Chapter 6: Good Afternoon, Captain

Twenty years earlier

For the next two days, Robby learned to walk.

That was how Julia put it. Morbius objected to the phrase, as she had known he would.

"He already possesses the ability."

"Then he is remembering it."

"Machines do not remember motor function in the biological sense."

Julia watched Robby cross the chamber, uneven but no longer halting, and turn at the far wall to come back. "He seems to."

Morbius had no answer for that, and Adams enjoyed it privately. In nearly three months of survey he had seen Edward Morbius lose exactly two arguments, and his wife had won both.

Robby stayed below. Adams would not have him aboard the Bellerophon until they knew a great deal more, and Robby showed no sign of wanting to go anywhere. He walked the chamber. He examined his hands. He stood for long periods in front of consoles nobody could read, and never touched one.

Communication was close to impossible. Morbius recorded hours of speech and found structure in it inside an afternoon, but structure is not meaning, and meaning did not come. Robby could make nothing of English either, and listened to it with what Adams was prepared to swear was patience.

It was Julia who thought of objects.

She stood in the middle of the chamber, well inside the screen now, Adams having given up pretending she would stay behind it, and touched her own chest.

"Julia."

Then her husband. "Edward."

Then Adams. "Captain Adams."

Robby watched her, motionless.

She put her hand flat against the wall. "Wall." Then the floor at her feet. "Floor." Then, after a pause, she pointed at him.

"Robby."

For the first time, he answered at once. It was a short sequence of sounds, four or five of them, rising and then falling away.

Julia's face lit. "I think he just told me his real name."

Morbius looked up from his recorder. "Or identified his construction series."

"Edward."

"It is equally possible."

She turned back. "Robby."

He regarded her for several seconds. Then he repeated the unfamiliar sequence, exactly as before.

"Robby," Julia said again, and waited.

The pause went on long enough that Farman shifted his weight by the doorway.

Then Robby raised one hand and touched his own chest, the way she had touched hers.

"Robby."

The pronunciation was imperfect and the second syllable came out almost as a hum. It was the name, in a voice that had been silent longer than anyone in the room could calculate.

Farman lowered his scanner. "Well."

Julia looked as though someone had handed her the planet. Morbius looked, Adams thought, faintly offended at how pleased he was.

* *

* *

The intrusions went on through the night.

Adams considered shutting down the data link between ship and surface, and sat with the order half formed the better part of an hour before he decided against it. Nothing had been damaged. Nothing had been altered. Nothing that could hurt anybody had been touched. Whoever was moving through the Bellerophon's memory behaved less like an intruder than like a student who had found the library door unlocked after closing and had no intention of disturbing the shelves.

He put it in the log that way, and sat looking at what he had written, aware of having made a decision he could not have said what rested on.

By morning, Robby had been through the entire English archive. By noon he had started on history.

That afternoon Adams went down with Farman and Julia.

Robby was standing in the center of the chamber, and Adams knew before anyone spoke that something had changed. The sluggishness was gone. He no longer held himself like a man doing arithmetic. When his head came around toward the doorway it came smoothly, and his eyes found each of them in turn without hurry.

Julia smiled. "Hello, Robby."

He looked at her. Then at Farman. Then at Adams.

His mouth opened.

"Good afternoon, Captain Adams."

Nobody moved. The voice was careful and exactly formed, the vowels a shade too even, as though each had been assembled from a sample and set in place by hand. It was entirely fluent.

Farman stared at him. Adams turned toward Julia, who was smiling as though she had expected nothing else. Morbius stood beside one of the consoles looking a great deal less surprised than anybody had a right to be.

Adams found his voice. "You speak English."

"Yes, Captain."

"How?"

Robby appeared to consider the question, and the consideration itself was new. "I learned."

Farman let out a short breath. "From the Bellerophon."

"Yes."

"You broke into our computer."

Robby's face did not change. "I accessed available information."

Farman looked at Adams. "I like 'broke into' better."

Adams ignored him. "You read our files."

"Yes."

"All of them?"

Robby paused. "No."

Adams felt an entirely unreasonable relief, and it lasted until Robby finished the thought.

"I have not yet completed them."

Julia laughed first. Farman went next, and then Adams found that he could not help himself either, and the sound of it went out into that enormous room and stopped a few meters away, the way every other sound did.

Robby looked from one face to another, and for the first time since they had found him standing in the dark he did not look like a machine that had waited in an ancient chamber for something to happen. He looked like a man who had walked into a room full of strangers and was trying, very seriously, to understand the joke.

Far beneath them, under the floor and the plateau and however many kilometers of stone no instrument they owned could measure, machinery that had waited out ages went on waking.