work. The soldier reslung the gun over his shoulder.
When they rounded a bend in the tunnel, another cavern opened up before them. A half dozen lab-coated technicians sat or stood about a large and messy work area. The room was bounded by the walls of the corridor on one side and three sets of large windows on the other. One window was brightly lit, another dim, the third dark. The corridor led on, but the soldier and Laura had arrived at their destination.
Dr. Griffith stood behind two of the seated technicians. He looked up and said 'Oh!' on seeing Laura and her escort. Every one of the dozen or so busy people, Laura noticed, also turned to look their way. Some twisted around in their chairs, both hands gripping the armrests in tense and watchful poses. But all quickly relaxed and resumed their work. The new arrivals were human.
'Look out for the cables,' Griffith said as he wove his way through the maze of consoles to greet Laura. They had rigged up some sort of temporary control room, and there were easily twice as many workstations as there were people. Laura watched one of the techs roll from console to console without getting up from his chair.
It appeared they were working two or more jobs at once.
'Sorry about all the mess,' Griffith said, smiling broadly. 'We've sort of consolidated our work group here. Come on. Let me introduce you to the team.'
He led her carefully across the room, stopping her at each of the cables to ensure she stepped safely over. She shook hands with the men and women of the cavern, who were friendly and talkative and hospitable. They seemed as glad to make contact with the outside world as Laura had been to find them.
When the introductions were finished, Laura's attention was drawn to a monitor. A Model Eight moved slowly across a room.
The floor and walls were white and antiseptic, but everywhere was strewn the debris of crushed and broken household objects. A coffeemaker lay on its side. The tattered remains of a lampshade sat tenuously atop a large clock. Torn clothes and twisted cookware and the shards of less resilient goods lay in random piles all about.
The camera followed the robot automatically. A casual collision sent a chair flying across the room, and it landed missing one of its four wooden legs. The Model Eight held two halves of a book, one half in each hand. It paused to watch the chair as it rattled to a stop in the corner.
'I take it this is some sort of finishing school for robots,' Laura said.
'We call it 'charm school,' actually,' Griffith replied.
Laura nodded. She remembered John Steinbeck's
'Dr. Aldridge?' Griffith asked. 'Are you all right? Was the elevator ride down too rough?'
Laura tried to compose herself and her thoughts. 'It was a little on the radical side.'
Griffith laughed. 'We all just use the surface entrance. I don't know anyone who takes that thing — except Mr. Gray, of course.'
'I wish I'd known that. Does Mr. Gray come down here often?'
Griffith shrugged. 'Off and on. A lot more recently — since we started having our troubles.' He looked up at her quickly. 'With the computer, I mean.' He turned to face away from her immediately.
'Well, anyway, I apologize that I can't give you the grand tour.'
'That's all right. It has to be difficult running a facility of this size when you're not fully staffed.'
'Oh, we don't 'run' this place from here or anywhere else. Everything is completely automated. Or, given what I understand of your theories, you could say it's being run by another of the company's 'employees.''
'You mean… the main computer?'
'Of course.'
'But… but the computer claims not to know what's going on down here. It claims it can't 'see' into the Model Eights' facilities or tell what they're doing.'
Griffith looked at her as if she were speaking in tongues. Laura glanced at the two technicians nearest her, who quickly returned to their work before she made eye contact. 'Well,' Griffith said awkwardly, 'that's just not the case.'
Laura looked around. At every one of the workstations there glowed a computer monitor. Lights on the surrounding panels lit and went dark, and lines of text and windows filled with charts and graphs popped onto the screens in a never-ending parade of workflow. It was all the computer's work, she realized.
'I can assure you, Dr. Aldridge — Laura — that the computer is very much in charge of things down here.' Griffith chuckled. 'As a representative of Homo sapiens everywhere, I would hate to admit it, but there is absolutely no way any one human, or any group of humans, for that matter, could ever operate a complex of facilities as extensive as the Model Eight workshops down here. Oh, not that we don't monitor things and make some decisions every once in a while. But as far as what you would call 'running' the place…?'
He shook his head.
Laura surveyed the busy room, her eyes ending up on the large observation windows. 'What are those?' she asked.
Griffith led her to the leftmost and most brightly lit of the three identical windows, which formed a rough semicircle along one wall of the room. The middle window was dimly lit, and the rightmost was dark.
'This is one of the tactile rooms,' he said. Below she saw a white concrete room filled with objects stacked neatly on shelves or piled in large bins that looked like toy boxes. There were place settings on a table, clothes on hangers, a sink with a dishrag beside it. Everything was in order.
'Here he comes,' the technician seated behind them said.
Laura spun to look at the open corridors, which were being guarded by the French soldier.
'Down there,' Griffith said, tapping Laura's shoulder and pointing down at the room below.
The Model Eight walked slowly through a tall door, which closed automatically behind it. The robot was enormous — much larger than Laura had expected. It headed straight for a large, open bin and extracted a shredded yellow piece of rubber by its handle.
'Ah,' Griffith said. 'I see it's 1.3.07.' The robot slung the frayed strands through the air. The whir and slap of the pieces could be heard through a small speaker over the window. 'I can always tell,' Griffith explained. 'This one likes that rubber ball, or what used to be a ball. He always goes to it first.'
The Model Eight let the yellow shreds drop to the floor, and it headed next for the overflowing toy chest. 'He can't really remember why he liked that rubber ball so much. His play time with it is falling off rapidly now that it has been destroyed. It's no longer as interesting as it used to be, and his mini-net's connections that led to a reward when he played with it are weakening.'
'Do you realize, Dr. Griffith, that you refer to the Model Eight as a 'he'?'
'Not all Model Eights,' he said. 'Some are quite definitely 'she.' That's one of the more amusing distractions among my team, figuring out whether each new Eight is a boy or a girl.' He looked over at her with a mischievous grin. 'It's obviously not as easy as checking the hardware, you understand.'
'What do you mean a boy or a girl?'
'I hope you don't find us to be terribly sexist, Dr. Aldridge, because it's really just intended for our amusement. We need a diversion because we spend so much time observing the Eights' behavior, especially now that Mr. Gray instituted a big-brother program.'
The Model Eight below broke a long plastic truck into two pieces.
The look on Griffith's face was like the amusement of a parent watching the boisterous, if slightly destructive, play of an active toddler.
The robot held the broken truck high over its head, pausing, Laura thought, to consider its next move. It then smashed it to pieces against the opposite wall and moved on.
'We base our informal gender designations on traditional, stereotypical human behavioral patterns. Some, like Bouncy down there, are very much into exploration of large-scale mechanical forces. Throwing things, moving as big an object as their strength and agility allows, et cetera. We call them boys. The girls tend to come into the tactile rooms and actually sit down. They'll find something like a quilt with a complicated print on it and patiently study it for hours.'
Griffith looked over at her to confirm, Laura supposed, that she wasn't offended. Apparently satisfied, he continued. 'The physical result to both boys' and girls' toys is usually the same. They're utterly destroyed during the learning process. But the behavioral patterns are quite distinctive, and they're generally consistent right from the first Power-up. Not that there's any scientific significance to the distinction, of course, but it does make for a lively
