Voyage From Yesteryear

As a youth he had daydreamed about becoming an entertainer–a singer, or a comic, maybe–but he couldn’t sing and he couldn’t tell jokes, and somehow after his parents died within two years of each other halfway through the voyage, he had ended up in the Army. So now, though he still couldn’t sing a note or tell a joke right, he knew just how to use an M32 to demolish a small building from two thousand yards, could operate a battlefield compack blindfolded, and was an expert at deactivating optically triggered anti-intruder personnel mines.

About all he was good with outside things like that was cards. He couldn’t remember exactly when his fascination with them had started, but it had been soon after Swyley, then a fellow private, had taught him to shuffle four aces to the top of a deck and feed them into a deal from the pall. Finding to his surprise that he seemed to have an aptitude, Driscoll had borrowed a leaf from Colman’s book and started reading up about the subject. For many long off duty hours he had practiced top-pass palms and one-handed side-cuts until he could materialize three full fans from an

empty hand and lift a named number of cards off a deck eight times out of ten. Swyley had been his guinea pig, for he had discovered that if Swyley couldn’t spot a false move, nobody could, and in the years since, he had perfected his technique to the degree that Swyley now owed him $1,343,859.20, including interest.

But his reputation had put him in a no-win situation at the Friday night poker school because when he won, everybody said he was sharping, and when he didn’t, everybody said he was lousy. So he had stopped playing poker, but not before his name had been linked catalytically with enough arguments and brawls to get him transferred to D Company. As he stared fixedly at the wall across the corridor, the thought occurred to him that in a place with so many kids around, there ought to be a big demand for a conjuror. The more he thought about it, the more appealing the idea became. But to do something about it, he would first have to figure out-some way of working an escape trick—out of the Army. Swyley should have some useful suggestions about that, he thought.

Clump, clump, clump, clump. His train of thought was derailed by the sound of steady tramping approaching from his left–not the direction in which the detail had departed, which shouldn’t have been returning by this route anyway, but the opposite one. Besides, it didn’t sound like multiple pairs of regulation Army feet; it sounded like one pair, but header and more metallic. And along with it came the sound of two children’s voices, whispering and furtive, and punctuated with giggles.

Driscoll turned his eyes a fraction to the side. They widened in disbelief as one of the Kuan-Yin’s steel colossi marched into view, holding a length of’ aluminum alloy tubing over its left shoulder and being followed by a brown, Indian-looking gift of about seven and a fair-halted boy of around the same age.

“Detail … stop” the girl called out. The robot halted. “Detail . . . Oh, I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. Stand with your feet apart and put your gun down.” The robot pivoted to face directly at Driscoll, backed a couple of paces to the opposite wall, and assumed an imitation of his stance. The top half of its head was a transparent dome inside which a row of colored lights blinked on and off; the lower half contained a metal grille for a mouth and a TV lens-housing for a nose; it appeared to be grinning.

“Stay.. . there!” the girl instructed.. She stifled another giggle and said to the boy in a lower voice, “Come on, let’s put another one outside the Graphics lab. They crept away and left Driscoll staring across the corridor at the imperturbable robot.

A couple of minutes went by. Nobody moved. The robot’s lights continued to wink at him cheerfully. Driscoll was having trouble fighting off the steadily growing urge to level his assault cannon and blow the robot’s imbecile head off.

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