check.'
Hoblenz hesitated, then heaved a noisy sigh and rose. He was furious, Laura could see.
'And Mr. Hoblenz, call off your surveillance of Dr. Aldridge.'
Hoblenz muttered something laced with profanity, then he stomped from the room with his jaw firmly set.
Laura kept her eyes on her plate. The waiters served the main course — rack of lamb with mint jelly. Laura drained her glass of wine, and Gray promptly refilled it.
'Look,' Laura said abruptly. 'I'm sorry if I saw something I wasn't supposed to. I knew I shouldn't have gone in there, but… I'm supposed to get inside the computer's head, so what better way than in one of those workstations?' she tried, using the computer's fairly weak justification.
Gray poked at his lamb, slumped over the plate wearing a look of resignation. 'You talked to the computer, didn't you?' he asked.
Laura chewed slowly, trying to decide whether to get the computer in trouble. 'The voice-recognition speech-synthesis program was loaded while you were in the workstation,' he said, eliminating any need for her to answer. 'What'd you think about it?'
Laura broke into a grin. 'It was amazing,' she said, and Gray smiled. 'Why don't you have it talk all the time?'
'I will, someday. Right now the program is a resource hog.'
They ate for a while in silence. When Gray resumed, he'd changed the topic. 'Have you talked to the computer about its depression?'
'I… I hadn't gotten that far yet,' Laura replied, feeling slightly defensive. 'I thought what I'd do first is determine whether the computer was sufficiently 'human' to exhibit psychiatric pathologies.'
Gray nodded. He seemed to have lost interest in his meal. 'So… where else did you go? In cyberspace, I mean?'
Gray poked at his food with his fork, waiting for her answer.
'It looked like… somewhere in space. Like on a planet or a moon, only the ground was jet-black.'
Gray replaced the utensil on his plate, the lamb resting on it uneaten.
He spoke slowly when he asked, 'Did you touch anything?'
Laura tilted her head in confusion, then replied, 'No, I didn't touch anything.'
'Are you absolutely certain?' he persisted.
Laura nodded, then nodded again more vigorously. 'When I reached out in front of me,' she explained, raising her arm in the air, 'my hand looked like this… claw.' She pinched her fingers together like a lobster. 'It scared me so much, I got out right away. I didn't touch a thing, I swear.'
Gray nodded slowly.
'What was that place?'
Gray looked up, but he stared straight past her and out the window. He spoke slowly, his voice lowered. 'For the first time in my life I don't know what to do. I don't know whether to tell you everything, or send you away from this island forever. I don't know whether to shut the computer down and start over, or whether what's happening is the most exciting thing since the dawn of man. I… I just don't know what to do.'
She waited, but he said nothing further.
'Mr. Gray, when you told me about how you could, you know, operate robots remotely…'
He looked up at her. 'Teleoperation,' he supplied.
'Yeah. Well… was that place where I went some kind of simulation? What it would be like to teleoperate a robot on another planet or something?'
'I don't know,' he replied in a faraway voice.
'You don't know the place I'm talking about?' Laura asked. 'The place with the pitch-black surface and some sort of… landing craft?'
'Oh, I know the place very well,' Gray replied in his tired monotone, looking up at her but clearly lost deep in thought. That was all he would say.
Gray remained quiet on the walk to the car parked in front of his house. He'd suggested they go for a drive, and Laura didn't press him about their destination.
When the car doors closed, Laura said, 'Hoblenz doesn't know about that place, does he?' Gray shook his head.
'Assembly building,' he directed in a clear voice, and the car took off. 'Everything is on a need-to-know basis. With the computer assuming control over more and more of our operations, the list of things even the department heads need to know is growing shorter.'
'You act like that's a good thing,' Laura said, shaking her head.
They passed through the gates and turned left on the curbed road. 'Keeping people in the dark. Why are you so secretive? I mean, surely you trust Margaret and Georgi and Griffith and the others.'
He opened his mouth to speak, but the words seemed to stick in his throat. Finally he said, 'It's a burden to know certain things. To have to carry them with you all the time. Having to live with their weight on your shoulders.'
Laura caught a glimpse of Gray shaking his head before they plunged into the black mouth of the tunnel. She felt emboldened by the cloak of darkness. 'The computer knows your big secret.'
When they burst out into the dim light of the evening, Laura saw that Gray was looking at her. 'Of course it does,' he said. 'The computer knows almost everything. This island is highly automated and the computer is at the center of all we do.' His gaze drifted out of the window. 'It's we humans that are becoming increasingly used to the day-to-day operations.'
'And you really think I can help the computer, Mr. Gray?' Laura asked, then anxiously awaited his response.
He turned to her. 'Please, call me Joseph,' was all he said. The assembly building was off-limits to humans. Those who did go inside, Gray explained, made quick runs in from the half a dozen trailers that had been set up just outside.
He led Laura through the duster into the massive building. They didn't venture out onto the main floor, but instead took a side door into a hallway. It led past empty offices to a door labeled 'Nursery.' Laura followed Gray in.
Along the far wall were arrayed a series of tall stools with low backs. They faced a wide plate-glass window overlooking a large room from on high. Gray ushered Laura past rows of computer terminals toward the window.
In front of each stool was a dashboard filled with monitors and controls. Contraptions that looked like empty gloves rose from the deactivated workstations, and devices like the grip of a gun hung suspended from the ceiling by booms.
'We used to do this by hand,' Gray said, apologizing for gear that to Laura seemed futuristic. He motioned for her to climb up onto a stool.
When she did, Laura saw a strange room one story beneath the window. A huge Model Seven stood precariously amid a clutter of objects. Balls, cubes, wedges, and cones — all jet-black — were strewn about the room's floor, which like the walls and ceiling was covered in bright white padding.
The gangly robot torso was supported by straps, as were its spidery legs and stunted metal arms. Connected to the straps were long cables — some taut, others loose — that descended from a carriage on the ceiling.
The overall impression Laura got was of a puppeteer whose marionette danced on the floor far below.
'When they first come off the assembly line,' Gray explained from the stool next to hers, 'they're basically helpless.'
The Model Seven extended its slender arm uncertainly, knocking one cube to the floor from its perch atop another. The robot's gripper returned to its side with spastic starts and stops. A claw hanging from the puppet master's small arm replaced the fallen cube atop its twin. A series of cables then tightened, and the sleeve encasing the Model Seven's arm smoothly led the pupil's gripper to the block. When the metal claw closed on the cube, the cables guided the arm to the floor with machinelike precision. The arm returned to the robot's side and sagged as the sleeve's cables loosened.
'The Model Seven is being trained by what's called lead through programming,' Gray said as the robot waited
