The Forgetful Robot, page 9
I stood on the edge of the perimeter and measured the distance to the killer robot. It was about forty feet, give or take a few inches. A long way to charge a killer that had only to lift its arm and fire a spray gun. Staying outside the thirty feet, I moved forward and cut down the distance. It began raising its arm. I stopped just outside the twenty-foot range of the gun.
It looked as though the only thing to do was chance it, rush in and try to zigzag away from the acid gun and then grab the knife arm before it smashed my optube or cut my diaphragms.
I got set.
Then I got a new demonstration of how alert and intelligent the Zarkians were. And how brave, because just as I was about to lunge, Gay and Pie set up a shrill twittering. They waved their arms and rushed forward to divert the killer robot’s attention. It stopped and turned to face them.
This action on the part of Gay and Pie was either brave or foolhardy by human standards—depending on the human who passed judgement on it. Human judgements can vary a great deal.
But to me it was an unpredictable act that had to be quickly evaluated. My only chance of defeating the robot was to reach him without injury to myself. The percentages in favor of my being able to do this were very low. What Pie and Gay had done, though, was a plus factor and therefore had to be used as such.
Twenty feet and some odd inches separated me from the killer. I moved forward. The acid gun, coming around to bear on me, had to move through an arc of approximately four feet. So it was only a matter of comparative speeds.
Alerted by the sound of my feet on the floor, the killer swung around. The two distances lessened.
My victory could have been measured in inches. But I won. I locked the killer’s acid gun arm at its side just as the deadly fluid spurted out. Fortunately, this miss of an inch was as good as a mile, which is a saying humans have for such situations. With the arm locked to the killer’s side, I was able to open its control box and deactivate it. The killer froze.
With this menace at least temporarily eliminated, we turned our attention to the pit. No sound had come from it since we’d entered the room, but now a wistful voice hit my diaphragms.
“Is anybody up there?”
It was Janet’s voice. I looked over the edge and focused my infrared. They were all down there, looking very tired and frightened.
I said, “I am Barney. Can you see me?”
“Oh, Barney! I knew you’d come. Please get us out of here.”
Slezak and Larch were at the other side of the pit. Slezak was looking up warily.
“Be careful,” he said to the others. “It may be a trap.”
Larch said, “Gardner took the robot over. He was carrying the guy’s books during our trial.”
“Barney wouldn’t desert us,” Larry said.
“You’re dreaming. A robot is a machine. It doesn’t have friends or enemies.”
Slezak said, “Shut up,” speaking wearily. It was as though he had become reconciled to spending the rest of his life telling Larch to keep his mouth shut.
Pie unwound the rope, and we had all five of them out of the pit very quickly. Granddad Ravencraft was the only problem. He had to be handled very gently. We brought him up first, and then Janet and Larry stayed with him.
Slezak asked, “Where are we going?”
“Yeah,” Larch echoed. “Where are you taking us? And I’m warning you—there better not be any tricks.”
“There are no tricks,” I said.
Janet flared at him. “Be quiet, you thief! It would serve you right if Barney left you down there.”
Slezak was equally disgusted. He said, “One more peep out of you and you get a clout in the mouth. Is that clear?”
We started back toward the barricaded sanctuary, Gay and Pie scouting ahead to warn us of any Earth men or unfriendly Shadow People along the way.
We made it without being seen, and then there was a tense time while we guided the party, one by one, through the mine field.
When they were all inside, I talked to Professor Dixon, telling him what we’d done and how valuable Gay and Pie had been to me.
Then I went back to Gardner’s room and stood where I’d been before, to wait for morning.
In the morning the lights came up again and Gardner awoke and got out of bed. He paid no attention to me and was eating breakfast when Wilson rushed in.
“They’re gone!” Wilson announced.
Gardner frowned as though annoyed by Wilson’s excitement. “Who is gone?”
“The Ravencrafts! Larch and Slezak. Out of the pit. They’ve vanished.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“I told you—they’re gone.”
“Then the robot must have been destroyed.”
“No. Only deactivated—but it looks to be okay. I left it as it was.”
Gardner faced the problem as one that required logic rather than consternation. “There has to be an explanation.”
“You tell me”
“We can eliminate the Zarkians. They’re deathly afraid of the robot. They wouldn’t go near it.”
“That leaves Dixon.”
“He would have been utterly incapable of defeating the robot. It would have destroyed him.”
“Well, it had to be somebody.” Wilson turned his eyes on me. “Could Dixon have come in here and sneaked Barney out?”
“Ridiculous. I was asleep right here in the room.”
“Yeah—asleep,” Wilson said.
I was concentrating on my optube, keeping the glow out of it, and wishing somebody would turn me on before Wilson looked too close. He did it himself, crossing the room and snapping the switch.
Gardner said, “That sound would have awakened me instantly. But you can forget about Barney. He would have been no match for the killer robot in the first place. And if Dixon had stolen him, he certainly wouldn’t have brought him back.”
“I guess you’re right,” Wilson growled. “But exactly where does that leave us? Does it mean there are some people in the undercity we don’t know anything about?”
“I doubt it. The explanation lies elsewhere. But the important thing is to find and recapture the prisoners. If they fled into the desert, they are doomed. If they are hiding in the undercity or up above, you should have no difficulty in apprehending them. I suggest you get busy.”
“I wonder if they’re with Dixon.”
“I don’t see why they should be, but you can check. If they are, we have no problem.”
Gardner’s analysis of the situation highlighted how little I had really accomplished. Being told about it made me realize even more sharply exactly what the situation was. If I was to carry out Professor Dixon’s general order successfully, I would have to do something more decisive than to get five humans out of one trap and lead them into another.
“The killer robot is the most important thing,” Gardner said. “Check it immediately for damage. And take this one with you,” he added, indicating me with a jerk of his head. “Find something for it to do.” He spoke as though my presence annoyed him.
As Wilson told me to follow him, I realized the opportunity I had missed—not incapacitating the killer robot. That forced me to reevaluate my data, because if destruction of the killer robot was logical, I should have done it automatically. And it certainly seemed logical.
So I came again to the part I could not evaluate—the reaction I’d experienced during my first contact with it. That meant my components had given me some data I hadn’t been able to clarify, which in turn meant I would have to have more data to work with.
Maybe there are times when humans expect too much of a robot… .
11.
Robots Should Stick Together
After we left Professor Gardner’s room, Wilson didn’t seem to know what to do with me. First we went to the mined corridor, and he peered along the length of it into the big room beyond, where the other Earthlings were gathered. No one was in sight.
Wilson called out, “Are you there?”
They didn’t answer. At first I thought they had left. But then I realized that they would see no point in satisfying Wilson’s curiosity. If I had been in there under the same circumstances and had been a human, I would have done the same thing.
He shrugged and gave up. But before we left, he spoke to me in a loud voice. “That corridor is mined with lignite fuses. When we’re ready, we’ll wall up this passage and let nature take its course. Let’s go.”
After sending that message down the corridor, he started away and then stopped long enough to call back, “We’ve got your robot, so you won’t be able to use him to break out. We’ve also got those two thieves and the three characters from the spacer.”
I don’t know whether he expected an answer, but if he did, he was disappointed. Then he made one more try.
“If you want to give up, Gardner will arrange to send you back to Earth with the others. This was his plan in the first place. You had no reason to run off and hide.”
That seemed to me a silly thing to tell people who had already been condemned to death, but I guess Wilson wasn’t trying to be smart—only trying to get a reaction that would tell him who was in the room beyond the mine field.
He got none, and we finally left. We went back through the more populated section of the undercity. Whenever we met Zarkians, they stopped what they were doing and stared at us until we passed. Wilson paid no attention to them.
When we got to the pit room, he examined the killer robot thoroughly but did not risk activating it. As I watched him, I got the feeling he didn’t really care whether it would function again. On the basis of what he and Bennett planned—to leave Zark on the Venusian ship—that seemed logical.
After finishing, he looked at me and frowned. Evidently he had no work for me, because he opened my control panel and snapped my switch.
I reacted as soon as possible, drawing the power out of my optube, but I could have saved the effort, because Wilson turned and strode out of the room without looking back.
This gave me the opportunity I hadn’t taken advantage of before—to put the killer robot out of commission. Thinking that I probably had a little time before Wilson would return, I was not in any rush. There was still the reaction that had prevented me from damaging it in the first place. I stared at the killer, wondering what its key word was. Usually killer robots are keyed to a single word, known only to their owners. In robot fights the word is whispered to them when they go against their opponents, and the word puts them into destructive motion.
My data on killer robots was sketchy at best, which was probably why the single point about the switch had not integrated instantly. But it was enough to justify further investigation. The robot had obviously been converted from some other use to that of a killer. This was not entirely illogical. I’d heard of robot parts being stolen from manufacturers on Earth for use in the Venusian factories, because their equipment did not anywhere near compare with those of Earth’s legitimate suppliers. But I had never heard of entire robots being stolen, which was evidently the case with this one. So I delayed damaging it beyond repair in order to check further.
I circled the robot slowly then, and saw something else—two grooves down the back of its torso. I knew this was the trademark of Humanoid Electronics, a company on Earth that specialized in domestics. That meant the killer had originally been wired and programmed to high intelligence, because a domestic works with children and must be absolutely reliable.
Naturally, that didn’t mean the killer could be trusted with children now. It had been changed too much. But it was enough to make me risk further investigation, so I snapped on its activator switch and stepped back, moving to the side opposite the spray gun.
I said, “Hello.”
The robot said, “Rephrase.” Evidently no one had ever said hello to it before.
I said, “We ought to be friends. Robots should stick together.” Not that it meant anything. It was just something to say.
“Rephrase.”
No good. I gave up and walked away—around to the other side of the pit, just in case some delayed action brought the killer to the point of using the acid spray on me. But I’d never heard anybody say it wasn’t a good idea to try one more time, so I went back to the killer robot and stood at a safe distance and said, “How are the children?”
If its memory bank had been blocked out completely, I would have gotten the rephrase answer. But it didn’t come. The killer stood there for a few moments, as though something in its components had clicked. Then it said, “The children are in bed.”
I asked, “What children?”
The killer thought again. “Richard and Damen.”
“Do you take care of them?”
While it struggled to answer that, the acid spray arm came up. I backed out of range, but the arm did not come around, so I decided the movement was a reaction to confusion in its memory bank, not a hostile one.
“Where did you take the children?”
“To the river. They threw sticks into the water and Garfield swam in after the sticks and brought them back to the shore.”
“Who is Garfield?”
“Garfield is a dog.”
So there it was. I had something, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I wished that Professor Dixon had been there. He would have known.
It seemed that the logical thing was to take the killer through the mine field to where Professor Dixon could assume the responsibility. But I couldn’t do that. It was too dangerous. Even though it could remember two little children named Richard and Damen, and a dog named Garfield, it was still a killer. I had to see what I could do by myself.
I said, “What is your name?”
“Rephrase.”
“The children were Richard and Damen. The dog was Garfield. Relate to them. What was the robot’s name?”
“The robot was Mildred.”
“Who was the robot?”
“I was the robot.”
“Then your name is Mildred.”
“Yes.”
That did not seem right, that a killer robot should have a nice name like that. But it was not Mildred’s fault. Also, it was hard to visualize a killer robot as a she, but of course it was only a term of identification for the convenience of the humans who made us.
Mildred and I were pretty much in the same situation. Both our memory banks had been tampered with, the only difference being that the job on her had been done by experts, while I’d been messed up by a couple of blundering amateurs named Larch and Slezak.
For some reason, whoever converted Mildred left some of the old memories in her recall unit. There could have been only one reason for this. Somehow, it made her a better fighter. She revealed to me the reason for this when I asked, “Will you fight for the children?”
Mildred said, “Richard and Damen are my responsibility. I will fight to the death to protect them.”
That was it. Whoever converted Mildred was pretty smart. They knew that a fighting robot would fight harder for a loyalty than just for the sake of fighting.
“Tell me about the dog.”
Mildred said, “Garfield is black with one white foot. He likes to chew on my leg. There are scratches from his teeth.”
I looked and saw the scratches. I asked, “Who were the father and mother of Richard and Damen?”
Mildred tried. That had been blocked out. “Rephrase.”
“Where was the river they threw the sticks into for Garfield to swim out and get?”
“On Earth.”
“At what place on Earth?”
“Rephrase.”
Mildred did not have an order in her command unit. I wanted to find out if she would accept mine or take it into her components to spray me with acid. I walked away from her, toward the door to the room, being careful to get far enough ahead so that I was beyond range of the gun.
Then I said, “Mildred, follow me.”
She hesitated for a moment when I gave the order. But then she obeyed me, her left knee creaking a little where she needed oil.
So she’d obeyed me and we were walking. The next thing was to figure out where to go. I only knew where we were not going—to the room where Professor Dixon was. Outside of that, I had no plan, and we came finally to the ramp leading out of the undercity.
“How are your batteries?” I asked.
“They are full.” Still getting residue out of her memory bank, she said, “Richard would tell me that if I wasn’t a good robot, he would let my batteries run down. But he never did. They were always kept full.”
For want of a better place to go, I led Mildred back to the Gallant Lady. She was still there, with her port cut open, making her useless.
But I examined the damage and began to think it might not be impossible to get her into space. There were two sections to the port, the outer section and the safety panel inside. The outer port opened outward, but the inner one hinged toward the interior of the ship. That meant that if we could anchor the outer port, we could pack and buttress the inner one solidly enough to stand against space pressure and maintain enough of a safety factor to take a chance. It wouldn’t be anything the Safety Patrol would put their approval stamp on, but when we told them what had happened, I was sure they would not penalize us for trying to escape from Zark.
I could not fix the Gallant Lady beforehand, because it would have to be done after boarding. The outer port could then be welded shut and the inner port buttressed.
So the thing to do was get Professor Dixon and the other humans aboard. This could be done only after dark. I wondered if it would be better to go back and stand in the pit room as though we had never left it.
I decided against this. There was too much chance of us being seen. And if Professor Gardner found us wandering around as though we owned the place, I was sure he would deactivate us.
So we would have to gamble on sneaking in and getting them out after dark. I meant I would have to gamble on it. When the time came, I would park Mildred and leave her deactivated until we got back to the Gallant Lady. I had not decided whether we would take her with us or not. It would depend on circumstances.
