ISAAC ASIMOV’S
ROBOT CITY

 

 

Books in the Isaac Asimov’s Robot City^TM series from Ace

 

BOOK 1: ODYSSEY by Michael P. Kube-McDowell

BOOK 2: SUSPICION by Mike McQuay

BOOK 3: CYBORG by William F. Wu

BOOK 4: PRODIGY by Arthur Byron Cover

BOOK 5: REFUGE by Rob Chilson

BOOK 6: PERIHELION by William F. Wu

 

 

ISAAC ASIMOV’S

ROBOT

CITY

 

BOOK 2: SUSPICION

MIKE MCQUAY

 

A Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc. Book

 

ACE BOOKS, NEW YORK

 

 

This book is an Ace original edition, and has never been previously published.

 

ISAAC ASIMOV’S ROBOT CITY

BOOK 2: SUSPICION

 

An Ace Book/published by arrangement with Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc.

 

PRINTING HISTORY

Ace Edition/September 1987

 

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 1987 by Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc.

Introduction copyright © 1987 by Nightfall, Inc.

Cover art and illustrations by Paul Rivoche.

Edited by David M. Harris.

Book design by Alex Jay/Studio J.

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

ROBOT CITY is a trademark of Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc.

For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

 

ISBN: 0-441-73126-0

 

Ace books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

The name “Ace” and the “A” logo are trademarks belonging to Charter Communications, Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

 

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

 

 

For Brian Shelton And the “bruised banana”

 

 

 

THE LAWS OF HUMANICS

ISAAC ASIMOV

 

I am pleased by the way in which the Robot City books pick up the various themes and references in my robot stories and carry on with them.

For instance, my first three robot novels were, essentially, murder mysteries, with Elijah Baley as the detective. Of these first three, the second novel, The Naked Sun, was a locked-room mystery, in the sense that the murdered person was found with no weapon on the site and yet no weapon could have been removed either.

I managed to produce a satisfactory solution but I did not do that sort of thing again, and I am delighted that Mike McQuay has tried his hand at it here.

The fourth robot novel, Robots and Empire, was not primarily a murder mystery. Elijah Baley had died a natural death at a good, old age, the book veered toward the Foundation universe so that it was clear that both my notable series, the Robot series and the Foundation series, were going to be fused into a broader whole. (No, I didn’t do this for some arbitrary reason. The necessities arising out of writing sequels in the 1980s to tales originally written in the 1940s and 1950s forced my hand.)

In Robots and Empire, my robot character, Giskard, of whom I was very fond, began to concern himself with “the Laws of Humanics,” which, I indicated, might eventually serve as the basis for the science of psychohistory, which plays such a large role in the Foundation series.

Strictly speaking, the Laws of Humanics should be a description, in concise form, of how human beings actually behave. No such description exists, of course. Even psychologists, who study the matter scientifically (at least, I hope they do) cannot present any “laws” but can only make lengthy and diffuse descriptions of what people seem to do. And none of them are prescriptive. When a psychologist says that people respond in this way to a stimulus of that sort, he merely means that some do at some times. Others may do it at other times, or may not do it at all.

If we have to wait for actual laws prescribing human behavior in order to establish psychohistory (and surely we must) then I suppose we will have to wait a long time.

Well, then, what are we going to do about the Laws of Humanics? I suppose what we can do is to start in a very small way, and then later slowly build it up, if we can.

Thus, in Robots and Empire, it is a robot, Giskard, who raises the question of the Laws of Humanics. Being a robot, he must view everything from the standpoint of the Three Laws of Robotics — these robotic laws being truly prescriptive, since robots are forced to obey them and cannot disobey them.

The Three Laws of Robotics are:

1 — A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2 — A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3 — A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Well, then, it seems to me that a robot could not help but think that human beings ought to behave in such a way as to make it easier for robots to obey those laws.

In fact, it seems to me that ethical human beings should be as anxious to make life easier for robots as the robots themselves would. I took up this matter in my story “The Bicentennial Man,” which was published in 1976. In it, I had a human character say in part:

“If a man has the right to give a robot any order that does not involve harm to a human being, he should have the decency never to give a robot any order that involves harm to a robot, unless human safety absolutely requires it. With great power goes great responsibility, and if the robots have Three Laws to protect men, is it too much to ask that men have a law or two to protect robots?”

For instance, the First Law is in two parts. The first part, “A robot may not injure a human being,” is absolute and nothing need be done about that. The second part, “or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm,” leaves things open a bit. A human being might be about to come to harm because of some event involving an inanimate object. A heavy weight might be likely to fall upon him, or he may slip and be about to fall into a lake, or any one of uncountable other misadventures of the sort may be involved. Here the robot simply must try to rescue the human being; pull him from under, steady him on his feet and so on. Or a human being might be threatened by some form of life other than human — a lion, for instance — and the robot must come to his defense.

But what if harm to a human being is threatened by the action of another human being? There a robot must decide what to do. Can he save one human being without harming the other? Or if there must be harm, what course of action must he pursue to make it minimal?

It would be a lot easier for the robot, if human beings were as concerned about the welfare of human beings, as robots are expected to be. And, indeed, any reasonable human code of ethics would instruct human beings to care for each other and to do no harm to each other. Which is, after all, the mandate that humans gave robots. Therefore the First Law of Humanics from the robots’ standpoint is:

1 — A human being may not injure another human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

If this law is carried through, the robot will be left guarding the human being from misadventures with inanimate objects and with non-human life, something which poses no ethical dilemmas for it. Of course, the robot must still guard against harm done a human being unwittingly by another human being. It must also stand ready to come to the aid of a threatened human being, if another human being on the scene simply cannot get to the scene of action quickly enough. But then, even a robot may unwittingly harm a human being, and even a robot may not be fast enough to get to the scene of action in time or skilled enough to take the necessary action. Nothing is perfect.

That brings us to the Second Law of Robotics, which compels a robot to obey all orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. This means that human beings can give robots any order without limitation as long as it does not involve harm to a human being.

But then a human being might order a robot to do something impossible, or give it an order that might involve a robot in a dilemma that would do damage to its brain. Thus, in my short story “Liar!,” published in 1940, I had a human being deliberately put a robot into a dilemma where its brain burnt out and ceased to function.

We might even imagine that as a robot becomes more intelligent and self-aware, its brain might become sensitive enough to undergo harm if it were forced to do something needlessly embarrassing or undignified. Consequently, the Second Law of Humanics would be:

2 — A human being must give orders to a robot that preserve robotic existence, unless such orders cause harm or discomfort to human beings.

The Third Law of Robotics is designed to protect the robot, but from the robotic view it can be seen that it does not go far enough. The robot must sacrifice its existence if the First or Second Law makes that necessary. Where the First Law is concerned, there can be no argument. A robot must give up its existence if that is the only way it can avoid doing harm to a human being or can prevent harm from coming to a human being. If we admit the innate superiority of any human being to any robot (which is something I am a little reluctant to admit, actually), then this is inevitable.

On the other hand, must a robot give up its existence merely in obedience to an order that might be trivial, or even malicious? In “The Bicentennial Man,” I have some hoodlums deliberately order a robot to take itself apart for the fun of watching that happen. The Third Law of Humanics must therefore be:

3 — A human being must not harm a robot, or, through inaction, allow a robot to come to harm, unless such harm is needed to keep a human being from harm or to allow a vital order to be carried out.

Of course, we cannot enforce these laws as we can the Robotic Laws. We cannot design human brains as we design robot brains. It is, however, a beginning, and I honestly think that if we are to have power over intelligent robots, we must feel a corresponding responsibility for them, as the human character in my story “The Bicentennial Man” said.

Certainly in Robot City, these are the sorts of rules that robots might suggest for the only human beings on the planet, as you may soon learn.

 

 

CHAPTER 1

PARADES

 

It was sunset in the city of robots, and it was snowing paper.

The sun was a yellow one and the atmosphere, mostly nitrogen/oxygen blue, was flush with the veins of iron oxides that traced through it, making the whole twilight sky glow bright orange like a forest fire.

The one who called himself Derec marveled at the sunset from the back of the huge earthmover as it slowly made its way through the city streets, crowds of robots lining the avenue to watch him and his companions make this tour of the city. The tiny shards of paper floated down from the upper stories of the crystal-like buildings, thrown (for reasons that escaped Derec) by the robots that crowded the windows to watch him.

Derec took it all in, sure that it must have significance or the robots wouldn’t do it. And that was the only thing he was sure of—for Derec was a person without memory, without notion of who he was. Worse still, he had come to this impossible world, unpopulated by humans, by means that still astounded him; and he had no idea, no idea, of where in the universe he was.

He was young, the cape of manhood still new on his shoulders, and he only knew that by observing himself in a mirror. Even his name—Derec—wasn’t really his. It was a borrowed name, a convenient thing to call himself because not having a name was like not existing. And he desperately wanted to exist, to know who, to know what he was.

And why.

Beside him sat a young woman called Katherine Burgess, who had said she’d known him, briefly, when he’d had a name. But he wasn’t sure of her, of her truth or her motivations. She had told him his real name was David and that he’d crewed on a Settler ship, but neither the name nor the classification seemed to fit as well as the identity he’d already been building for himself; so he continued to call himself by his chosen name, Derec, until he had solid proof of his other existence.

Flanking the humans on either side were two robots of advanced sophistication (Derec knew that, but didn’t know how he knew it). One was named Euler, the other Rydberg, and they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell him any more than he already knew—nothing. The robots wanted information from him, however. They wanted to know why he was a murderer.

The First Law of Robotics made it impossible for robots to harm human beings, so when the only other human inhabitant of Robot City turned up dead, Derec and Katherine were the only suspects. Derec’s brief past had not included killing, but convincing Euler and Rydberg of that was not an easy task. They were being held, but treated with respect—innocent, perhaps, until proven guilty.

Both robots had shiny silver heads molded roughly to human equivalent. Both had glowing photocells where eyes would be. But where Euler had a round mesh screen in place of a human mouth, Rydberg had a small loudspeaker mounted atop his dome.

“Do you enjoy this, Friend Derec?” Euler asked him, indicating the falling paper and the seemingly endless stream of robots that lined the route of their drive.

Derec had no idea of what he was supposed to enjoy about this demonstration, but he didn’t want to offend his hosts, who were being very polite despite their accusations. “It’s really . . . very nice,” he replied, brushing a piece of paper off his lips.

“Nice?” Katherine said from beside him, angry. “Nice?” She ran fingers through her long black hair. “I’ll be a week getting all this junk out of my hair.”

“Surely it won’t take you that length of time,” Rydberg said, the speaker on his head crackling. “Perhaps there’s something I don’t understand, but it seems from a cursory examination that it shouldn’t take you any longer than . . . ”

“All right,” Katherine said. “All right.”

“ . . . one or two hours. Unless of course you’re speaking microscopically, in which case . . . ”

“Please,” she said. “No more. I was mistaken about the time.”

“Our studies of human culture,” Euler told Derec, “indicate that the parade is indigenous to all human civilizations. We very much want to make you feel at home here, our differences notwithstanding.”

Derec looked out on both sides of the huge, open-air, V-shaped mover. The robots lining the streets stood quite still, their variegated bodies giving no hint of curiosity, though Derec felt it quite possible that he and Katherine were the first humans many of them had ever seen. Knowing nothing, Derec knew nothing of parades, but it seemed to be a friendly enough ritual, except for the paper, and it made him feel good that they should want him to feel at home.

“Is it not customary to wave?” Euler asked.

“What?” Derec replied.

“To wave your arm to the crowd,” Euler explained. “Is it no customary?”

“Of course,” Derec said, and waved on both sides of the machine that clanked steadily down the wide street, the robots returning the gesture with more nonreadable silence.

“Don’t you feel like a proper fool?” Katherine asked, scrunching up her nose at his antics.

“They’re just trying to be hospitable,” Derec replied. “With the trouble we’re in here, I don’t think it hurts to return a friendly gesture.”

“Is there some problem, Friend Katherine?” Euler asked.

“Only with her mouth,” Derec replied.

Rydberg leaned forward to stare intently at Katherine’s face. “Is there something we can do?”

“Yeah,” the girl answered. “Get me something to eat. I’m starving.”

Rydberg swiveled his head toward Euler. “Another untruth,” he said. “This is very discouraging.”

“What do you mean?” Derec asked.

“Our hypotheses concerning the philosophical nature of humanics,” Rydberg said, “must have their foundation in truth among species. Twice Katherine has said things that aren’t true . . . ”

“I am starving!” Katherine complained.

“ . . . and how can any postulate be universally self-evident if the postulators do not adhere to the same truths? Perhaps this is the mark of a murderer.”

“Now wait a minute,” Derec said. “All humans make . . . creative use of the language. It’s no proof of anything.”

Rydberg examined Katherine’s face closely. Then he pressed a pincer to her bare arm, the place turning white for a second before resuming its natural color. “You say you are starving, but your color is good, your pulse rate strong and even, and you have no signs of physical deterioration. I must conclude, reluctantly, that you are not starving.”

“We are hungry, though,” Derec said. “Please take us where we might eat.”

Katherine fixed him with a sidelong glance. “And do it quickly.”

“Of course,” Euler said. “You will find that we are fully equipped to deal with any human emergency here. This is to be the perfect human world.”

“But there are no humans here,” Derec said.

“No.”

“Are you expecting any?”

“We have no expectations.”

“Oh.”

Euler directed the spider-like robot guiding the mover, and the machine turned dutifully at the next corner, taking them down a double-width street that was bisected by a large aqueduct, whose waters had turned dark under the ever-deepening twilight.

Derec sat back and stole a glance at Katherine, but she was busily pulling bits of paper from her hair and didn’t notice him. He had a million questions, but they seemed better left for later. As it was, he had conflicting emotions to analyze and react to within himself.

He was a nonperson whose life had begun scant weeks before, when he’d awakened without past or memory to find himself in a life-support pod, stranded upon an asteroid that was being mined by robots. They had been searching for something, something he had accidentally stumbled upon—the Key to Perihelion, at least one of the seven Keys to Perihelion. It had seemed of incredible import to the robots on the asteroid. Unfortunately, he had had no idea of what the Keys to Perihelion were or what to do with them.

After that was the bad time. The asteroid was destroyed by Aranimas, an alien space raider, who captured Derec and tortured him for information about the Key, information that Derec could not supply. There he had met Katherine, just before the destruction of Aranimas’s vessel and their dubious salvation at the hands of the Spacers’ robots.

The Spacers also wanted the Key, though their means of attaining it seemed slightly more civilized and bureaucratic than Aranimas’s. Katherine and Derec were polite prisoners of bureaucracy for a time on Rockliffe Station, their personalities clashing until they were forced to form an alliance with Wolruf, another alien from Aranimas’s ship, to escape their gentle captivity with the Key.

They found that if they pressed the corners of the silver slab and thought themselves away from the Spacer station, they were whisked bodily to a dark gray void that they assumed to be Perihelion. Pressing the corners again, another thought brought them to Robot City. And then their thinking took them no farther, stranding them in a world populated by nothing but robots.

And that was it, the sum total of Derec’s conscious life. He had reached several conclusions, though, scant as his reserve of information was: First, he had an innate knowledge of robots and their workings, though he had no idea from where his knowledge emanated; next, Katherine knew more about him than she was willing to tell; finally, he couldn’t escape the feeling that he was here for a purpose, that this was all some elaborate test designed especially for him.

But why? Why?

It was worlds that were being turned here, physical and spatial laws that were being forced upside down—all for him? Nothing made sense.

And then there was the Key, the object that everyone wanted, the object that was safely hidden by the person who couldn’t control it. The robots here didn’t know he had it. Were they looking for it, too? He’d have to find out. The Key seemed to be the one strain that held everything else together.

Keeping that in mind, he determined to move slowly, to try always to get more in the way of information than he gave. He’d been at a disadvantage for the entire length of his memory. From this point, he wanted to keep the upper hand as far as possible.

But there was, of course, the murder.

 

Derec stood on the balcony of the apartment given to him and Katherine by the robots, looking out over the night city. A stiff, cold wind had come up, the starfield totally obscured by dark, angry clouds that seemed to boil up out of nowhere. Lightning flashed in the distance, electrons seeking partner protons on the surface. It was a beautiful sight, and frightening. Derec watched the distant buildings light to near daytime before plunging once more into darkness.

“There,” he said, pointing to a distant tower. “It wasn’t there a centad ago.”

Katherine walked up beside him, leaning against the balcony rail. “Where was it?” she asked, mocking.

“It wasn’t anywhere,” he replied, turning to take her by the shoulders. “It didn’t exist.”

“That’s impossible,” she replied, then turned and walked back into the large, airy apartment that sat at the top of another tower like the one Derec said had sprung from nowhere. “I wish they’d get here with our food.”

“They’re probably fixing us something extra special,” Derec said, joining her in the living room. “And impossible seems to be the way of our lives right now, doesn’t it? I’m telling you, Katherine, that along with everything else that doesn’t make sense, this . . . city is growing, changing right before our eyes.”

“How can that be?” she asked, and looked around uneasily. “I mean . . . cities are built, aren’t they? They don’t just grow.”

Derec stared a circle around the room. It was hexagonal, like standing on the inside of a crystal, with no visible line of demarcation for the ceilings and floor. The furniture seemed to flow from the walls, as the table seemed to flow upward from the floor. Light concentrated from the ceiling and lit the room comfortably, but it seemed the ceiling itself that was alight, with no external apparatus to make it happen.

“Look around you,” Derec said. “Everything’s connected to everything else, and connected seamlessly. And it all seems to be made from the same material.” He walked to a sofa that flowed out of the wall and sat on the cushion that formed its base. “Comfortable,” he said, “but I think it’s made from the same material as the harder stuff—some kind of steel and plastic alloy—just in different measure.”

Katherine had walked to the table and was staring at it. “If you look closely,” she said, “you can see a pattern to the material.”

Derec stood and walked up beside her, leaning down on the table to get a close look. The pattern was faint, but readable. The table was made up of a collection of trapezoidal shapes, interwoven and repeated over and over.

“Interesting,” Derec said.

“How so?”

“Is the shape familiar to you?” She narrowed her brows in concentration for a moment, then looked at him with wide eyes. “The same shape as the Key,” she said.

He nodded.

Katherine left him standing there and hurried back out to the balcony.

“It’s almost like individual pieces stuck together,” he called to her. “I wonder how they connect . . . ”

“It’s gone!” she shrieked, and Derec hurried onto the balcony. “Your tower from before, it’s gone!”

“No it’s not,” he said, pointing farther to the east.”

It’s moved?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He pointed to the huge, pyramidal structure that dominated the landscape to the west. It was at the top of that place where they were first brought by the Key. “That’s the only building I think doesn’t change. And we couldn’t see it from the balcony a moment ago.”

“You mean, we’ve changed?”

“Something like that.”

She put a hand to her head. “I didn’t see . . .  feel, I . . . ”

“It’s kind of like watching clouds,” he said. “If you stare at them from moment to moment, they seem to be solid and stationary, but once you turn away and then look back, they’ve changed. It’s almost like some sort of evolutionary growth . . . ”

“In a building?”

“If you stay out there much longer, you will probably get wet,” came a voice from behind them. They turned to see Euler’s glowing eyes staring at them in the darkness.

“We’ve gotten wet before,” Katherine returned, looking past Euler to the food being set out on their table. “Ah, a last meal for the condemned.”

“The rain here is particularly cool,” the robot said, and watched as Katherine shoved past him and ran into the dining area, “perhaps uncomfortably cool for the human body temperature.”

Thunder rumbled loudly in the distance, a brilliant shaft of lightning striking the top of the towering pyramid. Derec turned from the spectacle and moved toward the doorway, Euler stepping aside to let him pass.

He walked to the table, sitting across from Katherine, who was already piling food from a large golden bowl onto her plate, also gold-colored. The food seemed to be of a uniform, paste-like consistency, its color drifting somewhere between blue and gray. Golden cups filled with water sat beside the plates.

“Are these utensils made of gold?” Derec asked, clanging a spoon melodiously against his plate.

“Correct,” Rydberg said. “It’s a relatively useless soft metal that is a by-product of our mining operations. Its one major virtue besides its use as a conductor is the fact that it doesn’t tarnish, making it ideal for human eating utensils. We made these things for David’s visit.”

Derec watched the serving spoon slip from Katherine’s grasp to clang loudly against her plate. And for just a second her face turned white.

“That’s what you told me my name was,” Derec said, finding the coincidence a little too close for his comfort.

She fixed him with unfocused eyes, then shrugged, looking normal again. “It’s a common enough name on Spacer worlds,” she said, returning her attention to her plate.

She picked up the spoon and went back to the job at hand. Derec looked up at the robots who stood beside the table and the small servo Type-I:5 robot waiting patiently near the door for the return of the utensils.

“Would you care to sit with us while we eat?” Derec asked, and felt Katherine kick him under the table.

“Delighted,” Euler said without hesitation, and the two robots sat at table attentively, apparently enjoying in their way the human familiarity.

Derec took the serving spoon and began filling his own plate. “I take it that David was the other human who came here?” he asked.

“That is correct,” Rydberg said.

“Then he came in a ship?” Derec pressed.

“No,” Euler said. “He simply walked into the city one day.”

“From where?”

“I don’t know.”

“Aaaahhh!” Katherine yelled, spitting out food and grabbing for the glass of water, drinking furiously. The robots swiveled their heads to watch, then exchanged glances. “Are you trying to feed us or kill us?” she demanded.

“Our programming would never allow us to kill you,” Rydberg said. “That would be quite impossible.”

Derec tentatively dipped his spoon into the porridge-like mixture, taking a small bite. Not sour, not sweet, it simply had a strange, alien taste accompanied by a slight noxious odor, one he was also uncomfortable with.

“This stuff stinks!” Katherine said loudly, the robots looking at her, then turning expectantly toward Derec.

“She’s right,” Derec replied. “What is this?”

“A perfect, nontoxic mixture of local plant matter, high in protein and balanced carbohydrates,” Rydberg said. “It’s good for you.”

“The other human ate this?” Derec asked.

“Quite enthusiastically,” Euler said.

“No wonder he’s dead,” Katherine muttered. “This is simply unacceptable. You’re going to have to find us something else, something that tastes good.”

Derec took another bite, this time holding his nose. Disassociating the smell from the food helped some, but not too much. The gruel left an unpleasant aftertaste. How could the other man have eaten it and not complained? Less made sense all the time.

“How long before you can get us something else?” Derec asked.

“Tomorrow?” Rydberg suggested. “Although they were proud of this in food services. Finding something of equal nutritional value will be difficult.”

“Forget nutritional value to a degree,” Derec said. “Study other human foods and see how well those can be duplicated exactly with the know-how you have here.” He looked at Katherine. “We should probably try and choke some of this down to keep our strength.”

She nodded grimly. “I’d already figured that,” she said, and looked at Rydberg. “Bring me lots of water.”

The robot hurried to comply, fetching a gold pitcher from the servo-cart and refilling her cup.

“When did he die, this David?” Derec asked, holding his nose and taking another bite.

“Seven days ago,” Rydberg said, sitting again and carefully positioning the pitcher within everyone’s easy reach on the table.

“Well, that rules us out as suspect then,” Derec said happily. “We didn’t arrive here until last night.”

“You’ll have to excuse me,” Rydberg said politely, “but Katherine has already exhibited a penchant for speaking less than honestly—”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Katherine said angrily.

“No disrespect intended,” Rydberg said. “It is simply the case that your veracity must be in question in light of our conversations of this afternoon. At this point, we don’t know if we can trust anything either of you says.”

“We don’t even know where this place is,” Derec said.

“Then how did you get here?” Euler asked, swiveling his head to stare directly at Derec.

“I . . . ” Derec began, then stopped himself. He wasn’t ready to admit any knowledge of the Key. It was their only weapon, their only potential salvation; he couldn’t give it over so early in the game. “I don’t know.”

Rydberg stared for several seconds before saying, “To believe you means that you either materialized out of the ether or were somehow brought here totally without your knowledge or consent.”

Derec responded by taking the conversation away from the robot’s control. “You say this David also seemed to appear out of nowhere. Did you ever question him about his origins?”

“Yes,” Euler said simply.

“And you know nothing about his background,” Derec said, trying to keep his mind off the food by concentrating on the investigation. Across from him, Katherine was swallowing her food whole and washing it down with large gulps of water. “How was he dressed?”

“He was naked,” Euler said. “And he stayed naked.”

The two humans shared a look. Nudity was common and casual on many Spacer worlds, but the climate here would hardly recommend it. “When can we see the body?” Derec asked.

“That’s not possible,” Euler told her.

“Why?”

“I cannot tell you why.”

“Cannot or will not?” Derec asked, exasperated.

“Cannot and will not,” Euler replied.

“Then how do you expect us to investigate the cause of death?” Kate asked.

“If either or both of you are the murderers,” Euler said, “you already know the cause of death.”

“You’ve already decided our guilt,” Derec said, pointing. “That’s not fair or just.”

“There are no other possibilities,” Rydberg said.

“When the possible has been exhausted,” Derec replied, “it is time to examine the impossible. We are innocent, and you can’t prove that we aren’t. It only follows that the death was caused by something else.”

“Humans can murder,” Euler said, as thunder crashed loudly outside. “Humans can lie. You are the only humans here, and murder has been done.”

“We came out of nowhere,” Derec returned. “So did David. Others could also have come out of nowhere, others you haven’t discovered yet. Why, had we committed a murder, would we stay around for you to catch?”

The robots looked at one another again. “You raised logical questions that must be answered,” Euler said. “We certainly sanction your investigation.”

“How can we investigate without full access?”

“With all the other resources at your command,” Rydberg said, then stood. “Are you finished eating?”

“For now,” Derec said. “We’ll want real food tomorrow, though.”

“We will do our best,” Euler said, and he, also, stood. “Until then, you will stay here.”

“I thought I might go out,” Derec said.

“The rains will come. It’s too dangerous. For your own safety, you will stay here tonight. We have found that we cannot be certain if what you tell us is correct, so we’re leaving a robot at the door to make certain you stay in.”

“You don’t know that we’ve done anything wrong. You can’t treat us like prisoners,” Katherine said.

“And we shall not,” Rydberg said, moving toward the door; the servo whirred up to the table, its metal talons pulling the bowls and plates into its innards.

“There are many things we need to talk with you about,” Derec said.

“Tomorrow will be the time,” Euler said. “We will have a long interview at a prescribed time, where many issues will be discussed. Until then, we cannot fit it into our schedule. We are currently quite busy.” The robots turned to go.

“A couple of questions first,” Derec said, hurrying to put himself between the door and the robots. “You say we aren’t prisoners, yet you have locked us up. How long do we have to stay in this place?”

“Until it is safe,” Rydberg said.

“Then if you do let us out,” Derec persisted, “how can you be sure we won’t try to escape?”

“We will have to keep a very close watch on you,” Euler replied.

With that, the robot firmly, but gently, pushed Derec aside and moved out the door, the servo following quickly behind. Derec tried to follow them out, but a squared-off utility robot blocked his path, its body streaked with random bands of different colored paints like the colors on an artist’s pallet.

“Stand aside,” Derec told the machine.

“It is dangerous for you outside. I am to keep you inside where it is safe, and have no more conversation with you lest you try and deceive me.”

“Me?” Derec said. “Deceive?”

The robot pushed the door stud and the unit slid closed. Derec turned to Katherine. “What do you make of it?”

She moved to sit on the sofa, then stretched out, looking tired. “We’re being held prisoner by a bunch of robots with no one in charge,” she said, sighing deeply. “The dead man was an exhibitionist who could, apparently, eat anything. They want us to prove our innocence, but refuse to let us see the body or investigate.” She sat up abruptly, eyes narrowing. “Derec, we’ve got to get out of here.”

“They won’t do anything to us without proof of our guilt,” Derec replied. “It’s not in their nature. We’ll stay around and get this straightened out. Then they’ll be happy to send us on our way. Besides, this place has got me really curious. How does it work . . . why does it work?”

She lay down again, staring at the ceiling. “I’m not so sure they’d really let us leave,” she said, voice distant. “I think we’ve stumbled into something completely crazy. A robot world without humans could take any sort of bizarre turn.”

“But not a . . . what did you say . . . completely crazy turn,” he replied. “They can’t be crazy; there’s no logic to crazy. Besides, what makes you think we’ve stumbled into anything? We were brought here, plain and simple, for a reason that hasn’t been made clear yet. Maybe a little time here will help us ferret it out.”

“You ferret it out,” she said. “I’m tired.”

“Well, I’m not.” He moved to the balcony, feeling the stiff wind on his face as the light show continued to rage outside. “I’m going out tonight and do a little poking around.”

She was up from the couch, moving toward him. “They said it was dangerous,” she said quietly, a hand going to his forearm. “Go out tomorrow.”

“Under their watchful eye?” he said, then shook his head. “We need to get around on our own, and this is the time. Besides, a little rain can’t hurt me.”

“Stay,” she said. “I’m afraid,”

“You?” He laughed. “Afraid?”

She pulled her hand away. “All right,” she said. “Go out and get yourself killed. I’m tired of looking out for you anyway.”

“You’re angry.”

“And you’re an idiot.” She turned from him and stared out across the magnificent city, realizing that its beauty was for them alone to appreciate. There was something unutterably sad about that. “How will you get past the door guard?”

“We’ll take his advice and deceive him,” Derec said.

“We?”

“Will you help me?”

She turned and walked back into the apartment. “Anything to get you out of my hair,” she said over her shoulder.

Derec’s plan was simple enough, but it was one he could use only once. The robots learned quickly enough of human duplicity, arming themselves with the knowledge as a protection. But just this once, it might work.

He crouched beside the sofa, knotting into a tight ball. Just as soon as he was well out of sight of the door, Kate took a deep breath and tried to open it—locked.

She shrugged once in Derec’s direction, then began screaming in terror. A second later the door slid open, the utility robot blocking the entry.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s Derec!” she cried, pointing. “He fell from the balcony!”

Without hesitation, the robot rolled into the room, ready to check her story for lies and deceit. He quickly moved toward the balcony, leaning way over the edge to get a look into the night.

Derec jumped up from behind the couch and hurried quietly out the door and into the elevator that took him all the way to the ground and his first positive step in uncovering the mystery of Robot City. He was free, but what that meant here he could only guess.

 

 

CHAPTER 2

THE SLUICE

 

Derec exited onto the wide street, hurrying across it to the shadows of buildings a half a block away. From there he took a few minutes to turn back and study the surroundings he had just left behind, trying to memorize the positions and shapes of the buildings near his tower. If his feelings were correct and the city was evolving outward, finding his way back could be a difficult, if not impossible, task. He didn’t worry too much about it, though. He felt completely safe in this world of robots and figured that if he got lost, he’d simply turn himself in to the nearest robot of decent sophistication and be sent back.

That dwelt upon, he turned his attention completely to exploring the new world that an unseen fate had guided him to. In his current pristine state of innocence and awareness, it was difficult for Derec not to see the hand of destiny in his wanderings. It was as if his amnesia was an emotional and intellectual purging of sorts, set in motion to prepare him for a journey of which Robot City could be only a part. Since that was the only feeling or need he had to work with, he plunged himself into it with relish, enthusiasm, and as much good humor as he could muster. Katherine would never understand his feelings in this matter, but then Katherine had a life to go back to and memories to sustain her. For Derec, this was it, his whole world, and he wanted to know as much about it as he possibly could.

The city stretched all around him like some magnificent clockwork. The shapes of the buildings, from towering spires to squat storage warehouses, were all precise and multifaceted, like growing crystals. And the shapes seemed to be designed as much for aesthetic pleasure as pragmatic necessity. This concept formed the core of a theory within Derec’s mind, and one that he would want to explore in greater detail when he had time for reflection. For nothing exists in a vacuum. Robots were not motivated independently by unreasoning emotion. They had to have reasons for their actions, and by what Derec had seen, their actions were all directed absolutely, despite Rydberg’s claims of autonomy.

The cold winds sliced through him like a knife through water, and the sky rumbled and quaked, yet all around him he watched a furious activity that kept the mechanism of Robot City moving to its own internal rhythm and purpose. Hundreds of robots filled the streets around him, all moving and directed. All ignored his presence.

Streets were cleaned, even as spray painting was conducted on dull-sheened buildings, the sprayers held close to the target in the stiff wind—which probably explained the bands of paint on the utility robot that guarded the humans. Converted mining cars sped by, filled with broken equipment and scrap metal, their beamed headlights illuminating the streets before them like roving mechanical fireflies. Once he took to the shadows as a whole squad of drones, accompanied by a supervisor robot he hadn’t seen before, drove past in an open-bed equipment mover and passed his position without a look before disappearing around a distant corner. He thought about following them, but decided that he would continue exploring slowly at first, getting a feel for his world and its parameters.

The questions in his mind seemed endless, and their answers only led to more questions. Who began Robot City, and why did the robots not know of their own origin? Why this place, this particular planet? Why a city of human proportions for a world of the nonhuman? Euler had called Robot City the perfect place for humans—why? The murder, to Derec, was nothing but a small nuisance with large complications. What really interested him was the motivation behind the city itself.

The lousy food raised a great many further questions in his mind. Spacer robots were designed solely as mechanical helpmates to human masters. Spacer robots knew how human beings reacted to food. The robots here had basic human knowledge and the Laws of Robotics as their core, yet remained ignorant of specific, conditioned reactions to humans. It was almost as if their design had geared them toward an equal human partnership, rather than a master/servant relationship, and they were feeling out their relationship with the animal called human. It was a dizzying concept to Derec, one that he’d also have to think out in greater detail.

And, finally, the dead man. Where did he fit into the picture . . . and why? Derec’s mind, being a blank slate, soaked up everything around him like a sponge, unhampered by the intrusion of past thoughts and feelings that muddied observation. His eye for detail missed nothing, especially the reaction of Katherine to hearing Euler say the man’s name—David.

What could it mean? He had literally stumbled upon Katherine, yet she seemed an indispensable part of the puzzle. What role did she play? Again, destiny seemed to rule the day—a place for everything, everything in its place. He was a blind man with a jigsaw puzzle, feeling his way through, groping sightlessly for the connections. He liked the girl, couldn’t help it, and felt a strong physical attraction for her that he wouldn’t even try to wish away; yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that she was deeply involved in covering up his real identity and purpose. And again, his eternal question—why?

He continued moving down the street. Though the buildings were beautiful, they were nondescript, without markings of any kind. He recognized warehouses because parts were being moved in and out of them, but everything else seemed devoid of purpose. If he could find an official building, he could try to hook up to a terminal and make his own inquiries. The pyramid where he and Katherine had materialized, the place the robots called the Compass Tower, had seemed solid to him. Even though it appeared to be the point upon which all else hinged, he wasn’t ready to go back to it yet.

The robots on the street ignored him as he moved through their midst. There seemed to be a sense of urgency to them that he couldn’t understand. He stopped a utility robot like the one he had snuck past at the apartment, except this one had huge scoops for hands.

“Can you talk?” he asked.

“Yes, most assuredly,” the robot answered.

“I need to find the administration building.”

“I don’t believe we have one here.”

“Where would I find the closest computer terminal?”

“I regret that I cannot say.”

Derec sighed. The runaround. Again. “Why can’t you say?”

“If I told you that, you’d know everything.”

“Know everything about what?”

“About the thing that I cannot talk about. If you’d like, you can stay here and I’ll report to a supervisor and have him come out and find you.”

“No, thanks,” Derec replied, and the robot turned to walk away. “Hey, what’s your hurry?”

“The rain,” the utility said, pointing toward the sky. “The rain is coming. You had better get to shelter.” The robot turned and hurried off, his box-like body weaving from side to side as he rolled along.

“What about the rain!?” Derec yelled, but his words were lost in a sudden gust of wind.

He watched the figure of the robot for a moment, realizing that the street he had come down looked different than it had a moment before. The whole block, street and all, had seemed to shift positions, bowing out to curve what had once been straight. A tall, tetrahedral structure, which he had used as a reference point, had disappeared completely. Ten minutes on the street and he was totally lost.

He pressed on, the wind colder now, more intense. If this was such a perfect world for humans, then why did the weather seem so bad?

He reached an unmarked corner and found himself on the street he had ridden down earlier, during the parade. It was extra wide, a large aqueduct bisecting it.

He moved to the edge of the aqueduct and stared down at the dark, rushing waters that filled it no more than a quarter full. Where had the waters come from? Where were they going? Had Robot City been built here for the water, or was the water somehow a consequence of the building?

The water rushed past, dark and inscrutable, much like the problem of Derec’s past and, perhaps, his future. Yet he could know about the water. He could trace it to its source; he could follow it to its destination. He could know. The thought heartened him, for he could do the same with his life. Accepting that destiny and not chance had brought him to this impossible place, it then followed that the sources of that destiny could be traced through the city itself.

If he pursued it properly, he could trace the origins of the city and, hence, find his own origins. It seemed eminently logical, for he couldn’t escape the concept that he and Robot City were inextricably linked, physically, emotionally, and, perhaps, metaphysically.

If his searching came to naught, at least he’d be keeping himself, keeping his blank mind, occupied. He’d begin with the water—trace it through source and destination, find out the why of it. He’d work on the robots, finding out what they knew, what they didn’t know, what they’d be willing to tell him, and what he could find out from them unwillingly. And there was Katherine. He’d have to treat her like a friendly adversary and use whatever limited wiles he had at his disposal to find out her place in all this.

The water plopped below him, as if a large stone had been tossed in. He looked around but saw nothing save the gently glowing buildings and the distant robots hurrying about their secret business.

The water plopped again, farther down the aqueduct, then again, near the last place. He turned to stare in that direction when his shoulder was splashed by a drop of icy water.

A drop hardly described it. What hit him was more like a glassful. His jumpsuit sleeve was soaked, his shoulder cold. Water splashed on the street beside him, a drop bigger than a clenched fist, leaving a wet ring.

Derec had about a second to appreciate what was happening, for his mind to begin to realize what a major storm could mean, when the deluge struck.

With a force that nearly doubled him over, the rain fell upon Derec in opaque sheets that immediately cut off his field of vision. He was cold, freezing; the rain lashing him unmercifully, its sound a hollow roar in his ears.

He used his arms to cover and protect his head as the freezing downpour numbed his shoulders and back. He had to get to shelter quickly, but he had already lost his bearings in the curtain of water that surrounded him three-sixty.

He tentatively put out a foot, hoping he was moving in the direction of the buildings across from the aqueduct. Were he to move in the wrong direction, he’d fall into the aqueduct and be lost in its flowing waters.

Movement was slow as he felt his way, still doubled over, toward the buildings and safety. It seemed as if he should have reached them three times over—they couldn’t have been more than ten meters distant—yet he hadn’t gotten there yet. Could he have gotten turned the wrong way and simply be moving down the center of the street?

Keeping his balance was getting more difficult. Water on the street was up to his ankles, moving rapidly against his direction. He lost his footing and went to his knee, but managed to rise again. His clothes were now soaked through, and hung like icicles from his body. Every step was a labor.

“The perfect world,” he muttered, a thin smile stretching his lips despite his predicament.

Just as he was about to give up on his present direction and pick another one at random, the hulk of a building began to define itself in his vision. A few more treacherous steps and he was suddenly out of the rain, standing beneath a short awning that overhung the building front.

He used a hand to wipe the water from his face, then hugged himself, shivering, against the damp cold, taking stock of his position. The overhang protected the building front only for about a meter, and it extended for perhaps three meters in either direction from where he stood.

Beyond the awning, he could see nothing. The roaring water was impenetrable. The building front was no better. It was totally blank, no doors or windows. Yet, oddly enough, when he touched it, it felt warm, resisting the chill of the air. He was stuck in a world one meter wide by five meters long. The ground water had risen from his ankles to his calves, its current always pulling at him.

He stood there for several minutes, cold, teeth chattering, cursing the fate that would bring him to this hellhole. His numbness and melancholy soon, inevitably, turned to anger.

“Damn you!” he screamed, to whom, to what, he didn’t know. “Why me?”

In frustration, he turned to the wall behind him. Hands balled into fists, he pounded viciously at the wall and—his hands sank right into it!

“Aaaahh!”

He screamed in surprise, instinctively jumping backward.

The water cascading from the awning caught him on the face, and as he tried to duck away from it, the ground current took him down.

He went under, then came up gasping for breath. But his control was gone and he was caught in the current. It pulled him back across the street; even the street itself seemed tilted at an angle toward the aqueduct. At this point, trying to regain his footing was out of the question. Keeping his head above water was the only priority. Staying alive was everything.

He felt himself go over the lip of the aqueduct and plunge into its raging waters. He bobbed down, at no point touching bottom, then rose again, totally numb and choking as the swift current carried him away, pulling at him, sucking him ever down.

He had wanted to see the terminal point of the waters. He would now see it quickly—if he could stay alive long enough.

 

Katherine stood with Euler by the opening to the balcony, staring out at a completely opaque wall of water that made her think that Robot City didn’t really exist at all, but was simply an image conjured by an overactive brain exposed to too much cosmic radiation. The rain came down in never-ending torrents, rain such as she’d never seen or even thought could exist. It frightened her, a fright that almost overcame her anger at their predicament. Almost.

“Why did he go out?” Euler asked.

“I’ve already told you,” she replied, turning away from the incredible downpour and moving back into the apartment. “He wanted to see the city.”

“But we told him it was dangerous.”

Katherine sat on the couch, folding her arms across her chest. A black hole could swallow Derec and his robots for all she cared. “Her either didn’t believe you or didn’t care,” she said. “Why are you standing here asking me the same thing over and over when you could be out there looking for him?”

Rydberg came in from the bedroom, where he had apparently been searching in case Katherine had been lying. “Everything that can be done is being done,” he said. “We appreciate your concern. Ours is every bit as great as yours.”

“I’m not concerned,” she said. “I couldn’t care less.”

The robots exchanged glances. “You don’t care about the possible loss of a human life?” Euler asked.

Katherine jumped up from the couch. “You mean he could possibly be . . . be . . . ?”

“Dead?” Rydberg helped. “Of course. We warned you that it was dangerous.”

For the fiftieth time since Derec’s leaving, she hurried back to the balcony doorway and stared into the blank wall of water. He’d had been gone for several hours, far longer than he should have been. If anything had happened to him—

“Why did he go out?” Euler asked from beside her.

“Again!” she said loudly. “That same question. Why do you keep asking me that?”

“Because we don’t understand,” Rydberg said, moving up to join them. “You must know that robots don’t lie.”

“Yes,” she replied.

“Then, when we said it was dangerous, why did he risk his life?” Euler asked.

“To begin with, his definition of danger might be different from yours,” she said. “But beyond that, he wanted to know about this crazy city of yours more than he was afraid of the danger.”

“You mean,” Euler said, “that he could have purposely risked his life just for the sake of curiosity?”

“Something like that.”

“Astounding.”

“Let me ask you a question,” she said, poking Euler in his chest sensors with an index finger. “If you want people to live here so much, why did you pick a place with such dangerous weather?”

Rydberg seemed to hesitate, as if he were weighing the answer he was about to give by some sort of internal scale. “The weather here is not naturally like this,” he said at last.

“Naturally,” she repeated, zeroing in on the key word. “Does this mean that something has affected the weather adversely?”

“Yes,” Euler said.

“What?” she asked.

“We cannot tell you that,” Rydberg said, and walked over to peer beneath the couch.

“Will it stop soon?” Kate asked.”

Probably within the next hour,” Euler said. “At which time we can conduct an extensive search for Friend Derec.”

A thought struck Katherine. She wanted to suppress it, but couldn’t. “Is this how the other man . . . David, died?”

“He may have caused the rains,” Euler said. “but he didn’t die from them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It is quite late for humans,” Rydberg said, moving toward the door. “You must sleep now or risk damaging your health.”

With that, the two supervisor robots moved silently into the hallway, the door sliding shut behind them.

Katherine was alone, except for the robot standing guard in the hallway outside. She moved to the couch and curled into a tight ball. “Oh, David,” she cried into the sleeve of her jumper. “Why did this have to happen?”

 

 

CHAPTER 3

THE EXTRUDER

 

Derec rode the aqueduct like a log in a sluice, his body numb, his senses and his fate out of control. The waters raged in his ears as his entire existence turned on the simple act of trying to keep his head above water. Nothing else mattered; life had reduced itself to its essence. There was no fear, no time for it, and any yearnings to have his life pass before his eyes went unsatisfied, since he had no life to reflect upon. There was only the water and the numbing cold—and the ubiquitous companionship of Death.

His ride could have lasted a minute or an eternity—he was beyond calculating time—but when he felt himself free-falling in midair, his brain snapped to the new reality and questioned.

He was falling, surrounded by a hot, moist wind. A bare glow of light seemed to envelope him, but before he had a chance to appreciate it, he splashed into hot water.

He had gulped down water with his quickly sucked breath, and when he bobbed to the surface like a cork, he was choking and coughing, his head pounding with a heartbeat throb. He panicked, then forced himself into control when he realized the water he was in wasn’t flowing, but pooling.

As he treaded water, he found himself grateful to his former life for giving him the lifesaving advantage of swimming lessons. He leaned back and floated on his back, small currents pulling him this way and that. His body ached horribly from the battering he had taken in the aqueduct; every bit of strength had drained from him.

There was a ceiling of some sort above him, tiny lights making it dimly visible. The roar of waterfalls filled the hollow cavern completely, and he turned his head to the side to get a glimpse of his surroundings.

He was a hundred meters from the edge of a large square pool that stretched perhaps a thousand meters across. Red lights set at regular intervals bathed the entire area in an eerie glow. In the middle of each side of the pool were aqueduct runoffs, four in all, their cascades shimmering like fading pulsars in the red haze. These four runoffs provided the incredible noise that churned inside his head, all of it echoing within the confined space.

Where was he? A collection point of some kind, perhaps a reservoir. Any city needed a water supply. This was probably connected to a water treatment plant meant to sustain the human population that didn’t live there. This only strengthened Derec’s earlier speculation that this was not a city simply meant for robots. What was going on here was serious colonization.

Another realization occurred to him, too. The reservoir had saved his life. He had been showing the beginning signs of hypothermia during his wild ride down the aqueduct, but the hot water of the reservoir was thawing him out.

Why hot water? The water was definitely warmer than human body temperature, perhaps as much as fifteen degrees, and incredibly hot winds were raging through the chamber, competing with the charging runoff waters in loudness. In fact, the soothing heat and the rest were already beginning to lull his senses, and he realized that if he wasn’t careful, he could end up at the other end of the physical spectrum with hyperthermia. Whether hypo or hyper, though, the results were still the same. He was going to have to get out of the water or risk overburdening his heart.

Still on his back, he churned his legs lightly while propelling himself with his arms. There seemed to be robotic movement at the far end of the reservoir, but he didn’t have the strength to swim that far. Having no idea of which way to go, he simply moved toward the closest shoreline. The process was time-consuming, though, for the runoffs created their own currents.

He swam with leisure, but determination, taking the time to check out his body. He had taken a beating in his wild ride down the aqueduct, but besides general bruises, nothing major seemed to be wrong.

As he neared the edge of the pool, he could see that the runoff streams had slowed considerably, leading him to speculate that the rain had stopped outside. Fuzzy light was also beginning to seep in around the dark edges of the covered pool, and he realized that day had broken.

He finally reached the edge of the pool, its surface made from the same material as the rest of the city. Metal ladders were set at regular intervals around the edge, and he floated to the nearest one to begin his climb out.

The water was barely three meters from the top of the pool, and fortunately so, because as soon as Derec began his climb he knew he wasn’t doing well. His body, so light in the water, felt like it weighed a ton. The combination of emotional stress, the ordeal of the aqueduct, and the overheated water of the pool had all had an effect on his body. He dragged himself slowly up the ladder, then rolled, gasping, onto the edge of the pool and lay there.

He closed his eyes, just for a minute, and he was gone. He didn’t know how long he had slept, but when he awoke, it was with a start. A loud rumble assailed his hearing. He sat up quickly, darting his head around, and saw a large vehicle moving around the pool toward him, its engine noises amplified to a roar in the cavern-like surroundings.

Standing was a problem, since Derec still felt weak. But he got up on shaky legs and moved toward the areas of light beyond the reservoir. While he was still out and on the loose, he wanted to see as much as he could. For, this time, the robots wouldn’t be so quick to let him out of their sight.

As he moved toward the light, he passed open caverns that were filled with conduits for moving water. The huge pipes were twisted like knotted rope and seemed to be moving, writhing, like a snake pit—almost as if they were alive. He was taken over these areas by railed walkways that simply extended from the edges of the pit at his approach, growing—like crystals—before his eyes.

After the pits, he passed several squat buildings where he surmised the actual water treatment was performed. Drone robots moved in and out of the facilities rapidly, mostly moving machinery in both directions. Derec briefly considered going into one of the structures to search for a terminal, but the still-approaching vehicle made him change his mind.

“HUMAN!” came a loudspeakered voice. “YOU WILL HALT YOUR PROGRESS WHERE YOU ARE. IT IS UNLAWFUL FOR YOU TO PROCEED.”

He turned to the sound. It was coming from the robot-controlled vehicle that was rapidly closing the distance on him. It was time to move!

He ran past the building toward glowing walls of light just beyond.

“HUMAN!” the loudspeaker called again.

He raced to the wall, his legs heavy. The entire wall seemed lit and wrapped a circle around the reservoir area. It was translucent, like a shower curtain, and he realized that it was simply so thin that outside light passed right through. He pushed on it, but it felt solid. He pushed harder, and it gave under his hand, just like the wall last night.

Just then, he saw a drone approach the wall twenty meters distant and move right through it. He hurried there, with the robots in the vehicle closing rapidly on him. He stood at the spot, seeing no entry, but when he raised his hands to push against it, the wall irised open and he stepped through into the daylight.

It was morning, bright and calm, with no sign of the deluge that had taken place the previous night. The sun was still low in the sky, but Robot City was alive and active.

He was in the very heart of it here, the hub upon which the wheel of the city turned. He could see the aqueduct that had brought him cutting through the city like a spoke, and he could see other aqueducts, other spokes, slicing through the wheel of the city. And he began to think of the areas between the spokes as quadrants.

Robots in large numbers hurried quickly through the streets, always going somewhere, always busy with predetermined tasks. Many of them were disappearing into the treatment plant.

He moved a small distance from his exit point, then looked back at the reservoir, shocked to find a forest there! Then he realized that the forest had been planted above the reservoir, the land area serving double duty. But why a forest? Not for robots, certainly.

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the large, wheeled vehicle that had been tracking him within the reservoir moving through the exit point to the outside. He looked back at the city, then up at the forest. He would find escape in its random chaos.

Angling himself away from his pursuers, he ran back toward the huge reservoir building, preparing to climb one of the struts that helped support the outside edge of the forest. But as soon as he reached the place and put his hands on the arched strut, it seemed to melt away, changing into a gently sloping stairway.

He hurried up the stairs without a question and entered the forest. The ground was moist and spongy, muddying his already-soaked shoes. The trees were small, in many cases smaller than the underbrush that grew thick around them. A haze seemed to fill the entire forest, and the farther he plunged into it, the hazier it became.

Derec was no expert in vegetation, but he assumed the trees were all offspring, many generations removed, of trees that had once grown on Earth. Spacers, though hating to mention any connection to the planet of their ancestry, nevertheless made it a point to bring Earth vegetation and animal life to whatever planet they colonized. Where he’ gotten such information, he had no idea; the small glimpses of his own mind were maddening in their incompleteness.

He wandered the forest, pushing through the haze and the dense undergrowth, feeling jittery in untamed surroundings. And he knew that these were also the feelings of a Spacer pushing through his mind. He didn’t much like the forest; he longed for the order of the city. But for a human being, this had its place. Untamed but finite, aesthetically pleasing without being uncontrollable. This place existed for the aesthetics—for human aesthetics.

His foot hit something hard and uncompromising, and he tripped, going hard to soft ground, getting mud all over himself. He turned to the object that had caused his fall and found a small section of pipe sticking out of the ground. A fog-like haze was pumping from the pipe, the same haze that filled the entire area, and Derec began to see a master plan at work here.

He stood, then ducked when he saw a shadow moving through the haze not five meters from him. It was one of the robots. He listened and could hear them thrashing through the brush all around. They were slowly cordoning off the entire area, boxing him in.

He took a deep breath, then scrunched up into a ball and lay on the ground, listening as they moved near him. The forest was built over the reservoir so that condensing water could feed up to the trees from beneath and nourish the roots directly. Further, the haze was probably carbon dioxide vapor feeding the forest to promote health and growth. Where did the CO₂ come from? Perhaps a bleed-off from their industrial processes, which could also explain the heat in the reservoir area. The set-up was sophisticated and civilized, a city built around its ecological needs. Was it all of robot design?

A metal foot clanked down just an arm’s reach away from his position. He stifled the urge to rise up for a breath of normal air. Within seconds, the robot moved on.

As he heard the search party sweep past, he jumped to his feet and charged back in the direction he had come. The robots were much faster and stronger than he was, so he was going to have to make things happen quickly at this point.

He reached the edge of the forest in minutes, and rushed to the place where he had climbed up. The strut was already solid again, the steps nowhere to be seen. He looked over the edge of the forest. It was ten meters to the ground; jumping was out of the question.

“You, Derec!” came a robot voice behind. “Stop now! Stop!”

He sat on the ground and dangled his legs over the edge of the strut. Steps miraculously formed again. He ran down just as several robots reached the edge of the forest, calling for him to stop.

Amidst the confusion near the water treatment facility, he saw a large flatbed vehicle, filled with what looked like broken computers, ready to pull out. He took the last steps in leaps and charged the machine, the robots behind already reaching the bottom of the stairs.

The truck pulled out before he reached it, but with a burst of speed, he caught it and jumped into the back. A small, round drone the size of his head squeaked at him from among the broken computers.

 

Katherine stood at the wash basin, watching the lukewarm water flow from the tap, and wondered how plumbing could possibly be accomplished in a city that didn’t stand still. She splashed her face with water, then stared into the small mirror that was inset above the basin. Her eyes were puffy and dark, showing the results of no sleep, but her face remained calm, remarkably calm considering the terror that had been flashing through her for most of the long night.

He was gone, perhaps dead, and she was alone on this crazy world. Though David/Derec, whatever he wanted to call himself, had never looked on this place as anything but an adventure, to her it had been nothing but a prison. A first priority for anyone marooned in a Spacer port would be access to radio communications to inform search parties and anxious waiters; yet the robots seemed reluctant—no, evasive—when it came to the topic of communications. That frightened her more than anything else that was going on.

“Did you sleep well?”

She jumped to the sound, turning quickly to see Rydberg standing in the doorway, a light static issuing from his loudspeaker.

“I didn’t invite you in here!” she said in anger and frustration. “Get out! Now!”

The robot turned without a word and moved from the door, Katherine following him out into a small hallway.

“What do you want?” she asked. “Has there been any . . . news about Derec?”

Rydberg turned back to her. “I did not mean to intrude upon your privacy,” he said. “Please accept my apologies. I’ve brought you food.”

“I’m not hungry.”

Rydberg just stared at her.

“Has there been any word about Derec?” she asked again, softly this time.

“Yes,” the robot replied. “He was seen not three decads ago, but ran away when another of our supervisors called to him.”

She clapped her hands together loudly. “So, he’s alive!”

“Apparently so. Why would he run away? Is this a sign of guilt?”

“It’s a sign that he wants to check out this crazy place without a gaggle of robots hanging all over him.” She moved past him toward the living room. “Now, where’s that food? I’m so hungry I could eat a . . . ” She stopped herself, then looked at the robot. “I’m hungry.”

“But you just said . . . ”

“Forget what I just said. Correction!” She caught herself before the robot could explain its memory. “I mean never mind. Where’s the food?”

He led her back down the hall to the living room, where the food sat at the same table she had eaten at the night before. Strangely enough, the room was different, squatter, wider than it had been the previous night, the table closer to the wall.

She moved quickly to the table. There was a variety of what appeared to be fruits and cooked vegetables there. She sat down and tentatively ate a small piece of greenish fruit. It was delicious. Rydberg stood nearby as she greedily sampled everything on the table, all of it good. She didn’t invite the robot to sit with her as Derec had done. The machines were servants and needed to be treated as such. She’d never understand his insistence on treating them as anything other than the machines they were.

“When do we get to make outside radio contact?” she asked once the initial hunger pangs had died down.

“We will all meet later and discuss those questions.”

“Are you going to put us on trial,” she asked, “for the murder of this other human? We are entitled to a trial, you know.”

“Derec has told us that he will try to solve this mystery,” Rydberg said.

Katherine stopped eating and stared at him. “And what if he doesn’t? What if we don’t ever discover what really happened? You have no right to hold us here as it is. We can’t go on indefinitely like this.”

“If he cannot find out the truth of the matter,” Rydberg said, “then we will assume our original supposition to be correct.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “You have no right to determine my guilt or innocence without proper evidence. I’m not Derec, and I hold no romantic visions of a robot-controlled world. You cannot be allowed to have any power over the way I live my life. If you want to hold me for murder, you must put me on trial and prove it. If you put me on trial, I must be allowed to defend myself. I therefore demand immediate access to a radio so that I may provide myself with proper defense representation. I want a certified legal rep, and I want one now!”

“We will discuss the situation later today,” the robot said, “after Friend Derec has been returned to us. Meanwhile, your food is getting cold and will lose its appeal.”

“It already has,” Katherine returned, pushing the plate away from herself. She didn’t like the way this was turning. The radio seemed to get more and more distant to her, and with it, any hopes of ever leaving this place. Her arguments to Rydberg were based solely on laws and customs common to Auroran society. But all law, all freedom, was merely a rationalization away where a robot civilization was concerned.

The final result to her was quite simple: the machines were in charge and they could do anything they wanted.

 

Derec knew nothing with which to compare the size of Robot City, but as he drove its breadth, he couldn’t help but feel its vastness.

As the parts truck moved quickly through the city streets, the round drone bounced from one machine to another, squeaking loudly, its silver body lighting up in dozens of places, then winking out again as it performed automatic (but definitely sub-robotic) pre-troubleshooting functions on the broken machinery. Finally, it came to rest on Derec’s lap, all of its lights blinking madly, its squeaks turning into a high-pitched whine.

“So, where are we going?” he asked the troubleshooter while idly stroking its dome.

The machine whirred and bounced, but never answered. All at once, its whine turned to a loud, siren-like wail.

“Stop it!” Derec ordered, turning to the front of the truck to make sure he wasn’t attracting attention. He bent double over the thing, trying to muffle its sound without success.”

You’re going to have to stop,” he told the thing. “I can’t just . . . ”

It sent a jolt of electricity through its body, shocking Derec, moving him off.

“All right,” he said, pointing a shaking finger at the silver ball. “I don’t have to take that from you.”

The thing started bouncing up and down, higher and higher. Derec looked both ways over the truck back, then calmly brought up a foot and shoved the thing right off the truck, where it hit the street angrily, its wail louder as it bounced around like a rubber ball.

Within a few blocks, the vehicle slowed its pace, then got in line behind several other trucks, all filled with equipment. Derec got on his knees and looked over the piles of computers.

The trucks were pulled up to a gate, where a whole line of robots were moving up to the truck back, each taking a single piece of equipment and returning with it to a blockhouse that wasn’t much larger than a single doorway. Beside the blockhouse was the most amazing thing Derec had ever seen in his short memory.

A huge, gray machine rumbled softly, yet with undeniable strength and power. From it issued what could only be described as a ribbon of city. In five-meter-square slabs, the city appeared to be simply extruding from underground through the medium of the gray machine.

It pushed itself along, the slabs gradually forming and reforming as they moved, following some incredible preprogramming that actually let them build themselves. And as the slabs formed walls and floors and corners and stories and windows, they spun off in every direction in a slow, graceful dance that pushed against the already existing buildings, the mechanism that triggered the entire magnificent clockwork of Robot City.

It was as if the entire city were one mammoth, living organism always growing outward, always changing and replicating like the cells in a body, moving in imprinted patterns toward a complete, fully formed being.

It was a plan of monumental scale, an atmosphere of total, logical control for a given end. As he watched a skyscraper literally build itself from the ground up, each story pushing up the story above it and self-welding according to some unseen plan, he experienced the grandeur of an idea so vast that his limited knowledge was humbled by its power. This civilization was the product of a mind that refused to believe in limited options, a mind that accepted that what the imagination could conceive, the hands could make.

To such a mind, anything was possible. Even, perhaps, Perihelion.

The truck lurched, nearly knocking him from his knees. It had pulled up to the gate. The line of robots was now reaching into his bed for their equipment.

If all the action was happening below ground, that’s where Derec wanted to be. Hurrying out of the truck, he grabbed a small terminal that looked as if it had been shorted out by water, and took his place behind a robot heading toward that doorway into the ground.

He reached the doorway, cradling the computer like a baby. Warm air greeted him as he stepped through into barely lit darkness. He was confronted by a short flight of stairs leading down, and followed the robot that walked down before him.

The stairs terminated in a large holding area, brightly lit, frenetic with activity. Automated carts carried robots and mining equipment at breakneck pace. The cars zipped around one another in seemingly rehearsed fashion, their movements perfected over time, since it seemed impossible to Derec that they could move so quickly without hitting one another.

On the far wall sat a bank of elevators, perhaps twenty in all, some of them remarkably large. The robots that moved down the stairs headed toward these elevators, apparently going from here to a lower level where repair or scrap work was being done.

Having no idea of where to go, Derec chose an elevator at random and moved toward it with his burden. A large elevator nearby slid open, and a group of minerbots, covered with mud and soot, moved out bearing the non-operating carcass of one of their own above their shoulders.

Derec reached the elevator. It had no formal controls, but opened for him as soon as he stepped near.

A voice boomed behind him. “Nothing awaits you below, but death!”

He turned to see a huge supervisor robot, twice the size of a man, glaring down at him with red photocells. The robot’s body was burnished a bright, shimmering black.

“I’ve come to inspect your operation,” Derec said, feigning authority. He turned back to the elevator and began to step in.

The robot’s arm flashed out, his mammoth pincers clanging loudly around Derec’s forearm, squeezing tightly but not painfully.

“You are caught,” the machine said, and Derec’s computer crashed loudly at his feet.

 

 

CHAPTER 4

THE COMPASS TOWER

 

As the door to the apartment slid open, Derec tucked under the arm of the big robot, watched Katherine’s facial expression change from horror, to relief, to unbridled amusement—all in the space of three seconds.

“Let me guess,” she said, putting a finger to her lips, “you’re a ditty bag.”

“Cute,” Derec returned as the robot set him gently on the ground. He looked up at the huge, black machine. “Thanks for the ride, Avernus.”

“My pleasure, Friend Derec,” the robot replied, bending slightly so that the hallway could accommodate his height. “But I must ask you to stay away from the underground. It is no place for a human.”

“I appreciate your concern,” Derec said noncommittally. He walked into the apartment, then turned back to Avernus. “Will we see you at the meeting?”

“Most assuredly,” he returned. “All of us look forward to it with great expectation.”

“You can go now,” Katherine told Avernus coldly, the robot nodding slightly and moving off, the utility robot guard sliding quickly to fill the door space with his squat body.

Katherine punched the door stud, the panel sliding closed. “You missed breakfast and lunch,” she said, moving to sit listlessly on the couch.

“Avernus got me something before he brought me back,” Derec said. “He got my wounds cleaned up, and even let me sleep for a while.” Finally, he couldn’t ignore her mood any longer. “What’s wrong?”

“You,” she said, “this place . . . everything. I don’t know which way is up anymore. Did you find out anything?”

Derec spotted the CRT screen set up on the table and walked to stand before it. “It’s a place designed for humans,” he said, “and the building is going on at a furious pace, as if they’re in some kind of hurry to get finished. I think the buildings may be . . . I don’t know, alive, I guess is the best way to put it.” He pointed to the screen. “Where did this come from?”

“Rydberg brought it,” she answered, “But it only receives. What do you mean, the city’s alive?”

“Watch this,” Derec said, and ran full speed across the room, banging into the far wall. The wall gave with him, caving inward, then gently pushed itself back to a solid position.

“I laid awake all night worrying about you, while you were discovering the walls are made of rubber?” she asked loudly.

He turned to her, smiling. “Did you really worry about me?”

“No,” she replied. “What else?”

He walked over and sat on the couch with her, his tones hushed. “I saw the city building itself, literally extruding itself from the ground. I tried to go down there, but Avernus caught me. I think he’s in charge down there. The only thing I can figure is that there are immense mining operations underway below ground and that the buildings are positronic, some kind of cellular robots that make up a complete whole. It’s fascinating!”

Katherine was unimpressed. “Did you find a way out of here?”

He shook his head. “Not yet,” he answered, “but I don’t really think that’s going to be a problem.”

“That’s because you’re so eaten up with your robot friends you can’t think of anything else!” She suddenly jerked her head toward the wall. “If the walls are robots, I wonder if they can hear us now?”

Just then the screen on the table came to life, Rydberg’s face filling it. “So, you are back, Derec,” he said. “Good. Prepare yourselves. An honor guard is coming right now to bring you to your preliminary trial.”

“Trial?” Derec said.

“Uh oh,” Katherine said, putting a hand to her mouth. “That may be my fault. I all but dared them to put us on trial.”

“But we haven’t had a chance to investigate yet.”

She shrugged. “I was trying to find if we could have access to outside communications.” She snapped her fingers. “Maybe this means we’re going to get it.”

“Yeah . . . maybe,” Derec said, but he was skeptical. Robot City was too precious a gem to be hanging out in the ether for anyone to pluck. At this point, he wasn’t even sure if he wanted to communicate with the outside.

He looked at the screen. It had already gone blank. “Whatever the reason,” he said, “I believe we’re going to get some answers at this point.”

“Let’s hope they’re answers we can live with,” she sighed. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life here.”

Within minutes, the utility robot was knocking on the door. Derec hurried to open it. Euler greeted him, accompanied by a supervisor robot he’d not seen before. This one was the robot most closely molded to a human that Derec had seen, with chisled, though blank, mannequin-like features.

“Friend Derec,” Euler said, “Friend Katherine Burgess, may I present Arion, who will be in attendance at our meeting.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Derec said.

“Rydberg called it a trial,” Katherine said.

“This is a great moment for us here,” Arion said. “I trust that your stay so far has been satisfactory. I am doing my best with what little time I have to try and prepare some entertainment for you. We know that humans enjoy mind diversions.”

“We’d appreciate anything you could do,” Derec said.

“Sure,” Katherine said. “How about conjuring up a radio for us to call the outside for help?”

“Oh, that’s quite impossible,” Arion said.

“That’s what I thought,” Katherine answered.

“I have a present for each of you,” Euler said, extending his right arm. “Then we must be off to the meeting.”

Derec moved to the robot. His pincers held two large watches, dangling on gold chains. “You may know the time here now,” Euler said. “It is of importance to humans, and so, to us. We will do more to make you feel comfortable in this regard.”

Derec took the watches, giving one of them to Katherine. They had square faces encased in gold. On both of them, the LCD faces read 3:35. “They run on a twenty-four hour day,” said Euler. “We thought it would be more comfortable for you if we adjusted the length of our hour than if you had to adjust to a twenty-and-one-half hour day. Our hours, decads, and centads are approximately eighty-five percent of standard.” Derec walked out onto the veranda and looked into the sky. The sun had already passed its apex and was slowly crawling toward the eventual shadows of evening.

“Right on the money,” he said, returning to the apartment.

“You doubted it?” Arion asked, looking at Euler.

“Do you understand now?” Euler said to him.

“Interesting,” Arion said, cocking his head in an almost human fashion.

“We must go,” Euler said and hurried out of the apartment, the others following.

They rode the elevator to street level and boarded a multi-car tram that had no apparent driver. It started off immediately when they were seated. Euler turned to Derec, who sat, with Katherine, behind him and Arion. “You put yourself in extreme danger last night,” the robot said. “Why?”

“I’ve a better question,” Derec returned. “If this is such a perfect human world, why was it so dangerous?”

“Spacer worlds conquered weather problems eons ago,” Katherine interjected. “For you to have them in such an advanced culture makes no sense.”

Arion turned to her and bowed his head. “Thank you for calling our culture advanced.”

“The weather,” Euler said, “is quite honestly part of our overall problem right now. It is under our control, but also not under our control. Unfortunately, for security reasons, we cannot discuss it in detail.”

“Great,” Katherine said. “Everybody can do something about the weather, but nobody talks about it.”

“To answer your original question,” Derec told Euler, as he watched them move in a direct line toward the tower where they had initially materialized, “I have no memory and no past. My curiosity, my search for answers about myself, leads me to do things not necessarily in my best interest.”

“Amnesia?” Euler asked. “Or something else?”

Derec looked at him in surprise. “What else?”

The robot answered his question with another question, an old one. “How, then, did you come to our planet?”

Derec realized that the robot was playing word games with him that tied directly to the word games Derec had initiated the night before. He decided to keep playing. “What did the dead man, David, say when you asked him that question?”

“He said he didn’t know,” Euler replied, and turned back around in his seat. Over his shoulder, he said, “He claimed he’d had amnesia.”

The tram came to a halt beside the mammoth pyramid that dominated the landscape of Robot City, the place the inhabitants called the Compass Tower. Katherine put a hand on Derec’s arm, squeezing, and he knew she had the same fear that he’d felt. Here, about halfway up the tower, was where they had hidden the Key to Perihelion that had brought them to the city. Had the robots found it? Were they confronting them with the evidence, or, worse yet, taking it away?

But Euler said nothing of the Key. Instead, he simply climbed from the tram and led them directly to the base of the tower, a tower that Derec had surmised was solid.

He’d never been more wrong.

At the robot’s approach, an entire block of the solid matter that formed the base simply melted away, leaving a gently sloping runway leading into the structure, another example of Derec’s theory about the intelligence of the building materials themselves.

They moved into the pyramid through a short, dark hallway that emptied into a maze of criss-crossing aisles and stairs that, in turn, led off in all directions within the structure.

“Try and memorize our path,” Derec whispered to Katherine. “Just in case.”

“In case of what?” she asked. “In case you haven’t figured it out, we’re not going anywhere.”

“This is the most important building in our city,” Euler said, as he took them up a series of stairs and escalators that zig-zagged at every landing and culminated in a long, well-lit hallway. “This is where decisions are made, where . . . understanding takes place.”

They walked the hall, Arion hurrying ahead and disappearing down some stairs. The surrounding walls glowed lightly, with connecting hallways intersecting every ten feet.

They followed Arion’s path, changing direction several times before finding themselves standing in a large, well-lit room whose four walls angled in toward a ceiling, fifteen meters above, that poured in sunshine like a skylight.

The floor of the room was tiled in the form of a large compass, its four points forming the cornerstones of Robot City. In the center of the compass, under the direct rays of the sun, stood six robots in a circle, arms outstretched, their pincers grasping those of their neighbors on either side with space left for one more—Euler.

“This is the place where we seek perfection,” Euler said, and joined the circle, closing it.

“It’s almost religious,” Derec whispered to Katherine.

“Yeah,” she replied. “It give me the creeps.”

Derec looked around the room. There were no chairs or tables, nothing upon which a human being could rest. The walls were inset with CRTs jammed side to side around the entire perimeter. Each screen showed its own view of Robot City. Many showed excavation sites, the large movers pushing and leveling soil. Other pictures were of the extrusion plant he had visited, and he was led to conjecture that there might be more than one. There were pictures of the reservoir he had splashed into, and strange, underground pictures taken through the eyes of roving cambots that showed mining tunnels, kilometer after kilometer of deserted tunnel. And finally, many of the screens simply showed the pinktinged blue of the sky.

“You have come to this place,” Euler said loudly, “to help us in our search for correctness, for perfection, for completeness. We are the keys—human and robot—to the synergy of spirit. Synnoetics is our goal. I will introduce the rest of us and we will begin.”

“Synnoetics?” Katherine whispered.

“Man and machine,” Derec replied, “the whole greater than the sum of the parts.”

“It is religious!” she rasped. “And how did you know that?”

Derec shrugged. “This all feels so . . . comfortable to me.”

“You know Rydberg,” Euler said, “and Avernus and Arion.” The robots nodded as their names were called. “The rest of us . . . Waldeyer . . . ”

“Good day,” said a squat, roundish robot with wheels.

“Dante . . . ”

“I welcome you,” Dante said, his telescopic eyes sticking out several inches from his dome.

“And Wohler.”

A magnificent golden machine bowed formally without removing his pincers from his neighbors’. “We are honored,” Wohler said.

“We will answer what questions we can from you,” Euler said, “and hope that you will do the same.”

“If, as you say,” Derec told them, “we are all looking for truth and perfection, then our meeting will be fruitful. I would like to begin by asking you why there are certain areas of life here that you will not discuss with us.”

Rydberg spoke. “We are in a standby security mode that renders certain information classified by our programming.”

“Did our arrival prompt the institution of the security mode?” Katherine asked.

“No,” Euler said. “It was in effect when you arrived. If, in fact, you arrived when you said you did. We must ask you again how you came to be here.”

Derec decided to try a little truth. It couldn’t hurt as long as no mention was made of the Key. Perhaps a dose of the truth might get them to open up about the Key’s existence. “We materialized out of thin air atop this very building.”

“And where were you before that?” Wohler, the gold one, asked.

Derec walked slowly around the circle, studying his questioners. “A Spacer way station named Rockliffe near Nexon, right on the edge of the Settlement Worlds quarantine zone.”

Arion, the mannequin, asked, “What means, then, did you use to get from one place to the other?”

“No means,” Derec said. “We were simply transported here.”

There was silence for a moment. “This does not coordinate with any information extant in memory,” Avernus said, his large dome following Derec’s progress around the circle.”

You’ve found no ship that could have brought us,” Derec said, “and I’m sure you’ve searched.”

“That is correct,” Euler said, “and our radar picked up no activity that could have been construed to be a vessel in our atmosphere.”

“I can’t explain it beyond that,” Derec said. “Now, you answer a question for me. Where did you come from?”

“Who are you addressing?” Euler asked.

“All of you,” Derec said.

Avernus answered. “All of them except for me were constructed here, on Robot City,” he said. “I was . . . awakened here, but believe I was constructed elsewhere.”

“Where?”

“I do not know,” the large robot replied. “My first i/o memories are of this place. Nothing in my pre-programming suggested anything of an origin.”

“Are you trying to say,” Katherine broke in, “that all of you know nothing but the company of other robots? That your entire existence is here?”

“Correct,” Rydberg said. “Our master programming is well aware of human beings and their societies, but no formal relationship exists between our species.”

“Then how did you come to build this place?” Derec asked. “How then, did it become important to you to make a world for humans?”

“We are incomplete without human beings,” Waldeyer said, his squat dome swiveling to Derec and then Katherine. “The very laws that govern our existence revolve around human interaction. We exist to serve independent thought, the higher realms of creativity that we are incapable of alone. We discovered this very quickly, without being told. Alone, we simply exist to no end, no purpose. Even artificial intelligence must have a reason to utilize itself. This world is the first utilization of that intelligence. We’ve been building it for humans, in order to make the perfect atmosphere in which human creativity can flourish to the greater completeness of us all. Without this world we are nothing. With it, we are vital contributing factors to the ongoing evolution of the universe.”

“Why would that matter to you?” Katherine asked.

“I have a theory about that,” Dante said, his elongated eyes glowing bright yellow. “We are the product, the child if you will, of higher realms of creative thought. It seems impossible that the drives of that creative thought wouldn’t permeate every aspect of our programming. We want for nothing. We desire nothing. Yet, the incompleteness of our inactivity makes us . . . feel, for lack of a better word, useless and extraneous. Given the total freedom of our own world, we were driven to function in service.”

Derec suddenly felt a terrible sadness well up in him for these unhappy creatures of man’s intelligence. “You’ve done all this, even though you never knew if any people would come here?”

“That is correct,” Euler said. “Then David came, and we thought that all would be right. Then came his death, then the calamities, then you . . . suspects to murder. We never meant for anything to be this way.”

“When you say calamities,” Derec said, “are you speaking of the problems with the storms?”

“Yes,” Rydberg said. “The rains threaten our civilization itself, and it’s all our own fault. We are breaking apart from the inside out, with nothing to be done about it.”

“I don’t understand,” Derec said.

“We don’t expect you to, nor can we tell you why it must be this way,” Euler said.

Derec thought about the hot air pumping through the reservoir. “Is the city’s rapid growth rate normal?” he asked.

“No,” Euler said. “It coincides with David’s death.”

“Is it because of David’s death?”

“We do not know the answer to that,” Euler said.

“Wait a moment,” Katherine said, walking away from the circle to sit on the floor, her back up against the north wall. “I want to talk to you about our connection with all this . . . and why Rydberg called this a preliminary trial.”

“You were the one who first mentioned the concept of trial,” the robot replied, leaning out of the circle to stare at her. “I only used that term to make you feel comfortable.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll play. You say this is a civilization of robots that have never had human interaction, yet obviously someone gave you your initial programming and ability to perform the work on this city.”

“Someone . . . yes,” Euler said.

“Someone who’s in charge,” she said.

“No,” Euler said. “We are now in group communication with our master programming unit, but it simply provides us with information from which logical decisions are made. Our overall philosophy is service; our means are logical. Other than that, our society has no direction.”

“Then why put us on trial at all?” she asked.

“Respect for human life is our First Law,” Rydberg said. “When we envisioned our perfect human/robot world, we saw a world in which all shared respect for the First Law. We envisioned a system of humanics that would guide human behavior, just as the Laws of Robotics guide our behavior, just as the Laws of Robotics guide our behavior. Of course, we have been working entirely from theory, but we have made a preliminary list of three laws that would provide the basis for an understanding of humans.”

“Cute,” Katherine said. “Now they want us to follow the Laws of Robotics.”

Derec interrupted her complaint. “Wait. Let’s see what they’ve come up with.”

“Thank you, Friend Derec. Our provisional First Law of Humanics is: A human being may not injure another human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”

“Admirable,” conceded Derec, “even if it isn’t always obeyed. What is your Second Law?”

Rydberg’s hesitation before answering gave Derec the clear impression that the robot wanted to ask a question of its own, but his took precedence under the Second Law of Robotics.

“The Second Law of Humanics is: A human being must give only reasonable orders to a robot and require nothing of it that would needlessly put it into the kind of dilemma that might cause it harm or discomfort.”

“Still admirable, but still too altruistic to be always obeyed. And the third?”

“The Third Law of Humanics is: A human being must not harm a robot, or through inaction, allow a robot to come to harm, unless such harm is needed to keep a human being from harm or to allow a vital order to be carried out.”

“Not only is your experience with humans limited, so is your programming,” Derec said, shaking his head. “These ‘laws’ might describe a utopian society of humans and robots, but they certainly don’t describe the way humans really behave.”

“We have become aware of that,” said Rydberg. “Obviously, we are going to have to reconsider our conclusions. Since your arrival we have been subjected to human lies and deceit, concepts beyond our limited understanding.”

“But the First Law must stand!” Avernus said loudly, his red photocells glowing brightly. “Human or robot, all are subject to respect for life.”

“We certainly aren’t arguing that point,” Derec said.

“No!” Katherine said, standing angrily and walking back to the circle. “What we’re talking about is the lack of respect with which we’re being treated here!”

“Kath . . . ” Derec began.

“Shut up,” Katherine said. “I’ve been listening to you having wonderful little philosophical conversations with your robot buddies, and I’m getting a little tired of it. Listen, folks. First thing, I demand that you give us access to communications with the outside and that you let us leave. You have no authority to hold us here.”

“This is our world,” Euler said. “We mean no offense, but all societies are governed by laws, and we fear you have broken our greatest law.”

“And what if we have?” she asked. “What happens then?”

“Well,” Euler said. “We would do nothing more than keep you from the society of other humans who you could harm.”

“Great. So, how do you prove we did anything in order to hold us?”

“Process of elimination,” Waldeyer said. “Friend Derec has previously suggested some other possible avenues of explanation, but we feel it is incumbent upon both of you to explore them—not because we are trying to make it difficult for you, but because we respect your creative intelligence more than we respect our own deductive intelligence in an area like this.”

Derec watched as Katherine ran hands through her long black hair and took several deep breaths as she tried to get herself together and in a position to work with this. “All right,” she said, more calmly. “You said before that you won’t let us see the body.”

“No,” Euler said. “We said that we can’t let you see the body.”

“Why?”

There was silence. Finally Rydberg spoke. “We don’t know where it is,” he said. “The city began replicating too quickly and we lost it.”

“Lost it?” Derec said.

Derec knew it was impossible for a robot to be or look embarrassed, but that was exactly the feeling he was getting from the entire group.

“We really have no idea of where it is,” Euler said.

Derec saw an opening and quickly took it. “In order to do this investigation and prove that we’re innocent of any First Law transgressions, we must have freedom of movement around your city.”

“We exist to protect your lives,” Euler said. “You’ve been caught in the rains; you know how dangerous they are. We can’t let you out under those conditions.”

“Is there advance warning of the rain?” he asked.

“Yes,” Rydberg said. “The clouds build in the late afternoon, and the rain comes at night.”

“Suppose we promise to not go out when the conditions are unfavorable?” Derec asked.

Wohler, the golden robot, said, “What are human promises worth?”

Katherine pushed her way beneath the hands of the robots to stand in the center of the circle. “What are our lives worth without freedom?”

“Freedom,” Wohler echoed.

A dark cloud passed above the skylight, plunging the room into a gray, melancholy halflight, illumination provided by a score of CRT screens, many of them now showing pictures of madly roiling clouds.

The circle broke immediately, the robots, agitated, hurrying toward the door.

“Come,” Euler said, motioning to the humans. “The rains are approaching. We must get you back to shelter. There is so much to do.”

“What about my suggestion?” Derec called loudly to them.

“Hurry,” Euler called, waving his arm as Derec and Katherine walked toward him. “We will think about it and let you know tomorrow.”

“And if we can investigate and prove our innocence,” Katherine said, “will you then let us contact the outside?”

Euler stood still and fixed her with his photocells. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “If you don’t prove your innocence, you’ll never be allowed to contact the outside.”

 

 

CHAPTER 5

A WITNESS

 

Derec sat before the CRT screen on the apartment table and watched the “entertainment” that Arion was providing him in the form, at this moment, of sentences and their grammatic diagrams. Before that it had been a compendium of various failed angle trisection theorems, and before that, an incredibly long list of the powers of ten and the various words that had been invented to describe the astronomical numbers those powers represented. It was an insomniac’s nightmare.

It was a dark, gray morning, the air heavy with the chill of the night and the rain that had pounded Robot City for many hours. The sky was slate as the remnants of the night’s devastation drifted slowly away on the wings of the morning.

He felt like a caged animal, his nerves jangling madly with the notion that he couldn’t leave the apartment if he wanted to. They had been dropped off in the early evening after the meeting at the Compass Tower and hadn’t seen a supervisor robot since. The CRT had no keyboard and only received whatever data they chose to show him from moment to moment. At this particular time, they apparently felt the need to amuse him; but the time filler of the viewscreen only increased his frustration.

He hadn’t slept well. The apartment only had one bed and Katherine was using it. Derec slept on the couch. It had been too short for him, and that didn’t make sleeping any easier. But that wasn’t the real reason he’d been awake.

It was the rain.

He couldn’t get out of his head the fact that the reservoir had been nearly filled when he’d been flung into it the night before. How, then, could it possibly hold the immense amounts of water that continued to pour into it with each successive rainfall? He’d worried over that point: the more rain, the greater the worry. The fact that the supervisors hadn’t contacted him since before the storm seemed ominous. All of their efforts seemed to revolve around the weather problems.

How did the weather tie in with the rapid growth rate of the city? Were the two linked?

“You’re up early,” came Katherine’s voice behind him.

He turned to see her, face soft from sleep, framed by the diffused light. She looked good, a night’s sleep bringing out her natural beauty. She was wrapped in the pale green cover from her bed. He wondered idly what she was wearing beneath it, then turned unconsciously to his awakening, after the explosion in Aranimas’s ship, in the medical wing of the Rockliffe Station to find her naked on the bed beside. Embarrassed, he pushed that thought aside, but its residue left another thought from that time, something he had completely forgotten about.

“Can I ask you a question?” he said.

Her face darkened and he watched her tighten up. “What is it?” she asked.

“When we were at Rockliffe, Dr. Galen mentioned you had a chronic condition,” he said. “Later, when he began to talk about it, you shut him up.”

She walked up to look at the screen, refusing to meet his gaze. “You’re mistaken,” she said. “I’m fine . . . the picture of health.”

She turned slightly from him, and there seemed to be a small catch in her voice. When she turned back, her face was set firm, quite unlike the vulnerable morning creature he’d seen a moment ago. “What’s happening on the screen?” she asked.

He looked. A pleasant, always changing pattern of computer generated images was juicing through the CRT, accompanied by a random melody bleeped out of the machine’s tiny speaker.

“You make it very hard for me to believe you,” he said, ignoring the screen. “Why, when we need total honesty and trust between us, do I feel that you’re holding back vital information from me?”

“You’re just paranoid,” she said, and he could tell he was going to get nothing from her. “And if you don’t change the subject quickly, I’m going to find myself getting angry, and that’s no way to start the day.”

He reluctantly agreed. “I’m worried about the rains,” he said. “They were worse last night than the night before.”

She sat at the table with him. “Well, if this place is getting ready to have major problems, I hope we’re out of here before they happen. We’ve got to get something going with the murder investigation.”

“Do you know what makes rain?” he asked, ignoring the issue of the murder.

“What has that got to do with our investigation?” she asked, on edge.

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m just wondering about these rains, I . . . ”

“Don’t say it,” she replied holding up a hand. “You’re worried about your robot friends. Well, let me tell you something, your friends are in the process of keeping us locked up for the rest of our lives . . . ”

“Not locked up, surely,” he interrupted.

“This is serious!” she said, angry now. “We have a very good chance of being kept prisoner here for life. You know, once they make a decision like that, I see no reason that they would ever change it. Don’t you understand the gravity of the situation?”

He looked at her calmly, placing a hand over hers on the table. She drew it away, and he felt his own anger rise, then rapidly subside. “I understand the problem,” he explained, “but I fear the problem with the city is more pressing, more . . . immediate.”

“But it’s not our problem. The murder is.”

“Indulge me,” he said. “Let’s talk about weather for just a minute.”

She sighed, shaking her head. “Let’s see what I remember,” she said. “Molecules respond to heat, separating, moving more quickly. Water molecules are no exception. On a hot day, they rise into the atmosphere and cling to dust particles in the air. When they rise into the cooler atmosphere, they turn into clouds. When the clouds get too heavy, too full of water, they return to the ground in the form of rain.”

“Okay,” he said. “And wind is simply the interplay of heat and cold in the atmosphere.”

She shrugged. “The cold, heavier air pushes down and forces the warm air to move—wind.”

“I think I’m beginning to see a connection,” he said, excited. “Look. Robot City is building at a furious pace, sending a great deal of dust into the atmosphere.” He thought about the reservoir. “Meanwhile, they are somehow liberating a great deal of water from the mining processes that are needed to build the city. Along with the mining processes comes a tremendous amount of kinetic energy, heat, which they are venting into the atmosphere near the water, forcing the heated molecules to rise as water vapor and cling to the dust particles that are thick in the atmosphere right now. At night, the temperature cools down a great deal . . . ”

“That could be an uncompensated ozone layer,” she said.

He pointed to her. “Ozone. That’s what seals in our atmosphere. As goes the ozone layer, so go our temperature inversions. So, it cools at night, the rain clouds forming, the cool air bringing on the big winds, and the rain falls.”

“So,” Katherine said, “if they slowed down the building pace, it could slow down the weather.”

“It seems logical to me,” he replied.

“So why don’t they do it?”

“That’s the mystery, isn’t it?”

The door slid open and Wohler, the golden robot, moved into the room, flanked on either side by smaller robots.

“Good morning,” Wohler said. “I trust your sleep-time was beneficial.”

“You’re going to have to learn to knock before you come barging in here,” Katherine said. “Now go out and do it again.”

Derec watched the robot dutifully march outside the door and slide it closed. He knew that Katherine was simply venting frustration. On Spacer worlds, robots were considered simply part of the furniture and their presence was not thought about in terms of privacy.

There was a gentle tapping on the door, the nature of the material muffling the sound somewhat.

“Come in,” Katherine said with satisfaction, and the door slid open, the robots reentering.

“Is this the preferred method of treatment in future?” Wohler asked.

“It is,” she replied.

“Very well,” the robot said, then noticed Derec’s sleeping covers on the sofa. “Should these be returned to the bedroom?”

“You only provided us with one bed,” Derec replied. “I slept out here.”

Wohler moved farther into the room, coming up near the table. “Did we err? Was the sleeping space too small . . . ”

“Katherine and I would simply like . . . separate places to sleep,” Derec said.

“Privacy?” Wohler asked. “As with the knocking on the door?”

“Yes,” Katherine said, and he could tell she was unwilling to delve into the social aspects of human sleeping arrangements, so he left it alone, too.

“On-line time is a matter of priorities right now,” the robot said, “but we will see if we can arrange something for you that is more private.”

“Thanks,” Derec said. “And if it takes another day to arrange it, that’s all right with me. It’s Katherine’s turn to sleep on the couch tonight.”

“What?” she said loudly. Derec grinned broadly at her. She wasn’t amused.

He quickly changed the subject. “What brings you here this morning, Wohler?” he asked. “Have you reached a decision about our requests of yesterday?”

“Yes,” the robot replied. “And it is our sincerest wish that the decision be one that all of us can accept. First, in addressing the issue of your investigation and freedom of movement. We conferred at as great a length as time would permit under the present circumstances, and decided that, despite your flaws, you are human, and that fact in and of itself demands that we give you the benefit of the doubt in this situation. Many of our number were concerned about your veracity, or lack of it, but I reminded them that a great human philosopher once said, ‘Isn’t it better to have men being ungrateful than to miss a chance to do good?’ And so my fellows voted to do good in this regard.”

“Excellent,” Derec said.

“But . . . ” Katherine helped.

“Indeed,” Wohler returned. “It is my place to philosophize in any given situation, and I need remind you now that one must always be prepared to take bad along with good.”

“Just get on with it,” Katherine said.

Wohler nodded. “On the matter of your safety, and your . . . unpredictability, it was decided that each of you would have a robot companion to . . . help you in your investigations.”

“You mean to guard us,” Katherine said.

“Merely a matter of semantics,” Wohler countered, and Derec could tell that the robot had been geared for diplomacy. “Actually, in this case, I believe you may find these robots more useful as assistants than as protection. In fact, one of them was present during the death of David and the subsequent confusion.”

Katherine perked up. “Really? Which one?”

The robot to Wohler’s left came forward. Its body was tubular, its dome a series of bristling sensors and photocells. Without arms, it seemed useless in almost any sense.

“What are you called?” Katherine asked the machine.

The machine’s tones were clipped and precise. “I am Event Recorder B-23, Model 13 Alpha 4.”

“I’ll call you Eve, if that’s all right,” Katherine said, standing and wrapping her blanket a little tighter around herself. She looked at Derec. “I want this one.”

“Fine,” Derec said, then to the other, “come here.”

The robot moved up close to him. “You’ll answer to Rec.”

“Rec,” the robot repeated.

“We call these robots witnesses,” Wohler said. “Their only function is to witness events precisely for later reporting.”

“That’s why they have no arms,” Derec said.

“Correct,” Wohler replied. “They are unequipped to do anything but witness. Once involvement begins on any level, the witness function falters in any creature. These robots only witness and report. They will know the how of almost everything, but never the why. They will answer all of your questions to the best of their ability, but again, they are unable to make any second-level connections by putting events together to form reasons.”

“I’m going to go get dressed,” Katherine said, the happiest Derec had seen her in days. She hurried out of the room, disappearing down the hall to the bedroom.

“Where will we be denied access?” Derec asked. “Or is the entire planet open to us?”

“Alas, no,” Wohler said. “You will be denied access to certain parts of the city and certain operations. Your witness, however, will tell you when you’ve stepped into dangerous water, as it were.”

“What are the chances of me getting around a terminal,” Derec asked, “and talking to the central core?”

“The central core has sealed itself off because of our present state of emergency,” Wohler said. “It will not accept input from any sources save the supervisors, and we are unable to help you in this regard.”

“How do the day-to-day operations survive?” he asked.

“Essential information can be gathered through any terminal,” the robot answered. “But input is limited.”

“You don’t mind if I try?”

“That is between you and the central core. We all have our jobs to do. All that we insist upon is that you honor your commitment to come back here when the rains approach. We must put your safety above all else. Having failed in this regard with your predecessor, we perhaps err on the side of caution. But all privileges will be denied should this directive be overlooked or ignored.”

“I understand,” Derec replied, “and will respect your wishes.”

“Your words, unfortunately, mean very little right now,” the robot said, turning to the door, his head swiveling back to Derec. “By your deeds we will judge you in future. As an Earth philosopher once said, ‘The quality of a life is determined by its activities.’ Now, I must go.”

With that, Wohler moved quickly through the opening and departed hurriedly down the elevator. The activity bothered Derec; it said to him that things were not going well in Robot City. He had intended to ask Wohler about the effects of last night’s rain, but then decided a first-hand look might be better and determined that Rec would take him where he wanted to go.

“There,” Katherine said, coming down the hall to bustle around the room. She wore a blue one-piece that the dinner servo-robot had brought with it the night before. “Finally, we can start moving in a positive direction. Where do you want to start?”

“I thought I’d go down to the reservoir,” he replied, “and see how much rain fell last night.”

She stopped walking and stared, unbelieving, at him. “Don’t you realize that every moment is precious right now? We need to find that body and see what happened. It could be . . . decomposing or something at this very minute.”

“I’ve got to see if there was any damage,” he said. “I’ll try and join you later.”

“Never mind,” she said angrily, and walked quickly to the door. “Satisfy your stupid urges. I don’t want you with me. You’ll just get in the way anyhow. Come on, Eve. We’ve got a corpus delecti to find.”

She walked out of the apartment without a backward glance and was gone, Derec frowning after her. He couldn’t help the way his feelings ran on this. He felt that so much of his own life, his own reasons for being, hinged upon the future of Robot City that its troubles seemed to be his own.

“I want to go to the reservoir,” he told Rec. “Can you take me there?”

“Yes, Friend Derec,” the robot answered, and they left together.

When they arrived at street level, Derec was disappointed to find that the supervisors hadn’t left any transportation for him to use. A great deal of time would be wasted walking from place to place. Perhaps he could talk to Euler about it later, though he feared that the reasons had much to do with keeping him from going very far from home.

“Do you want to go the most direct route?” the witness asked him.

“Yes, of course,” Derec said as they set out walking. “Let me ask you a question. Is the rain a result of the work being done on the city?”

“For the most part,” Rec answered through a speaker located on Derec’s side of his dome. “It is also the rainy season here.”

“If they slowed down the building, would it slow down the rain?”

“I do not know.”

Derec was going about this wrong, asking the wrong questions of a witness. “How does the city make rain?” he asked.

The robot began talking, recalling information in an encyclopedic fashion. “Olivine is mined below ground and crushed in vacuum, releasing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, from which water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane gas, and traces of other chemicals are liberated. Iron ore is also being mined for building materials, along with petroleum products for plastics . . . ”

“Plastics?” Derec asked.

“Plastics are used as alloys in making the material from which the city is constructed. Do you wish me to go on with my previous line of witnessing?”

“Let me tell you,” Derec said, “and you tell me if I’m right. Water vapor, along with the heat energy from the mining process, is pumped into the air, heat also being pumped into the reservoir. The CO₂ is bled into the forest to help growth. The reason that the weather is so rainy now is that the city is growing too fast, giving off too much heat, dust, and water.”

“I do not know why the weather is so rainy right now,” Rec said. “I do not even understand what so rainy means. The other statements you made are juxtapositional with statements I heard Supervisor Avernus make, which I assume to be correct.”

“Fine,” Derec said. “Is there a problem with the ozone layer?”

“Problem?” the robot asked.

Derec rephrased. “Is any work being done on the ozone layer?”

“I do not know,” Rec said, “although I did hear Supervisor Avernus say on one occasion that the ‘ozone layer needs to be increased photochemically to ten parts per million.’“

“Good,” Derec said. “Very good.”

“You are pleased with my witnessing?” Rec asked.

“Yes,” Derec replied. “Will the supervisors be asking you to witness later what we’ve discussed?”

“That is my function, Friend Derec.”

They walked for nearly an hour by Derec’s watch, the city still subtly changing around them. It sometimes took a while to get information out of the witness, but if questions were phrased properly, Derec found Rec an endless source of information, and he wondered how Katherine was faring with her witness.

Derec knew they were nearing the reservoir long before they arrived there. A long stream of robots was moving toward and away from the site, followed by large vehicles bearing slabs of city building material.

They walked into an area sonorous with activity, echoes raising the pitch enough that Derec covered his ears against the din. Within the confines of the reservoir area, his worst fears were realized. The water had reached the top of the pool and was splashing over slightly in various areas.

For their part, the robots were doing their best to stop it. Large machines, obviously converted from mining work, had been modified to lift huge slabs of the building material to the top of the pool, where utility robots with laser torches were welding the higher sections together, trying for more room, bathing the area in various sections in showers of yellow sparks.

It was a massive job, the reservoir covering many acres, as the robots worked frantically to finish before the next rain. And to Derec’s mind, this could be no more than a stopgap measure, for unless the rain was halted, it would overflow even the extra section in a day or two.

“What happens if the water overflows?” he asked Rec.”

I am unable to speculate on such matters, Friend Derec,” the robot said. “It is not overflowing. When it does, I will witness.”

“Right,” Derec said, and moved forward, closing on the workers.

“Do not get too close,” Rec called. “It is dangerous for you.”

Derec ignored him and moved closer, recognizing Euler, who was helping with the movement of a slab. He was directing a large, heavy-based machine with a telescoping arm that held a six-by-six-meter slab in magnetic grips. He was holding his pincers at the approximate distance the arm had yet to travel so that it would be flush with the edge of the pool and the slab next to it. Utility robots physically guided the slabs to the ground and held them so the welders could set to work immediately.

“Euler!” Derec called, the robot jerking to the sound of his name.

“It is too dangerous for you here!” Euler called back, waving him away. “We have no safety controls over this area!”

“I’ll only stay a centad,” Derec said, moving up close to him. He could look past the end of the last slab and see the dark waters churning the top of the pool. In the distance, all around the reservoir, he could see the same operation being repeated by other crews.

“What are you doing here?” Euler asked him.

“I had to see for myself,” Derec answered. “I knew the levels were rising. Why don’t you stop the building pace and let these waters recede?”

“I can’t tell you why,” Euler said.

“But what happens when this overflows?”

“We lose the treatment plant,” Euler said, holding his pincers up to signify to the arm to stop moving the slab. Then he motioned toward the ground, the arm bringing the slab down very slowly. “We lose much of our mining operations. We lose a great many miners. We will have failed.”

“Then stop the building!”

“We can’t!”

Just then, a utility robot working the slab was bumped slightly by the moving metal and lost its footing on the wet floor. Soundlessly and without drama, it slipped from the edge of the pool and fell into the dark waters, disappearing immediately.

Everything stopped.

Euler pushed past Derec to hurry to the water’s edge, where he stood, head down, watching. The rest of the crew did the same, lining up quietly beside the water. Derec moved to join Euler.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Euler slowly turned his head to look at the boy, not saying anything for a long time. “I should have paid more attention,” he said.

“How deep is the water?” Derec asked.

“Very deep,” Euler replied. “I was talking with you and didn’t give the job my complete attention.”

“Can it be saved?”

“Had there been more time,” Euler said, “the job would have been studied for safety and feasibility and this wouldn’t have happened. Had I known better, I wouldn’t have allowed you to come so close. A robot is lost, and the supervisor is to blame.”

“There was nothing you could have done,” Derec said.

“A robot is dead today,” Euler told him. “I will not answer any more of your questions right now.”

 

 

CHAPTER 6

THE TUNNELS

 

“If the city keeps moving,” Katherine asked, “how can you take me to the location of the murder?”

“Triangulation,” Eve, the witness, said. “Using the Compass Tower as one point and the exact position of the sun at a given time as another point, my sensors are able to triangulate the position where I first witnessed the body. The time is the only real factor at this point. We must gauge the sun in exactly 13.24 decads to get the position right.”

They were walking through the city, Katherine feeling a mixture of fear and exuberance at her first solo trip outside. They were walking high up, above many of the buildings, bridges between structures seemingly growing for her to walk across, then melting away after her passage. Eve apparently needed the height in order to take the precise measurements.

Katherine was angry at Derec for his lack of interest in their predicament, but she knew him well enough to know how stubborn he could be. She, in fact, knew him far better than he knew himself, and that was maddening. They were caught in a web of intrigue that existed on a massive level, and as long as she was trapped there, she had to play the situation with as much control as she could muster. And that included not telling Derec any more about his life than he could figure out for himself. Her own existence was at stake, and until she could escape the maze that had locked up their activities, she desperately feared saying anything more.

She had to get away from Robot City. The pain had increased since her arrival here, and, for the first time in her life, death was a topic she found herself dwelling upon.

And her only crime was love.

She felt the tears begin to well up and fought them back with an iron will. They wouldn’t help her here. Nothing would, except her own tenacity and intelligence.

“Tell me about your involvement in David’s death,” she asked Eve, who was busy calibrating against the sun.

“In approximately two decads,” the robot said, “it will have happened exactly nine days ago. We go down from here.”

Eve moved directly to the corner of the six-story structure they were standing upon, and railed stairs formed for them to walk down. As they descended, the robot continued talking.

“I was called upon to witness the attempts to free Friend David from an enclosed room.”

“An enclosed room?” Katherine said. “I’ve never heard about this. How could he get trapped like that in this place?”

“The room grew around him.” Eve said. They reached street level and the robot headed west, away from the Compass Tower. “It sealed him in and wouldn’t let him leave.”

“Why?”

“I do not know.”

“Does anyone know?”

“I do not know.”

“All right,” Katherine said, watching a team of robots carry what looked to be gymnasium equipment into one of the buildings. “Just report what you saw.”

“Gladly. I was called upon to witness the attempt to free Friend David from the sealed room. When I arrived, Supervisor Dante was already on the scene . . . ”The robot stopped moving and for several seconds stared up into the sun. “Precisely here.” Eve pointed to a section of the street. “Friend David was caught inside the structure and we could hear him shouting to be let out.”

“Who?”

“Myself, Supervisor Dante, a utility robot with a torch, and another household utility robot who first discovered Friend David’s problem.”

“What happened then?”

“Then Supervisor Dante asked Utility Robot #237-5 if the laser torch was safe to use in such close proximity to a human being, and Utility Robot #237-5 assured him that it was. At that point, Supervisor Dante tried to reason with the room to release Friend David, and failing that, he requested that the room be cut into with the torch.”

“And that request was complied with?”

“Yes. Supervisor Dante, in fact, asked Utility Robot #237-5 to complete the project quickly.”

“Why?”

“I do not know.”

Katherine thought about the nature of the witness and asked another question. “Were there any other events that coincided with this event?”

“Yes,” Eve said. “Food Services complained that Friend David could not be served lunch on time and inquired if that would be dangerous to his health; several of the supervisors were meeting in the Compass Tower to discuss ways in which Friend David might have come to the city without their knowledge; and the city itself was put on general security alert.”

“Does a general security alert alter the way in which functions are performed?” she asked.

“Yes. We were all called to other emergency duties, and were here only because of the danger to Friend David and the need to release him.”

“Which you did.”

“Not me,” Eve said. “I only witnessed. But Friend David was freed from the enclosed room.”

“Did you notice anything odd at that point?”

“Odd? Friend Katherine, I can only . . . ”

“I know,” she interrupted, a touch frustrated. “You only witness. Then tell me exactly what happened.”

“Supervisor Dante asked Friend David to return to his apartment because a security alert had been called. Friend David said that he was not ready to return to his apartment, that he had business to do. Then he complained of a headache. Then he started laughing and walked away. Utility Robot #237-5 then asked Supervisor Dante if Friend David should be apprehended, and Supervisor Dante said he had weighed the priorities and had decided that the security alert took precedence and ordered us to proceed to our emergency duties, which, in my case, involved witnessing something that I am not at liberty to discuss with you.”

“Then what?” Katherine asked, anxious.

“Then I performed the security duty that I had been assigned.”

“No, no,” Katherine said. “What happened then in regard to David?”

“Approximately nine decads later, I was again called upon.” Eve began moving quickly down the street, Katherine right behind, having to run to keep up. “I am taking you to the approximate place of the second incident,” the robot called from a speaker set in the back of its dome. “I was called here, along with Supervisor Euler this time, by Utility Robot #716-14, who had discovered several waste control robots trying to take the body of Friend David away.”

Eve moved quickly around a corner, then stopped abruptly, Katherine nearly running into the robot.

“Here,” Eve said, “is the approximate place where the body was alleged to have fallen.”

“Alleged?”

“It was no longer here upon my arrival.”

“What story did the utility robot tell?”

“Utility Robot #716-14 said that he sent the waste control robots away, then examined Friend David for signs of life without success. During the course of the examination another room began to grow around the body and enclose it, at which point Utility Robot #716-14 removed himself before becoming trapped, and put in an emergency call to us. We returned to the scene together, but the body was gone. That is the last time anyone has seen Friend David.”

“Were there signs of violence on the body?”

“Utility Robot #716-14 reported that the body appeared perfectly normal except for a small cut on the left foot. Since I can only report hearsay in this regard, I am unable to render this as an accurate examination.”

Katherine leaned against the wall of a one-story parts depot, the wall giving slightly under her pressure. It seemed more than coincidence that David’s plight in the sealed room and the alert conditions of the city happened concurrently—but how were they connected?

“Do you feel, then, that the body moved simply because the city moved it?” she asked.

“I cannot speculate on such a theory,” the witness said, “but I heard Supervisor Euler make a pronouncement similar to yours—hearsay again.”

“Given the growth rate of the city,” Katherine said, “calculate how far and in what direction the body of David could have traveled if, indeed, the movement of the city took him from this place.”

“Approximately ten and one-half blocks,” Eve said without hesitation, “in any direction. The city works according to a plan that is not known to me.”

“Ten and a half blocks,” Katherine said low. “Well, it’ll sure give me something to do to fill in the time.” She looked at Eve’s bristling dome. “Let’s take a walk.”

“That is your decision,” the robot replied, as Katherine picked a direction at random and began walking, looking for what, she didn’t know.

 

ACCESS DENIED was written in bold letters across the CRT, and it was a phrase Derec had run into over a dozen times in as many minutes.

He stood at a small counter set beside a large, open window. Through the billowing clouds of iron-red dust floating into the sky, he could see the long line of earthmovers inching their way along the rocky ground, the teeth of their heavy front diggers easily chewing up the ground to a depth of 70 centimeters, then laying out the mulch in a flat, even plain behind, holes filling, rises falling, the ground absolutely uniform behind. A series of heavy rollers completed the unique vehicles, packing the ground hard for the slab base of the city to push its way into that section as it was completed.

After leaving the reservoir and its tragedy behind, he had asked Rec to take him to the edge of the city. He had wanted to see for himself the creation of the cloud dust and also to try and find access to a terminal far out of the reach of the supervisors. The robot had been hesitant at first, but after Derec had assured him that he’d go no farther than city’s edge, Rec had readily agreed.

But now that he was here, Derec resented the time it had taken to come this far out. The terminal had been a complete bust. He’d found himself able to access any amount of information when it came to this part of the city operation: troubleshooting info, repair info, time references, equipment specs, personnel delineation, and SOPs of all kinds; but beyond that, access was impossible.

He had tried various methods of obtaining passwords, but it seemed he was stymied before he got started. He came away with the impression that once the city was on alert, terminals became place-oriented, only able to pick up specific data as it related to their possible function in a given location. He found this difficult to believe, for if the robots were in total charge of access and passwords it belied the nature of their “perfect human world.” It struck him that access would have to be humanly possible for very basic philosophical reasons.

But not here; not at this terminal.

So, where did that leave him? The rains still came, with or without his presence; the central core was still denied to him, and with it any answers it might possess; he was still a prisoner (a fact he did take seriously, despite Katherine’s feelings); and he still knew nothing about his origins or reasons for being in Robot City.

That thought returned him to the basics. When he had visited the Compass Tower, Avernus had been pointed out as the first supervisor robot, the one that had initiated the construction of the other supervisors. Derec had been successful in determining the origin and destination of the water; now he would work on the origin of the city itself. The only place to start was with Avernus and the underground. The mining was needed to produce the raw materials to build the city. Everything else sprang from that foundation. He would go to the source—to Avernus.

He shut down the useless terminal and walked out of the otherwise bare room to find Rec intently studying the rising dust clouds, taking readings. It was his obsession.

“I want to go into the mines and speak with Avernus,” he told the robot. “Is that acceptable?”

“I will take you to the mines, Friend Derec,” Rec answered, “but from that point on, the decision will belong to Avernus.”

“Fair enough,” Derec said, and prepared for another long walk. Then he spotted one of the trams parked near the excavation and walked toward it. “Let’s ride this time.”

“We were not given this machine,” Rec said. “It is not ours to take.”

“Were you told not to let me take the machine?” Derec countered.

“No, but . . . ”

“Then let’s go.”

Derec jumped in the front, but saw no controls with which to drive it. He knew that this was probably the means by which the robots working the movers got here, but the witness was unable to make that speculation and consequently folded up. “How does it work?”

“You speak your destination into the microphone,” Rec said.

“The underground,” Derec said, then shrugged at Rec. Within seconds, the car lurched forward and moved speedily away from the digs.

They traveled quickly, moving through an entire section full of nothing but robot production facilities that were running full tilt, furiously trying to keep up with the record-setting building pace. As the number of buildings increased, so, too, did the number of robots to service those buildings and the people who didn’t live in them. They passed vehicle after vehicle jammed full of new, functionally designed robots who stared all around, seeing their world for the first time.

They also passed other small forests and what seemed to be large sections of hydroponic greenhouses, for when large-scale food production became a reality. Then they whizzed past a large, open area that seemed to serve no function.

“What’s that?” Derec asked.

“Nothing,” Rec answered.

“I don’t mean now,” Derec said. “What’s it going to be?”

“I do not often deal in potential,” the robot replied, several red lights on his dome blinking madly, “but I recall Supervisor Euler once referring to this place as a future spaceport.”

Derec was a bit taken aback. Robot City was absolutely unable to deal with incoming or outgoing ships in any form. It led him down another avenue.

“If the spaceport hasn’t been constructed yet,” he said, “where do you keep your hyperwave transmitters?”

He asked the question casually, knowing full well that Rec would undoubtedly tell him the information was classified; but he was totally unprepared for the answer he received.

“I do not know what a hyperwave transmitter is,” the robot replied.

“A device designed for communication over long distances in space,” Derec said. “Perhaps you call it something else.”

“I have witnessed nothing designed to communicate beyond our atmosphere,” Rec answered.

“You don’t send and receive information from off-planet?”

“I know of no such instance,” Rec replied. “We are self-contained here.”

The tram jerked to a stop, jerking Derec’s thoughts along with it. Somehow, it had never occurred to him that they really were trapped on this planet. The Key and its proper use suddenly became of paramount importance to him.

“We have arrived, Friend Derec,” Rec said.

“So we have,” Derec replied, getting slowly out of the car. What was going on here? Who created this place? And why? It was a pristine civilization removed from contact with anything beyond itself, yet its Spacer roots were obvious. Could David, the dead man, have been the creator?

He walked past the lines of robots carrying their damaged equipment, past the huge extruder and its never-ending ribbon of city, and stood at the entrance to the underground. He turned to see Rec standing beside him.

“Find Avernus,” he said. “Tell him I want to speak with him. I don’t want to break protocol by going somewhere off-limits to humans.”

“Yes, Friend Derec,” the robot answered and moved aside to commune with its net of radio communications.

Derec sat on the ground beside the doorway and watched the robots walking back and forth past him. He was beginning to feel like a useless appendage with nothing to do. He felt guilty even ordering the robots around; they had more important things to do.

He glanced at his watch. It was two in the afternoon, and soon they’d be approaching another night of rain, another useless night of speculation as the water level rose higher and higher. “We will have failed,” Euler had said, and in that sentence the robot had spoken volumes. Like Derec, the supervisor knew that Robot City was a test, a test designed for all of then. If Euler and the others were unable to solve the problem of the rain, they would have failed in their attempt to build a workable world. He also knew that the salvation of this world would take a creative form of thought that most people felt robots incapable of. Perhaps that’s where Derec fit in. Synnoetics, they had called it, the whole greater than the sum of the parts. For that to take place, Derec would have to begin by convincing the robots they had to confide in him despite their security measures.

“I’m extremely busy, Friend Derec,” the voice said loudly. “What do you want of me?”

Derec looked up to see Avernus’s massive form bending to fit in the door space.

“We need to speak of saving this place,” Derec said. “We need to approach one another as equals, and not adversaries.”

“You may have done murder, Derec,” Avernus said. “I am not the equal of that.”

“Neither is Euler,” Derec replied, “but his inattention caused a robot to die today.”

“You were also present.”

Derec looked at the ground. “Y-yes,” he said. “I had no right to bring that up.”

“Tell me what you want of me.”

“Answers,” Derec said. “Understanding. I want to help with the city . . . the rains. I want someone to know and appreciate that.”

The robot looked at him for a long moment, then motioned him inside. They walked down the stairs together and into the holding area, Rec following behind at a respectable distance. Avernus then took him aside, away from the activity, and made a seat for him by piling up a number of broken machines of various kinds.

Derec climbed atop the junk pile and sat, Avernus standing nearby. “We are in an emergency situation, and my programming limits my communication with you.”

“I understand that,” Derec replied. “I also know that many situations require judgment calls that you must sift through your logic circuits. I ask only that you think synnoetically.”

“If you ask that of me,” the robot said, “I must tell you something. The concept of death holds more weight with me than with the others. My logic circuits are different because of my work.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The robot’s stock-in-trade is efficiency,” Avernus answered, “and in jobs requiring labor, cost efficiency. But in the mines cost efficiency isn’t necessarily cost efficient.”

“Now I’m really confused.”

“The most cost-effective way to approach mine work may be the most dangerous way to approach it, but the most dangerous way to approach it may result in the loss of a great many workers because of the nature of the mines. So, the most effective way to work the mines may not be the most cost-efficient in the long run. Consequently, I am programmed to have a respect for life—even robotic life—that far and away exceeds what one could consider normal. The lives of my workers are of prime importance to me beyond any concept of efficiency.”

“What has that got to do with me?” Derec asked.

“If you have killed, Derec, you will be anathema to me. The fact that you are accused and could be capable of such an action is almost more than I can bear. I voted against your freedom when we met on this issue.”

“I swear to you that I am innocent,” Derec said.

“Humans lie,” the robot answered. “Now, do you still wish me to be the one to ‘appreciate’ your position?”

“Yes,” Derec answered firmly. “I ask only that I be given the opportunity to show you that I have the best interests of Robot City at heart. I am innocent, and the truth will free me.”

“Well said. What do you want to know.”

“You are the first supervisor,” Derec said. “What are your first recollections?”

“I was awakened by a utility robot we call 1-1,” Avernus said, his red photocells fixed on Derec. “1-1 had already awakened fifty other utility machines. I awakened with a full knowledge of who and what I was: a semi-autonomous robot whose function was to supervise the mines for city building, and to supervise the building of other supervisors to fulfill various tasks.”

“Were you programmed to serve humans?”

“No,” Avernus said quickly. “We were programmed with human information, both within us and within the core unit, which was also operational when I was awakened. Our decision to service was one we arrived at independently.”

“Could that be the reason that the robots here have been less than enthusiastic about Katherine and me?” Derec asked. “Not knowing human reality, you accepted an ideal that was impossible for us to live up to.”

“That is, perhaps, true,” Avernus agreed.

“How long ago did your awakening take place?”

“A year ago, give or take.”

“And did you see any human beings, or have knowledge of any, at that time?”

“No. Our first action was the construction of the Compass Tower. After that, we began our philosophical deliberations as to our purpose in the universe.”

“How about 1-1? Did he have any contact with humans?”

“It never occurred to us to ask,” Avernus said.

“Where is 1-1 now?” Derec asked, feeling himself working toward something.

“In the tunnels,” Avernus said, gesturing toward the elevators. “1-1 works the mines.”

Derec jumped off the makeshift seat. “Take me there,” he said.

“Security . . . ” the robot began.

“I’m a human being,” Derec said. “This world was designed for me and my kind. I’m sorry, Avernus, but if you exist to serve, it’s time you started to act like it. If you respect your own philosophies, you must accept the fact that your security measures were not designed to keep you secure from human beings. If they were, there is something desperately wrong with your basic philosophy.”

“It is dangerous in the mines,” Avernus replied.

“You can protect me.”

The robot stood looking between Derec and the elevator doors. “I must deny you the central core,” he said at length. “I must deny you knowledge of our emergency measures. But you are a human being, and this is your world to share with us. I will take you to 1-1 and protect you. If, at some point, protecting you means sending you back to the surface, I will do that.”

“Fair enough,” Derec said, looking at his watch. “We must go.”

They moved toward the elevators, Rec joining them within the large car. In deference to the supervisor, the other robots let them have the car to themselves. Avernus pushed a stud in the wall and the door closed. The car started downward.

It went down a long way.

“The trick to movement in the mines is deliberation,” Avernus said, as the car shuddered to a stop.

“Deliberation,” Derec repeated.

The door slid open to delirious activity. Thousands of utility robots moved through a huge cavern that stretched as far as Derec could see in either direction. A continuous line of train cars rolled past on movable tracks, delivering raw ore to the giant smelters that refined it to more workable stages where it was heated and alloyed with other materials. The ceiling was thirty-five meters high and cut from the raw earth. Clean rooms filled the space at regular intervals.

“Iron!” Avernus said, stretching his arms wide. “The foundation upon which the ferrous metals are based, from which the modern world is made possible. We mine it in huge quantities, using it in its raw state to make our equipment, and alloyed with special plastics to form our city. There!”

He pointed to a machine through which layers of iron were belt-feeding, together with imprinted patterns of micro-circuits. The congealed mass issued from the top of the machine and proceeded through the ceiling in a continuous ribbon, the building material that Derec had seen extruded on the surface.

“That is the stuff of Robot City,” Avernus said. “Iron and plastic alloy, cut with large amounts of carbon, and using carbon monoxide as a reducing agent. The ‘skin’ is then imprinted with millions of micro-circuits per square meter. In centimeter, independent sections, the ‘skin’ is alive with robotic intelligence, geared to human needs and protection. The whole is pre-programmed to build and behave in a prescribed fashion, and to react to human needs as they arise.”

“That’s why the walls give when I push on them,” Derec said, moving gingerly out of the elevator and staying close to Avernus.

“Exactly. Now remember, deliberation. Stay close.”

Avernus moved out into the middle of the furious activity, machines and robots and train cars rushing quickly all around them. As Avernus stepped into the path of onrushing vehicles, Derec froze, wanting to pull back. But the expected accidents never took place, the robots and their machines gauging all the actions around them and reacting perfectly to them.

That’s when the concept of deliberation became clear to Derec. Movement needed to be deliberate, with constant forward momentum. All judgment was based on the idea that movement would be steady and could be avoided once gauged. It was the erratic movement that was dangerous—the abrupt stop, the jump back; down here, such movements would be fatal.

Once he understood the concept, it became easier to walk into the path of on-rushing vehicles. And as they moved through the center of the great hall, Derec began to feel more comfortable.

“Let me ask you a question,” he said to the big robot. “Did you invent the ‘skin’ of Robot City?”

“No,” Avernus replied. “Its program was already within the central core.”

“So its activities are all pre-programmed?”

“Correct. All we did was use it once we decided to be of service to humanity.”

They reached an edge of the hall, dozens of smaller tunnels branching off from it.

“We ride now,” Avernus said, climbing into a cart that was far too small for his immense bulk. Derec and Rec climbed in with him, and Avernus started off right away, taking them down a barely lit tunnel.

“This one looks deserted,” Derec said, and they hurried along at a fast clip.

“It was, until two days ago,” Avernus said. “It is now, perhaps, going to save us.”

“How?”

“You will see.”

They rode for several more minutes through the dark, going deeper into the earth. Then Derec heard activity ahead.

“We are approaching,” Avernus said.

“Approaching what?” Derec asked.

Avernus turned a corner and they were suddenly confronted by a widening of the tunnel, several hundred robots working furiously within an ever-growing space, scooping out dirt into any available container or skid, anything that would move earth. They then would take the earth and move quickly with it down adjoining tunnels, refilling that which had been excavated sometime previously. Like an ant farm, they moved in graceful cooperation and determination, and standing atop a cart, looming above them, was Rydberg, silently pointing as he transmitted his orders by radio to the toiling robots.