The Night of the Storm
Dean R. Koontz
This is a twisted story about a man that must confront his past and gets a second chance by choosing the highway road he didn't take 20 years earlier. It will take him back to when he was 20 years old and will enter new people to help him along the way. He is able to rewind for a few minutes until he gets it right. It was a very short story. A bit too descriptive for me, I felt like the story dragged.
Dean R. Koontz
The Night of the Storm
He was a robot more than a hundred years old, built by other robots nearly eight centuries after the end of human civilization. His name was Suranov, and as was the custom of his kind, he roamed the earth in search of interesting things to do. Suranov had climbed the highest mountains in the world, with the aid of special body attachments (spikes in his metal feet, tiny but strong hooks on the ends of his twelve fingers, an emergency grappling rope coiled inside his chest-area storage compartment and ready for a swift ejection if he should fall); his small, anti-grav flight motors were removed to make this climb as dangerous and, therefore, as interesting as possible. Having submitted to heavy-duty component sealing procedures, Suranov once spent eighteen months underwater, exploring a large portion of the Pacific Ocean, until he was bored even by the mating of whales and by the ever-shifting beauty of the sea bottom. Suranov had crossed deserts, explored the arctic circle on foot, gone spelunking in countless different subterranean systems. He had been caught in a blizzard, in a major flood, in a hurricane, and in the middle of an earthquake that would have registered 10 on the Richter Scale, if the Richter Scale had still been in use. Once, specially insulated, he had descended halfway to the center of the earth, there to bask in pockets of glowing gases, between pools of molten stone, scalded by eruptions of magma, feeling nothing. Eventually, he grew weary of even this colorful spectacle, and he surfaced again. He wondered if, having lived only one of his two assigned centuries, he could last through another hundred years of such tedium.
Suranov’s private counselor, a robot named Bikermien, assured him that this boredom was only temporary and easily alleviated. If one were clever, Bikermien said, one could find limitless excitement as well as innumerable, valuable situations for serious data collection both about one’s environment and one’s mechanical aptitude and heritage. Bikermien, in the last half of his second century, had developed such an enormous and complex data vault that he was assigned stationary duty as a counselor, attached to a mother-computer and utterly immobile. By now, extremely adept at finding excitement even through second-hand experience, Bikermien did not mourn the loss of his mobility; he was, after all, a spiritual superior to the ordinary robot. Therefore, when Bikermien advised, Suranov listened, however skeptical he might be.
Suranov’s problem, according to Bikermien, was that he had started out in life, from the moment he’d left the factory, to pit himself against the greatest challenges — the wildest sea, the coldest cold, the highest temperatures, the greatest pressures — and now, having conquered these things, could see no interesting obstacles beyond them. Yet, the counselor said Suranov had overlooked some of the most fascinating explorations. The quality of any challenge was directly related to one’s ability to meet it; the less adequate one felt, the better the experience, the richer the contest and the handsomer the data reward.
Does this suggest anything to you? Bikermien inquired, without speaking, the telebeam open between them.
Nothing.
So Bikermien explained it:
Hand-to-hand combat with a full-grown, male ape might seem like an uninterestingly easy challenge, at first glance; a robot was the mental and physical superior of any ape. However, one could always modify oneself in order to even the odds of what might appear to be a sure thing. If a robot couldn’t fly, couldn’t see as well at night as in the daylight, couldn’t communicate except vocally, couldn’t run faster than an antelope, couldn’t hear a whisper at a thousand yards — in short, if all of his standard abilities were dulled, except for his thinking capacity, might not a robot find that a hand-to-hand battle with an ape was a supremely exciting event?
I see your point. Suranov admitted. To understand the grandeur of simple things, one must humble himself.
Exactly.
And so it was that, on the following day, Suranov boarded the express train going north to Rogale’s Province, where he was scheduled to do some hunting in the company of four other robots, all of whom had been stripped to their essentials.
Ordinarily, they would have flown under their own power; now, none of them had that ability.
Ordinarily, they would have used their telebeams for communication; now, they were forced to talk to one another in that curious, clicking language that had been especially designed for machines but which robots had been able to do without for more than six hundred years.
Ordinarily, the thought of going north to hunt deer and wolves would have bored them all to tears, if they had been able to cry; now, however, each of them felt a curious tingle of anticipation, as if this were a more important ordeal than any he had faced before.
* * *
A brisk, efficient robot named Janus met the group at the small stationhouse just outside of Walker’s Watch, toward the northernmost corner of the Province. To Suranov, it was clear that Janus had spent several months in this uneventful duty assignment, and that he might be near the end of his obligatory two years’ service to the Central Agency. He was actually too brisk and efficient. He spoke rapidly, and he behaved, altogether, as if he must keep moving and doing in order not to have time to contemplate the uneventful and unexciting days that he had spent in Walker’s Watch. He was the kind of robot too eager for excitement; one day, he would tackle a challenge that he had not been, by degrees, prepared for, and he would end himself.
Suranov looked at Tuttle, another robot who, on the train north, had begun an interesting, if silly, argument about the development of the robot’s personality. He had contended that, until quite recently, in terms of millenia and centuries, robots had not had individual personalities. Each, Tuttle claimed, was quite like the other, cold and sterile, with no private dreams. A patently ridiculous theory. Tuttle had been unable to explain how this could have been, but he refused to back down from his position. Watching Janus chatter at them in a nervous staccato, Suranov was incapable of envisioning an era when the Central Agency would have dispatched mindless robots from the factories. The whole purpose of life was to explore, to store data collected from an individual viewpoint, even if it were repetitive. How could mindless robots ever function in the necessary manner?
As Steffan, another of their group, had said, such theories were on a par with belief in Second Awareness. (Some believed, without evidence, that the Central Agency occasionally made a mistake and, when a robot’s alloted lifespan was up, only partially erased his accumulated memory before refitting him and sending him out of the factory again. These robots, the superstitious claimed, had an advantage and were among those who matured fast enough to be elevated to duty as counselors and, sometimes, even to service in the Central Agency itself.)
Tuttle was angered to hear his views lumped with all sorts of wild tales. To egg him on, Steffan also suggested that Tuttle believed in that ultimate of hobgoblins, the ‘human being.’ At this, disgusted, Tuttle settled into a grumpy silence, while the other enjoyed the jest.
‘And now,’ Janus said, calling Suranov back from his reverie, ‘I’ll issue your supplies and see you on your way.’
Suranov, Tuttle, Steffan, Leeke, and Skowski crowded forward, eager to begin the adventure.
Each of the five were given: binoculars of rather antique design, a pair of snowshoes that clipped
and bolted to their feet, a survival pack of tools and greases with which to repair themselves in the event of some unforeseen emergency, an electric hand-torch, maps, and a drug rifle complete with an extra clip of one thousand darts.
‘This is all, then?’ Leeke asked. He had seen as much danger as Suranov, perhaps even more, but now he sounded frightened.
‘What else would you need?’ Janus asked impatiently.
Leeke said, ‘Well, as you know, certain modifications have been made on us. For one thing, our eyes aren’t what they were, and — ’
‘You’ve a torch for darkness,’ Janus said.
‘And then, our ears Leeke began.
‘Listen cautiously, walk quietly,’ Janus suggested.
‘We’ve had a power reduction to our legs,’ Leeke said. ‘If we should have to run — ’
‘Be stealthy; creep upon your game before they know you’re there, and you’ll not need to chase them.’
‘But,’ Leeke persisted, ‘weakened as we are, if we should have to run from something — ’
‘You’re only after deer and wolves,’ Janus reminded him. ‘The deer will not give chase — and a wolf hasn’t any taste for steel flesh.’
Skowski, who had thus far been exceptionally quiet, not even joining the good natured roasting the others had given Tuttle on the train, now stepped forward. He said, ‘I’ve read that this part of Rogale’s Province has an unusual number of — unexplained reports.’
‘Reports of what?’ Janus asked.
Skowski swept the others with his yellow visual receptors, then looked back at Janus. ‘Well — reports of footprints similar to our own but not those of any robot, and reports of robotlike forms seen in the woods-’
‘Oh,’ Janus said, waving a glittering hand as if to brush away Skowski’s suggestion like a fluff of dust, ‘we get a dozen reports each month about “human beings” sighted in the wilder regions northwest of here.’
‘Where we’re going?’ Suranov asked.
‘Yes,’ Janus said. ‘But I wouldn’t worry. In every case, those who make the reports are robots like yourselves: they’ve had their perceptions decreased in order to make the hunt a greater challenge for them. Undoubtedly, what they’ve seen has a quite normal explanation. If they had seen these things with the full range of their perceptions, they would not have come back with these crazy tales.’
‘Does anyone besides stripped down robots go there?’ Skowski asked.
‘No,’ Janus said.
Skowski shook his head. ‘This isn’t anything at all like I thought it would be. I feel so weak, so…’ He dropped his supplies at his feet. ‘I don’t believe I want to continue with this,’ he said.
The others were surprised.
‘Afraid of goblins?’ Steffan asked. He was the teaser in the group.
‘No,’ Skowski said. ‘But I don’t like being a cripple, no matter how much excitement it adds to the adventure.’
‘Very well,’ Janus said. ‘There will be only four of you, then.’
Leeke said, ‘Don’t we get any weapons besides the drug rifle?’
‘You’ll need nothing else,’ Janus said.
Leeke’s query had been a strange one, Suranov thought. The prime directive in every robot’s personality, when he left the factory, forbade the taking of life which could not be restored. Yet, Suranov had sympathized with Leeke, shared Leeke’s foreboding. He supposed that, with a crippling of their perceptions, there was an inevitable clouding of the thought processes as well, for nothing else explained their intense and irrational fear.
‘Now,’ Janus said, ‘the only thing you’ll need to know is that a natural storm is predicted for the northern Rogale area early tomorrow night. By then you should be to the lodge which will serve as your base of operations, and the snow will pose no trouble. Questions?’
They had none they cared to ask.
‘Good luck to the four of you, then,’ Janus said. ‘And may many weeks pass before you lose interest in the challenge.’ That was a traditional send-off, yet Janus appeared to mean it. He would, Suranov guessed, prefer to be hunting deer and wolves under decreased perceptions rather than to continue clerking at the stationhouse in Walker’s Watch.
They thanked him, consulted their maps, left the station-house and were finally on their way.
Skowski watched them go and, when they looked back at him, waved one shiny arm in a stiff-fingered salute.
* * *
They walked all that day, through the evening and on into the long night, not requiring rest. Though the power supply to their legs had been cut back and an effective governor put on their walking speed, they did not grow weary. They could sense their lessened abilities, but they could not grow tired. Even when the drifts were deep enough for them to break out their wire-webbed snowshoes and bolt those in place, they maintained a steady pace.
Passing across broad plains where the snow was swept into eerie peaks and twisting configurations, walking beneath the dense roof of crossed pine boughs in the virgin forests, Suranov felt a twinge of anticipation which had been missing from his exploits for some years now. Because his perceptions were so much less acute than usual, he sensed danger in every shadow, imagined obstacles and complications around every turn. It was positively exhilarating to be here.
Before dawn, a light snow began to fall, clinging to their cold, steel skin. Two hours later, by the day’s first light, they crested a small ridge and looked out across an expanse of pine woods to the lodge where it rested on the other side of a shallow valley. The place was made of a burnished, bluish metal, with oval windows, very straight-walled and functional.
‘We’ll be able to get some hunting in today,’ Steffan said.
‘Let’s go,’ Tuttle said.
Single file, they went down into the valley, crossed it and came out almost at the doorstep of the lodge.
* * *
Suranov pulled the trigger.
The magnificent buck, decorated with a twelve-point rack of antlers, reared up onto its hind legs, pawing at the air, breathing steam.
‘A hit!’ Leeke cried.
Suranov fired again.
The buck went down onto all four legs.
The other deer, behind it in the woods, turned and galloped away, back along the well-trampled trail.
The buck shook its huge head, staggered forward as if to follow its companions, stopped abruptly, then settled slowly onto its haunches and, after one last valiant effort to regain its footing, fell sideways into the snow.
‘Congratulations!’ Steffan said.
The four robots rose from the drift where they’d fallen when the deer had come into sight, and they crossed the small, open field to the sleeping buck.
Suranov bent and felt the creature’s sedated heartbeat, watched its grainy, black nostrils quiver as it took a shallow breath.
Tuttle, Steffan, and Leeke crowded in, hunkering about the creature, touching it, marveling at the perfect musculature, the powerful shoulders and the hard-packed thighs. They agreed that bringing down such a brute, when one’s senses were drastically damped, was indeed a challenge. Then, one by one, they got up and walked away, leaving Suranov alone to more fully appreciate his triumph and to carefully collect his own emotional reactions to the event in the micro-tapes of his data vault.
Suranov was nearly finished with his evaluation of the challenge and of the resultant confrontation, and the buck was beginning to regain its senses, when Tuttle cried out as if his systems had been accidentally overloaded.
‘Here! Look here!’
Tuttle stood, Suranov saw, two hundred yards away, near the dark trees, waving his arms. Steffan and Leeke were already moving toward him.
At Suranov’s feet, the buck snorted and tried to stand, failed to manage that yet, blinked its gummed eyelids. With little or nothing more to record in his data vault, Suranov rose and left the beast, walked toward his three companions.
‘What is it?’ he asked when he arrived.
>
The stared at him with glowing amber visual receptors which seemed especially bright in the gray light of late afternoon.
‘There,’ Tuttle said, pointing at the ground before them.
‘Footprints,’ Suranov said.
Leeke said, ‘They don’t belong to any of us.’
‘So?’ Suranov asked.
‘And they’re not robot prints,’ Tuttle said.
‘Of course they are.’
Tuttle said, ‘Look closer.’
Suranov bent down and realized that his eyes, with half their power gone, had at first deceived him in the weak light. These weren’t robot prints in anything but shape. A robot’s feet were cross-hatched with rubber tread; these prints showed none of that. A robot’s feet were bottomed with two holes that acted as vents for the anti-grav system when the unit was in flight; these prints showed no holes.
Suranov said, ‘I didn’t know there were any apes in the north.’
‘There aren’t,’ Tuttle said.
‘Then — ’
‘These,’ Tuttle said, ‘are the prints — of a man.’
‘Preposterous!’ Steffan said.
‘How else do you explain them?’ Tuttle asked. He didn’t sound happy with his explanation, but he was prepared to stick with it until someone offered something more acceptable.
‘A hoax,’ Steffan said.
‘Perpetrated by whom?’ Tuttle asked.
‘One of us.’
They looked at each other, as if the guilt would be evident in their identical, bland metal faces. Then Leeke said, ‘That’s no good. We’ve been together. These tracks were made recently, or they’d be covered over with snow; none of us has had a chance, all afternoon, to sneak off and form them.’
‘I still say it’s a hoax,’ Steffan insisted. ‘Perhaps someone was sent out by the Central Agency to leave these for us to find.’
‘Why would Central bother?’ Tuttle asked.
‘Maybe it’s part of our therapy,’ Steffan said. ‘Maybe this is to sharpen the challenge for us, add excitement to the hunt.’ He gestured vaguely at the prints, as if he hoped they’d vanish. ‘Maybe Central does this for everyone who’s been sated, to restore the sense of wonder that — ’
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