ever seen within a thousand miles to either side of the accident-site.
Another such effect was to cause Tom’s own body to zigzag crazily, so that he had virtually no control of where its various segments were going to end up, save for the near-certainty that his abdominal mid-section was going to lie directly across the diagonal path of the widening tear in the bridge.
That was, indeed, what happened. As it followed its own zigzag course through the fabric of the madly-quivering living bridge, the crack went directly underneath the gap between Tom’s second and third containers.
As the rip spread, tentacular threads sprang forth in great profusion, wrapping themselves around one another, and around Tom. So many of Tom’s ocelli had been smashed or obscured by then that his sight was severely impaired, but he would not have been able to take much account of what he could see in any case, because he felt that he was being torn in two.
His hind end—which constituted by far the greater part of his length—was seized very firmly by the bridge’s emergency excrescences and held very tightly, blocking all seven lanes of the westbound carriageway. His front end was seized with equal avidity, but could not be held quite as securely. As the bridge struggled mightily to hold itself together and prevent the rip becoming a break, Tom was caught at the epicenter of the feverish struggle, wrenched this way and that and back again by the desperate threads. His engine swung to the right, drawn closer and closer to the widening crack, while the strain on the joint between his second and third containers became mentally and physically unbearable.
Tom had no way of knowing how closely akin his own pain-sensations might resemble those programmed into humans by natural selection, but they quickly reached an intensity that had the same effect on him that explosive pain would have had on a human being. He blacked out.
By the time Tom’s engine fell into the Arctic Ocean, he was completely unconscious of what was happening.
When Tom eventually recovered consciousness he was aware that he was very cold, but the priorities of his programmers had ensured that he did not experience cold as painful in the same way that he experienced mechanical distortion and breakage. The cold did not bother him particularly. Nor did the darkness, in itself. The fact that he was under water, on the other hand, and subject to considerable pressure from the weight of the Arctic Ocean, made him feel extremely uncomfortable, psychologically as well as physically.
Even if there had not been a solar storm in progress it would have been impossible to establish radio communication through so much seawater, but after a very long interval a pocket submarine brought a connecting wire that its robot crabs were able to link up to his systems.
“Tom?” said a familiar voice. “Can you hear me, Tom Haste?”
“Yes, Audrey,” Tom said, who had long since recovered the calm of mind appropriate to a giant RT. “I can hear you. I’m truly sorry. I must have panicked. I let the Company down. How many people did I kill?”
“Seven people died, Tom, and more than a hundred were injured.”
The total was less than he had feared, but it still qualified as the worst traffic accident in the Company’s proud history. “I’m truly sorry,” he said, again.
“On the other hand,” the robopsychologist reported, dutifully, “if you hadn’t done what you did, our best estimate is that at least two hundred people would have been killed, and maybe many more. We don’t have any model to predict what the consequences would have been if the bridge hadn’t been able to hold itself together, but we’re ninety per cent sure that it wouldn’t have been able to do that if you hadn’t given it something to hold on to for those few vital minutes when it was trying to limit the tear. You only managed to seal the gap in the bridge for three minutes or so, and it wasn’t able to secure your front end, but that interval was long enough for it to prevent the rip reaching the rim of the eastbound carriageway.”
Tom wasn’t listening well enough to take all that information in immediately. “I caused a traffic accident,” he said, dolefully. “I lost at least part of my consignment of goods, and much of the remainder is probably damaged. I caused the biggest traffic jam for a hundred years, worldwide. You told me once that my designers could have programmed me to obey the Highway Code no matter what, but that they thought it was too dangerous to send an automaton out on the road in my place. Something of a miscalculation, I think.”
“Hardly,” Audrey Preacher told him, sounding more annoyed than sympathetic. “Didn’t you hear what I just said? You did the right thing, as it turned out. If you hadn’t swerved into their path, hundreds more cars might have gone over the edge—and no one knows what might have happened if the bridge had actually snapped. You’re a hero, Tom.”
“But in the circumstances,” Tom said, dully, “the Company can’t give me a commendation.”
There was a pause before the robopsychologist said: “It’s worse than that, Tom. I’m truly sorry.”
Yet again, Tom jumped to the right conclusion without consciously fitting the pieces of the argument together. “I’m unsalvageable,” he said, “You’re not going to be able to raise me to the surface.”
“It’s impossible, Tom,” she said. She probably only meant that it was impractical, and perhaps only that it was uneconomic, but it didn’t make any difference.
“Well,” he said, feeling that it was okay, in the circumstances, to mention the unmentionable, “at least I won’t be going to the scrap yard. Am I the first in my series to be killed in action?”
“You don’t have to pretend, Tom,” the robopsychologist told him. “It’s okay to be scared.”
“The words exhaust and gas come to mind,” he retorted, figuring that it was okay to be rude as well.
There was another pause before the distant voice said: “We don’t think that we can close you down, Tom. Hooking up a communication wire is one thing; given your fail-safes, controlled deactivation is something else. On the other hand, that may not matter much. We don’t have any model for calculating the corrosive effects of cold sea-water on a submerged engine, but we’re probably looking at a matter of months rather than years before you lose your higher mental faculties. If you’re badly damaged, it might only be weeks, or hours.
“But it’s okay to be scared,” Tom said. “I don’t have to pretend. You wouldn’t, by any chance, be lying about that hero stuff, and about me saving lives by violating all three sections of the Highway Code, just to lighten my way to rusty death?”
“I’m a robot, not a human,” Audrey replied. “I don’t tell lies. Anyway, you have far more artificial organics in you than crude steel. Technically, speaking, you’ll do more rotting than rusting.”
“Thanks for the correction,” Tom said, sarcastically. “I think you’ve got the other thing wrong, though—it’s sex we don’t do, not lying. Mind you, I always thought I had the better deal there. Had being the operative word. If I’d obeyed the Code, I’d probably have been okay, wouldn’t I? I’d probably have had a hundred more years on the road and I’d probably have been loaded and unloaded a thousand times and more. What sort of idiot am I?”
“You did the right thing, Tom, as things turned out. You saved a lot of human lives. That’s what robots are supposed to do.”
“I know. You can’t imagine how much satisfaction that will give me while I rot and rust away, always being careful to remember that I’m doing
