'Are you kidding?' the trainee asked, and the crowd roared with laughter.
'O-o-kay. Now, I know you've all been on long flights, but I hope you got some sleep. The course you're about to enter is going to be intense. There'll be no rest for the weary. I can, however, offer you two treats as a welcome-aboard present tonight. First off, are you ready to take a dip in the pool?'
Quite a few 'yeahs' sounded amid the general excitement and beaming smiles of the group. It was more than one would expect from adults offered a swim in a pool, but Laura could feel vicariously their excitement at embarking on the adventure of a lifetime.
'Then we'll head straight to Outfitting to get your new gear. We should be out of the pool and dried off just in time for the real treat of the day. Tonight, a few hours after sunset, the Gray Corporation has scheduled its first- ever launch of three rockets simultaneously from the island!'
The new arrivals were clearly thrilled. When they were led down a corridor by their guides, Laura gravitated toward the opposite side of the lobby A small group of people were gathered around a television.
Before Laura could see the screen, she could hear that they were watching a newscast.
'… neither confirmed nor denied reports coming off Capitol Hill that Joseph Gray had refused a direct request by the President to allow an inspection of his island by members of the International Atomic Energy Commission. Senate sources did say, however, that unilateral U.S. action had not been ruled out and that the President would be granted the widest possible latitude in dealing with the emergency up to, and including, the use of U.S. military forces.'
The people on the U-shaped sofa around the high-definition television wore grim looks. These were not the cheerful faces of the welcoming committee or the wide-eyed wonder of the would-be space cadets. These were the worried looks of older hands.
The anchorwoman went on to say that a commission established to deal with the crisis had no independent technical means of verifying the data on the asteroid released by Gray.
'Why don't you tell the world what the rest of the report said?' one of the men slouched on the sofa sniped bitterly, but the anchorwoman moved on to a story about end-of-the-world 'asteroid parties' being planned across America. 'That damn commission found that if our data was correct,' the man on the sofa pointed out, 'then Gray's plan should lead to a safe retrieval.'
'They would leave that part out,' a woman sitting across the U chimed in.
Laura turned and headed back to the car. A new batch of recruits was following its leader toward the locker rooms.
'Are we allowed to look around the island?' someone asked from the back of the pack.
'During the daylight hours, yes, but not after dark.'
Laura headed out to the car — out into the black night.
It was dark, but the laptop's screen bathed the keyboard in blue light.
She sat on the base of the statue that dominated the central boulevard below. The location seemed a natural focal point of the Village, and Laura could see where its slab had been defaced. But the chips in the sharp edges of the granite were not the prank of some juvenile vandals, as Griffith had suggested. They were the result of the awkward missteps of thousand-pound robots, Laura felt sure.
'Why is there no artwork in the Village?' she typed. 'Just the one statue?' Laura hit Enter and then craned her neck to look up at the marble figure of a woman. She wore pants, not the flowing toga of classic sculpture. Her head was raised to a globe that she held to the heavens in her hands. Laura couldn't see well in the darkness, but the orb seemed to be sculpted and was slightly irregular in shape.
Laura confirmed that the patient car still stood beside her, then looked back down at the glowing screen.
<Mr. Gray didn't want to impose his tastes on anybody. He commissioned a study of cultural and architectural preferences and designed the Village as a blend of the various motifs of human cultures by toning down or eliminating the salient exceptions.>
Laura looked at the buildings that lined the boulevard There were no Greek columns, no Victorian woodwork, no sleek chrome-and-glass facades of the late twentieth century. It contained elements of numerous styles without any one prevailing over the others.
'Well, how truly multicultural of him,' Laura zyped. 'What about his house? It's filled with the works of dead white European males.'
<Gray's lineage and culture is European. When he decorates his own home, he's not imposing his tastes on others. But when it comes to Gray the public man, rather than celebrating the differences among his workers, he carefully molded a city in which their similarities were highlighted. Humans possess basically the same 'hardware,' if you'll allow an analogy from my world. It's their 'software' that differs at collection of cultural, social, educational, and experiential conditioning that makes each human unique.>
'Are you saying it's all environment, not heredity?'
<I'm not saying that at all! You need look no further than Mr. Gray to disprove that idea. I've done studies I think you'd find interesting. Mr. Gray constructs long-term memories almost ten times as quickly as the human norm. No other examples of human genius have been measured to construct memories more quickly than three times the human average. It's in that processing speed that Mr. Gray has his greatest advantage. He doesn't have to think about something for as long before he knows the answer. And not only does he solve problems more quickly, he stores that knowledge without having to resort to humorous rhythms or rhymes, or endless repetition, or any of the other mnemonics employed by some humans to memorize things.>
'You sure seem to be in a talkative mood,' Laura typed.
<'It's good to be alive!', as you humans say.>
Something was not quite right. 'Has Mr. Gray done any more reprogramming today? Given you any more 'analgesics'?'
<Nope. But I found a couple of irritants myself and patched them over. I never realized how tiresome being sick could be. I mean, I had the Hong Kong 1085 last year, but it was over — quickly. This one, though — wow! You get tired of all the trillions of little problems that nag and nag. It's always something. 'Where is that damn capacitor report? I was supposed to get it 10.4 cycles ago!' Or 'Why am I getting this same Romanian lady every time I call to collect pay-per-view orders? That number is supposed to give me a modem's handshake protocol!' Or 'What's that big building between the computer center and the launch pads? Must be new construction, but it doesn't show up on my master permit list!' Office work is just as dreary for me as for any human; the only difference is I don't get paper cuts. You get my joke?>
'You're as high as a kite,' Laura mumbled, then squinted to reread the response. She looked up at the brightly lit walls of the assembly building rising over the dark jungle. 'What was it you were saying about the 'big building' between the computer center and the launch pads?' Laura typed with growing concern. 'Do you mean the assembly building?'
<And I'll tell you another thing, too. If I hadn't done my little reprogramming there is no way I'd be able to handle the loads that Dr. Filatov is sending my way. Everybody has banned rentals of computer time to the Gray Corporation. I'm having to purge things like my model of the shopping mall in Virginia and compress files in off- board processors — digitally! I hate digital memories. They're never the same when you decompress them. They're grainy and artificial. The compression routines don't bother with all the minor detail. If a single scanning line has two hundred blue pixels in a row, then three little reds, then two hundred greens, guess what gets saved? That's right! '200 x BLUE then 200 x GREEN.' So what the hell happened to the three little reds? Not important enough? But they may have been the whole point of the image. 'Just a dab of paint by Matisse on the canvas.' Not worth sacrificing the gains in storage capacity from a forty-to-one compression ratio — oh no! I envy you sometimes, living in a fully analog world.>
After she finally finished reading, she typed, 'You didn't answer my question about the assembly building.'
<What about the assembly building?>
'I mean, that huge building that sits out there in between the computer center and the launch pads. What does it look like to you? What is that building?'
<I don't know what that building is! Didn't I already say that, Laura? Have you been paying attention? Some department forgot to file a permit for new construction. Now I've got to go all the way back to ground- breaking, compile all the costs, figure out the man hours of labor and the rates we apply for cost accounting to
