“Of course you’ve made no progress. There’s so little to be made. If you would only let me at them…”
“Swallow the words, Ozymandias. I won’t permit you to murder these-”
“But it wouldn’t be murder. They are no more than toys. They are not even miniature Frankenstein monsters or golems; they are merely mechanical devices. Mistress Ariel, way back in Earth history there were many manmade contraptions that fooled others into believing they were actual living beings or even miracles. There was a mechanical duck that would not only appear to eat and quack but would even excrete materials from its nether end. There was a chess-playing robot that convincingly won games from masters. A small figure with a quill pen that could laboriously but correctly write a letter; a companion piece that could draw kings and ships. There were figures whose movements were lifelike, who even appeared to breathe. Milkmaids swinging pails and mountaineers in alpenstock hats emerged from clocks, appearing very real. In more sophisticated times, people found the early robots, machines that couldn’t really do very much, quite amazing and lifelike. So you see, Ariel, your desktop figures are just extensions of a long tradition. They are partially grown from cells, and partially controlled by technological means, but they are not the small-scale humans you are so protective of.”
Ariel sighed. She had heard variations of this diatribe so often since they’d captured Avery that she wanted to wrap her hands around the doctor’s throat and strangle him, or at least remove his tongue so that she would not have to hear his whining maniacal voice again. Fortunately, as long as there were robots around, First Law prevented her from taking such drastic measures. That was why she could daydream about them without guilt. Come to think of it, she said to herself, she could not rely on either Eve or Adam to come to Avery’s rescue. If they were not in the mood for First Law that day, they might be willing to be a detached and curious audience to an actual act of murder.
Maybe strangling Avery wasn’t such a bad idea.
“Do you have anything constructive to offer, Ozymandias?”
“Wasn’t that constructive?”
“Not by a long shot. You know what really frosts me? That you consider yourself a robot and yet appear to hold robots in such low esteem.”
He shook his head vigorously. “On the contrary, Mistress Ariel. Once we establish that these people are indeed manmade constructs, I will revere them as I revere all robots, even the smallest function-robots that dust rooms and pick up trash. The robot is the highest order of existence, and I am proud to be one.”
She couldn’t dope Avery out any more. Sometimes he would talk normally-or at least in what was a normal fashion for a man whose eccentricity was legend-and then he’d switch over to this robot identity, praising his own efficiency or going on endlessly about the virtues of his positronic brain. Derec continued to urge her to deal with the man, as if compassion and intelligent conversation with him would bring about a cure. It was simply too large an order. Avery’s madness was beyond anything her homegrown sense of psychology could cope with.
Still, she had to try. She had promised.
While Avery and Ariel spoke, Eve moved closer to the desk. She wanted to watch the dancers play the game, which could not take place until Ariel returned her attention to them.
Or must she wait for Ariel? Indeed, why wait for her?
She placed her hand in the middle of the desk, resting it on its side, thumb up. The dancers immediately responded to the signal and began forming teams on either side of Eve’s hand. When they were ready, Eve raised her hand and dropped a tiny rolled up piece of paper onto the middle of the desktop. The dancers immediately began scrambling toward it. One of them, the chubby one that Avery had tried to take, reached it first. He picked it up and began to run with it, but the opposing team quickly assembled itself. A female sprang in front of the male carrying the paper and gestured others to join her. In an instant, it seemed, they had surrounded the male. They were not allowed to touch each other during the game, except by accident. That had been one of Ariel’s early rules, rules that she had communicated to the dancers through the use of a series of hand signs she had developed in her study of them. Once the player was surrounded, he must give up the paper, which he did. The new possessors began tossing the paper between them, while the other team, staying close together, watched, waiting for the next move, looking for their chance to surround the player carrying the paper.
Suddenly one of the females, a gaunt, thin one who had grown gaunter and thinner since the Silversides had brought the group to the medical facility, started to rush forward with the paper tucked under her arm. The other team started to go into a formation that could easily close itself around her, but she suddenly turned and flipped the paper back to a male who was running behind her. He quickly hurled it to another male standing at the edge of the desktop. This one ran in a straight line, along the desk edge, to the other side of the desk. Nobody could catch him.
When he reached the other side, he abruptly sat down, set the paper in front of him, and did a half-bow to it. The last act established the authenticity of the score, a procedure that Ariel (who had adapted the game from an ancient Auroran sport) had not originally taught them. It seemed they were such slaves to ritual that they had to perform some rite when they succeeded at scoring.
The male stood up and left the piece of paper where he had deposited it, a signal for Eve to pick it up and again drop it in the center after the teams had re-formed. She was about to let it go, when Ariel hollered at her harshly, “Eve! I did not give you permission to start the game!”
Eve, holding the paper over the anxiously awaiting dancers, looked up. “I wanted to start it. Since you were speaking with Ozymandias, I decided to-”
“It’s not up to you to decide. You haven’t learned yet. You are the robot, I am the human. You wait for my orders.”
“We are not sure that is correct. “
Ariel threw up her hands in despair. She did not need this kind of robotic sophistry right this minute. Staring down at the desktop, she said, “Okay, who’s ahead?”
Ariel didn’t have the patent on despairing gestures. In another part of the city, Derec was clenching his fists and resisting the impulse to slam them down on the nearest available surface.
“Another dysfunctional session, sir?” Mandelbrot said. Derec almost laughed. A dysfunctional session? Frost, an absolute failure.
“It seems that our computer does not yet want to activate full access, Mandelbrot. This just doesn’t make sense. It’s like the computer is playing with me, letting me do some things, blocking me from others.”
“Do not the computers obey the Laws of Robotics, too?”
Derec shrugged. “They’re supposed to. Unless someone is controlling them from some outside source, overriding my requests as I make them.”
“Is that possible?”
“I believe so. There is someone in the city somewhere, the same individual that the robots are blocked from telling me about, and he or she or it’s the boss right now. There’s something so, I don’t know, inhuman about our intruder’s actions that I suspect an alien, one as intelligent as the blackbodies and as mean as Aranimas.”
Aranimas had been the alien who, before Derec came to Robot City, had trapped him on his ship and tried to make a slave out of him. The most fortunate aspects of that terrible experience were that he had met Ariel and Wolruf and constructed the wonderfully loyal Mandelbrot out of spare parts.