Dean R. Koontz - The Night of the Storm

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THE NIGHT OF THE STORM By Dean R. Koontz HE WAS A ROBOT MORE THAN A

HUNDRED YEARS OLD, BUILT BY OTHER robots in an automated factory that had been

continuously engaged in the production of robots for many centuries. His

name was Curanov, and as was the custom of his kind, he roamed the earth in

search of interesting things to do. Curanov had climbed the highest mountains

in the world, with the aid of special body attachments (spikes in his metal

feet, tiny but strong hooks on the ends of his twelve fingers, an emergency

grappling rope coiled inside his chest-area storage compartment and ready for

a swift ejection if he should fall); his small, antigravity flight motors were

removed to make the climb as dangerous and, therefore, as interesting as

possible. Having submitted to heavy-duty component-sealing procedures, Curanov

had once spent eighteen months under water, exploring a large portion of the

Pacific Ocean, until he was bored even by the mating of whales and by the

ever-shifting beauty of the sea bottom. Curanov had crossed deserts, explored

the Arctic Circle on foot, gone spelunking in countless different subterranean

systems. He had been caught in a blizzard, in a major flood, in a hurricane,

and in the middle of an earthquake that would have registered nine on the

Richter scale, if the Richter scale had still been in use. Once, specially

insulated, he had descended halfway to the center of the earth, there to bask

in pockets of glowing gases, between pools of molten stone, scalded by

eruptions of magma, feeling nothing. Eventually, he grew weary of even that

colorful spectacle, and he surfaced again. Having lived only one of his two

assigned centuries, he wondered if he could last through another hundred years

of such tedium. Curanov's private counselor, a robot named Bikermien,

assured him that this boredom was only temporary and easily alleviated. If one

was clever, Bikermien said, one could find limitless excitement as well as

innumerable, valuable situations for data collection about both one's

environment and one's mechanical aptitude and heritage. Bikermien, in the last

half of his second century, had developed such an enormous and complex data

vault that he was assigned stationary duty as a counselor, attached to a

mother computer, utterly immobile. By now, extremely adept at finding

excitement even through secondhand experience, Bikermien did not mourn the

loss of his mobility; he was, after all, a spiritual superior to most robots,

inwardly directed. Therefore, when Bikermien advised, Curanov listened,

however skeptical he might be. Curanov's problem, according to Bikermien,

was that he had started out in life, from the moment he'd left the factory, to

pit himself against the greatest of forces - the wildest sea, the coldest

cold, the highest temperatures, the greatest pressures - and now, having

conquered these things, he could see no interesting challenges beyond them.

Yet, the counselor said that Curanov had overlooked some of the most

fascinating explorations. The quality of any challenge was directly related to

one's ability to meet it; the less adequate one felt, the better the

experience, the richer the contest, and the more handsome the data reward.

Does this suggest anything to you? Bikermien inquired, without speaking, the

telebeam open between them. Nothing. So Bikermien explained it:

Hand-to-hand combat with a full-grown male ape might seem like an

uninteresting, easy challenge at first glance; a robot was the mental and

physical superior of any ape. However, one could always modify oneself in

order to even the odds of what might appear to be a sure thing. If a robot

couldn't fly, couldn't see as well at night as in the daylight, couldn't

communicate except vocally, couldn't run faster than an antelope, couldn't

hear a whisper at a thousand yards - in short, if all of his standard

abilities were dulled, except for his thinking capacity, might not a robot

find that a hand-to-hand battle with an ape was a supremely exciting event?

I see your point, Curanov admitted. To understand the grandeur of simple

things, one must humble himself. Exactly. And so it was that, on the

following day, Curanov boarded the express train north to Montana, where he

was scheduled to do some hunting in the company of four other robots, all of

whom had been stripped to their essentials. Ordinarily they would have

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flown under their own power. Now none had that ability. Ordinarily they

would have used telebeams for communication. Now they were forced to talk to

one another in that curious, clicking language that had been designed

especially for machines but that robots had been able to do without for more

than six hundred years. Ordinarily, the thought of going north to hunt deer

and wolves would have profoundly bored them. Now, however, each of them felt a

curious tingle of anticipation, as if this were a more important ordeal than

any he had faced before. * * * A

brisk, efficient robot named Janus met the group at the small station house

just outside of Walker's Watch, toward the northernmost border of Montana. To

Curanov, it was clear that Janus had spent several months in this uneventful

duty assignment, and that he might be near the end of his obligatory two

years' service to the Central Agency. He was actually too brisk and efficient.

He spoke rapidly, and he behaved altogether as if he must keep moving and

doing in order not to have time to contemplate the uneventful and unexciting

days that he had spent in Walker's Watch. He was one of those robots too eager

for excitement; one day, he would tackle a challenge that he had not been

prepared for, and he would end himself. Curanov looked at Tuttle, another

robot who, on the train north, had begun an interesting if silly argument

about the development of the robot personality. He contended that until quite

recently, in terms of centuries, robots hadn't possessed individual

personalities. Each, Tuttle claimed, had been like the other, cold and

sterile, with no private dreams. A patently ridiculous theory. Tuttle had been

unable to explain how this could have been, but he'd refused to back down from

his position. Now, watching Janus chatter at them in a nervous staccato,

Curanov was incapable of envisioning an era when the Central Agency would have

dispatched mindless robots from the factories. The whole purpose of life was

to explore, to carefully store data collected from an individual viewpoint,

even if it was repetitive data. How could mindless robots ever function in the

necessary manner? As Steffan, another of their group, had said, such

theories were on a par with belief in Second Awareness. (Some believed,

without evidence, that the Central Agency occasionally made a mistake and,

when a robot's allotted life span was up, only partially erased his

accumulated memory before refitting him and sending him out of the factory

again. These robots - or so the superstitious claimed - had an advantage and

were among those who matured fast enough to be elevated to duty as counselors

and, sometimes, even to service in the Central Agency itself.) Tuttle had

been angered to hear his views on robot personality equated with wild tales of

Second Awareness. To egg him on, Steffan also suggested that Tuttle believed

in that ultimate of hobgoblins, the "human being." Disgusted, Tuttle settled

into a grumpy silence while the others enjoyed the jest. "And now," Janus

said, calling Curanov back from his reverie, "I'll issue your supplies and see

you on your way." Curanov, Tuttle, Steffan, Leeke, and Skowski crowded

forward, eager to begin the adventure. Each of the five was given:

binoculars of rather antique design, a pair of snowshoes that clipped and

bolted to their feet, a survival pack of tools and greases with which to

repair themselves in the event of some unforeseen emergency, an electric hand

torch, maps, and a drug rifle complete with an extra clip of one thousand

darts. "This is all, then?" Leeke asked. He had seen as much danger as

Curanov, perhaps even more, but now he sounded frightened. "What else would

you need?" Janus asked impatiently. Leeke said, "Well, as you know, certain

modifications have been made to us. For one thing, our eyes aren't what they

were, and-" "You've a torch for darkness," Janus said. "And then, our

ears-" Leeke began. "Listen cautiously, walk quietly," Janus suggested.

"We've had a power reduction to our legs," Leeke said. "If we should have to

run-" "Be stealthy. Creep up on your game before it knows you're there, and

you'll not need to chase it." "But," Leeke persisted, "weakened as we are,

if we should have to run from something-" "You're only after deer and

wolves," Janus reminded him. "The deer won't give chase - and a wolf hasn't

any taste for steel flesh." Skowski, who had thus far been exceptionally

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