Mach chose 7. PUZZLE, trusting that his wit was quicker than the android's. Ware chose H. GENERAL, which broadened the range of choices.
They filled in the sub-subgrid with various types of mechanical puzzles: jigsaw, matches, string, knots, cube assembly, Rubic cube and a labyrinth. When the final choices were paired, the result was the labyrinth. Well, Mach should be able to solve that faster than the android could.
'Hey, didn't you run that one this morning, Ware?' a bystander called.
'Yeah,' Ware replied, satisfied.
Oh-oh. The format of the labyrinth was changed on a daily basis. A player never could know which variant or detail it would have-unless that player had experienced it on the same day. Ware had gotten a major break.
Or had he made his own break, knowing that Mach preferred mental or tool-assisted games, and liked puzzles? Had he somehow planned for this encounter? If so, he was smarter or more determined than Mach had credited.
Still, Mach had run the labyrinth many times, and was familiar with most of its variants. He might not be at as great a disadvantage as he feared. There were interactive properties that could nullify advance knowledge.
They adjourned to the labyrinth chamber. This time it was set up in the form of a huge circle with three entrances. Doris was designated the Damsel in Distress, and Mach was the Rescuing Hero, and Ware was the Monster. Mach's object was to find and rescue the Damsel before the Monster found her and dragged her away to his lair. If Mach could bring her out his entrance, he would be the victor; if Ware brought her out his, he was. The Damsel was required to go with whomever touched her first. In a double sense, Mach realized.
He had kept company with her because, as a cyborg, she had the body of a robot and the mind of a human being. She had originally been human, but an accident to her body had rendered it inoperable, so her brain had been transplanted to the machine, where it was maintained in a bath of nutrients and connected to the machine's perceptive and operating units. Such mergers had always been problematical, for no human brain could align perfectly with anything other than a human body, but as cyborgs went she had been more sensible than most. She had been given the finest of bodies, which she delighted to use for every purpose, and because she was both human and machine, she understood Mach's ambivalence. He had one human and one machine parent; having experienced the machine existence, he longed for the human one, the other face of his coin. Doris had actually known both, and that made her endlessly fascinating. But she did have that erratic streak, which could make her difficult to deal with at times. Evidently she was toying with the notion of having physical relations with a flesh creature, having satisfied herself about those with a nonflesh creature. Now that she was angry with him, she was using this notion to force him to respond.
All because he had tried to help the alien female get adjusted. Yet Agape had been in genuine need; what else could he have done? A machine could have ignored her plight, but a human being would have helped, and it was the human model he preferred to emulate.
They entered at their doors. The game was on.
It was gloomy inside, but his vision adjusted automatically to the changed conditions. He could see well enough. The passage curved and recurved and divided. There was no way to be sure which passage would lead most directly to intersect with Doris' door; he would have to depend on speed and memory, learning the maze as he went. For the trick was not merely to find the Damsel first, it was to bring her back out. If he got her, but then the Monster intercepted them, he would probably be lost, because the Monster was by definition the stronger of the two males, and would win any direct encounter. This was counterbalanced by the Damsel's established preference for the Hero; she would try to help him find her, and would even search for him, while trying to avoid the Monster. If the Hero touched her first, she would go quietly wherever he led; if the Monster caught her, she would go with him, but would scream all the way, making it easier for the Hero to intercept them and perhaps prevent the Monster from making his exit.
Now Mach heard her screams. The Monster had caught her already! How could it have happened so quickly?
But as he moved on, he realized that the sounds were wrong. Doris was still alone. She wasn't exactly screaming, she was calling. 'Hero! Hero!' she called. 'Come find me!'
The fool! Didn't she realize that the Monster could hear her just as well as the Hero could? Since Ware was already familiar with this variant of the maze, the advantage would be his; he could go directly to her without false detours.
Then Mach heard his rival, pounding along a nearby passage. Ware knew where he was going, certainly!
Well, there was one way to even things up: he could follow the Monster! Mach ducked into a cul-de-sac, hiding, as the android passed, then emerged and pursued him quietly. Soon they both arrived at the Damsel's site. As Ware closed on her, she neither screamed nor fled as she was supposed to; she simply waited for him. Had she forgotten all the conventions of this game?
Ware slowed, approaching her. He reached out his hand to tag her, and she extended her hand to him.
Something very like human emotion took Mach.
Mach launched himself at the back of the Monster. By striking by surprise, at the moment the rival's attention was distracted by imminent victory, he might score against him; the Game Computer allowed for such tactics. All he had to do was touch Ware from behind-
'Look out!' Doris cried.
Ware, alerted, swung around to meet Mach's charge. They collided, face to face.
'Hero killed,' the voice of the Game Computer announced. Thanks to Doris' betrayal, Mach had lost the game-and her favor.
Back in his private serf chamber, Mach pondered the ramifications. He had thought that Doris' anger with him was a misunderstanding, spawned by his appearance with the alien female. Now he realized that he had misjudged the cyborg. She had grown tired of him, but preferred a pretext to separate. After all, if she formally broke up with him, others might conclude that she liked breaking hearts (or power cells, as the case might be) and be wary of her, leaving her without male company. She was not the sort to risk that. So she had engineered it so that another male had taken her away from Mach. That left her nominally innocent. She had had her prospective companion, the android Ware, get his fellow android Narda to set Mach up with Agape, then had sought out the pair and made a scene-with Ware handily near. How cunning! Then she had worked to ensure Ware's victory, by 'misplaying' her part, and finally openly betraying Mach. Thus he, Mach, had become the butt of the play. Had he 'won' her, then there would have been no onus on her, and she could have tried another ploy at another time.
So he was without a girlfriend-and perhaps had been for longer than he had realized. What was he, after all, except a machine-that could not even experience the grief that a human or android or even alien being would at such a situation! No wonder Doris had grown tired of him. Living creatures had genuine emotions that made them less predictable and more interesting. How he wished he could be alive!
He lay on his bed, which he didn't really need because it was not necessary for him to sleep, and invoked his creative circuit. This was newly developed, and had been installed only a few months ago. He had taken to playing with it at odd moments, savoring the illusion of erratic thought. It had random factors included, so that the same starting thought could lead to different results, some of them only marginally logical. Living creatures were capable of illogic, and that was part of their appeal. Even the cyborg Doris, with her inanimate body and living brain, could be marvelously illogical when she chose. Mach wanted that capacity for himself, but so far had never been able to originate a truly illogical thought process. The circuit was only a circuit; he could reflect on it, but it did not govern him. He always knew the illogic for what it was, and that prevented him from being truly alive.
Now he tried a special variant. He tried to imagine himself in the mysterious frame of Phaze, where magic supposedly operated and science did not. That was so illogical that it would represent a monumental leap of belief on his part. If he could successfully believe that, he could believe almost anything-including the possibility of somehow coming alive.
He imagined having a living brother his own age, there in Phaze. No, not a brother-an alternate self, who bore the same relation to him that Stile did to Citizen Blue. The same person he was, only split apart from his reality, existing in that nonreality of Phaze. It was of course nonsensical to postulate a robot having an alternate self-but no more so than the notion of a land of magic. How convenient that that land was forever sealed off from Proton, according to his father's story! No way to prove or disprove it! What
