Gradually the principal source of emotional interference that was Fletcher diminished with distance as the captain retraced its path to their entry point and jetted towards Rhabwar, and a few minutes later the faint background of emotional noise from the ambulance ship’s crew was gone as well. Very slowly and cautiously Prilicla extended one long, fragile arm and moved dose to the robot.
“I think I’m mad, too,” he said softly to himself.
Lightly he touched the robot in the center of what he assumed was the cranial swelling on its forebody. His gloves were insulated but very thin and he was expecting anything from a faint, tingling sensation to a lethal bolt of lightning, but nothing happened at all.
He concentrated his entire mind on his empathic faculty to force it into maximum sensitivity. As well as receiving the emotional radiation of patients, injured casualties, and accident survivors, he possessed a projective empathic ability which, if the receiving entity was not too distressed by fear or pain, could be used to pacify and reassure. It was the reason why most people felt good around him and why he had so many friends. As an id to focusing the effect rather than in an effort to communicate, he began to speak.
“I mean you no harm,” he said. “If you are in trouble, sick, injured, or malfunctioning, I want to help you. Disregard my liter shape and that of the other person who was with me, and the others you may meet. We must look strange and frightening to you, but we all mean you well….”
He repeated the message while continuing to project reassurance, sympathy, and friendship at maximum intensity and, while doing so, he moved his hand to the middle of the robot’s body and changed his touch into a soft, gentle push.
Abruptly it released its grip on the netting with four of its hands and used the other two to pull itself rapidly away from him. It was about to disappear forward beyond the range of his light when it paused and began to move back towards him again. When it was about five meters distant it stopped, then began to move away more slowly.
Plainly it wanted him to follow it, which, after a moment of fearful hesitation, he did.
The passageway was leading directly towards a complex structure that seemed to fill the interior of the vessel’s bow section. The bracing members radiating from it and the framework of the passageway he was following were festooned with cable looms, many showing the distinctive color-coding of the outer hull’s sensor network.
He was beginning to feel something.
“Are you doing this,” he called ahead to the to the robot he was following, “or is it your superintelligent captain robot?”
It continued moving forward without replying. There was nothing on its silvery body surface that resembled a mouth, so probably it couldn’t. The feeling that came to him was so tenuous that it verged on the insubstantial, but it was increasing slowly in strength. At first he was unsure whether it was originating from one mind or a group of them; then he decided that it was coming from two separate thinking and feeling beings. Both of them felt distressed and frightened, and, as well, one was puzzled and intensely curious while the other was radiating the claustrophobic panic characteristic of close confinement and sensory deprivation.
So far as he could feel, neither of them were in any pain nor were they exhibiting the fear characteristic of imminent termination, but then, he thought, thinking robots might not have such feelings. For a more accurate emotional reading he needed to get much closer to them, but that was triply impossible.
He was at the end of the passage and facing the solid wall of the structure that probably housed them. Although there was a convenient panel filled with colored buttons and switches, he had no idea of the operating principles of the actuator mechanism that would allow entry or the damage he might do—not least to himself—if he tried and failed. And most important of all, he was fast running out of conscious time.
Prilicla was still frightened but for some odd reason he no longer felt threatened by his situation. Still, it would be considered an act of utter stupidity and carelessness if he were to fall asleep in the middle of an alien starship.