“Clarification. You wish for Aranimas to believe that I am completely in his service?”
“Suspend. I do,” Derec said. “If he’s going to get any use out of you, he’s going to have to teach you about the ship. Anything you learn will help us escape.”
“I understand the necessity for intelligence, sir,” the robot said. “But if I am to protect you I must remain at your side.”
Derec had expected the objection-PD circuits made robots more argumentative. “Since Aranimas is in command of this ship, he is the real threat to me. Only his actions or his orders can harm me. By remaining close to him, you will be best able to protect me.”
“I understand, sir.”
“All right. Resume. There are two things that we particularly need to know. A valuable object came aboard with me, a metallic rectangle, silver color, about five by ten centimeters. I think it’s the same object Aranimas called the key, and Wolruf the jewel. It’s apparently valuable and powerful. We need to know where it is.”
“Yes, Derec. I will be particularly alert for clues to this object’s whereabouts.”
“The other thing we need to know is what Spacer facility we’re heading for and when we’re going to get there. If we wait too long to move, Aranimas will have us locked up somewhere to keep us out of his hair while he’s stealing robots.”
“That would be a prudent precaution.”
“Which means that Aranimas will probably think of it,” Derec said. “If you learn where the key is located, you are to wait one decad and then simulate a Code 804 malfunction. If you learn where we are headed or when we are to arrive, you are to wait fifteen centads and then simulate a Code 3033 malfunction. End instruction block.”
Though he knew what he hoped would happen from that point onward, Derec stopped there. Verbal instruction-in-advance was a tricky enough matter, requiring the skills of a semanticist with the foresight of a seer. He did not wish to saddle the robot with excessively specific and possibly useless orders.
Much work and intelligence had gone into designing the PD library cube. Derec would have to trust that, when the time came, Alpha would grasp the situation and do what was required.
Chapter 12. Mutiny
Despite how little of the night was left when Derec was done, he slept well and awoke rested, with his head clear and his spirits up. He began clearing one end of the room as though to make a stage, determined to put on a good show. Presently, Aranimas arrived with Wolruf in tow.
Derec did not have a Handbook of Robotics with its extensive diagnostic interrogatory, but he knew the main lines of questioning used to test the various positronic functions.
“If the daughter of a woman with red hair owns two dogs and the father of a boy with a broken leg is unemployed, what day does the barber give shaves?”
Wolruf hooted at that one, and Aranimas looked puzzled. But the robot calmly answered, “It is not possible to determine the answer from the information given.”
“What is the value of hex 144C times 16F2?”
“Hex 1D1B7D8.”
“Touch your right index finger to the middle of your forehead.”
The robot complied.
“State the Rayleigh law of magnetic permeability-”
For fifteen minutes, Derec peppered the robot with commands and questions, less to impress Aranimas with the robot’s abilities than to underscore his own competence. He did not want Aranimas thinking that with the robot operational, he, Derec, was now expendable.
Then, before Aranimas could grow impatient, Derec asked the final question. “Alpha, who is your master?”
“Aranimas,” the robot replied.
Derec turned to Aranimas. “The robot’s yours now,” he said. “You will have to teach it what you want it to do, but you won’t have to show it more than once.”
Aranimas rose. “Order it to attack Wolruf,” the alien said.
“What?”
“I will not share control of this servant. Order it to attack Wolruf.”
Derec’s hesitation was calculated. He turned to the robot and said, “Pick up that brace and strike Wolruf in the head.”
Wolruf whimpered, but the robot did not move. “I may not comply, sir.”
Then Aranimas repeated the command. “Servant. Pick up the brace and strike Wolruf.”
Derec held his breath. If there was going to be a First Law conflict over treatment of the aliens, now was when it would surface.
“Yes, master,” the robot said, turning and reaching for the metal rod.
Wolruf crabbed nervously toward the door. Derec released a small sigh of relief.
“Stop, servant,” Aranimas ordered. To Derec he said, “You have done as you promised. It seems that you are worth keeping alive after all. Wolruf will find other duties for you.”
That was a wild card Derec had not expected, and he could not let it be played unchallenged. “No,” Derec said boldly. “I’m a roboticist, not a laborer. Not a Narwe. If you want to keep your new servant in good order, you’re going to keep me working here.”
“Doing what?”
“First, disassembling the other body for spare parts. Some of the patches I did on this robot are temporary. I can work on better fixes. Some of the damaged components may be repairable if I can get certain supplies.”
Derec plunged on, gathering a head of steam. “Out in the real world, there are repair technician robots which do nothing but maintain other robots. You only have one robot at the moment, so I’m your technician. You’ve seen what I can do. How long did you have those parts? How much time did you spend looking at them and figuring out nothing? Why do you want to start treating me like a particularly ugly Narwe?”
Aranimas stared, then made a hissing sound which might have been laughter. “Come, servant. We will leave the master roboticist to his work.”
It was difficult for Derec to watch Alpha walk away with Aranimas. It was even more difficult to wait patiently for some sign whether the fragile plan he and Wolruf had concocted would even pass the first threshold.
He was still isolated in his little corner of the ship. There was no way for him to know what Aranimas was doing with the robot. He did not know from one minute to the next whether his instructions to the robot were still intact. Perhaps Aranimas had only pretended to be ignorant about robots. Perhaps he had already undone all of Derec’s careful conditioning.
Even if the instructions were still intact, they could well be irrelevant. Derec had assumed that Aranimas would be so fond of his new toy that he would keep it close at hand. Everything depended on that being true. But if he was wrong, if Aranimas had simply dispatched Alpha to some far corner of the ship to perform some menial function, then his plan was foredoomed to failure. Derec would have given up the robot and gotten nothing in return for it.
Derec had work to do, some to maintain the fiction he was Aranimas’s faithful employee, some for his own purposes. He tried to make the hours pass more quickly by immersing himself in it. But work could not dull the edge of his impatience or his anxiety. Even with no clock to watch, time crawled by.
Wolruf was in and out several times the rest of that day, and even when she was gone she was never far away. He welcomed the interruptions, but he worried that Aranimas might detect the change in her working patterns and wonder why. And without Alpha to alert him to Aranimas’s approach, Derec was reluctant to talk about their evolving plot against the alien commander.
But it was not entirely avoidable. The call could come at any time, and a key problem remained unsolved. Derec knew, or thought he did, how they could disarm Aranimas. The unanswered question was how to disable him.
With surprising vehemence, Wolruf ruled out killing the Erani. Derec did not much regret it. He could not picture himself walking up to Aranimas with a club and battering him to death. But at the same time, as long as Aranimas was alive he was dangerous.
Derec first proposed a stunner, made from a recharged microcell and a few bits of wire. But there was no way to be sure that Aranimas was vulnerable to electric shocks, or to assure that the high-voltage current wouldn’t kill him.