Well, he, Kickaha, had a big ego, too. But a healthy one.
The Lord remembered only a few of the locations of the auxiliary sensor systems. He couldn’t be blamed for that since there were so many. But he was able to give Kickaha directions to three of them. He also gave him some instructions on how to operate them.
Just to make sure he hadn’t been neglecting another source of information, Kickaha asked robots One and Two about the sensors. They were aware of only that in the control room. Urthona had not trusted them with any more data than he thought necessary for his comfort and protection.
Kickaha thought that if he had been master of this palace, he would have installed a safety measure in the robots. When asked certain questions, they would have refused to answer them. Or pretended that they didn’t know.
Which, now that he thought about it, might be just what was happening. But they’d given him data that Urthona might not want his enemies to have. So possibly, they were not lying.
He took One with him, leaving Anana to keep an eye on her uncle. It wasn’t likely that he’d be going any place or doing anything worth noticing. But you never knew.
The hidden system console was in a room behind a wall in a much larger room on the tenth floor. Lacking the codeword to gate through, he and One tore part of the wall down. He turned on the console and, with One’s aid, checked out the entire building. It was done swiftly, the glowing diagrams of the rooms flashing by too swiftly on the screen for Kickaha to see anything but a blur. But a computer in One’s body sorted them out.
When the operation was complete, One said, “There are one hundred and ten chambers which the sensors do not monitor.”
Kickaha groaned and said. “You mean we’d have to get into all of them to make sure no living being is in one of them?”
“That is one method.”
“What’s the other?”
“This system can monitor the control chamber. It’s controlled by that switch there.” One pointed. “That also enables the operator to hook into the control-room sensories. These can be used to look into the one hundred and ten chambers. The man named Ore did not know that. The switch is not on the panel in the control room however. It is under the panel and labeled as an energy generator control. Only the master knew about it.”
“Then how did you come to know about it?”
“I learned about it while I was scanning the displays here.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me?”
“You didn’t ask me.”
Kickaha repressed another groan. The robots were so smart yet so dumb.
“Connect this system with the control room’s.”
“Yes, master.”
One strode ponderously to the control board and turned a switch marked, in Lord letters: HEAT. Heat for what? Obviously, it was so designated to make any unauthorized operator ignore it. Immediately, lights began pulsing here and there, a switch turned by itself, and one of the large video screens above the panel came to life.
Kickaha looked into the room from a unit apparently high on the wall and pointing downward. It was directed toward the central chair in a row of five or six before the wide panel. In this sat a man with his back to Kickaha.
For a second he thought that it must be the Englishman who had helped Ore. But this man was bigger than the one described by Ore, and his hair was not brown but yellow.
He was looking at a video screen just above him. It showed Kickaha and the robot behind him, looking at the man.
The operator rose with a howl of fury, spun out of his chair, and shook his fist at the unit receiving his image.
He was Urthona.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE LORD WAS clad only in a ragged skin bound around his waist. A longitudinal depression, the scan from the axe wound, ran down the center of his chest. His hair fell over his shoulders to his nipples. His skin was smeared with the oily dirt of his world, and a bump on his forehead indicated a hard contact with some harder object. Moreover, his nose had been broken.