“I eat same as ‘ou,” Wolruf said.
“Borscht today,” said Ariel with a smile that seemed natural. “We’ve got lots of tomato sauce, and besides, I like it.”
“It’s wonderful to have a commercial synthesizer and a large stock of basics,” Derec said, cheering at her cheer. “Remember our experiments in Robot City?”
She made a face. “Remember? I’m trying to forget.”
Dr. Avery’s ship was well-equipped. Indeed, they could live indefinitely out here-at least until the micropile gave out, or their air and water leaked away. The water purifier used yeast and algae to reclaim sewage, the plants then being stored as basic organic matter for the synthesizer.
Derec, having removed the suit with motions suitable to a contortionist, stowed it away in its clips beside the airlock. Mandelbrot immediately went to it and checked it over. Reaching to the ceiling of the cabin, Derec touched off, tippy-toed off the floor, and back off the ceiling. Called “brachiating,” it was the most efficient mode of movement within a cabin in free-fall.
He turned on the receiver. It was tuned to BEACON- local.A calm, feminine-sounding robotic voice spoke. “Beacon Kappa Whale Arcadia. Report, please. Beacon Kappa Whale Arcadia. Report, please.” Turning off the sound, Derec glumly checked the indicators. Kappa Whale was coming in on the electromagnetic band, both laser and microwave. They were getting minimal detection on the hyperwave, however.
“I don’t understand it,” he muttered. Ariel glanced at him over her shoulder as she floated before the cooking equipment.
Wolruf joined him. “Wass broken by Doctorr Avery, do ‘ou think?”
“Sabotage? I don’t know. It was picking up Kappa Whale beautifully when we took off from Robot City.”
They had left the planet of robots hurriedly in this stolen ship. Dr. Avery, who had created the robots that went on to build Robot City, had been pursuing them for reasons none of them understood. Though Derec suspected that Ariel knew more about the enigmatic and less-than-sane doctor than she had said.
Once off the planet and safe from Dr. Avery, they discovered that either there were no astrogation charts in the ship, or they were well concealed in its computer. Though positronic, that was not a full-fledged positronic brain. Had it been, they could have convinced it that without the charts they would die in space. Under the First Law of Robotics, it would be unable to withhold the charts, regardless of the orders it had been given.
The First Law of Robotics states: A robot may not knowingly harm a human being, or knowingly allow a human being to come to harm.
Orders would have come merely under the Second Law, which is: A robot must obey the orders of a human being, except where this would conflict with the First Law.
But the computer was merely a more complicated calculator, incapable of the simplest robotic thought. Robotic ships with positronic brains had been tried, and had all failed, because all full-sized positronic brains were designed with the Three Laws built into them. Necessarily, they were too intent on preventing possible harm to their occupants. Since space travel is inherently unsafe, they had a tendency to go mad or to refuse to take off.
“I feel like hitting the damn computer, or kicking it,” he said.
Wolruf grinned her rather frightening grin. “Ho! ‘Ou think, like Jeff Leong, all machines should have place to kick?”
“Or some way to jar information loose. I’m convinced there must be charts in there somewhere-”
It was a reasonable guess. Nobody could remember all the miles of numbers that was a star chart. Charts were rarely printed out in whole, though for convenience in calculation, some sections might be. This little ship didn’t have a printer. All it had-they presumed-was a recording in its memory.
But they couldn’t find it.
Even that wouldn’t have been too serious if the hyperwave hadn’t gone out on them. Lacking charts, in orbit about Robot City, they had swept space with the hyperwave and picked up Kappa Whale Arcadia quite well. The fix was good enough to Jump toward, and they had done that. Logically, they should then have been able to pick up other beacons and hop, skip, and jump their way to anywhere in inhabited space: the fifty Spacer worlds, or the Settler worlds that Earth had recently begun to occupy.
“We’re somewhere within telescopic distance of Arcadia,” murmured Derec. That was a minor and distant Spacer world. But they had no idea on which side of it lay the constellation of the Whale. They knew only that this-Kappa-was the ninth-brightest star in that constellation, and that there was only one fainter, Lambda Whale. Constellations, by interstellar agreement, had, for astrogational purposes, no more than ten stars.
“Sooner or laterr a ship will come,” Wolruf said reassuringly.
Sooner or later. Derec grunted.
He didn’t need to have the argument repeated; it had been mostly his. When they found that, after the Jump, the hyperwave would only pick up the nearest beacon, Derec had suggested that they lie low until a ship came by, and request a copy of the astrogational charts from it. To beam a copy over would take the ship only a few minutes, and be no trouble at all.
Sooner or later.
“Soup’s on, or stew in this case,” Ariel said. The oven opened with an exhalation of savory steam. “We still have some of your crusty bread, Derec. I reheated it. But we’ll want more later.”
“It smells good,” Derec said honestly. Wolruf, with even greater honesty, licked her chops and grinned. Derec had overcome his irritation at Ariel’s invasion of the male preserve of the chief of cuisine, and had admitted to her that she was a better chef than he. (Common cooking was robot work, which no human admitted to doing.)
They ate in silence for a short while. The stew was served in covered bowls, but it clung to the inner surfaces. Manipulating their spoons carefully, they were able to eat without flinging food allover the ship. At first even Ariel’s appetite was good, but she quickly lost interest.
“Do you think a ship will ever come by here?” she asked finally, her gaze, and apparently her thought, a long way away.
“Of course,” said Derec quickly. “I admit I was too optimistic. I suspect we’re well out on the edge of inhabited space; this lane is not too well traveled. But eventually……”
“Eventually…” she said, almost dreamily. She seemed, often now, in a drifting, abstracted state.
“Eventually,” Derec repeated weakly.
He was too honest to try to argue her into belief. Ships didn’t fly from star to star like an aircraft. They Jumped, with massive thrusts of their hyperatomic motors, going in a direction that was at right angles to time and all three spatial dimensions simultaneously. Since they went no-distance, it naturally took no-time to Jump. Therefore there were no lanes of star travel.
For safety reasons, ships Jumped from star to star; if one was stranded for any reason, rescuers had only to chart the route and check every star along it. And since not every star had inhabited planets, all along these well-traveled lanes (as they were called) were the beacon stars. A ship Jumping into this beacon system was supposed to verify that it had indeed arrived at Kappa Whale, beam its ship’s log to the beacon’s recorders, and depart. Periodically, patrol ships copied those records to assure that nothing untoward had happened.
But days had passed and no ships had appeared. Of course a ship appearing on the other side of Kappa Whale would not be detected by them on the electromagnetic band until it had Jumped out. The hyperwave radio, though, was functioning well enough to detect a ship reporting to the beacon anywhere in this stellar system. Derec and Wolruf agreed on that.
So: eventually they would be found and rescued.
Wolruf finished her meal by opening her bowl and licking it clean efficiently. “I wass thinking,” she said. “Maybe Jump-wave shock shifted things in ‘ou’rr hyperwave antenna.”
“Shifted the elements?” Derec nodded uncertainly. He had no idea where he had been educated, but he had a good general technical background with a strong specialty in robotics-not unusual for a Spacer youth, as he assumed himself to be. But hyperwave technology was a whole other and, if anything, even more difficult school of knowledge.