Ben Bova - Exiled from Earth

Spinal tap, Lou thought, his innards sinking.

“I promised I wouldn’t move even if it hurt,” George said.

“Georgy, listen. The doctor… he said he’d be back. When? When’s he coming back?”

“Tomorrow.”

Tomorrow. This morning, most likely. “Okay, Georgy, you get back to sleep now. I’ll come and see you tomorrow.”

“All right. Uncle Lou. Good night.”

“Good night.”

As the gorilla shambled back toward his pallet, Lou began to know what real responsibility felt like. Big George trusts me. he told himself. He needs me to keep them from hurting him.

And then with a shock Lou realized that the only way he could save Big George would be- to destroy Ramo. He almost laughed as he stood by the wire fence in the moonlight.

Some family I’ve got, he thought bitterly. A gorilla and a computer. One of them is going to die. And it’s up to me to choose which one.

He hesitated only for a moment. Then he turned and headed for the computer building.

The door to the computer building was locked. Not by a voice-code lock, but an old-fashioned mechanical type, the kind that has a set of nine buttons that must be pushed in the right combination.

Lou didn’t know the combination. And I’ll bet Marcus has the building wired with alarms. There’d be guards swarming in here before I sat down in the control slot.

He stood there for a moment, uncertain. No sense getting shot if you can’t do the job you set out to do, he told himself. And then he smiled. On the other hand, if you’re smart enough, and quick enough, there might be a way to get the job done without killing anybody.

Grinning with his new idea, Lou walked back to the dormitory, undressed quickly, and got into bed. He set his wristwatch alarm to buzz at six, then closed his eyes. In five minutes he was sound asleep.

He had less than three hours of sleep, but Lou felt bright and ready as he stood by the fence of George’s compound again.

“Here’s some fruit I saved from breakfast,” he said to the gorilla. “Catch!”

He tossed a banana and two oranges over the fence. George backpedaled clumsily and managed to grab the banana in one huge hand. The oranges fell to the ground.

He stooped to pick them up, then jammed all three into his mouth.

“Thank you, Uncle Lou,” Big George said juicily.

Lou laughed. “You’re welcome, Georgy.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Lou saw a guard walking past the lab buildings, stopping at each door briefly to touch out a combination on the lock. He talked with the gorilla for a few minutes more, then, when he was sure that the guard was out of sight, Lou walked briskly to the computer building.

The rest of the technical staff was probably just getting up, Lou thought as he glanced at the control panel clock. Sliding into the seat, he immediately started typing out instructions to Ramo.

It was mid-morning before he found out if his scheme had worked. Despite the computer room’s nearly arctic air conditioning, Lou was sweating as he sat at the control desk. He was trying to do his own work, but it was going very slowly. His mind certainly wasn’t on it.

The phone buzzed. Lou was expecting it, but it still made him jump. He touched the ANSWER button. The round Oriental face of the chief biochemist appeared on the screen. He looked unhappy.

“We seem to have a problem this morning,” he said without preamble.

“Really?” Lou said as innocently as he could.

Still frowning, the biochemist said, “Yes. We went to run a routine check of yesterday’s work and found that the data we recorded yesterday is missing from the computer’s memory bank.”

“Missing?” Lou shook his head. “Impossible. You’re probably just searching the wrong bank.”

They talked it over for nearly half an hour. The results of yesterday’s spinal tap on the gorilla, the cortical map, even some of the chemical formulas that had been stored in the computer weeks earlier—were gone from Ramo’s memory banks.

Lou forced himself to look serious. “I’ll do a complete check to find the missing data,” he said, “but it sounds to me like some of your people have goofed up. Running this computer isn’t as simple as operating a typewriter, you know. You should have let me record your data… or at least you ought to have a trained computer programmer or technician doing the job.”

“They are trained technicians!” the biochemist snapped.

Lou shrugged. “Then they haven’t been trained well enough— Okay, I’ll look for the data for you. But I’m willing to bet it was never stored properly in the first place, and it’s simply not in the memory banks.”

The biochemist was starting to look furious. “Two months of work lost!” He lapsed into Chinese.

It took them a week to figure out what was going on. Lou would spend his days at his own work, and then at the end of the day he’d have Ramo review the biochemists’ work for him. It took him only a few minutes to erase some of their material from Ramo’s memory banks. Lou never washed out very much material, just enough to slow them down.

The biochemists became a very unhappy group of people. Their chief went around screaming and purple-faced. The computer technicians who worked for (hem looked scared. By the end of the week, Lou was spending most of his day with the technicians, trying to find out why they couldn’t do their jobs properly.

Lou told nobody what he was doing. But Bonnie and Kori guessed it. By the end of the week, at dinner with them in the noisy cafeteria, Lou said to Kori:

“You’ve got to figure out some way to get us off this island. It’s only a matter of time until the biochemists figure out what’s wrong with the computer programs, and then…”

“I know,” Kori answered, hunching over the table and speaking as low as possible. “I’ve been trying to work out a navigational fix, so that we can at least find out where we are. But I’m afraid I’m not much of a navigator. And the sextant I’ve built isn’t very accurate.”

“But how do we get off the island?” Bonnie asked.

Kori shrugged. “Maybe we could build a raft—”

“Or a flying carpet,” Lou replied acidly.

That ended their discussion.

It happened the next day. Lou wasn’t really surprised when an armed guard showed up at the computer control room. It had been exactly a week since he had first started tinkering with Ramo’s biochemistry banks.

“What is it?” Lou asked, tensing.

The guard said, with a Malay lilt to this voice, “Mr. Marcus wishes to see you.”

“I’m busy at the moment. Tell him…”

“Now,” the guard said. And he hitched a thumb on the holster at his hip.

Lou nodded. “Okay, just let me…”

“Do not touch the computer controls,” the guard said softly, even gently. But his hand curled around the butt of his gun.

Lou found that his own hands were suddenly trembling, and well away from the controls. “Okay, okay, but the computer’s in the middle of a run.”

“Some other technicians are being brought in to take care of it. You will come with me, please.”

Marcus’ car was waiting outside, with another guard at the wheel. Lou climbed in and the first guard sat beside him. In a few minutes, Lou was ushered into the air-conditioned study of Marcus’ house. It was a small room, lined with books and a single large window that overlooked the sea.

Marcus was sitting at a desk in front of the window. There were a few straight-backed chairs in the room, and a comfortable-looking sofa. Marcus was talking into the viewphone on his desk when Lou entered. Without looking up, he gestured Lou to a chair next to the desk.