Avernus turned and looked at Derec. “Somewhere in there,” he said, “you will find 1-1.”

 

 

CHAPTER 7

ONE-ONE

 

Katherine’s first thought had been that it was a monument, but then she realized there were no monuments on Robot City. It was set on a narrow pedestal about one hundred feet in the air. Located in the middle of a block, the city had simply built itself around the object in a semicircle, leaving it set apart from all other structures by a gap of fifty feet. She had spent several hours walking the changing topography of Robot City without success, but she stopped the moment she came upon this place. If she wanted to compare the workings of the living city to a human body, this room atop the pedestal was like a wound, sealing itself off with scar tissue to protect it from the vital workings of the rest of the body.

It was no more than a room. Katherine stood at ground level staring up at the thing. A box, perhaps five meters square, totally enclosed. The robots took the workings of their city for granted and simply accepted this anomaly. To the creative eye, it stuck out like a solar eclipse on a bright afternoon.

Katherine continued to stare up at it because she didn’t want to lose it. Even now, the city continued to move, to grow before her eyes, and as the buildings turned in their slow waltz of life, she turned with them, always keeping the room within her vision. Eve, meanwhile, was trying to round up a supervisor who could effect a means of getting inside the structure and checking it out.

During the course of this excursion, Katherine had begun to develop a grudging respect for the workings of the city. Obviously, things were not going well right now, but in the long run such a system could be quite beneficial to the humans and robots who inhabited it. The safety factor alone made the system worthwhile. Derec’s harrowing ride down through the aqueduct resulted in nothing more than fatigue and a few bruises, all because the system itself was trying to protect him. To Katherine’s mind, such a journey on Aurora would have caused Derec’s death. She smiled at the thought of a Derec-proof city.

She’d also had time, while waiting for Eve to reach a supervisor, to notice the changes taking place around her. She felt as if she were visiting a resort at the tail end of the off season, all the seasonal workers arriving and getting the place shipshape for the influx of visitors. Clocks were being installed in various parts of the city, and street signs were beginning to go up. The largest change taking place, however, was the increased production and distribution of chairs. Robots had no need for sitting or reclining, and chairs were at a premium; but as they tried to make their city as welcome as possible for humans, they worked diligently to do things just right, despite the fact that the city’s emergency measures were forcing many of them into extra duty. She wondered if she’d be this gracious if it were her city. The thought humbled her a bit.

Despite the differences, despite the bind the robots had put them in, they really were trying to make this world as perfect as they could for the travelers, travelers whom they suspected of murder. She had never before considered just how symbiotic the binding of humans to robots really was and, at least for the robots, how essential. She hoped that they would, eventually, have their civilization, complete with humans to order them around stupidly. She found herself smiling again. Her mother had a phrase that could apply to the robots’ longing for human companionship—a glutton for punishment.

She heard a noise behind her and turned, expecting to see a supervisor arriving. Instead she saw two utility robots moving toward her, carrying between them what looked for all the world like a park bench. Without a word, they moved right up to her and placed the bench just behind. She sat, and they hurried off.

She sat for barely a decad before Arion came clanking around a corner, along with a utility robot with a bulky laser torch strapped on his back. It took her back for a second, a seeming replay of the scene Eve had described to her when David had first become trapped in the sealed room.

“Good afternoon, Friend Katherine,” Arion said as he moved up to her. “I see you are taking advantage of one of our chairs to rest your body. Very good.”

“What’s that on your wrist,” Katherine asked, “a watch?”

The supervisor held up his arm, displaying the timepiece. “A show of solidarity,” he said.

“You’re in charge of human-creative functions on Robot City, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Human-creative is a redundant term,” Arion replied. “Creativity is the human stock-in-trade. I hope you’ve found satisfactory the entertainments I’ve provided for you.”

“We’ll talk about that later,” she answered.

“Of course.”

“I thank you for coming so promptly,” Katherine said.

“This is a priority matter,” the robot said, gazing up at the sealed room. “You believe this to be the location of the body?”

“I’m certain of it.”

“Very good. Let’s take a closer look.”

Katherine stood and walked to the base of the tower with Arion. The pedestal was approximately the size of a large tree trunk, just large enough that she could almost reach around it if she tired. Arion reached out and touched the smooth, blue skin, and magically a spiral staircase with railing jutted from the surface and wound around the exterior of the tower.

“After you,” the robot said politely.

Katherine started up, the design of the staircase keeping her from any sense of vertigo. As she climbed, she could feel that the air was cooling down, the presage to another night of destructive rain. Behind her, Arion, the utility robot, and the witness followed dutifully, and she realized that she was in the lead because it was the natural position for her in regard to this inquiry. This was her notion, her case—the robots at this point were merely her willing cohorts. Finally, she could give orders again and have them carried out!

She reached the top quickly. The flat disc of the pedestal top curled up and inward all around to make it impossible for her to fall off. That left the room itself. Uncolored, it was a natural gray-red and perfectly square. She walked completely around it looking for entry, but her first assessment had been correct: it was locked up tight.

“What do you propose at this point?” Arion asked her, as he followed her around the perimeter of the room.

“We’re going to have to get inside,” she said, “and see what there is to see. I suppose there’s no other way to get in except by using the torch?”

“Normally, this situation would never arise,” Arion told her. “There are no other buildings in the city that behave like this. There is no reason to seal up a room.”

“You mean you don’t know why or how the rooms have sealed themselves up?”

“The city program was given to us intact through the central core, and only the central core contains the program information. Other than through observation, we don’t know exactly how the city operates.”

Katherine was taken aback. “So, the city is actually a highly advanced autonomous robot in its own right, operating outside of your control.”

“Your statement is basically inaccurate, but containing the germ of truth,” Arion said. “To begin with, it is not highly advanced, at least not in the same sense that a . . . supervisor robot, for example, is highly advanced.”

“Do I detect a shade of rivalry here?” she asked.

“Certainly not,” Arion said. “We are not capable of such feelings as competitiveness. I was simply stating a known fact. Furthermore, the city’s autonomy is tied directly to the central core. Although it does, in fact, operate outside of supervisor control.”

“Can you affect the city program, then?”

“Not directly,” Arion said, running his pincers up and down the contours of the building as if checking for openings. “The central core controls the city program, and the supervisors do not make policy by direct programming.”

“I think I’m beginning to truly understand,” Katherine said, motioning for the robot with the torch to come closer. “The data contained in the central core is the well from which your entire city springs. All of your activities here are merely an extension of the programming contained therein, for good or ill.”

“We are robots, Friend Katherine,” Arion said. “It could not be otherwise. Robots are not forces of change, but merely extensions of extant thought. That is why we so desperately need the companionship of humans.”

“Cut here,” Katherine said pointing to the wall, and the utility robot waited until she had backed away to a safer distance before charging the power packs and moving close with the nozzle-like hose that was the business end of the laser torch. She turned to Arion. “Does cutting through the wall like this break contact with the main program?”

“No,” the robot answered as the torch came on with a whine, its beam invisible as a small section of the wall glowed bright red, smoking slightly. “The synapses simply reroute themselves and make connection elsewhere.”

There was a sound of suction as the torch broke through to the other side of the wall, a sound that any Spacer knew well, the rushing of air into a vacuum. The room had sealed totally and airlessly. The torch moved more quickly now, cutting a circular hole just large enough for a human being to get through without working at it.

The edges tore jaggedly, the walls that seemed so fluid under program fighting tenaciously to hold together otherwise. Despite Arion’s claims, Katherine was still the city-robot.

The welder was halfway done, pulling down the jagged slab of city as he cut. Katherine had to fight down the urge to run up and peer through the opening already made, but her fear of the torch ultimately won out over her impatience.

“Are you capable of doing autopsies here?” she asked Arion as an afterthought.

“The medical programming is in existence, and at this very moment several medically trained robots are being turned out of our production facilities, along with diagnostic tables and a number of machines. Synthesized drugs and instruments are coming at a slower rate. So much of the city is geared toward building right now, and these considerations never became a problem for us until David’s death.”

“Done,” the utility robot said, the cut section falling to clang on the base disc.

“Witness!” Arion called, as Katherine hurried to the place and climbed through the hole.

The naked body lay, face down, in the middle of the floor. Katherine walked boldly toward it, then stopped, a hand going to her chest. She had been so intent upon fulfilling her mission that she had failed to consider that it was death—real death—she’d be dealing with. It horrified her. She began shaking, her heart rate increasing.

“Is something wrong?” Eve asked from the cut-out.

“N-no,” she replied, her eyes glued to the body, unable either to move forward or pull back.

“If there’s a problem,” she heard Arion say, “come out now. Don’t jeopardize yourself.”

Come on, old girl. Get yourself together. “I’m fine,” she said. You’ve got to do this. Don’t stop now.

She took a deep breath, then another, and continued her walk to the body. Bending, she touched it gingerly. The surface was cool, the muscles tight.

“Is everything all right?” Arion asked.

“Yes,” she said. Won’t they leave me alone?

There was no sign of decomposition, and she realized that it was because the room had been airless. At least that was something.

She examined the body from the back, her heart rate still up, her breath coming fast. Looking at the foot, she could see a small cut on the left instep and realized immediately what had caused it. Something stupid. Something she had done herself before. A misstep, perhaps a broken fall, and the bare feet came together, a too-long toenail on the other foot scraping the instep. It was nothing. There was some dried blood on the side and bottom of the foot, but that was it. She was going to have to roll the body over.

She moved to the side of the body, reaching out to try and turn it over, finding her hands shaking wildly. Will this be me soon—fifty kilos of dead meat? She tried to push the body onto its back, but there was no strength in her arms.

“Could you help me with this?” she called over her shoulder. Arion came through the cut-out to bend down beside her. She looked up at the nearly human-looking machine. “I want to roll it over.”

“Surely,” Arion said, reaching out with his pincers to push gently against the side of the body. It rolled over easily, dead eyes staring straight at Katherine.

She heard herself screaming from far away as the shock of recognition hit her. It was Derec! Derec!

The room began spinning as she felt it in her stomach and in her head. Then she felt the floor reach up and pull her down; everything else was lost in the numbing bliss of unconsciousness.

 

“Don’t try to leave without me to lead you!” Avernus called to Derec as the boy waded into the churning sea of robots. “You could become hopelessly lost in these tunnels.”

“Don’t worry!” Derec called back, thinking more about the danger of the main chamber than the labyrinthine caves.

He moved slowly through the throng, walking toward Rydberg. It was damp, musty in there, plus a bit claustrophobic, but Derec was so fascinated by the spectacle of the eleventh-hour plans that he never allowed his mind to dwell on the all-too-human problems of the location.

Rydberg saw him approaching, and turned to stare as Derec closed on him. He climbed atop the cart and joined the supervisor.

“What are you doing here?” Rydberg asked, the words crackling through the speaker atop his dome. “It is too dangerous underground for you.”

“I talked Avernus into bringing me down and protecting me,” Derec replied. “What’s going on here?”

“We’re trying to tunnel up to the reservoir,” Rydberg said. “We are trying to work out a way to drain off some of the reservoir into the deserted tunnels below to keep it from flooding.”

Derec felt an electric charge run through him. “That’s wonderful!” he yelled. “You’ve made a third-level connection—a creative leap!”

“It was only logical. Since the water was going to come into the mines anyway, it only made sense that we should try to direct it to parts of the mines that would cause the least amount of damage. Unfortunately, our estimates show such a move could only hold off the inevitable for a day or two longer. It may all be in vain.”

“Why are you digging by hand?” Derec asked. “Where are the machines?”

“They are tied up in the mining process,” Rydberg said. “The current rate of city-building must take precedence over all other activities.” The robot turned his dome to watch the excavations.

Derec put his hands on the robot’s arm. “But the city-building is what’s killing you!”

“It must be done.”

“Why?”

“I cannot answer that.”

Derec looked all around him, at the frantic rush of momentum, at a civilization trying to survive. No, they weren’t human, but it didn’t mean their lives weren’t worthwhile. What was the gauge? There was intelligence, and a concerted effort toward perfection of spirit. There was more worth, more human value here in the mines than in anything he had seen in his brief glimpse of humanity. And then it struck him, the reason for all of this and the reason for the state of emergency and security.

“It’s defensive, isn’t it?” he said. “The city-building is a way for the city to defend itself against alien invasion?”

Rydberg just stared at him.

He grabbed the robot’s arm again, tighter. “That is it, isn’t it?”

“I cannot answer that question.”

“Then tell me I am wrong!”

“I cannot answer that question.”

“I knew it,” he said, convinced now. “And if it coincided with David’s appearance in the city, then it is somehow tied to him. For once, Katherine’s in the right place.

“This whole thing is a central core program,” Derec said, “and obviously the program is in error. There must be some way you can circumvent it.”

“Robots do not make programs, Derec,” Rydberg said.

“Then let me into it!”

“I cannot,” Rydberg replied, then added softly. “I’m sorry.”

Derec just stared at him, wanting to argue him into compliance, and fearing that the argument would simply present the robot with a contradiction so vast it would freeze his mental facilities and lock him up beyond hope. He didn’t know where to go from here. He’d had a tantalizing glimpse of the problem, yet, like a holographic image, it still eluded his grasp.

“You still have not told me why you came down into the mines,” Rydberg said. “Humans have such a poor sense of personal danger that I fail to see how your species has survived to this point. If you cannot present me a compelling reason for your presence, I fear I must send you away now.”

“If humans have a poor sense of personal danger,” Derec said, angry at Robot City’s inability even to try to save itself, “then it has been justly inherited in your programming. I’ve come down to visit 1-1 on a matter not of your concern. Would you please point him out to me?”

“Our first citizen?” Rydberg said, and Derec could tell the robot wanted to say more. Instead, he turned up his volume. “WILL ROBOT 1-1 PLEASE COME FORWARD.”

Within a minute, a small, rather innocuous utility robot with large, powerful looking pincer grips moved up to the cart. “I am here, Supervisor Rydberg,” the robot said.

“Friend Derec wishes to speak with you on a personal matter,” the supervisor said. “Do as he asks, but do not take an excessive amount of time.”

Derec jumped off the cart. “I hear you were the first robot awakened on this planet,” he said.

“That is correct,” the robot said.

“Come with me,” Derec said. “Let’s get out of the confusion.”

They moved through the rapidly widening chamber to the place where Avernus had first dropped him. “I am searching through the origins of Robot City,” Derec said, “and that search has led me to you. You were the first.”

“Yes. Logical. I was the first.”

“I want you to tell me exactly what your first visual input was and what followed subsequently.”

“My first visual input was of a human arm connecting my power supply,” the robot said. “Then the human turned and walked away from me.”

“Did you see the human face?”

“No.”

“What happened then?”

“The human walked a distance from me, then disappeared behind some machinery meant to help in our early mining. I was to wait for one hour, then turn on the other inoperative robots in the area. Then we were to begin work, which we did.”

“Of what did that original work consist?”

“There were fifty utility, plus Supervisor Avernus. Twenty-five of us built the Compass Tower from materials left for us, while Supervisor Avernus and the other twenty-five began the design and construction of the underground facilities and commenced the mining operations.”

Derec was puzzled. “Avernus didn’t supervise the construction of the Compass Tower?”

“No. It was meant as a separate entity from the rest of the city. It was fully planned, fully materialized. There was no need for Supervisor Avernus to take an interest in it.”

Derec heard an engine noise and saw lights, far in the tunnel distance, gradually closing on his position. “What do you mean when you say it was ‘meant as a separate entity?’ ” Derec asked.

“The Compass Tower is unique in several respects, Friend Derec,” 1-1 said. “It is not part of the overall city plan in any respect; it has the off limits homing platform atop it; and it contains a fully furnished, human administration office.”

“What!” Derec said loudly, as he watched the mine tram rushing closer toward him in the tunnel. “An office for whom?”

“I do not know. Perhaps the person who awakened me.”

“You’ve never spoken of this with the supervisors?”

“No one has ever inquired before now.”

“Why did you call it the administration office?”

“The construction plans are locked within my data banks,” 1-1 answered. “That is what it was called on the plans.”

The tram car screeched to a halt right beside Darren, the huge bulk of Avernus stuffed in its front seat. “We must go,” the supervisor said.

“Just a minute,” Derec said. “Why did you call it a homing platform?”

“We must go now,” Avernus said.

“It was designed as a landing point of some kind,” 1-1 said. “Nothing is ever allowed on its surface, or within twenty meters of its airspace.”

Avernus took hold of Derec’s arm and gently, but firmly, turned him face to face. “We must go,” Avernus said. “Something has happened to Friend Katherine.”

Derec reeled as if he’d been hit. “What? What happened? Is she all right?”

“She is unconscious,” Avernus said. “Beyond that, we do not know.”

 

 

CHAPTER 8

IDENTITY CRISIS

 

Derec hurried into the apartment to buzzing activity. Arion was there, and Euler, plus Eve and several utility robots. There was also a rather frail-looking machine with multiple appendages that Derec surmised to be a med-bot.

The living room seemed different, much squatter, but he really wasn’t paying attention.

“Friend Derec . . . Euler began, hurrying to intercept Derec as he crossed the living room floor.

“Where is she?” he asked, still moving.

“The bedroom,” Euler said. “She has regained consciousness and is resting. I do not think you should try and see her just yet.”

“Nonsense,” Derec said, hurrying past him. “I’ve got to see her.”

“But you don’t underst . . . ”

“Later,” Derec said, moving down the hallway. There were now two bedroom doors. He opened one to an empty room, then turned to the other, pushing the stud. It slid open. Katherine was sitting up in bed, her face drained of all color, her eyes red.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

Her eyes focused on him, then grew wide in horror.

“Noooo!” she screamed, hands going to her straining face.

Derec ran to her and took her by the shoulders. She kept screaming, loudly, hysterically, her body vibrating madly on the bed.

“You’re dead!” she yelled. “Dead! Dead!”

“No!” he yelled. “I’m here. It’s all right. It’s all . . . ”

Euler was pulling him away from her, robots filling the room. “What are you doing?” he yelled. “Let go, I . . . ”

“You must leave now,” Euler said, lifting him bodily in the air and carrying him, Katherine’s screams still filling the apartment.

“Katherine!” he called to her as Euler carried him out the door. “Katherine!”

Euler carried him all the way to the living room, then simply held him there, the med-bot slipping into her bedroom and sliding the door closed, muffling the screams somewhat.

“Put me down!” Derec yelled. “Would you put me down?”

“You must not go in there,” Euler said. “It is dangerous for Katherine if you go in there.”

He felt the anger draining out of him. “What’s going on?” he asked sheepishly. “What’s happened to her?”

“She’s suffered some sort of emotional trauma,” the supervisor said. “May I put you down?”

“Believe me,” Derec said, “at this point, I don’t want to go back in.”

Euler set him gently on the floor. Derec rubbed his arms to get the circulation back into them.

“I am sorry if I caused you any discomfort,” Euler said. “Truly.”

“It’s all right,” Derec replied. “Tell me what happened.”

Thunder crashed loudly outside, both Derec and Euler turning to look at the building thunderheads through the open patio door. They were in for another bad one. From the bedroom, the sounds of screaming had died to occasional whimpers.

“Katherine found the body of David,” Euler said, “and had a utility robot cut into the sealed room that contained it.” The robot swiveled its head to take in the rest of the room. “Perhaps it is better to have Arion witness the story. He was present for it.” He motioned for the human-like machine to join the discussion.

“Friend Derec,” Arion said as he moved up close. “I had no idea that seeing the body would have this kind of effect on Friend Katherine. I would never have allowed her to come close to it had I known.”

“I understand,” Derec said. “Just tell me what happened.”

“She was examining the deceased,” Arion said, “when she called me in to help her roll the body over. I, of course, complied. She screamed when she saw the face, then lapsed into a state of unconsciousness.”

“She’s been disconsolate ever since,” Euler said. “Most peculiar. She persisted in the belief that the dead man was you.”

“Why would she do that?” he asked, moving to sit at the table. Arion’s CRT was busily finding the cube roots of ten-digit numbers.

“I don’t know,” Euler said. “Perhaps because the body looked like yours.”

Derec sat up straight, staring hard. “You mean . . . just like me?”

The robots looked at one another. “Perfectly,” Arion said.

“Doesn’t that strike you as odd?” Derec said, dumbfounded, still not believing the information.

“No,” Euler said.

“I don’t understand,” Derec said. “When you first saw me, didn’t you take note of the similarity of our appearances?”

“Yes,” Euler said, “but it didn’t mean anything to us.”

“Why not?”

Arion spoke up. “Why should it? We’ve only seen three human beings. Robots certainly can look exactly alike, why not humans? We knew you and Katherine were different, but that didn’t mean that you and David couldn’t be the same. Besides, we knew that David was dead; so, consequently, we knew that you couldn’t be David. Simple.”

The med-bot came gliding down the hall, moving quickly up to Derec. “She’s calm now,” the robot said. “She’s lightly sedated with her own pituitary endorphins, and wants to see you.”

Derec stood, uneasy after the last time. “It’ll be all right?” he asked the med-bot.

“I believe she understands the situation now,” the med-bot responded in a gentle, fatherly voice.

“I’d like to see her alone,” he told the others.

Euler nodded. “We’ll wait out here.”

He moved down the hall, unsure of his feelings. It had hurt him to see her in such pain, hurt him emotionally. She could get on his nerves so badly, yet seemed such an integral part of him.

He knocked lightly on her door, then opened it. She sat up in bed, her face still sad. She held her arms out to him. “Oh, Derec . . . ”

He hurried to the bed, sitting next to her, holding her. She began to sob gently into his shoulder. “I was so afraid,” she said. “I thought . . . thought  . . . ”

“I know,” he said, stroking her hair. “Arion told me. I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t know what I’d do without you,” she said, then pulled away from him. “Oh, Derec. I know we’ve walls between us  . . .  but please believe me, I have no idea what this place is and what’s going on here.”

“I believe you,” he said, reaching up to wipe tears from her eyes. He smiled. “Don’t worry about that now. How are you doing?”

“Better,” she said. “The med-bot stuck me a couple of times, but it really helped. All I’ve got is a headache.”

Thunder rolled again outside. “Good,” he said. “It looks like we’re locked in for the night anyway. What do you say we send the robots away, get some dinner sent up, and compare notes. I’ve got a lot to tell you.”

“Me, too,” she said. “It sounds good.”

 

They had a vegetable soup for dinner that was the best thing Derec had eaten for quite some time. The rains pounded frenetically outside, but Derec didn’t worry so much since he figured the precautions taken by Euler and Rydberg would, at least, get them through the night. And the best he could do now was to live day to day. Even Arion’s entertainment was beginning to diversify. The CRT was exhibiting an animated game of tennis played by computer-generated stick figures on a slippery surface. It was actually quite amusing.

After the servo had cleared the dishes away and left, they made themselves comfortable on the couch and recounted the details of the day. Derec, for reasons he wasn’t quite sure of, left out the fact that there were no hyperwave transmission stations on the planet. Counting on Katherine’s experiences to help him, he listened alertly to her account of the discovery of the body.

“The fact that he looked just like you,” she asked when she’d finished, “what does it mean?”

“To begin with,” he said, “it finally knocks the idea of our trip to Robot City being an accident right out the air lock. We were brought here; why, I don’t know. The dead man is either the one who brought us or was brought himself. We’ll have to continue to ferret that out. What interests me more is the fact that the city-robot works independently. I believe that the city is somehow replicating itself as a defensive measure. If it operates independently, the supervisors may not be able to stop it.”

“What does that mean?”

He looked at her. “It means that I’ve got to.”

“That brings us back to our same old argument,” she said, darkening a bit. “The city or the murder investigation.”

“Not necessarily,” he said, standing. “This should make you happy.” He walked back to the patio door and idly watched the downpour, feeling now that it could, eventually, be beaten. He turned back to her. “I believe that David and the city alert and replication are inexorably linked.”

She jumped up, excited, and ran to him, throwing her arms around him. “You’re going to help me solve the murder, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he laughed, returning the embrace. “Tomorrow we go back to the body and pick up where you left off.” He moved away from her and intertwined his fingers. “It’s all like this, all connected. If we can put a few of the pieces together, I’ll bet the rest fall into place. Whatever, or whoever, killed David, is the reason for the alert.”

“First thing in the morning, we’ll have Eve take us back there.”

“Not first thing,” he said. “First thing, I’ve set up a brief meeting with the supervisors at the Compass Tower.”

“Why?”

“Two reasons. First, I want to ask them some questions about their underground operations; and second, I want to be able to poke around the building for a bit.”

“Looking for the office?”

He nodded. “1-1 said it was fully furnished. I bet we’ll find answers there.”

Her face got suddenly serious. “I hope you find the kind of answers you’re looking for,” she said.

 

 

CHAPTER 9

THE OFFICE

 

A table had been set up in the meeting room. It was long and narrow and included seats for nine. Derec sat at the head of the table, with Katherine at his right. The supervisors took up the rest of the seats, still holding hands, with the two at the end of the line holding hands over the tabletop.

“Why do human beings lie, Friend Derec?” Supervisor Dante asked, his elongated, magnifying eyes staring all the way down the table. “The most difficulty we’ve had with you is your penchant for lies and exaggeration. It is what keeps us from trusting you completely.”

Derec licked dry lips and watched them all expectantly watching him. He knew he’d have to get beyond this hurdle if he were to work with them in solving the city’s problems.

“Robots receive their input in two ways,” he said, hoping his explanation would be adequate. He’d gotten up early to think it out and prepare it. “Through direct programming, and through input garnered through the sensors that is then tested in analog against existing programming. Your sensors record events accurately, with mathematic precision, and classify them through the scientific validity of several thousand years of empirical thought. You are then able, through your positronics, to reason deductively by weighing, again through analog, incoming data against existing data. You can make true second-level connections.”

“We understand the workings of the positronic brain,” Friend Derec,” Waldeyer said. “It is the human brain that confounds us.”

“Bear with me,” Derec said. “I want to pose you a question. Suppose, just suppose, that your basic programming was in error—not just in small ways, but in its most basic assumptions. Suppose every bit of sensory input you received was in total opposition to your basic programming.”

“We would spend a great deal of time reasoning erroneously,” Wohler said. “But human brains are not at the mercy of programming. You have the freedom to sift through all empirical data and arrive at the truth at all times.”

“That’s where you are wrong,” Derec replied. “The human mind is not a computer with truth as its base. It is merely a collection of ganglia moved by electrical impulses. Truth is not its basis, but rather ego gratification. Truth to the human mind is a shifting thing, a sail billowing on the wind of fear and hope and desire. It has no reality, but rather creates it from moment to moment with that same creative intelligence that you value so highly in us.”

“But the base program is available,” Euler said. “It is there for the human to use.”

“And it is also there for him to reject,” Derec countered. “You must observe your programming. My mind has no such chains on it. The human mind is painfully mortal. That particular truth in itself is more than most humans can tolerate. We are frail creatures, seeking permanence in an impermanent world. We lie to those around us. We lie to ourselves. We lie in the face of all logic and all reason. We lie because, quite often, the truth would destroy us. We lie without even knowing it.”

Avernus spoke. “How do robots that exist with humans on other worlds deal with the deceit?”

“They follow instruction according to the Laws of Robotics,” Derec said, quite simply. “They are not autonomous as you are, so they have no choice. The Laws were invented with the salvation of the species in mind. Robots protect humans from their own lies, and honor them because of what’s noble in the species. You saw Katherine’s grief when she thought I was dead.” He reached out and took her hand. “We are fragile creatures capable of great nobility and great ignominy. We make no excuses for ourselves. We are the creators of great good and great evil, and in the creation of robots, we were at the height of our goodness. Our species deserves praise and condemnation, and, in the final analysis, it is beyond rational, positronic explanation.”

“You are saying we must take you as you are,” Euler said.

“No laws will define us,” Derec answered, “no theorem hold us in check. We will amaze and confound you, but I can guarantee you we will never be boring.”

“You would tame us with your words,” Wohler, the philosopher, said.

“Yes,” Derec said, smiling. “I would do exactly that. And I will tell you now that you will let me because the wonders of the universe are contained in my confounding mind, and you can only reach them through me . . . and you desperately want to reach them!”

“But what of the Laws of Humanics?” Rydberg asked.

“Very simple,” Katherine added, winking at Derec. “There is only one Law of Humanics: expect the unexpected.”

“An oxymoron,” Arion said.

“As close as you’ll ever get,” Derec said. “That’s the point. You needn’t give up your search for the Laws of Humanics, but you must make them fit us, not try to make us fit them. We can’t be anything but what we are, but if you accept us—good and bad—we’ll see to it that you reach your full potential.”

“Intriguing words,” Dante said, “but just words. Where is an example of what you can do with your creative intelligence?”

“If you’ll let me,” Derec said, “perhaps I can help you save your city.”

“All your suggestions so far have tried to force us away from our programming,” Euler said.

Derec stood; he thought better on his feet. “That’s because until yesterday I never fully realized what was going on and how little control you had over the situation. I’m working on that, too, but I have some other ideas.”

Arion and Waldeyer sat side by side, pincers locked together. Derec walked between the two of them, resting his elbows on their shoulders.

“I’ve watched you digging in the tunnels, trying to siphon off reservoir water to lower the level and avoid a flooding of your underground operations. Has it been successful?”

“To a degree,” Rydberg said. “We will break through after our meeting this morning. Unfortunately, we calculate that it will only postpone the inevitable for one more day. We can save our operations through tonight’s expected rain, but that’s it.”

“All right,” Derec said. “Let’s think about something. I was in the main chamber of one of the quadrants yesterday. Was that chamber dug?”

“No,” Avernus said. “Each quadrant Extruder Station is located in a chamber similar to that one. Our first action in beginning underground operations was to take sonogram readings to determine natural caverns under the surface. The mine tunnels were dug, but the main chambers are natural.”

“Has it occurred to you,” Derec said, “to take sonograms now, in the present situation?”

“I do not understand,” Avernus said.

Derec pounded the tabletop with an index finger. “Find the closest underground cavern to your reservoir, dig a tunnel connecting it to the reservoir, and . . . ”

“And drain the reservoir water in there!” Avernus said, standing abruptly and breaking contact with the central core.

“Right!” Derec pointed to him. “Meanwhile, Katherine and I will be working on solving the murder. I’m absolutely convinced that the solution to the murder will also provide the reasons for the state of emergency.” He turned to Supervisor Dante. “Is that creative enough for you?”

“Happily so,” Dante said.

“It seems,” Euler said, “that if we are to have the opportunity of putting Friend Derec’s suggestions into practice, we should adjourn this meeting and set to work.”

The robots stood, Derec wondering if they realized that he had gently manipulated them, for the first time, into including him as a real partner in their planning.

He watched them filing out of the large room, for the first time beginning to feel he was getting a handle on the deviousness of the mind that had brought all of them together. Synnoetics. The worst hills still remained to be scaled toward reaching a truly equal social union of human and robot. Now, if they could only survive the rains, they could perhaps be the trailblazers in the opening of a new era.

As soon as the robots left the room, Katherine hurried to the door and peered out. “They’re gone,” she said, turning back to Derec.

“Good.”

He joined her at the door, Eve and Rec, trailing dutifully. Derec turned to them. “Has either of you ever witnessed within this building before?”

“Yes,” Rec said. “Most of this building is given to experimentation on the positronic brain and ways to improve its function. I have witnessed experiments in almost every laboratory in the structure.”

“Have you ever seen an office, something that a human might use as his personal quarters?”

“No,” the robot answered.

“Are there parts of the building you have never seen?”

“Yes.”

“All right, listen carefully,” Derec said, shrugging in Katherine’s direction. “I want you to take me to all the parts of the building you have never seen.”

“I cannot do that.”

“Why not?” Katherine asked.

“There is a sector in the Compass Tower that is off-limits to robots. No one goes there.”

“Did someone tell you that,” Derec asked, “a supervisor?”

“It is part of our programming,” Rec said.

Eve agreed. “Not even supervisors are allowed.”

Derec shook his head. Just like robots—all duty, no inquisitiveness. “I want you to take us there,” he said.

“I already told you it was off-limits,” Rec said.

Derec smiled. “I don’t mean for you to take me inside the off-limits part,” he said. “Just take me as close as you can get and point it out to me.”

That seemed amenable enough, so the two witnesses led the way, while Derec and Katherine followed closely. They walked the maze-like halls, twisting and turning, but always going higher. An elevator took them six floors up, but that wasn’t even the end of it. It was interesting to Derec. The meeting room had been designed to look like it was at the apex of the pyramid, but it was actually only about halfway up the structure, perhaps the illusion being more spiritual in intent than anything else.

The upper levels had begun to get rather small, doorways appearing more sparsely between the gently glowing wall panels, when the robots abruptly stopped. Rec pointed to a door at the end of a short hallway.

“We can go no farther,” the robot said. “No one knows where that doorway leads.”

“If you want to wait here,” Derec said, “we’ll be back soon.”

“But it is off-limits,” Eve said.

“To robots, not humans,” Katherine replied.

“But we cannot separate,” Rec persisted.

“It is only one door,” Derec said. “We’ll have to come back through it.”

“Our orders . . . ”

“Do what you want,” Derec said. “We’re going on.”

With that, Derec and Katherine continued down the hallway, turning once to see the attentive robots before opening the door and stepping inside.

What they found was a spiral staircase leading up to a door set ten feet above their heads.

“You want to go first?” Derec asked.

“Go ahead,” Katherine returned. “I left my courage back in that sealed room.”

Derec moved slowly up the stairs, a feeling of expectation rising slowly in his stomach. He connected the word, butterflies, to the feeling, but had no idea of what it meant. He reached the door, and pushed the stud, expecting it to be locked up tight.

It wasn’t.

The door slid easily and opened, he thought at first, to the outside. It was as if he were walking onto an open platform set with furniture and a desk, a beautiful, panoramic view of Robot City all around. But there was no feel of the air, no wind, no heat from the mid-morning sun.

“How did we get outside?” Katherine asked, following him in.

“We’re not,” Derec said, pointing behind her.

The outside view was marred by the still-open doorway, a black maw in the center of downtown. When he pushed the stud to close the door, the full view was restored.

“Viewscreens?” she asked.

“I think so,” he replied. “There must be a series of small cameras set around the peak of the pyramid to give the view, which is then put on the screens. Look,” he pointed, “even above us.”

She looked up to see pinkish-blue sky above. “That would be the view from the platform we materialized on,” she said.

“Fascinating,” he said softly, knowing they’d finally stumble upon something. “If you were sitting in here, you could watch someone materialize on the platform and they’d never know it.”

“Do you think someone watched us materialize?” she asked, eyes wide.

He shrugged. “I’d have to think it probable at this point,” he said. “We were brought here. We were meant to be here. It seems logical that our progress would be measured.”

“Have you ever considered the fact, Derec, that you were brought here and I’m excess baggage?” she asked.

He walked slowly through the room. It was designed for someone to live in. There were easy chairs and a couch that converted to abed. Not city-robot material, but real furniture. There was even a plant of some kind under its own growth light. That told Derec that whoever kept this office returned at least often enough to keep the plant watered.

“I’ve considered a great many things,” Derec told her, “including the scenario you’ve just outlined. But there are several things to consider. I believe our meeting on Aranimas’s ship was accidental. The situation was too dangerous and uncontrollable to be otherwise, our injuries too real. But consider the facts that you admit to having known me previously by another name and that that name just happens to belong to someone who looked enough like me to be my twin. It’s a large universe, Katherine. That’s an awful lot of coincidence. Let me ask you something. Have you ever considered the possibility that the David you knew could be the one lying dead in that sealed room, and that I’m somebody else?”

Her face became confused, lips sputtering. “I—I . . . ”

Then she started to say something and stopped. Derec would have given a fortune, ten fortunes, to know the thoughts that had been running through her mind that second before she shut herself up.

“What are you hiding from me?” he asked loudly, in frustration.

Her face was a mixture of pain and longing. She responded by solidifying, as she had done so many times since they’d met on Aranimas’s ship. “There’s nothing up here for me,” she said. “I’m going back down with the robots. Join us quickly. We have other work to do.”

Then she turned and departed without a backward glance, leaving Derec angry again. He could feel so close to her, and so far away. There was never any mid-point with Katherine; it was all one way or the other.

He decided to inspect the office methodically, rather than simply tearing furiously into things, which had been his strongest desire. Starting on the outer edges of the room, he traversed it slowly, saving the plum of the desk for last.

He found a small, air-tight shelf full of tapes, all marked “Philosophy,” then broken down according to planet. Nearly all of the fifty-five Spacer worlds were represented. They weren’t of interest to him at the moment, but a perusal in future wasn’t out of the question.

He continued his walk of the outer perimeter, his hand finding the ladder where his eyes couldn’t. It was a metal ladder, set against the screen and lost in shadows. Even knowing it was there, he still found it difficult to see. It went up from the floor and stopped at the flat ceiling.

He climbed it until he reached the ceiling screen. There was no reason at all for this ladder to exist unless it went somewhere. Gingerly, he reached out and touched the ceiling screen above the ladder. It gave easily on well-oiled hinges, flapping open to reveal real sky.

He moved up through the trap door to find himself standing on the platform where he had materialized. Amazing. He began to put together a theory. Whoever started this civilization, whoever’s arm it was that turned on 1-1, with proper use of a Key to Perihelion, could materialize on Robot City at will, move down into the off-limits office and observe his city’s progress without ever being seen. When he was through, he could leave by the same means.

So, the city had an overseer, a guardian, who had apparently brought Derec here to sweeten the mix with the human ingredient. Why Derec? That question, he couldn’t answer.

He wondered if the overseer had been present during his and Katherine’s stay, if he had been watching them, perhaps all the way up to the moment they opened the office door. It would be simple enough for him to get away. All he’d need was the Key and a few seconds’ time.

Derec climbed back into the office and closed the trap door behind him, once again sealing in the illusion completely.

He continued his tour of the office by emptying the small trash can that sat by the desk. The trash can held several empty containers that he recognized as standard Spacer survival rations of good-tasting roughage plus supplementary vitamin and protein pills. He torn open one of the roughage containers to find, in the corner, a small glob of the stuff, which hadn’t hardened completely. This food had been eaten within the last twenty-four hours. The rest of the trash was comprised of wadded-up pieces of paper containing mathematical equations relating to the geometric progression of the city-building, which seemed to relate to the time it would take to fill the entire planet with city. Others seemed to be directed to the amounts of rainfall and the reservoir size, quick calculations regarding how long it would take an overflow to occur. Derec had the feeling that if he simply sat in the office and waited an indefinite amount of time, he could probably catch the overseer coming back. Unfortunately, he didn’t have an indefinite amount of time.

He put the trash back in the can and directed his attention to the desk itself. The top of the iron-alloy desk contained a blotter with paper and two zero-g ink pens. The only personal item on the desk was a holo-cube containing a scene of a very nice looking woman holding a baby. The sight of the cube sent a cold chill down his back.

He turned his attention to the drawers. On his left were several small drawers, which were, for the most part, empty. Only the top drawer contained anything at all, and that was simply more paper and some technical data on the workings of the logic circuits of the positronic brain. On his right, however, he struck gold. As he opened the big well drawer there, a slight motor hum brought a computer terminal up to desktop level, the screen already active, the cursor flashing: READY.

Interestingly enough, the terminal had all the hook-ups and leads for hyperwave transmission and reception. Unfortunately, the power pack and directional hyperwave antenna were missing from the back, taken, no doubt, by the overseer.

He stared at the terminal in disbelief. No blocks, no passwords, no protections on the system at all. He couldn’t believe that an entire civilization would open itself up to him just because he’d found an office. Suppose he’d meant to cause it harm?

Cautiously, he slipped into the scheme of things, working his way down to the level of files, then asking to go to the central core. Once reaching that, he asked to open the file marked: CITY DEFENSES.

Within seconds, the READY signal was flashing again. He was in! Rapidly he typed:

LIST CITY DEFENSES.

The computer answered:

CITY DEFENSES:

ADVANCE REPLICATION

SEAL CONTAMINATION

HALT CENTRAL CORE INPUT

MOBILATE CENTRAL CORE

LOCALIZE EMERGENCY TERMINALS

ISOLATE SUPERVISORY PERSONNEL

He sat, shaking, at the typer. This was it. He decided to try his hand at shutting it down. He typed:

CANCEL REPLICATION.

The computer never hesitated.

CITY DEFENSES CANNOT BE CANCELED WITHOUT JUSTIFICATION AND INPUT REGARDING ALIEN THREAT OR CONTAMINATION.

Derec typed:

OVERRIDE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS AND CANCEL REPLICATION.

The computer answered:

OVERRIDE IMPOSSIBLE UNDER ALL CIRCUMSTANCES. CITY DEFENSES CANNOT BE CANCELED WITHOUT JUSTIFICATION AND INPUT REGARDING ALIEN THREAT OR CONTAMINATION.

It was a lock-out. The computer refused even to talk to him about it unless he could determine the reason for the defensive measures and provide proper rationalization for termination. It seemed etched in granite. He typed:

LIST REASONS FOR CITY DEFENSE ACTIVATION.

The computer answered with a graph of the city, its shape ever changing, turning slowly. A tiny light was flashing in the section marked Quadrant #4. At the bottom of the screen the computer wrote:

ALIEN CONTAMINATION IN QUADRANT #4.

Derec asked:

CITE NATURE OF CONTAMINATION.

The computer answered:

ALIEN CONTAMINATION IN QUADRANT #4.

He sat back and looked at the machine. It was very possible that the flashing light could represent the body of his look-alike. The machine wasn’t going to let him off the hook on the murder. He was beginning to see why it was so easy for him to get into the central core from this terminal, and he received his final confirmation quickly, when he typed:

LIST PROCEDURE FOR DEACTIVATION OF CITY DEFENSES.

The machine replied:

DEACTIVATION PROCEDURE:

ISOLATE CONTAMINATION OR PRESENCE

DEFINE NATURE OF THREAT

NEUTRALIZE THREAT

PROVIDE PROOF OF NEUTRALIZATION THRU PROCEDURE C-15

Derec typed:

LIST PROCEDURE C-15

And was answered:

PROCEDURE C-15:

ISOLATE MOBILATED CENTRAL CORE

ENTER CENTRAL CORE

PROVIDE SUPERVISOR PASSWORD

ENTER PROOF OF NEUTRALIZATION

Derec just stared at the screen, frustrated and amazed at what he was looking at. Nothing of consequence could be done from this terminal, or from any city terminal, for that matter. Input had to come directly at the central core, and unless he misunderstood the word “mobilate,” the central core was not stationary. It was mobile, moving. And to round out the entire business philosophically, a supervisor robot was necessary to enter the defensive program.

It was actually the perfect defense. The act of shutting down the defenses had to be deliberate and calculated and agreed to by both human and robot supervision. Again, the system was set up synnoetically, and Derec, despite his disappointment, had to admire it. Ultimately, he really didn’t know the form of the contamination. The central core was behaving properly by not granting his requests for deactivation until all the facts were in. The problem, of course, was that city could kill itself before the facts came to light.

He was back where he started, with the murder of his twin. There was still much he could learn from the office and the open terminal, but he simply didn’t have the time right now. He reluctantly decided that he’d have to close out for now and return when there was more time.

He had reached out to return the terminal to its berth in the drawer when he thought of something. If the overseer were, indeed, keeping track of them, perhaps there was a file extant with that information. Not knowing his own name, he decided to go with another. Bringing the filename menu back on the screen, he typed in the words:

BURGESS, KATHERINE

The machine answered:

BURGESS, KATHERINE, see DAVID.

His mouth was dry, his heart pounding as he typed in the name of the dead man.

The machine answered quickly, in a notation file obviously set in the overseer’s own hand:

ASSIMILATION TEST ON DAVID #2 PROCEEDED ON LINE AND WITHOUT MISHAP UNTIL THE TRIGGERING OF THE CITY DEFENSIVE SYSTEM AND THE DEATH OF SUBJECT THROUGH UNKNOWN MEANS.

WITHOUT HUMAN INTERVENTION, ROBOTS ARE UNABLE TO PREVENT VITAL DAMAGE THROUGH OVER-SUCCESS OF CITY PLANNING AND OPERATION WOULD BE TOTAL FAILURE.

DAVID #1 ARRIVED TO INTERVENE IN CITY CATASTROPHE AND PROCEED WITH ORIGINAL OPERATIONAL TESTING OF SYNNOETIC THEORIES. RESULTS YET TO BE SEEN.

UNCONTROLLED FACTOR ARRIVED WITH DAVID #1 IN THE FORM OF A WOMAN. SHE IS NOW CALLING HERSELF KATHERINE BURGESS FOR REASONS UNKNOWN. HER ULTIMATE INFLUENCE OVER OPERATION AND THE EXACT NATURE OF HER AIMS HAVE YET TO BE DETERMINED.

SHE WILL BE WATCHED CAREFULLY.

That was it, the end of the file. Derec stared at the flashing cursor for a moment, his mind whirling with a dozen different thoughts. But one thought overrode everything else, one sentence burned its way into his brain and hurt him more deeply than he thought possible—SHE IS NOW CALLING HERSELF KATHERINE BURGESS FOR REASONS UNKNOWN.

 

 

CHAPTER 10

THE SEALED ROOM

 

Derec had hoped that when he came out of the overseer’s office Katherine would have already been gone, but she wasn’t. She stood waiting for him with the two witness robots, a smile on her face as if seeing him somehow made her happy. What an actress. He had to wonder now, once again, what it was she wanted out of all this. He’d once again have to pull in and play it by ear where she was concerned. Perhaps she’d say something to give herself away. Meanwhile, she’d get no satisfaction.

“How did it go?” she asked cheerily, but then her face changed, tightened up when she noticed his mood swing. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing . . . Katherine,” he said, her phony name sticking in his throat. “I found an exit to the top platform, and a computer, but nothing in it helped any, except to tell me what we already knew—that we’d have to solve the murder.”

“Well then, I think we should stop wasting time and get on to that,” she said suspiciously, not quite believing his change of attitude. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Never better,” he lied, angry at himself for wanting to be close to her despite what he’d learned. If he had any sense, he’d turn and run as fast and as far as he could from her. Instead, he said, “Let’s go.”

They moved out of the Compass Tower quickly and quietly, Katherine watching Derec out of the corner of her eye most of the time. He tried to be more nonchalant to keep from arousing her suspicions, but it was difficult for him. He apparently wasn’t as schooled in subterfuge as she. As they made their way through the building, robots paid them no attention, already becoming familiar and comfortable with human presence.

When they stepped outside, they found a tram with a utility driver atop it, waving to them. “Friend Derec!” the robot called, and they moved over to the tram.

“What is it?” Derec asked the squat driver.

“Supervisor Euler asked me to be your driver today, honoring an earlier request you made in regard to transportation.”

“Well,” Derec said, looking at Katherine, “it appears that we’re finally being trusted a little bit. Our own tram, eh?”

“It’s radio-controlled,” the utility robot said.

Derec narrowed his brows. “What’s its range?”

“The range of the control is roughly equivalent to the limits of the already extruded city.”

“Oh,” Derec said quietly. “You mean that the tram won’t operate except in city limits?”

“A fair appraisal,” the robot said.

Katherine laughed loudly. “Now that’s what I call trust,” she said, and shook her head.

He glared at her and climbed into the tram. “Rec,” he told his witness, “why don’t you ride up here with me?”

The robot dutifully climbed in beside Derec, leaving Katherine to sit with her witness in the seat behind.

“Where to, sir?” the tram driver asked.

Derec turned to Katherine. “You know where we’re going?”

“Quadrant #4,” Katherine replied. “Eve will show you from there.”

They drove on quickly. Derec, for the first time, took a moment to think about the other things that had happened in the office, things that were pushed out of his mind by his anger toward Katherine. His name, for instance. He was called David #1 on the computer record. Then why did he come after David #2? Was it a simple experiment shorthand, or did the name have meaning? It sounded so . . . engineered. The thoughts generated by that line of reasoning were more than he could bear. He pushed them away and thought that if his name was, indeed, David, then Katherine had told him the truth; at least about that.

There were other concepts implied in those few paragraphs. Whoever the overseer was, he obviously knew David and Katherine, and knew something of their past histories. So whoever had brought him here was someone he’d known before his memory loss, and he couldn’t help but consider the possibility that the overseer had had something to do with his memory loss. But the chances were just as good, if not better, that Katherine herself had been connected with his amnesia for her own purposes, whatever they were.

Layers and layers. So much had been implied by the notes on the computer. The city was, indeed, considered an experiment in synnoetics, of that much he could now be certain. But then, when it came time to deal with a reason for the defense system going operational, the overseer seemed just as much in the dark as he, himself, was.

Derec also wasn’t sure if he had been deliberately brought here to help the city, or if he had shown up accidentally, the overseer deciding to the use him, as opposed to either stepping in himself or letting the operation shut itself down. The more answers he found, it seemed, the more in the dark he was.

They arrived at quadrant #4 without difficulty. Eve took her triangulation readings to help them find their way back to the house on the pedestal. Derec watched the city developing all around him as they drove, the sight of humans driving the inhabitants into a frenzy of human preparation—the robot equivalent of nesting.

“This is the place,” Eve said as the tram stopped in the middle of an ordinary-looking street. The witness looked all around. “It doesn’t appear to be here.”

“It’s moved some, that’s all,” Katherine said. “We’ll go on foot from this point.”

They climbed out of the tram and started walking, the tram following close behind them in case they had need of it.

“You sure this is the right direction?” Derec asked, after they had gone a block. “How far could it have moved?”

“Everything looks familiar here,” she replied.

“The whole city looks the same,” Derec said. “I don’t think you . . . ”

“There!” She pointed.

Derec needed no pointing finger to tell him they’d arrived. A tall tower stood in the middle of a street, nothing else anywhere near it. Atop the tower was a single room, sealed up except for a circular hole cut out of it.

“Let’s leave a witness here with the tram in the case of problems,” Derec said. “We’ll take Rec up with us.”

“Fine,” Katherine replied, walking to the pole.

He followed her, watching the spiral staircase reform when she touched the pole with her hand.

“You’re not going to believe this,” she told him, starting confidently up the stairs. “If this man’s not your twin, he went to an awful lot of trouble to look just like you.”

Derec smiled weakly in return, wondering, given the fact that he was #4, just who was whose twin.

She reached the top, waiting off to the side for him to join her. “I want you to go in first,” she said. “After what happened last time, I’m afraid of my reactions. I may have to work up to it.”

“All right,” he said, moving around to the cut-out. As he got close to the place, he felt his own insides jumping a bit at the thought of seeing himself dead. He got right up to the cut-out, then quickly ducked his head in before he changed his mind.

It was empty.

He climbed through; there was no sign of a body or anything that resembled a body or anything else for that matter.

“Katherine,” he called. “Come around here.”

She moved to the cut-out, shyly poking her head inside, her eyes widening when she saw the empty room. “Where is he?” she asked.

“That was my question,” Derec replied. “It appears that our corpse has gotten up and walked away.

“Or was taken away,” she returned. “Remember what happened when he died? A utility robot had to fight waste control robots for possession of the corpse. Maybe they got him this time.”

“Didn’t anyone stay behind when you passed out before to keep that from happening?”

“I don’t know,” Katherine said, and went back out the cut-out to call down to her witness. “Eve! Did anyone stay behind after I fell unconscious yesterday?”

“No,” the robot called back up. “You were our first priority. We all did our parts to get you home safely and to get you medical attention.”

Katherine came back into the room. “No one stayed behind,” she said.

“I heard,” Derec replied. “Pretty convenient.”

“Convenient for whom?” she said, eyes flashing. “What are you driving at?”

“Nothing,” he replied. “I’m just . . . disappointed.”

“You’re disappointed,” she said, sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall. “This was my ticket out of here.”

“Just like you,” he said, “thinking about yourself while the whole world crumbles around you.”

Her eyes were dark fire. “And just who should I think about?” she asked. “The buckets of bolts who run this place, who don’t have enough sense to keep from destroying themselves?”

“Like every other human culture that ever lived,” he replied. “Yes. Think about them . . . ” He pointed at her, then snapped his fingers. “Maybe we don’t need a body for this. Maybe we can simply recreate the circumstances.”

“You mean try and set it all up just like it happened to the dead man?”

“Sure. The computer in the office told me that there is danger from alien contamination. Let’s see if we can bring it out a little.”

Katherine stood again, her face uncertain. “Need I remind you that the last man who had to face up to this predicament is dead?”

He walked past her, out onto the now inward-curled disc that held the room, watching the robots on the streets hurrying to their deadlines through time and space. She joined him within a minute.

“What choice do we have?” he asked.

“None,” she answered. “Both of our problems are tied up in the murder. We’ll do whatever we have to, to solve it.”

“Let’s go over everything the witness told you,” Derec said. “Look for a loophole.”

“It’s sparse,” Katherine replied. “He was already sealed up, and angry about it, when they arrived to cut him out. He had no idea why he’d been sealed in. When they cut him out, his behavior seemed a bit erratic, he had a headache and a cut on his foot.”

“Didn’t you have a headache last night?” he asked.

She cocked her head. “I just assumed it had something to do with my passing out,” she said.

“Just a thought,” Derec replied. “I’m trying everything on for size right now.”

“Anyway,” she continued, “he went off, against supervisory request, and turned up dead a short time later. When the utility robot tried to turn the body over to take a pulse, another room sealed itself off, and the robot just barely survived the sealing because of his quick reflexes. That’s it. The whole story.”

He leaned against the curled lip of the disc on stiff arms, trying to reason the way a computer would. “You know,” he said after a minute, “the phrase ‘alien contamination’ could cover a lot of territory. On surface, human beings and their composition are obvious. But, under the surface, on the body’s interior, we’re all quite a strange collection of ‘alien’ germs and viruses.”

“The bleeding foot,” Katherine said. “That thought occurred to me, but I was never able to connect it with the actual murder, so I assumed it to be inconsequential.”

“Me too,” Derec replied. “But I’m beginning to think that, perhaps, this puzzle works on more than the obvious level.” He knelt on the ground, studying the cut-out piece of city-robot that lay on the disc surface.

“What are you doing?” Katherine asked.

“This piece has been taken off stream,” he said. “It’s not connected to the city anymore, or to its programming source.”

“So?”

“So it’s dead, it’s the only thing around here that isn’t going to protect me from its jagged edges.”

“You’re going to hurt yourself!” she said loudly.

“There’s only one way to test our theory,” he said, rolling up the sleeve of his one-piece.

Rec poked his head out of the room. “Please, Friend Derec, don’t do anything that could cause harm to your body.”

Derec ignored both Katherine and Rec, drawing his forearm across a sharp edge of the dead city part, making a five-centimeter gash along his inner arm.

He stood, grimacing with the pain, then watched the dark blood well up from the place.

“Nothing yet,” Katherine said.

“Let’s try an experiment,” Derec said, turning his arm over so the blood could drip on the disc. “The second sealed room didn’t develop until the utility robot rolled the body over. Maybe gravity . . . ”

“Derec!” Katherine yelled.

No sooner had the blood hit the floor than the curled lip of the disc began growing, pushing in and up, trying to close them in.

“Let’s get out of here!” Derec called, moving toward the stairs, the disc curling up over his head like a cresting wave as he moved.

With Katherine right behind, he reached the stairs leading down, only to have them disappear before he could plant a foot on them. Overhead, the roof of the already existing room was stretching itself out, joining the edge of the disc in a perfect, seamless weld. Where the stairs had been was now a solid wall.

“Keep moving around the disc!” Derec called, breaking into a trot. “Maybe we can beat the enclosure.”

He had turned his arm back over now, trying to catch dripping blood on his free hand to keep it off the ground. But it didn’t help. The city-robot had isolated him as the alien carrier and was reacting to him now, and not his blood.

They went around the perimeter of the room, the roof hurrying to meet the curling disc. It had closed them in completely.

Then, as they watched, the already existing room seemed to melt and combine with the floor, the outer walls straightening and angling to ninety degrees, then pushing in all around.

Within a minute, they found themselves standing in a sealed room, exactly like the one David had been cut out of.

 

 

CHAPTER 11

DEADLY AIR

 

Derec and Katherine sat on the floor of the room, while Rec, who’d been trapped with them, leaned close to Derec, witnessing the boy wrapping his cut arm in a piece of cloth ripped from his one-piece.

“Do you think Eve’s called for help?” he asked Rec as he worked.

“No,” the witness said. “Eve will not perceive a danger to you. Are you in danger?”

“What about the utility robot?” Katherine asked, ignoring the robot’s question. “Will the utility robot summon help?”

“That is within the scope of the utility robot’s field prerogatives,” Rec replied, straightening as Derec finished. He then wheeled slowly around the room, taking everything in for later recounting. Rec took his job very seriously.

Derec had left two loose ends on the tight bandage, and held his arm out to Katherine to tie them. “Can I trust you to tie a good knot?” he asked.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

She frowned deeply as she tied. “What happened in that office?” she asked. “You’ve treated me like your worst enemy ever since you came out of there.” She pulled the knot tight, a smile touching her lips when he groaned loudly.

“Look,” he said. “You’ve got secrets, I’ve got secrets. Why don’t we just leave it at that?”

“Fine with me,” she said. “All I want is for us to get the rest of this together; then I’ll make an emergency hyperwave call and be out of your hair in less than a day. You can rot here for all I care.”

“We’ll both rot here,” he said, wanting to hurt her.

She drew back. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Damn you!” she yelled. “Tell me what you mean? Why did you say I’d rot here?”

“No reason.”

“It’s the hyperwave, isn’t it?” she asked. “They won’t give us access to the hyperwave.”

“It’s not that, it’s . . . ”

“It’s what? What?”

He leaned his head back and shut his eyes. “There is no hyperwave transmitter,” he said softly.

She pulled herself a distance from him and curled into a small ball. “You’re lying,” she said, but he could tell that she really believed him.

“The robots have no contact with the outside,” he said. “They have no spaceport for landing ships. They have no hyperwave, or even the equipment for making one. They’ve been evasive about the point because of the security alert.”

“Why have you waited until now to tell me this?” she asked.

“I told you—you’ve got secrets, I’ve got secrets.”

“I get it now,” she said, her eyes distant. “We’re both free agents, looking out for ourselves.”

“Something like that,” he said, but why did it hurt so bad to say it?

She stood and moved all the way across the room to sit on the wall opposite. “Well, I suppose, at this point, we must work together to solve the murder,” she said.

“I suppose,” he replied, sorry to have started the whole line of conversation.

Her face was hard. “After that, I will thank you to stay away from me. We’ll each take care of our own problems.”

“Fair enough.”

“So tell me, if it’s not a great secret, why the room sealed around us because you cut yourself?”

“I’ve got a theory, nothing more,” he said. “The city-robot is programmed to protect human and robot inhabitants and to defend itself against anything alien . . . foreign to it. Apparently blood inside the body is fine, but once it gets outside the body, its natural microbes register as alien and set off the works. The city program has to be fairly complicated. The omission is obvious, and could either have been a mistake or a deliberate glitch to test the ability of the robots and humans living here to control their own system.”

“What do we do now?”

“Well, once we get out, if I can get access to the central core with one of the supervisors, I can reprogram the core to accept human blood as a natural microbe on the body of the city. In this sterile atmosphere, it’s perfectly understandable how such a glitch could happen. It could even be a means for the city to protect itself from infection.”

“But how did David die?” Katherine asked.

“Could it have been blood loss?” Derec asked.

She shook her head. “No chance,” she replied. “There was very little blood. The cut was smaller than yours.”

“What’s left?” he said. “I have to think that his death is a completely separate incident, unconnected to the blood loss.”

She looked skeptical. “Back-to-back coincidences, Derec? Deadly coincidence at that.”

He stood. “You’re right, of course. It must all tie together . . . but how?” He paced the room. “What other leads do we have? The only other connection is the fact that both of you came away from a sealed room with a headache.”

“We have another problem,” she replied, watching him moving back and forth in the confined space. “When I came in this room the first time to find the body, it had been sealed up . . . air tight.”

He stopped walking and stared at her. “The city would never keep us locked up without air. It would be a violation of the First Law, should we die.”

“It happened to David.”

“But David was already dead when it happened to him,” Derec said. “In fact, this just strengthens my theory. When the utility robot rolled him over to check for signs of life, gravity pulled a little more blood out of an already open wound. The room didn’t relate to David as a human, since he was dead. All it fixed its sights on was the ‘infection.’ We’re still alive and the city-robot knows it. Whatever else this crazy place may be, it’s run robotically. Ipso facto, we’re safe on that account.”

“Just the same,” she said, “I’ll be happier to be out of here.”

“Me too.”

“You realize, Derec,” she said, her voice low and heavy with meaning, “that we are recreating history right now. We are going through exactly the same progression that David went through before he died.”

“I know,” Derec replied. “But what else can we do?”

They stared at one another across the space of the room, the witness recording it all, and they may as well have been a million kilometers apart. They sat that way for a long time, far longer than it should have taken for a supervisor to show up.

Derec spent the time alternately trying to think his way out of their dilemma, figure out what was going on with Katherine, and looking at his watch. And the late morning turned to early afternoon, and Derec, who wasn’t worried about the air supply in the room, suddenly became very thirsty and began to dwell on the possibility that the robots had either forgotten them or couldn’t find them.

“Friend Derec!” came a loud voice from outside the room. “Friend Katherine! It is I, Wohler, the philosopher!”

Derec glanced at his watch. It was nearly five p.m., which meant rain was undoubtedly on the way. “We’re in here!” Derec called. “Can you get us free?”

Wohler called back loudly, “An Auroran philosopher once said, ‘Freedom is a condition of mind, and the best way to secure it is to breed it.’ Ho, Derec. We were held up digging in the mines, but I now have a laser torch to cut you out. I am here on the west wall of this room. I will ask kindly that you move to the east wall to avoid the torch as well as possible!”

Derec was sitting against the west wall. He stood immediately and moved over near Katherine, who looked at him with unreadable eyes.

“Go ahead!” Derec yelled through cupped hands, Rec moving up closer to the west wall to witness the torching from the inside.

Even through the thickness of the wall, they could hear the hiss of the torch on the other side. Derec slid down the wall to sit next to Katherine. Their arms accidentally touched. Both of them pulled away.

“Something’s wrong,” she said. “Something feels wrong.”

“I know,” he replied, “but what?”

The inside of the wall began to glow red hot in a small, circular section. Then the red turned to white, and a rivet-sized section burned through to reveal the outside through a quivering haze of heat.

Derec watched the hole expand, his mind racing as the torch began to etch the beginnings of a human-sized circle in the side of the room. He thought about headaches, and about erratic behavior and about blood and its composition—and then he thought about the nature of the city-robot.

“Stop!” he yelled, jumping to his feet and running as close to the metal cutting as he dared. “Stop the torch!”

“Derec?” Katherine asked, beginning to stand.

Derec covered his mouth with his hand. “Get on the floor!” he yelled. “All the way down and cover your mouth!”

“What’s wrong?” came Wohler’s voice from outside, the sound of the laser winding down to nothing. “What is it?”

“We can’t use the torch on the wall!” Derec called.

“I don’t understand,” Wohler said, bending down so that his eye covered the hole in the wall and he could look inside.

Derec backed away, getting down close to Katherine on the floor. “Is there some way to flush oxygen in here?” he asked loudly.

“We’ve come in a newly manufactured emergency truck,” Wohler replied. “I believe the emergency equipment includes oxygen cylinders.”

“Get one quickly!”

“The rains are approaching,” Wohler said. “We must hurry and get you out.”

“Listen,” Derec said. “The city material is a kind of metallic skin, an iron/plastic alloy. In the manufacturing process, a great deal of carbon monoxide is used as the reducing agent. I think your torch is liberating the monoxide as a gas into the closed room. By cutting us out, you’re gassing us!”

“The utility robot has gone for the oxygen!” Wohler said. “You have my apologies.”

“You didn’t know,” Derec said. He looked at Katherine. “Are you all right?”

“So far,” she replied. “Are you sure of what you’re saying? David didn’t die until later, outside of the room.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he replied. “Carbon monoxide in large doses will simply work its way gradually through the bloodstream, bonding firmly with hemoglobin and starving the tissues of oxygen. His headache and erratic behavior were the first signs of an oxygen narcosis reaction and, unless he was treated to massive doses of oxygen, it would spread throughout his entire body, eventually killing him.”

“And my headache?”

“You walked into the room with his body just after they had cut through the walls,” he said. “You undoubtedly saved your own life by passing out when you did, for they took you out of the room immediately, thus limiting your exposure to the gas. Carbon monoxide is colorless, odorless, and tasteless. You would never have known what hit you.”

“The oxygen is here, Derec!” Wohler called, fitting a hissing nozzle up against the hole.

Derec crawled across the floor toward the hole. “Come on,” he said, waving her on.

They reached the hole and sat breathing the life-giving oxygen. Derec felt the beginnings of a small headache, but he was sure it would get no worse.

They emptied the canister of oxygen and began another. When that was finished, Wohler returned to the opening. “Rain is imminent,” the robot said. “How do we get you out? We have nothing small to cut through this, and our heavy equipment can’t be brought up this high, at least not with the rain coming. Do we leave you for the night?”

“There’s no time for that,” Derec said. “I must get underground and report this information to the central core.”

“The rain is also dangerous for me, Friend Derec,” Wohler said. “I must take shelter soon.”

“Okay,” Derec said. “Stay with me as long as you can. Just let me think for a minute.”

“Derec . . . ” Katherine began.

“Shhh,” Derec said. “Not now.”

“Think about your arm,” she said. “Think about where you cut it, and how.”

“My arm, I . . . ” He held his arm up, looking at the blood-soaked bandage and feeling the throb. “I cut it on the dead piece of city-robot,” he said.

“Because . . . ”

“Because it was the only piece of the city that would allow me to cut myself on it!” He put his hands to his head. “That’s it! Wohler! Stand back. We’re coming through.”

With that, he raised his right hand, pushing his pointer finger through the small, burned-out hole. As soon as his finger grazed the jagged edge of the hole, it expanded to allow free passage. Next came his balled-up fist; the hole expanded wide to keep from cutting him. Then his arm went through, followed by head and shoulders. Seconds later, he was standing on the disc, its edges curling up to protect him. Katherine followed him through, and both of them stared into the teeth of a bitter cold wind and a savage vision of blue-purple clouds crackling with lightning.

“We must go now!” Wohler said, his shiny gold body reflecting lightning flashes.

Suddenly, Katherine broke from the group, hurrying to the stairs.

“What are you doing?” Derec called to her, but she ignored him, charging as quickly as she could down the stairs.

“Perhaps she’s hurrying to safety,” Wohler said, as Rec made it through the hole in the wall.

“Perhaps,” Derec said, but as he ran the rest of the disc and began to take the stairs, Katherine had already run to the tram that was still dutifully waiting. She barked some orders to the utility driver, and the unit sped off into the darkening night.

“What is happening?” Wohler called as he followed Derec down the stairs.

“I’m afraid something crazy,” the boy answered, remembering a conversation they had had while waiting to be rescued.

They moved to the emergency van that Wohler had brought. “We must get you back to your apartment before the rain comes,” the robot said.

“No!” Derec said. “Get me underground. I’ll wait out the storm there. Then you’ve got to go after Katherine. I’m afraid of what she’s doing.”

A long streak of lightning struck the top of the pedestal right beside them, the metal clanging loudly and smoking.

“But where could she have gone, Friend Derec?” Wohler asked as they all climbed aboard the large, white van.

“The Compass Tower,” Derec said, voice heavy with dread. “I’m afraid she’s climbing the Compass Tower.”

 

 

CHAPTER 12

THE THIRD LAW

 

The Quadrant #4 Extruder Station was less than ten minutes from the sealed room, with Wohler moving the emergency van along at the top speed possible that still allowed a safety margin for his passengers.

Derec watched the city speed past, its full-blown dance of thoughtless progress still continuing despite the gathering darkness, despite the fact that its course was suicidal. He feared for the city; he feared for Katherine, or whatever her name was. She was going for the Key, he was certain of that, trying to take herself out of the situation in the only way she knew how. He didn’t expect that the Key would do her much good, but he could hardly blame her for trying. What frightened him was the danger she was exposing herself to by trying for the Key in the rain. He would have gone after her alone, but, having experienced the destructive power of Robot City’s weather, he knew he’d be no help at all in a storm. Only a robot would have a chance.

Wohler jerked them to a stop before the Extruder Station entrance, a series of low, wide buildings constructing themselves from ground level. There was no robotic activity here now, no unloading of trucks. All had taken shelter from the impending storm.

“You think she’s gone to the Compass Tower?” Wohler asked.

“I’m sure of it.”

“She may have time before the storm to get inside to safety.”

Derec looked at him, then reached out and put a hand on his shiny gold arm. “She’s not going inside,” he said. “She’ll be trying to climb the pyramid.”

“But why?”

“We hid something there, something she’s trying to retrieve.”

“I must go,” Wohler said without hesitation. “She’ll be killed.”

“What will the rain do to you?” Derec asked as he climbed out of the van.

“Rain in ordinary amounts won’t do anything,” the robot replied. “City rain could force its way through my plating in a thousand different places and make its way into my electrical system. The limits of the damage at that point are a matter of imaginative speculation.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Derec said. “If you don’t go . . . ”

“Katherine will die,” the robot finished. “You can tell me nothing. My duty is self-evident. Good-bye, Derec.”

Wohler looked back once to make sure the witnesses were off the van, then hurried off at a pace that didn’t include the safety margin he had preserved with Derec in the cab.

“Come with me,” Derec told the witnesses, and moved toward the now-closed entrance to the underground. Despite his fears for Katherine’s safety, he had things to do. With his explanation of the murder and its connection to the city defenses, backed up totally by Rec’s witness testimony, there was no doubt that he’d at least be able to get into the core and stop the replication. That wouldn’t stop tonight’s rain, however, or even future rains for a time; but it was a start.

He opened the outside door, then hurried inside, going down the stairs to the now-deserted holding area and its bank of elevators. This wasn’t the same Extruder Station he’d been in previously, but it was set up exactly the same.

He walked quickly to the same elevator he had taken with Avernus when he’d gone underground. He got inside with the witnesses and pushed the down arrow. The lift began its long journey to the caverns below.

The elevator opened into the bustling cavern where the work of building Robot City continued unabated. There wasn’t a supervisor in sight, however. There seemed to be activity at one of the darkened, unused mine tunnels at the west end of the cavern.

He began to move into the flow, then stopped, steeling himself. Deliberation, Avernus had said. As he stood on the edge of the activity, a long tram sped past him at a hundred kilometers an hour, passing within a few centimeters, his hair being pulled by its suction.

Deliberation. It was the only way.

“Stay with me,” he told the witnesses. Then he set his body in line with his goal and shut his eyes, taking a blind step right into the fray.

He walked quickly, without hesitation, trying to direct his mind away from the feel of unrushing robots and vehicles that barely brushed him as they hurried past. Occasionally, he would open his eyes a touch, just to make sure he was still heading in the right direction. Then he’d squeeze them closed again, and keep walking.

He kept this up for nearly ten minutes as he crossed the great chamber without mishap. As he reached the safety of the mine entrance, he released a huge sigh that made him feel as if he’d been holding his breath the whole time.

A utility robot was stationed near the mine entrance, using an overhead pulley system to remove the spent batteries from a fleet of mine trams and replacing them with charged batteries. The trams were parked three deep all around him.

“Robot!” Derec called across the cars to him. “Where can I find Supervisor Avernus?”

The utility robot pointed down the tunnel. “They are releasing some of the reservoir water into the abandoned tunnels. It may be dangerous for humans.”

“Thanks,” Derec said, then pointed to a tram. “Has this one been recharged?”

“Yes,” the robot answered.

“Thanks again,” Derec said, and climbed behind the steering mechanism. “Rec, Eve, get in.”

As the robots climbed into the back of the tram, the utility called to Derec.

“Did you not hear me? It may be dangerous for humans in there.”

“Thanks,” Derec said again, waving, then keyed on the electric hum and geared the car down the dark tunnel.

As he sped down the tunnels, marking distance by counting the small, red lights spaced along the length, he passed other trams full of robots going the other way. There were uniformly dirty from digging, many of them dangling shorted-out appendages. Even for robots, they appeared grim. One tram they passed carried a robot shorting from the head, sparks arcing from his photocells and speaker.

He drove for several kilometers, climbing gently upward with the tunnel. Finally, he approached a large egg of light that threw long shadows against the rough-hewn walls. When he reached the place, he found a large number of utility robots, plus six of the seven supervisors, gathered around a drop-off in the tunnel.

He jumped from the tram and pushed his way through the crowd to approach the drop-off. It was the same area in which the robots had been digging the day before, only approached from the other side. A subsidiary tunnel, going upward, had been dug by hand, and it met the existing tunnel, which had been trenched out to carry water. The trench was empty. Euler and Rydberg were leaning out over the trench, looking up the newly dug tunnel, while Avernus sorted out those robots damaged beyond usefulness here, and sent them back down the tunnel.

Derec moved up to Euler. “I’ve solved the murder,” he told the supervisor without preamble.

Both Rydberg and Euler turned to look at him. “What was the cause?” Rydberg asked.

“Carbon monoxide poisoning,” Derec said. “When they tried to torch David out of the sealed room, carbon monoxide was released by the heating process into the enclosed space.”

“It was our fault, then,” Euler said.

“It was an unfortunate accident,” Derec replied. “And I have witnesses.” Both Eve and Rec hurried to join him.

“Two minutes,” Dante called. The small robot was fiddling with a terminal hooked up in the back of a tram, his long digits moving with incredible speed over the keyboard.

“Two minutes until what?” Derec asked.

“Until the charge we placed by the reservoir wall brings the water down,” Euler replied.

“I also know why the city is on security alert,” Derec said. “It was because of David’s blood. When he cut himself, the blood that dropped on the city-robot was mistaken for an alien presence because of the blood organisms. My witnesses will also corroborate that fact.”

Euler spoke up. “Then we need to feed this information to the central core and stop the replication, if there’s time.”

“What do you mean, if there’s time?” Derec asked.

Avernus joined the group. “We found a cavern that would hold all the water in the reservoir, thanks to your sonogram. Unfortunately, it will take a great deal of digging to reach it.” Avernus pointed to the trench. “This diversion will do no more than put off the inevitable for one more day; then, instead of overflowing above, the water will overflow below, here in the tunnels.”

“Where is the central core?” Derec asked. “If we can get to it and stop the replication, then we can use the digging machines to turn the trick before the next day’s rain.”

Avernus turned to Dante, looking at him over the heads of all the other robots. “Where is the core now?” he called loudly.

The little robot’s digits flew over the keys while Euler spoke. “Even with the machines, we’d have to start digging almost immediately to reach the cavern in time.”

“The core is in Tunnel J-33 at the moment,” Dante called, “moving south by southwest at ten kilometers per hour.” He hesitated briefly, then added, “Twenty centads.”

Avernus turned abruptly from them all. “That is . . . too bad,” he said.

“What do you mean, too bad?” Derec asked.

All at once, there was a rumble that shook the tunnel, dust and loose pebbles falling atop them. Derec nearly lost his footing on the quaking ground. Within seconds, a low roar filled the mines, growing in intensity with each passing second.

“It is too bad,” Euler said loudly above the roar, “because the central core is in Tunnel J-33, on the wrong side of the trench, and the rains are beginning outside.”

With that, tons of water came rushing down the new tunnel, slamming in fury into the trench below, churning, frothy white, dangerous and untamed. Derec watched in horrified fascination as his only possible route to the central core disappeared under a raging river that hadn’t been there a second before.

 

Katherine’s mind was as dark as the clouds overhead as her tram hurried through the streets of Robot City in the direction of the Compass Tower.

“I fear we won’t make the Tower before the rains come,” the utility driver told her. “We must take shelter.”

“No,” she said, determined that she’d keep them from taking away her last ounce of free will. “Go on. Hurry!”

“It is not safe for you out here,” the robot insisted. “I cannot in all conscience take you any farther.”

Katherine began to respond with anger, but feared it would arouse the robot’s suspicions. “All right,” she said. “Pull over at the next building.”

“Very good,” the robot replied, and brought the tram to an immediate stop before a tall building that had the words MUSEUM OF ART embossed in metal above the doors.

The robot got out of the tram and took Katherine by the arm to guide her. “This way, please,” he said, and Katherine began to think the robots had been having meetings about human duplicity.

She allowed the robot to lead her into the confines of the building. “This is Supervisor Arion’s project,” he said, “to please our human inhabitants.”

She looked around, taking note that the robot had used the word inhabitant instead of visitors. It merely confirmed what she already knew to be the case. They weren’t going to let her go. They had no intention of letting her go. The robots needed someone to serve, and they’d keep the masters as slaves just to see that it came to be.

The first floor of the museum was full of geometric sculptures, many of them made from city material that moved through its own sequences, constantly changing shapes in an infinite variety of patterns.

After a moment, she asked, “Please, is it possible to contact Derec and tell him where we are? I’m afraid he’ll worry.”

“There should be a terminal in the curator’s office,” the robot replied. “Would you like me to do it for you?”

“Yes, please. I would be most grateful.”

The robot hurried off immediately. As soon as he was out of sight at the far end of the building, Katherine turned and ran.

She got quickly out the front doors and down the short walk to the tram, taking the driver’s position. It started up easily, and she was off. She had no idea of which streets to take to get to the pyramid, but its size made it a beacon. She simply kept moving toward it.

She concentrated on planning as she drove. The rain was very close now, and she didn’t want to get caught in it, but it was worth the try to get out of the city. Derec had said there was a trap door from the office to the platform atop the structure. She’d go through the inside of the pyramid, then, to reach the top. The Key was hidden partway down the outside of the structure, and it would be far easier and faster to climb down from the top than to climb up.

The sky rumbled loudly as she drove; the wind whipped her long hair around her face. She was cold, but put it out of her mind as she concentrated on her objective. Why did he have to do it to her? Why did he have to go over to the other side? The city had become Derec’s obsession. He apparently couldn’t understand that she had to have freedom, that she couldn’t live within its structure forever.

The pyramid loomed large before her. It lit up brightly as a bolt of lightning ran down its face. She skidded to a stop before it and jumped out of the tram, hearing a noise behind her.

There, two blocks distant, the robot that called itself Wohler was hurrying to intercept her. She turned and ran up to the entry. The city material melted away at her approach to allow her inside.

Once inside, she had no idea of where she was going. The only thing she remembered for sure was that she needed to keep going up. She ran the maze-like halls, taking every opportunity to climb stairs or take an elevator that would put her higher. About halfway up the structure, she heard an announcement over unseen loudspeakers that called attention to her flight and gave instructions for her apprehension.

At that, she doubled her pace, going full out. Her only hope of escaping was to reach the safety of the off-limits zone before she was spotted.

She hurried unseen down the now-shortened hallways, reaching the last elevator up. A tech robot with welder arms spotted her as she hurried inside. Heart pounding, she stabbed at the up arrow and the machine sped her quickly to the upper floor.

The doors slid open and she burst through, running immediately. There were voices behind, calling her by name. She turned a corner, ran up a short ramp, and burst into the off-limits hallway just as the robots behind were closing on her.

She ran to the door leading up to the office, her hand going to the power stud.

“Katherine.”

She recognized Wohler’s voice and turned to face him. He stood, a hallway full of robots behind him, at the edge of the off-limits zone, the same place the witnesses had stopped earlier in the day.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Come away from there. This place is off-limits.”

She smiled. “Not to me,” she said. “I’m human, remember? I’m free, and I’m going to be freer.”

“Please do not go outside,” Wohler said. “The rains are beginning. It could be dangerous for you.”

“You’re not going to keep me here,” she said, opening the door that faced the spiral staircase.

“We would love to have you stay with us,” the robot said, “but we would never keep you here against your will.”

“Then why don’t you have the means on-planet for me to leave or call for help?”

“You act as if we brought you here under false pretenses,” Wohler said. “We did nothing. You came here uninvited. Welcome . . . but uninvited. Our civilization has not developed to the point where planetary interaction is possible. You can see that for yourself.”

“We’re wasting time,” Katherine said, and started through the door.

“Please reconsider,” the robot called. “Don’t put yourself in jeopardy.”

She stared hard at him. “I’ve been in jeopardy every second I’ve been in this crazy place.”

With that, she moved through the door, closing it behind her. She took the stairs quickly and entered the office. The angry clouds rolled up close to the viewers, making it seem as if she were standing in the midst of the gathering storm.

Searching the office, she found the ladder easily enough, climbing it to reach the windy platform above. The wind was so strong that she feared getting to her feet, and crawled to the edge where she and Derec had made their first treacherous descent into the city of robots.

For the first time since being freed from the sealed room, her fears began to overcome her anger at the situation as she turned her body to edge herself off the dizzying height to begin her climb downward. The wind pulled viciously at her like cold, prying hands; her ears and nose went numb, and her fingers tingled with the cold.

Though the pyramid was made from the same material as the rest of the city, it wasn’t the same in any other respect. It was rigid and unbending, its face set with patterns of holes that she and Derec had used as hand and footholds previously, and in which they had hidden the Key on their first descent.

Her mind whirled as she climbed, slowly, so slowly. How far down had it been? She had been moving fast, and Derec, carrying the Key, had been unable to keep up. They had stopped for a conference and decided to hide the Key and continue without it. How far down? A fourth of the climb, barely a fourth, in the leftmost hole of the pattern that ran down the center of the structure.

She continued downward, her fingers hurting now, her eyes looking upward, trying to gauge her distance just right. She began testing the holes in the repeated pattern, to no avail. She still hadn’t reached the place. Something wet and cold hit her hard on the back. Her hands almost pulled out of their holds reflexively. It was a raindrop, and it wet the entire back of her one-piece.

She was running out of time.

The pattern of holes repeated again as she inched downward, and when she looked up, squinting against the frigid wind, she knew she had reached the place.

Hugging the pyramid face with the last of her strength, she slowly reached out, sticking her hand into the leftmost hole of the pattern.

The Key was gone.

“No!” she screamed loudly into the teeth of the monster, and, as if in response, the rain tore from the heavens in blinding, bludgeoning sheets to silence her protests.

 

Derec stood at the exit door to the Extruder Station and listened to the rain pounding against the door, and watched the small puddle that had somehow made its way under the sealed entry. Katherine was out there somewhere, and Wohler. Nothing had been heard from either of them since before the start of the rain. Avernus had made contact with the Compass Tower, and though both had been seen there, neither was there now.

With the rain controlling the day, everything had come to a standstill, making searching impossible, making contact with the central core impossible, making everything except the almighty building project slow to nothing. It was maddening.

He pounded the door, his fist sinking in, cushioning. He wanted to open those doors and run into the city and find her for himself—but he knew what that meant. Most likely, nothing would be known until the rain abated the next morning.

He turned from the door and walked down the stairs to the holding area and the six robot supervisors who awaited him there. His mind was awash in anxiety.

“Supervisor Rydberg has proposed a plan, Friend Derec,” Euler said. “Perhaps you will comment on it.”

Derec looked at Rydberg, trying to bring his mind back to the present. Why did the woman affect him this way? “Let’s hear your plan,” he said.

“We can go ahead and devise our evacuation schedule for the robots working underground,” Rydberg said. “It seems that when morning comes, you will be able to contact the core and halt the replication. It will be too late to dig through to the cavern in time, but at least we will have the opportunity to spare our mine workers before the floods.”

“Why do you have to give up like this?” Derec said, exasperated. “You’ve heard the reasons for the defenses. Can’t you just stop them now and use the digging equipment to begin excavating the cavern?”

Waldeyer, the squat, wheeled supervisor, said, “The central core is our master program. We cannot abandon it. Only the central core can judge the veracity of your statements and make the final decision.”

“I’m going to reprogram the central core,” Derec answered, too loudly. “I’m going to change its definition of ‘veracity.’ And besides, the Laws of Robotics are your master program, and the Second Law states that you will obey a human command unless it violates the First Law. I’m commanding you to halt the mining processes and begin digging through to the drainage cavern.”

“The defensive procedures were designed by the central core to protect the city, which is designed to protect human life,” Waldeyer replied. “The central core must be the determining factor in any decision to abandon the defenses. Though your arguments sound humane, they may, ultimately, be in violation of the First Law; for if the central core determines that your conclusions are erroneous, then shutting down the defenses could be the most dangerous of all possible decisions.”

Derec felt as if he were on a treadmill. All argument ultimately led back to the central core. And though he was sure that the central core would back off once he programmed the information about human blood into it, he had no way to prove that to the robots who, in turn, refused to do anything to halt the city’s replication until they’d received that confirmation from central.

Then an idea struck him, an idea that was so revisionist in its approach that he was frightened at first even to think out its effects on the robots. What he had in mind would either liberate their thinking or send them into a contradictory mental freeze-up that could destroy them.

“What do you think of Rydberg’s plan?” Avernus asked him. “It will save a great many robots.”

Avernus—that was it—Avernus the humanitarian. Derec knew that his idea would destroy the other robots, but Avernus, he was different. Avernus leaned toward the humane, a leaning that could just possibly save himself and the rest of Robot City.

“I will comment on the evacuation plan later,” Derec said. “First, I’d like to speak with Avernus alone.”

“We make decisions together,” Euler said.

“Why?” Derec asked.

“We’ve always done it that way,” Rydberg said.

“Not any more,” Derec said, his voice hard. “Unless you can give me a sound, First Law reason why I shouldn’t speak with Avernus alone, I will then assume you are violating the Laws yourselves.”

Euler walked to the center of the room, then turned slowly to look at Avernus. “We’ve always done it this way,” he said.

Avernus, the giant, moved stoically toward Euler, putting a larger pincer on the robot’s shoulder. “It won’t hurt anything, this once, if we go against our own traditions.”

“But traditions are the hallmark of civilization,” Euler said.

“Survival is also one of the hallmarks,” Derec replied, looking up at Avernus. “Are you willing?”

“Yes,” Avernus answered without hesitation. “We will speak alone.”

Derec led Avernus to the elevators, then had a thought and returned to Euler. He unwrapped the fabric bandage from his cut arm and handed it to the supervisor. “Have the blood analyzed, the data broken down on disc so I can feed it to the core.”

“Yes, Derec,” Euler said, and it was the first time the supervisor had addressed him without the formal declaration, Friend. Maybe they were all growing up a little bit.

Derec then joined Avernus in the elevator, pushing the down arrow as the doors slid closed. They only traveled down for a moment before Derec pushed the emergency stop button; the machine jerked to a halt.

“What is this about?” Avernus asked.

“I want to make a deal with you,” Derec said.

“What sort of deal?”

“The lives of your robots for one of your digging machines.”

Avernus just stared at him. “I do not understand.”

“Let’s talk about the Third Law of Robotics,” Derec said. “You are obligated by the Third Law to protect your own existence as long as it doesn’t interfere with the First or Second Laws. In your case, with your special programming, I can easily extend the Third Law to include the robots under your control.”

“Go on.”

“My deal is a simple one. Rydberg has suggested an evacuation plan that could save the robots in the mines from the flooding that is sure to occur if the cavern is not excavated. The evacuation plan depends completely on my reprogramming the central core to halt the replication. For if I don’t, the city will have to keep replicating, even to its own destruction . . . that destruction to include the robots who are working underground.”

“I understand that,” Avernus said.

“All right.” Derec took a deep breath. What he was getting ready to propose would undoubtedly freeze out the positronics of any of the other robots; the contradictions were too great, the choices too impossible to make. But with Avernus . . . maybe, just maybe. “Unless you give me one of the digging machines so I can begin the excavation myself, I will refuse to reprogram the central core, thereby condemning all your robots to stay underground during the flooding.”

Avernus red eyes flared brightly. “You would . . . kill so many?”

“I would save your city and your robots!” Derec yelled. “It’s all or nothing. Give me the machine or suffer the consequences.”

“You ask me to deny the central core program that protects the First Law.”

“Yes,” Derec said simply, his voice quieting. “You have got to make the creative leap to save your robots. Somewhere in that brain of yours, you’ve got to make a value judgment that goes beyond your programming.”

Avernus just stood there, quaking slightly, and Derec felt tears welling up in his eyes, knowing the torture he was putting the supervisor through. If this failed, if he, in effect, killing Avernus by killing his mind, he’d never be able to forgive himself.

The big robot’s eyes flashed on and off several times, and suddenly his body shuddered violently, then stopped. Derec heard a sob escape his own lips. Avernus bent to him.

“You will have your digging machine,” the robot told him, “and me to help you use it.”

 

 

CHAPTER 13

THE CENTRAL CORE

 

Even as Katherine clung doggedly to the face of the pyramid, she knew that her ability to hold on could be measured in no more than minutes, as the rain lashed savagely at her and the winds worked to rip her off the patterned facade.

The ground lay several hundred meters below, calling to her. As her body went totally numb in the freezing downpour, her strong survival instinct was the only thing keeping her hanging on.

Her brain whirled, rejecting its own death while trying desperately to prepare for it, and through it all, she could hear the wind calling her name, over and over.

“Katherine!”

Closer now, the sound grew more pronounced. It seemed to come from below.

“Katherine!”

For the first time since she’d begun her climb, she risked a look downward, in the direction of the sound. She blinked through the icy water that streamed down her face only to see an apparition, a gray mass moving quickly up the face below her, proof that her mind was already gone.

“Katherine, hang on! I’m coming!”

In disbelief, she watched the apparition coming closer. And as her arms ached, trying to talk her into letting go and experiencing peace, she saw a golden hand reach from under the gray lump and grasp a handhold in one of the cutouts.

Wohler!

“Please hold on!”

“I can’t!” she called back, surprised to hear the hysteria in her own voice. And as if to reinforce the idea, her left hand lost its grip, her arm falling away from the building, the added pressure sending cramping pain through her right arm still lodged in the hole.

The robot below hurried his pace. The wind, getting beneath the tarp he wore to protect himself from the rain, pulled it away from his body to float like a huge, prehistoric bird.

“P-please . . . ” she called weakly, her right arm ready to give out.

“Hold on! Please hold on!”

The urgency in his voice astounded her, giving her an extra ounce of courage, a few more seconds when seconds were everything. And as she felt her hand slip away for good and all, his large body had wedged in behind her, holding her up against the facade.

Wohler clamped solidly in hand and footholds just above and below hers and he completely enveloped her, protecting. She let herself relax, all the strength immediately oozing out of her, Wohler supporting her completely.

“Are you unhurt?” the robot asked in her ear.

“I-I think so,” she answered in a small voice. “What happens now?”

“We can only wait,” Wohler said, his voice sounding somehow ragged. “An old Earth proverb says, ‘Patience is a bitter plant but it has sweet fruit.’ Survival w-will be our fruit . . . Friend Katherine.”

“Friend Wohler,” she responded, tears mixing with the cold rain on her face. “I want to th-thank you for coming up here for me.”

But Wohler didn’t answer.

 

The supervisors as a group stood behind the gateway excavator that Derec and Avernus operated. Neither helping nor hindering, they simply took it all in, no doubt unable to appreciate the thought processes that had led the big robot to pull the machine away from his mining crews and their replication labors, to put it to work simply clearing a path for something that, at this point, was no more than mere potential.

Derec had seen excavators like these before. On the asteroid where he had first awakened to find he had no identity, the robots had used identical machines to cut out the guts of the asteroid in their search for the Key to Perihelion.

The gateway was a marvel, for it demolished and rebuilt at the same time. Derec sat with Avernus at the two cabin control panels, watching the boom arms cutting into rock face nearly a hundred feet distant. One of the boom arms bore rotary grinders, the other microwave lasers that tore frantically at the core of the planet, chewing it up as it went. There were numerous conveyors and pulleys for the removal and scanning of potential salvage material, but none of these were in use right now. They were simply grinding and compressing the excavated rock and earth, the gateway itself using the materials to build a strong tunnel behind—smooth rock walls, reinforcing synthemesh, even overhead lamps.

They were creeping toward the cavern, every meter a meter closer to possible salvation. They had been working through the night, Derec desperately trying to let the effort keep his mind off Katherine and Wohler. It wasn’t working. There had been no word of them since before the storm had begun nearly ten hours ago. Had they been alive, he would have heard by now.

There was always the chance that Katherine had retrieved the Key and left, perhaps waiting out the rain in the gray void of Perihelion, or perhaps finding her way to another place. But that didn’t explain Wohler’s absence.

During the grueling hours spent working the gateway, Avernus and Derec had conversed very little, both, apparently, lost in their own thoughts. Derec worried for Avernus, who he knew was going through a great many internal recriminations that could only be resolved with a satisfactory outcome and subsequent vindication of his actions.

“Derec!” came Euler’s voice from the newly built tunnel behind; it was the first time the robot had spoken to them since the operation had begun.

Derec looked at his watch. It was nearly five a.m. He shared a glance with Avernus. “Yes!” he called back.

“The rain has abated,” Euler returned. “The missing have been located!”

Derec resisted the urge to jump from the controls and charge out of there. He still had work to do. He looked at Avernus. “What now?”

“Now we will see,” the robot said. “We must locate the core and reprogram.”

“Should I leave you here to continue operations and go with someone else to the core?”

“No,” Avernus said with authority. “I am supervisor of the underground and know my way around it. I also . . . must know the outcome. Can you understand that?”

Derec reached out and punched off the control board, stopping new digging and bringing all operants to the standby position. “You bet I can understand it. Let’s go!”

They moved out of the gateway, squeezing past stacked up cylinders to join the other supervisors in the tunnel behind. It was the first time Derec had looked back at their handiwork. The tunnel he and Avernus had made stretched several hundred yards behind them, nearly as far he could see.

“Where are Katherine and Wohler?” he asked. “Are they all right?”

“No one knows,” Rydberg said. “They are clinging to the side of the Compass Tower, nearly a hundred meters above the surface, but they have not responded to voice communication, nor have they attempted to come down.”

Derec’s heart sank. They’d been out all night in the rain.

It looked bad.

“Are rescue operations underway?” he asked.

“Utility robots are now scaling the Tower to determine the extent of the problem for emergency disposition,” Euler said.

“The central core,” Avernus said to Dante. “Tell me where it is right now.”

“Tell me honestly, Euler,” Derec said. “Will my presence at the Tower facilitate the rescue operation?”

“Tower rescue has always been part of our basic program, for reasons no one can fathom,” the robot said. “Standard operating procedure has already been initiated. You could only hinder the operation.”

“Good,” Derec said. Of course Tower rescue was standard. The overseer had worried that, should the trap door to the office below become jammed, he would be caught on the Tower, unable to get down. The almighty overseer didn’t mind letting everyone else twist slowly in the wind, but he wasn’t going to let himself be uncomfortable on the Tower.

Dante spoke up from the terminal in his tram car. “The central core is in Quadrant 2, Tunnel D-24, moving to the north.”

Avernus nodded and looked at Derec. “We must hurry,” he said, “lest all our work be in vain.”

“Work is already in vain,” Waldeyer said to Avernus. “Because of your unauthorized impoundment of the gateway excavator, the on-hand raw iron consignments have dropped dangerously low. Within an hour, replication efforts will begin falling behind schedule.”

The big robot simply hung his head, looking at the floor.

“I pose a question to you all,” Derec said. “If Avernus and I are able to get to the core and reprogram to halt the replication, will our work already done here enable us to dig the rest of the way through to the cavern before tonight’s rain?”

“Barring work stoppage and machinery malfunction,” Euler said, “we should just be able to make it. This, of course, is all hypothetical.”

Derec just looked at them. There was no satisfaction to be gained from arguing at this point. It was time to deliver the goods. “Where’s the data from my blood sample?” he asked.

Arion stepped forward and handed him a mini-disc. “Everything you asked for is in here,” he said.

“Thanks,” Derec said, taking the disc and putting it in his breast pocket. “Now, listen. We’re going to the central core. As soon as we reprogram, we’ll need you to begin work here again immediately so that no time is lost.”

Arion took a step toward the gateway. “It is now too late to move the excavator back to the iron mine and pick up our failed operation there, so I see no reason why the digging here shouldn’t continue in your absence. There is no longer anything to lose. I will continue to work here, even as you approach the central core.”

“No,” Euler said. “Will you now violate your programming, and perhaps the Laws?”

“The program is already shattered,” Arion said, moving into the innards of the gateway. “There is no putting it back together now.”

Derec smiled broadly as he heard the standby board being brought to full ready by Arion. He walked over to Dante. “We’ll need your tram,” he said. “Now.”

 

The fever had come on strong, and along with it, hallucinations. Katherine’s world was a nightmare of water, a world of water always threatening to pull her downward, and through it all Derec/David, David/Derec, Derec/David, his face smiling evilly and becoming mechanical even as she watched, metamorphosing from human to robot and back again, over and over. He’d skim the cresting waves to take her in his arms, only to use those arms to pull her underwater—drowning her! Drowning!

“Katherine . . . Katherine. Wake up. Wake up.”

Voices intruding in her world of water. She wanted them to go away, to leave her alone. The water was treacherous, but at least it was warm.

“Katherine . . . ”

Something was shaking her, pulling her violently from her dream world. She opened her eyes to pain blazing like fire through her head.

It was daytime, early morning. A utility robot was staring at her around the protective branch of Wohler’s arm.

“C-cold,” she rasped, teeth chattering. “So . . . cold.”

A light flared above her and to the left, a light raining sparks. She squinted. Welders were using laser torches to cut Wohler’s pincers off the facade where they were locked tight. Above the welder, she could see mechanical pulleys magnetically clamped to the side of the structure, city-material ropes dangling.

“We are cutting you free,” the robot said. “A net and stretcher have been strung just below you. You are safe now.”

“C-cold,” she rasped again.

“We will warm you. We will get you medical attention.”

And through the haze that was her mind, she felt the reassuring firmness of Wohler’s body protecting her, always protecting her.

“Wohler!” she said loudly. “We’re s-safe. Wohler!”

“Supervisor Wohler is . . . nonoperational,” the utility said.

Even through the hurt and the delirium, she was wracked by waves of shame. That this robot would give his life for hers, after the way she’d acted, was more than she could bear.

She felt his weight behind her give; then hands were lifting both of them onto the stretchers pulled up tight below. She felt the morning sun on her face, a sun that Wohler would never experience again, and rather than dwell on the unpleasant results of its own selfishness, her mind once more retreated into the blissful haze of unconsciousness.

 

“Would you have?” Avernus asked him as they pushed the tram down tunnel D-24, heading north.

“Would I have what?” Derec replied. The tunnel walls rushed past, red lights zipping overhead at two-second intervals.

“Would you have let the robots die if I hadn’t agreed to help you dig the tunnel?”

“No,” Derec said. “I wouldn’t have done anything like that. I just wanted to talk some sense into you.”

“You lied to me.”

“I lied to save you,” Derec said. “Remember our discussion about lying in the Compass Tower? I created a different reality, a hypothetical reality, to force you into a different line of thought.”

“You lied to me.”

“Yes.”

“I do not know if I’ll ever really understand that,” Avernus said, subtly telling Derec that their relationship would forever be strained.

“I’ll have to learn to live with that,” Derec replied sadly. “Sometimes the right thing isn’t always the best thing. I’m sorry if I hurt you.”

“Hurt is not a term that I understand,” the robot replied.

“No,” Derec said, turning to fiddle with the terminal Dante had left in the back. “It’s a term that I relate to.”

Derec used the terminal to contact the city’s hastily organized medical facility, trying for information on Katherine and Wohler. He and Avernus had left Quadrant #4 and traveled through the city to #2, going underground again at that point. Tunnel D-24 was one of the more distant shafts, drilled as an oil exploration point for the plastics operation. A pipeline churned loudly, attached to the tunnel ceiling above their heads.

“They’ve gotten Katherine and Wohler down from the Tower!” he said, wishing his fingers moved as well as Dante’s over the keyboard.

“Are they well?”

“Katherine is suffering from shock and exposure,” Derec said excitedly. “She’s being treated now. The prognosis is good. Wohler is . . . is . . . ” He turned sadly to Avernus. “Wohler is dead.”

“Look!” the robot called, pointing ahead.

Farther along the tunnel, they were rapidly closing on a moving area of light. It was perhaps six meters long, and just tall enough to miss the overhanging lights.

“The central core!” Avernus said, braking heavily, the tram skidding to a halt.

“What are you doing?” Derec asked. “It’s getting away!”

“It will be faster now on foot,” Avernus said.

“Not for me,” Derec replied. “I can’t run fast enough to . . . ”

“Climb on my back,” the robot ordered. “Quickly.”

While the huge robot was still sitting, Derec stood and climbed onto his broad back, putting his hands around Avernus’s head, the robot locking an arm behind him, holding Derec on tightly.

Then Avernus jumped from the cart and began a headlong charge down the tunnel, moving faster than Derec realized was possible. Tunnel segments flew by in a blur as the moving core grew larger and larger in their vision.

They caught it quickly, and Avernus slowed his pace to match the speed of the core. Its outer surface was transparent plastic of some kind, and very thick. Like a transparent eggshell, it contained the complex workings of a sophisticated, operating machine. In the rear was a platform with steps leading up to a sliding door.

Avernus jumped, catching the stairs and climbing on. He brought his arm around, gently lifting Derec off to stand before the door. “Go on,” he said. “Go in. Only one at a time can pass through.”

Derec slid open the door by hand and walked in to find himself within the transparent chamber. A red button was set in the plastic before him. He pushed it. Sprayers and heat lamps came on, a full body spray of compressed air traveling the length of his body to remove all traces of dust. There was a loud sound of suction, and then the wall before him slid open and he walked into the beating heart of Robot City.

The core was open, like an exposed brain, its working synapses sparking photons up and down its length, its fluidics a marvel of imaginative engineering. He found a typer halfway down its length and juiced it to life, while hearing Avernus going through the chamber ritual. The robot was doubled over to fit within the “clean room.”

The first thing he did was open a file under the heading of HEMOGLOBIN, and enter the disc’s-worth of information Arion had procured for him. Then he got into the DEFENSES file again, going as far as he could with the system until it prompted him for the supervisor’s password.

He heard a door slide open and turned to see Avernus, still somewhat hunched over, move to stand beside him at the typer.

“It wants your password,” Derec said.

Avernus looked at him, not speaking, then reached out and typed on the screen:

AVERNUS—2Q2-1719

PASSWORD: SYNNOETICS

Without a second’s hesitation, the computer prompted:

RATIONALIZATION FOR DEACTIVATION OF CITY DEFENSES?

With shaking fingers, Derec typed his rationalization into the machine, dumping, as he did so, all the information from the HEMOGLOBIN file into the CITY DEFENSES file as authoritative backup and information to keep the same thing from ever happening again.

When he was through typing he stood back and took a breath, almost afraid to push the ENTER key.

“We must know now,” Avernus said.

Derec nodded, swallowed hard, and entered the information.

The machine churned quietly for a moment that seemed to last an hour. Finally, quite simply and without fanfare, it responded.

RATIONALIZATION ACCEPTED—DEFENSES DEACTIVATED.

They stood for a moment, staring, not quite believing that it could be so easy. Then they felt a noticeable slowing of the core’s motion. Within seconds, it had ground to a stop.

It was over.

 

 

CHAPTER 14

WORLD PERFECT

 

Derec walked the corridors of the mostly dark, mostly unfurnished medical facility. It would be a fine building when it was completely finished, a place where the humans who would inhabit Robot City could receive the finest medical care available anywhere in the galaxy under the supervision of the most advanced team of med-bots operational. He knew this would be so because the robots who performed the services would perform them by choice, out of love instead of servitude.

He walked the corridors alone—no guides, no keepers, no jailers. He was a free citizen now, a condemned man no longer. And it was good, because now, right now, he preferred being alone.

A room at the end of the corridor was awash with light, and he knew he’d find Katherine there, recovering from her night with the storm. He no longer cared about her subterfuge or her reasons for being with him on Robot City. For good or ill, he was happy and thankful that she was alive. Nothing else really could, or did, matter.

He was beginning to know why she affected him the way she did—he loved her.

He reached the room and poked his head inside. It was a large room, one that would most likely be a ward at some future time. But right now it was empty, except for Katherine’s place at the far end.

She lay in stasis, floating half a meter above a table, bright lights surrounding her completely. She was naked, just as she’d been on Rockliffe Station. This time he didn’t turn away, but looked, and her body seemed somehow . . . familiar to him.

A med-bot rolled up to him.

“How is she?” he asked.

“Splendid,” the robot replied, “except for her chronic condition . . . ”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, letting her have her secrets. “Other than that?”

“She’s sleeping lightly,” the med-bot said. “We have rebalanced her chemicals through massive influxes of oxygen and fluids, and warmed her up. She lost a small part of her left ear to the cold, but that has already been adjusted through laser cosmetic surgery. You may visit with her if you wish.”

“I’d like that,” he said. “But before you wake her up, would you put a robe or something on her?”

“The heat lamps work better if . . . ”

“I know,” Derec said. “It’s a matter of her personal privacy.”

“I see,” the robot said in its best bedside manner, but Derec could tell that it didn’t.

When the med-bot turned and rolled back to Katherine, Derec politely stepped through the doorway and back into the hall.

A moment later, he could hear her talking to the robot, so he walked back in. She was off the table, sitting in a motorized chair, swathed in a bright white bathrobe. Her face was blank as he moved up to her.

“I’m sorry for everything,” he said. “I’ve been suspicious and hard to get along with and . . . ”

She smiled slightly, putting up a hand. “No more than I have,” she said softly, her voice hoarse. “I guess I’ve acted pretty stupidly.”

“Human prerogative,” he said. “You look . . . good.”

“They scraped the surface skin off me,” she said, “cleared away the dead dermis. I guess I could say you’re looking at the new me.” She moved her gaze to the floor. “The Key is gone.”

“I didn’t know,” he replied. “I guess we’re really stuck.”

She nodded. “Did you hear what . . . what Wohler did for me?”

“Yes.”

“I never understood your . . . feeling for the robots,” she said, eyes welling up with tears. “But his life was as important to him as mine is to me, and he . . . he gave it up . . . so I could live.”

“He was burned out completely,” Derec said. “They’re trying to reconstruct him now.”

She looked up at him. “Reconstruct?”

“It won’t be the same, of course. We are, all of us, a product of our memories. The Wohler you knew is, for the most part, dead.”

“But if they reconstruct,” she said, “something of him will remain.”

“Yes. Something.”

“I want to go there,” she said. “I want to go where he is.”

She tried to stand, Derec gently pushing her back in the chair. “You’re still a sick girl,” he said. “You can’t be running around doing . . . ”

“No,” she said, a spark of the old Katherine already coming back. “He died so that I could live. If there’s anything of him left, I want to be there.”

Derec drew a long breath. “I’ll see what I can do,” he said, knowing how stubborn she could be.

And so, thirty minutes later, Katherine, wrapped in a sterile suit, wheeled herself into the dust-free repair chamber where six different robots were working diligently on the body of Wohler, the philosopher. Derec walked with her.

Most of his plating was gone, circuit boards and relays hitting the floor with clockwork regularity, a small robot wheeling silently around and sweeping up the discards.

“Can I get closer?” she asked Derec.

“I don’t see why not,” he answered.

Just then, Euler came into the chamber and walked directly toward the couple. “Friend Derec,” he said. Derec smiled at the reuse of the title before his name. “We are just completing work on the connecting tunnel to the runoff cavern and would very much like you to be present for the opening.”

Derec looked down at Katherine. “Well, I’m kind of busy right now, I . . . ”

“Nonsense,” Katherine said, reaching out to pat his hand. “I’m just going to stay around here for a while. One of the robots here can get me back to medical.”

He smiled broadly. “You sure it’s okay?”

She nodded, smiling widely. “I understand completely,” she said.

He grinned at Euler. “Let’s go,” he said, and the two of them moved quickly out of the room.

Katherine listened to their footsteps receding down the hall, then wheeled her chair closer to the work table. Her anger at Derec along with a great many other conflicting emotions, had died along with Wohler on the Compass Tower. Because of her thoughtlessness, a life had been lost. All her other emotions seemed petty in the face of that.

She wheeled up near the golden robot’s head. Most of his body was exposed in pieces on the table, but the head and upper torso were intact. The robots working on the body moved around the table to accommodate her presence.

She stared at his head, reaching out a finger to gingerly touch him. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

Suddenly, the head turned to her, its photocells glowing brightly. “Were you addressing me?” he asked her.

“Wohler,” she said, jumping. “You’re alive.”

“Do we know one another?” he asked, and she realized that this was a different Wohler, a newly programmed Wohler who knew nothing of their previous experience.

“No,” she said, choking back a sob. “My name is Katherine. I’m . . . pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“A new friendship is like new wine,” Wohler said.

“When it has aged, you will drink it with pleasure. Katherine . . . Katherine. Why are you crying?”

 

Only a small dam held back the waters in the trench from the tunnel that Derec and Avernus had dug to the cavern. The supervisors and as many of the utility robots as could clusters in the opening were there, Derec holding the electronic detonator that would blast away the dam and open up the new waterway.

“This is the first day,” Euler told him, “the first day in a truly unified city of humans and robots. The beginning of the perfect world.”

“We have reacted synnoetically to make this day happen,” Rydberg said. “Working together we can accomplish much.”

“While we still have a great deal to learn about one another,” Derec said, “I, too, believe that we have proven something of value here today.”

“Then open the floodgate, Friend Derec,” Euler said, “and make the connection complete.”

“With pleasure.”

Derec flipped the toggle on the hand control. A small explosion made the wall of dirt and rock jump. Then it crumbled, and rapidly flowing water from the trench finished the job that the explosive had begun.

And as the waters rushed past, he thought of all the things still unresolved, still rushing, like the waters, through his confused brain. Who was he? Who was the dead man? Who put this all together, and why?

And then there was Katherine.

In many ways, he still felt as if his journey had just begun, but he couldn’t help but feel he had accomplished something major with the breaking down of the dam. He couldn’t help but feel that something good, something positive had been accomplished. And that made him feel just fine. Maybe life was nothing so much as a succession of small battles, small victories to be won.

“Derec,” came a voice behind him, and he turned to see Avernus standing there.

“Yes?”

The robot, so large, spoke with a small voice. “I do not know that I can understand why you did what you did to me last night,” he said, “but I cannot help but feel that we did the right thing, and that doing the right thing is what is important.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Derec said, smiling widely. “Friends?”

Avernus nodded solidly. “Friends,” he said, as he laid his pincer in Derec’s open palm in the universal gesture of peace and good will.

It wasn’t going to be such a bad day after all.

 

 

DATA BANK

Illustrations by Paul Rivoche

 

KATHERINE ARIEL BURGESS, “KATE”: Kate is a native Auroran, banished from her homeworld because of an incurable disease. Despite her illness and a pampered upbringing, Kate is headstrong, tough, demanding, and resourceful. On the advice of the medical robot Galen, she refuses to tell Derec what she knows of his past life.

 

 

ROBOT CITY: The city is a unique blend of visionary architecture and state-of-the-art robotics, designed to accommodate both its robot and (eventual) human populations in the areas of safety, movement, and easy access. The city material is an iron-plastic-carbon alloy using carbon monoxide as a reducing agent. This raw material is etched with micro-circuits. The result is an artificially intelligent “City” capable of pre-programmed movement and structural change, but still reactant to stimuli. The city material is strong yet flexible, each cell (approx. 1/16” x 1/32”) able to interact in a variety of ways with its brother cells. The cells bear a striking structural relationship to the Key to Perihelion.

The city architecture is based on combinations of the “perfect” geometric solids, and is constantly changing as the city grows and adapts. Entire new buildings can spring up overnight, and disappear just as suddenly.

 

 

 

 

 

WITNESS ROBOTS: These robots contain specialized sensor equipment and are equipped to function only as event witnesses and reporters. Capable only of first-level (observation) connections, the witness robot has no lifting appendages, in order to maintain detached objectivity.

 

 

EULER: One of the main Supervisor robots of Robot City, Euler possesses a bipedal, bilaterally symmetrical structure covered with a metallic skin. Supervisors control the basic functions of the city and constitute the central computer. They have access to the central data core and are capable of second-level connections, drawing conclusions from existing data.

 

 

AVERNUS: Another of the main Supervisors, Avernus has a bipedal, humanoid structure, stands approximately twelve feet high, and has a jet-black metallic skin. Instead of the pseudo-hands possessed by human-oriented supervisors, such as Euler, Avernus has interchangeable hands for various functions. He is shown here with the humanoid hands he employs for very delicate work. His usual hands, however, are a set of highly adaptable pincer-like claws.

 

 

TROUBLESHOOTER: Small, round computer diagnostician. Makes quick determinations of fault in computer function, and does nothing else.

 

 

 

MICHAEL McQUAY

Mike McQuay began his writing career in 1975 while a production line worker at a factory. Before that he had worked at a variety of jobs, including musician, airplane mechanic, banker, retail story owner, bartender, Club Med salesman, and film pirate.

Since the publication of his first novel, Lifekeeper, in 1980, McQuay has published 22 novels and short story collections in a variety of fields—science fiction, children’s, horror, mainstream thriller, and adventure.

McQuay is 37 years old and lives in Oklahoma City with his writer wife Shanna Bacharach, their three children and three cats.