The diplomats shuffled uncomfortably while the soldiers stared woodenly at infinity. A few awkward seconds dragged by. At last the a.s.sistant took the initiative and peered quizzically at the man who had introduced himself as Clem.

"Who are you?" he demanded. The formality had evaporated from his voice. "Are you in authority here?

If so, what are your rank and t.i.tle?"

Clem frowned and brought a hand up to his chin. "Depends what you mean by authority," he said. "I organize the regular engineering crew of the ship and supervise the maintenance. I suppose you could say that's authority of a kind. Then again, I don't have a lot to do with some of the special research programs and modifications but Hermann does."

"True," Hermann, the young man in the white labcoat, agreed. "But on top of that, parts of this place are used as a school to give the kids early off-planet experience. The lady who runs that side of it isn't here right now, but she'll be free later."

"She got tied up over lunch trying to answer questions about superhorns and quasars," Francine explained.

"On the other hand, if you mean who's in charge of a.s.signing the equipment up here and keeping track of who's scheduled to do what and when, then that would be Cromwell," Carla said. "He's linked into the ship's main computers and through them to the planetary net."

"Cromwell knows everything," Amy declared from her perch. "Cromwell, are those soldiers carrying Terran M32 a.s.sault cannon, or are they M30s?"

"M32s," the robot said. "They've the enhanced fireselectors."

"I hope they're not going to start shooting each other up here. It would be pretty scary in orbit. They could decompress the whole ship."

"I think they know that," Cromwell said. "They've spent a lot longer in s.p.a.ce than the few trips you've made."

"I suppose so."

The a.s.sistant's patience snapped at last. "This is ridiculous! I want to know who is in overall authority here. You must have a Director of Operations or some equivalent. Please be kind enough to-"

Farnhill stopped him with a curt wave of his hand. "This spectacle has gone far enough," he said. He looked at Clem. "Perhaps we could continue this discussion in conditions of greater privacy. Is there somewhere suitable near here?"

"Sure." Clem gestured vaguely behind him. "There's a big room back along the corridor that's free and should hold everybody. We could all get some coffee there too. I guess you could use some-you've had a long trip, huh?"

He grinned at the joke as he, turned to lead the way. Farnhill didn't seem to appreciate the humor.

"Ahem..." General Portney cleared his throat. "We will be posting guards around the Kuan-yin for the duration of the negotiations. I trust there will be no objections." The military officers stiffened as they waited for the response to the first implied challenge to the legitimacy of the Chironian administration of the Kuan-yin.

Clem waved an arm casually without looking back. "Go ahead," he said. "Can't see as you really need any, though. You're pretty safe up here. We don't get many burglars." Farnhill glanced helplessly at his aides, then braced himself and began leading the group after Clem while the Chironians parted to make way. The military deputation broke formation to take up the rear with Wesserman tossing back a curt "Carry on, Guard-Commander" in the direction of Sirocco.

The relief detachment from B Company marched from the exit of the shuttle to take up positions in from of the ramp, and Sirocco stepped forward to address the advance guard. "Ship detail, atten-shun! Two ranks in marching order, fall...in!" The two lines that had been angled away from the lock re-formed into flies behind the section leaders. "Sentry details will detach and fall out at stations. By the left...march!"

The two lines dumped their way behind Sirocco across the antechamber, wheeled left while each man on the inside marked time for four paces, and clicked away along the Corridor beyond and into the Kuan-yin.

Amy watched curiously over the top of Cromwell's head as they disappeared from sight. "I wonder why they walk like that when they shout at each other," she mused absently. "Do you know why, Cromwell?"

"Have you thought about it?" Cromwell asked.

"Not really."

"You should think about things as well as just ask questions. Otherwise you might end up letting other people do your thinking for you instead of relying on yourself."

"Ooh...I wouldn't want to do that," Amy said.

"All right then," Cromwell challenged. "Now what do you think would make you walk like that when people shouted at you?"

"I don't know." Amy screwed her face up and rubbed the bridge of her nose with a finger. "I suppose I'd have to be crazy."

"Well, there's something to think about," Cromwell suggested.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

CLUMP, CLUMP, CLUMP, clump, clump, clump, clump, clump.

"Detail...halt!"

Clump-Clump!

The D Company detachment came to a standstill in the corridor leading from the X-Ray Spectroscopy and Image a.n.a.lysis labs, at a place where it widened into a vertical bay housing a steel-railed stairway that led up to the Observatory Deck where the five-hundred-centimeter optical and gamma-ray interferometry telescopes were located. A few Chironians who were pa.s.sing by paused to watch for a moment, waved cheerfully, and went about their business.

"Sentry detail, detach to...post!" Sirocco shouted. PFC Driscoll stepped one pace backward from the end of the by-this-time-diminished file, turned ninety degrees to the right, and stepped back again to come to attention with his back to the wall by the entrance to a smaller side corridor. "Parade...rest!"

Driscoll moved his left foot into an astride stance and brought his gun down from the shoulder to rest with its b.u.t.t on the floor, one inch from his boot. "Remainder of detail, by the left...march!" Clump, clump, clump, clump...

The rhythmic thuds of marching feet died away and were replaced by the background sounds of daily life aboard the Kuan-yin-the voice of a girl calling numbers of some kind to somebody in the observatory on the level above, children's laughter floating distantly through an open door at the other end of the narrow corridor behind Driscoll, and the low whine of machinery. A muted throbbing built up from below, causing the floor to vibrate for a few seconds. Footsteps and a s.n.a.t.c.h of voices came from the right before being shut off abruptly by a closing door.

Driscoll was feeling more relieved. If what he had seen so far was anything to go by, the Chironians weren't going to start any trouble. He'd had to bite his tongue in order to keep a straight face back in the antechamber by the ramp, and it was a miracle that n.o.body important had heard Stanislau sn.i.g.g.e.ring next to him. The Chironians were okay, he had decided. Everything would be okay...provided that a.s.s-faces like Farnhill didn't go and screw things up.

What had impressed him the most was the way the kids seemed to be involved in everything that was going on just as much as the grown-ups. They didn't come across like kids at all, but more like small people who were busy finding out how things were done. In a room two posts back, he had glimpsed a couple of kids who couldn't have been more than twelve probing carefully and with deep frowns of concentration inside the electronics of a piece of equipment that must have cost millions. The older Chironian with them just watched over their shoulders and offered occasional suggestions. It made sense, Driscoll thought. Treat them as if they're responsible, and they act responsibly; give them bits of cheap plastic to throw around, and they act like it's cheap plastic. Or maybe the Chironians just had good insurance on their equipment.

He wondered how he might have made out if he'd had a start like that. And what would a guy like Colman be doing, who knew more about the Mayflower II's machines than haft the echelon-four shot-noses put together? If that was the way the computers had brought the first kids up, Driscoll reflected, he could think of a few humans who could have used some lessons.

His debut into life had been very different. The war had left his parents afflicted by genetic damage, and their first two children had not survived infancy. Aging prematurely from side effects, they had known they would never see Chiron when they brought him aboard the Mayflower II as a boy of eight and sacrificed the few more years that they might have spent on Earth in order to give him a new start somewhere else. Paradoxically, their health had qualified them favorably in their application to join the Mission since the planning had called for the inclusion of older people and higher-risk actuarial categories among the population to make room for the births that would be occurring later. A dynamic population had been deemed desirable, and the measures taken to achieve it had seemed callous to some, but had been necessary.

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 apt.i.tude, 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-pa.s.s 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, n.o.body 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 girl 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 a.s.sumed 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. n.o.body moved. The robot's lights continued to wink at him cheerfully.

Driscoll was having trouble fighting off the steadily growing urge to level his a.s.sault cannon and blow the robot's imbecile head off.

"Why don't you p.i.s.s off," he growled at last.

"Why don't you?"

For a moment Driscoll thought the machine had read his mind. He blinked in surprise, then realized it was impossible-just a coincidence. "How can I?" he said. "I've got my orders."

"So have I."

"That's different."

"How?"

"You don't have to do this."

"Do you?"

"Of course I do."

"Why?"

Driscoll sighed irritably. This was no time for long debates. "You don't understand," he said.

"Don't I?" the robot replied.

Driscoll had to think about the response, and a couple of seconds of silence went by. "It's not the same," he said.

"You're just humoring kids."

"What are you doing?"

Driscoll didn't have a ready answer to that. Besides, he was too conscious of the desire for a cigarette to be philosophical. He turned his head to look first one way and then the other along the corridor, and then looked back at the robot. "Can you tell if any of our people are near here?"

"Yes, I can, and no, there aren't. Why-getting fed up?"

"Would it worry anyone if I smoked?"

"It wouldn't worry me if you burst into flames." The robot chuckled raspily.

"How do you know there's no one around?"

"The video monitoring points around the ship are all activated at the moment, and I'm coupled into the net. I can see what's going on everywhere. Go ahead. It's okay. The round cover on the wall next to you is an inlet to a trash incinerator. You can use it as an ashtray."

Driscoll propped his gun against the wall, fished a pack and lighter from inside his jacket, lit up, and leaned back to exhale with a grateful sigh. The irritability that he had been feeling wafted away with the smoke. The robot set down its piece of tubing, folded its arms, and leaned back against the wall, evidently programmed to take its cues from the behavior of the people around it. Driscoll looked at it with a new curiosity. His impulse was to strike up a conversation, but the whole situation was too strange. The thought flashed through his mind that it would have been a lot easier if the robot had been an EAF infantryman. Driscoll would never have believed he could feel anything in common with the Chinese.

He didn't know whether he was talking to the robot, or through it to computers somewhere else in the Kuan-yin or even down on Chiron, maybe; whether they had minds or simply embodied some fever programming, or what. He had talked to Colman about machine intelligence once. Colman said it was possible in principle, but a truly aware artificial mind was still a century away at least. Surely the Chironians couldn't have advanced that much. "What kind of a machine are you?" he asked, "I mean, can you think like a person? Do you know who you are?"

"Suppose I said I could. Would that tell you anything?" Driscoll took another drag of his cigarette. "I guess not. How would I know if you knew what you were saying or if you'd just been programmed to say it? There's no way of telling the difference."

"Then is there any difference?"

Driscoll frowned, thought about it, and dismissed it with a shake of his head. "This is kinda funny," he said to change the subject. "What is?"

"Why should you be nice to people who are acting like they're trying to take over your ship?"

"Do you want to take over the ship?"

"Me? h.e.l.l no. What would I do with it?"

"Then there's your answer."

"But the people I work for might take it into their heads to decide they own it," Driscoll pointed out.

"That's up to them. If it pleases them to say so, why should we mind?"

"The people here wouldn't mind if our people started telling them what to do?"

"Why should they?"

Driscoll couldn't buy that. "You mean they'd be just as happy doing what our people told them to?" he said.

"I never said they'd do anything," the robot replied. "I just said that people telling them wouldn't bother them."

Just then, two Chironian girls strolled around the corner from the narrow corridor. They looked fresh and pretty in loose blouses worn over snug-fitting slacks, and had lightweight stretch-boots of some silvery, l.u.s.trous material. One of them had brown, wavy hair with a reddish tint to it, and looked as if she were in her mid-thirties; the other was a blonde of perhaps twenty-two. For a split second, Driscoll felt an instinctive twinge of apprehension at the thought of looking ridiculous, but the girls showed no surprise.

Instead they paused and looked at him not unpleasantly, but with a hint of reserve as if they wanted to smile but weren't quite sure if they should.

"Hi," the redhead called, a shade cautiously.

Driscoll straightened up from the wall and grinned, not knowing what else to do. "Well...hi," he returned.

At once their faces split into broad smiles, and they walked over. The redhead shook his hand warmly.

"I see you've already met Wellington. I'm Shirley. This is my daughter, Ci."

"She's your daughter?" Driscoll blinked. "Say, I guess that's...very nice."

Ci repeated the performance. "Who are you?" she asked him.

"Me? Oh...name's Driscoll-Tony Driscoll." He licked his lips while he searched for a follow-up. "I guess me and Wellington are guarding the corridor."

"Who from?" Ci asked.

"A good question," Wellington commented.

"You're the first Terran we've talked to," Shirley said. She nodded her head to indicate the direction they had come from. "We've got a cla.s.s of kids back there who are bubbling over with curiosity. How would you like to come in and say h.e.l.lo, and talk to them for five minutes? They'd love it."