“So what? It’s safe enough down here. No need for security.”

“I know, I know. It’s just disturbing. It should be closed.”

“God, you’re going anomaly-crazy. Let’s go in.”

She charged ahead of him before he could hold her back. Her sudden move didn’t surprise him. Ariel had always been more impulsive than he. He ran after her.

Again, as they crossed a threshold into a dark room, the automatic lighting did not function. At least the Compass Tower rooms had manual overrides so that, when necessary, lights could be controlled by the inhabitants. Ariel, feeling the wall next to the door with the back of her hand, found a light switch and flicked it on.

The Supervisor robots were, in typical fashion, seated around the long meeting table. She recognized Avernus, Dante, Rydberg, Euler, Anon, and particularly the first Wohler, the robot who had saved her life on the outside wall of the tower, then had lost all memory of his own heroism. Each time she saw Wohler, she felt a twinge of affection for him.

“Why were they sitting in the dark?” Ariel said. “Hey, why are you guys sitting in darkness?”

“It is not dark now,” Avernus said. His voice sounded odd, a bit deeper, like a sound tape being slowed down.

“But it was. Wait a minute. You fellows don’t usually play those robotic word games with us. Heck, the bunch of you together form a major computer. What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Euler said. His voice sounded weird, too.

She turned to Derec. “What’s going on, you think?”

“I don’t know.”

He walked around the table, studying the robots carefully, sometimes touching them, asking fast questions, receiving slow answers. Finally, he came back to Ariel and whispered, “They’re not really functioning.”

“What do you mean? They responded to your questions, they spoke.”

“But their responses were meaningless, they didn’t really say anything. You heard them. Whenever my questions had anything to do with possible computer malfunctions, they each said the computer is fully operational. But, when I asked any specific questions about what was wrong with the city, they said nothing was wrong. Well, we can see how much is wrong and, Ariel, part of what’s wrong is them. Whoever’s behind the sabotaging of the city has gotten control of them, too. They’re just another system gone haywire. Let’s try the office. Maybe we’ll find the culprit there.”

Before they left the room, Derec and Ariel looked back. The Supervisor robots had not appeared to move an inch. They had not sprung up, ready to serve Derec and Ariel, or provided useful information. They had seemed listless, and listless robots seemed a contradiction in terms. Before she switched off the light, Ariel said, a bit sadly,” ‘Bye, fellas.” Was she mistaken, or was there a faint mumbling response from them?

The office light also had to be turned on manually. The room itself looked no different from usual. Its furniture was all in place, surfaces were clean, the computer was positioned correctly on the desk. The surrounding walls, furnishing a computer display of the view from the Compass Tower roof, still functioned, although they showed an altered Robot City, now too dark and too mysterious. Derec cursed under his breath.

“What’s wrong?” Ariel asked. It seemed her main question ever since they had returned to Robot City.

“The chemfets. It’s as if they’re getting fainter, dissolving. Whatever’s affecting the city is affecting them. It has to. Let me at the computer.”

As he activated the screen, called up access codes, made his fingers fly across the keyboard, his eyes teared up and he struggled to keep from crying. Ariel, for the first time in a long while, didn’t know what to say to him or what to do for him. The chemfets had always been a mystery to her, and she didn’t know how to counter their effect on him.

Finally, with an angry yowl, Derec slammed his fists on the keyboard. A few random letters appeared on the screen followed by a question mark.

“It’s like everything else around here. It won’t communicate with me. Whatever I type into it, it sends back gobbledygook-an error message, or request for clarification, or denial of access. I asked why the lighting systems were not working properly, and it asked if I’d like a Cracked Cheeks cassette delivered to our rooms.” The Cracked Cheeks were the robot jazz group that had formed during the “Circuit Breaker” incident. A fascination with creativity had captivated several robots at the time, but Avery had later programmed such “dangerous” impulses out of them. “I asked why so many systems were down, and it called up a file-management tutorial file. I asked if there had been any newcomers to the city, and it said that information was restricted. I asked it to unrestrict it, and it said it was restricted forever.”

“How can that be?”

“I don’t know. It just seemed to be toying with me, treating me like a child, not relating to the chemfets at all. There’s been some kind of bypass, somebody’s hacked in or something, or a computer virus, I don’t know. Whatever, whoever it is, is in control. I could try to access the right information until I was blue in the face, and I’d just get nonsense from it. The computer’s been taken from me, the robots are no longer in my power, the city is running down, and I can’t stop it. And all I want to do is go back to the ship, lift off from this hellhole, go back to Aurora or even to Earth, and never come back.”

He was close to breaking down. Ariel could see that. Gently she ran her hand through his bristly sandy-colored hair, uncertain for a moment of what to say, then she knelt down beside him. “Hey, snap out of it. These are minor setbacks, pal. We can take care of them. We’ve done it before.”

He smiled. “You’re right. What’d I do without you?”

“Probably blunder on with much less efficiency.”

He sat quietly for a long while. “I wonder if he ’ s behind all of it.”

She did not have to ask who he was.

“It has the fingerprints of Dr. Avery all overit, doesn’t it?”

“It has to be him.”

“But,” said Dr. Avery, his small form stepping out of a dark comer, “this time it is not me. I am, my son, just as confused by it allas you are.”

“You were in that corner all this time?” Ariel asked.

Avery looked smug as he responded, “Since long before you violated my privacy by coming into the room. I’ve been -”

Derec suddenly screamed, “Damn you!” He vaulted out of his chair and lunged at Dr. Avery, grabbing him by the throat and shoving him against the nearest wall. The doctor’s eyes remained calm, as if the way he looked when he was being murdered was the same as when he delivered a sarcastic comment.

“Derec!” Ariel shouted. “Stop! Right this minute!”

She pulled hard at his arm, breaking his grip, then she interposed her body between him and Dr. Avery. With a forceful backhand, she hit Derec on the side of his face. Derec’s eyes looked momentarily dazed. Gently she began walking, edging him back toward the computer terminal.

“Now why in the name of the fifty Spacer planets did you do that?” she said.

Derec sat down again. His fingertips brushed along a row of letters on the keyboard. “I’m sorry, Ariel.”

“How about me?” Avery said, his voice a bit shaky as he tentatively touched his throat. “I think you should apologize to me.”

“No! That I won’t do! You spied on us.”

“I wouldn’t call it spying, son. I was here first, remember? Meditating in the darkness. You intruded on me. I just wasn’t ready to announce it.”

“He’s right, Derec,” Ariel said. “His spying’s not important enough for an attempted murder.”

“I wouldn’t have killed him. You know that.” Ariel was bothered by the fact that she really didn’t know whether or not Derec could commit patricide. “I just wanted to hurt him.”