He was proved correct, for shortly a stocky, red-faced man emerged from the access tunnel and hurried to Horsu, with whom he engaged in agitated discussion. On seeing Horsu shake his head in a gesture of indignant refusal Jasperodus heightened the sensitivity of his hearing so as to eavesdrop on their conversation.
‘Do you imagine my fine robots are so many lumps of wood to be burned up just like that? Away with you!’ Horsu was saying.
‘But imagine if there is an explosion – right underneath the palace!’ the other implored with anguish. ‘Would you have the King rebuke you for malfeasance?’
Horsu parried the threat. ‘To me is entrusted only the care of the household robots. The powerhouse is not within my province and is in no way my responsibility.’
And the other riposted: ‘Indeed it is, for your robots are even now engaged in building an extension to it.’
However else Horsu might have answered remained unknown, for the Major Domo himself arrived, bearing himself imperiously and trailing behind him Kitchen Help.
The Major Domo curtly overruled Horsu’s objections. ‘This robot here will be no loss,’ he declared. ‘The kitchen staff tell me he is completely useless and more of a nuisance than an asset. So let him expend himself on one last useful act.’
With an aggrieved sigh the stablemaster looked this way and that, scratching his chin. He next looked Kitchen Help up and down and then glanced at Jasperodus; a crafty look came over his face.
‘Very well!’ he agreed. ‘Take Kitchen Help. The crisis evidently demands a sacrifice.’
The aged construct nodded his head as it was explained to him what was required. His weakly glowing eyes blinked in his effort to understand. ‘Yes, I obey. Reach the opposite wall of the furnace; inspect to ascertain why the conduits will not open nor the rakes work; clear the mechanism and make sure it is working aright; if possible, quit the furnace and return.’
‘Excellent, excellent!’ The party moved to the mouth of the access tunnel and disappeared from view.
Jasperodus continued with his work, but presently Horsu and the others emerged into the open again, minus the robot. The Major Domo pointed to a humanoid who worked alongside Jasperodus.
‘How about that one there? He seems sturdy enough.’
But Horsu beckoned to Jasperodus himself. ‘I can do even better. It’s futile to send machine after machine into the furnace if they are simply destroyed without doing the job. This one, now, is in perfect condition; if he can’t do it none of them can.’ He adopted an expression of regret tempered with duty. ‘It distresses me, of course, that I shall probably lose this prime property, but after all they’re all expendable.’
‘What is the nature of the problem?’ Jasperodus asked on coming near.
The powerhouse minder turned to him. ‘The furnace controls are jammed and all attempts to clear them from the outside have failed. In a word, it’s out of controclass="underline" the furnace is overheating, the boilers are building up pressure, and if this goes on I don’t like to think about the consequences.’
‘Clearly a poor piece of design,’ Jasperodus remarked.
The powerhouse minder shot him a look of reproof and then continued. ‘Someone has to go right into the furnace to see what the trouble is. We’ve already sent the kitchen robot, but apparently the temperature was too much for him.’ He went on to issue the same instructions he had given Kitchen Help.
‘I am acquainted with this furnace, and I am not likely to survive either,’ Jasperodus volunteered. ‘Perhaps if I were equipped with a cooling agent, such as frozen carbon dioxide supplied through a hose…’
‘Enough!’ roared Horsu. ‘There’s no time for niceties. This is an emergency – get on with it.’ And Jasperodus understood that Horsu was using the situation to get rid of him for good and all.
If I were a living being it would be an injustice, he thought, but I am not a living being, so there is no injustice…
He followed the humans to the access tunnel, automatically going over the layout of the powerhouse in his mind. Its design was so crude as to lose even the advantages of simplicity. Theoretically it used nuclear energy, consuming a specially processed type of ‘safe’ compound isotope that produced no residual radioactivity when it decayed, but generated enough heat to raise steam through a primitive heat exchanger. The isotope was shovelled into the furnace as slag and triggered into decay by a powerful jolt of microwaves, after which it decomposed into liquid waste and could be drained off through conduits.
But in practice the isotope fuel was permanently in short supply and so was combined with an oddly disparate method of producing energy. The furnace was fitted with a system of flues to draw oxygen, and into it went anything that would burn – timber, coke, plastic, sometimes rubbish from the palace. The combination of combustion and nuclear power was not a happy one, as could be seen from the present situation. It would be a small disaster for King Zhorm if the powerhouse was destroyed, for apart from the damage it would cause to the palace itself, it would cut off the electricity supply to part of the town of Okrum – a form of royal largesse from which Zhorm drew popularity.
The tunnel was lined with concrete and angled sharply underground. The light here was dim, being provided by feeble yellow lamps set in the ceiling. Halfway down the tunnel turned a right angle, and here Horsu and the others paused.
‘Right,’ Horsu said with unveiled satisfaction. ‘You know what you have to do – get on with it.’
Wordlessly Jasperodus proceeded on his own. A few yards further down brought him to the furnace room.
The space between wall and furnace was narrow. Facing Jasperodus were the furnace doors, fabricated of mica-carbon laminate and glowing faintly. Behind them the fire of the furnace seemed to roar and beat like a living heart.
Two crouching robots turned towards him in the baking gloom. Jasperodus knew them welclass="underline" they were stokers, their feeble mentalities adapted only to that one task. They were incapable of any other, such as the mission he had been sent on.
Here I go, then. As I am nothing, so I shall be nothing. A thought in the void without a thinker…
He dismissed any thought of death. Death could not exist for one who had never been born… It seemed to him that what was about to happen to him was a logical conclusion of the tragedy that surrounded him. Every day of his life he had been living a lie, the lie of his own being. That lie had brought him first to despair, then to the knowledge of his own imprisonment, and now… Everything had been leading to this fiery execution chamber.
Understanding what was expected, the stokers applied themselves to levers, one on either side of the doors, and forced them slowly open. A brilliant white glare flooded into the narrow space.
As the glaring fire was revealed, a curious image rose in Jasperodus’ mind, so vividly as to paralyse him for a moment. He saw a blast furnace in which iron and steel were smelted. Into it trundled an endless stream of scrap metaclass="underline" objects large and small, weapons, cars, broken-up aircraft and locomotives, canisters, ornaments, statues and statuettes, table-ware, hooks and buttons, brackets, rods, girders, fences, gates, trays, myriad machines and defunct robots, every one disappeared into the ravening heat to lose all form and identity. And all the metal thereby gained was used again to make a new generation of artifacts. Unaccountably this thought left Jasperodus feeling stunned – he himself could be melted down in such a furnace (as he had once been drawn from one) and used to make, perhaps, the chassis for a motorised carriage, or even a new, totally different robot who would live a happily humdrum existence unafflicted by the curse of a fictitious self-image.