“Yah, sure. Nice low number you got there. I guess I should have said ‘What are you?’”
“My lord, I am a labor and defense unit. Would you please accompany me. We have very little time.”
“You’re maybe something my nephew, Heiny, came up with?” Guibedo noticed that the thing had at least eight additional fixed eyes, scattered around its circumference.
“Yes, my lord. Lord Copernick created me. He sent me here to facilitate your escape. Please accompany me.” The LDU was backing down into the pit.
“Well, if Heiny says so, let’s go,” Guibedo said, following.
“Hey!” Jimmy said. “What about me?”
“Sir, your presence would constitute a security risk. I must insist that you stay here,” the LDU said.
“He’s right, Jimmy,” Guibedo said. “This could get rough. They’re gonna throw you out in the morning, anyhow.”
“Yeah, Professor, but what am I going to tell them?”
“If you tell them the truth, Jimmy, they’ll throw you in the funny house. Just tell them you went to sleep and when you woke up, I was gone.”
“Yeah, okay. Take it easy, Professor! I’ll get me that tree house like you said.” Jimmy shook Guibedo’s hand.
Guibedo was already waist deep in the pit. “And when you get your tree house, talk to it. They like that. Bye, Jimmy.”
“Bye, Professor.”
“My lord, has the leave-taking ceremony been completed?” the LDU asked.
“Uh, yeah, sure.”
The LDU slid the concrete slab back into position over the pit. When the floor was sealed, lights in the tunnel went on. A long line of LDUs stood patiently waiting. Each was carrying a load of wet cement on its broad back.
“My lord. Once we have you out of here, our plan is to seal up the first one hundred feet of the tunnel with cement to slow down pursuit, then to fill the balance with dirt.”
“That’s a lot of work!”
“We were made for work, my lord. My Lord Copernick ordered it.”
“Well, let’s get walking.”
“That’s quite impossible for you, my lord. This tunnel is fifteen miles long.”
“Fifteen miles! You dug this for me?”
“Yes, my lord, that’s why we were three weeks in getting here.” The LDU crouched to the height of a chair. “Would you please get on my back.”
Eyeing the LDU’s spindly legs, Guibedo cautiously put his portly bottom on its back. The LDU stood up easily to its normal tabletop height and took off at a smooth trot with the man riding sidesaddle. Guibedo soon found it was more comfortable to ride facing forward with his legs crossed.
“Curves ahead, my lord.” Tentacles that Guibedo hadn’t noticed slid from the LDU’s sides and fastened themselves around the man’s waist and legs. Several others provided an acceptable back rest. The LDU’s speed increased to thirty mph and they were still passing concrete-laden LDUs.
“A lot of you guys here.”
“We are ten thousand in the zero-zero division, my lord. Ten brigades of a thousand each with ten platoons of a hundred, each with ten squads of ten LDUs.”
“Just like the army,” Guibedo said, his white hair flapping in the breeze. “Who’s the general?”
“No one, exactly, my lord. Or whichever one of us you talk to. You see, we’re all in telepathic contact with each other. When one of us knows your desires, we all do, and therefore comply.”
“Telepathy! I didn’t know that Heiny was that far along.”
“I don’t believe he designed for it, my lord,” the LDU said above the wind. “But you see, we’re all identical and we have quite extensive and widely distributed redundant neural systems. I have twelve major ganglia, and I can function properly on six.”
“Like the thing with human identical twins…” Guibedo said. “So Heiny just got lucky! Well, that’s nice. Things went bad for him for too long there. I guess it made you guys pretty easy to educate.”
“Yes, my lord. Once he discovered our abilities, he only had to teach one of us to read and write. The rest of us picked it up from Alpha 1. Now, each of us has his own field of expertise, based on our individual reading, with the information available to all.”
“So what’s your specialty?” Guibedo asked.
“Unarmed combat, with a minor in sociology, my lord.” The LDU crowded closer to the left-hand wall of the tunnel. They were no longer passing the concrete carriers, and LDUs with empty baskets were passing them at an astounding speed.
“Pretty quick, your buddies are.”
“Cruising speed for an LDU is forty mph, my lord, although we can go sixty for short durations.”
“Unarmed combat?” Guibedo said. “If you were expecting trouble, why go unarmed?”
“My lord, I mean no
“Cutting through concrete! How you do that?”
“Diamond is just another carbon compound, my lord.”
“And carbon is one of the things that we are all made of.” Guibedo laughed. “So you
“We couldn’t know if there would be resistance or not, my lord. Nor could we be sure that we would come up in the right cell of the prison. We Alpha series are only telepathic with one another, not with humans.”
“Betcha Heiny’s working on that, though.”
“Yes, my lord. As I understand it, the Gamma series LDU is to have a malleable nerve net. It is hoped that they will be able to at least receive telepathically from other species, such as man.”
“Well, I’m not so sure I like that, uh—what was your name again?” Guibedo asked.
“Alpha 001723, my lord.”
“Not your number. Your name.”
“I have no other designation, my lord.”
“A nice guy like you oughta have a name, not a number.”
“Do you really think I could, my lord? I mean, it would be permitted?”
“Sure thing. Why not? Pick any name you want.”
“Well, my lord, I think I would like to be called Dirk.”
“Dirk, huh? I was thinking maybe Rover, but if it’s Dirk you want, it’s Dirk you’ll get.”
“Thank you, my lord!”
“Anytime. How old are you, Dirk?”
“I hatched three months ago, my lord, although I was sentient before then.”
“Three months old. Well, I guess that explains it,” Guibedo mused. “So you were sentient inside your egg. That must have been strange.”
“It was, my lord. Each of us thought he was Alpha 1, the first one hatched. And Alpha 1 thought he heard echoes, but he didn’t know that that was unusual.”
“Hah! Hatching must have been a shock. But I don’t see why you were so well developed at such an early stage.”
“It has to do with our cell replication process, my lord. You see, we have four-stranded DNA, which reproduces very slowly. This results in a long gestation period, twelve months. But when we do hatch, we have as many cells as a full-grown adult. With enough food, we can grow from a two-pound eggling to a three—hundred- pound adult in a week, simply by increasing cell size.”
“And here I been using single strand DNA on all my trees,” Guibedo said.
“My lord, that certainly gives rapid growth and repair, but a combat troop needs resistance to heat and radiation, and our glandular redundancy makes up for our slow repairability,” Dirk said.
“You know, Dirk, for a specialist in unarmed combat, you sure know your biochemistry.”
