Robot Blues

by Margaret Weis; Don Perrin

  “Sakuta did his homework. He learned all about Mag Force 7. He learned all about Xris. He knew what type of jobs Xris would take, what kind he wouldn’t. Sakuta’s a skilled actor. I’ve no doubt he played the role to perfection. And, of course, he was just exactly what Xris expected an ‘egghead’ professor to be. Khizr, I’m going to level with you.”

  “Begging your pardon, my lord, but it’s about time,” Jamil said bitterly.

  “No apologies, Khizr. You’re damn lucky—you and Xris both—that you’re not sitting behind a force field about now. You came that close to blowing this case all to hell. Instead, I’m going to give you a chance to set it right.”

  “We’ll be glad to help you out, my lord,” Jamil said respectfully. “How much does the job pay?”

  “What?” Dixter was incredulous.

  “How much does the job pay, my lord?” Jamil repeated. He leaned back, crossed one leg over the other. “I figure, say ... twice what Sakuta was prepared to pay us....”

  “Don’t bother with the brig. Throw him out the air lock, John,” General Hanson said.

  “Calm down, Irma,” John Dixter returned. He put the tips of his fingers together. “There’s the small matter of kidnapping and murder charges. The small matter of impersonating an officer in His Majesty’s Army. The small matter of working for an enemy of the state. What do you think this job is worth to you, Khizr?”

  Jamil sat up straight. “My skin, sir?”

  “Your skin, Khizr.”

  “Plus expenses,” Jamil added.

  Dixter stared, then he started to chuckle. He caught himself, rubbed his eyes, drew in a deep breath. “All right, Khizr. Plus expenses. Tell Xris to send me a bill.” The Lord Admiral activated the commlink.

  The door slid open. The admiral’s adjutant entered, saluted. “Yes, my lord.”

  “Take Khizr and get him something to eat and drink. Fill him in on all the details of this job, tell him what he’s supposed to do. Good luck, Khizr.” The admiral rose to his feet. He was no longer laughing. “I can’t begin to tell you how critical this assignment is. If you fail, God help you.”

  “God help us all,” General Hanson intoned. She no longer looked fierce. She looked just plain worried.

  “Yes, my lord. Yes, ma’am,” said Jamil, subdued. He stood up, started instinctively to salute, as Sir John and General Hanson departed. He stopped himself just in time, changed the salute to an awkward scratching of his jaw.

  He remained standing until the Lord Admiral and the general had left the room through a side door.

  “If you’ll come with me, Colonel Jatanski,” Tusk said, motioning Jamil toward the open door, where stood the two armed Marines.

  Jamil had had enough. “Look, I’m not—”

  “Not ready to leave yet, sir?” Tusk interrupted. “Sorry, colonel, but I’m afraid your time’s up.”

  Jamil sighed. He knew when he was licked. “Very well. Carry on, Commander.”

  Tusk was grave. “Yes, Colonel, sir. This way, sir.”

  Jamil walked out the door. The armed Marines fell in behind.

  Chapter 19

  . . . the articulate and audible voice of the Past . . .

  Thomas Carlyle, The Hero and Hero Worship

  At just about the time Xris was dreaming of robots with human eyes doing irreparable damage to spaceplane engines, and Jamil was sweating it out with Lord Admiral Dixter, a human named Jeffrey Grant, who lived in another part of the galaxy and who had never heard of the planet Pandor and who only knew the Lord Admiral from the news vids, was taking his usual morning stroll to work.

  Grant lived on a world known as XIO, short for some number that had been assigned to it by ancient explorers. It says a great deal for the creativity and originality of XIO’s inhabitants that they had never bothered to come up with anything different. The planet was rich in mineral resources and was therefore heavily industrialized. Factories belched untold poisons into the air, the people breathed them and breathed money. Profit was king. Pollution laws were nonexistent and, to be honest, XIO polluted wasn’t much worse than XIO in pristine condition.

  Its people were hardworking, no-nonsense, solid union, and almost predominantly members of the middle class. The few wealthy business magnates who ran XIO did not live there. As for the poor, XIO was proud to boast that, like Adonia, their world did not have any poor. On XIO, if you were union, you had a job, or you were retired and living off your pension. If you were not union, you didn’t belong on XIO.

  Jeffrey Grant had been a union worker for thirty-five of the fifty-five years of his life. Now he was retired and, because he had no family, was able to live quite well on the generous pension plan his union provided. He was a gray man in appearance. His hair was gray, he wore gray off-the-rack suits. His eyes had probably started out blue but had now faded. His complexion had a grayish tinge to it, but that may have been due to the dust and soot of his environment. He was short, inclined to be tubby around the waist, with a preoccupied smile and a benign expression. A gray, ordinary man, you would guess.

  You would be wrong. Jeffrey Grant was a man with an obsession.

  He was obsessed with space flight.

  Grant had been a pilot of sorts, his job having consisted of flying an orbital shuttle from one side of XIO to the other. Lesser minds might refer to Grant as more bus driver than pilot. Grant never argued the matter, but merely responded with a secret smile which implied a wealth of adventures equivalent to those of any Royal Navy hotshot and known only to Grant himself. Such secret adventures did exist, if only in the head of Jeffrey Grant.

  A quiet, somewhat shy, and retiring man, Grant had entertained himself on the long shuttle flights by imagining his Ladybird orbital transport was a sleek fighter and that he was the flying ace of every major space combat battle from the time of the Black Earth forward. His shuttle bus never deviated from its set course, its fixed speed. It was run by computer. Grant had little to do but watch the stars flit past him.

  Jeffrey Grant saw more than stars. Jeffrey Grant saw squadrons of Scimitars swooping in to attack the planet in the name of some rogue dictator. He saw Claymore bombers fly off to do battle for the new king. He saw deadly dogfights between Flamberge bombers and Corasian fighters. He saw Jeffrey Grant, in his Scimitar or his Claymore or his Flamberge. He saw Jeffrey Grant, the wing commander.

  Since the hated Corasians—who were on the other side of the galaxy—never attacked XIO, Grant never had a chance to put his dream into action. Considering that his shuttle bus was not armed, this was probably just as well. He didn’t really want the Corasians to attack, nor did he particularly want XIO to fall to a bloodthirsty dictator. But he did admit to a feeling of disappointment that the most exciting thing to have happened to him in thirty years of space piloting was the malfunction of the toilets on the shuttle bus, which had resulted in a flood of a most unpleasant nature.

  He spent thirty-five years piloting the shuttle bus by day, piloting Scimitars on his flight simulator by night. When retirement was forced upon him at age fifty-five by a benevolent union, which needed to make room for younger employees, he was provided with an adequate pension. In addition, Grant had quite a tidy sum of money saved, all of which enabled him to make at least one of his dreams come true. He opened a space museum.

  His museum was as different from the Megapolis Space and Aeronautics Museum as Grant’s shuttle bus was different from a sleek Katana fighter prototype. The museum was located in a dusty storefront on a side street in a part of the city that no tourist in his right mind would have any inclination to visit. This was perhaps just as well, since Grant neither liked nor trusted tourists, and if any happened to wander into his museum—perhaps to use the bathroom—he did his best to get rid of them.

  He had on display in his museum various antiques from bygone eras of space travel which he had collected over the years. These included boost engines from an original Arc-Class Terraforming Transport, two small Type F-66 fighter spacepla
nes with no guns. (Originally in service with the Galactic Express, the spaceplanes had been painted bright orange. Grant had repainted them their original gray.) He was the proud possessor of a jump-juice distillery (not in working order) and owned innumerable flight and computer instruments from very early space flight in various stages of disrepair.

  Grant spent his days dusting his treasures, poring over his books and old papers, playing games on his flight simulators (he owned forty-seven), and browsing through vid antique catalogs, searching for material to add to his collection.

  A new arrival was expected today, in fact. A gun site simulator for a Scimitar Type A, still in working condition. Grant smiled in pleasant anticipation.

  The morning was fine—a rare commodity on XIO. The sun struggled to shine through a haze of smoke and fumes, but at least the sun was shining. Grant enjoyed his short stroll between his small brownstone and the museum. He nodded the usual greetings to his neighbors (he’d never spoken to any of them in the twenty-five years he’d lived in the neighborhood, except once, when the house next door caught fire, and then he felt compelled the next day to politely inquire if anyone needed a blanket).

  His part of the city was a very old part, containing crumbling brick buildings that had once housed important firms, but were now reduced to selling adult vids and renting out clown costumes. It was the last place one would have expected to find a museum. Grant considered himself lucky to have discovered it.

  He inserted the key into the lock of the wooden door, pausing as he paused every morning to admire the gold lettering on the glass pane which read: GRANT’S AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM: AN OUT-OF-THE-WORLD EXPERIENCE. Pleased with the sign and himself and the sunshine, looking forward to a day filled with dusting and puttering, unpacking and perusing, Grant opened the door and switched on the overhead light.

  Something was wrong.

  Jeffrey Grant didn’t know quite what yet, but he was so attuned and accustomed to the atmosphere of his quiet little museum that the slightest change registered instantly. He stood in the door, nervous and wary, trying to figure out what was disturbing him. A first cursory glance around the room seemed to indicate that all was exactly as he had left it the night before.

  Of course, he couldn’t see every part of the museum from where he stood; the one-room museum was filled from floor to ceiling with his collection, and what portion the helmets and gloves and hull plates from rocket boosters and instruments did not take up, his books and papers did. The book he’d been reading was still on the vidscreen; his prized artifact—a graduation ring from the Mars Terran-Command Flight School—was still in its glass case. He hadn’t been robbed.

  Yet something was most definitely wrong.

  Standing, alarmed and troubled, in the open doorway, Grant deliberated his next move.

  He decided, on consideration, to shut the door.

  This done, he was immediately cognizant of a strange sound, a high-pitched and annoying hum that had not been there yesterday, nor any days prior to yesterday.

  He relaxed, relieved, no longer alarmed, merely annoyed. The furnace was old enough to have almost qualified as an exhibit. It required constant attention and was a considerable source of trouble to him. True, the furnace had never made a sound like this before, but Grant was confident that it could if it truly put its mind to it. Muttering mild imprecations, he made his way through the clutter to the back of the room, opened a door, and began to descend to the cellar, where the furnace was located.

  He stopped halfway down the stairs, puzzled. The sound, instead of growing louder, as it should have if the furnace was the source, was growing softer. Grant paused on the staircase, head cocked to one side, listening intently. Yes, the hum was not nearly as pronounced down here as it had been up above.

  Grant experimented, walked down to the bottom of the stairs. He could not hear the hum at all. He checked the furnace, just to be certain. The furnace was not at fault.

  “I see,” said Grant to himself. “Sorry,” he apologized to the furnace, then turned and went back up the stairs. “It must be one of the computers. Or maybe I forgot to shut off the flight sim.”

  He knew that wasn’t the case. Grant was a creature of habit. (It had taken him a week, following his retirement, to break himself of the habit of going work. He’d finally accomplished this only by writing the words NOT NEEDED on a large placard and posting it on his refrigerator.) Grant habitually turned off the flight simulators every time he was through with them. If not, his electric bill—already substantial—would have been astronomical.

  He stepped out into the museum. The hum was distinctly audible.

  Methodically, Grant checked all the computers, then began walking down the line of flight simulators that took up one entire wall. He turned each one on, listened to it, turned it off, and moved to the next. He was fairly certain that they were not to blame; he had excellent hearing and the hum seemed to be coming from another part of the room. It was best to rule out the obvious, however, before investigating further. He was switching off the twenty-third simulator when it occurred to him— rather uncomfortably—that the hum might be the prelude to something nastier. An explosion, perhaps.

  Grant wavered in his determination to check out all the rest of the flight simulators. He looked about fearfully, thinking he should carry all his valuables out of the building, but that would take days. Then he thought he would only carry out his most valuable artifacts, but that meant choosing between them, and that was impossible. Then he thought that perhaps he should call in an expert. But ... an expert in what? Annoying hums? Perhaps he should call the police, firemen. He had a vision of the firemen, with their laser cutters and foam canisters and water hoses, entering his beloved museum, and he shuddered. He’d rather be blown up.

  It was at this point, during his dithering and his fitful darts to grab something beloved, only to put it down distractedly to pick up something else, only to put that down and finally head for the phone in back, only to reconsider and pause in confusion, that Jeffrey Grant saw the light.

  It was a blue light and it was flashing on an antique machine, an ancient antique machine, a machine that was one of Jeffrey Grant’s most valuable artifacts, a machine that—as far as he had been able to ascertain had not worked in centuries. This was the machine that was flashing. This was also the machine that was humming.

  Grant stared, began to tremble, as if an icon of a dutifully worshiped saint had suddenly begun shedding tears of blood. He approached the machine—which had a corner location of honor all to itself—with timorous footsteps, regarded it with reverential awe.

  He had acquired the machine several years previous. It was very old and had run off electrical power supplied by lines run through the walls. No building on XIO operated with such antiquated equipment; Grant was forced to hook the machine up to a nuclear-powered battery. The cost of the battery had been considerable, but Grant deemed it worth the price. The machine had a large text screen on the front, and though it had never displayed any information, Grant kept it turned on. The screen cast a soft glow which bathed the back portion of the room in white luminescence. In other words, Grant used the machine for a lamp.

  The machine was truly antique. It had a keyboard interface on the front with a track-ball built into the keyboard. The central memory and functioning hardware were housed in a small box attached behind the keyboard. The front of the box was a vid unit that provided the wonderful white glow. Along the side were six small lights, about two centimeters in diameter. One of these lights was flashing a bright blue this morning.

  Grant was careful not to touch the machine; he was afraid he might do something wrong, might cause it to shut off. He examined the machine closely, intently, studied every part of it, rotating it by turning its stand in order to see the back.

  Finished with his inspection, he regarded the machine in doubt. He had read up on the machine, knew all about it, what it did, why it did it, was completely familiar with its workings, an
d there was only one logical explanation as to why it had suddenly begun, after all these years of silence, to speak.

  But that explanation was so bizarre, so strange, so impossible, that Grant had to consider some other cause.

  More practical, less wonderful: a malfunction, a short in the wiring, a lightning strike.

  He wanted so much to believe. He wanted to fall down on his knees and give praise. And therefore he knew he had to consult some higher authority. He had to prove the saint’s tears were blood, as it were, not streaks of rust.

  Leaving the machine to hum to itself—a hum that was, for Grant, no longer annoying, but a chorusing of angels—he headed for the reference library part of his museum. He was forced to stop, however, to calm himself. His heart was racing in a most unhealthy fashion, his hands shook, the palms were clammy with sweat. He began to see spots in his vision and was horribly afraid he was going to pass out.

  “Get hold of yourself, sir,” he counseled himself sternly. “I expect you to set the example for the younger pilots. Enemy sighted. Lock onto target.”

  Since the only people with whom Grant communicated were the fellow pilots and commanders inside his space games, he was used to talking to them and interacting with them. He took all the parts and, in this instance, considered himself as being chewed out by his commander.

  The momentary dizziness passed. Grant felt better. He locked onto his target—the bookcase—and proceeded toward it. Once there, he studied the shining metallic disks in their plastic cases, selected three, pulled them out and carried them to his computer. He inserted the first, brought up the file.

  He spent the remainder of the day in study so intense and rewarding and exalting that he lost all notion of time, forgot even to eat his baloney and mustard sandwich for lunch, something that had not happened in thirty-five years. He ascended to a higher state, reveled in the ecstasy of his discovery, forgot everything on the more mundane levels of existence.

  How long he would have remained at his work is open to question. Mankind being heir to the weaknesses of the flesh, Jeffrey Grant was brought back to this realm rather abruptly by the rude insistence of his bladder that he go to the bathroom and that he go now.