“I’m not a servant any longer!” yelled someone in the acacia.
“Me neither!”
“Look at those hind legs!”
The front ranks of mechanical monsters reached the clearing and stopped. The ones in back piled into them and they all collapsed into a heap, tangling up, their outlandish articulations spread wide. Above, the poles on wheels toppled over with a dull thud, breaking in two. One wheel, its springs ringing, rolled up to the platform, circled around, and fell down at Evgeny’s feet. Then Evgeny looked at Rudak. Rudak was standing on the platform, his hands resting against his sides. His beard was waving.
“There we are, guys,” he said. “I give all this to you for pillage and looting. Now we’ll find out how and why they tick—probably.”
The conquerers threw themselves upon the defeated army.
“You can’t really mean the Great CODD built all this to study the behavior of Buridan’s sheep, can you?” Evgeny asked in horror.
“And why not?” said Rudak. “It could very well be. It probably is.” He winked with unusual slyness. “Anyhow, it’s certainly clear that something is out of kilter here.”
Two strapping designers dragged a small metal beetle by its rear leg. Just opposite the platform the leg broke off, and the designers fell into the grass.
“Monsters,” muttered Rudak.
“I already told you it wasn’t fastened on well,” said Evgeny.
A sharp elderly voice roared through the merry noise: “Just what is going on here?”
Silence set in instantly. “Oh, boy,” Rudak said in a whisper, and climbed down from the platform.
It seemed to Evgeny that Rudak had suddenly shriveled.
An old gray-haired black in a white lab coat approached the platform, limping. Evgeny recognized him-it was Professor Lomba. “Where is my Paul?” he asked in an ominously affectionate voice. “Children, who can tell me where my deputy is?”
Rudak remained silent. Lomba walked straight toward him. Rudak stepped backward, knocked his back against the platform, and stopped.
“So, Paul my dear boy, just what’s going on here?” Lomba asked, looming close.
Rudak answered sheepishly, “We seized control from CODD—and rounded up all the monsters into one pile.”
“The monsters, eh?” Lomba said tersely. “An important problem! Where does the seventh leg come from? An important problem, my children! A very important problem!”
Suddenly he grabbed Rudak by the beard and dragged him through the crowd, which opened in his path, to the middle of the clearing. “Look at him, children!” he snouted ceremoniously. “We are astounded! We rack our brains! We fall into despair! We imagine that CODD has outsmarted us!” With each “we” he pulled Rudak’s beard, as if ringing a bell. Rudak’s head swung submissively.
“What happened, teacher?” a girl asked timidly. From her face it was obvious that she felt very sorry for Rudak.
“What happened, my dear little girl?” Lomba at last let go of Rudak. “Old Lomba goes to the center. He drags the best specialists away from their work. And what does he find out? Oh, the shame! What does he find out, you redheaded villain?” He again grabbed Rudak by the beard, and Evgeny hurriedly aimed his camera. “They’re laughing at old Lomba! Old Lomba has become the laughingstock of every last cyberneticist! They’re already telling jokes about old Lomba!” He let go of the beard and stuck a bony fist in Rudak’s broad chest. “I’ll get you! How many legs does an ordinary Australian merino sheep have? Or perhaps you’ve forgotten?”
Evgeny suddenly noticed that upon these words a few young men started moving back with the clear intention of losing themselves in the crowd.
“Don’t let the programmers get away,” Lomba ordered without turning his head.
There was a noise in the crowd, and the young men were pushed into the center of the circle.
“What do these intellectual pirates do?” inquired Lomba, turning sharply towards them. “They indicate in the program that a sheep has seven legs.”
The crowd began to grow noisy.
“They deprive the sheep of a cerebellum.”
Laughter—approving, as it seemed to Evgeny—spread through the crowd.
“Poor, nice, well-meaning CODD!” Lomba raised his arms to the heavens. “It piles absurdity upon absurdity! Could it suppose that its red-bearded hooligan of a master would give it a problem about a five-sided triangle?”
Rudak muttered miserably, “I won’t do it again. Honest I won’t.”
The crowd, laughing, thrashed the programmers on their resonant backs.
Evgeny spent the night at Rudak’s. Rudak bedded him down in the study, then went back to the acacias, brushing his beard carefully. An enormous orange moon, gridded with the gray squares of D-spaceports, looked into the open window. Evgeny looked at it and laughed happily, going over the events of the day in his mind.
He very much liked days like this, ones that did not go by for nothing-days when he had managed to meet new, good or merry or simply nice people. People like thoughtful Parncalas, or magnificent Rudak, or Lomba the Thunderer. I’ll have to write about this, he thought. Absolutely! About how intelligent young men, at their own risk, inserted a notoriously nonsensical program into an unusually complicated and capable machine, to see how the machine would react. And how it reacted, carefully trying to create a consistent model of a sheep with seven legs and no cerebellum. And how an army of these monster-models marched over the warm black savanna in order to surrender to a red-bearded intellectual pirate. And how the intellectual pirate got pulled by the beard—not for the first time nor, probably, for the last. Because he’s very interested in problems involving five-sided triangles and square spheres… which are detrimental to the dignity of an honest, well-intentioned computer. It could come out all right—a story about intellectual hooliganism.
Evgeny fell asleep and woke up at dawn. Dishes were quietly crashing in the dining room, and a discussion in low tones was under way:
“Now everything’s going smooth as silk—Papa Lomba has calmed down and gotten interested.”
“As well he should! Such neat data on the theory of machine error!”
“But still, guys, CODD turned out to be fairly simple-minded. I expected more inventiveness.”
Someone suddenly laughed and said, “A seven-legged sheep without the least sign of an organ of balance! Poor CODD!”
“Quiet—you’ll wake the correspondent!”
After a long pause, when Evgeny had already begun to drowse, someone suddenly said with regret, “It’s a shame that it’s all over already. It was interesting! O seven-legged sheep! We’ve seen the last of thy mystery and it’s a crying shame.”
14. Candles Before the Control Board
At midnight it started to rain. The highway got slick and Zvantsev reduced speed. It was unusually dark and bleak—the glow of city lights had disappeared behind the black hills—and it seemed to Zvantsev as if his car were going through a desert. The white beam of the headlights danced ahead on the rough wet concrete. There were no cars going the other way. Zvantsev had seen the last one before he turned onto the highway leading to the Institute. Half a mile before the gate was a housing development, and Zvantsev saw that despite the late hour almost all the windows were lit up, and the veranda of a large cafe by the road was full of people. It seemed to Zvantsev that they were keeping quiet, waiting for something.