Prisoners of Tomorrow (76 page)

But his reputation had put him in a no-win situation at the Friday night poker school because when he won, everybody said he was sharping, and when he didn’t, everybody said he was lousy. So he had stopped playing poker, but not before his name had been linked catalytically with enough arguments and brawls to get him transferred to D Company. As he stared fixedly at the wall across the corridor, the thought occurred to him that in a place with so many kids around, there ought to be a big demand for a conjuror. The more he thought about it, the more appealing the idea became. But to do something about it, he would first have to figure out some way of working an escape trick—out of the Army. Swyley should have some useful suggestions about that, he thought.

Clump, clump, clump, clump.
His train of thought was derailed by the sound of steady tramping approaching from his left—not the direction in which the detail had departed, which shouldn’t have been returning by this route anyway, but the opposite one. Besides, it didn’t sound like multiple pairs of regulation Army feet; it sounded like one pair, but heavier and more metallic. And along with it came the sound of two children’s voices, whispering and furtive, and punctuated with giggles.

Driscoll turned his eyes a fraction to the side. They widened in disbelief as one of the
Kuan-yin
’s
steel colossi marched into view, holding a length of aluminum alloy tubing over its left shoulder and being followed by a brown, Indian-looking girl of about seven and a fair-haired boy of around the same age.

“Detail . . .
stop!”
the girl called out. The robot halted. “Detail . . . Oh, I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. Stand with your feet apart and put your gun down.” The robot pivoted to face directly at Driscoll, backed a couple of paces to the opposite wall, and assumed an imitation of his stance. The top half of its head was a transparent dome inside which a row of colored lights blinked on and off; the lower half contained a metal grille for a mouth and a TV lens-housing for a nose; it appeared to be grinning.

“Stay . . .
there!”
the girl instructed. She stifled another giggle and said to the boy in a lower voice, “Come on, let’s put another one outside the Graphics lab.” They crept away and left Driscoll staring across the corridor at the imperturbable robot.

A couple of minutes went by. Nobody moved. The robot’s lights continued to wink at him cheerfully. Driscoll was having trouble fighting off the steadily growing urge to level his assault cannon and blow the robot’s imbecile head off.

“Why don’t you piss off,” he growled at last.

“Why don’t you?”

For a moment Driscoll thought the machine had read his mind. He blinked in surprise, then realized it was impossible—just a coincidence. “How can I?” he said. “I’ve got my orders.”

“So have I.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“You don’t have to do this.”

“Do you?”

“Of course I do.”

“Why?”

Driscoll sighed irritably. This was no time for long debates. “You don’t understand,” he said.

“Don’t I?” the robot replied.

Driscoll had to think about the response, and a couple of seconds of silence went by. “It’s not the same,” he said. “You’re just humoring kids.”

“What are you doing?”

Driscoll didn’t have a ready answer to that. Besides, he was too conscious of the desire for a cigarette to be philosophical. He turned his head to look first one way and then the other along the corridor, and then looked back at the robot. “Can you tell if any of our people are near here?”

“Yes, I can, and no, there aren’t. Why—getting fed up?”

“Would it worry anyone if I smoked?”

“It wouldn’t worry me if you burst into flames.” The robot chuckled raspily.

“How do you know there’s no one around?”

“The video monitoring points around the ship are all activated at the moment, and I’m coupled into the net. I can see what’s going on everywhere. Go ahead. It’s okay. The round cover on the wall next to you is an inlet to a trash incinerator. You can use it as an ashtray.”

Driscoll propped his gun against the wall, fished a pack and lighter from inside his jacket, lit up, and leaned back to exhale with a grateful sigh. The irritability that he had been feeling wafted away with the smoke. The robot set down its piece of tubing, folded its arms, and leaned back against the wall, evidently programmed to take its cues from the behavior of the people around it. Driscoll looked at it with a new curiosity. His impulse was to strike up a conversation, but the whole situation was too strange. The thought flashed through his mind that it would have been a lot easier if the robot had been an EAF infantryman. Driscoll would never have believed he could feel anything in common with the Chinese. He didn’t know whether he was talking to the robot, or through it to computers somewhere else in the
Kuan-yin
or even down on Chiron, maybe; whether they had minds or simply embodied some clever programming, or what. He had talked to Colman about machine intelligence once. Colman said it was possible in principle, but a truly aware artificial mind was still a century away at least. Surely the Chironians couldn’t have advanced that much. “What kind of a machine are you?” he asked. “I mean, can you think like a person? Do you know who you are?”

“Suppose I said I could. Would that tell you anything?”

Driscoll took another drag of his cigarette. “I guess not. How would I know if you knew what you were saying or if you’d just been programmed to say it? There’s no way of telling the difference.”

“Then is there any difference?”

Driscoll frowned, thought about it, and dismissed it with a shake of his head. “This is kinda funny,” he said to change the subject.

“What is?”

“Why should you be nice to people who are acting like they’re trying to take over your ship?”

“Do you want to take over the ship?”

“Me? Hell no. What would I do with it?”

“Then there’s your answer.”

“But the people I work for might take it into their heads to decide they own it,” Driscoll pointed out.

“That’s up to them. If it pleases them to say so, why should we mind?”

“The people here wouldn’t mind if our people started telling them what to do?”

“Why should they?”

Driscoll couldn’t buy that. “You mean they’d be just as happy doing what our people told them to?” he said.

“I never said they’d
do
anything,” the robot replied. “I just said that people telling them wouldn’t bother them.”

Just then, two Chironian girls strolled around the corner from the narrow corridor. They looked fresh and pretty in loose blouses worn over snug-fitting slacks, and had lightweight stretch-boots of some silvery, lustrous material. One of them had brown, wavy hair with a reddish tint to it, and looked as if she were in her midthirties; the other was a blonde of perhaps twenty-two. For a split second, Driscoll felt an instinctive twinge of apprehension at the thought of looking ridiculous, but the girls showed no surprise. Instead they paused and looked at him not unpleasantly, but with a hint of reserve as if they wanted to smile but weren’t quite sure if they should.

“Hi,” the redhead called, a shade cautiously.

Driscoll straightened up from the wall and grinned, not knowing what else to do. “Well. . . hi,” he returned.

At once their faces split into broad smiles, and they walked over. The redhead shook his hand warmly. “I see you’ve already met Wellington. I’m Shirley. This is my daughter, Ci.”

“She’s
your daughter?” Driscoll blinked. “Say, I guess that’s . . . very nice.”

Ci repeated the performance. “Who are you?” she asked him.

“Me? Oh . . . name’s Driscoll—Tony Driscoll.” He licked his lips while he searched for a follow-up. “I guess me and Wellington are guarding the corridor.”

“Who from?” Ci asked.

“A good question,” Wellington commented.

“You’re the first Terran we’ve talked to,” Shirley said. She nodded her head to indicate the direction they had come from. “We’ve got a class of kids back there who are bubbling over with curiosity. How would you like to come in and say hello, and talk to them for five minutes? They’d love it.”

“What?” Driscoll stared at them aghast. “I’ve never talked to classes of people. I wouldn’t know how to start.”

“A good time to start practicing then,” Ci suggested.

He swallowed hard and shook his head. “I have to stay here. This conversation is enough to get me shot as it is. Ci shrugged but seemed content not to make any more of it. “Are you two, er . . . teachers here or something like that?” Driscoll asked.

“Sometimes,” Shirley answered. “Ci teaches English mainly, but mostly down on the surface. That is, when she’s not working with electronics or installing plant wiring underground somewhere. I’m not all that technical. I grow olives and vines out on the Peninsula, and design interiors. That’s what brought me up here—Clem wants the crew quarters and mess deck refitted and decorated. But yes, I teach tailoring sometimes, but not a lot.”

“I meant as a regular job,” Driscoll said. “What do you do basically?”

“All of them.” Shirley sounded mildly surprised. “What do you mean by ‘basically’?”

“They do the same thing all the time, from when they quit school to when they retire,” Ci reminded her mother.

“Oh yes, of course.” Shirley nodded. “That sounds pretty awful. Still, it’s their business.”

“What do you do best?” Ci asked him. “I mean . . . apart from holding people’s walls up for them. That can’t be much of a life.”

Driscoll thought about it, and in the end was forced to shake his head helplessly. “Not a lot that you’d be interested in, I guess,” he confessed.

“Everybody’s got something,” Shirley insisted. “What do you like doing?”

“You really wanna know?” An intense note had come suddenly into Driscoll’s voice.

“Hey, back off, soldier,” Ci said suspiciously. “We’re still strangers. Later, who knows? Give it time.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Driscoll protested, feeling embarrassed. “If you must know, I like working cards.”

“You mean tricks?” Shirley seemed interested.

“I can do tricks, sure.”

“Are you good?”

“The best. I can make ’em stand up and talk.”

“You’d better mean it,” Shirley warned. “There’s nothing worse than trying to spend money you don’t have. It’s like stealing from people.”

Driscoll didn’t follow what she meant, so he ignored it. “I mean it,” he told her.

Shirley turned to look at Ci. “Say, wouldn’t he be great to have at our next party? I love things like that.” She looked at Driscoll again. “When are you coming down to Chiron?”

“I don’t know yet. We haven’t heard anything.”

“Well, give us a call when you do, and we’ll fix something up. I live in Franklin, so there shouldn’t be too much of a problem. That’s where we usually get together.”

“Sounds good,” Driscoll said. “I can’t make any promises right now though. Everything depends on how things go. If things work out okay, how would I find the place?”

“Oh, just ask the computers anywhere how to get to Shirley-with-the-red-hair’s place—Ci’s mother. They’ll take care of you.”

“So maybe we’ll see you down there sometime,” Ci said.

“Well . . . yeah. Who knows? He was about to say something more when Wellington interrupted.

“Two of your officers are heading this way. I thought you ought to know,”

“Who?” Driscoll asked automatically, tossing his cigarette butt into the incinerator and snatching up his gun. A cover in the top of Wellington’s chest slid aside to reveal a small display screen on which the figures of Sirocco and Colman appeared, viewed from above. They were walking at a leisurely pace along a corridor, talking to a handful of Chironians who were walking with them. Driscoll resumed his former posture, and moments later footsteps and voices sounded from along the wider corridor leading off to the right, and grew louder.

“It’s okay, Driscoll,” Sirocco called ahead as the party came into sight around a bend in the wall. “Forget the pantomime. We’re back in the Bomb Factory.” Driscoll relaxed his pose and sent a puzzled look along the corridor.

“I might have guessed,” Colman said, nodding to himself and taking in the two girls as he drew to a halt.

“Very cozy,” Sirocco agreed.

“Er . . . Shirley and Ci,” Driscoll said. “And that’s General Wellington.”

“Been having a nice chat, have you?” Sirocco asked.

“Well, yes, actually, I suppose, sir. How did you know?”

Sirocco waved at the corridor behind him. “Because it’s happening everywhere else, that’s how. Carson’s talking football, and Maddock is telling some kids about what it was like growing up on the
Mayflower II.”
He sighed but didn’t sound too ruffled about it. “If you can’t beat ’em, then join ’em, eh, Driscoll. . . for an hour or so, anyway. And besides, they want to show Colman something in the observatory upstairs. I don’t understand what the hell they’re talking about.”

“Steve’s an engineer,” one of the Chironians, a bearded youth in a red check shirt, explained, indicating Colman and speaking to Ci. “We told him about the resonance oscillations in the G7 mounting gyro, and he said he might be able to suggest a way of damping them with feedback from the alignment laser. We’re taking him up to have a look at it.”

“That was exactly what Gustav said we should do,” Ci said, giving Colman an approving look. “He was looking at it yesterday.”

“I know. Maybe we can get Gustav and Steve working on it together.”

“Hey, don’t get too excited about this,” Colman cautioned. “I only said I’d be interested in seeing it. The Army might have different ideas about me getting involved. Don’t bet your life savings on it.”

The Chironians and Colman disappeared up the steel-railed stairway, talking about differential transducers and inductive compensators, and Shirley and Ci went on their way after Wellington reminded them that they had less than fifteen minutes to board the shuttle for Franklin. Driscoll and Sirocco remained with Wellington in the corridor.

“If you don’t mind my saying so, isn’t this a bit risky, sir?” Driscoll said apprehensively. “I mean . . . with all this going on? Suppose Colonel Wesserman or somebody shows up.”