Invincible Summer by Alice Adams Page A

sound. Irritated at being distracted but sufficiently unnerved by the possibility of something being wrong with what was, after all, a cupboard full of very expensive equipment, he pushed his keyboard aside and went to investigate.
      
    Benedict opened his eyes and watched as the polystyrene ceiling tiles and strip lighting of the office swam into view. There was something else, too, dark and blurry and closer to his face than the ceiling. He struggled to focus on the inorganic arm protruding from a hole in the cupboard door. Boris. There was a sharp pain in the side of his face, he realised, and lifted his hand to touch it.
    ‘Don’t move,’ a woman’s voice barked. A female voice was in itself an unusual phenomenon in his office. He tried to turn his head and focus on the face as it hove into view above him.
    ‘What did I just say? Don’t move.’ Now the face moved directly into his line of vision and he recognised it as belonging to Lydia, another PhD student from the Solid State team along the corridor.
    ‘What happened?’ His voice came out as an embarrassing croak.
    Lydia appeared to stifle a smile. ‘I’m afraid your robot appears to have gone rogue. I’m using my powers of deduction here, Watson, but it looks like it punched through the door and hit you in the face. I was just checking my gallium arsenide cells when I heard a load of banging and then a squeal, and I found you lying on the floor and Boris hanging halfway out the door of his cupboard. I’ve turned the power to your room off at the fuse box, by the way, hope you didn’t have anything unsaved on your computer but Boris was still twitching rather alarmingly.’
    Benedict started to peel himself up off the carpet.
    ‘You stay right there. The ambulance will be here any minute.’
    ‘Ambulance?’ he groaned. ‘That’s really not necessary.’
    As he clambered to his feet waving away Lydia’s restraining hand, two green-clad paramedics appeared in the doorway.
    ‘The patient’s in here,’ Lydia called to them. ‘I did tell him not to move. He was knocked out by a robot, you know.’
    ‘Robot attack, is it?’ said the first paramedic, a large grey-haired man of about fifty, in a thick West Country burr. ‘We don’t get many of those, I don’t mind telling you.’
    ‘Honestly, it’s nothing,’ Benedict said. ‘Look, I’m fine now, really, it’s just a graze.’
    ‘We’ll be the ones to decide that,’ said the second paramedic, a skinny young man with a large nose. ‘Sit yourself in this chair and let me have a look in your eyes. Bright light, try not to blink. Now, this young lady said you were out for the count. How long was he unconscious?’ This last addressed to Lydia.
    ‘Not more than a few minutes, I’d say,’ she told him. ‘I heard a loud noise which must have been the robot arm punching through the door, and found him out cold on the floor. I phoned for the ambulance but he opened his eyes almost as soon as I put the phone down.’
    ‘You’ve got a bit of a bruise but it doesn’t look that bad,’ said the older paramedic. ‘Still, can’t be too careful with a head injury. We’d better take him in.’
    ‘No really, I’m absolutely fine,’ Benedict protested. ‘I certainly don’t need to go to hospital.’
    ‘Well, we could release you into her care, I suppose. Will you be with him all night, young lady? Take him straight to A&E if there’s any vomiting or strange behaviour?’
     Benedict looked pleadingly at Lydia and she sighed. ‘Yes, I can take him home with me tonight. I’ll keep a good eye on him.’
    This seemed to be enough to placate the paramedics, and they picked up their bags to leave. As they reached the doorway the older man turned back towards them.
    ‘So that’s what you lot get up to down here, is it?’ he said disapprovingly. ‘Shenanigans with robots? And then they get a mind of their own and something like this happens? I’ll tell you the name of a film you should