Free Showdown at Centerpoint by Roger MacBride Allen Page B

deliberately made machines do things that no one else would want them to do. But one could learn a lot about an unknown device by watching Anakin figure it out.
    Thus, the droid had two purposes in watching the child—first was at least to attempt to prevent him fromdoing
too
much damage as he wandered from one piece of machinery to the other.
    His other duty was simply to record what the child did when he started fiddling with the hardware he found.
    It was a full-time job—a more than full-time job, really. Q9-X2 drew most of the duty, thanks to his built-in recording systems. But even a droid had to recharge once in a while, and besides, Q9-X2 did not
want
to spend all day every day preventing this most peculiar child from pushing the wrong button and melting the planet. If nothing else, the constant strain would be too much for his judgment circuits. At least it
might
be, and that came to much the same thing. Perhaps not the most straightforward thought process, just there, but it was enough of an argument to get him a break from Anakin-watching once in a while, and that was more than good enough.
    Anakin punched a code into the access panel, and a low chime sounded. Past experience had taught Q9 that this sound was not a good sign. It seemed to be a sort of warning bell.
    “That will do, Anakin,” said Q9.
    Anakin looked around in surprise, as if he hadn’t known Q9 was there. “Q9!” Anakin shouted. “Oh!”
    If the droid had been programmed to do so, he would have let out a sigh. Q9 had been with him for hours now, so it seemed unlikely the child could be surprised by his arrival. On the other manipulator, Anakin hadn’t shown much sign of acting talent. Q9 had
heard
of the phenomenon known as absentmindedness, but he hadn’t had any reason to believe it really existed until he met Anakin. “I think it would be best if you stopped examining that machine until Chewbacca or one of the others can take a look at it.”
    “But I’ve almost got it working!” Anakin protested.
    “Do you know what it does? Do you have any
idea
what it does?”
    “N-n-no,” Anakin admitted, quite reluctantly.
    “Do you remember what happened the last time you heard that chime and you kept going?”
    “A trapdoor opened,” Anakin said, suddenly finding reasons to look everywhere but at Q9.
    “Yes. A trapdoor opened. Under me. And I fell into a waste disposal chute. If I had not managed to jump my repulsors to high power in time and bounce back up, what would I be right now?”
    “Mashed down to a ten-centimeter cube. Unless the machine had melted you down by now.”
    “Quite right. But Chewbacca only found that out afterward, didn’t he?”
    “I helped him,” Anakin protested.
    “Yes, you did. And we need you around to help him more. So what would we do if the trapdoor was under you this time?”
    Anakin’s eyes grew wide with alarm. “Oh,” he said. “Maybe I’d better stop and let Chewie look.”
    “Maybe you’d better,” agreed Q9. “Come on, let’s go find the others.”
    Anakin nodded. “Okay,” he said, and turned back the way they had come.
    Q9 followed after on his repulsors, relieved that Anakin had decided to be cooperative—this time. Q9-X2 had been designed with the capacity to learn new behaviors by trial and error, but he had never expected to use that capacity to learn practical child psychology. The skills required to handle Anakin with even marginal success were taking up an inordinate portion of system resources. Q9 decided he was going to have to perform a partial memory wipe on himself, and free up some capacity, when this was over.
    If it ever
was
over. As they came out of the side passage and into the central chamber, Q9 reflected that this situation was starting to look rather permanent.
    They were a motley crew, all of them holed up inthis huge and alien place. Anakin and Q9 paused at the exit from the side passage and looked around.
    Seen from this vantage point, the repulsor