Robert Thurston - Intruder

She couldn’t dope Avery out any more. Sometimes he would talk normally-or at least in what was a normal fashion for a man whose eccentricity was legend-and then he’d switch over to this robot identity, praising his own efficiency or going on endlessly about the virtues of his positronic brain. Derec continued to urge her to deal with the man, as if compassion and intelligent conversation with him would bring about a cure. It was simply too large an order. Avery’s madness was beyond anything her homegrown sense of psychology could cope with.

Still, she had to try. She had promised.

While Avery and Ariel spoke, Eve moved closer to the desk. She wanted to watch the dancers play the game, which could not take place until Ariel returned her attention to them.

Or must she wait for Ariel? Indeed, why wait for her?

She placed her hand in the middle of the desk, resting it on its side, thumb up. The dancers immediately responded to the signal and began forming teams on either side of Eve’s hand. When they were ready, Eve raised her hand and dropped a tiny rolled up piece of paper onto the middle of the desktop. The dancers immediately began scrambling toward it. One of them, the chubby one that Avery had tried to take, reached it first. He picked it up and began to run with it, but the opposing team quickly assembled itself. A female sprang in front of the male carrying the paper and gestured others to join her. In an instant, it seemed, they had surrounded the male. They were not allowed to touch each other during the game, except by accident. That had been one of Ariel’s early rules, rules that she had communicated to the dancers through the use of a series of hand signs she had developed in her study of them. Once the player was surrounded, he must give up the paper, which he did. The new possessors began tossing the paper between them, while the other team, staying close together, watched, waiting for the next move, looking for their chance to surround the player carrying the paper.

Suddenly one of the females, a gaunt, thin one who had grown gaunter and thinner since the Silversides had brought the group to the medical facility, started to rush forward with the paper tucked under her arm. The other team started to go into a formation that could easily close itself around her, but she suddenly turned and flipped the paper back to a male who was running behind her. He quickly hurled it to another male standing at the edge of the desktop. This one ran in a straight line, along the desk edge, to the other side of the desk. Nobody could catch him.

When he reached the other side, he abruptly sat down, set the paper in front of him, and did a half-bow to it. The last act established the authenticity of the score, a procedure that Ariel (who had adapted the game from an ancient Auroran sport) had not originally taught them. It seemed they were such slaves to ritual that they had to perform some rite when they succeeded at scoring.

The male stood up and left the piece of paper where he had deposited it, a signal for Eve to pick it up and again drop it in the center after the teams had re-formed. She was about to let it go, when Ariel hollered at her harshly, “Eve! I did not give you permission to start the game!”

Eve, holding the paper over the anxiously awaiting dancers, looked up. “I wanted to start it. Since you were speaking with Ozymandias, I decided to-”

“It’s not up to you to decide. You haven’t learned yet. You are the robot, I am the human. You wait for my orders.”

“We are not sure that is correct. “

Ariel threw up her hands in despair. She did not need this kind of robotic sophistry right this minute. Staring down at the desktop, she said, “Okay, who’s ahead?”

Ariel didn’t have the patent on despairing gestures. In another part of the city, Derec was clenching his fists and resisting the impulse to slam them down on the nearest available surface.

“Another dysfunctional session, sir?” Mandelbrot said. Derec almost laughed. A dysfunctional session? Frost, an absolute failure.

“It seems that our computer does not yet want to activate full access, Mandelbrot. This just doesn’t make sense. It’s like the computer is playing with me, letting me do some things, blocking me from others.”

“Do not the computers obey the Laws of Robotics, too?”

Derec shrugged. “They’re supposed to. Unless someone is controlling them from some outside source, overriding my requests as I make them.”

“Is that possible?”

“I believe so. There is someone in the city somewhere, the same individual that the robots are blocked from telling me about, and he or she or it’s the boss right now. There’s something so, I don’t know, inhuman about our intruder’s actions that I suspect an alien, one as intelligent as the blackbodies and as mean as Aranimas.”

Aranimas had been the alien who, before Derec came to Robot City, had trapped him on his ship and tried to make a slave out of him. The most fortunate aspects of that terrible experience were that he had met Ariel and Wolruf and constructed the wonderfully loyal Mandelbrot out of spare parts.

With an expansive hand gesture that clearly dismissed the computer, Derec stood up and began pacing the room. “Mandelbrot, I should be in charge, but the he or she or it is not allowing it. This individual doles out some information through the computer-how to activate the devices for food, Personals, the slidewalk, heat and light-but only that data that we require in order to survive. When it comes to completely activating the computer, getting the services of the city running again, and putting the robots back in their proper jobs, it keeps blocking me from accomplishing anything. Obviously it is not out to destroy us, not at present anyway. But he, she, or it is definitely hiding something from us. Its identity, of course, but maybe something more. Maybe there’s something about its identity that we should not know. Or about its future plans.”

“What about the chemfets?” Mandelbrot asked. “In the past they have always provided the right information about the city.”

“That’s what’s really crazy, Mandelbrot. The chemfets aren’t any more functional than the city is now. Oh, I get a sensation or two about our mysterious visitor now and then, but no real clue about who or what he, she, or it is. And I get this vague feeling that there’s some kind of a solution, but it remains just outside my reach. At any rate, the chemfets are messed up, just like Robot City. There are times when I can hardly detect them. And I hate that more than I can tell you.”

He stretched his arms, as if trying to stir up the chemfets. “You know,” he continued, “I used to think the chemfets were a hellish thing. I thought they were controlling me, racing up and down my bloodstream, making me ill. Now that they’ve reached maturity and I’ve integrated myself with them, I can’t cope with them not working like this. I want to activate them desperately, and I can’t. It’s like me and the city. I want to get Robot City going again. I have to. Yet I’m so darn stymied. There’s got to be a way, Mandelbrot, and I’m going to find it.”

The Watchful Eye eavesdropped on Derec with some satisfaction. Now, back to its natural shape but completely hidden by layers of the mosslike substance it had strewn over the computer, it considered its next moves.

The strange word that Derec had used, stymied, seemed to apply to the Watchful Eye’s circumstances also. As Ariel and Avery continued their research on Series C, Batch 21, it did not feel safe in reactivating the robots who had done the original lab work that led to the creation of the various batches. It had convinced those robots that more research was needed on the Laws of Humanics, and, since there were no humans in the city, they would have to create their own. Of course the Watchful Eye knew, as Avery had perceived, that their little models were not full-fledged human beings, that they were just robotically activated biological material formed into human shapes. It could have made them into any shape, even made them look like itself, but it chose to create their appearance from pictures it called up from a computer file of historical figures.