James White - Second Ending

Maybe they were playing hide and seek, Ross thought wildly; if so, he was getting tired of the game, tired of being “it”…

“Come out, come out!” Ross yelled at the top of his voice, “Wherever you are!” They came out.

They were long cylindrical objects mounted on four padded wheels, possessing at least ten thick, multi-jointed metal arms and various other projections of unknown function. As they rolled steadily toward him, Ross knew with a terrible certainty that what he was seeing was his nightmare — multiplied by twenty. There was almost a score of the things coming at him from the left-hand fork of the corridor. The lights gleamed off their shiny metal sides and folded arms. He could see that each had a double lens arrangement mounted vertically atop a short, headless neck. The upper lens rotated slowly; the lower was directed forward. They advanced without a sound. Ross wanted to run, but his brain seemed to have gotten its signals crossed. All he could do was tremble and sweat, until…

“Our previous instructions were to conceal ourselves until after you had spent some time in Dr. Pellew’s room,” said a quiet, female voice behind him, “and we were warned that to do otherwise might result in severe psychological disturbance to yourself. The wording of your last order, however, is such that it overrides our previous instructions.”

Ross turned around, slowly. The thing behind him was a large, erect ovoid mounted on three wheels and surmounted by one fixed and one swiveling eyepiece. There were no arms but the smooth, egglike body showed the outlines of several panels which might open to reveal anything. Clamped to one of the wheel struts was a large square box with a cable running from it to the main body. It gave the impression of having been stuck on as an afterthought. One of its wheels had a worn tread which emitted a faint sighing sound as it moved toward him. Ross thought of dodging around it and running — or trying to run; he felt almost too weak to stand now — for the ramp, but behind the egg there were more cylinders coming fast.

With his head jerking from side to side Ross watched them roll up to within a yard of him and stop. The rotating lenses turned slowly; the stationary ones were fixed on him.

After several unsuccessful tries Ross made his tongue work. He said, “What… what is all this?”

The cylinders began to tick like runaway clocks and then the egg spoke again. It said, “The question, requiring as it does complete and detailed knowledge of astronomy, anthropology, cybernetics, evolution, mass psychology, metallurgy, medicine, nuclear physics as well as other sciences about which I have no data, is beyond the scope of an electronic brain. For your information, sir, when asking questions or giving orders to a robot the wording must be detailed and non-ambiguous.”

So they were only robots who could answer questions — simple questions — and obey orders. Ross began to relax. His first thought was to tell them all to get to blazes out of his sight, but then he decided that that, also, might be too confusing for them. He considered for a moment, then said timidly, “Go back to whatever you were doing before I called you.”

They all began to move away, including the egg-shaped one. Ross called, “Not you. Wait. Your voice is familiar — are you the one who came into my room last night?”

“Yes, sir.”

“But I’d thought… the mutations…” Ross stammered. “What happened to the mutants?”

“They are dead, sir. The research was discontinued before I was programmed.”

Ross shook his head. He had been expecting mutants and had found robots instead. In a way he ought to have expected something like this, because the trend had been well developed even in his time. Full-scale automation spreading from the factories into the homes, guardian robots for small children — there had even been talk of a robot barber. But in his wildest moments Ross would never have thought of them turning one loose in a hospital. Ross had to check an urge to revise his picture of what had happened while he was in Deep Sleep, because the revision would be based on incomplete data and would probably be as wide of the truth as the last one. Horrible mutations working under a cloak of darkness, indeed! He decided not to jump to any conclusions at all until he had been to Dr. Pellew’s quarters.

Matching pace with Ross’s weary shuffle, the robot led him through a series of short corridors, up another ramp for two levels, then into what appeared to be the administration and maintenance section. Ross was feeling quite pleased with himself. He had had a horde of robots sprung on him without warning only minutes ago, and now he was talking to one of them, almost naturally. Such powers of adaptability, he thought, were something to be proud of.

He kept the conversation simple, of course, and confined mainly to short, direct questions regarding the rooms or machinery they passed. To some of the simple questions the robot gave concise and detailed answers, and occasionally he received a reply of “I’m sorry, sir, I have not been programmed with data on this subject…”

At one point Ross broke off to ask, “Why do you keep calling me ‘sir’ when you know my name?”

The robot ticked quietly to itself for a few seconds, and Ross went over the question again in his mind to see if it might sound ambiguous. It didn’t, so he repeated the question aloud.

The ticking slowed and stopped. “A Ward Sister of my type has two choices of behavior toward human beings,” the robot said in its pleasant, feminine voice. “Toward patients we are friendly but authoritative, because we are better qualified to know what will and will not benefit them, and surnames prefixed by ‘Mr.’ are used. When a human being is mobile and shows no marked signs of physical malfunction we treat him as our superior. The choice was difficult in your case.”

“Between a mobile Boss and a bedridden patient,” said Ross drily, “and I was a mobile patient.”

“As my superior,” the robot went on, “you are not required to give reasons for your misuse and damaging of ward bed linen.”

Ross began to laugh softly. Sisters were all the same, he thought; even the mechanical ones were inclined to fuss. He was still laughing when they reached Dr. Pellew’s room.

It was much smaller than the quarters Pellew had once occupied, but it contained the same chairs, desk and bookcase. The only items missing were Beethoven and the thin, irascible person of Pellew himself. A heavy ledger lay exactly centered on the desk with an empty ashtray on one side and an adjustable calendar on the other. Pellew had been a notoriously untidy man, Ross knew, so this uncharacteristic neatness must be due to the cleaning robots while Pellew was in Deep Sleep. Knowing that the Doctor was not in a position to object, Ross sat at the desk and opened the ledger.

It was a diary, more than half filled with Pellew’s odd, backward-leaning scrawl.

Before he settled down to reading it, the caution of a lowly student who was making free with his superior’s holy of holies prompted a question.

“Who is the Doctor in charge at the moment?” Ross asked. “Who’s awake, I mean.”

“You, sir,” said the robot.

“Me! But…”

He had been about to say that he wasn’t qualified, that another two years of study would elapse before, if he was lucky, he could tack “Dr.” in front of his name. But there was a staff shortage, so much so that they must have been forced to awaken students to fill in for qualified doctors. The ledger would probably tell him why.

“Have you any instructions, sir?” said the robot.

Ross tried to think like a Doctor in charge. He hemmed a couple of times, then said, “Regarding the patients, none at present. But I’m hungry — will you get me something to eat?”