much simpler now.
FRIDAY, 8:48 PM
Pitt tugged at the brim of his hat. It had taken a ridiculous amount of time, he calculated, to get himself down from the ceiling of the cavern; he considered whether his next generation of robots ought to be more intelligent. It was a precarious balance: whenever he made them too intelligent they always started to show the same kind of inefficiency as human beings. The robots that had been guarding the doorway were an irritating example. Why had they all decided to go back to work on the Projectile?
If he gave them too much intelligence they would end up being just as big a problem as human people were. Then what would he do? Build a new Projectile to get rid of them?
He strode down the hallways between the cavern and his control center. He had to check on the project’s status first, but then he’d go straight to Perkins’s cell and one way or another he would learn who D. Kent was, and where to find him; and then Pitt would put a stop to whatever it was the young man was doing. Kent had already seen far too much. He could not be tolerated.
Pitt ran a hand along the length of his slide rule. Interference at this stage of the project was dangerous: until the Projectile was complete he had to concentrate on security. And on retribution.
He stopped. Retribution? Really?
He gave his head a shake. His hat slid across his glossy scalp; he straightened it again. Retribution was counterproductive. It was a waste of resources. How could such an … emotional idea have taken hold of him?
The threat to the project needed to be eliminated: that was all. Nothing else was necessary.
He rested one hand on his holstered slide rule and set off again toward the control center. He would do what was necessary, and then he would be done.
FRIDAY, 8:49 PM
Abner startled himself awake. It took a moment before he understood that he’d been snoring. A weary look around his cell showed him that nothing had changed. It might be noon or midnight: he had no way to know in the cell’s dim light.
He sat up on his pallet.
He had accepted Pitt’s statement that the Transport Pod had been removed from the main lines of the system. This was completely believable. The cell walls were burnished steel; the door, he had found, was impregnable; its lock was inaccessible from this side.
That left the Transport Tube’s passage, if he could reach it. This seemed every bit as unlikely as anything else; but he had nothing else to do with his time, so he started an examination of the smooth, cylindrical housing around the Pod.
It was flawless.
He tapped on it, frustrated.
A moment later, something tapped back.
FRIDAY, 9:04 PM
Rusty was practically bouncing up and down in front of the videophone while the operators huddled around the operator robot, giving her new imaginary instructions and timing her responses. They had her simulating six different clients on six Info-Slates.
“She’s really good,” Freda said again.
Nola’s eyes were on the televideo screen. It was displaying a graphic that read OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT, RETROPOLIS FRATERNAL LEAGUE OF ROBOTIC PERSONS.
Rusty hung up. His shoulders drooped.
Then he seemed to have a thought and he dialed another number. Another placeholder graphic flickered on. This one read THE FERRISS MOTO-MAN COMPANY: HARRY ROY, SHIFT SUPERVISOR.
He hung up again and looked out the window.
Nola put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s after business hours,” she told him. “They probably won’t be back till Monday.”
He raised his glassy eyes to hers.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I just don’t understand. Why do you want to talk to them?”
Rusty seemed to think this over. He gestured at the robot operator. For once it seemed that he just couldn’t mime what he meant to say.
“I hope you work it out,” Nola told him. “But nobody else seems to be doing anything about Dash and I’m sure he’s in trouble. I really need to find him.”
