Intruder

Chapter 7. No Averys Need Apply

“You were in that corner all this time?” Ariel asked.

Avery looked smug as he responded, “Since long before you violated my privacy by coming into the room. I’ve been -”

Derec suddenly screamed, “Damn you!” He vaulted out of his chair and lunged at Dr. Avery, grabbing him by the throat and shoving him against the nearest wall. The doctor’s eyes remained calm, as if the way he looked when he was being murdered was the same as when he delivered a sarcastic comment.

“Derec!” Ariel shouted. “Stop! Right this minute!”

She pulled hard at his arm, breaking his grip, then she interposed her body between him and Dr. Avery. With a forceful backhand, she hit Derec on the side of his face. Derec’s eyes looked momentarily dazed. Gently she began walking, edging him back toward the computer terminal.

“Now why in the name of the fifty Spacer planets did you do that?” she said.

Derec sat down again. His fingertips brushed along a row of letters on the keyboard. “I’m sorry, Ariel.”

“How about me?” Avery said, his voice a bit shaky as he tentatively touched his throat. “I think you should apologize to me.”

“No! That I won’t do! You spied on us.”

“I wouldn’t call it spying, son. I was here first, remember? Meditating in the darkness. You intruded on me. I just wasn’t ready to announce it.”

“He’s right, Derec,” Ariel said. “His spying’s not important enough for an attempted murder.”

“I wouldn’t have killed him. You know that.” Ariel was bothered by the fact that she really didn’t know whether or not Derec could commit patricide. “I just wanted to hurt him.”

“Well, you at least succeeded in that purpose, young man,” Avery said. Now he was tugging at the cuff of his sleeve with one hand, smoothing out the cloth of his laboratory smock with the other. “You do not seem to be accomplishing much elsewhere, however. No wonder you were reduced to tears.”

Derec made a small furious sound in his throat, but restrained himself from jumping up again. Instead, he said quietly, in a level voice, “What it was, Ariel, he saw me cry. I didn’t want him to see that, that’s all. Not him! Childish of me, I guess. I’m sorry.”

Ariel hugged him. “You are childish, darling. And it’s all right to cry. No matter who sees it.”

“Not if it’s him.” He rubbed at his eyes with the back of his right hand, trying to wipe away any remaining evidence of his tears. “He has no right to judge me.”

“I’ve always judged you. I am your father. I’m supposed to.”

“He may be lying about being my father. How do we know?”

“You’ve inherited my bad temper, son. Isn’t that proof enough for you? And why won’t you address me directly?”

Derec refused to reply. He sat silently, staring at the computer screen’s last message, a bit of gobbledygook about invalid parameters.

Avery, smoothing down his white wavy hair, then pressing down his mustache, walked forward. Ariel noticed that his eyes glowed. He had always seemed crackbrained in his words and deeds; now she saw it in his eyes. Derec whirled around in his chair and faced the scientist. A strange smile came slowly over Avery’s face.

“We have a problem,” he said.

“We have many problems,” Derec said. “Which one are you referring to?”

Avery waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “Not the ones between you and me, son. They are trivial. I will win you over in time. No, I mean the city. My city. Your city, too. Almost all normal functioning has stopped, as you’ve seen.”

“And you have nothing to do with it?”

Avery shook his head no. “I understand why you suspect me. I might suspect myself. But I was away on a different project, conducting a different set of experiments at another robot city. I used a Key to Perihelion to return here yesterday, and my arrival has so far been undetected. That’s no surprise, considering the way things have fallen apart here.”

“What’s the cause of it?” Derec asked.

“I can’t find out. The changes didn’t occur by themselves, I’m sure of that. Someone is behind them. But I haven’t a clue whom. For a while I thought it might be you, fooling around with your domain here, trying out your wings. But I realize now it wasn’t.”

“Why do you think it’s someone?” Ariel asked. “Couldn’t it be a flaw in the works, something you overlooked that’s making the city decay?”

A flash of furious anger came briefly into the doctor’s eyes then receded as he stared at his questioner.

“No, the city cannot decay,” he said. “It could choke itself to death with overproduction, as it was doing the very first time you two arrived here. It could come close to social ruin, as it nearly did when the artist Lucius created his “Circuit Breaker” sculpture. But the mechanisms themselves cannot fail, and neither can the robots. However, essentially I agree with your insight. There is decadence here. Not originating in the system but from an outside source. We must find the source.”

“Stop saying we,” Derec said angrily. “You do what you want to, but I won’t work with you. Until I find out otherwise, you are my chief suspect for the state of the city.”

Again the doctor smiled, and again it was a strange smile, corning over his face as if it were released by a spring mechanism. “We must work on your logic circuits, son. Why would I try to ruin Robot City, the city I created myself, then peopled with my own robots? Destroying this city would be, for me, like destroying myself.”

“Excuse me, sir,” Ariel said, “but your previous behavior doesn’t entirely eliminate the chance you might, in a fit or tantrum, decide to get rid of your own creation. I’m sorry, but I have to agree with Derec on this.”

She moved to Derec, placed her hand casually on his shoulder.

“Well, don’t the two of you make a pretty pair?” Avery said. “Like dull-eyed pioneers in a tintype. All the imperfections of humanity stiffly posed on a chemically treated plate. I suppose I’d hoped for more from you two, but one thing I’ve learned: Humans may fail you but robots are forever.”

Ariel laughed. “That’s diamonds are forever, I believe.”

“My robots will endure beyond the cheap glitter of geological accidents.”

Derec started to stand up, but Ariel’s gentle pressure on his shoulder kept him seated. “Doctor,” she said, “I admire florid language as much as the next gal, but what in Frost’s name do you mean?”

Avery’s eyes squinted and his head tilted slightly, as if he could not comprehend how he could be misunderstood. “My dear, a robot is, although manmade, the finest stage of humanity, the ideal toward which you puny, disease-prone, uncertain beings should aspire. Instead, you don’t even respect them. You order them about, treat them as servants.”

“Not true,” Ariel said. “We do respect them. Most of us.”

“But not all,” Avery said smugly.

“At any rate, they were created as servants,” Derec said, “adjuncts to human laborers in industry, maids in private homes.”

“Yes, they were enslaved at first. But I have liberated them. I have created communities for them where they can exist without the continual interference of the human race, cities more magnificent than the overcrowded hovels of Earth and the brutally isolated homes of Aurora. I’ve-”

.”Wait, wait,” Ariel said. “With due respect, sir, these robot cities are designed as relatively perfect environments for humans-to-come. Yet, you say they’re really for the robots?”

“Very good, Ariel. You catch on quickly. I’ve had to tell my robots that they were building for humans. The Laws of Robotics demand that. They must at least think they are here to protect humans, to follow orders from humans. Rarely, however, do they ever encounter humans. That doesn’t seem to make any difference to them, so long as they think there will be humans eventually.”

“But you’ve never intended to, say, import colonies to live here?”

“Originally I did. But I’ve changed my mind. I say, Robot City for robots. Why contaminate them with hordes of humans spreading their weak-minded mores and indifferent customs? Don’t you see, Ariel, it would be wrong for the superior beings to continue to serve the lesser? That’s why I am a liberator. The robot is the next level of existence. Humans can die out, while robots will endure.”

Ariel realized that she had been holding her breath as she listened to the doctor’s shouted diatribe. She turned to Derec and whispered, “He is mad.”

“I heard that, young lady. And of course you’d perceive me that way, with your limited perception. I’d expect no more. But your antagonism only stimulates my positronic pathways.”

“Your what?”

“Positronic pathways. You see, I have not only created the Avery robots in my own image, but I have recreated myself, casting away my humanity and transforming myself into a robot also.”

“Ba-nanas,” Ariel muttered.

Avery merely smiled. Now she could see it as a definitely robotic smile, even though she believed none of his story.

“I knew you wouldn’t believe,” Avery said.

“Are you trying to say, oh, that you’ve implanted a robot brain into your head? Is that what the positronic pathways guff is all about?”

“I see that you’re patronizing me, so I think we can terminate this discussion.”

For a moment Ariel wondered if this figure, identical to the Dr. Avery she had met before, might indeed be a robotic recreation. Then he swept by her, and his easily detectable body odor told her that he was still at least partly human.

After Avery slammed the door behind him, Ariel commented, “The man needs help.”

“So do we,” Derec said. His fingers flew across the keyboard again. Some data came up on the terminal’s screen. “Look at this, Ariel.”

All she saw was a bunch of figures. “What does it mean?”

“This is a report of construction activity in Robot City. The earlier figures represent the city’s normal rate of new building. But lately the figures have gradually fallen off, with fewer and fewer buildings being created. Since before we arrived, there have, in fact, been no new buildings created. All construction in Robot City has stopped.”

“Funny,” Ariel commented.

“What’s funny about it?”

“This tends to support your father’s story.”

“How does it do that?”

“Well, remember what he said about robots being the supreme whatever and all that, plus the city being the safest haven for them? So why would he stop that? Why would he allow the robots themselves to become, as he said, decadent? This man isn’t going to be happy with listless Supervisors and robots who are tap dancers or movie buffs. After Lucius, he programmed creativity right out of his robots. No, for once Dr. Avery isn’t the chief troublemaker. It’s somebody else, it’s got to be.”

“Okay, granted. But what do we do now? I can’t get anything out of the computer, the robots are uncooperative, and the city’s becoming a play-village for someone whose identity we don’t know. What next, my pretty?”

“Well, I’ve got a swell idea if you don’t mind a little break in the action.”

“You’ve got-”

“This room comes furnished with a couch-bed, and there’s even a blanket on the end table there if you want privacy.”

“You flip off the lights, I’ll switch off the computer.”

“Why the computer?”

“I don’t know. I’ve a feeling it could spy on us.”

As they embraced in darkness, the real spy outside the door, still indoctrinated with the Laws of Robotics, knew they applied in some way to this situation, and so he discreetly retreated. After all, he thought, in the best movies he had seen, the camera always discreetly retreated from this sort of scene. As he rejoined Timestep outside the Compass Tower, Bogie decided that the shadowing assignment was a fortunate one. Keeping watch on the two young humans was a bit like watching a movie-in a way, better, since it took place in three dimensions.