Unexpected Magic (28 page)

“Someone! Where are you?” called No One.

Someone scuttered around the end of the sofa where Betty was. This was a pretty pickle! it said. Fat lot of use No One was as a servitor!

“I know,” said No One. “I must certainly be scrapped. Can you think of any way to get rid of the car those men came in?”

Someone chuckled. Just watch! And, in its supernatural way, it melted itself through the wall and through the front door. Meanwhile, the four men were kicking over the cocktail cabinet that was blocking their way to the dining area and hurrying through toward the kitchen. House Control had laid an ambush here. The floor cleaner trundled out from behind the last wall, set to blow. A blast of dirty coffee beans met the four men. When they tried to take shelter behind the dining table, the table dodged.

“
No One can do anything to help
!” Edward screamed above the rattling beans.

This allowed No One to go to the nearest window, where he could see the men's robot car standing by the front door. The lawn mower was advancing on it, roaring. “Out, out!” it howled, whirling its rotors threateningly. “I shall slash your tires!” The car juddered nervously and backed off down the drive. The lawn mower followed it. “Go away! I shall have you in ribbons!”

Then one of the men shot the floor cleaner and they all rushed past it to the kitchen area. House Control had laid on a splendid reception here. The refrigerator, which was a very meek machine, lay sideways across the entry. On top of it stood the microwave, far from meek, open and turned on. The men got out of its way quickly, knowing they could be cooked. But the gate expert pulled himself together and waved an arm in front of the microwave—the arm was Edward's, not his own—and the safety circuit at once switched the microwave off. Another of the men shoved it to the floor, and they all scrambled over the refrigerator into knee-deep foam from the dishwasher and the clothes washer. Under the foam, like mines in a minefield, lay gray frozen packets from the freezer. All five of them, Edward included, slid flat on their backs. As they lay there, the pepper grinder began to work, and the coffee grinder, the flour dispenser, the cornflakes hopper, the spice mill, and the garlic crusher.

No One overrode his own safety circuits by assuring them that he was going to be scrapped anyway. He walked out through the window in a shower of burglar-proofed double-glazing and went at superspeed down the drive to shut the Security Gate again. The robot car was by then doing a desperate U-turn through Mrs. Scantion's rose garden, and the lawn mower was flailing after it. Fast as No One went, the car was faster. It flashed past him on the drive, crashed through the Gate, and roared away down the road, with the angry lawn mower in such hot pursuit that it left a vapor trail like a jet plane. By the time No One reached the Gate, it was a complete wreck. He picked it up, trailing wires, and stood it between the gateposts.

That wouldn't even stop a mouse, Someone remarked, scuttering at his feet. Why didn't people use boiling oil these days?

“I hope the autocooker is doing that,” No One said.

The autocooker was using spinach pancakes at that moment. It was having the time of its life. As soon as the five foamy, sneezing humans floundered to their feet in a storm of flour and pepper and cornflakes, the little doors on the autocooker began to open and shut and food flew out of them. The oven and the roaster and the grill backed it up by sending out blasts of hot air, but the autocooker did the real damage. It hurled its entire menu at the four men. It threw soufflés, squirted cocoa, shot cutlets, and scrambled eggs, and bombed out steak-and-kidney pies. The men dragged Edward as far as the back door twice, only to be driven back by a storm of hot sausages.

“What can we block the gateway with?” No One asked Someone.

Leave that to me, Someone said. No One had better go and get rid of the other horseless carriage before the men thought of taking Edward away in that.

“I still have not learned to think,” No One said as he supersped up the drive again. He had not seen that Aut was a danger.

He hurtled past the back door. The four men burst out of it a second later, hauling Edward with them, all of them red-eyed and plastered with food. The autocooker had run out of ammunition. But House Control had not finished yet.

“My turn for fun at last,” the clothes drier remarked as the humans hurried past it. It snapped a nylon rope loose and went on whirling. The rope, and the washing on it, wrapped itself around the whole dirty group, and went on wrapping as the drier twirled. It had them wrapped up in a struggling, shouting bundle by the time No One sped up to Aut.

“Hide somewhere,” No One said to Aut. “Four humans are trying to kidnap Edward, and they will use you to take him away if they see you.”

Aut gave a hydraulic yawn. He did not want to move. “It's a long time, wirenose,” he grunted, “since I obeyed an order. I never did take orders from robots.”

“Please, sir,” said No One.

“They won't be able to do a thing with me,” said Aut. “All right. If it makes you happy, I'll go to ground in the shrubbery.” His gears grated. In a leisurely way, he started his engine and rolled slowly across the lawn.

No One's Miscellaneous Wisdom program told him that pride goeth before a fall. And it was proved true. The man who had shot the floor cleaner had a knife. He slashed at stockings, vests, and nylon rope, until the food-covered washing fell away. The four of them hurried Edward around to the front of the house, to find their own car gone and Aut trundling majestically across the lawn.

“
Catch it
!” they shouted. They were—understandably—desperate to get away by then. They ran across the lawn after Aut, spreading out as they ran. One of them threw himself in front of Aut. Aut's brakes squealed. He tried to go into reverse, but the man with the knife dragged Edward up behind. Aut jolted to a stop and tried to turn left. The man who had hit Betty quickly got on that side, and, while Aut was still on left-lock, the gate expert got on his right. Aut could not move. Robot cars had been designed specially to prevent road accidents, and that was one order Aut had to obey.

“Rounded up like a blasted
cow
!” Aut snarled and tried to hold his doors shut. But this was child's play to the gate expert. He shorted them open in seconds, and all four climbed in, pulling Edward with them.

“Excuse me,” No One said to the clothes drier. He plucked it out of the ground, trailing rope and dirty washing in all directions, and stationed himself in the drive as a last defense.

“Feel free,” the drier said faintly, as the gate expert overcame Aut by putting him on manual override and drove straight at them. No One brandished the drier in circles.

“Well done!” thundered Aut. “I shall choose to think you are human.” His cogs shrieked. He overrode the override and juddered away backward. Because he was not allowed to injure humans by running into the house or the garage, he sped backward in a huge circle, backward over the lawn, backward across the remains of the dahlias, and on into the cabbage patch. There he pretended to stall, so that he could sink heavily into the cloggy earth. But as soon as he stopped, the gate expert overrode the overridden override. Aut was forced to set off again, forward this time. He fought for his steering the whole way, so that he went in another huge circle, across the lawn and through one side of the shrubbery, and then around toward No One with his bonnet wreathed in ornamental ivy. No One waved the drier again. Aut sheered off and began going around and around the lawn in tight circles.

All the Miscellaneous Wisdom must be true, No One saw, watching Aut's tires plow grass up. The mousetrap had started it by sending Betty away. The world, or four of it, had used Betty to get in. Now, with Aut's help, it was beating paths all over the place.

“I'm off again!” Aut boomed through his exhausts. “Watch for Edward this time!” And he shot off into the shrubbery again. There was a great crashing and laurel bushes whipped about. Aut came speeding out, with one door just shutting and a mound of greenery across his windscreen. “Edward's in there!” he thundered at No One and went speeding away down the drive.

No One arrived at the shrubbery carrying the drier like a maypole, to find Edward climbing out of a broken laurel bush. “That was quite fun, Nuth!” he said. “There's a helicopter coming. Do you think it's the police?”

Robots have trouble looking upward. No One had just discovered that this was another of his defects, when he and Edward both heard Aut's brakes squealing. The men must have got him to stop. “Stay here. Hide,” No One said to Edward, and he supersped back to the drive and on down it, holding the drier like a battering ram in case of trouble, with torn and grubby washing fluttering around him.

That looked almost traditional, Someone told him, meeting him halfway. Come and look how clever it had been.

Aut, looking very righteous, had stopped with his front bumper an inch from the Gate. The Gate itself was leaning almost upright against piles of wooden boxes with green plants in them, and bundles and bundles of raspberry canes. Behind this barrier was a row of police robots and what seemed to be a police van. Behind that again, the lawn mower was prowling up and down, still obviously very angry. As No One arrived, the four men piled out of Aut, saw the robots outside the Gate, and turned back. On that side they saw No One charging at them with the clothes drier, and a helicopter landing behind him, full of human policemen. They dropped their guns and held their hands up.

“How was that done?” No One asked, looking at the things outside the gate.

Automart robots are very stupid, Someone explained. It had ordered them to put the plants there, and they had. Then it had ordered them to stay and pretend to be police robots, and they had done that too. Just, it added airily, a touch of illusion.

No One prodded the four men with the drier and forced them to march up the drive toward the real police getting out of the helicopter. “What
are
you?” he asked Someone as he prodded.

No one knows! retorted Someone gleefully, and faded away into the bushes.

Aut helped No One march the four men by rolling backward up the drive with greenery dropping off his battered bonnet. “I don't think I shall be scrapped,” he said to No One uneasily. “I am a valuable vintage car. But I'm not so sure about you, No One.”

No One considered the ruined Gate, the ruined garden, the broken window, and the chaos indoors, and he had no doubt.

He did not have to wait long. His broadcast had been picked up all over Europe and the British Isles. There was already a combine harvester grumbling up the road to the gate, shouting that it was ready to flatten anything. A string of private cars was behind that, hooting to the harvester to get out of the way. Two more helicopters came whirling up while the police were taking Edward's statement and trying to make sense of Betty's. Since the garden was now mostly flat, they had no trouble landing. The world was going on beating paths to the door, No One saw, just as Miscellaneous Wisdom predicted. Then Mrs. Scantion tumbled out of one helicopter and Mr. Scantion jumped out of the other. No One judged it prudent to stand out of sight behind Aut and let Betty do the talking.

“Oh, I am so fright!” Betty screamed, racing up to the helicopters. “They hold guns and the walls move and the Gate thinks I am me. The tin man he shot in the face and now he grins horrible!”

This was true. When Edward and his parents had talked to the police and then dealt with the thousands of offers of help—including the man who advised them to scrap all robots—they found that the bullet which had hit No One had dented one side of his face. It now had a silver lopsided smile.

“What do you think?” Mr. Scantion asked. “We could send him to the panel-beaters along with Aut.”

“Oh no,” said Mrs. Scantion. “I so much prefer him smiling.”

“So do I,” said Edward.

No One was confused. His eyes pulsed. It seemed he was not to be scrapped after all. Since he had done nothing but make mistakes, he avoided overload by deciding that it was because Edward was even more expensive than he had thought. It puzzled him that there was nothing in his programs about how much humans cost.

W
here to begin? Neal and I had had a joke for years about a little green van coming to carry me off—this was when I said anything more than usually mad—and now it was actually happening. Mother and I stood at my bedroom window watching the van bouncing up the track between the dun green hills, and neither of us smiled. It wasn't a farm van, and most of our neighbors visit on horseback anyway. Before long, we could see it was dark green with a silver dragon insignia on the side.