Where had this vision come from? Presumably from the stock of gratuitous memories bestowed on him by his father – somehow he still thought of the old man as his father. But it was over in a second or so. He moved forward, switching his vision to ultraviolet in an attempt to see through the flames, and clambered into the furnace. Fire licked at him; the doors edged shut behind him.
He stood alone in a raging haze of incandescence.
The air was thick with energy. It was like being under water.
This must be what it’s like inside a star.
Then it was hard for him to think anything for everything went fuzzy; the heat was disrupting his processes. He took a step, and stumbled over the body of Kitchen Help, which was at white heat and looked on the point of beginning to melt. His own skin was already glowing. Vaguely he was aware of his lower brain functions responding to the damage with a stream of urgent reports, analyses and prognostications; their import was that he should remove himself from here on the instant.
The possibility presented itself that he might not even reach the far wall of the furnace, though it was not very far away. But something else rose to the surface in him, sweeping aside both defeatism and the machine analogue of panic. He determined that he would accomplish this one last thing, at whatever degree of difficulty; he would not end his functioning on a note of failure.
His eyes were only of minimal use to him by now. He went forward, reeled, recovered himself and so gained the far end of the furnace where the trouble was. Groping with his hands, he verified what he had already guessed to be the cause of failure: vitrified ash from the burning of a combustible fuel had sealed both the lids of the waste pipes and the clumsy mica-laminate rakes that were supposed to shovel the ash away. Both ash and decomposed isotope was supposed to form a slurry to flow away to the waste pits below; instead they had stayed in the furnace, building up more and more heat.
Though barely operational, Jasperodus kicked desperately at the glassy mass, and eventually succeeded in cracking and shattering it. Then he threw himself at the rakes, tearing free the fused fragments with his hands.
His body was at white heat. His senses were going out, leaving him hanging in a vacant void.
Collapse was imminent.
If I really tried, he thought, perhaps I could reach the door. But he made no move to do so, and shortly he felt a tearing sensation as vital systems were taken out. Then he knew no more.
There was light, gentle and caressing. There was the rustle of fabric, and the sigh of a breeze.
And Jasperodus retracted his eyelids, gazing astonished at a baroque ceiling.
Above him hovered the thin, intent face of Padua the robotician. He smiled faintly to see that Jasperodus was ‘awake’.
‘Do not be surprised,’ he murmured. ‘You have survived.’
Nevertheless Jasperodus was surprised. Experimentally he levered himself to a sitting position, and observed that he had been lying on a low table covered with a yellow cloth. He appeared to be in one of the gracious little bowers that fringed the palace gardens; through the window casements he could see small, delicate trees, flowered bushes and orange-coloured blossoms.
He looked down at his body: bronze-black, decorated all over with engravings, but otherwise unmarked. He swung his legs to the floor and stood with feet apart, trying to detect some persisting damage in himself.
‘I thought I had sustained more harm than this!’ he exclaimed.
‘You did – you were very badly damaged indeed,’ Padua told him mildly. ‘You have been out for six months.’
‘Six months…’ Jasperodus echoed wonderingly. He flexed his fingers, examining his hands.
‘You were in the condition known as scrap when they brought you out of the furnace,’ Padua said. ‘But for all the damage the basic design elements were intact – the brain was particularly well protected. I undertook to put you back in order and rescued you from the junkyard – just in time, as you were about to be pounded under the steam hammer.’
‘Six months is a long time to spend on a repair job. A labour of love, almost.’ Jasperodus’ tone was sardonic.
‘Perhaps.’ Padua smiled faintly again. ‘I was loath to see such fine work as you represent go to waste. There is little to give my talents full rein here in Gordona – that is the price one pays for living in such an out-of-the-way place. I regarded it as a pleasurable test of my skill, and no thanks are due my way.’
Jasperodus, who had not intended to thank him, nevertheless noticed that Padua was looking at him with a strangely expectant expression on his face. He paced the room.
‘My faculties are fully restored?’
‘Yes, though it cost much effort.’
‘This hardly looks like your workshop.’ Jasperodus indicated the harmonious décor.
‘I decided to let you be reactivated in pleasant surroundings, rather than amid a clutter of tools and instruments.’ Again the expectant look.
‘What of radioactivity?’ Jasperodus asked suddenly, remembering the furnace. ‘Am I not dangerous to be near? The way things were, the isotope fuel might well have become unstable.’
‘There’s nothing to worry about on that score. There was a little radioactivity, but I purged your substance of it by a means of accelerating atomic decay that is known to me.’
‘You are indeed wasted in Gordona,’ Jasperodus grunted grudgingly. He paced again, trying to place what it was that was new and puzzling in his environment.
‘There’s a change,’ he said. ‘What is it?’
At this Padua laughed and clapped his hands in delight. ‘I thought you’d never notice. Try again – can you guess what it is?’
‘I wouldn’t be asking if I could,’ Jasperodus replied with an irritable gesture.
‘Well, you see, the making of robots is as much of an art as a science. Even the masters of highest attainment are invariably stronger on some features, weaker on others – except, of course, for an acme of perfection like Aristos Lyos. Now your own maker was unexcelled in the area of intellectual functions, but rather weak when it came to a certain type of fine nerve structure needed for the senses of smell and touch. Now it so happens that that area is my own speciality! So I undertook to remedy his deficiencies. In the field of touch-sensation and of smell you now have the same range and sensitivity as any man or woman!’
With much curiosity Jasperodus drew one hand across the other. It was as Padua had said: the dynamic sense of solid bodies was there, as before, but in addition there was an entirely new feeling; a stroking, tingling feeling.
Fascinated, he laid the flat of one hand on the cloth of the table he had just vacated, moving the palm gently across the felt. An entirely novel rough-smooth feel coursed through him. A whole area of his brain seemed to come alive for the first time.
‘It’s fantastic,’ he said quietly.
‘I had hoped it would afford you some diversion,’ Padua replied affably.
Jasperodus, however, would not be jollied along. ‘No doubt it will enable me to appreciate the qualities of the stable all the better,’ he grunted. ‘One thing you have not amended. I still have this irrational belief that I possess consciousness!’ And he rounded on Padua accusingly.