The Night of the Storm

Dean R. Koontz The Night of the Storm

He was a robot more than a hundred years old, built by other robots nearly eight centuries after the end of human civilization. His name was Suranov, and as was the custom of his kind, he roamed the earth in search of interesting things to do. Suranov had climbed the highest mountains in the world, with the aid of special body attachments (spikes in his metal feet, tiny but strong hooks on the ends of his twelve fingers, an emergency grappling rope coiled inside his chest-area storage compartment and ready for a swift ejection if he should fall); his small, anti-grav flight motors were removed to make this climb as dangerous and, therefore, as interesting as possible. Having submitted to heavy-duty component sealing procedures, Suranov once spent eighteen months underwater, exploring a large portion of the Pacific Ocean, until he was bored even by the mating of whales and by the ever-shifting beauty of the sea bottom. Suranov had crossed deserts, explored the arctic circle on foot, gone spelunking in countless different subterranean systems. He had been caught in a blizzard, in a major flood, in a hurricane, and in the middle of an earthquake that would have registered 10 on the Richter Scale, if the Richter Scale had still been in use. Once, specially insulated, he had descended halfway to the center of the earth, there to bask in pockets of glowing gases, between pools of molten stone, scalded by eruptions of magma, feeling nothing. Eventually, he grew weary of even this colorful spectacle, and he surfaced again. He wondered if, having lived only one of his two assigned centuries, he could last through another hundred years of such tedium.

Suranov’s private counselor, a robot named Bikermien, assured him that this boredom was only temporary and easily alleviated. If one were clever, Bikermien said, one could find limitless excitement as well as innumerable, valuable situations for serious data collection both about one’s environment and one’s mechanical aptitude and heritage. Bikermien, in the last half of his second century, had developed such an enormous and complex data vault that he was assigned stationary duty as a counselor, attached to a mother-computer and utterly immobile. By now, extremely adept at finding excitement even through second-hand experience, Bikermien did not mourn the loss of his mobility; he was, after all, a spiritual superior to the ordinary robot. Therefore, when Bikermien advised, Suranov listened, however skeptical he might be.

Suranov’s problem, according to Bikermien, was that he had started out in life, from the moment he’d left the factory, to pit himself against the greatest challenges — the wildest sea, the coldest cold, the highest temperatures, the greatest pressures — and now, having conquered these things, could see no interesting obstacles beyond them. Yet, the counselor said Suranov had overlooked some of the most fascinating explorations. The quality of any challenge was directly related to one’s ability to meet it; the less adequate one felt, the better the experience, the richer the contest and the handsomer the data reward.

Does this suggest anything to you? Bikermien inquired, without speaking, the telebeam open between them.

Nothing.

So Bikermien explained it:

Hand-to-hand combat with a full-grown, male ape might seem like an uninterestingly easy challenge, at first glance; a robot was the mental and physical superior of any ape. However, one could always modify oneself in order to even the odds of what might appear to be a sure thing. If a robot couldn’t fly, couldn’t see as well at night as in the daylight, couldn’t communicate except vocally, couldn’t run faster than an antelope, couldn’t hear a whisper at a thousand yards — in short, if all of his standard abilities were dulled, except for his thinking capacity, might not a robot find that a hand-to-hand battle with an ape was a supremely exciting event?

I see your point. Suranov admitted. To understand the grandeur of simple things, one must humble himself.

Exactly.

And so it was that, on the following day, Suranov boarded the express train going north to Rogale’s Province, where he was scheduled to do some hunting in the company of four other robots, all of whom had been stripped to their essentials.

Ordinarily, they would have flown under their own power; now, none of them had that ability.

Ordinarily, they would have used their telebeams for communication; now, they were forced to talk to one another in that curious, clicking language that had been especially designed for machines but which robots had been able to do without for more than six hundred years.

Ordinarily, the thought of going north to hunt deer and wolves would have bored them all to tears, if they had been able to cry; now, however, each of them felt a curious tingle of anticipation, as if this were a more important ordeal than any he had faced before.

* * *

A brisk, efficient robot named Janus met the group at the small stationhouse just outside of Walker’s Watch, toward the northernmost corner of the Province. To Suranov, it was clear that Janus had spent several months in this uneventful duty assignment, and that he might be near the end of his obligatory two years’ service to the Central Agency. He was actually too brisk and efficient. He spoke rapidly, and he behaved, altogether, as if he must keep moving and doing in order not to have time to contemplate the uneventful and unexciting days that he had spent in Walker’s Watch. He was the kind of robot too eager for excitement; one day, he would tackle a challenge that he had not been, by degrees, prepared for, and he would end himself.

Suranov looked at Tuttle, another robot who, on the train north, had begun an interesting, if silly, argument about the development of the robot’s personality. He had contended that, until quite recently, in terms of millenia and centuries, robots had not had individual personalities. Each, Tuttle claimed, was quite like the other, cold and sterile, with no private dreams. A patently ridiculous theory. Tuttle had been unable to explain how this could have been, but he refused to back down from his position. Watching Janus chatter at them in a nervous staccato, Suranov was incapable of envisioning an era when the Central Agency would have dispatched mindless robots from the factories. The whole purpose of life was to explore, to store data collected from an individual viewpoint, even if it were repetitive. How could mindless robots ever function in the necessary manner?

As Steffan, another of their group, had said, such theories were on a par with belief in Second Awareness. (Some believed, without evidence, that the Central Agency occasionally made a mistake and, when a robot’s alloted lifespan was up, only partially erased his accumulated memory before refitting him and sending him out of the factory again. These robots, the superstitious claimed, had an advantage and were among those who matured fast enough to be elevated to duty as counselors and, sometimes, even to service in the Central Agency itself.)

Tuttle was angered to hear his views lumped with all sorts of wild tales. To egg him on, Steffan also suggested that Tuttle believed in that ultimate of hobgoblins, the ‘human being.’ At this, disgusted, Tuttle settled into a grumpy silence, while the other enjoyed the jest.

‘And now,’ Janus said, calling Suranov back from his reverie, ‘I’ll issue your supplies and see you on your way.’

Suranov, Tuttle, Steffan, Leeke, and Skowski crowded forward, eager to begin the adventure.

Each of the five were given: binoculars of rather antique design, a pair of snowshoes that clipped and bolted to their feet, a survival pack of tools and greases with which to repair themselves in the event of some unforeseen emergency, an electric hand-torch, maps, and a drug rifle complete with an extra clip of one thousand darts.

‘This is all, then?’ Leeke asked. He had seen as much danger as Suranov, perhaps even more, but now he sounded frightened.

‘What else would you need?’ Janus asked impatiently.

Leeke said, ‘Well, as you know, certain modifications have been made on us. For one thing, our eyes aren’t what they were, and — ’

‘You’ve a torch for darkness,’ Janus said.

‘And then, our ears Leeke began.

‘Listen cautiously, walk quietly,’ Janus suggested.

‘We’ve had a power reduction to our legs,’ Leeke said. ‘If we should have to run — ’

‘Be stealthy; creep upon your game before they know you’re there, and you’ll not need to chase them.’

‘But,’ Leeke persisted, ‘weakened as we are, if we should have to run from something — ’

‘You’re only after deer and wolves,’ Janus reminded him. ‘The deer will not give chase — and a wolf hasn’t