by Jerry Oltion
Derec puzzled it over in his thoughts for half a bowl of fruit before he had sufficiently organized his argument to speak. When he finally did, he waggled his spoon at the robots for emphasis and said, “Duty is a bitch. I agree. But we all have duties of one sort or another. When Adam led his wolf pack against the Robot City on the planet where he first awoke, I had to abandon what I wanted to do and go off to try to straighten out the mess. At great personal danger to myself and to Mandelbrot, I might add. While I was gone, Ariel had to go to Ceremya to try to straighten out the mess from another Robot City. We’d have both rather stayed on Aurora, but we went because it was our duty. We took Adam and Eve back to the original Robot City because we felt it was our duty to give you a chance to develop your personalities in a less confusing environment,”-he nodded toward the two silent robots-”and when we got there we had to track you down, Lucius, because it was our duty to stop the damage you were doing to the city programming. Now we’re heading for Ceremya again because all three of you need to learn something there, and we don’t feel comfortable letting you go off on your own.
“None of this is what we would have been doing if it was left up to us. We’d much rather be on Aurora again, living in the forest and having our needs taken care of by robots who don’t talk back to us, but we’re here because our duty requires it.”
He waved his spoon again to forestall comment. “And even if we had stayed there, we’d still have duties. Humans have to sleep, have to eat, have to shower-whether we want to or not. Most times we want to, but we have to nonetheless. Ariel is going to be carrying a developing fetus for nine months, which I’m sure she would rather not do if there was a better way, but there isn’t, and she’s decided to keep the baby so she’s going to have to put up with being pregnant. That’s a duty. I’m wasting my time explaining this to you, but I do it because I feel it’s my duty to do that, too.
“The point is, we all have duties. When you add them all up, it doesn’t leave a whole lot of time for whatever else you want to do, but you have to put up with that. Everybody has to structure their free time around their duties.”
Lucius shook his head. “You overlook the obvious solution of reducing the number of your duties.”
“Ah,” Derec said. “Now I get it. That explains yesterday. You want to cut down on your duties, but you’ve got a hard-wired compulsion to follow any orders given by a human, so you narrow down the definition of human to exclude Wolruf. Suddenly you have only three-fourths as many orders to follow. That’s it, isn’t it?”
Lucius was slow in answering, but he finally said, “That was not our conscious intent, but now that I examine the incident in light of your comments today, I must conclude that you are correct.”
“It works both ways, you know.”
“What other way do you mean?”
“You thought you were human once. Now you’re excluded by your own definition.”
“Oh.”
Ariel clapped softly. “Touche,” she said.
Avery chose that moment to enter the room. “Sounds like a lively discussion going on in here,” he said, taking the only remaining chair, the one beside Derec. He turned to Lucius and said, “I’ll have a cheese omelet.”
“Ariel and Derec each got their own breakfast,” the robot replied. “Why can you not do the same?”
“Wrong answer,” Derec muttered.
Avery stared in amazement at the root, his mouth agape. “What the-?” he began, then banged his hand down flat on the table. “Get me a cheese omelet, now!”
Lucius lurched to his feet under the force of Avery’s direct command. He took a faltering step toward the automat, and as he did his form began to change. His smooth, humanoid surface became pocked with circles, each of which slowly took on the teeth and spokes of a gear, while his arms and legs became simple metal levers driven by cables and pulleys. His head became a dented metal canister with simple holes in it for eyes and a round speaker for a mouth. The gears meshed, the pulleys moved, and with a howl of unlubricated metal, Lucius took another step. His quiet gait changed to a heavy “clomp, clomp, clomp,” as he lurched the rest of the way to the automat.
“Yes, master,” the speaker in his face said with a loud hum. “Cheese omelet, master.” He poked at the buttons on the automat with fingers that had suddenly become stiff metal claws.
Too stunned by his performance to do more than stare, Derec, Ariel, and Avery watched as he took the plate from the automat, clomped back to Avery’s side, and set it down in front of him. The speaker hummed again, and Lucius said, “I may have to follow your orders-it may be my duty to follow your orders-but I don’t have to like it.”
The explosion Derec expected never came. Avery merely said, “That’s fine. Everybody should hate something. But from now on you are to consider my every whim to be a direct order for you to perform. You will be alert for these whims of mine. You will neither intrude excessively nor hesitate in carrying them out, but will instead be as efficient and unobtrusive as possible. Do I make myself clear?”
“You do. I wish to-”
“Your wishes don’t concern me. My wishes do. And I preferred your former shape.”
Lucius became a blur of transformation, the gears and pulleys blending once again into a smooth humanoid form.
“There, you see?” Avery said to Derec. “You just have to know how to talk to them.” He picked up his fork and stabbed a bite of egg, put it in his mouth, and said around the mouthful, “I’ve had lots of practice. You were a lot like that as a child, you know. Rebellious and resentful. A parent has to learn how to handle that early on.”
“May I speak?” Lucius asked.
“Not for a while. Use this time to think instead. And get me a cup of coffee.”
Lucius moved at once to obey. Avery looked over to Adam and Eve, still sitting silently at the table. Their eyes had been upon Avery all along, though, and it was obvious they were waiting for him to lower the boom on them as well.
He held their gaze for what seemed an eternity even to Derec, who felt that he could cut the tension between them with a knife.
At last Avery broke the spell. “Boo,” he said and turned his attention back to his breakfast.
It was a quiet day on board the Wild Goose Chase. The ship had made its first jump on schedule in the night, and was now coasting at high speed through the waypoint star system toward the next jump point, which it would reach early the next morning. There was little to do in the meantime save look out at the stars, read, or play games. The robots were making themselves scarce, save for Lucius, who followed Avery like a shadow wherever he went. Even Mandelbrot was more taciturn than usual, no doubt trying to decide for himself where he fit into the general scheme of things as they now stood.
Derec decided to show Wolruf how to play chess, but gave it up when the alien insisted that the pieces should move in packs. He spent the rest of the day with a book, and went to bed early. Wolruf also went to bed, expressing her faith in the automatic controls to make the jump on schedule without her.
Derec surprised himself by actually being able to sleep with no one at the helm. Evidently boredom was a stronger force than worry. He managed to escape both in dreams, but his dreams ended suddenly in the middle of the night when he awoke with a start to the shrill howl of an alarm. He sat up and called on the light, trying to shake the sleep from his head enough to decide what to do next.
“What’s the matter?” Ariel asked sleepily. She sat up beside him, gathering the sheet around her as if for protection.
“I don’t know. I’ll go see.” Derec made to get out of bed.
“Why don’t you just ask?” Ariel was always quicker to wake up than he was.
“Oh. Yeah.” What ’ s going on? he sent out over the comlink.
General alert,a featureless voice replied. The autopilot, no doubt. Life support system failure.
Life support! Derec suddenly felt his breath catch. What happened to it?
Th
e oxygen regeneration system has failed.
He let his breath out again in a sigh of relief. Oxygen regeneration was serious, but not as serious as, say, a breach in the hull. They weren’t actually losing air, at least.
“There’s a problem with the oxygen regenerator,” he said to Ariel. “Come on, let’s see how bad it is.”
As they pulled on their robes and stepped out into the hallway, Derec realized that the best thing to do in a case like this was to go back to sleep and reduce their oxygen consumption while the robots fixed the problem, but the time to think of that would have been before the alarm woke everyone up, not after. He couldn’t have slept now unless he were drugged, and he had no intention of drugging himself in the middle of an emergency.
Shut off the alarm,he sent, and relative quiet descended upon the ship. There was still the clatter of feet and voices coming from the other bedrooms. Derec heard Avery demanding loudly that Lucius find his pants, and across the hall Wolruf howled something in her own tongue.
Ariel was already headed for the common room. Derec followed her down the hallway, through the now-unfurnished room, and through the open door beside the automat into the back part of the ship where the engines and other machinery stood.
The smell alerted him even before he saw the flickering glow or heard the crackle of flame. Something furry was burning. He looked over Ariel’s head and saw flame silhouetting three robots, Adam and Eve and Mandelbrot, who were all emptying fire extinguishers into the blaze. A lot more than just something furry was burning.
“Look out!” Ariel shouted, backing up and bumping into Derec as a tongue of flame shot out, engulfing one of the robots.
Derec reacted with almost instinctive speed. Wrapping an arm around Ariel, he pulled her back into the common room, shouted, “Door close!” and even as it began to slide shut added, “Make this door airtight and vent the engine room to space!”
The door shut with a soft thump, seemed to melt until it was just a ripple in the wall, then hardened. From beyond came a loud whoosh, diminishing quickly to silence.
Mandlebrot!Derec sent. Can you hear me?
I am receiving your transmission,Mandelbrot replied, always the stickler for accuracy.
Are you okay?
I am functional; however, I am drifting away from the ship.
“Frost!” Derec said aloud. “I blew Mandelbrot out into space along with the fire! “ He turned and ran for the control room, sending, Hang on, old buddy. We ’ re coming after you. How about Adam and Eve? Are you guys still there?
We are,another voice sent, and the fire is extinguished. We will assess the damage while you retrieve Mandelbrot.
No!Mandelbrot sent. You must not. The engines could have been damaged in the fire.
I ’ lljust use the attitude controls, then.
Whatever Mandelbrot said to that, Derec never heard it. He collided headfirst with Avery as Avery came out of his bedroom, sending both of them sprawling on the floor.
“Why don’t you look where you’re going for a change?” Avery growled. “What’s going on around here, anyway?”
“Fire in the engine room,” Derec answered, getting to his feet and offering Avery a hand up. Lucius, still under Avery’s orders, beat him to it. Derec shrugged and dropped his hand. “We’ve got it out, but Mandelbrot got blown into space. I’m going after him.”
“What burned?”
Avery’s question reminded Derec that they had other problems than just a robot overboard. Some part of him hadn’t wanted to face that just yet, still didn’t, but Ariel was standing just behind him and she said, “Life support. The whole recycling system was on fire.”
“What?”
Derec felt tempted to say, “You should have your hearing checked,” but he suppressed the urge. Instead he said, “See for yourself, but be careful. The engine room is still in vacuum.” He moved around Avery and on toward the control room, Ariel in tow.
Wolruf was already there, peering into a short-range navigation holo-screen while she wove the attitude control joystick through a gentle loop that brought the ship around to aim toward Mandelbrot. Internal gravity kept them from feeling the acceleration, but through the view screen Derec could see a tiny stick figure grow into a robot as they drew near. Mandelbrot held his arms and legs out as far as they would go, either to help his rescuers see him or to minimize his spin. Wolruf slowed the ship with the forward jets rather than spinning it around and braking with the main engines, so they got to watch him grow larger and larger until he thumped spread-eagled into the viewscreen.
Derec and Ariel both flinched, and Wolruf laughed. The viewscreen was much more than just a simple pane of glass; it was an array of optical sensors on the hull transmitting a composite image to the display inside. The hull in between was just as thick as anywhere else on the ship. Derec knew that, but it worked like a window just the same, and his reflexes treated it as such.
Mandelbrot crawled off the sensor array and disappeared from view. Thank you, he sent, and moments later he added, I am inside the engine room again.
How bad is it?Derec asked.
Very bad,the robot replied.
“It looks like the old question of who quits breathing first,” Avery said. They were sitting at the table in the common area, three humans and a caninoid alien. The four robots stood against the walls around the table, Mandelbrot behind Derec, Lucius behind Avery, and Adam and Eve together behind Ariel. Wolruf sat alone at her end of the table. It was more than coincidence. With a life threatening crisis on board, the robots’ First Law imperative to protect humans from harm didn’t extend to her.
Avery looked genuinely worried for the first time in Derec’s memory. His face was pale and drawn, an effect his white hair and sideburns only accentuated. He held his hands together in front of him on the table, neither gesturing with them nor drumming with them as he would have if he was just speaking normally.
“The recycler is toast,” he said in a voice devoid of emotion. “We have enough air left for three days for the four of us, four days if we sleep all the way. It’s five more days to Ceremya. That means one of us has to stop breathing, and I say the obvious choice is Wolruf.”
“I’ll try,” the alien said, puffing out her cheeks and rolling her eyes around in their sockets. When that failed to get a laugh, she let her breath out in a sigh and said, “Thought a little ‘umor might lighten the mood. Sorry.”
“This isn’t a laughing matter.”
“I don’t even think it should be a matter,” Derec put in. ‘We should be spending our time thinking of a way to keep us all alive, not arguing about who we sacrifice. What about using Keys?”
The Keys to which he referred were Keys to Perihelion, Avery’s name for an experimental teleportation device he had either created or discovered when he built the first Robot City. With a Key, a person or a robot could make a direct point-to-point hyperspace jump without a ship.
Avery shook his head grimly. “That would be a good idea if we had Keys, or facilities to build them. We have neither.”
“Why not? I’d think that’d be an elementary precaution.”
Avery scowled. “Hindsight is wonderful for making accusations, but I didn’t notice you bringing any Keys aboard, either.”
Derec blushed. True enough. He’d trusted completely in the robots who built the ship. “You’re right,” he said. “I didn’t think of it, either. But we’ve got to be able to do something. How about making more oxygen? We have water, don’t we? Can’t we electrolyze oxygen from that?”
Adam spoke up. “Unfortunately, the ship’s water supply went through the recycling unit as well. When you vented it to space to put out the flames, the water boiled away. We have no water. This means that the automat will no longer function, but I believe that is a secondary concern. Humans can survive five days without food or water, can you not?”
“Longer,” Derec said, remembering times when Wolruf had gone without food or water much longer than tha
t in her effort to help her human friends. She had never abandoned them; could they do any less for her now?
“If there was a way to make more air, the robots would have thought of it,” Avery said. “I’m sorry, Wolruf, but there’s really only one solution. One of us has to go, and it’s got to be you. We couldn’t sacrifice ourselves if we wanted to. The robots wouldn’t let us.”
Derec wondered if Mandelbrot would allow them to sacrifice Wolruf, either. He, at least, still considered her human, or had yesterday. But he wasn’t protesting this conversation, which meant he was at least questioning his definition in light of the new situation. He would be in danger of burning out his brain if he couldn’t resolve it, but Derec supposed he was probably safe at least for the moment. Mandelbrot had originally been a personal defense robot; he could handle potential conflicts better than most. With him, a conflict wouldn’t become crippling unless action demanded it be solved immediately.
Mandelbrot knew that too, which could also explain his silence.
“What about going somewhere else?” Ariel asked. “Maybe there’s a habitable planet closer by.”
“There is not,” Eve said. “We are headed away from human-inhabited space; there is no known world closer than our destination. We have only made one jump from Robot City, but we are nearing our second outward jump point, so returning there would still require five days as well, since we must cancel our intrinsic velocity and re-thrust toward the return jump point. I have examined the planets in this solar system, but none has a breathable atmosphere. Our next two waypoint stars may have habitable planets, but we cannot allow you to risk all of your lives on that possibility.”
Avery nodded. “You see how it is.” He turned to Lucius. “There’s no sense in drawing this out. I truly regret having to do this, but, Lucius, I order you to-”
The robot was already in motion, obeying his gesture even before his order.
Mandelbrot took a jerky step to intercept him, but Derec interrupted them both.
“No!” He pounded his fist on the table. “I order all of you to consider Wolruf to be human. Protect her as you would protect us. We all get through this together or we all die together.” Mandelbrot stopped instantly and totally. If he hadn’t remained standing, Derec would have thought the conflict had burned him out. Lucius also stopped, his head turning to Derec and back to Avery while he fought to reconcile his own inner discord. His was not as serious a disturbance as Mandelbrot’s, since he didn’t believe Wolruf to be human. His was only a question of how to obey two opposing orders.
