Leo Frankowski

gone.”
    “Yeah, okay.
Take it easy, Professor! I’ll get me that tree house like you said.” Jimmy shook
Guibedo’s hand.
    Guibedo was already
waist deep in the pit. “And when you get your tree house, talk to it.
They like that. Bye, Jimmy.”
    “Bye,
Professor.”
    “My lord, has
the leave-taking ceremony been completed?” the LDU asked.
    “Uh, yeah,
sure.”
    The LDU slid the
concrete slab back into position over the pit. When the floor was sealed,
lights in the tunnel went on. A long line of LDUs stood patiently waiting. Each was
carrying a load of wet cement on its broad back.
    “My lord. Once
we have you out of here, our plan is to seal up the first one hundred feet of the
tunnel with cement to slow
down pursuit, then to fill the balance with
dirt.”
    “That’s a lot
of work!”
    “We were made
for work, my lord. My Lord Copernick ordered it.”
    “Well, let’s get
walking.”
    “That’s quite
impossible for you, my lord. This tunnel is fifteen miles long.”
    “Fifteen miles!
You dug this for me?”
    “Yes, my lord,
that’s why we were three weeks in getting here.” The LDU crouched to the
height of a chair. “Would you please get on my back.”
    Eyeing the LDU’s
spindly legs, Guibedo cautiously put his portly bottom on its back. The LDU
stood up easily to its normal tabletop height and took off at a smooth trot with the man riding
sidesaddle. Guibedo soon found it was more
comfortable to ride facing forward
with his legs crossed.
    “Curves ahead, my lord.”
Tentacles that Guibedo hadn’t noticed slid
from the LDU’s sides and fastened themselves
around the man’s waist and legs. Several others provided an acceptable back rest. The LDU’s speed increased to thirty mph and they were still
passing concrete-laden LDUs.
    “A lot of you
guys here.”
    “We are ten
thousand in the zero-zero division, my lord. Ten brigades of a thousand each with
ten platoons of a hundred, each with ten squads of ten LDUs.”
    “Just like the
army,” Guibedo said, his white hair flapping in the breeze. “Who’s the
general?”
    “No one, exactly, my lord. Or
whichever one of us you talk to. You see,
we’re all in telepathic contact with each
other. When one of us knows your desires, we all do, and therefore comply.”
    “Telepathy! I
didn’t know that Heiny was that far along.”
    “I don’t believe
he designed for it, my lord,” the LDU said above the wind. “But you see, we’re all identical and we have quite extensive and widely
distributed re dundant neural systems. I have twelve major ganglia, and I can function properly on six.”
    “Like the thing
with human identical twins…” Gui bedo said. “So Heiny just got lucky!
Well, that’s nice. Things went bad for him for too long there. I guess it made you guys pretty
easy to educate.”
    “Yes, my lord.
Once he discovered our abilities, he only had to teach one of us to read and
write. The rest of us picked it up from Alpha 1. Now, each of us has his own field of
expertise, based on our individual reading, with the information available to
all.”
    “So what’s your
specialty?” Guibedo asked.
    “Unarmed combat,
with a minor in sociology, my lord.”
The LDU crowded closer to the left-hand wall of the tunnel. They were no longer
passing the concrete carriers, and LDUs with
empty baskets were passing them at an astounding speed.
    “Pretty quick,
your buddies are.”
    “Cruising speed
for an LDU is forty mph, my lord, although we can go sixty for short durations.”
    “Unarmed combat?” Guibedo said.
“If you were expecting trouble, why go unarmed?”
    “My lord, I
mean no external armament.” From a slot above each wrist, a bayonetlike claw extended out to a foot past the knuckles. “They are a
trifle dull from cutting through the concrete floor, but they are still quite
serviceable.”
    “Cutting through concrete! How you do
that?”
    “Diamond is just
another carbon compound, my lord.”
    “And carbon is
one of the things that we are all made of.” Guibedo laughed. “So you were expecting trouble.”
    “We couldn’t know
if there would be resistance or not, my lord. Nor could we be sure that we would come up in the right cell of the prison. We Alpha series
are only telepathic with one another, not with humans.”
    “Betcha Heiny’s
working on that, though.”
    “Yes, my lord. As I understand it,
the Gamma series LDU is to have a malleable
nerve net. It is hoped that they will
be able to at least receive