Walt & Leigh Richmond

by Phoenix Ship

  Behind him he could hear light running footsteps, obviously not far behind, or he couldn't have distinguished them among the numbers of people about. He was just yards from a byway, but the runner was not many more yards behind.

  Abruptly, he turned into the byway. No sooner had he made the comer than he flattened his back against the wall of the shop he had rounded, hands loose and ready.

  As the figure came around the comer at top speed, he reached, reflexed, half caught her on the withdraw, and ended up supporting his quarry to keep her from falling.

  He was looking down into a pretty Oriental face, topped with mussed dark hair, flushed from running, and completely startled so that the mouth was still open in an "oh." She was wearing a gold belt over tunic and trousers.

  In spite of himself, Stan began to smile. "Every day in every way," he said happily, "the robots get prettier and prettier."

  The flush that mounted her cheeks this time was not from running. She pulled away from him in fury, then softened again.

  "You're Star Duster," she said breathlessly, "and you've got to trust me quick, because I can get you out of here. I'm Sandra Lang. Will you trust me?"

  "Yes," said Stan, surprising himself. He would rationalize later that he couldn't get out by himself; that trusting her was the best gamble available. There would be all sorts of reasons, but when it came right down to it, he trusted her because he trusted her. It was that simple.

  She nodded at him, but remained still, thinking. "They'll have all the strut-cars monitored, so we can't go by car," she said hesitantly. "Freight cars, too .. . Oh, I know."

  Back onto the mall she led him, down a ways, across the mall, into a foodstore. Through the store to the back through a door to the delivery area, looking in every direction, then breaking into a run to catch a man stopping over some newly unloaded vegetables on a platform.

  "Mr. Jim." She stopped beside him, panting. "Are you returning anything to the rim right now?"

  The face that turned up to hers was graying, lined, a bit grim, but the expression softened as he looked up. "What sort of trouble you in today, Sandra? I thought you'd outgrown hide and seek."

  "This one's for real, Mr. Jim," she said solemnly. "This is Star. We both need to get out to Gramps's, fast and inconspicuous like."

  "Those crates over there," he said, smiling at her fondly. "They're going back out to Rosie's. You get in them and m dial you to Katsu, then you tell him to dial them on to her. Hop in. How serious if you're caught?"

  "Plenty." She didn't amplify the statement, but her tone left no doubt.

  "Don't you get yourself mixed up in politics, Sandra," he told her severely as he opened two of the biggest crates for them to climb in. "It's not a game for sweet youngsters like you. A pretty face is no protection when it's power politics that's being played," he went on as he replaced the covers and checked the lashings to the strut-car, "and they're playing it rougher every day." Then, "Here you go," he ended, and Stan felt the strut-car begin to move as he lay curled in the dark in a crate on a freightcar near a pretty girl who was the granddaughter, obviously, of the man who had made him a robot. And perhaps Tm a fool, he told himself, but there was something inside that refused to believe the statement.

  Katsu Lang sat at the keyboard of the symphony master, taking out the tensions that had been building within him in thunderous, rolling tones of barbaric style, harnessed to an insistent violin concerto theme. The contrasting elements delighted him, and took his attention from the chase he knew to be going on, matching the demanding insistence of a violin rampant, he thought, to the overpowering brutality of a cadenced bass viol clawing at the understructure of the racing theme. The two musical forces were harmonized by a patterned form that included within itself the warring elements—and he found himself quite satisfied with the resultant dynamic stability.

  He had turned on the recorder, and he knew that the tensions had given him a body of music which, with a few months spent in organization and handling, could be made into a great work.

  Lifting his fingers from the keys, he leaned back in the maestro's great seat and flipped on the recording of what he had just played. It washed over him in rolls of movement and countermovement, and it almost drowned the tiny wrist receiver that told him that Sandra, at least, was back. And young Star Dustin must be with her, he decided, for if she had lost him she would not return until she found where he was taken and what could be done—and that would necessarily have required more time.

  Muting the recorder, he rose to meet his guests, approaching now through the apple orchard beyond the bays of the music stall. The grass carpeting beneath his feet felt resilient; the glow of late afternoon filled the air. He wondered idly if the Earth boy would recognize the programming which kept the light of the enclosure that was his home tuned to the Earth-light sequence for any time of day. Or the need for that programming: the changing colors within the atmosphere modulating a changing of b^dv reactions, preventing the hypnosis that is a single-light-frequency response.

  We have so much to learn of artificialized living, he thought; and, he added to himself, so much to learn of learning itself.

  The two coming through the orchard made a graceful contrast to the stubby-fingered grace of the trees themselves, now in full leaf with tiny apples budding.

  Paulsen was not with them. It had been some vears now since he had seen Paulsen—one of the hopefuls of the program that had turned out to be so flawed. Sandra was light and graceful beside the tall figure of the now grown young man that was Star Dustin. The young man's stride was easy, his head high, the hair a deep flame beneath the trees. He was graceless in contrast to Sandra, but his stride held a strength that was a grace of its own. How very like Trevor, Lang thought.

  He watched Stan's face as the young man stepped through the bay into the music stall; watched his slight catch of breath as he noticed that the grass over which he had been walking continued as carpeting of the stall; watched his glance as it went to the acoustically designed canopy.

  Then the boy's eyes met his own, and he felt the warmth of pleasure with which the Other responded; and, like a slap in the face, the fear and fury which shuttered it almost instantly afterward.

  He bowed his head in reaction to the mental blow, then managed to make the gesture into one of greeting.

  "Welcome, Stan Dustin, son of my late partner and very true friend," he said formally.

  "Son?" Stan's voice was startled, and there was hope behind it.

  "You are Trevor Dustin's son, Stan. The other was a fiction of convenience, and in the Belt such fictions are not necessary."

  "Then, if I am the son of your true friend, why did you let them make me into a robot?" The words seemed torn from Stan, but he looked straight into the older man's eyes as they poured forth.

  "Would I have made my own granddaughter into a robot? It was an unforeseen flaw in the program, Stan; and one that was enhanced and emphasized by those who killed the third partner and forced me out."

  Stan's face crumpled from the fierce anger it had held, and the hope and pleasure slowly returned to it. Holding the younger man's eyes with his own, Katsu Lang continued softly, "It is my hope that if you will work with me, as Sandra has, we can find the key to changing the responses."

  The work began next morning, work that was based on tests in a cubicle like the one in which Stan had spent so many hours for so many years on Earth; and he threw himself into the tests with a fierce, exultant hope that was overridden only by the need to eat and sleep.

  The tests went on for three days, but in the afternoon of the third day Katsu Lang came to call him from the cubicle into a small study, where Sandra served them tea.

  The older man waited until the tea was served and the three were relaxed in deep pneumochairs. Then he said slowly:

  "Stan, you are not a robot You do not show any of the robotic reactions."

  The sentence hung there between them for a long minute, while Stan looked at him, tr
ying to stifle the hope that flooded him, hope that would surely be dashed. . . .

  "I do not understand, sir. I was trained, with the others. I saw Paulsen's reaction...."

  "Nor do I understand, Stan. But I have given you every test of which I can think. I have used every hypnotic command I know that has been trained into those who attended either the Earth school or the one in the Belt.

  "Then, in case I had not known the ones to which you might be keyed, I have tested your reactions to the information patterns to which you were trained molecularly. And even to these, you respond as you yourself would respond; not as the donor of the molecular patterns would have responded. You respond as a young man would respond, armed with vital knowledge from many fields—not as the person would have responded who had spent a lifetime acquiring the one set of knowledge, with his reactions necessarily shaped by that knowledge alone, and with the thought habits of such specialization.

  "Further," he went on slowly, "your information depth is not limited to what one man in each field might have acquired in one lifetime; but is infused and colored with factors that must have been transmitted genetically from generations back, for it includes accurate and detailed information on factors which have not been in use for generations."

  "What do you mean by that, sir?"

  Lang took his time before answering, sipping his tea thoughtfully. Finally he said slowly, "For instance, when you flew the tubes. Your reactions, I gather, were structured in an accurate, detailed, seat-of-the-pants knowledge of small-plane flying; of flying of a type that hasn't been done since the very early Twentieth Century. . . ."

  Stan broke in excitedly. "You're right, you know. I could almost feel the flimsy structure of a ... a flying machine around me; and a stick in my hands with which to guide her; and someone shooting at me. . .."

  "So detailed? I had wondered. Yes, I think it is undeniable that you have picked up genetic recordings along with the molecular memories with which we were training you."

  "Sir . . . Dr. Lang. Why am I not a robot, and what about the others?"

  Again Lang paused and sipped his tea. Then he leaned back and half-closed his eyes. "The normal method by which a person acquires information," he said, "is through the five senses. Information is fed into the brain by electronic signals from each of the five senses. In the brain that information is assembled by the intelligence, analyzed, sorted out, and readied for storage—for filing. The intelligence is the analyzer.

  "Reason," he went on, "is the function of the intelligence. The information input is electronic, is analyzed by the intelligence, and is filed in the biochemical body which acts on it without further analysis.

  "Now, when you hypnotize someone, you remove the intelligence from the circuit, and the responses you get are purely logic-circuit responses—backed by an eidetic 'memory,' or complete access to the near infinite information filing system.

  "And when we put information into the body through a molecular memory framing system, we are filing the information biochemically without putting it through the electronic brain/intelligence system. It is therefore filed without analysis or patterning.

  "The only way that this information can be properly correlated and patterned by the intelligence is for it to be brought back to the cerebral circuits for review.

  "Now it is possil le," and here excitement crept into Lang*s voice, "that, in insisting on re-studying every subject to which you were trained by molecular memory patterning, you forced the brain to call up all relevant information for review, so that the new information you had acquired could be patterned in with the old information already in the system.

  "If that is true, then the 'alternating current' effect that you spoke of feeling while you slept would be the electromagnetic recall and refiling mechanism at work."

  "If that's true, sir, then we can retrain Paulsen and the others?" Stan's voice held a hope so great as to make his voice shake. "We can . . . put the robots under their own control?"

  "Let me think how it would work." Lang paused for a long minute, then began speaking again in a distant voice. "It would be necessary for them to seek out, on their own, information with which they had been inoculated. And then ... we must find a way to inoculate the sleep-review system.

  "I think that, with your experience in mind, we shall be able to handle the retraining of the molecularly trained students—once we remove the influence of the basically hypnotic command-responses that have been driven deeply into them; and if we can get them where we can work with them for . . . I'd say at least several months." "That's a pretty big if, sir."

  Lang smiled. "That is an if we shall have to find the means to accomplish," he said softly. "And perhaps, with your cooperation, we shall not find it impossible."

  VII

  STAN WALKED into Weed's office with his head held deliberately high, his shoulders squared, as though the trepidation that might be expected of a younger man faced with the awe-inspiring might of the AT Corporation was forcing a defiant reaction. He held the pose as Weed slowly rose from his seat and extended his hand, which Stan ignored.

  "Ah," said Weed, "I see that you are unconvinced, though sensibly coming to see what AT has to offer." Stan nodded curtly.

  "Very sensible of you." The porcine-faced man before him nodded his head solemnly. "Very sensible, though somewhat insensitive to retain this obviously recalcitrant attitude. However ..."

  Weed reached into a drawer, pulled out a large signet ring, placed it deliberately on his finger, and stood twisting it, watching Stan to be sure that the younger man had fixed his attention upon it. Then, in a voice of command, he said: "I, the trainer, speak. You obey."

  St2n felt the slight tug at his senses that recognized the old command, discarded it instantly, and then forced his eyes to take on a glassy stare, his shoulders to slump slightly, his head to lose its defiant lift.

  "Ah," said Weed, and the sound carried a world of satisfaction.

  Stan stood immobile, waiting. This was going to be quite tricky, he realized.

  ""Now, young man," Weed was saying, "we will get to the business at hand. I made a mistake earlier in not using the correct symbolism, but then I had two of you to controL Hereafter," he went on, "you will respond either to the Earth command I have just used, or to the phrase, Tn the name of the Belt, I command you.' Do you understand?"

  Stan nodded, slowly.

  "Then tell me," said Weed, "to what you must respond, and what response you must make?"

  "I must respond either to the ring or to the belt, and I must respond with complete obedience," Stan said, keeping his voice flat.

  The other looked at him sharply. Oh oh, thought Stan. I should have said to the phrases backed by the objects. Have I been caught out? But he maintained his glassy-eyed stare, and it seemed to satisfy Weed.

  "Now, young man," Weed said slowly, "I must have your shares in Astro Technology."

  Stan let his hand move as though toward a pocket, then hesitate, as though a stronger force was working on him; then move again to the pocket and hesitate again. Finally, he let his hand rest immobile halfway between his pocket and its former position by his side.

  "Oh?" Weed puzzled for a moment. "I gather that the shares of stock you possess hold an attraction nearly as strong as the command under which you respond to me?" There was silence and he finally added, "Answer."

  "Yes, sir. They do."

  Weed sank back in his chair and waited a moment. Finally he said, "Give the shares to me."

  Stan made the gestures of trying to obey again, again let his hand rest immobile in a halfway gesture and stood silent.

  "Why do you not give them to me?" asked Weed. "I cannot, sir. They were given to me in trust." "Um." Then, "I could have them taken from you forcibly."

  "You could, sir. That would break my conditioning. Then I could fight you." The voice was still a monotone, and Stan waited, forcing his eyes to remain unwavering. This was the crucial point. Would Weed believe that Stan could
produce this much independent reasoning, while still under control? Lang had thought that he would. Weed was not a fighter; he was a weasler. He would have to figure this one out, but if he figured it out in terms that were normal to him ...

  "I was told that you were independent. However," Weed said softly, let us reason together." Stan kept himself from breathing a sigh of relief. The pig was going to go along with it

  "The shares—the trust—are, I gather, from your uncle?" "Yes, sir."

  "And what would your uncle's wishes in the matter be?"

  "I am not sure, sir. It is a trust. It is a trust to see that his projects at AT are finished in the way in which he intended them."

  "Ah." Weed began to relax now. He'd been given a bargaining point and bargaining was something in which he felt secure.

  "And just what were his projects?" Weed asked, almost happily.

  "That the Belt become and remain independent sir."

  "It is, and AT is seeing to it that it will remain independent. If that is all, you may sign over your shares to me."

  "That I could not do, sir. I was given them in trust I might be able to give you proxies."

  "Very well. I shall have them drawn up."

  "No, sir."

  "No?"

  "No. The independence of the Belt was not my uncle's only project. I must carry out his projects." "What, then, were the others?"

  "That AT remain technologically advanced over Earth." Weed's voice lost some of its aplomb. "That's being done, son," he said impatiently. "If you want proof ..." "Your word is sufficient sir."

  "Then you have my word. That is being done. Anything else?"

  "That the colony on Jupiter's moon be established."

  "That is being . . ." Suddenly Weed paused. This was too easily checked, and the boy had mentioned that the "trust" under which he'd been placed was sufficient to break his conditioning if it was forcibly thwarted.

  The name Dustin was one to conjure by in the Belt Weed knew. If he could get this boy's wholehearted—at least apparently wholehearted—cooperation, half his troubles with the Belters would be over. The Jupiter colony ship, the Phoenix, was a useless hulk; and perhaps this would be a method by which he could get the youngster's open cooperation, as well as getting him out of the way. It would take some cash and time to get the old hulk actually out into the system with Stan aboard, but the time could be utilized for propagandizing the Dustin reassocia-tion with AT; and the expense would not be too great.