Saturn 3

by Steve Gallagher

  “You frightened him,” James said reproachfully.

  EIGHT

  Hector lumbered along to the lab, with James calling out instructions for every turn or change of pace. The Demigod seemed to have no formed intellect of its own, only an imperfectly developed motor system which responded to direct command and continued in the response until it was told to stop. Every move suggested uncertainty and a degree of misjudgement that was sometimes hastily corrected, more often not. Twice the Demigod lurched into the curving wall of the corridor, unable to modify its linear advance without advice.

  Nevertheless, it heard and understood, and was able to take the correct action once that action had been identified to it. This was considerably in advance of the lab robots, which needed a painstakingly set-up programme to break down every routine into the simplest stages, and which could never divert from that programme although, once remembered, they could repeat it indefinitely. The Demigod could learn by instruction or by observation, and it had an added—although admittedly sub-human—capacity to synthesise that learning into basic forms of judgement and understanding.

  “The real programming hasn’t even begun yet,” James insisted as Hector squared up to the lab doors and prepared to march straight through, whether they opened or not. James quickly put his hand within range of the biocapacitance sensor, and the doors flew apart. This would be a problem; some system would have to be devised whereby Hector would be able to open doors for himself. “All I was aiming at,” James went on as they followed the Demigod through into the lab, “was a demonstration of the basic nerve responses.”

  “Whose nerves?” Adam demanded. “His, or ours?”

  “One of you is going to have to live with him. It’s as well you get some idea of what he can or can’t do right from the start. Once he’s learned some measure of self-control . . .”

  “Until he does, I want him kept away from all the living and recreation areas. Is that understood?”

  “You’re not being fair,” James protested. “The braincase was powered less than an hour ago. You can’t take what you’ve seen as a conclusive demonstration of his abilities.”

  “Until I decide better, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Without control he’s a potential danger and I want him kept well away from Alex.” Adam turned to the girl. She was standing some way back from the Demigod, eyeing the machine warily. “We don’t know the instruction vocabulary. I think we’d best keep Hector in here until we know he can be trusted outside.” Then, back to James, “Neither of us will come into the lab unless you’re here, and even then we’ll probably come together.”

  “All this isn’t necessary. It won’t take me more than a few hours to set up a basic intellect. After that he’ll be as safe as anything.”

  “Safe for you, perhaps.”

  “Safe for anybody.” James turned to Alex. There was a note of desperation in his voice, a need for self-justification. “Try him. Give him a simple instruction.”

  Alex glanced at Adam, and Adam nodded. She looked around the lab for inspiration, and then said, “Hector . . . would you please give that micrometer to the Major?”

  The Demigod’s hand flew out in a swift, sure response, but then hovered uncertainly.

  Tie doesn’t understand the subjunctive yet,” James explained. “It’s got to be a direct command.”

  “Oh.” Alex thought for a moment, then tried again. “Give the micrometer to the Major,” she said.

  Hector’s hand moved slightly; he’d heard the instruction, but was not proceeding on it.

  “He doesn’t recognise micrometers or Majors,” James said, beginning to wish that he hadn’t suggested the demonstration. “You have to be very specific.”

  “But how?” said Alex, bewildered.

  James took over. “Listen to me, Hector.” Without warning a green light flickered on the indicator panel set into the robot’s chest. “I’ve got his attention,” James told them. “Speech response comes later.” Again he addressed himself to the Demigod. “Do you know what a lab bench is?” Green light. “On the bench ahead of you and at approximately sixty degrees, that instrument is a micrometer. Across the bench at about eighty degrees, that man is the Major. Pick up the micrometer and give it to the Major.”

  The hooked fingers landed delicately on either side of the micrometer and then closed together as Hector estimated the effort needed to grip and lift. Then the arm extended, offering the instrument to Adam.

  “Not bad,” said Adam, impressed in spite of himself. James relaxed a little, his relief obvious. Adam reached out to take the micrometer and complete the scenario.

  Hector’s claw closed without warning. The toughened glass on the front of the instrument burst and splintered as the metal casing was crushed in around its centre. Adam froze, his hand in mid air, and then took a step back.

  “I’m glad you didn’t tell him to shake hands with me,” he said.

  “That’s not the intellect,” James said, annoyed and embarrassed, “that’s just straight physical feedback. There’s some fine tuning to be done on it yet.”

  “Evidently,” Alex said drily.

  Alone in the lab, James worked with a feeling of growing bitterness. Hector had failed him, had not given him the edge of authority over the Major that he so desperately needed; instead the Demigod had behaved as a bumbling, overpowered child. Now James’s major sources of frustration were language and mechanics as Hector repeatedly failed to give the correct responses to his instructions and adjustments.

  Hector would learn. The random neural flows within his braincase would be shaped and directed, balk or resist as he may; and if he wouldn’t develop on his own, he would be forced. Direct imprinting would drag him every step of the way, and to hell with the official caveat that the technique was not to be used until the basic intellect was fully developed.

  James ran his fingers around to the back of his head, searching for and tracing the path of the hard bulge that ran from behind his ear to the niche between the skull and the neck sinews. The hair had grown back on the skin around the implant, but the plastic cap was still in place. He took the small button between thumb and forefinger and gave it a half-twist; it unthreaded and he removed it, placing it on the bench and picking up a small metal probe which ended in a jack connection. Pushing the hair aside with his free hand he inserted the jack into the open socket, giving it the opposite half-twist to fix it in place; then, brushing the hair back to cover the buried probe, he moved over to the Demigod and tuned it to imprint mode.

  James had mixed feelings about the implant. Its insertion had been a matter of pride to him, but the wave-output that it gave on test had cost him his promotion . . . but no. It hadn’t cost him anything. He functioned within and better than his rank—here he was, proving it.

  He stepped back. Hector stepped back as well, banging into the bench and knocking a few unimportant objects on to the floor on the opposite side. James lifted a hand, and Hector lifted a hand.

  James smiled. Hector stood, unmoving.

  “So you haven’t managed to get him to speak yet?”

  James didn’t look up at Adam’s question, but simply shook his head. He was slumped on a lay-low in the general living quarters, radiating tense exhaustion. A few unfinished soy biscuits were broken into crumbs on a plate by his side, and he was holding a half-emptied glass of Alex’s amber juice. He took another drink, and almost drained it.

  Adam was beginning to relax a little. It seemed that his first response to this new technology—that it would create far more problems than it solved—was correct, and that Alex’s ploy with his exercise records might not be needed; in which case all that would be required would be to erase the false data and replay the original figures from the tape copy.

  “I don’t understand it,” James said at last. “Everything else is coming along fine, and there’s nothing wrong with any of the speech circuits—I checked them out twice, and I got one of the lab robots to run through them
as well, just to make sure.”

  “Perhaps he doesn’t want to talk yet,” Alex suggested.

  “That’s not possible,” James said emphatically. “Anything I want, he wants. He doesn’t have the choice at this stage.”

  “I don’t know,” said Adam. “It doesn’t sound so ridiculous to me. You told us you’d set up the basic, intellect during the first couple of days. If we’re talking about a four week schedule there’s been plenty of time for him to start building up his own ideas and prejudices.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” James snapped, and then tried to compensate for his over-hasty response in tones of reason. “We’re not talking about some street-sweeper driven by a cat’s brain. Hector’s got a brain that’s cultured from a human tissue sample.”

  “All the more scope for complications.”

  “That’s not so. Hector’s brain started out almost completely clean, and nothing goes in other than what I put there. He’s got no conflicts, no complications, no self-doubt. There’s nothing you could hang a neurosis on at all, no crisis of identity or anything.”

  “I don’t see how that’s possible,” said Adam. “You’re giving information, he’s receiving it. That seems to imply a potential for self-awareness on his part, especially if he’s been given the capability to sort the information out for himself. And one week is a hell of a short time to get yourself balanced up under those circumstances.”

  James pushed himself forward to the edge of the lay-low, his patience and temper fraying in roughly equal proportions. “It doesn’t work like that,” he insisted. “Problems like those were worked out in the design stages.”

  “But you did say that Hector was one of the first of the Demigod series?”

  “That makes no difference. All the procedures have been tested and checked. Hector can’t have an identity problem, because at the moment the only identity he’s got is mine.” James paused, and noted with satisfaction that he had his audience without an argument. To be more precise, they had no idea what he was talking about.

  James half-turned, and lifted the hair on the back of his head to show them the locked-in probe. “This is a wave transmitter,” he explained, “and there’s a receiver and resonator linked into Hector’s brain. I’ve had feedback training which lets me control the transmitter’s output and channel my thoughts directly into him.”

  “So he becomes a copy of you?”

  “Not in any real sense—I told you, I can control it. I select out exactly what I want him to have.”

  “You can choose what you’re thinking about?”

  James nodded, and not without a touch of obvious pride.

  “I wish I could,” Adam said, aware that he was not being totally flippant.

  “I don’t understand how it can work,” Alex said.

  James hesitated for a moment, and then levered himself to his feet from the divan. “Come with me to the lab,” he said, “and I’ll show you.”

  They fell in behind him as he led the way down the corridor, and Adam couldn’t help smiling as he observed that James had pulled himself together in his tiredness at the prospect of being the centre of attention. The last few days had obviously made heavy demands on his abilities and resources, and the shadow of failure depressed and even frightened him. Now that James and his Demigod seemed unlikely to cause the ruin of the isolated happiness that he shared with Alex on Saturn Three, Adam was able to feel some small measure of sympathy—for the man, if not for the robot. He was so obviously a creature of the world that Adam had quit—nervous, ambitious, sick with a desperation to succeed in the hierarchy of an inhuman and unforgiving organisation, now poised and insecure as he hung with probationary status between ranks. Perhaps the confirmation which would be added to his handler’s flashes depended on his achievements with Hector; in which case his future was by no means assured, as his lack of accomplishment seemed to indicate a deficiency in the absorption of his training.

  The Demigod stood by the lab bench, masses of hastily-jotted notes and cut wire and discarded tubing strewn around him.

  “He hasn’t moved since I left,” James explained. “I haven’t wanted him to, and he’s no will of his own.”

  Alex gave a start as Hector drew himself up and began to move across the lab towards them.

  “Careful, Captain,” Adam said quickly. “Remember what I told you.”

  Hector stopped in mid-stride, and then subsided back to a balanced stance. His movements were far more assured than they had been on his first excursion only a couple of days before. The robot’s hands came up in a brief, inconsequential movement, almost a human shrug; and then he returned to his position by the bench.

  “There’s no need to worry,” James said. “He’s moving under my instruction, not of his own free will.”

  “Only when you transmit a wave pattern?”

  “When I choose to transmit, yes.”

  “And what about when you’re not transmitting? What goes on in his head then?”

  “Damn-all, Major,” James said with a smile. “The braincase is down in his chest.”

  Adam and Alex stood well back as James sent Hector on a tour of the lab, negotiating with care around the tanks and the cabinets and neatly avoiding any collisions. The robot paused at several points and its hand reached out, settling around some object and lifting it into the air before setting it down again with delicacy and precision. James watched closely, brows creased into a slight frown of concentration. A muscle in his neck twitched, almost as if he were sub-vocalising Hector’s instructions, and his hands made inconsequential little movements in sympathy with the Demigod’s manoeuvres.

  Hector stopped at the far end of the lab and turned to face them. The clouded glass of the low-pressure bacterial tanks was behind him, their metalled gridiron divisions a framework against which the robot seemed to be measuring himself. He stood, his lens turret sweeping the lab, as if he would claim it all.

  “You see,” James said, “total control and sympathy. None of the shambling and lurching you saw on his first day.”

  “It’s very impressive,” Alex said. James looked across at her, and seemed to increase a little in stature with her approval. “But why,” she went on, “won’t he talk?”

  James’s face fell. “I don’t know,” he said, and flicked his hand in a throwaway gesture of defeat.

  The air rang with the keen agony of breaking glass from the far end of the lab, a dead smack followed by shatter and a bursting of water. One of the bacterial tank divisions dumped its contents through its open front, liquids boiling into gases with the release of pressure as they swamped and flowed around the Demigod’s body. Hector’s claw was raised in an exact imitation of James’s dismissive wave, thrust into the now-open panel on the front of the tank.

  The contaminated water hit the floor and spread into an instantaneous sheet, and the dog Sally’s frightened howls were added to the noise and confusion as she erupted from her hiding-place between the hydroponics tanks and pelted in head-down terror for the lab doors.

  “Out, fast,” Adam commanded, and there were no arguments. They piled out into the corridor, Sally struggling through between James’s legs and almost tripping him as the doors slammed together.

  The corridor lights were blinking on and off in emergency alarm, and there was the distant echo of a siren from the communications room. The dog was off and away before the people had sorted themselves out. Alex felt a concerned touch on her arm, and in the flare of the corridor lights saw that it was from James; then his hand fell away, and on the next illumination he had stepped back.

  The chances were that the bacterial soup contained nothing harmful, but the lab was now sealed airtight until this could be confirmed. Whilst none of the experimental bacteria were particularly virulent, there were some which could not only survive out of the tanks but which could cause sickness and irritation if, by some devious means, they found their way into the gut. Adam had once been laid low by suc
h an organism, and he took no pleasure in recalling the experience.

  They made their way to the communications room, where Adam shut down the alarms and asked the base computer for a check on the contents of the ruined tank. James said nothing, and met nobody’s eye. In the quiet that followed the persistent whine of the siren Alex cut up the output of the lab camera on to the monitor bank, panning and zooming to give a tightly-framed shot of Hector and the damage. The Demigod was frozen as they had left him, his metal claw still poised in its attitude of destruction; but as James saw this image on the screen, the claw dropped swiftly back to the robot’s side.

  “There’s no danger,” Adam said with relief as the computer gave out its report on the visual display. “All we’ve got to worry about is a nasty mess and a lost experiment.”

  James offered neither excuse nor apology. He stared at the screen with a silent resentment for his uncooperative ally.

  “I suppose,” Adam went on, “that Hector’s numerous inhibitions wouldn’t prevent him from cleaning up after himself?”

  “I’ll handle it,” James said tonelessly.

  Adam turned to Alex. “We may as well go,” he said. “We can leave replacing the experiment until tomorrow—no sense wading through the crap when we don’t have to. Not when we’ve got Hector to do it for us.”

  He said it with resignation, but not with any obvious display of humour. If it had been a joke, James might have resented it and found some outlet for his formless and undirected anger; but as a statement of almost-fact it was cold, simple, and barely resistible.