Robert Thurston - Intruder

“Iss there anything I may do?”

“Take me home to Aurora.”

“If I could-”

“No, Wolruf, no. I didn’t really mean it anyway. I’m happy here in scenic Robot City. I plan to be president of the Chamber of Commerce.”

She was about to tell the Silversides that they could end their playacting, just as Eve passed her. Eve stopped in front of Avery and leaned in toward him, continuing her muttering in his voice. He pushed her away. She slid backward a few feet, then came close to him again.

“Stay away from me!” Avery cried. “That’s an order. Second Law.”

Ariel moved in closer, too.

“You’re a robot. You can’t invoke Second Law.”

“What? Oh? Yes. Get her away from me.”

“No. Go ahead, Eve. Stalk him. Whatever he goes, you go. You, too, Adam. Encroach.”

They surrounded Avery. Whenever he broke away from them, one of them zoomed in on him again. He flailed out at them, and they sidestepped his badly thrown blows.

Finally, he broke into a run, pursued by Adam and Eve. Near the desk he spun around, and Ariel saw he had something in his hand. A moment passed before she realized what it was. She had not seen it in a long time.

The weapon was Avery’s electronic disrupter, a device that emitted an ion stream that would interfere with the circuits of any advanced machine. Any machine, like the Silversides. And he was raising it to aim at them.

Ariel, who had been standing behind the Silversides, ran between them, and roughly pushed them away. In the back of her mind, she realized that she’d just violated another of the Laws of Humanics, the one that said humans must not harm robots. Both Silversides went flying sideways.

Her move came just in time. Avery’s shot went right over Ariel’s head and would undoubtedly have affected circuitry in Adam or Eve.

She continued her rush to Avery, jumping at him, knocking the electronic disrupter out of his hand and throwing him to the floor.

“Some robot you are,” she said, breathing heavily. “You don’t even make a decent human being.”

“Ariel,” Avery said weakly. He struggled to his feet. “I don’t-that is, I-I’m-I am-I-”

He looked sick. All the color had drained from his face. Ariel could see that it wasn’t the result of the fighting. It was something else. From the look of him, he could be dying.

“You better sit down,” Ariel said. “Adam?”

Adam picked up a chair and brought it to Avery, who settled heavily down upon it. Eve walked to Adam and the two took up a position behind Avery’s chair. The fact they looked so much alike was disconcerting to Ariel, as if she were about to talk to a group called the Avery Trio.

“Are you all right?” Ariel asked Avery.

“I-I think so.”

“Robots don’t get sick, you know. They don’t suffer from heart palpitations or exhaustion. They-”

“It’s okay, Ariel. You don’t have to speak to me as if I were a child. I know who I am. I may not like it. I may want to live forever. I may want to be a robot. But I know who I am.”

“And that is-”

“Ariel, please.”

“No, I’m a literalist. Are you a robot, Dr. Avery?”

“No.”

“Say it out.”

“I. Am. Not. A. Robot.”

Ariel smiled.

“Well,” she said, “that’s a start.”

Bogie stood in the corner where Derec had placed him so long ago. Timestep was across the room in another corner. While it was impossible for Bogie to be bored or to consider the possibilities of nothingness while in fact doing nothing for several consecutive days, he was aware that he had been in the corner for some time. It seemed to him that his position must be very much like the detectives on stakeout in several of the films he had researched. In scenes where they had waxed philosophical in tough-guy language, with plenty of wise-cracks and sentimental observations about life, they had had to pass time with only their own words to keep them company, plus a few doughnuts. Bogie would, he decided, prefer to do a stakeout for Derec than merely to stand in a corner awaiting his next order.

The order came, but not from Derec. The Watchful Eye transmitted a comlink message to Bogie over the secret channel it had created for private communications with its robots. The message told Bogie to come at once but not to allow Derec to see him go. That posed quite a dilemma for Bogie. If he left immediately, it would be obvious. If he waited for the right time, he would be disobeying the Big Muddy’s command to come at once. For a while he stood in his corner, aware that he could get mental freeze-out, a condition where a robot’s positronic brain essentially stopped functioning because of an unresolvable dilemma. He was, he thought, a cybernetic goner if he could not slip away soon.

In the room Derec was speaking with Mandelbrot.

“I had another dream about my mother last night,” Derec was saying.

“That is your fifth dream about her,” Mandelbrot said. “The fifth that you have told me about.”

“Yep. That’s all of ‘em. There wasn’t much to this one. I was a child, and she came to give me medicine. But this time I saw her face clearly. She had blond hair and hazel eyes. She seemed very kind. We talked for a while, I don’t remember about what. Then she said she loved me and left. And I woke up.”

“It was a pleasant dream then?”

“I suppose. But I woke up wondering if the woman in the dream was really my mother. I mean, I’ve never seen her, so anyone I think up could come into my dream and say she’s my mother without even looking anything like her. Do you understand, Mandelbrot?”

“Frankly, no.”

“Well, I guess you don’t have a mother.”

“You know I do not.”

Derec seemed about to explain something to Mandelbrot, but there was a soft rapping on the door.

“That sounds like Wolruf,” Derec said. “I’d recognize that tap anywhere. Come in, Wolruf.”

The caninoid alien came into the room.

“Messsage frrom Arriel,” she said. “She ssent me. We are making progrresss with your fatherr, she told me to tell ‘u.”

Derec’s face brightened. “That’s wonderful news, Wolruf. How much progress, do you think?”

“Am not able to guesss. In my homeland iss no mental illnesss. Have not seen it before Dr. Averry.”

“But he seems better.”

“That may be ssaid, I think.”

“Good. But she still doesn’t want me to come there?”

“Afrraid you’ll-”

“I know, I know. I could set him back. That’s okay.” (It wasn’t, but he said so. He was very curious about what his father would be like as a sane man. He could not conceive of the possibility.) “How about your other project? The Silversides?”

“They help Arriel, but she feelss they are just ass unpredictable ass everr.”

“I suspect so. And the dancers?”

“She ssaid to tell ‘u they do not do well. They get old. One died.”

“Did that upset Ariel badly?”

“No, I don’t think so. Eve wass concerned. She inssissted on taking it somewhere and burrying it. Ariel ssaid that iss sstrange.”

“I agree. But Adam and Eve seem full of surprises, don’t they?”

“Alwayss.”

“Anything more, Wolruf?”

“That’ss all she told me to tell ‘u.”

“Well, thank you. You make a good messenger, Wolruf. I won’t have to shoot you.”

“Shoot me? You would-?”

Derec laughed. “No, I wouldn’t shoot you. According to some Earth legend I read about, if a king was dissatisfied with the news a messenger brought, he would order the messenger killed. But, if it were ever true, it was a custom that faded out with civilization.”