Unexpected Magic (25 page)

George opened the door of the Bentley and the Fat Wizard climbed out. He was very angry again. He puffed and he glared and he panted, and he finally got both feet out onto the grass. They sank up to the ankles as soon as he took a step. The earth quivered. He took two more steps. Music stands in front of the band fell over. By this time the Fat Wizard was walking along a small trench, sinking lower every second. He must have weighed well over a ton. His bulging blue eyes flickered angrily about looking for someone.

Auntie May said, in a mild, pleased voice, “I hope Tallulah Ward has the sense to keep out of sight.”

But Mrs. Ward was right near the edge of the crowd, easy to pick out by her red dress and the bunch of straining balloons. Her face was so pale that she had a bright red spot of makeup showing on each cheek.

Just then Lizzie Holgate came around the Bentley, pushing her pushchair and surrounded by all her kids. They seemed to be looking for a good place to stand. Jimmy and Mary had to lift the pushchair over the trench the Fat Wizard had made, so that for a second the whole family was milling around the Fat Wizard.

When they moved on again, the Fat Wizard was the right weight. He climbed easily out of his trench and he took an easy step or so. But it never occurred to him to thank the Holgates. He just glared at Mrs. Ward.

“If you'll just come over to the microphone, sir—” the Vicar called.

But Ranger had followed the Holgates around the Bentley, hoping for more ice cream. He saw something was going on and he stood, looking about inquisitively. He looked at the Fat Wizard.

“Ah!” said the Fat Wizard. “Now I know what to do to that woman!” He pointed a fat finger at Mrs. Ward, and he shouted out something that made an even louder noise than the loudspeakers.

All Mrs. Ward's balloons went up together in a huddle, like hair standing on end. In place of Mrs. Ward, there was suddenly a thin white pig with blobs of pink on its cheeks. It ran about among everyone's legs, trying to get itself out of its red dress. Then it dashed into the beer tent, trailing underclothes and squealing, and there was suddenly a lot of noise from in there, too.

Everyone except Ranger looked at the Vicar, and the Vicar looked at the sky. Ranger looked at me—in a puzzled, reproachful way, as if he thought it was
my
fault that Mrs. Ward was knocking tables over and squealing in the beer tent.

“Where do I stand to open this silly Fête?” the Fat Wizard said.

“Oh no you
won't
open the Fête!” I screamed. I couldn't bear the way Ranger was looking. I rushed through the crowd and I stood in the open, with one hand stretched out toward the Fat Wizard and the other stretched toward Ranger. “You're selfish and greedy and cruel!” I yelled. “
Ranger
would make a better human than you!”

The loudspeakers made a
MOTORBIKE-STARTING-IN-HEAVEN
noise. After that Ranger and the Fat Wizard seemed to have changed places. The Fat Wizard was standing where Ranger had been, staring at me with amused piggy eyes. Where the Fat Wizard had been was a very fat pig with a sort of black waistcoat marked on its white skin. This pig had blue eyes and it looked stunned.

Jimmy Holgate shouted, “
Cheryl! Look out
!”

George was climbing out of the Bentley. His smart chauffeur's uniform burst off him. He leaped toward me, towering over me, huge and blue-black. The tail he always seemed to be missing was lashing round his legs, thick and hairy, with a forked tip. I was terrified.

Lizzie Holgate and her kids arrived beside me. Auntie May was there too, holding her hat on dourly. And my mother was next to Auntie May, which
did
surprise me, because she never goes to the Church Fête. George towered and gnashed his long teeth. We all shouted “Avaunt!” and the loudspeakers went
SCREAM
and George vanished. The poor little piglet down by the bowling pitch suddenly went mad. George had possessed it. It screamed so hard that it almost drowned the noise in the beer tent.

Ranger winked at me. “Let's get this Fête open,” he said to the Vicar in a pleasant grunty voice, “and we can all have an ice cream.”

But Lizzie Holgate was whispering to my mother, “Can you send her somewhere where there's no pigs around?”

Mother caught the glaring blue eye of the pig with the waistcoat. “Her Godmother. In Town,” she whispered back.

I caught the two-thirty bus outside the gate. While the bus was turning around, Old Ned let the piglet out of its hutch and it chased after the bus, foaming at the mouth, until Jimmy Holgate managed to catch it by one leg.

I have never dared to go back. Mother writes that the blue-eyed pig made such a nuisance of himself, squealing and grunting night and day, that they sent him along with George to the bacon factory some time ago. Mother has Mrs. Ward in the sty in her backyard. Even the Holgates can't turn her back. Ranger is still living at the Big House. He opens the Church Fête every year, and Mother says you couldn't have a nicer landlord.

O
ne morning in the year 2084, the Right Honorable Mrs. Barbara Scantion M.P. was talking to a friend in the House of Commons. “Yes, it's school holidays,” she was saying. “My husband's in Madrid. We got a foreign girl to look after Edward, but Edward's just rung up to say she's walked out again. That's the second time this week!”

“Does that mean no one's looking after Edward?” the friend asked.

“Yes. No one's looking after Edward,” Mrs. Scantion said. She laughed.

A fly-on-the-wall bug recorded this conversation and it was duly passed on to the Anti-European Organization, which wished to make use of Mrs. Scantion. Unfortunately, it was entirely misunderstood.

No One was a robot—though Edward called him Nuth, short for Nothing. He was No. One in Knight Bros's special new series of White Knights, which meant he was fitted with every latest device in robotics, including a quasi-permanent power pac, long-distance radio, and self-reprogramming. He had an AT brain (meaning Advanced Type). His silver skin would only melt at extreme high temperatures, and, what was probably more useful, he could feel with his silver fingers. His pink eyes could see in the dark. In fact, he could see anything which was not actually invisible. He was programmed both to obey orders and think for himself. He was brand-new. He cost a bomb (Mr. Scantion was very, very rich). And he knew he was utterly useless.

He got both his names because the Scantions looked up from reading, in the thick booklet which had come with him, that he was No. One in the White Knight Series. And the robot was not there. The passage leading to the garage door was empty. Since they had all seen the lorry drive up and deliver the big crate labeled
FRAGILE THIS END UP
, and since Mr. Scantion had signed the delivery note with the robot unpacked and standing beside him in the garage, this puzzled everyone extremely.

It was quite simple. The moment Mr. Scantion went through the door to the house, something slammed the door shut and left the garage in darkness. The robot could see another pair of large robot eyes not far away. He thought he was in a store place for robots and was meant to stay there.

“Can you tell me if I should stay here?” he asked the other robot politely. It was a car of some kind, he could see.

Its voice seemed to be made from grinding cogwheels together. “Think for yourself,” it grunted unhelpfully.

“Yes, but I am new,” the robot explained. “I am a household robot, so I assume I should be in a house. But the door is shut. Why is that?”

The car gave a hydraulic sort of sigh. “Someone shut it of course! Wirenose! If you go close to it, the circuit will cause it to open again. That's how the softbodies do it.”

“Thank you. What are softbodies?” asked the robot.

“Humans,” grunted the car. “People. Folk. Owners.” And as the robot walked toward the door, it snarled at him, in a perfect crash of cogs. “Learn to
think
, blobface! Or get scrapped!”

The lorry driver's mate had said that too, in the same disgusted way. The robot stepped through the door when it opened, wondering if there was something more to thinking than he had in his programs. There were four humans (softbodies?) in the passage beyond, one of them unnaturally small, all with the lower hole in their faces pulled into an O.

“Nothing!” said Betty the foreign girl, whose English was always a stage behind the facts.

The robot advanced toward them on soundless spongy feet. “Think,” he said. “Consider, judge, believe, or ponder.”

To his confusion, Betty screamed and ran away, and the rest fell about laughing. Mr. Scantion said, “No need to think. Your name's No One.”

“Nothing's better,” Edward said, but this joke was not attended to.

People very seldom attended to what Edward said. This confused No One, because he was told straightaway that his main job was to take care of Edward. Betty the foreign girl was considered unreliable. She broke down all the time. When she did, she sobbed that she was “
not happy
!” and then put things in a blue suitcase and went away down the drive. Presumably she went to get serviced, because she always came back about twelve hours later. It became No One's job to release the switches on the gate to let Betty out, and then release them again when she came back. It was a special Security Gate, designed to keep Edward safe.

Edward was obviously very precious. No One was told that Edward was going to inherit some things called “the firm” and “responsibilities” later on. No One ran through his dictionary program and discovered that “firm” meant the same as “hard, difficult.” This must be why Edward always went white when these things were talked about. It was a sign of slight overload, the same sort of thing that made No One's eyes pulse. Edward was being programmed, very slowly, in all sorts of hard things like manners and playing the piano. No One knew how that felt—and it had only taken six months to program him: Edward was going to take years. He realized that Edward was very expensive indeed and treated him with great respect.

But he was confused. None of his programs quite fitted things as they were. This was Knight Bros's fault. When Mr. Scantion had ordered a household robot for Fawley Manor, someone in the office looked at a photo of the Manor and saw it was a large old house. They programmed No One for a large old house, not realizing that Fawley Manor had been modernized throughout inside. The only old thing left was the stairs. The walls were energized screens and the furniture was energized foam blocks, all of which could be moved at the touch of a button, controlled by a robot fixture in the cellar. The kitchen was a mass of machinery. No One's eyes pulsed when he saw it. But Mrs. Scantion had told him to cook supper because she was sick of autofood, so he located the freezer and opened it.

The freezer hummed frosty air complacently around No One. It was full of square gray frozen packets which all looked exactly alike. There was no way of telling carrots from éclairs, or beetroot from blackberries. “You'll have to melt everything to find out what it is,” the freezer hummed.

“That would take too long,” said No One. He held up a gray packet. “What is this?”

“Chicken drumsticks,” hummed the freezer.

“And this?” asked No One, holding up another packet.

“I've forgotten,” said the freezer. “You won't do it that way. My self-melt will come on if you keep me open much longer.”

No One picked a bundle of gray packets out at random and shut the freezer. He put them in hot water in one of the sinks to thaw. While he was doing that, coffee beans began pouring out of a hopper in the opposite wall. No One went over to the hopper. “Why are you doing that?” he asked.

“Making-use-of-a-faulty-circuit-to-annoy-you,” rattled the hopper. “Boo!” And coffee beans piled on the work surface.

No One tried to locate the faulty circuit. There was a gargling behind him. Even moving at superspeed, No One was not quick enough to stop the waste-disposal in the sink from eating every one of the gray packets, and he nearly lost a finger trying to. “Glumph,” said the waste-disposal, satisfied. As No One went to the freezer for another set of gray packets, he distinctly heard something scuttering and scrambling out of his way. But there was nothing there. Whatever it was continued to scutter and scramble from then on, confusing No One thoroughly. Since it did not seem to be there, he tried to ignore it. He stripped the plastic off the gray food and put it in the roasting oven. The autocook and the microwave at once flashed red lights at him.