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flyer hummed for three (seconds and added sadly, "I'm sorry sir. I was not
prepared for this."
"Keep trying," Quamodian said. "We've got to reach the Earth and Molly
Zaldivar, in spite of whatever it is!" He glanced at that surly sun and tried
not to shiver. "How's the air?" he asked. "Fit for me?"
"Oxygen, thirty-point-seven-nine per cent," the flyer said. "Diluents, noble
gases. Helium, neon, argon. Temperature and pressure toward the lower limits
of human tolerance. You won't like it, but it won't kill you."
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'Thanks," he said. "Open no, wait!"
An odd little procession came marching down the beach from a black round cave
which he saw now above the rubble at the foot of the cliffs. Half a dozen
tattered citizens. Three of them robots, badly damaged. Two yellow-crusted
multipeds with missing legs. A single human being, leading them all, waving a
white rag on a stick.
The human was visibly a woman, in a faded garment made for a larger citizen of
a very different race. Her thick dark hair had been clumsily haggled off, and
black dirt splotched her visible skin.
Quamodian scrambled out of the flyer, ran a little way to meet her, and paused
in wonder. Beneath the alien garb and the grime, she was not only beautifully
human. In some way her loveliness was hauntingly familiar. He nailed her
breathlessly, in old Earth English.
"Hello..."
"Stop!" She cut him off sharply, in the universal tongue. "Stand where you
are. Identify yourself."
Her voice was brisk and cold, but something in its rich timbre reminded
him reminded him of Molly
Zaldivar! That was what had teased his sense of recognition. The likeness sent
a chilly prickling down his spine. Scrub off the dirt, replace her butchered
hair, put her in human
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garb, feed her a few square meals, and she would be a dead ringer for Molly
Zaldivar.
"I'm waiting:" Sternly, she raised that tantalizing voice. "Let's have your
standard identification code."
He made some vague, bewildered sound.
"Speak outl" She waved a signal, and the robots darted out around him. "I'm
the authority here."
Stammering a little, he recited his universal identification pattern.
"Thank you, Monitor Quamodian." She nodded briskly. "I am also with the
Companions of the Star.
Senior Monitor Clothilde Kwai Kwich." She stressed the Senior. "What's the
date, outside?"
He gave her the universal date.
"Thank you, Monitor." Calculating, she made an appealing little frown that
belonged to Molly
Zaldivar. "That means I've been here five years five years too long!"
She nodded at the bloated sun.
"Time's hard to follow here," she added. "Because the day and the year on this
planet are the same. The sun never moves in the sky. We can't even count the
local years, because we can see no stars for reference points."
Listening, Quamodian closed his eyes. Except for its brisk authority, her rich
voice was altogether Molly's.
"Wake upl" she snapped. "How did you get here?"
"I was in transflection transit from Exion Four to Earth," Quamodian said.
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"With travel priority from Cyg-nus to answer a trouble call from a girl named
Molly Zaldivar." He saw no change in her dark-smudged face when he spoke the
name, but he couldn't help asking, "You don't happen to have a twin named
Molly?"
"Certainly not. Don't waste my time with idle talk. Monitor, you'd better wake
upl We've all facing unprecedented problems here. Every effort must be
directed toward their solution. As your superior Companion, I'll require you
to cooperate. My subordinates may now identify themselves."
Speaking in unison, the three robots intoned a voice pattern which identified
them as traffic safety inspectors. Curiously, all three gave the same serial
number. The two yellow-shelled multipeds spoke in turn, but they were both
assistant traffic safety inspectors and then-
identification codes were identical.
"They arrived a year after I did," Clothilde Kwai Kwich explained. "I had been
assigned to discover what becomes
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of the statistically small number of passengers lost in transflection transit.
Their assignment was to find what became of me. They entered the headquarters
terminal as a team of two an inspector and his robot assistant. I had been in
route to Exion Four, and that was their destination." Staring at the three
damaged robots and the two crippled multipeds, Quamodian felt cold breath on
the back of his neck.
"You see what happened," she went on. "The inspector was duplicated in
transit. The robot assistant was triplicated. What is even more confusing,
their identities were switched.,All the robots now have the minds and memories
of the original inspector. The duplicated original inspector has the logical
programs and the memory banks of the robot assistant. Finally, they were all
dropped here."
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Her brisk voice cracked. "And that " For a moment, beneath her commanding
self-assurance, he heard the quaver of naked terror. She stiffened at once,
recovering herself. "Monitor Quamodian, that's the sort of problem we face
here." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]