by Isaac Asimov
There was a brief pause, and then the robot’s eyes began to glow steadily. “My default language is Galactic Standard, Auroran dialect,” it said. “No other language banks are currently available. Is that acceptable, sir?”
Derec broke into a smile. After his frustrations with the robots on the asteroid, it was a pleasure to be addressed civilly again. “Auroran Galactic is fine.”
“Yes, sir. Who is my owner, sir?”
“I am,” Derec said. “You are never to acknowledge that to anyone. But if you ever receive conflicting orders from myself and another, my orders are always to take precedence.”
“Yes, sir. By what name may I call you, sir?”
For some reason, Derec resented having to supply the robot with his meaningless, casually adopted name. “Derec,” he said finally, unable to think of an alternative.
“Yes, sir. To what name would you like me to respond?”
Derec suppressed a bitter laugh. Who am I to tell you your name, when I can’t even tell myself mine? “So long as you are the only one on this ship, Alpha is name enough.”
“Thank you, Derec. During my power-on self-test I detected a number of error states. Would this be a convenient time to review them?”
“In a moment,” Derec said. “Can you scan this compartment?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are there any spyeyes here with us?”
“I detect no active sensors of any sort, Derec.”
“Good. Listen closely. I need to tell you something about what’s happening. You and I are on board a spaceship populated by hostile lifeforms. These lifeforms are a potential threat to both of us. Until I tell you otherwise, you are to immediately enter a passive wait-state any time we have company or I leave the lab.”
“I understand. You do not wish them to know that I am functional.”
“That’s right.”
“Is it possible that these wait-states will be of extended duration, sir?”
“It is.”
“Then may I ask if there are any problems to which I may devote myself during those periods?”
“I’m sure we’ll find some,” Derec said. “Right now, the problem is getting you in shape. Let’s have the first anomaly off your error list.”
The first that Derec knew of Wolrufs return was when the robot stiffened suddenly and its eyes went black. A few seconds later, the caninoid entered the lab and crossed to where Derec was seated. She stood at Derec’s elbow and peered briefly into the exposed inner mechanisms of the robot, then turned to him. She seemed less animated than she had been earlier.
“Aranimas would like a report on ‘urr progress.”
“You can tell Aranimas that I have reason to hope I’ll have a robot for him in a few days.”
“’Ow many days?”
“I don’t know,” Derec said, laying down the pen he had been using as a probe. “I also don’t know how much it’ll be able to do. I’ve replaced a few damaged components. Right now I’m trying to do something with the servo linkages for the right arm, which are really a mess. Was it you people who roughed up these robots, or did you find them this way?”
“Can’t say,” Wolruf said, and headed for the door. “I tell Aranimas.”
“Hold on a moment,” Derec said, standing. “You can also tell him that I don’t work around the clock. I need time to rest and a place to do it.”
“Rest ‘ard to get on Aranimas’s ship,” Wolruf said, gesturing toward the floor. “Sleep ‘ere.”
That was not an entirely unhappy prospect, since Derec had already determined that he had some privacy there. “What about a pillow, some kind of cushion?”
The caninoid made a sort of whistling sound that Derec read as a sigh. “I get ‘u something,” she said, and started to go.
“Am I going to be allowed to eat?” he called after her.
The sigh was a wheeze this time. “I get ‘u something.”
“Tell you what, Wolruf,” Derec said, drawing closer. “Why don’t you show me where the food is kept, so I can get it myself when I’m hungry? That’ll save you some running around on my account.”
Wolruf wrinkled her cheeks in surprise, then frowned. “Aranimas wants ‘u working, not running errands. Thass my job.”
“You’ve got enough things to do without all the extra work I’m creating,” Derec said on a hunch. “If Aranimas makes a fuss, I’ll tell him I insisted. If I’m going to do my best work, I’m going to need to get out of that lab from time to time just to clear my mind.”
Cocking her head, Wolruf considered. “Okay. I show ‘u.”
“Great. Ah — one more thing.” The thought of an alien Personal was an unpleasant one, but he was suddenly aware that there was some urgency. “I have — um — excretory needs. Do you also — ah — is there —”
Wolruf laughed, a sound like purring. “Of course. Come, I show ‘u that, too.”
There seemed to be fewer aliens afoot in the ship at that hour, which started Derec wondering about the sleep cycles observed by the various species aboard. The curiosity stayed in his mind while Wolruf showed him the Personal, identified to him the three foods in the pantry considered safe for him, and escorted him back to the lab. By that time, he was certain that she was fatigued, and when she left him, he was certain that it was for an appointment with a bed.
There was no lock on the lab door. There was no Narwe guard to note his comings and goings. The opportunity was there, if he wanted it. Wolruf would not disturb him. Perhaps Aranimas was now sleeping as well. Derec could scout the layout of the ship, snoop in some of the hundreds of storage bins he had seen.
Or perhaps Aranimas was waiting for a report from Wolruf, and might soon be coming to check Derec’s progress personally. Or perhaps he never slept. Perhaps his mind was structured in a way that he did not need the periodic “dumpings” dreams represented, his metabolism clocked at a steady pace rather than cycling through active and passive periods.
The uncertainty stilled Derec’s impulse to go exploring, at least for a time. Turning to the food he had carried back with him, he gnawed at a few of the thick crackerlike biscuits, ate most of the fatty mottled-blue paste, sipped at the honey juice. Though his taste buds regarded it all with suspicion, none of it alarmed his stomach.
When he was done, his own fatigue was pressing in on him. He placed Alpha in a wait-state, then unrolled the thin cushion in an open spot of floor and stretched out. The cushion did little to make the floorplates less hard. He supposed that Aranimas, slender as he was, would have found it entirely suitable. But Derec turned restlessly from back to side to stomach in a fruitless quest for a comfortable position.
How long had it been since he had slept? Thirty hours? Forty? He had started the day a reluctant prisoner of the robots, and now he was an even more reluctant prisoner of the raiders. I really should go snooping, he thought. He could not let the opportunity pass. Perhaps the absence of a guard was an oversight that would be corrected tomorrow.
I’ll just lie here for an hour or so, he told himself, make sure that Aranimas isn’t going to show up, give Wolruf a chance to settle in. Then it’ll be safe. I can rest a little while. This poor excuse for a bed is too hard to sleep on anyway —
He was wrong. One moment he was closing his eyes against the uncomfortably bright light which he had not been told how to douse. The next, he was rubbing sleep out of those eyes, gingerly stretching sore muscles, and bemoaning his own foul breath. The room was in semidarkness, but Wolruf was crouching in the doorway, silhouetted against the well-lit corridor.
“Iss it done yet?” Wolruf asked brightly.
“Eat space and die,” Derec growled, and threw the nearest rock-sized bit of robot scrap in Wolruf’s direction. The caninoid snatched it neatly out of the air and threw it back in one motion.
“No thanks,” she said with a curled-lip grin. “I already ‘ad breakfast.”
Though there was running water in the Personal, there was no provision for a s
hower or bath. Derec settled for sponging himself off, though there were no blowers and the only toweling available was harsh and scratchy. By the time he emerged, Wolruf was nowhere in sight. Derec wondered if she had perhaps stopped by only to waken him and would not be coming back.
Thinking that it wouldn’t take him long to get tired of the fare, he carried another meal of biscuits, cheese, and honey back to the lab. Settling at the workbench, he resumed work on the robot’s right arm. The electrical connections were sound, but the servo linkages were damaged beyond Derec’s ability to repair. His efforts to do so only made things worse. Whatever skill he had was cybernetic, not electromechanical.
“Alpha, I don’t think I can fix your arm. I’m wondering if you can, with your good arm. I could get a mirror so you could see inside —” “I am sorry. Without a Robotech cube in my library, my abilities in this area are limited to diagnosis only, sir.”
“I figured as much,” Derec said. “But it never hurts to ask.”
“Sir, I detect a deactivated robot in the room. Perhaps it would be possible to salvage the appropriate parts from its mechanism to repair me.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to do,” Derec said gruffly. “I can’t do it, not without micromanipulators. Besides, there’s some structural damage in the shoulder mount, which isn’t replaceable.”
Sighing, Derec pushed himself back from the bench and crossed to where his paltry inventory of robot parts lay spread out on the floor. As it had many times before, his gaze fell on Monitor 5’s arm. For the first time, he picked it up and examined it closely.
“I guess you’re just going to have to make do with one wing,” he said. “There’s a lot of it going around.”
The robot made no reply. Derec turned the Monitor’s arm over and tried to flex the elbow. It resisted — consistent with the fact that the hand had been locked in a literal death grip on the silver artifact.
Consistent, Derec realized with a sudden shock, except that the arm contained no joints. Not at the elbow, not at the wrist, not at the knuckle. Oh, the elbow was bent at an obtuse angle, the wrist twisted slightly, the fingers curled. But insofar as he could tell from looking at it, the arm was incapable of movement.
There were any number of syntheskin coverings which would flex and wrinkle realistically while masking joints. But this was no covering. It was rigid to the touch and absolutely seamless, like a plastic casting. Puzzled, Derec carried it back to where the robot sat.
“What magnification are your optical sensors capable of?”
“Only a limited amount, sir — one hundred power.”
“At what resolution?”
“That would vary with the distance of the object being observed, sir. The maximum resolution is approximately ten micrometers.”
“That’s better than I can do with that thing,” Derec said, nodding toward the inspection scanner. “See what you can tell me about the structure of this arm.”
“Sir, I am not knowledgeable in this area.”
“You can see and you can describe. I’ll settle for that at the moment.”
“Yes, sir. May I hold the limb?”
Derec surrendered the arm, and the robot held it at eye level in its rock-steady grip. “At ten power, the surface is undifferentiated. Increasing magnification now. Granularity becoming evident. There seems to be a regular pattern. Pattern resolving now into hexagonal planar surfaces. Maximum magnification.” The robot paused for a fraction of a second. “The surface appears to consist of twelve-sided solids in close association.”
“What?”
“The surface appears —”
“I heard you. Look at another spot.”
The robot turned his head slightly to the left. “I observe the same pattern.”
“The end,” Derec snapped. “Look at the end, where it broke off.”
“The surface is much more irregular, but it is made up of the same dodecahedral units.”
“All the way through?”
“Yes, Derec.”
Derec stood staring, dumbfounded. What the robot had described suggested a completely new approach to robotic design — not an evolution, but a revolution. It sounded as though the Supervisor robots had been built — no, it couldn’t be.
“Kill your right shoulder control bus,” Derec snapped.
“The circuits are now inert,” the robot said.
Derec separated the three-conductor control wire from the damaged right arm and threaded it out through the opening where he had been working. He touched the connector to the stump end of the Supervisor arm, and it clung there as though it belonged.
“Activate the control circuit. Send a command to bend the elbow.”
Almost instantly, the disembodied Supervisor arm slowly began to flex. “Look at the joint,” Derec demanded. “Tell me what’s happening.”
“The changes are taking place more quickly than my scan rate allows me to observe,” the robot said. “However, I infer that the dodecahedrons are undergoing some type of directed rearrangement.”
“Flowing into a new shape. The material of the arm is transforming itself.”
“Those descriptors are imprecise but consistent with my observations. The technical term for such reorganization is morphallaxis.”
Derec felt for his chair and sat down shakily. The Supervisors had been built out of billions of tiny crystalshaped modules — a cellular structure. Each had to contain kilometers of circuit connections, megabytes of programming. It was the cells that were the robots. The robots were more like organisms.
What a feat of engineering they represented — the essence of a robot in a package a few microns in diameter. Properly programmed, they could take on any shape. A Supervisor was an infinity of specialized forms held within one generalized package.
As he marveled, Derec was reminded of something he had not thought about for several days. The cellular design bore the same distinctive stamp that the asteroid colony’s lifts and environmental system had. Superficial simplicity — achieved on the strength of hidden complexity. Elegance of design, novelty of approach. It was another brush with the minimalist designer, and it gave Derec one more reason to seek to escape from the raiders.
Because somehow, somewhere, he had to meet the designer.
Chapter 10
MORE THAN SEMANTICS
AFTER A SHORT break for a late lunch of the same monotonous foods, Derec set about installing the cellular arm in place of the robot’s original limb.
It was not an easy task, requiring both structural and functional marriages between two wildly divergent technologies. Derec worried about the functional link first, and not only because he expected it to be the tougher challenge. If the robot could not control the new arm, there was no point in going to the trouble of attaching it.
But the cellular arm apparently used the standard command set and carrier voltages. Though there was no evidence of any contacts or wiring in the stump end, the arm responded no matter where Derec attached the control bus.
Experimenting, he found that the arm responded even if he attached the control bus to the skin of the forearm, the palm of the hand, even the tips of two fingers. It seemed as though the cellular microrobots were smart enough to accept the command input from any location and channel it to the appropriate sites.
Once attached, the arm responded not only to all the robot’s basic motor commands, but even to some novel commands. With coaching from Derec, the robot was able to “think” an additional joint onto his arm between the elbow and wrist. In another test, Derec asked the robot to try to modify the cellular thumb and forefinger into long, slender microclamps. To his delight and amazement, it could. With the right command codes, the material of the arm seemed to be infinitely malleable.
But no matter how Derec prepared the mounting ring the arm was connected to, the right shoulder joint remained weaker than the left was or the original had been. At one point, the cellular arm broke loose completely when the robot tried to li
ft an object weighing less than twenty kilos. Even after he reattached it, Derec had doubts it would withstand the stresses of, for instance, a brawl.
“Looks like you’re going to have one strong arm and one smart one,” he told the robot. “Try not to forget which is which.”
“It is not possible for me to forget, sir.”
“This isn’t an off-the-shelf replacement,” Derec said sternly. “Until you’ve burned what it can do and can’t do into your pathways, you be careful with it. And never let anyone but me see you doing tricks with it, understand?”
While Derec was talking, the robot went rigid and its eyes dimmed. Derec knew what that meant, and fell silent. A moment later her heard the soft padding of Wolruf’s footsteps in the corridor. It was becoming a familiar sound, for it was Wolruf’s third visit to the lab that day. Aranimas, apparently occupied with the duties of “ship’s boss,” had managed only two.
Like the previous visits, this one was casual. Wolruf had no messages for him and no burning curiosity about what he was doing with the robot. It was almost as though she was using checking on him as an excuse to avoid other work, or trying to cultivate his friendship. But Derec kept up his guard. Wolruf was Aranimas’s lieutenant, no matter how sympathetic she might seem. Even her concern for him while he was being tortured, he had decided, was nothing more than a good cop, bad cop stage show meant to speed his surrender.
As before, Wolruf stayed but a few minutes, then continued on to some other task. As soon as she was out of earshot, the robot reanimated.
“I understand, sir,” it said, as though there had been no interruption.
“The next time you have to go down like that, you might spend your time trying to analyze the arm’s command set. Can you do that?”
“I can try, sir. It should be possible to separate those command codes which are valid from those which are nulls. However, I will have to be fully functional to test the valid codes and determine their function.”
“Let’s wait on that until we know we’re going to have some privacy.” He paused a moment to decide what he needed doing next. There was still the matter of reprogramming the robot, but that was also a job which required some assurance of privacy. The best opportunity seemed to be during shipboard night, which was also the best time to explore the ship.
