Smith awoke to a blinding light that hurt his eyes. His head ached and pounded, but… the voices - - yes, the damned, cursed voices that had driven him to the edge and over - - were silent.
Gone.
Although his body felt as if he’d been dragged across Priplanus on the underside of the Chariot, the utter mental bliss he now experienced from the absence of the voices was liberating to the point of being euphoric.
His eyes now adjusting slightly, Smith realized he recognized this place. He was lying on the exam table in that Med-dem room that used to be his old cabin. The bright light was emanating from above. He tried to shield his eyes, but found his arms restrained. He was, in fact, completely immobilized, upon orders from Will Robinson.
"What is the meaning of this? Why am I bound?" protested Smith. "I demand to be released!"
The Robot entered the room. "I am afraid you are in no position to demand anything, Dr. Smith," he stated.
"You tin-plated traitor," sneered Smith. "Release me at once, do you hear? At once! Or I shall take a stick to your hide, sir!"
"Dr. Smith," responded the Robot. "You should remain calm. Agitation is not good for you in your present condition."
"Not good for me? Not good for me! And just what do you care about my present condition, booby!" growled Smith.
"A hell of a lot more than I do right now," interjected Will matter-of-factly as he rounded the corner and entered the room. Ignoring Smith and turning to the Robot, he asked, "Well? What’s the prognosis, Dr. Freud? Is your patient ‘cured?’"
"His patient! What are on Earth are you babbling about?" asked Smith. "I’ll not be treated for a hang-nail by this bellicose bumpkin!"
"Well, the alliteratives are a promising sign -- in my book anyway," said Will. "What’s the ‘official’ diagnosis?"
"Med-dem MEM diagnostics report that the alien mindwash still has a positive presence in Dr. Smith’s synaptic patterns," replied the Robot. "However, the patterns are not active, indicating that the mindwash is now effectively back in a state of remission."
"Remission, huh," repeated Will. "You know that’s not good enough, Robot. We have no idea how long he’ll remain in remission, or what might cause the damned mindwash to become active again."
"According to my calculations, current remission state of ‘damned mindwash’ has a very good chance of lasting at least as long as it did before," replied the Robot.
Will rolled his eyes at the Robot’s subtle attempt to chide him for swearing.
"There’s probably also just as good a chance he could snap right back into it the moment we leave the ship, am I right?" questioned Will.
The Robot was silent.
"Thought so," concluded Will. "No, I’m not gonna go there and take that risk. I’m sorry, but we’ve got to keep him restrained and have the Med-dem induce the artificial coma."
"You can’t be serious, dear William," objected Smith. "I cannot be held accountable for my actions. It simply wasn’t me. It was that hostile brainwash taking over again. I can assure you, I’m back to my dear old self now. The voices inside my head are gone - - really. Oh, please William."
"I, too, wish to appeal your decision, Will Robinson," protested the Robot. "It is possible that I might be able to adjust my internal sensors to monitor Dr. Smith’s cerebral state of mind and report on any changes in brainwave patterns."
"You are true blue, my dear mechanical friend," cooed Smith.
"There’s no time for that, Robot, and you know it," replied Will. "We’ve got to get moving. While you’ve been working down here, I’ve been able to run some scans. All of our long-range instrument readings indicate there are no other life forms on this planet - - which is a pretty strange phenomena in itself. However, I’m picking up some suspicious looking energy patterns about 3 miles southwest of here. It might be some kind of stealth structure or ship that’s impervious to scanning. Bears checking out anyway."
"But I could help," volunteered Smith. "I could go with you, William. Please, won’t you reconsider? It would be just like old times - - Dr. Smith and William to the rescue. Oh, please dear boy? I assure you, I am truly a changed man."
Wow, déjà vu - - how many times had he heard that before, Will asked himself as he slipped a standard, pre-programmed cartridge into the Med-dem which contained the medical program that would keep Smith sedated, hydrated and nourished. The sly old fox had played him for a fool once too often, but just the same, the doctor’s plea still cut Will to the quick. He wasn’t totally convinced it was the right thing to do, but couldn’t risk letting his emotions cloud his judgement. Tactically, he had to eliminate any last potential threat the scoundrel might render to deter his efforts to find his family.
Smith was sleeping peacefully before Will could even come up with a response to his plea.
* * * * * * * *
After double-checking the Med-dem’s program and scanning Smith’s vitals, Will turned and headed silently for the elevator followed by the Robot. Neither of them spoke on the way to the upper deck. Although, intellectually, he knew it was not possible, Will still couldn’t shake the distinct feeling that the Robot was glaring angrily at him on the trip up.
"Let’s take another look outside," suggested Will snapping on a monitor. "Hmm, looks like it’s starting to get light," he noted. "I’d hoped for another couple hours of darkness, but you travel better in daylight anyway."
"I am sorry if my mobility limitations are ‘cramping your style,’ Will Robinson," answered the Robot.
"Do I detect a note of sarcasm? Or are you just angry with me for my decision about Dr. Smith?" asked Will.
"Negative on both counts," replied the mechanical man. "I was not programmed for sarcasm or anger. It was merely an observation of my meager cybernetic limitations versus your superior reconnaissance abilities."
"Ahhh, it that so? Hmm, first the little morality jab a few minute ago, and now sarcasm, anger and condescension. You know? You honestly get scarier by the year," smiled Will, giving the Robot an affectionate "bubble-noogie" as he walked by. "I wonder what the cybernetics guys back at Alpha Control would think, if they ever found out they’d created a sentient life form instead of a ‘General Utility Non-Theorizing Environmental Robot.’"
"Class B-9," the Robot reminded Will.
Will continued over to the instrument panel at the main viewport. He’d wanted to run another scan on the energy signature he’d picked up earlier. He was both puzzled and agitated by the lack of information he was able to gather. Lost in thought, he didn’t hear the Robot’s voice until he repeated his statement.
"Oh, um what?" asked Will. "Sorry, I was concentrating on these readings."
"I said, I am sorry, Will Robinson, that I have failed both you and your family," repeated the Robot in a mechanically despondent tone.
"Look, forget about it," replied Will. "We’ve already been over this. It’s not your fault. You did everything you could. Hell, you saved my life."
After the Robot rendered Smith unconscious and hooked him up to the Med-dem, he’d given Will both an accounting of the attack and an explanation for his sudden, mysterious appearance.
The Robot reported that he and Major West had been working on decoding a radio transmission that was being broadcast identically on 7 different celestial bandwidths. Will already knew this, as he’d overheard the conversation on his way down to the Power Core.
Initially, the Major assumed it was a distress call. So, while the Robot worked on running the message through his dialectic and pattern analysis sub-routine buffer, West charted, plotted and began following the signals back to their point of origin.
Will and Don had butted heads on this very subject before, both hypothetically and in the course of actual events. The Major was from the old school of space military training that subscribes to the "act first, think later, trust-your-gut-instincts" mentality. He was, essentially, a "hot dog" and proud of it. Will admired Don’s fearlessness, sharp mind and quick reflexes. But his headstrong nature had caused them setbacks on more than one occasion.
Will, on the other hand, was a strategist. He was overly cautious when approaching a situation, and he knew it. But he’d seen too many of his H’rlaxian friends and comrades captured or killed because they just jumped into a fray without thinking.
As it turned out, the radio transmissions were not a distress call. They were a "b’kull," as they used to call it in the H’rlax.
A carrot.
A lure.
The Robot’s final analysis of the bogus transmissions sent up enough red flags to Professor Robinson that he ordered West to turn the ship around and hightail it out of the sector as fast as he could. The order came too late however, as the Jupiter 2 was suddenly hit by a magnetic vehicle stasis net emanating from a stealth ship that had eluded detection by both long and short range scanners.
The attackers had obviously underestimated the power of the Jupiter 2, as the stasis net was not of sufficient power or intensity to hold it. It merely slowed it down. Realizing this almost immediately, they switched to a more aggressive means, firing upon the ship.
The sneak attack had caught them off-guard and the bottom of the Jupiter took a direct hit before Don could get a force field fully emitted around the ship. Although the ship’s thickly armored hull was able to withstand the attack, the concussion caused a static power build-up and electrical overload in one of the new the sub-atomic particle matrix chambers, resulting in the explosion in the Power Core level that rendered Will unconscious.
Knowing Will was working in the lower part of the ship that had just been the focal point of the alien blast, John Robinson tried to raise his son over the ship’s intercom. When he got no reply, he dispatched the Robot to go down to the Power Core.
The failure of the sub-atomic particle matrix caused the Jupiter 2 to be temporarily held helpless in the magnetic vehicle stasis beam, while the other two particle chambers built up enough power to compensate and allow the ship to break free. Don remained at the helm controls ready to fire the superthrusters to navigate the ship out of attack range and into a more strategically defensive position once the chambers had enough power. In the meantime, John and Drykr had powered up the ship’s offensive weaponry, while the women quickly manned the defensive and emergency backup stations on the lower deck. John managed to get one cyclo-disrupter blast in on the alien ship before the unthinkable occurred.
What happened next according to the Robot, made Will want to kick himself around the nearest asteroid. While descending on the elevator to the lower deck, the Robot’s sensors picked up eight armed intruders materializing simultaneously on the upper and lower decks. This should not have been able to happen with the force field in place around the Jupiter 2. He had heard rumors recently through his H’rlaxian contacts of new trans-spatial boarding beam technology, but never in a million years would have thought he’d have to deal with it. That kind of stuff was used by the big boys in the big battles.
Exiting the elevator on the lower deck to defend ship and crew, the Robot drew laser fire from two of the intruders, deflecting a couple of blasts into the nearby support beams, while firing back electrical discharges that disabled the two intruders’ weapons. A third alien entered the fray, firing a hand-held laser cannon - - the blast hurling all 550 pounds of Robot off his treads and though the open hatch door into the Robot Bay, smashing into the storage locker of spare robotics parts they had accumulated over the years. Components flew everywhere.
Blast-scorched, the Robot’s armored exterior had been reinforced to withstand laser assaults. The only real physical damage he sustained was a cracked bubble and bent up audio sensors. However, with his high voltage defense mechanism engaged, the severe impact into the locker caused an internal electrical feedback that overloaded his primary power grid. Emergency back-up power cells re-activated the Robot’s sensors, while his damage control computer sub-routine began the task of internally regenerating the primary power grid.
Sensing his opponent was, indeed, "down but not out," the attacker tossed an incendiary grenade into the bay and closed the hatch to finish off his mechanical victim. However, the incendiary device erupted violently in a mass of flame before the hatch was completely sealed off, and the white-hot flames that shot out from the bottom of the door like a blast furnace jammed the closing mechanism and instantly vaporized the alien.
The fireball from the grenade had about the same strange effect on the Robot as the Junkman’s blast furnace had so many years ago; which was basically, none at all, save a couple overheated circuit boards that slowed down the internal repairs, leaving him alert, but otherwise immobilized.
This is where his report to Will ended. The Robot could not "compute" what had caused the ship to crash or if anyone was left on board when it did. It wasn’t until right after Dr. Smith had trapped Will, that his mobility returned, enabling him heave open the jammed hatch and foil Dr. Smith’s deadly intentions.
As Will again went over these events in his mind, a new blip on the radar screen alerted him.
"That’s odd," said Will. "That wasn’t there a minute ago. I wonder what it is?"
"It is a blip," replied the Robot dryly.
"Quite a sense of humor you’ve got there," retorted Will. "I can see it’s a blip. It’s too small to be a ship and not large enough to be a vehicle. And our scanners still indicate no life forms. Yet, whatever it is, it’s only about a quarter mile out and moving this direction."
Will moved over to the main hatch, slung the small backpack he’d already prepared over his shoulder and holstered the Atomizer at his side.
"Stay inside and secure the hatch when I leave," ordered Will. "Reactivate the force field when I’m out of range and try to monitor me with the radio-telescope."
"I would advise extreme caution, Will Robinson," replied the Robot. "Perhaps I should accompany you. If this unidentified object should turn out to be a robot, it could be dangerous and I may be of assistance."
"Don’t worry. I’m not planning on making contact - - yet. I just want a quick look at what we’re up against," said Will. "I’ll keep my radio open. If it looks like more than I can handle, you’ll be the first one I call."
"I shall keep you informed of its movement and whereabouts on the radar scope, Will Robinson," answered the Robot.
Will and the Robot had decided to go ahead run tests on the planet’s atmosphere, even though it was pretty obvious that the atmosphere was breathable - - given the fact that the main hatch was wide open when Will had originally come up from below. However, it was actually good thing they had run the tests, because they discovered the planet’s atmosphere contained microscopic spores that would have a caustic effect with prolonged exposure. The Med-dem was able to break down the composition of the spores and formulate a chemical solution that, if taken hourly through an inhaler, would enhance the body’s immune system enough to neutralize the little buggers.
Taking a deep hit on his inhaler, Will exited the ship. In the dawn’s breaking light, he could make out a rocky hill about 50 yards straight ahead of the ship. If the "blip" was indeed headed toward the Jupiter 2, it would have to pass by there. He figured it would be the best vantage point to get a look at whatever it was without being detected.
Looking around, he made a quick dash to the rocky incline, agilely climbing to a spot where he could view both the Jupiter 2 and the area from which he calculated the object to be approaching.
"Robot, do you read me?" questioned Will into his radio.
"Affirmative, Will Robinson," answered the Robot.
"Are you able to track me on the radio telescope?" he asked.
"Negative. There is currently too much interference emanating from anomalous energy source to make visual contact. I will attempt to change frequencies," replied the Robot. "However, I am still tracking unidentified moving object on radar scope. Object is still approaching Jupiter 2 spacecraft from southwest."
Will strained his eyes in the dim light. He could still see nothing approaching.
"Attention! Unidentified object is changing course, Will Robinson," reported the Robot. "It is now headed due north."
Will checked his compass. Okay, he thought, that only means it’s decided to go around the other side of this hill, that’s all. If it’s truly fixed on and headed for the Jupiter 2, I’ll still have a clear view before it gets too close.
Will repositioned himself to get a better view of his left flank.
"Unidentified object has ceased movement," reported the Robot. "It is now within range of my internal sensors. However, it does not compute - - it registers energy and heat, yet is neither a life form, nor robotic in nature. Correction! Unidentified object is now moving due east. According to my calculations – it is headed up the other side of the embankment where you are positioned! Warning, Will Robinson! Danger! Immediate retreat advised."
"Okay, settle down," said Will sternly. "Just tell me where is it in proximity to both me and the Jupiter 2?"
"In colloquial terms, ‘12 o’clock high,’ Will Robinson!" warned the Robot. "Warning! Unidentified object is now directly behind you!"
Will spun around quickly with his Atomizer raised and ready to fire.
"YOU!" he exclaimed.
