by Troy Conway
“Get away!” I howled, positive I was going mad but determined to go down struggling. “Get the hell away!”
After a time, the hands slid off.
Feng Ti and I went on and on. There was a malleatic madness in me that caused me to need this furious fluttering (induced, I later realized, by the hypnotism that made me think Feng Ti was a married woman and that I was in a hotel room). I had to thrust my hips upward, I had to grip her hips and make sure they ground and circled above me.
My hands slid along her smooth thighs, caressing her. She felt my palms and leaned her exquisite face down and touched her open lips to my mouth. We kissed a long time, a long time.
But not long enough. Bigger hands came to grab my legs and arms, to yank Mrs. Feng Ti bodily off my jade stick. I howled like an Irish banshee at this deprivation. I struggled upward, ready to fight.
More hands came, this time with a hypodermic needle.
The hands stuck the needle into my arm.
I went out like a broken light bulb.
When I came to, I was in my own room, the round bed room that had been assigned me. I was naked under the covers, and asleep. My eyelids rose, I stared around the room. Memory came back to me, with understanding.
They came for me when I was up and dressed-in the loose linen coolie jacket and trouser. I suspected they had a tiny television camera hidden somewhere in my roam. Or maybe it was only bugged for sound.
Novotny and a pretty Chinese girl escorted me to breakfast. The girl was Lee Chi, as pretty as. Ip Chung and Kai Lai, and just as well built. Novotny told me that Lee Chi would be my official hostess from there on in, and would relay orders to me from my hosts. In- sparkled in her black eyes, and her smile was happy. She seemed like one of the better robots.
She fed me ham and eggs and coffee plus some sweetbuns, in the communal dining hall. I ate in solitary splendor. Lee Chi assured me that everybody else was up and working hours ago.
There were no working orders for me yet. I .suggested we take a walk, that she show me the layout of the caves and laboratories. Lee Chi frowned, then nodded.
“I have not been forbidden to do so,” she stated. “Besides, there is no way for you to escape from here, so it makes no difference.”
“Why can’t I escape?” I asked.
“The metal grilles come down on the throwing of a switch. They lock into place and can only be opened by the director himself, Kang Chow. You would like to see them?”
I told her I would. I did not intend to stay here a prisoner the rest of my life if I could help it, and I could help it by learning just where and how these metal grilles operated. Lee Chi showed me a control box in the ace where I had first met the Russians. That moved the grilles up and down electrically.
The grilles themselves were set into the overhang at each cave mouth. Standing under them, I could glimpse the bright metal of the grille bars recessed into their metal sheaths. We strolled the galleries so that I could see the panorama of this corner of Hunan province stretched before us.
The air was cool and sweet. A steady wind blew across the cultivated fields and over the ribbon-like roads at which I stared.
A loudspeaker blared to life.
“Attention, Lee Chi. Attention, Lee Chi. The American professor is to be brought to the duplication room at once. The American is to be brought to the duplication room at once.”
As we were leaving the rickety wooden gallery, I noticed a switch set into a recess. “What’s that?” I wondered.
“It is a safety measure. In case some malfunction should lock the grilles in place, a radio call from the laboratory compound would permit someone on the outside to swing this switch and raise the grilles. Otherwise, those metal bars might keep us all inside the caverns until we starved to death.”
Yeah, hey! M was a thought I tucked into the back of my head.
Then Les Chi walked me to the duplication room and sat down, crossing her legs and folding her hands in her lap. Fedor Novotny and Kolsikoff were already in the laboratory, busied over a blue metal table, adjusting a series of searchlights so that they focused on the tabletop.
The beefy man turned from the table and came toward me. “Professor, if you are ready?”
I nodded, knowing I had to play my role to the hilt so as not to arouse suspicions. I stripped naked at his order, I let them put me down on the table add strap my body so that I could not move. They put plastic hemispheres, hollowed out, over my eyes to protect them from the rays of the searchlights.
I heard the click of a switch.
Heat bathed my body; not intolerable heat, just pleasant warmth. All I knew of what was happening now was- that heat. Later, La Chi explained this process more fully to me. The searchlights were highly modified ray-probes that measured me, photographed me, tested me, and sent electronic messages about Professor Rod Damon directly into the complex wiring systems of the giant computers. The computers already possessed my measurements, so that within a certain area of information, they were now ready to accept detailed data
The relay systems worked steadily. Lights flashed on in banks and in individual parts here and there across the computer-face. I did not see the lights but I heard the faint little clicks as the computers went to work. Those warm rays were taking my blood pressure, my metabolism, my heartbeat. They analyzed my skin, they tested my temperature They did about everything it might take a hundred highly skilled medical men a year to find out. All in the matter of maybe half an hour.
Somebody began undoing my straps.
Fedor Novotny said, “There we are, Professor. That’s all for now. Everything has gone like clockwork.”
“That’s all there is to it?”
“Not quite all. There still remain some delicate investigations to be made, but these can wait a few days.”
I turned to my clothes. Lee Chi was there ahead of .me, lifting my shorts and holding them as she sank to her knees. I noticed that she turned away her head when I stuck my legs in the proper holes in my shorts. There was a faint smile on her full red lips as her black eyes took in the size of my manhood as it dangled.
I asked, “Did they measure that too?”
“Oh, yes. It is very important.”
She seemed willing to talk, so I went on. These other tests they will make. What are they like?”
“Oh, running, jumping, hopping, that sort of thing. The rap-probes will record your reactions and these will be used as a gauge to test the finished product. In other words, your duplicates must perform exactly as you do, in order to be you”
“As you robots are built to be like the master model of girls like Ip Chung and Kai Lai?”
“Yes. They—we, that is—must perform as the master model performs. Of course, we do not have her exact personality, personalities will be programmed for each robot, for the better ones, anyhow, to make her or him as much like a human being as is possible.”
She held my coolie pants. I slipped my legs into them. She drew them up about my lean hips and tied the cord that served as a belt.
“What puzzles me is, how can they get a brain inside the head of these robots? Your brain, for instance. There are ten billion neurons hide the normal human skull. To duplicate this complexity, would require a lot of space, maybe a whole floor of a building like the Empire State in New York”
“Fedor Novotny and Dmitri Kolsikoff are geniuses,”stated Lee Chi. “They defected from Russia because they were not allowed to continue their experiments on the manufacture of living flesh and plasma that the malleable exterior of all us robots are covered.
“This was their major contribution to the robotics project here. They can duplicate all human organisms, but there is no need to do this. Just the exteriors must be lifelike. And, of course, the vaginal passages of the female. The rest of our bodies are filled with wires and electronic relay systems. Our brains are in our torsos, actually.”
I had read somewhere that all human knowledge of the past ten thousand years could be put
in a six-foot cube. Novotny and Kolsikoff did not have much space in their robot girls, but they did not need that much. Their women were programmed for certain purposes, no more.
Each of their productions, even my own duplicates. Would be made for certain tasks. The soldiers would need be programmed only to fight, the workers to hoe or dig or harvest, and so on. They could get miniaturized control units inside humanoid chests for those purposes very easily.
When my jacket was on, I turned back and out Fedor Novotny. I wanted to watch the process by which processed data was translated into male androids shaped like me. Novotny was pleasant, but firm.
“Permission must be refused, Professor. Our processes must remain secret. You must enjoy your life here. You have no worries, no responsibilities. You can have all the food you want, all the rice wine you can drink, all the women who catch your eye. What more could a man ask?”
I could have told him, but I grinned like a moron and made myself look happy. A vegetable might have been happy the way he suggested. I could not. I told myself I was going to get the hell out of this place as soon as possible.
I realized I might need help.
My hand caught Lee Chi by her smooth golden hand as we walked down the laboratory corridor side by side. She seemed surprised, and turned her puzzled eyes to mine.
“Don’t you robots understand tenderness?”
She flushed and nodded. “Yes, of course. But— “
“Well, I like you I want to be your friend. If I’m going to stay here forever, and you’re to be my hostess, we really should get to know one another very well.”
“I have no past,” she stated flatly.
“I do, however. I’d like to talk about it.”
As a bar against the homesickness that might already be working in my psyche? I did not know, but I found it helped to talk about the little country town where I was born, to tell Lee Chi things that happened at the university, relate my earliest memories. We went to the gallery and walked up and down it, enjoying the cool winds, and all the while I chatted.
When I was done, I saw tears in her eyes.
“Hey,” I said in mock alarm. “You don’t have to go quite so far. Turn off your programming.”
She laughed. “I can’t. It’s built into me, so that I respond as a human girl would respond.”
A shaft of sunlight caught her blue linen coolie jacket. outlining her shapely body through its almost transparent folds “I wish you were human,” I found myself saying wistfully. “I like you a lot. Maybe because you’re such a good companion.”
Her face lit up with a happy smile “Thank you It is a great compliment you pay me.” Her fingers squeezed mine. Then she asked, as if the idea had just occurred to her, “Would you care to sunbathe?”
I would, indeed. I felt as if I’d been cooped up in this place forever. To be out in the sun, to feel its rays bathing my skin and turning it a rich brown, would be a little like being free.
Lee Chi laughed and caught my hand and ran with me up the gallery stairs. These stairs extended to the top of the cliffs, where a flagstoned terrace more than a hundred yards square had been built for the compound personnel. There were shufleboards, tennis courts, volleyball courts. There was also an area covered by h e white sand, where a man could lie down and bask in the rays of old Sol.
Towels were on a rack. Lee Chi snatched two up, tossed one to me, and ran out onto the sand. I followed her a little more discreetly. Lee Chi spread her towel, took mine and hid it out. Then she stood up and unbottoned her jacket.
I don’t know why I was surprised at her action, I just was. Naturally you are not going to sunbathe all dressed up. I stared as the buttons fell away and she threw back the flaps.
Her breasts were firm and heavy,’ jutting proudly with large, dark nipples. Those breasts shook as she wriggled her arms out of her sleeves. Her sly eyed caught me staring at her bouncing globes.
She asked sweetly, “Aren’t you going to strip too?”
I stripped. The sun was hot on my bare skin, but the breezes sweeping over the cliff top were coding. I found my manhood was not bothered by La Chi’s nudity, even though my eyes appreciated her shapely hips and legs and breasts— in a kind of esthetic sense, that is—and that I could stretch out naked beside her without wanting her body.
After all, she was a robot. My phallus knew it.
I fell asleep for a little while. When I woke up my skin tingled with that familiar bite of sunburn. It felt good, lying here like this. I could forget my worries about escaping. I turned over on my front.
My companion was fast asleep, which surprised me. I was even more surprised to discover that her skin was showing a bit of burn too.
Where her thick black hair grew from her temples, there was a film of sweat. She was feeling the sun’s heat just as I was. I marveled at the almost magical qualities of this almost-human flesh which Novotny and Kolsik off had created.
Then I did a kind of double-take.
Hold on a minute, now. These robots had to be programmed to sweat. They could not do it by themselves, as the human body did. Sweating is a completely reflex action. Nobody ever wills himself to sweat. It happens because of nervous tension or too much heat or humidity.
I got up, I walked all around the flagstoned patio until I found a sharp stone. I brought it back and, lying down, scratched Lee Chi in the wrist.
She woke up, yelping and clamping a hand to herself.
“You damned little liar,” I breathed in utter admiration.
“Wha-what?” she gasped.
Her reactions had been fast, but I’d managed to see the tiny drop of blood well up wetly from her cut flesh. I put my lip to her cut, brushing away her hand. I sucked her tiny wound until it did not bleed any more.
Then I lay back and put my hands behind my neck, eyes closed. I said, “They’re going to kill me, aren’t they?”
“What makes you say that?”
“You’re alive, but you pretend to be a robot. Actually you’re the master model for androids like Ip Chung and Kai Lai. Aren’t you?”
A soft palm clapped my lips shut. Terrified eyes stared down at me, wide and huge. “Please! Don’t even suggest it.”
I caught her palm, holding it still as I kissed it. There was the faint taste of sweat on her skin.
“All right,” I told her meekly. “I’ll keep my voice down. I realize the place may be bugged.”
She shook her head, still leaning over me and staring down into my face. Some of her earlier terror was gone from her eyes. She even smiled a little.
“No. It isn’t that. I don’t mind talking up here. It’s when we go down there that makes me worry. If they thought you knew I was real, my life is finished.”
Her heavy breasts lay warm on my chest. Their touch stirred the fluttering fires in my loins. My manhood began to take an interest in her as a female.
“That’s where the danger is,” I rasped, and she followed the direction of my eyes to my’ slowly rising flesh. “Novotny and the others know I can’t function as a man with a female robot—without hypnotism. If they see me like this with you, they’ll damn well be suspicious. Be a good girl. Put on some clothes, and take those adorable tits. off my chest.”
She flushed and giggled, but she did what I said. She kept her back turned as I donned my own coolie wear.
Half in jest, I murmured, “I’ve always been proud of my erectile powers. Now I’m not so sure. I wouldn’t want my phallus to betray your humanity. So I’ve got to be on my guard all the time.”
She said, “Only for about two weeks. That’s how long it will take the Russians to complete their tests and to run out perfect duplicates of you, professor. Then they will kill you dead to make sure you never talk. I’m alive simply because they are sure I’ll cooperate and not try to escape.”
“I’ve got to get out of here before then, obviously.
She glanced back at me, eyebrows arched. “How? I wish with all my heart you could—I’d go wi
th you in a flash. But there isn’t any way. There just isn’t.”
“There is. I’ve got to think of it.”
“I’ll help you, of course.”
“Hmmm. You know the layout here. I don’t. You can help by briefing me as to the exact location of all alarm systems, where the guards hang out, and so on.”
She nodded happily. She leaned over and whispered, “I wish I could kiss you, Professor. But I’m afraid of that—that monster of yours.”
We went downstairs, where we behaved ourselves circumspectly. Lee Chi showed me around the compound, then brought my evening meal to my round room, where she shared it, pretending to be a robot Her warning finger lifted to her kissable mouth several times, reminding me that the room was probably bugged.
After dinner we searched the room thoroughly. I finally found the bugging device under a corner of the carpet not far from the big bed. I pointed at it so Lee Chi would know where it was as I said out loud, “It’s kind of hot in here. I think I’ll move the bed over where the air-conditioner sends down a current of cool air. On second thought, you do it for me, Lee Chi”
I wanted them to think I thought of Lee Chi as a robot. Actually I was the one who stooped and lifted the bed, working it toward the hidden bug. When I had the bed-leg poised over the telltale gadget, I lifted it even higher, then let it go. Its falling weight squashed the listening device absolutely flat.
I grabbed Lee Chi, half dragging her over the head- board, and kissed her thoroughly. Her lips were warm and soft, she was all girl. Real girl. I could feel her nipples getting hard where her breasts mashed my chest through the thin linen of our coolie jackets.
Then I let her go. I didn’t want to push it too far, one of the Russians might walk in just when things got interesting. But I did want her to know how I felt about her. She got the message. Her eyes danced; she giggled and then clapped her soft palms over her full lips.
I dragged her down on the bed, but just to talk.
“Tell me all about this place. I saw one of the sailors burn Yi Lou back in Hok Tang. I take it that’s the way they get rid of the unwanted robots?”