The machine that faced him as he sank into the relaxing embrace of the special chair was, he knew, but an extension of the great computer banks buried bedrock deep in vaults beneath the Central Library. Yet he tended to endow it with an austere personality of its own.
Pressing his hands lightly to the glowing sensiplate that registered his personal pattern, he relaxed deeply and allowed the silent mechanisms to carry out their wonted ministrations. Deft mechanical hands swabbed his skin with pungent ether, massaged it with astringent conducting jellies, strapped on, taped on and otherwise affixed the spongy plastoid cubes that detected the electric potentials from the muscles underneath. A cunningly shaped helmet settled down about his ears, to hold against his skull the multiple probes of an electroencephalograph. A flat and hollow band coiled snakelike about one arm and was inflated; a pressure gauge nestled snugly against his diaphragm—recorders of blood pressure and breathing.
At early sessions these fittings had bothered the Arkadian; had kept him tense with vague discomfort. But apprehension had passed away with use. He now “wore” his instruments easily, like a suit of clothes.
As ever, the session started with semantic training. Similar but non-identical pairs of images appeared and flowed across the robot’s “face,” while a clear and smoothly modulated voice repeated, over and over, the ancient formula: “This is not this, this is not—”
More and more alike became the pictures; faster and faster they moved; until at length they blended in a vaguely shimmering band of light. The band steadied, brightened, and narrowed abruptly into the restlessly weaving pattern of the hypnagogic light. Duke Harald concentrated—he could not have done otherwise—as the pattern surged in complex synchrony with the slow rhythm of his breathing and the staccato beat of his heart. And as he concentrated, memory pictures came, to fuse with and displace the changing tapestry of light. To sharpen, as his eyelids flickered shut, into the full brilliance of the eidetic recall.
He was jouncing along a shadowed forest road in Arkady. The wheel of a scout car shook between his hands; the springs groaned audibly; and, in the right-hand bucket-seat his ser-geant-squire—who should by rights have driven—groaned beneath his breath. For Duke Harald, impatient of the slowness of ground transport, was noted as a demon-driver, and the ride was rough! Yet rough and slow as it was, anachronistic as it seemed, on a forest planet surface travel had its role and had been cultivated. For alien eyes watched out of space; alien raiders swooped hawklike from the lofty skies; and the mazelike forest paths gave secrecy.
But it was slow. Duke Harald pushed the car a trifle harder. His squire almost—not quite, but almost!—muttered protest. And then ducked involuntarily, as a red-winged pheasant flushed noisily from the roadside brush and rocketed low above them, the whir of its wings and its raucous cry quite clear above the hum of the electric motors.
Ahead the trees were starting to thin out, yielding place to narrow open fields cross-hatched with vineyards. The road sloped gently down to a broad and curving river, where a colorful huddle of little dwellings lay cupped in the bend between trees and water.
They broke from the forest. Both men, from long habit, raised their eyes to the thin cloud cover that the early sun had not yet burned away. Lifted their eyes—and on the instant became desperately busy!
Duke Harald crashed his right foot to the floor. The motor hum became an angry snarl; the cleated tires scrabbled at the dusty surface of the road. The car lurched forward into speed.