“Wait ...” Smith’s whisper crawled with urgency. “Maybe it’s the food! And I’ve just been eating . . .”
“Right! And I haven’t. Remember, we were in that theater for, oh, several hours longer without food and water than we’ve gone since we landed. Oh, it might not be the food. It might be some form of hypnosis, or something else we can’t even suspect. But I’ll bet it’s the food.”
“Those robots aren’t perfect by a long shot—I’d bet they just never thought that the dosage, whatever it is, would wear off that quickly.”
“Dosage! Aggghh!” Smith rose to his feet hurriedly, and left the room, hand over his mouth. Sounds of food vacating his stomach came to Robinson from the bathroom.
A few minutes later, a very pale Dr. Zachary Smith emerged into the living room. ‘Perhaps,” he said, his long face seamed with lines of acute physical and mental distress, “perhaps I didn’t have it in my stomach long enough to take effect. I have a decided liking for calling the activity of my fine mind my own, and not some roboticized, drugged, nameless—”
“No, Dr. Smith, I don’t think it’s nameless. I think I could put a name on it pretty quickly.”
John Robinson stood and motioned to Smith.
“Come on, let’s see if they understand about prison breaks here ...”
They had argued about it on the way down. Finally Robinson decided that one should stay, because if they both tried to leave, the robots would certainly become upset. If Robinson’s theory was correct.
So Smith remained in the doorway of the Tower of Nuleff as Robinson got into a small one-man sphere- vehicle that he had persuaded Mahri to call for him.
He was very careful not to try to raise the Jupiter with his communicator while he was out in the open.
It was a wild ride.
Robinson’s instructions to the robot control was to take him outside the city, and return him to his scoutcraft.
There was a hesitation in the Robot’s response, a sound as of distant relays clicking and shunting into new patterns, searching for correct responses to a non-predicted signal.
“Certainly, sir,” said the Robot voice presently. “Hang on tight!”
The sphere immediately became transparent and jolted forward.
Travelling at least twice the speed of the larger sphere he had first ridden in, Robinson found himself feeling grateful Smith was not along.
The sphere darted among the moderate traffic of the city as if hag-ridden by a fear of rusting into castaway scrap if it did not proceed at the utmost possible velocity—quite possibly the case, Robinson realized. He wasn’t sure whether the thought amused him.
In a kind of soundless nightmarish dream movie, the streets and vehicles and obstacles flowed by Robinson, anchored with a death’s grip to the arms of his seat in the transparent vehicle. It was impossible to miss anything that happened; with the walls transparent it was as if he were moving along at a hundred miles an hour, completely unprotected. He didn t even dare to shut his eyes.
It seemed a thousand times a thousand times that he and the vehicle had escaped annihilation, in collisions whose combined velocities, he thought, could almost create an impact-force sufficient for the total liberation of all relevant energies . . . At one point Robinson even heard himself say aloud, "Some day I’ll look back on all this and just laugh.”
He thought about that for a moment, then continued, “And laugh, and laugh, and laugh, and laugh . . .” The last thing it seemed, was a laughing matter . . . So intent was Robinson on maintaining his seat, and in silently praying they would avoid the next imminent collision, that he did not realize how much time had passed—until he noticed that they had passed the same disabled robocarrier at the same intersection . . . for the third time.
Startled, he checked his watch—the sphere had taken almost ten minutes to get him exactly no place at all . . .
“Hey,” he shouted. “Hey, you—robot, driver, vehicle —whoever you are—listen to me a moment!”
“Excluse slight malfunction in audio-vocal systems, Master; but you must speak very loud.”
“Well, then, why don’t you stop a moment so you can give me your undivided attention.”
“Possibility. Modification of orders. Yours. Elsewhere. Confusing. Multiple malfunctions. Will think.” And the sphere halted so quickly Robinson was half thrown out of his seat. Behind them, he saw, a stream of slower traffic was dividing around them like ants around an iron cake. “No,” he thought confusedly, “no, that doesn’t make much sense. This place must really be getting to me . . . ”
“Halted now. You have speak me?” The robot voice had become harsher, but its volume was diminishing greatly, thus making up for the slightly threatening tone of voice it had developed.
"You bet I speak you. To you, I mean. Why aren’t you taking me outside the city, to my scoutcraft? You’re supposed to obey your master’s voice.”
“Now stop that,” he told himself immediately. “You don’t have any time for that sort of thing.”
“Hypothesis of extreme malfunctioning, Master. Is humble to move suggestion possible?”
“Huh? I better run that one through my own computer-like brain.” Then he realized that what the robot meant was simply that he should transfer to another vehicle.
Dubiously he asked to be let out of the sphere, and after a slight pause the machine complied.
As he stepped into the street another small sphere rolled up and halted beside him. Now instead of traffic spilling around, it was beginning to back up, the roadway being sufficiently narrow that two motionless vehicles blocked well over half of it.
“Whew! That’s the first silent traffic jam I’ve ever been in!”
Robinson sank into the new seat with a wave of relief. It wasn’t the runaround that bothered him, half so much as the sheer lunacy of the vehicle he had just left. He was glad Maureen wasn’t aware of what was going on down here.
And then he remembered the problems that that fact implied.
He sighed again. “Can you follow directions any better than that other cabbie, fella?”
“You betchum, Red Ryder,” the robot voice said, as the vehicle took off with a sharp jerk. “Up, up, and away!”
“Oh, now,” he thought, exhaling his breath as he decided not to say anything, “this can’t be real. I’ll bet it’s one of Smith’s little tricks again, somehow.”
In less than a minute, before Robinson could well collect his thoughts, the sphere had come to a halt.
“End of the line, bing-bing, here we are,” the robot’s voice came, sounding almost cheerful in its breeziness. “Home sweet home. The Tower of Nuleff. Garden spot of the—”
“Are you sure Dr. Smith hasn’t put you in touch with our ship’s Robot?”
He didn’t expect an answer, as his thoughts began collecting around a feeling that Smith might have some questions to answer.
Then he realized what the robot had said, and looked to see where they’d stopped.
It was the Tower of Nuleff, all right, all ten skyscraping stories of it. “They built taller buildings out of mud six thousand years ago in Mesopotamia,” he muttered.
“All right,” he continued, to the robot, ‘let me out of here.”
“Ja wohl, mein kapitan” Obediently the sphere’s surface opaqued and a doorway appeared.
‘Tell me one thing,” he said, pausing on the ramp. “If I told you I insisted on going out to my scoutcraft—”
“Uh,” said the voice, and beeped a couple of times. “Uh, think this machine very malfunctioned in bad ways, maybe never to be repaired. ‘Nother boy him maybe same go ‘longside you . . . ”
“Forget it,” Robinson said as he walked out toward Smith, who was waiting in the doorway with a worried expression. “I guess I don’t play a very good game when every card’s wild.”
“Hey, nonny, nonny,” said the sphere, and rolled away erratically . . .
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FOUR
“Augggh,” said Smith, forcing down a concentrated food pellet and taking a sip of lukewarm water from his small survival pack. “Why can’t we make this stuff so it tastes good?”
“It’s just supposed to keep us alive on alien planets, Dr. Smith, you know that. It isn’t supposed to be a steak dinner.”
It was the evening of the day after Robinson’s abortive attempt to return to the scoutcraft; he had spent the day arguing futilely with Mahri, and Smith had been tinkering with the computer outlet. Robinson could tell Smith was going to spend the next few minutes leading up to some discovery.
“Obviously they’re trying to hide something,” Smith said, after Robinson had gone over the question of the malfunctioning sphere-vehicles with the reluctance of any robot here to discuss what had happened to the Voyds.
“Thanks,” said Robinson sourly, and caught himself just before tearing away with his teeth at a shred of thumbnail.
“Quite welcome,” Smith answered tranquilly. “Anything I can do to enlighten my fellow man while travelling on his mystery-enshrouded way—”
“Are you for real?”
“Mphf,” said Smith, his face clouding up to match Robinson’s. “Well, at any rate, I’ve made a lot of progress while you were joy-riding and gallivanting about the town in your carefree fashion, and hobnobbing with that dull humanoid. And what you tell me only bears out what I just said: the robots are trying to hide something. What’s more, they’re also trying to hide it from themselves. I think they’d rather go mad than face up to it—at least when we try to push them to face up to it.”
“Oh, I suppose. It seems the only answer, and an obvious one at that. I wonder, though, what they’d do if we just walked up to one and said ‘by the way, Charlie, we just found out what happened to the Voyd’azh . . . ’ ?”
Smith uttered a dour chuckle.
Robinson allowed himself to smile, and thought, "Well, now we’ve made peace between us for the four hundredth time . . . ”
Aloud, he said, “You spoke of something you’d found checking through the history tapes I’d already run.”
“Yes.” Smith began to wax enthusiastic. “It’s really rather exciting. In effect, there’s a period beginning about six months before the last specific date I’ve located anywhere else that says the Voyd’azh were alive at such-and-such a time—a period to which the Central Complex has not allowed me direct access.”
“Well. Yes. Sure.” Robinson tried to keep from getting angry. “Yes, we’ve already established they are keeping something from us. Right.”
“Aha! Indeed they are! But the keen brain of Smith has also deducted something else—the Central Complex isn’t hiding the fact that it’s hiding something.”
Robinson shook his head in disgust.
“Wait!” Smith was eager not to be misunderstood. “That’s the whole point! Central Complex wants us to find the answer!”
“All right,” Robinson said carefully. “How do you figure that?”
“Perfectly obvious to the trained genius of a Smith. If it really wanted to keep the secret from us, the first thing it’d do would be to keep us from suspecting a secret existed. Right?”
“Mmmm.” Robinson thought a moment, nodded grudgingly, then realized something.
“Of course,” he said, “the Central Complex could simply be inefficient. Stupid, even. We haven’t seen that much evidence indicating these robots are that much brighter than we are.”
Smith did not answer, but his face slowly mellowed into a familiar expression of superiority.
“Professor Robinson,” he said at last, gently, “my studies indicate that Central Complex, and its ‘family of independently-operating robots, have in the past three hundred and some years developed: one, a method of plasticizing metals which could revolutionize every Earth industry today that uses either material; two, a method of synthesizing from plain, ordinary, garden-variety soil any kind of vegetable or animal tissue it wishes to, and to do so to the strictest requirements—as witness the fact that the food it made for us didn’t even upset our stomachs; three, a sufficient knowledge of biochemistry to analyze for duplication an alien biochemical lifeform—us, as I said—with the end not only of making food for us, but of drugging us subtly, to enslave us, or whatever they want us for; fourth, they have almost solved the Katz-Porter Anolomy, which as you know has presented insoluble problems for subatomic physicists since about 1971; fifth-”
“Ok, ok, they’re geniuses. I’m outgunned. But how do you get the idea they want us to solve their impossible traumas from knowing all that stuff?”
“Traumas! That’s the precise word I was about to use. You show excellent instincts, Professor. If you had only been born a Smith, however—”
Robinson pursed his lips angrily. “All right, Dr. Smith, enough of this. Make your point.”
“Professor, about 320 years ago something happened on this planet, and the survivors can’t remember what it was. That is clear indication of trauma, as you of course know. What is more, it indicates that total impossibility, a racial trauma, inasmuch as all the robots seem similarly affected.”
Smith strode over to the computer outlet, which primarily resembled a television set on top of a typewriter, and flicked a switch.
“The time has come to tell you the rest of what I’ve learned. I have now turned this receptor-transmitter outlet on. It previously was off. But listen closely to the answer to the question I pose it. Central Complex, will you play back a transcript of, oh, what we were saying five minutes ago in this conversation?”
Whirrrr-click.
“‘—walked up to one and said “by the way, Charlie, we just—“’” On a word by Smith, the recording ceased as abruptly as it had begun.
Smith turned back to Robinson. “The Central Complex is sufficiently interested in our deliberations to monitor them even though its monitor outlet here was turned off. Now then. The robots here want us to stay forever, remaining in ignorance of their history and of what we would prefer for our future—which at this point, Central Complex,” he broke off, turning to the monitor outlet, “I assure you would be anywhere but here—remaining here, I say, forever, as substitutes for their beloved Masters.”
“But. On the other hand, the computer, Central Complex, which exerts only partial direct control over the robots, wants us simply to—”
There was a rasp from the monitor outlet; then the voice of Central Complex spoke in calm tones. “I want you simply to shrink my head. Brainwash—no, psychoanalyze—me.”
Robinson had never known himself to do it before, but it was clear to him now that his jaw had just dropped. Solidly.
In fact, as he began to speak it actually ached.
“Now listen here, Smith, is this another one of your put-up jobs? I know now you didn’t have anything to do with what happened when I tried to get back to the scoutcraft, but when I came back from what you amuse yourself by calling my ‘joyride,’ I was all ready to show you a couple of new places to hang your arms from. Lucky you talked me out of it.”
“But if you don’t come up with an explanation fast, you’re going to talk me right back into it . . . expecting me to believe a computer has just asked me to brainwash itl”
Smith smiled his wintry satiric smile.
“My dear Professor Robinson, I assure you that the only communication between myself and this admirable machine,” and here Smith turned and patted the TV-like outlet, “has been as between two equals, Smith to Smith, as it were; and just as no mortal can force a Smith to do something he desires not to do, why, the same with Central Complex.”
“He is, perhaps, more omniscient than I, and I . . . more independent of spirit. Other than that, we neither give nor take orders from the other. Such companionship ideal, professor, absolutely ideal!”
“Ok, ok, again.”
Robinson passed his hand over his eyes and tried to concentrate on extracting factual content from Smith’s unending flow of verbiage.
“Look, er, sir,” he said at last to the computer outlet, feeling totally ridiculous, “perhaps we can help each other. Why don’t you tell me your position on all this?”
“Wery vell,” it began, and Robinson suppressed a smile at the unconscious verbal slip; this Central Complex wasn’t as omniscient as Smith thought.
“I—or We, it makes no difference which way this system termed Central Complex is described, but I is perhaps simpler—I have lost part of my memory, and I want it back. I believe that you can help me.”
“How, I do not know.”
"Well, I certainly don’t, either,” Robinson said. “Dr. Smith, I trust you have some ideas on this subject?”
Inwardly, Robinson groaned. “He looks like he just swallowed a five hundred pound canary,” he thought, “and that usually means trouble.”
“Really, my dear Professor Robinson, such a problem is but a slight matter to one of my accomplishments.”
‘Well, let’s see you accomplish one thing, and how about gloating after you come through with the answer. Might save you some embarrassment . . .”
Smith replied, haughtily, “There are only a handful of time-tested methods for attacking the problem of my friend here. My own favorites are to make the patient relive the moments leading up to the traumatic event and, failing that, a deft switch to authoritative usage of the Father Image.”
“Oh, great,” Robinson said, his voice harsh now with sarcasm. “Yes, you’ve really hit on something this time. I’d like to meet this computer’s Father Image, Smith. I’d really like to see that.”
“Tut, tut, nothing easier, my dear chap. Central Complex has been entertaining me with certain projections from past eras for some time. CC, old fellow,”—Robinson winced involuntarily—“how about giving him a quick tour of the year of your birth?”
“Certainly, Zachary,” said the Central Complex. "With or without background commentary?”
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