Alice: The Girl From Earth - Булычев Кир - Страница 33

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The robots were the forced into a lottery; those who lost were taken apart for spare parts or sold to passing space ships or stellar wanderers for machine oil. That was how the robots lived. Gradually, they became all the fewer, but all the same there remained many millions of robots unemployed. The robots decided to build a space ship and fly it to some as yet unsettled planet in order to start all over again, but they were unable to build a ship because they had no plans, and they were unable to design one themselves. And so it continued, right up to the present time. And then this strange epidemic struck the robots and all of them were paralyzed.

“But about what animals are you talking?” I asked the robot’s head.

“About robot animals. We wanted to have everything that people have. And when we realized that the local animals had all died out because they could not live on a dead planet, we made artificial animals But then the shortages became to great and we decided to turn the animals into spare parts of ourselves. We don’t do it any longer, but the animals could feel the danger and they fled over the planet Eyeron’s flat valleys. If you can help us we can catch some totally unusual metal animals for you.

“Thank you,” I told the robot head, but at the same time thinking that such animals would hardly fit into our Zoo when every school child on Earth can now build a mechanical turtle or electric hedgehog from a kit bought from a store.

While we spoke with the robot’s head Zeleny cleaned all the parts of the robot’s body throughly and applied new lubricating oil. Then he tightened the robots screws from top to bottom and pressed his thumb down on a red button. All of us waited with concern for what might happen next. The robot uncertainly raised an arm and then made a step forward. The leg obeyed him He made another step, raised both arms above his head, bent forward, then back, and began to dance. I had never before in my life seen a dancing robot. He almost knocked over the table and nearly kicked me; the robot seemed to be laughing from joy.

Having danced himself to contentment the robot shouted:

“Tha…ag!” And froze.

We hadn’t changed the lubricating oil on his head.

This time engineer Zeleny didn’t hit the robot with his fist on his chin’ he just dipped the head into an open oil can.

The robot started to gurgle, something clicked inside him, the mouth started to open and closed again, and the robot sang in a fine, resonant voice:

“Too, too, the lilly-white boys, clothe them all in green, Ho! Ho! one for one and all for all and ever more shall be, so!” which had evidently been programmed into his ancestor long, long ago.

“So then, the problem is located in the lubricating oil.” The robot said more than a little disturbed. “But it was almost fresh. We had just changed it.”

Zeleny, without saying a word, placed some of the old machine oil taken from the robot onto a glass slide and went over to the microscope.

“It’s all clear now.” Zeleny said after a minute. “I should have guessed it right from the beginning. There’s bacteria in the oil which turns it into useless gunk. Interesting any idea how this bacteria could have gotten into your oil supply?”

The robot started to think. We all went into the Crew’s Lounge to continue the conversation.. The robot continued to think. We poured ourselves tea, and poured our robot guest a tube of sunflower oil, an enormous delicacy for robots. The robot automatically drank down the tube’s contents and continued to think.

Suddenly over our heads the Blabberyap bird awoke. It caught one sight of our guest and, spreading its beak wide, began to sing:

“‘Who’s afraid of the big, bad, wolf..’.”

The bird was singing in the robot’s voice.

We were very surprised. Only the robot was not surprised; he raised his head and said to the Blabberyap bird:

“Hello, bird. How are you?”

But the Blabberyap bird continued to sing; it fluttered its wings. No one had expected an answer; a Blabberyap is not a very wise bird.

“You know the Blabberyap bird?” Alice asked.

“Yes, of course.” The robot answered absently. “I was the one who repaired him.”

“And how could you repair a living bird?” Alice was curious.

“A few years ago,” the robot answered, “this bird came to our planet out of space. At the time we didn’t have any air worth breathing and there were no local animals left, but Blabberyaps, as you must know, do not need air. They are able to fly between planets and not breath for several weeks and even for months. But this bird hardly made it to our planet. Someone had attacked it en route and severely wounded the bird.

“We rescued the bird, fattened him up again on lubricating oil, but one wing had to be cut off and replaced with a prosthetic.”

“That’s not possible.” I exclaimed. “We would have noticed it already.”

“Take a look.” The robot answered with pride. “We do superb repair work.”

I got to my feet and walked over to the Blabberyap bird. The bird, as though guessing what was needed, spread its right wing. I felt it. Beneath the feathers was metal. The robot had told the truth.

“As you see, not even you noticed it.” The robot said triumphantly.

“But what happened to the bird then?” Alice asked.

“It had flown here from the Medusa system.” The robot said. “Someone was chasing after it and wanted to kill it. While we were fixing the bird it told us a great deal, and we leaned that someone had suffered some sort of accident and fallen into danger on one of the Medusa system’s planets and the bird was hurrying to inform someone else, a friend. We would have gone to his aid ourselves, but we don’t have any space ships.”

“And you let the bird go?”

“We let it go.” The robot said. “But we tried to explain to it that it would never be able to reach the sector of the Galaxy where it was headed. Although the artificial wing looks just like the real one, it’s not possible to fly very far on it. Alas, the bird did not understand us. It is not a very wise bird. But we also knew that the planet Blooke isn’t very far from us; it’s the Blabberyap bird’s home planet, and we concluded the blabberyap bird would be able to make it home. We haven’t seen it since then.”

“There, see!” Alice said. “How can you doubt that the Second Captain survived and sent the bird for help now?”

“But four years have passed since then.” I answered. “Most likely, he’s dead.”

“But I should relate to you one very strange event.” The robot said. “It took place not all that long ago. About a month or so. Just three days before the epidemic began. I would not have even remembered about it had I not seen the Blabberyap bird. A small black ship landed here on our world. One individual emerged. He wore a hat. We thought at first that he wanted to deal in our spare robots, but it turned out his ship was damaged and he needed our aid… We were delighted to have a chance to render assistance to this person…”

“That was Doctor Verkhovtseff.” Alice whispered.

“But when his ship was ready for flight we asked him if he might give us some machine oil or recent newspapers in exchange for the labor. However, the person in the hat cursed us and said that we would get nothing. And that we should be thankful to him for even leaving us alive. I then said to him: ‘Alien, you should be ashamed of yourself. I remember when we aided a non sapient bird, a Blabberyap, and repaired her wing, although she had nothing to give us in return, and we thought nothing about it. But you are a sapient being, an Earthman by your exterior appearance. You should be ashamed of yourself!’ At that he asked: ‘What Blabberyap’s wing did you fix?’ I said that had happened all of four years before and was irrelevant to the present matter. But he insisted that I tell him all about the injured bird. You should have seen how angry he became. He cursed us for helping the bird, and when he learned she had flown on to the planet Blooke, he set off for there. ‘I have wasted far too much time on that darned bird!” And he muttered a few more things. And later that night he was seen near the main cistern…”

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