Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus: The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis

He looked down at his body: bronze-black, decorated all over with engravings, but otherwise unmarked. He swung his legs to the floor and stood with feet apart, trying to detect some persisting damage in himself.

‘I thought I had sustained more harm than this!’ he exclaimed.

‘You did – you were very badly damaged indeed,’ Padua told him mildly. ‘You have been out for six months.’

‘Six months …’ Jasperodus echoed wonderingly. He flexed his fingers, examining his hands.

‘You were in the condition known as scrap when they brought you out of the furnace,’ Padua said. ‘But for all the damage the basic design elements were intact – the brain was particularly well protected. I undertook to put you back in order and rescued you from the junkyard – just in time, as you were about to be pounded under the steam hammer.’

‘Six months is a long time to spend on a repair job. A labour of love, almost.’ Jasperodus’ tone was sardonic.

‘Perhaps.’ Padua smiled faintly again. ‘I was loath to see such fine work as you represent go to waste. There is little to give my talents full rein here in Gordona – that is the price one pays for living in such an out-of-the-way place. I regarded it as a pleasurable test of my skill, and no thanks are due my way.’

Jasperodus, who had not intended to thank him, nevertheless noticed that Padua was looking at him with a strangely expectant expression on his face. He paced the room.

‘My faculties are fully restored?’

‘Yes, though it cost much effort.’

‘This hardly looks like your workshop.’ Jasperodus indicated the harmonious décor.

‘I decided to let you be reactivated in pleasant surroundings, rather than amid a clutter of tools and instruments.’ Again the expectant look.

‘What of radioactivity?’ Jasperodus asked suddenly, remembering the furnace. ‘Am I not dangerous to be near? The way things were, the isotope fuel might well have become unstable.’

‘There’s nothing to worry about on that score. There was a little radioactivity, but I purged your substance of it by a means of accelerating atomic decay that is known to me.’

‘You are indeed wasted in Gordona,’ Jasperodus grunted grudgingly. He paced again, trying to place what it was that was new and puzzling in his environment.

‘There’s a change,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

At this Padua laughed and clapped his hands in delight. ‘I thought you’d never notice. Try again – can you guess what it is?’

‘I wouldn’t be asking if I could,’ Jasperodus replied with an irritable gesture.

‘Well, you see, the making of robots is as much of an art as a science. Even the masters of highest attainment are invariably stronger on some features, weaker on others – except, of course, for an acme of perfection like Aristos Lyos. Now your own maker was unexcelled in the area of intellectual functions, but rather weak when it came to a certain type of fine nerve structure needed for the senses of smell and touch. Now it so happens that that area is my own speciality! So I undertook to remedy his deficiencies. In the field of touch-sensation and of smell you now have the same range and sensitivity as any man or woman!’

With much curiosity Jasperodus drew one hand across the other. It was as Padua had said: the dynamic sense of solid bodies was there, as before, but in addition there was an entirely new feeling; a stroking, tingling feeling.

Fascinated, he laid the flat of one hand on the cloth of the table he had just vacated, moving the palm gently across the felt. An entirely novel rough-smooth feel coursed through him. A whole area of his brain seemed to come alive for the first time.

‘It’s fantastic,’ he said quietly.

‘I had hoped it would afford you some diversion,’ Padua replied affably.

Jasperodus, however, would not be jollied along. ‘No doubt it will enable me to appreciate the qualities of the stable all the better,’ he grunted. ‘One thing you have not amended. I still have this irrational belief that I possess consciousness!’ And he rounded on Padua accusingly.

Padua looked a little embarrassed. ‘There was nothing I could do about that,’ he said defensively. ‘It’s in the basic design: if I tried to remove it you would be reduced to a hulk, good for nothing.’

Jasperodus emitted a sigh, a gesture he had learned from Horsu Greb. ‘Then to be frank I could have preferred that you had left me for scrap.’

His words provoked such a look of unhappiness on the robotician’s face that he instantly regretted them – he had spoiled Padua’s pleasure. But he impatiently cancelled the feeling. Padua had enjoyed his work and he, Jasperodus, had to pay the price for his enjoyment.

‘Would it be any use if I advised you not to brood too much on this enigma?’ Padua suggested cautiously. ‘It is part of your integration state, and it does appear to work, as a device for raising your degree of function to a greater independence than is normally found in a robot. You are, almost, a perfect simulation of a man.’