Isaac Asimov's Robots and Aliens 5 by harry

Author:harry
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Published: 2011-02-03T23:57:06.150000+00:00

CHAPTER 13

JANET

A cool spring morning in Robot City. The black limousine rolled swiftly through the empty streets, nearly silent save for the soft thrumming of its electric motor and the gentle hiss of rubberoid tires on pavement. Inside the vehicle, Janet Anastasi sat in the passenger compartment, her nose buried in a sheaf of fax pages, while Basalom sat in the chauffeur’s compartment, jacked into the vehicle’s master control panel, driving.

One of the advantages of being a robot with telesensory feeds was that Basalom could rotate his head 180 degrees and still keep an eye on the road. Confident that the vehicle was safely under control, Basalom swiveled around to look at Dr. Anastasi. He allocated every third nanosecond to introspection.

She certainly seems happier now that she’s stopped sleeping in the lander and has taken an apartment in the city. Briefly switching to thermographic vision, he felt a small glow of satisfaction in the part of his brain that Dr.

Anastasi had taken to calling his “mother hen” circuit. Dr. Anastasi’s heat contours were a calm, relaxed study in blues and greens. There were no indicators of unpredictable endocrine activity, no hints of dangerous blood pressure or cardiac rate changes. And it’s been 52 hours since her last emotional outburst, Basalom noted with some pride. Yes, she’s definitely happier now that she’s adapting to the city.

Sure, mac, the limousine interjected, give the lady all the credit. Why don’cha ever notice how the city is adapting to her?

Will you kindly keep out of my private thoughts? Basalom asked, not for the first time.

Can’t help it, Mac, the car answered. You go around jacking your main data bus into other folk’s sensory feeds, your thought stream’s gonna become a party line.

Still, you could have the decency to pretend that you aren’t listening.

Yeah, I could, the car said. And on the other tire, if it bugs you that much, you could go back to letting me drive. After all, I am Personal Vehicle One.

You are a pile of steel and plastic with the simulated personality of a twentieth-century Chicago cabbie, Basalom corrected archly, and I will no longer tolerate your verbal abuse of Dr. Anastasi.

Suit yourself, Mac. I get recharged no matter who’s driving. The car’s positronic brain went back into idle mode, and Basalom once more resumed the task of trying to create a private security partition in his brain.

Erecting an encrypted buffer without verbally thinking about how he was doing it was a ticklish job, though. When he thought that he’d succeeded, he moved the stack of pointers that represented his consciousness into the secured partition and initiated a new thought stream. What in the name of Wendell Avery were the supervisors thinking of when they decided to create this mass of argumentative positrons, anyhow?

They were thinking of what Dr. Anastasi said in Tunnel Station # I 7, Personal Vehicle One answered, as clearly as ever. As she was returning via tunnel to the spaceport after her first meeting with Central, she said-and I quote: “Frost, Basalom, look at what the air blast has done to my hair.

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