Cerberus: A Wolf in the Fold flotd-2

by Jack L. Chalker

  Two assistants came up with a crazy-looking vertical hand truck, and as we watched, the giant was told to stand, then tilted forward, the platform slipped expertly under, then tilted back so it could carry the thing, which remained rigid. They wheeled him out a side door as we watched, Merton following.

  “Where are they going?” I asked curiously.

  “First we’ll hook him up to some analytical equipment to see if the change took—or if it did, whether or not we can see it at all.” Laroo told us. “After—well, one step at a time.”

  Several nervous minutes passed, after which Merton reappeared. “Nothing I can measure has changed in the slightest,” she told us. “As far as I can see, everything’s the same.”

  Laroo sighed. “All right, then. We have to try a live test. Is Samash prepared?”

  She nodded, went to a wall intercom, and called somewhere. I could recognize Bogen’s voice, and the surprise when she said Samash. But in less than a minute an unconscious figure was wheeled into the lab, one that looked nothing like the giant In fact he was the oldest man I’d ever seen on Cerberus, although he was probably no more than in his middle fifties.

  “Samash is a technician here on the island,” Laroo told us. “He’s very loyal and not very bright, but he’s handy. And you can see, he’s more than overdue for a new body.”

  “Some new body,” Dylan noted.

  “Well, now he’ll look the part.”

  “Is he—drugged?”

  “Kabash leaves, a substance about which, if I remember, you also know something.”

  “Oh.”

  I got the picture. This was the stuff that forced a transfer if anybody else in the area had it or was receptive. Samash was wheeled into the other room, and soon Merton and the techs all emerged. “Give him, say, an hour,” she said confidently. “I’ll call you.”

  And with that, we were dismissed. As before, we were fed, and very nicely, too.

  “I’m still worried about all this,” Dylan commented.

  “Want more?” I told her about my fears of Merton.

  She sighed. “Well, we did our best, right?”

  “We’ll see. It isn’t over yet.”

  An hour or so later we were called back and found.the lab the same except that now the great giant seemed to be sleeping on the table in the center. Of the old body I saw nothing, and guessed it had died from lack of interest.

  Even though the giant robot was sleeping, there was no doubt that there was a person inside it now. It looked natural and normal; somehow even its sleeping face was filled with an indefinable something that had not been there before.

  “Wake him up,” Laroo ordered.

  Dr. Merton and the two assistants stood back, and there was a sudden, almost deafening cymbal-like sound all around. It subsided quickly, and Merton called, “Samash! Wake upl”

  The body stirred, and we stepped back to the wall and held our breath. Even the Laroos seemed extremely tense.

  Samash’s eyes opened, and the face took on a puzzled look. He groaned, a deep bass, shook his head, and sat up on the cart and looked around. “Wha—what happened?” he managed.

  “Look at yourself, Samash,” Laroo told him. “See what you’ve become! See what I have given you!”

  Samash looked and gasped, but seemed to realize instantly what had happened. He jumped off the cart, stretched, smiled, and looked around, a slight smile on his face. I didn’t like the looks of that smile.

  “Samash, I am Wagant Laroo. Activation Code AJ360.”

  The giant hesitated a moment as if puzzled, then started to laugh.

  “Samash, Activation Code AJ360!” Lartte repeated uneasily.

  Samash stopped laughing and started looking mean and irritated. He turned and pointed to goatee. “I don’t take orders from you,” he sneered. “Not any more. I don’t take orders from nobody! You don’t know what you did, Laroo! Sure, I know what Activation Code AJ360 means. But it don’t mean nothin’ to me. Not me. You fouled up this time, Laroo.” He turned, ignoring us all, and said to himself, aloud, “You don’t know the feeling! The power! Like a god!” He turned back to goatee. “Greater than you’ll ever know, Laroo, whichever one of you you really are. You’re through now!” With that he lunged for the five Laroos.

  “Protect me!” screamed the teenage girl we’d rightly fingered, real panic in her voice—and to our shock the other four, plus Merton and the two assistants, all leaped upon the giant with almost bunding speed. In seconds they had pinned him to the floor.

  “Oh, my God!” Dylan breathed. “They’re all robots!”

  The girl—Laroo, the real one—stepped nervously to the far wall and tripped the intercom. “This is Laroo. Security on the double!”

  On the double was right: we were suddenly flooded with National Police as well as Bogen, arms drawn.

  “Stand away from him!” Bogen shouted. “Let him up!”

  As quickly as they were on him, they were off. Then it took only a split second for Samash himself, in one motion, to get to his feet and charge Bogen and the NPs.

  He never had a chance. As lightning-fast as he was, they were even faster. Beams shot out, covering the giant’s body. It was an incredible display, since any one of those beams would slice steel in two and burn, melt, or disintegrate almost anything we knew—and all they did was stop Samash. No, not even stop him, exactly—just slowed him to a crawl. He was almost at them, but they kept firing and stood their ground—and suddenly you could see the beams finally taking effect.

  There was a sudden, acrid smell. Samash stopped, looked surprised and more confused than anything, and then, with a bright flash that almost blinded us, ignited and melted down into a horrid little puddle of goo. At the moment of ignition, all weapons stopped firing at the same moment, so no beam went astray—an incredible display.

  “All of them,” Dylan was saying. “Even Merton and Bogen and the cops. All of them.”

  “Except her,” I noted, pointing to the still frightened face of the teenaged girl. “That’s Wagant Laroo for today.”

  Laroo regained some of his—-her—composure.

  “Yes, that’s right. All the important people on the island are robots,” she admitted. “Normally only two of my party are, but I didn’t want to take any chances this time. You can see why.”

  I nodded. “But you took one anyway. He almost got you, even after taking enough blast to melt the Castle.”

  She nodded nervously. “We’ll have better precautions next time. I really didn’t quite expect that”

  “Well? What did you expect?” Dylan asked caustically. “You’re not exactly the most popular person on Cerberus, you know, and you suddenly gave the old guy tremendous power and a real shot at you.”

  “Enough for now!” Laroo snapped. “Get out of here, you two! Go back upstairs until I call for you again.”

  If you need us again, you mean, I thought grumpily.

  “Well, at least we proved the system works, I think,” I noted, and both of us exited at that line, carefully stepping around the NPs, Bogen, and the still smoldering pile of goo.

  “How did they stop him?” Dylan wondered later that evening.

  “I suspect they trained a bunch of different weapons at different settings on him,” I told her. “His cells kept compensating for one kind of charge and he was finally faced with too many contradictory conditions to fight at one time. One got through, damaged something vital, and triggered the self-destruct in the cell units.”

  She shivered. “It was horrible.”

  “I don’t think we’d have liked Samash, either,” I pointed out.

  “No, not that. The fact that they’re all robots. Even that nice Dr. Merton.”

  “I know. Even I didn’t think of that, which shows how paranoid he really is. And damn it, they’re so stinking real! Bogen, Merton—they were real people. Natural, Understandable. They looked, talked, acted just like normal people.” I shivered a bit. “My God! No wonder they haven’t foun
d a defense against these things!”

  “So now what do we do?” she asked.

  I sighed. “We relax, get some sleep, and find out if we still wake up in the morning.”

  We did wake up and were served an excellent breakfast to boot. It was a good sign. After we ate, dressed, and cleaned up a bit we were summoned back down to the lab. Laroo had not changed bodies and was alone now, except for Merton, Bogen, and a figure we both recognized.

  “Sanda?” Dylan called.

  She saw us and smiled. “Dylan! Qwin! They told me you were here! What’s this all about? I don’t remember anything since I went to sleep last night back in Medlam.”

  Dylan and I both suddenly froze, the same idea in our heads, and Sanda, sensing something wrong, stopped too, her face falling and looking a little puzzled. “What’s the matter?”

  I turned to Laroo. “You did it anyway.”

  She shrugged. “She was here, prepped and available. We decided to see if Dr. Merton’s process would work from what we took off of you.”

  “I gather it didn’t, or we wouldn’t still be here,” I noted.

  Sanda looked genuinely bewildered. “Qwin? Dylan? What’s all this about? What are you talking about?”

  “That’s quite enough, Sanda,” Laroo told her wearily. “Go report to housekeeping on the third level.”

  Suddenly Sanda’s manner changed. She forgot about us and her bewilderment, turned to Laroo and bowed. “As you wish, my lord,” she said, then walked out. Our eyes followed her in stunned amazement.

  “How does it work, Laroo?” I asked. “I mean, what does the programming we’re canceling say?”

  “You don’t know? Basically it states that you love, admire, worship, or whatever whoever gives you the activation code, and that you wish to serve only the wishes of that person or that person’s designated agents. It’s sort of an emotional hook, but it’s unbreakable. They genuinely love me.”

  “Surely you don’t activate all of them yourself!”

  “Oh, no. But if one of my own robots is the activator, it works out to the same thing, you see. Complicated, though. Takes a computer to remember who loves whom.”

  “Well, I gather your process doesn’t work in recording, anyway,” I said, relieved, then turned to Dylan. “Don’t worry about Sanda. She’s still all there. She’s just finally in love with somebody else.”

  Laroo sighed. “Well, we’ve done what we could. Merton assures me that the language is still gibberish. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t record and work—but it doesn’t. We tried it out not only on Sanda but on three others, varying various factors. It didn’t work with any of them. I sadly have to admit that I need you,”

  Back to my move, I thought, and thank you, Dr. Dumonia or whoever.

  “Ready now to take the plunge yourself?” Dylan asked Laroo.

  She nodded. “But I’ll need a half-hour or so in prep. However, I want to warn you—both of you. Any funny business, anything wrong with my programming, even accidentally—anything—and you won’t live a moment. My robots will tear you to pieces, slowly.”

  “There won’t be any double-cross,” I assured her. “We have some stake in this ourselves, remember. We’re the only two people who can’t become those robots—and as such, we need you for new bodies at the proper time. It’s an even trade.”

  “It better be.” It was that little girl’s voice, but that same threatening tone was there.

  We waited anxiously for the prep.

  To our surprise, the body Laroo had chosen was rather nondescript. Average in almost all respects—civilized world standard, male, nothing exceptional, wouldn’t stand out in a crowd. ”

  “Still, it makes sense,” I told Dylan. “The last thing he wants is to attract attention to himself.”

  “It’s not too bad,” Dylan said critically. “Looks a little like you, really.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  In a short time the girl’s body was wheeled in by Bogen and the two attendants, and off into the back room. We wasted no time at all giving the jolt to the selected body on the helmet machine, and watched that body get the same hand-truck treatment to the back.

  I spent the time looking around the lab, asking Merton a few mane and useless questions and taking in what I could. Something bothered me. Laroo had given in too easily, even considering the stress. Particularly after last night. Something just felt wrong. It was a while, though, before I figured out what it was and whispered to Dylan. “Another trick. Don’t fall for it”

  She frowned and whispered back so low I could barely hear, “How do you know?”

  “Those were cameras up there yesterday, I’m sure. Now they’re laser cannons.”

  “You sure they weren’t there before?”

  “Sure. Otherwise they’d have used them on golden boy. They can track anything in the lab on those camera mounts.”

  “So he switched during the night.”

  “Uh-huh. Clever bastard, but hold tight. We got him.” His move. No countermove.

  A little over an hour later they wheeled the body back out and went through the wakeup routine again. At least this time we held our ears when the cymbals clanged. The man on the table went through much the same experience as Samash had the day before, and when he jumped to the floor, he looked around wonderingly. “Well, I’ll be damned!”

  Merton went up to him. “Activation Code AJ360,” she said to him.

  The man paused, smiled, and shook his head. “Nope. There’s a little tingle when you say it, like something inside wants to be let out, but it’s suppressed, all right.” He sighed. “I can see now what Samash must have felt. Like a godl” He turned back to Merton. “You have no idea what it’s like—oh, of course you do. I forget. It’s—unbelievable!” He turned to us.

  “Well,” he said, “it works. It really works! You have no idea of the power I feel. It’s almost a strain to slow myself down to your speed just to converse with you. Every cell in my body’s olivet. Alive and sentient! Sentient—and obedient! The power in each is phenomenal! Even I had no idea until now just how powerful and versatile these bodies were. And no pain! Every single body has some pain at all points after they’re born. We live in it. The rush of freedom—to be totally immune to it—is almost awesome!”

  “I wonder, though—if these aliens are so smart, why did they allow this loophole to slip by?” I commented. It was a genuine question that really bothered me.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. That bothered me, too—but not now. Nothing,” he added darkly, “will ever bother me again. Nothing and no one.” He looked back at us. “Now, tell me. Give me one reason why I should allow either of you to live one moment longer.”

  Dylan looked up at me questioningly, as if to ask, are you sure this isn’t Laroo?

  “Trust me,” I whispered beneath my breath, then turned to Laroo once more—the fake Laroo, I was convinced. “Insurance,” I told him aloud, hoping his superior hearing would mistake her glance and my comment for reassurance and nothing more sinister. “Remember Samash. And that robot they caught in Military Systems Command. Hard to kill—yes. Superior? Yes. But immortal? No. Not only that, but I think I know, or can at least guess, the alien’s insurance policy.”

  Both Merton and “Laroo” looked startled. “Go on,” he urged.

  “They—these robot bodies. They’ll wear out. They have to, no matter how good they are. What’s to prevent a little bit of that programming we dared not touch, the autonomic system’s, say, from suddenly stopping at some predetermined point in time?”

  He looked nervously at Merton. “Is this possible?”

  She nodded. “But not insurmountable. Remember, I have recorded your and other people’s imprints. As long as you update them periodically, as they do in Confederation Intelligence, you can die over and over again—and still live again.”

  That explanation satisfied him, and also me. “Might I point out, though, that if somebody’s not there to clear the next robotic
programming, you’ll have to go back into a human body again.”

  “Never!” he snapped. “Once you’ve been in one of these you can never go back. Not for an instant! Never!” He realized the implications of what he was saying. “Yes, all right. You’re right. But you will remain here on the island as my permanent guests. For all time, and from body to body. You say you want to keep your children, raise them yourselves. Very well, do so here, in the midst of luxury.”

  “Luxury prison, you mean,” Dylan responded.

  He shrugged. “As you wish. But it’s velvet-lined and gold-plated. You’ll want for nothing here. It’s the best I can do. You and I both know the Confederacy will quickly know that you played false with them. They’ll want you at all costs, to erase that information which is probably easily done with a simple verbal trigger—so I can afford you no contact except with my own.”

  “And if they fry the island?” Dylan asked pointedly.

  “They won’t,” he responded confidently. “Not until they’re sure. And we’ll give them corpses to look at and a really convincing story, not to mention obviously dismantling Project Phoenix. Everything back to normal. They’ll believe something went wrong, all right—but it’ll be convincing. Believe me.”

  I sighed and shrugged. “What choice have we got?”

  “None,” he responded smugly. At that point I noticed he was alone in the center of the room. The laser cannon opened up, and after an incredible time he too was melted. I looked over at the brownish patch left from Samash, still there despite a strong cleanup effort. My move—success. And check.

  Dylan gasped and whispered, “You were right!” Then she hesitated. “How will we know the real one?”

  “We won’t,” I told her. “Just trust me.”

  We went through three more acts, each one as or more convincing than the first. Each time the robot was suddenly melted. I kept wondering if they’d all be so confident if Laroo told them what had happened to their predecessors.