Refuge iarc-5

by Rob Chilson

  That wonderful flexible arm came into view, Mandelbrot twisted the return valve, and in a moment there was the faint murmur of a small pump. Water, too, was moving through the pipes by now.

  The radiator and vacuum distillation sections of the water-purification-and-cooling system was in operation. They had settled down for a long stay in space.

  Should have done this days ago,Derec thought but didn’t say aloud. An optimist, he had hoped a ship would have come by before now. Ariel, who tended to be pessimistic, had doubted.

  “I’m coming back by way of the sun side,” he said. “The light’s better.”

  Ariel didn’t answer. A punch on a button made his safety line release itself and reel in from the forward airlock. He reattached it to a ring near the hatch; the robot mimicked his movements. Feeling better about standing upright on the hull, Derec strode slowly and carefully around the rather narrow cylinder until the tiny red lamp of their current “sun” came into view, then on around until it was overhead.

  A class M dwarf, the red star was no doubt very old. It was certainly very small and it had no real planets. Its biggest daughter was an ancient lump of rock barely four hundred kilometers in diameter, its next biggest less than half that in size. Most of its daughters were fragments that ranged from respectable mountains down to fists-and there weren’t many of any size. A star that old was formed at a time when the nebulas in the galaxy had only begun to be enriched with heavy elements. This was not a metalliferous star; no prospector had ever bothered to check out those lumps of rock for anything of value; none ever would.

  Dim and worthless though it was, the star lit the way… somewhat. Under its light, the silvery hull looked like burnished copper-a pleasing sight. Shadows still were sharp-edged, his own shadow an odd-shaped, moving hole, it seemed, in the hull, a hole into some strange and other-dimensional universe.

  Mandelbrot followed him gracefully.

  “Detection alert,” said Ariel, sounding bored. “Rock coming our way. Looks like it might be about a mouthful, if you were hungry for rocks.”

  “I’m not,” said Derec, but it made him think of baked potatoes. He was getting hungry.

  Had there been any danger, Ariel would have said so; Derec assumed that the rock would miss them by a wide margin. They were well out from the star, sparsely populated though its space was with junk. This was only the second thing they’d detected in two days, and the first was merely a grain of sand. Probably both objects were “dirty ice”-the stuff of comets.

  Danger or no, Mandelbrot moved closer to him, scanning the sky without pausing. Derec didn’t notice, and didn’t bother to look for the rock. The sun drew his eye instead. At this distance, dim as it was and weak in ultraviolet light, it could be looked at directly.

  Pitiful excuse though it was for a star, poor as its family was, still it made an island of light in a vast sea of darkness where stars hard and unwinking as diamonds cut at him with their stares. He thought of the space around the red star as a room, a warmly lit room in an immensity of cold and darkness.

  After the circumscribed life of Robot City, he felt free. Space, Derec thought, is mankind’s natural home.

  There came a bark from inside the vessel, and he was reminded with a sudden chill that others than men used space. One of those others was within this ship: Wolruf, the doglike alien with whom he’d made alliance on Aranimas’s ship. She had escaped first from Aranimas with him, then from the hospital station, then from Robot City.

  Things had been worse for them in the past, he thought. If they had to wait here for a week or two…

  Then he thought: I’mworried about Ariel, though.

  He moved forward, found the airlock, and crowded in to make room for the bulky robot.

  Frost condensed on his armor as soon as he entered the ship, but Derec ignored that, knowing that it wasn’t too cold to touch yet; they’d only been out for minutes. It seemed even more cramped inside after having been out…

  “We should spend more time outside,” he said. “It’s not exactly fresh air, but at least there’s a feeling of freedom.”

  Ariel looked momentarily interested, then shrugged. “I’m all right. “

  Mandelbrot looked keenly,at her, pausing in his ridiculous motion of scraping frost off his eyes, but said nothing. He had said nothing to Derec yet, but Derec knew that he was worried, too. Ariel had a serious disease. A fatal disease, she had said; It had caused her occasional pain before this, stabbing muscular aches, and she frequently seemed feverish and headachey and generally out of it; sometimes she even had hallucinations. But this prolonged gloom was new, and worrisome.

  “So there’s water for showerr, yess?” said Wolruf. She was the size of a large dog and not infrequently went on all fours, but usually walked upright, for her front paws were clumsy-seeming hands, ill-shaped by human standards but clever with tools.

  “Give it half an hour,” Derec said. The furry alien needed showers daily in a ship where there was no escape from each other.

  “Derec, shall I prepare food?” Mandelbrot asked. “It approaches the usual hour for your meals.”

  Ariel roused herself, said, “I’ll do that, Mandelbrot. What do you want, Derec, Wolruf?”

  There were no potatoes ready. Of course he did not expect to find real food in a spaceship, and it took time for the synthesizer to prepare a specialty item. “Stew would be fine. Keep varying the mix and it’ll be a long time before I get bored with it.”

  “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 hu
man 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.

  “Do ‘ou have-’ou know-things to measure them with?”

  Derec had seen a toolbox on the ship’s schematic that he had accessed before going out to set up the recycling system…There might be.”

  There was. A few minutes later, with Ariel listless at the detectors and Wolruf at the communicator, Derec carefully strode forward outside, followed by Mandelbrot.

  The hyperwave antenna could have been put in any part of the ship, since the hyperatomo didn’t kowtow to the laws of space-time, but it would have had to have been well shielded lest its backlash in the small ship damage the instruments. or even the crew. So in these Star Seeker models it was in a blister on the bow, as far from everything as possible.

  The antenna looked like a series of odd-shaped chunks of metal and coils of wire, and the testing gear simply shot current through each element in turn. The readouts were within normal range, as nearly as he could tell from the manual he had accessed before coming out.

  “I don’t get it,” Derec complained, thinking of the classical definition of Hell: the place where all the instruments test out to be perfect, but none of them work. “How can I fix it if it isn’t broken?”

  “I think,” said Wolruf slowly, “that Dr. Avery hass retuned the antenna. “

  “Retuned?” Derec had never heard of such a thing, but knew little about the subject. “I thought all Spacer talk was in the same range. Is he trying to pick up-Settlers? Or what?”

  “Maybe Aranimass.”

  Maybe,Derec thought, chilled. Maybe, indeed. That long-armed pirate was definitely interested in Dr. Avery’s doings, though he might not know who or what Dr. Avery was.

  Derec stood, looking around the warm room generated by Kappa Whale, and shivered. For the first time the thought came to him: What if the first ship that showed up was Aranimas’s? He must be systematically searching the beacon stars -

  A touch on his arm nearly made Derec jump off the hull.

  Chapter 2. Perihelion

  The burnished, enigmatic face of Mandelbrot approached his. The robot gripped him with his normal left arm. His Avery-construct right arm bent impossibly, reached around Derec and switched off his communicator.

  Derec had had nightmares about that arm. It was a piece of scrap from an Avery robot, which Aranimas had had picked up from the ice asteroid where Derec had first awakene
d. “Build me a robot,” the alien had said. Derec had put pieces together to build the robot he called Alpha. It wasn’t a good job, but it worked.

  Then, weeks later, the crudely attached right arm seated itself firmly and made a few modifications in Alpha’s brain: Alpha informed them that he was now known as Mandelbrot. Derec had observed the fine structure of the arm: a series of tiny chips, or scales, that gripped each other and could therefore mold the arm to any shape that might be desired.

  Each unit was a sort of robotic cell; together, they were a brain. And having integrated themselves, they had-to a degree-taken over Alpha. Derec’s nightmare was that the cells were eating the robot out from the inside, that his interior was one solid mass of them, and he was about to become something -horrifying.

  Impossible; the cells couldn’t eat. Also, all the brains were robotic, Mandelbrot’s normal positronic brain and the units in the cells. The Three Laws compelled them all. But dreams are not logical.

  At the moment, the worst nightmare had come true, until Mandelbrot put his head against Derec’s helmet. It would have looked to an observer as if the robot were kissing his cheek: his microphone touched Derec’s helmet and Mandelbrot spoke.

  “Derec, I am worried about Ariel.”

  They had been careful to conceal from Mandelbrot the worst of Ariel’s condition. The robot knew only that she was sick, not that the disease was usually fatal. The effect on his positronic brain was more than they cared to risk; the First Law left no loophole for incurable diseases.

  “Ariel is bored, as well as ill,” Derec said.

  He looked away uneasily from the robot’s expressionless but intense face. The stars beckoned, promising and threatening; somewhere out there, perhaps, he might recover his memory. He remembered Jeff Leong, who had crashed on Robot City after an accident while on his way to college. In a few years, Derec would have been thinking about college, if this fantastic thing hadn’t happened to him.