Their near perfect existence in New York continued until early one morning, when Richard and Nikki were topside together along the northern ramparts of the island. Actually it was the little girl who first saw the silhouettes of the ships in the dim Raman light. She pointed out across the dark water. “Look, Boobah,” she said, “Nikki sees something.”
Richard’s weakened eyes could not detect anything in the darkness, and his flashlight beam did not travel far enough to reach whatever it was that Nikki was seeing. Richard pulled out the powerful binoculars that he always carried with him and confirmed that there were indeed two vessels in the middle of the Cylindrical Sea. Richard placed Nikki in the carrier on his back and hurried home to the lair.
The rest of the family was just waking up and had difficulty initially understanding why Richard was so alarmed. “But who else could it be in a boat?” he said. “Especially on the northern side. It has to be an exploration party sent by Nakamura.”
A family council was held over breakfast. Everyone agreed that they were facing a serious crisis. When Patrick confessed that he had seen Katie on the day of the escape, primarily because he had wanted to tell his sister good-bye, and that he had made a few unusual comments which had caused Katie to start asking questions, Nicole and the others became silent.
“I didn’t say anything specific,” Patrick said apologetically, “but it was still a dumb thing to do. Katie is very smart. After we all disappeared, she must have put all the pieces together.”
“But what do we do now?” Robert Turner voiced everyone’s apprehension. “Katie knows New York very well-she was almost a teenager when she left here-and she can lead Nakamura’s men directly to this lair. We’ll be sitting ducks for them down here.”
“Is there any other place we can go?” Max asked.
“Not really,” Richard replied. “The old avian lair is empty, but I don’t know how we would feed ourselves down there. The octospider lair was also vacant when I visited it several months ago, but I haven’t been inside their domain again since Nicole arrived in New York. We must assume, of course, based on what happened when Nicole and I went exploring, that our friends with the black and gold tentacles are still around. Even if they aren’t living in their old lair anymore, we would still have the same problem of obtaining food if we were to move over there.”
“What about the area behind the screen, Uncle Richard?” Patrick asked. “You said that’s where our food is manufactured. Maybe we could find a couple of rooms there.”
“I’m not very optimistic,” Richard said after a short pause, “but your suggestion is probably our only reasonable option at this point.”
The family decided that Richard, Max, and Patrick would reconnoiter the region behind the black screen, both to find out exactly where the human food was being produced and to determine if another suitable living area existed. Robert, Benjy, the women, and the children would stay in the lair. Their assignment was to start developing the procedures for a rapid evacuation of their living quarters, in case such action ever became necessary.
Before going, Richard finished testing a new radio system that he had designed in his spare time. It was strong enough that the explorers and the rest of the family would be able to remain in radio contact during the entire? time that they were separated. The existence of the radio link made it easier for Richard and Nicole to convince Max Puckett to leave his rifle in the lair.
The three men had no difficulty following the map in Richard’s computer and reaching the boiler room that Richard and Nicole had visited on their previous exploration. Max and Patrick both stared in wonder at the twelve huge boilers, the vast area of neatly arranged raw materials, and the many varieties of biots scurrying about. The factory was active. In fact, every single one of the boilers was involved in some kind of manufacturing process.
“All right,” Richard said into his radio to Nicole back in the lair. “We’re here and we’re ready. Place the dinner order and we’ll see what happens.”
Less than a minute later one of the boilers closest to the three men terminated whatever it was doing. Meanwhile, not far from the hut behind the boilers, three biots that looked like boxcars with hands moved out into the arrays of raw material, quickly picking up small quantities of many different items. These three biots next converged on the inactive boiler system near Richard, Max, and Patrick, where they emptied their containers onto the conveyor belt entering the boiler. Immediately the men heard the boiler surge into active operation. A long, skinny biot, resembling three crickets tied together in a row, each with a bowl-shaped carapace, crawled up on the conveyor belt system when the short manufacturing process was almost finished. Moments later, the boiler stopped again and the processed material came out on the conveyor belt. The segmented cricket biot deployed a scoop from its rear end, placed all the human food upon its backs, and scampered quickly away.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” Max said, watching the cricket biot disappear down the corridor behind the hut. Before any of the men could say anything else, another set of boxcars with hands loaded the conveyor belts with thick, long rods, and in less than a minute the boiler that had made their food was operating for another purpose.
“What a fantastic system,” Richard exclaimed. “It must have a complex interrupt process, with food orders at the top of the priority queue. I can’t believe—”
“Hold on just a damn minute,” Max interrupted, “and repeat what you just said in normal English.”
“We have automatic translation subroutines back at the lair-I designed them originally when we were here years ago,” Richard said excitedly. “When Nicole entered chicken, potatoes, and spinach into her own computer, a listing of keyboard commands which represent the complex chemicals in those particular foods was printed on her output buffer. After I signaled that we were ready, she typed that string of commands on the keyboard. They were immediately received here and what we saw was the response. At the time, all the processing systems were active; however, the Raman equivalent of a computer here in this factory recognized that the incoming request was for food, and made it the highest priority.”
“Are you saying, Uncle Richard,” Patrick said, “that the controlling computer here shut down that operating boiler so that it could make our food?”
“Yes, indeed,” said Richard.
Max had moved some distance away and was staring at the other boilers in the huge factory. Richard and Patrick walked over beside him.
“When I was a little boy, about eight or nine,” Max said, “my father and I went on our first overnight camping trip, up in the Ozarks several hours from our farm. It was a magnificent night and the sky was full of stars. I remember lying on my back on my sleeping bag and staring at all those tiny twinkling lights in the sky. That night I had a big, big thought for an Arkansas farm boy. I wondered how many alien children, out there somewhere in the universe, were looking up at the stars at exactly that moment and realizing, for the first time, how very small their tiny domain was in the overall scheme of the cosmos.”
Max turned around and smiled at his two friends. “That’s one of the reasons I remained a farmer,” he said with a laugh. “With my chickens and pigs, I was always important. I brought them their food. It was a major event when ole Max showed up at their pen…”
He paused for a moment. Neither Richard nor Patrick said anything. “I think that deep down I always wanted to be an astronomer,” Max continued, “to see if I could understand the mysteries of the universe. But every time I thought about billions of years and trillions of kilometers, I became depressed. I couldn’t stand the feeling of complete and total insignificance mat came over me. It was as if a voice inside my head was saying, over and over, ‘Puckett, you aren’t shit. You are absolutely zero.’“
“But knowing that insignificance, especially being able to measure it, makes us humans very special,” Richard said quietly.
“Now we’re talking philosophy,” Max replied, “and I’m completely out of my element. I’m comfortable with farm animals, tequila, and even wild midwestern thunderstorms. All this,” Max said, waving his arms at the boilers and the factory, “scares the shit out of me. If I had known, when I signed up for that Martian colony, that I would meet machines that are smarter than people—”
“Richard, Richard,” they all heard Nicole’s anxious voice on the radio. “We have an emergency. Ellie has just returned from the northern shore. Four large boats are about to land. Ellie says she’s positive she spotted a police uniform on one of the men. Also, she has reported some kind of large rainbow in the south. Can you get back here
