you were on the verge of a breakthrough.'
For the very first time since her arrival, Laura suddenly felt confident about something. He was desperate for her to stay. A smile crept onto her face, and she had to suppress it lest it be betrayed in her voice. 'Okay, if you won't tell me everything, you've at least got to tell me a whole lot more. Enough for me to decide if I can continue with my work here.'
'And if I do, you'll stay?'
'Well, that sort of depends on what you tell me.'
'All right then!' Gray responded with obvious delight, and Laura again found herself fighting a smile. 'Here's the deal.' he said, taking to his feet and standing profiled against the starry black canvas. 'I'll grant you unlimited physical access to the facilities. What you figure out on your own — any conclusion you draw — is your business. That means I'll only tell you things I think you're ready for when I think you need to know them. Is that a deal?'
'No. I want to know at least as much as you've told your department heads. At least as much.'
She waited. It was a test. 'Fair enough,' Gray replied.
In the darkness, Laura grinned in silent celebration of her coup.
'Let's get started,' he said, grabbing the lantern. 'Dr. Aldridge, I'd like to introduce to you number 1.2.01R — otherwise known as 'Hightop.'' The beam of light swung around to the opposite side of the ledge. There sat an enormous Model Eight robot.
Laura gasped and grabbed at the ground in panic. One flinch, one twitch from the giant machine would have sent her flying down the hill for the car. But the hulking metal beast sat in a surprisingly human repose, and Laura remained coiled in a four-point stance atop the quilt.
Gray placed the lantern on the ground and opened a laptop computer beside the robot. Its screen came to life and Gray typed away. Laura kept her eyes fixed on the reclining Model Eight. It was covered in a gunmetal-gray material that reflected none of the light cast by the bright beam. Its 'face' was oddly human in appearance despite having lenses for eyes and vented membranes where its mouth and nose should be. It had all the same joints as on a human — elbows, knees, wrists, ankles, et cetera. A shiny black fabric encased the robot's massive limbs in a tight elastic fit, and subtle ridges of hard metal were clearly flexed just underneath. A black cable protruded from an open compartment on the robot's chest. It snaked its way to a port at the back of Gray's computer.
'Hightop sends his regards,' Gray said, looking up from the bright screen, 'and he asks that I shine the light on you. Do you mind?' Laura shrugged and shook her head. Gray shined the lantern in her face for a moment, then turned it back toward the reclining robot.
'Hightop thinks you're pretty,' Gray said.
'What?' Laura asked. 'Let me see that.'
Gray held the laptop in front of her. <She is pretty,> Laura read on the screen.
She examined the huge machine from close up. 'Are you sure this is safe?' she whispered.
'What? Hightop? He's our star! He's also the robot whose battery ran down. Interestingly, when we reprogrammed him, he learned much more quickly than before. Apparently, a lot of the connections he'd made in his first incarnation remained intact because he scores a good twenty percent higher on aptitude tests than the others in his class. Better even than his original class.'
Hightop sat motionless, its head turned slightly toward the two humans. Laura found it disconcerting that she could get no cues from the robot.
No body language. No facial expressions. Nothing in its eyes.
'Okay,' she said, 'what about the rest of our deal? What about the nuclear devices? Tonight's super-important space launch? The deadline, whenever it is?'
'It's two days,' Gray said, 'and are you sure you want to know the answers to those questions?' Laura nodded, but inwardly she doubted her answer. He rose and held his hand out to Laura. She didn't need the help, but she took his hand anyway.
'Where're we going?' she asked.
'To answer your questions,' Gray said, and he started down the hill.
'What about all this stuff?' Laura called out, looking at the gear strewn all about. They were obviously skipping the little [garbled] Gray had planned.
'Hightop'll clean it up.'
'Why do you call him 'Hightop'?'
Gray stepped back onto the quilt, a smile barely visible in the dim light. 'We put the robots in tactile rooms to expose them to everyday items. The idea is they won't then go around crushing things when we let them out into the real world. Well, Hightop fell in love with some size-fourteen triple-E sneakers. He figured out that they went on his feet, and damned if they didn't fit. One of the techs laced them up, and he wore them till they fell apart, which wasn't very long.'
'Did you bring Hightop up here just to show me?'
Gray regarded the machine in silence for a moment 'I didn't bring Hightop here. He climbed up on his own. Startled the hell out of me.' Gray caught Laura's eye, then turned to face the dark mass of the island, which was bounded by the slightly brighter glow from the water. 'They're getting out of the yard.'
Even in the negligible light his brilliant eyes were the focus of who he was. They were the windows to one of the greatest minds ever.
'How did you do it?' she whispered. 'How did you turn tiny flashes of light into… life?'
She could see the white teeth of his grin. 'From simplicity, complexity arises.'
28
'This is my media room,' Gray said. Laura followed him into a previously unnoticed room just down the hall from his study. He flipped on the lights to reveal what looked like the bridge of a spaceship. The room was completely circular, with walls covered floor to ceiling with high-definition television screens. In the center stood a plush 'captain's chair' mounted high atop a sturdy black swivel. All was metal and leather and beige carpeting. The room had clearly been designed by and for a male. Gray ushered Laura not to the big chair but to a sofa sunken into the floor just in front.
He settled in beside her and powered up the system from an instrument console that took the place of a coffee table.
'Are we hailing an enemy vessel or something?' Laura asked, and Gray smiled.
In rapid succession, hundreds of screens lit the walls with spectacular displays, bringing the room alive with five hundred channels.
Fully one-quarter of the programs were news broadcasts, and a sizable percentage of those had the same still photograph of a trackless section of night sky. They had the same stars, the same blackness of space, and no hint as to what the significance of the picture was.
'Does this have something to do with your launch?' Laura asked.
'Indirectly,' Gray replied. He picked up a laser pointer and directed a cursor smoothly from screen to screen until it rested on a broadcast whose legend read 'CNN-5' in the lower right-hand corner. At the push of a button atop the small device, sound burst from thunderous speakers, and a red box lit the borders of the active channel.
'… at Mount Palomar still can't say whether the object is any threat to us here. We go now to our CNN correspondent on science and technology to get the latest. Steve?' The picture was now split between the anchorwoman in her studio and a reporter, who stood in front of a messy bulletin board holding a microphone. The reporter stepped aside to reveal a bald man in short sleeves from whose chin sprouted an enormous, bushy beard. 'Cathy, I'm here with Professor Lawrence Summers of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Professor Summers, I understand the people here at JPL have been doing some rough calculations.'
'O-o-oh,' the man laughed, red lips protruding from his beard. 'I wouldn't call them calculations. Back-o'-the- napkin kinds of things, really.'
'Perhaps you could explain the problem for our viewers. Why can't we get any firm figures on exactly where
