Perihelion

Chapter 18. Down Ahole

At the far end of the valley, Wolruf sat quivering in the chilly air. She was huddled high in the mountains in a vertical crevice of rock. This was the compromise she had reached for her conundrum: she was in the valley where she could try to observe the humans or even Mandelbrot if they were here when day broke. At the same time, she would not lead the Hunters following her directly to them.

Now she could not see any of them in the faint light down in the valley. In the nearer regions below her, function robots were visible doing their regular chores among the crops. Her physiology kept her just warm enough at this altitude to remain for a while, but she was not comfortable. Nor did she have the energy left to run farther.

She waited patiently, reviewing the moves she had made to break her trail. None of them could avoid a systematic search by the Hunters if they were close enough to detect her heat. Also, the Hunters probably had checked the pass at some point, because it was a bottleneck that could quickly tell them if she was inside the valley or out.

If her heat trail had faded before they had reached it, they still had physical signs to rely on. She had been as careful as possible, but the robotic vision of the Hunters could detect extreme detail. The rest was up to them.

Her ears perked up at the sound of footsteps on the rock fall below her. With no more energy left for fleeing, she waited patiently. The giant shape of a Hunter emerged from the darkness, thrown into silhouette by the distant glow emanating from the crops below. She knew it would not harm her, but it would take her prisoner and possibly deliver her to Dr. Avery, who could certainly harm her if he wished. She shivered as the Hunter reached down to pick her up.

Derec was staring disconsolately at the dirt-covered sensor when it suddenly erupted in an uneven spray, knocking loose some of the dirt. Ariel and he both flinched. All around them, other spigots were also spraying jets of fine mist into the air.

“That’s it!” Derec lifted his arms toward her. “Let’s go. Can you help me up?”

Ariel took his arms and pulled. His legs gave out under him. She wasn’t strong enough to lift him.

She started to pull again.

“I can’t walk any more.” His lower legs and feet had lost all feeling.

“You can’t walk at all?” Her shoulders slumped.

“But I can crawl. Let’s go.”

“Derec…?”

“Come on!” He started crawling through the soft earth, which was quickly turning to mud.

She stood and walked alongside him. “This is crazy. We’re hardly getting anywhere.”

“We have a lot more time now. The Hunters can’t follow our heat trail so they’ll have to start a pattern search. And at least one of them will have to carry Mandelbrot after they’ve shut him down.”

“Derec, you’ve only gone two meters!”

He stopped, sighing, and looked ahead. She was right. He could barely move. “Hey-what’s that thing?”

“What?” She looked, too.

Some kind of large rectangular shape, at least a cubic meter in size, was emerging from the ground below the trees.

“That…thing, there. We haven’t seen one of those before.” He started crawling again.

“There’s one behind us, too,” she said. “And beyond that one. They’re coming up all over. They were completely hidden before.”

“We must have triggered them along with the irrigation. Go see what it is.”

She hurried ahead and stopped in front of the object, bending low in front of it. After a moment, she came back and knelt down. “I think we can get inside it. It looks like a ventilation duct or something.”

Derec nodded. He had stopped crawling to get his breath again. His head was spinning dizzily.

When she got down on all fours and moved under him, he let her. She gathered his arms around her neck and maneuvered under him. Then, supporting his weight, she began to crawl much faster than he had, carrying as much of his weight as she could.

He hung on with his arms and closed his eyes against the spray of water.

“Here,” she said, after a few moments.

He opened his eyes into a gaping black opening with no other features. As she eased out from under him, he reached inside and felt for the shape of the object.

“It’s not a straight drop.” She helped him climb inside. “You can feel a gradual incline.”

Derec hesitated, too disoriented to speak but still reluctant to throw himself into an unknown hole.

“Go on, get in before the Hunters see us.”

He was losing all sense of his surroundings. Following directions was easier than arguing. He worked his way inside the opening and then suddenly was sliding downward and accelerating.

All was in darkness. He felt a rushing of air, the smooth pressure of the surface against his back as he slid, and Ariel bumping against him from above as she slid with him. Vaguely, he realized he was too exhausted to feel any fear.

He should have been terrified of winding up in a moving fan blade, for instance, or in the workings of some mysterious robot creation that would convert them both to fertilizer. Apparently he had been on Robot City too long for that. The robots couldn’t allow that much danger to a human to exist here.

No, that wasn’t it, either. The reason was even simpler. Nothing on this planet was more frightening than the chemfets destroying his body from the inside at this very moment.

The sensation of falling continued as they entered some turns, gradual curves, and finally reached a sudden upturn.

In the short ascent, gravity broke their momentum and then they slid backward again. Derec lay motionless, aware that they had stopped in the bottom of this thing, whatever it was. No light reached them at all.

He felt Ariel move a little, probably getting her bearings.

“Derec?” She said softly.” Are you hurt?”

A moment passed before he had the breath to answer. “No,” he whispered. “But I’ve had it.”

“We’re safe now,” she said, feeling for him and stroking his hair.” At least from the Hunters. I’m sure of it. They’ll have to search the entire valley, and every one of these things. And these were popping up every few meters, it looked like… well, every fifty or sixty, anyhow. Without a heat trail to follow, it’ll take them forever.”

“I can’t do it.”

“But we’re onto him! Avery, I mean. I’m sure of it.” She shuffled around and seemed to stand. “You know that upward curve at the end of our…little ride? It’s here and not very high. The duct continues on a level from here. Say, you know what else? There are handholds of some kind on the side opposite the one we slid down.”

“Maybe for service robots to make repairs down here.” He thought a moment. The temptation to go on was strong. Confronting the crazy doctor after all the suffering he had endured…but he couldn’t move. All he wanted to do was sleep.

“I think you’re right,” he said finally. “This is a ventilation duct. From the size and number of them, it must lead to an immense living space.”

“Avery’s home. Robots wouldn’t need it or the produce in the valley. Come on, let’s go. I’ll help you up.”

“You’ll have to go on alone. I honestly can’t move.”

She was quiet a moment. “Do you really want me to go on without you?”

“Yes.”

“All right,” she said slowly. She waited, perhaps trying to think of something else to say. Then she got her arms around him and embraced him very hard, and held on.

He was too weak to respond. After a moment, he felt her let go and stand up. Then she was climbing, and he heard her moving down the ventilation duct away from him.

He closed his eyes and slept.

Ariel felt her way forward slowly with her hands as she crawled, not making any move until she knew what was ahead of her. She was still in absolute darkness in some kind of giant tube that was so far stretching straight ahead on a level course. With Derec unable to move, she was painfully aware that she was the last of their group to have a chance at finding Dr. Avery.

She was not exactly in top condition herself. Her hands and feet were painfully cold and she was drenched from the sprinklers. She was worn out, too, though not sick like Derec was. The climb up the mountainside and down into the valley had taken a lot of energy out of her.

She hoped, with guarded optimism, that her memory was growing stronger. Those weird memory fugues had grown less frequent and she wished fervently that none would strike while she was alone in this thing, whatever it was.

She began to find branches and intersections in the passageway. Without any way to pick one direction over another, she attempted to go as straight as she could. Going in roughly one direction would at least prevent her from wandering hopelessly in circles. She suspected that the intersecting tunnels represented those other openings on the surface they had seen.

After a while, she thought she had picked out a pattern. From what she could feel, smaller tunnels seemed to converge more often and become larger ones consistently to her left. She began to move leftward and discovered that the tunnels were now high enough for her to stand if she bent over.

Now that she was moving in this direction, more tunnels converged around her all the time. Then they started branching out again, some of them splitting off above her. Finally she realized that she could see hints of shapes: dark spaces that represented openings one way, a faint reflection of an inner surface another way.

The traces of a light source shone from just one direction.

She dropped to all fours again to pursue the light source, now more concerned with making noise than with the height of the tunnel.

Around a curve, she reached something recognizable: a covered opening into a room. Barely daring to breathe, she moved as quietly as she could toward it until she could peek through the opening.

It was nearly opaque.

The room was lit, but she couldn’t see much. It was carpeted in brown. Nor could she hear anything.

After the silence had continued, she decided that she would have to risk entering the room. She began studying the edge of the covering to see if she could get it loose. In a moment, she found that pressure on the covering itself caused a hole to appear in the middle. The substance, whatever it was, receded from the hole to fade outward into the surrounding wall until the vent was entirely open.

She let out a sigh of relief that the room was deserted. It was still silent, as well. After shifting around to get her feet out first, she dropped to the floor of the room and looked around.

It was a small room, perhaps only three meters cubed. The brown carpeting went all the way up the walls and covered the ceiling as well. The light came from a globe floating just under the center of the ceiling.

She looked again at the ceiling, then at the walls. The room was not built on right angles. The corners were slightly askew.

A couple of computer tapes were piled on the floor. In one corner, a small stuffed animal of unrecognizable type lay on its side. The room was not being used for anything that she could see.

This was not what Ariel had expected from Dr. Avery.

The door was closed. She held her breath and pushed the stud on the wall next to it. It slid open silently.

She remained where she was, waiting. When nothing happened, she stuck her head out slowly. She found a hallway extending maybe six meters one way and four the other. The hallway itself was oddly shaped, but familiar-then she recognized it. It was a hollow three-dimensional rendition of the Key to Perihelion.

She stepped into the hallway. The closed doors at each end of it were also shaped like the Keys. She chose one and walked toward it.

This one opened as she reached it. She hesitated, then edged through. Her mouth dropped open in surprise.

This room reminded her of some ancient historical paintings she had seen. The high vaulted ceiling was at least two stories high and hung with curtains of burgundy velvet. Imitation Renaissance paintings in garish gold frames seemed to fit what she remembered of that period…or did they? Yet that furniture…was classic Auroran design, developed many centuries later. She looked up again, trying to orient herself…and shuffled quickly to one side to catch her balance.

This room was also askew. Worse than that, she guessed, it was not built on angles at all. Though the corners of the ceiling and walls were partly hidden by curtains, the whole room seemed oddly rounded, even twisted out of shape, as though the room had begun as a rectangle, had started to melt, and then had frozen again.

She started across the room to look more closely at the furniture. After four steps, the floor gave out beneath her and she fell, sliding this time down a short, twisting chute. She heard the trapdoor above her hiss closed again as she landed somewhere else with a thump.

This room was tiny, with just barely enough room for her to stand up. It, too, was in the shape of the Keys. There was a door in each wall that was big enough, and nothing else. The walls glowed with light, as in the Compass Tower. She pressed a stud by one of the doors.

The door slid open to reveal a solid glowing wall. She opened another one. This door opened to reveal a dark, narrow hallway. Before trying it, she pushed another stud.

A weirdly sculptured face stared at her from an archaic red brick wall. It had pointed ears, a long pointed face, and was laughing. Grimacing, she closed that one and tried another.

Another dark hallway stretched in front of her.

She had to go somewhere. With a glance at the other open doorway, she edged inside. The walls here didn’t glow, and she slid her feet carefully along the floor before committing her weight forward. After a few steps, the corridor began to curve.

A moment later, she had followed it right back to the same little room again. Ariel closed the doors to the circular hallway and stood inside the room. It might not have an exit, of course; this was the work of a paranoid who’s tendencies had been openly revealed. The room could just be a prison.

“Well, now what?” She said aloud.

A muffled response sounded behind one of the doors. She pressed the stud and found herself looking at the grotesque sculptured face again. All its features were exaggerated.

“What did you say?” She demanded.

“Pull my nose,” it said.

“Who are you?”

“Pull my nose.”

“What happens when I do?”

“Pull my nose.”

“Is that all you can say?”

“Pull my nose.”

She watched it for a moment. “One, two, three.”

“Pull my nose.”

She figured it out, then. This was a function robot without a positronic brain. It had one line to say, triggered by any sound of human speech.

Holding her breath, she pulled its nose.

The long, narrow nose stretched toward her and then suddenly snapped back, out of her grasp. On impact, the entire sculpture collapsed into itself, inverted, and pushed itself out the other way. Then the brick wall broke into quarters and each piece receded sideways, carrying the inverted face with it.

She was looking down a short ramp into another corridor, this one lined with glowing stones cut in the shape of the Keys but not in a smooth surface. Their corners protruded irregularly out of the wall to create a jagged, textured wall. The entire shape of the corridor as she faced the opening was in the shape of the corridor as she faced the opening was in the shape of the Keys, as well.

Still stepping carefully, she ventured down the ramp. After a moment, she realized that she was chillier than before…air was moving against her soaked clothing. Puzzled, she turned around-and found the walls, ceiling, and floor behind her converging to pinch off the corridor after she had passed.

She hurried forward a little, despite her caution, and came up against a stone wall at the end. Starting to panic, she ran her hands across the stones, feeling for a control of some kind. She felt nothing and whirled around to look at the shrinking corridor.

Suddenly something dropped from the ceiling in front of her and she flattened against the end wall, trying to see the object as it swayed before her face. She recognized it as Wolruf’s head, dangling on a long piece of rope tied into an ancient noose.

As she stared at it in horror, she realized that it was only a function robot rendered in realistic detail.

“Why arr ‘u ‘err?” The robot asked, in Wolruf’s voice.

Ariel’s spine prickled at the sound. She glanced behind the hanging head. The corridor had stopped closing behind her and now had left her in a very small dungeonlike space.

“Wrong answer,” said the robot, though she hadn’t spoken.

Suddenly the floor rose under Ariel’s feet, pushing her up toward the ceiling. The rope retracted with her, keeping the Wolruf head level with her as she rose. The ceiling opened and then the section of floor stopped, now flush with the floor just above the stone corridor.

The abrupt halt threw her off balance and she fell on a rich, gold carpet. Above her, five elaborate chandeliers sparkled and shone from a surprisingly low beamed ceiling. She rose up on her elbows, looking around fearfully.

She was in a library. Shelves of antique books, not computer tapes, stretched around all the walls and were protected by a transparent barrier of some kind. Turning, she stepped off the lift platform away from the Wolruf head.

A candelabra of some sort was on a shelf outside the transparent barrier that protected the books. It stood inside a blue and white bowl, leaning to one side. The candelabra was on a round base, with one central stem holding one candle and four branches arching upward on each side to total nine. She had never seen one before, whatever it was, and thought it seemed out of place here, as though someone had set it down and forgotten it.

She stepped back and looked at the bowl. It was large enough to serve four or five people plenty of food. Light blue designs danced around the white background on the outside. It had never been meant to hold a candelabra, though. Someone had left these here carelessly.

“What iss it?” The Wolruf head asked.

Ariel flinched at the sound and looked at the head. “A candleholder of some kind, obviously.”

“Wrong again.”

One of the shelved walls glided away soundlessly. She stood where she was, eyeing the dark opening that appeared. An animal-no, a function robot, almost certainly-stepped into a space where light fell on it. It had Wolruf’s caninoid body and Ariel’s own face.

“If you’re standing on the surface of the planet Earth in Webster Groves, Missouri,” said the robot-Ariel, “which way is Robot City?”

She stared at it hopelessly. “I’m no navigator. Not without some kind of information to use, anyway.”

Robot-Ariel cocked her head, turned, and trotted away.

The wall of shelves slid back into place.

Ariel sank to the floor in a mixture of relief and despair. She couldn’t just go on wandering aimlessly in the real-life manifestation of one man’s insanity. If this place offered a way out, she could figure it out. If it didn’t, she might as well stay in this room instead of going forward into some dungeon cell or something worse.

As before, her knowledge of Dr. Avery was the only source of clues she had, and she no longer had Jeff’s memories or Derec’s facility with robots to help. All right. Basically, what did she know?

She knew he was a genius, that he was paranoid, that he wanted to create a perfect society. But what did this crazy place have to do with order and rationality? What was it doing on Robot City?

Everything she knew about Robot City said that this place just didn’t belong here at all. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that every line of thought brought her back to that one conclusion. “That’s it,” she whispered to herself suddenly. “He’s gone over the edge. He’s even crazier than before.”

In the heart of a planet-wide city based on logic and efficiency, its creator had lost his mind.

She smiled at the irony. It wasn’t funny, exactly, but it was…funny. Somehow.

Exhaustion and fear made her giddy. She began to giggle. The more she thought about this-about all their discussions of the Laws of Robotics and all their convoluted efforts to reason with the positronic brains of the robots-and how it had led to this……She really began to laugh. She fell onto the floor on her back, laughing in the little room by herself.

The wall of shelves slid open again, apparently triggered by the sound of her laughter.

Suddenly on guard again, she sat up and looked around. The function robot with her face was back.

“If you’re standing on the surface of the planet Earth in Webster Groves, Missouri,” said the robot-Ariel again, “which way is Robot City?”

Ariel giggled again. “Up, of course.” She laughed-and the floor gave way beneath her.

She was in one more chute, twisting in a tight downward spiral. Just as it began to level off, the dark space ahead of her irised open into light. She spilled out onto a polished hardwood floor.

Shaken by the ride, she lay still for a moment gazing at a very high beamed ceiling that was nearly lost in shadows. She turned her head to the side and found walls of gray stone, precisely chiseled and fit again in the modular shape of the Key to Perihelion. The room was huge, stretching meters on each side of her.

She raised onto her elbow, still getting her bearings. The end of a large, intricately carved table was in front of her. Its legs and feet were sculpted in the shape of some furry, clawed animal she did not recognize. It was made of a dark, deeply polished wood.

Struggling to rise, she reached up and grabbed the edge of the table. She pulled herself up to lean on it and then froze in surprise. At the far end of the table, many meters away, a man sat in a high, straight-backed chair with a gigantic fire blazing behind him in a stone fireplace twice her height.

“Welcome, Ariel. I am Dr. Avery.”

She stared at him with nothing to say. After all the effort to find him, landing here like this was so unexpected that she hadn’t formed any plan of attack, any arguments to use with him. She wasn’t ready to talk to him.

“You are welcome to warm yourself by the fire,” said her host.

She was willing to stay chilly to keep away from him, but she wanted to stall a little if she could, without getting too close. Slowly, she moved around the corner of the table and began to walk down the side of it. Dr. Avery seemed relaxed, even unconcerned, as he fingered some small object in front of him on the table.

The long, narrow table had all kinds of articles on it: flowers, dishes, trinkets, small sculptures. She didn’t dare take the time to look. Her eyes remained on Dr. Avery.

He was short. looking especially so in the high-backed chair. His build was stocky. Wavy white hair framed his face, which was also adorned with a bushy mustache. He looked friendly and benign.

His coat was too big, as she remembered from the other times she had seen him, and he still wore a white shirt with a ruffled collar.

He didn’t look crazy.

Ariel stopped a good four meters away, still watching him. What was a crazy man supposed to look like?

“I was not expecting visitors, Ariel,” said Dr. Avery. He was still studying the object in front of him. “Though I had warning that oddities, shall we say, were occurring in this vicinity.”

He didn’t sound crazy, either.

“Ariel, you don’t remember me, do you?” His gaze remained on the table.

“Yes,” she said timidly.

“No, not really. You remember me after the performance of Hamlet and when the Hunter robots located all of you in the passageways beneath the city and you remember me from when they brought you to me. That’s all.”

“That’s when we met.”

He smiled and picked up the little object. “Automatic alarms were triggered tonight. A couple of them, in fact. When a man who enjoys his privacy feels it may be disturbed, he likes to have alarms installed. Did you trigger them, Ariel?”

She watched him silently, surprised by his changing subjects so quickly.

“A humanoid robot mysteriously shut down completely just a short distance from here. Then a shift in the soil was reported. Did you do those, Ariel?”

“Kind of. I guess.”

“You guess. I guess, too. Violations of the provisional Laws of Humanics? Perhaps. I haven’t yet investigated the details. But how did you enter my abode?”

Derec was lying helpless along her route. She didn’t dare answer that question.

“One of the few weaknesses in my security here is in my emergency ventilation system. It opens when unexplained malfunctions occur in this valley.” He sighed. “I could have had the robots make it entry-proof, but it happens to represent my escape routes, as well. If no one could get in that way, then I couldn’t get out that way, could I?”

“What do you want?” she demanded, hoping to get him off that subject. “What is all this about, anyway?”

“Of course, I do have a maze that one must negotiate. It acts as a buffer zone. Perhaps you managed that.”

She was shaking with tension, unable to get a handle on a conversation that kept jumping topics.

“By the way, I’ve misplaced a couple of items. Have you seen them? One is an antique menorah crafted in the ancient Earth empire of the czars. The other is a Ming Dynasty bowl.”

She stared at him, vaguely remembering a fancy bowl.

“You really don’t remember me, do you, Ariel?”

“Why do you keep saying that?”

“You have new memories now, clearly. You are not the Ariel I last saw. You are again the real Ariel, if you only knew it. A few more accurate memories will trigger the rest, I believe.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your memories now are accurate. It is the real you. The one you thought was you…no. You never knew a Spacer who contaminated you. You never had a disease. You will, I sadly suppose, recall the name…David Avery.” For the first time, then, he looked up and met her eyes.

David Avery. David. Derec…?

Suddenly memories did come flooding back. “David! Derec is David! And you hated me!”

“Oh, now, now. What I attempted with you failed. Bygones are bygones, eh?”

“You…what have you done?” She was horrified, yet fascinated. Finally, after such a long time, the mysteries were being answered. “Oh, no. Wait a minute. Is Derec really David…or what about the corpse? Was that David? Did you kill him?” She was nearly hysterical, partly from the shock of understanding.

“No, no, of course not.” He waved a hand in dismissal. “The corpse, as you call it, was merely a synthetic physical imitation of David. A good one, of course, that used genuine human blood. I used him in a dry-run test of David’s encounter with Robot City.”

Ariel, still quivering with tension but now composed again, leaned against the table for support. “So you planted memory chemfets and disease in me a long time ago to give me a false memory. Memories of events that never existed to replace my memories of real life. And…Derec is David.”

“And you were his lover. Oh, by the way, didn’t you ever wonder what happened to the corpse? The cleaning robots recognized it as nothing more than waste material and hauled it away.”

“You destroyed my memory,” she said again, slowly. “And his. The amnemonic plague was artificial, created by chemfets. It was you. To separate David and me. You must have given him his amnesia for the same reason.”

“I always knew you had intelligence. My son’s taste was always exceptional.”

“And ever since my memory returned on Earth, I withheld telling Derec the truth because I was afraid these memories might not be correct. All this time, I could have put his mind at ease if I had only trusted my memories.”

“A compliment. Consider my actions a compliment. Breaking your hold on my son’s will required extreme measures. Judge it as the extent to which he cares about you.” He leaned back in his chair, holding the little item he had been playing with. “Cared, I should say. He doesn’t remember even now, of course…but he does seem to have formed an affection for you allover again, seen by the way you two have remained a team.”

“You practically destroyed two people just to keep them apart.” Her anger was mixed with sheer astonishment.

“Ah, no. Sorry. You are not so important as you think. My other motive was to test my son’s resourcefulness. You see, if he succeeded in manipulating and controlling Robot City, then he was truly worthy of my final plan for him.”

“Final plan…? Do you mean to say,” she said slowly, “that you wiped his memory and placed him on that asteroid as a test?”

“It is what I mean to say and what I have said.” He sat up and for the first time his face reflected enthusiasm. “You see, Robot City has been finished. Now each of the humanoid robots here has had implanted in his body…one or two duplicate Keys to Perihelion. Even now, they are marching to predetermined sites around this planet from which they will launch themselves to different galaxies. In each galaxy, they will begin replication of themselves and construction of more Robot Cities. And David, my son who has now earned the right to act as my son, will control each and every robot in every Robot City…making him the most powerful man in the universe!”

“He what? How?”

“The chemfets, my dear. The memory chemfets in his body. You see, a tiny Robot City is growing inside him…and when it matures, his mere thoughts will control every Avery robot in the universe.”

“Oh, no…you are insane. You don’t know what’s happened to him!”

“Of course I do. The chemfets develop slowly and cause certain physical disabilities. I know that. They behave like a disease and can even cause the formation of antibodies in the bloodstream.”

“You’re murdering him! He’s almost dead now!”

“Oh, nonsense. The chemfets didn’t kill you, did they? I wouldn’t kill him, would I? After all this? Why would I throw away all this effort?”

“But you’re wrong! Your chemfets for me were much simpler. He’s dying!”

“Where is he?”

She paused, suddenly realizing the dilemma that Derec and she had never solved. They could not force Dr. Avery to cooperate. He had to be convinced.

“The central computer is calling. For several moments now, I have ignored a little light on my table here. I have done so because I know what it signifies, I believe. Excuse me, will you?”

Ariel stared at him, amazed at his composure and his refusal to believe her.

A small section of the table in front of Dr. Avery swiveled to reveal a computer console on what had been the underside of the table. “Would you like to hear?” He pushed a button. “I’ll set it on voice, which I usually find intrusive. Report,” he said into the console.

“HUNTERS REPORT APPREHENSION OF HUMAN NAMED DEREC.”

“Thought so,” said Dr. Avery pleasantly. “Report status of Hunter project.”

“THE FOLLOWING HAVE BEEN APPREHENDED AND ARE HELD ON THE NORTH SLOPE OF THE VALLEY: DEREC, JEFF LEONG, MANDELBROT, WOLRUF. STILL MISSING: ARIEL WELSH.”

Dr. Avery laughed casually. “Now, who would have thought I could outperform my own team of Hunter robots?”

Ariel’s heart was pounding with tension. If Derec was already in Avery’s control, very little risk was left. “Dr. Avery. Will you agree to a test?”

“Eh? What kind of test? Haven’t we had enough testing around here for a while?”

“Have the robots check David and see if he is in danger from the chemfets. They’ll tell you.”

“A party,” said Dr. Avery. “An excellent idea. I’ll have the Hunters bring everyone. We’ll have a party.” He tossed the object in his hand over his shoulder into the fire.

Ariel saw it clearly for the first time. It was a small model of a humanoid robot.