"Asimov, Isaac - Robot City 05 - Refuge - Robert Chilson 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Asimov Isaac)

The antenna looked like a series of odd-shaped chunks of metal and coils of wire, and the testing gear simply shot current through each element in turn. The readouts were within normal range, as nearly as he could tell from the manual he had accessed before coming out.

"I don't get it," Derec complained, thinking of the classical definition of Hell: the place where all the instruments test out to be perfect, but none of them work. "How can I fix it if it isn't broken?"

"I think," said Wolruf slowly, "that Dr. Avery hass re-tuned the antenna."

"Retuned?" Derec had never heard of such a thing, but knew little about the subject. "I thought all Spacer talk was in the same range. Is he trying to pick up.--Settlers? Or what?"

"Maybe Aranimass."

Maybe, Derec thought, chilled. Maybe, indeed. That long-armed pirate was definitely interested in Dr. Avery's doings, though he might not know who or what Dr. Avery was.

Derec stood, looking around the warm room generated by Kappa Whale, and shivered. For the first time the thought came to him: What if the first ship that showed up was Ar-animas's? He must be systematically searching the beacon stars --

A touch on his arm nearly made Derec jump off the hull.


2. PERIHELION

The burnished, enigmatic face of Mandelbrot approached his. The robot gripped him with his normal left arm. His Avery-construct right arm bent impossibly, reached around Derec and switched off his communicator.

Derec had had nightmares about that arm. It was a piece of scrap from an Avery robot, Which Aranimas had had picked up from the ice asteroid where Derec had first awakened. "Build me a robot," the alien had said. Derec had put pieces together to build the robot he called Alpha. It wasn't a good job, but it worked.

Then, weeks later, the crudely attached right arm seated itself firmly and made a few modifications in Alpha's brain: Alpha informed them that he was now known as Mandel-brot. Derec had observed the fine structure of the arm: a series of tiny chips, or scales, that gripped each other and could therefore mold the arm to any shape that might be desired.

Each unit was a sort of robotic cell; together, they were a brain. And having integrated themselves, they had--to a degree--taken over Alpha. Derec's nightmare was that the cells were eating the robot out from the inside, that his interior was one solid mass of them, and he was about to become something--horrifying.

Impossible; the cells couldn't eat. Also, all the brains were robotic, Mandelbrot's normal positronic brain and the units in the cells. The Three Laws compelled them all. But dreams are not logical. At the moment, the worst nightmare had come true, until Mandelbrot put his head against Derec's helmet. It would have looked to an observer as if the robot were kissing his cheek: his microphone touched Derec's helmet and Mandel-brot spoke.

"Derec, I am worried about Ariel."

They had been careful to conceal from Mandelbrot the worst of Ariel's condition. The robot knew only that she was sick, not that the disease was usually fatal. The effect on his positronic brain was more than they cared to risk; the First Law left no loophole for incurable diseases.

"Ariel is bored, as well as ill," Derec said.

He looked away uneasily from the robot's expressionless but intense face. The stars beckoned, promising and threatening; somewhere out there, perhaps, he might recover his memory. He remembered Jeff Leong, who had crashed on Robot City after an accident while on his way to college. In a few years, Derec would have been thinking about college, if this fantastic thing hadn't happened to him.

"Ariel is very sick," said Mandelbrot. "Her eating pattern has altered markedly. She suffers from fever most of the time. Her attention span is abnormally low, she is sensitive to light, she moves about only with effort--"

"All right," said Derec, feeling that he would ossify before the robot finished its catalog if he didn't interrupt. "It's true that Ariel is ill. But I am not worried about her."

That wasn't true, especially now that it had been brought out into the open.

"You should worry. I fear for her safety if something is not done for her."

"What do you suggest we do.'?"

"You may have to use the Key to Perihelion."

After scouring Robot City for weeks for a Key to Perihelion, the mysterious device that would transport them instantly off the planet, they had managed to steal Dr. Avery's ship when he had come to investigate their "interference." On the ship they had found the Key, but Derec's investigation of Dr. Avery's office had shown him where the Key would probably take him.