Split Infinity

Stile brought the pack to Sheen. He hoped her robot-structure was standard in this respect; he didn’t want to waste time looking for her power site. What made her special was her brain-unit, not her body, though that became easy to forget when he held her in his arms. Men thought of women in terms of their appearance, but most men were fools—and Stile was typical.  Yet if Sheen’s prime directive and her superficial form were discounted, she would hardly differ from the cleanup machines. So was it foolish to be guided by appearance and manner?

He ran his fingers over her belly, pressing the navel.  Most humanoid robots—ah, there! A panel sprang out, revealing the power site. He hooked out the used power pack, still hot from its sudden discharge, and plugged in the new.

Nothing happened. Alarm tightened his chest. Oh—there would naturally be a safety-shunt, to cut off the brain from the body during a short, to preserve it. He checked about and finally located it: a reset switch hid-den under her tongue. He depressed this, and Sheen came back to life.

She snapped her belly-panel closed. “Now I owe you one. Stile,” she said.

“Are we keeping count? I need you—in more ways than two.”

She smiled. “I’d be satisfied being needed for just one thing.”

“That, too.”

She glanced at him. She seemed more vibrant than before, as if the new power pack had given her an extra charge. She moved toward him.

There was a stir back the way they had come. It might be a machine, returning from a routine mission- but they did not care to gamble on that. Obviously they had not yet lost the enemy.

Sheen took him to the service side of a large feeding station. Silently she indicated the empty crates. A truck came once or twice a day to deliver new crates of nutro-powder and assorted color-flavor-textures, and to re-move the expended shells. From these ingredients were fashioned the wide variety of foods the machines pro-vided, from the vomitlike pudding to authentic-seeming carrots. It was amazing what technology could do.

Actually, Stile had once tasted a real carrot from his employer’s genuine exotic foods garden patch, a discard, and it had not been quite identical to the machine-constituted vegetable. As it happened. Stile preferred the taste and texture of the fake carrots with which he was familiar. But Citizens cultivated the taste for real foods.

He could hide inside one of these in fair comfort for several hours. Sheen would provide him with food; though this was the region for food, it was all sealed in its cartons, and would be inedible even if he could get one open. Only the machines, with their controlled temperature and combining mechanisms and recipe programs, could reconstitute the foods properly, and he was on the wrong side of their wall.

Stile climbed into a crate. Sheen walked on, so as not to give his position away. She would try to mislead the pursuit. If this worked, they would be home free for a day, perhaps for the whole week. Stile made himself halfway comfortable, and peered out through a crack.

No sooner had Sheen disappeared than a mech-mouse appeared. It twittered as it sniffed along, following their trail. It paused where Stile’s trail diverged from Sheen’s, confused, then proceeded on after her.

Stile relaxed, but not completely. Couldn’t tell the difference between a robot and a man?  Sniffers were better than that! He should have taken some precaution to minimize or mask his personal smell, for it was a sure giveaway—

Oh, Sheen had done that. She had given him a scented shower. The mouse was following the trail of rose—and Sheen’s scent was now the same as his. A living hound should have been able to distinguish the two, but in noses, as in brains, the artificial had not yet closed the gap. Fortunately.

But soon that sniffer, or another like it, would return to trace the second trail, and would locate him. He would have to do something about that.

Stile climbed out of his box, suffered a pang in one knee, ran to his original trail, followed it a few paces, and diverged to another collection of crates. Then back, and to a truck-loading platform, where he stopped and retreated. With luck, it would seem he had caught a ride on the vehicle. Then he looped about a few more times, and returned to his original crate. Let the sniffers solve that puzzle!

But the sniffer did not return, and no one else came.  This tracking operation must have been set up on the simplistic assumption that as long as the sniffer was moving, it was tracking him. His break—perhaps.

Time passed. The night advanced. Periodically the food machines exhausted a crate of cartons and ejected it, bumping the row along. Stile felt hungry again, but knew this was largely psychological; that double handful of regurgitated pudding should hold him a while yet.