Wiz couldn’t sense temperature very well through the simulacrum, but the
glare of the sun and the bright reflection off the gate told him it had to
be hot out here. He wondered if he was sweating.
Then the door started to move. Wiz opened his mouth and nearly choked on
his carefully prepared greeting when he saw what was behind it.
The robot was eight feet tall with glowing red eyes and a glossy black
skin. It was human-shaped, but it wasn’t what Wiz would call reassuring.
“You rannggg?” it asked in a voice like the bell of doom. It would have
been even more impressive if the robot had been talking to the visitor
instead of the gatepost.
Wiz dredged up the last of his nonchalance. “Yeah. I’m Wiz Zumwalt and I’m
here to see the boss.”
The robot paused as if considering the information. A crackling blue
nimbus played over its head and down its right shoulder.
“Commeee,” it commanded.
The head cocked to one side and jerked upright. The arms jerked up, elbows
bent, bringing the hands to shoulder level. The robot spun on its heel,
nearly lunged into the gate, recovered and strode off, weaving from side
to side like a drunken sailor.
“Lead on, Lurch,” Wiz said to the robot’s departing back, then hurried
after him. The guns tried to track him even inside the portal.
The hall beyond the gate was so gargantuan that Wiz couldn’t make out the
other end. High above shafts of sunlight washed down through the haze that
hid the ceiling.
A rather thick haze, Wiz noticed as he strode along after his jerking,
zig-zagging guide. It wasn’t just that the place was big, it needed a good
vacuuming. He noticed that both he and the robot were leaving footprints
in the film of reddish dust on the marble tiled floor.
After a few hundred yards they turned off into a side corridor. Its
proportions were more to human scale, but it was round and a trickle of
water down the center made the going harder. The robot splashed along
unconcerned, but Wiz tried to keep his feet dry by staying to the side. He
had to hurry even more to keep up with the robot.
Even though Wiz’s temperature sense didn’t work very well, it was so cold
he shivered a bit. The metal walls of the tunnel were filmed with
condensation which trickled down and accumulated at the bottom of the
corridor.
That’s where the water comes from, he thought. They need a little work on
their climate control system. He looked down at the water in the center of
the tunnel and saw it was slimed with green algae.
Not to mention their housekeeping.
A short way down the corridor was a door, round and massive like a bank
vault’s. The robot stopped short and waited as Wiz came up beside him.
Just as Wiz reached the robot the door popped open and clanged against the
corridor wall. Wiz jumped back to keep from being crushed. His guide
remained impassive even though the door missed him by a fraction of an
inch.
A few other little things they need work on, too. As he set off in pursuit
of the robot he wondered if that was supposed to have been an automated
door opener or a man trap.
Another few hundred feet brought them to a bank of elevators that looked
like something out of a New York office building-if you ignored the
remote-controlled machine guns covering the lobby and the gargoyles
perched over the elevator doors.
After a brief wait one set of doors banged open and Wiz and the robot
stepped into an elevator-more accurately, they stepped down into an
elevator, since the car had stopped about a foot below the floor.
It took a long, long time to reach the top. Wiz wasn’t sure whether that
was because they were going so high or because the elevator worked about
as well as the robot guide. They jerked, lurched, sputtered, speeded up
and slowed down until Wiz lost all sense of how far they had come. He
wasn’t even too sure they had gone straight up.