by Isaac Asimov
Avery nodded. He scrutinized Derec with what appeared to be a peculiar combination of pride and anger. It was as if Avery could not make up his own mind about how he felt about this crew and what he wanted to do about them. Derec had the distinct feeling that this man was flying without a navigation computer.
“How did you get here?” asked Derec.
“That is my business and none of yours.”
“Did you perchance find a Key to Perihelion? In that case, it wouldn’t inconvenience you in the least to permit Ariel and me to use it. I would return as soon as she was being taken care of.”
“I don’t know that, and in any case your suggestion is immaterial. I have no such Key.”
“Then you’ve arrived in a spacecraft,” said Derec, forcing the issue in an effort to do exactly what he had been doing since he had awakened in the survival pod: turn things around to his advantage. “Where is it?”
Avery laughed uproariously. “I’m not going to tell you!”
“It is ironic, is it not,” said Mandelbrot, “that humans, who depend so much upon robots to adhere to the Three Laws, cannot be programmed to obey them.”
“Thiss one exis’ss ou’side lawss of ‘ur kind,” said Wolruf.
Avery regarded the alien in a new light. “If what you’re saying means what I think it does, then you’re absolutely correct.”
“Is this how you get your kicks,” asked Derec, “by jeopardizing the lives of innocent people?”
Now a light of an entirely different sort blazed in Avery’s eyes. “No, by disregarding the lives of innocent people. The only thing that matters is my work. And my work would never get done if I allowed my behavior to be restricted by so-called humanitarian considerations.”
“Is that why you left the city for so long, to get your work done? To start other colonies?” Derec asked.
“I was away, and that is all you need to know.” Avery put his hand in his pocket, pulled out a small device and pointed it at Mandelbrot. The device resembled a pinwheel, but it made a strange hissing sound when it moved, and the sparks, instead of corning out of the wheel, came out of Mandelbrot!
Ariel screamed.
“What are you doing to him?” Derec asked, rushing to his robot’s side.
Wolruf squatted, and her hindquarters twitched as if She was about to make a leap at Avery. Avery looked at her and said, “Careful. I can make it easier on him — or I can make it worse!”
Wolruf straightened up, but she warily kept her eye on Avery, searching for an opportunity to strike.
Derec was so angry that his intentions were the same, though he was hoping he wasn’t being that obvious about it. But at the moment he was preoccupied with trying to keep Mandelbrot standing, or at least leaning against the wall, though he wasn’t sure what difference it would make.
Mandelbrot quivered as the sparks spat out of his joints and every opening in his face. His pseudo-muscular coordination was in an advanced state of disruption; his arms and legs flailed spastically and an eerie moan rose from his speaker grill like a ghostly wail. Derec pushed him flat against the wall, and was struck several times by the robot’s uncontrollable hands and elbows. Despite Derec’s efforts, however, Mandelbrot slid onto the floor, and Derec sat on him, trying to keep the writhing robot down.
But Mandelbrot was too strong, and finally it was all Derec could do to get out of harm ‘s way.
Avery, meanwhile, calmly continued to point the device at the robot. “Don’t come any closer — I can make it worse. I can even induce positronic drift.”
“What are you doing to him?” Derec repeated.
“This is an electronic disrupter, a device of my own invention,” Avery replied with some pride. “It emits an ion stream that interferes with the circuits of any sufficiently advanced machine.”
“You’re hurting him!” said Ariel. “Don’t you care?”
“Of course not, my dear. This is a robot, and hence has only the rights I prefer to bestow upon him.”
“Think not!” growled Wolruf.
“I can press a button faster than any of you can move,” said Avery, warningly.
“Why are you doing this?” Derec asked.
“Because I do not wish this robot to interfere. You see, I have stationed some Hunter robots outside this theatre. They await my signal, even as we speak. When I alert them, they will capture you and take you to my laboratory, where I shall drug you with an advanced truth serum and learn everything your mind has to tell me.”
“Will this serum help me remember who I am?”
“Derec!” exclaimed Ariel, shocked.
“I seriously doubt it. Unfortunately, the serum isn’t quite perfected yet — it’s another invention of mine — and I confess there is the possibility that it may actually jumble things up a little more for you. For a time, anyway. You may take comfort in the fact that the damage won’t be permanent.”
Derec nodded. He looked at Mandelbrot on the floor. “Sorry, old buddy,” he said.
“What?” said Avery, a nanosecond before Derec hefted a chair at him.
As the scientist ducked, Derec ran to the door, shouting, “Follow me! We’ll come back for Mandelbrot later!”
The trio ran down the hall toward the stage, toward members of the cast and crew. Wolruf was clearly holding herself back to remain with Derec and Ariel.
“Out of the way!” Derec shouted as they moved past the robots; he hoped that he could create enough confusion to slow down the robots in case Avery invoked his precedential authority and ordered them to capture him and his friends.
“Where are we going?” Ariel asked.
“You’ll see!”
They soon heard Avery angrily shouting something in the background, but by then they had reached the stage. Derec stopped at the center trapdoor and opened it. “Quick! Down here!”
“But that leads backstage!” protested Ariel.
“That’s not all,” said Derec. “Hurry!”
Wolruf leapt inside, and Derec and Ariel were quickly with her. As Derec closed the door, they were enveloped in blackness. “We’ll have to feel our way around for a few minutes,” said Derec as they made their way down the narrow corridor. “Ah! Here! This door leads to the underground conduits of the city!
Even Avery’s Hunters will have a hard time searching for us down here!”
“Not for long!” said Ariel. “Can’t they trace us with infrared?”
“It’ll still give us time!” said Derec between his teeth. “And we can use that time to figure out our next move! Let’s go!”
“All right,” said Ariel resignedly, “but I hope somebody turns on the lights.”
As it happened, the lights were the one thing they didn’t have to worry about. The lining of the underground conduits automatically glowed in the presence of visitors, illuminating the narrow spaces several meters behind and ahead of them. Things were not so elegant here. At first they saw only what they had expected: wires and cables, pipes, circuit banks, transistorized power generators, oscillators, stress and strain gauges, capacitors, fusion pods, and various other devices that Derec, for all his knowledge in electronics and positronics, could not even name. He stared at the construction in fascination, momentarily forgetting the reason why he and his friends had come here.
Derec couldn’t help but admire Avery. Surely the man was a genius unparalleled in human history; it was too bad he appeared to have lost his humanity in the process of making his dreams real.
“How much further do we have to go?” Ariel finally asked. “I’m getting tired, and it’s not too easy to get around in this silly dress.”
“I don’t know,” said Derec, breathing heavily. He hadn’t realized how tired he was. He had given all his energy to the performance, and probably didn’t have too much reserve left at the moment. “We could keep going, I suppose, but I don’t see what difference it’d make.”
“More be’ween ‘u an’ ‘ur purrsuerrs, the bedder,” said Wolruf. “Fir
ss less-on pup learrns.”
“Derec — what’s that?” Ariel asked, pointing to the illuminated regions ahead.
“What’s what? Everything looks the same.”
Wolruf sniffed the air. “Smell not the same.”
Derec moved up the corridor. As he did so, the illumination moved upward with him. And in the distance, just before the corridor was enveloped in total darkness, wires and generators began to blend into an amorphous form. Derec waved the others on. “Let’s go — I want to see what’s going on.”
“Derec, we’re in trouble — we can’t go exploring just because we feel like it.”
“I don’t know why not. Besides, this corridor only goes in two directions — this way and that way.”
The further they went, the more amorphous the materials in the conduit became, merging into one another until only the vaguest outlines of generators, cables, fusion pods, and all the other parts were visible. It was as if every aspect of the conduit had been welded into inseparable parts. Derec had the feeling that if he could open one of the generators, for example, what he would find inside would be amorphous, fused circuits and wires.
“Deeper,” he said, “we’ve got to go deeper.”
“Derec, things are definitely getting cramped here,” protested Ariel.
“She’s rite,” said Wolruf. “Furr’her down we go, the narrower the tunnel. If Hunterrs come —”
“We won’t be able to do anything anyway,” said Derec. “Look at what’s happening here! Don’t you realize what’s going on?”
“Looks like the city’s beginning to dissolve,” said Ariel.
“Ah! In actuality, the effect is precisely the opposite. The further up we go, the more the city begins to coalesce. understand?”
“Are you serious? No!”
“The ultimate foundation of Robot City is still further down this conduit. The meta-cells must be manufactured below, and they’re propelled upward in much the same way that water’s propelled through a pipe. Only more slowly.”
“Then why are all these phony machines here?”
“They’re not phony, they just haven’t been fully formed yet. The cells probably have to make it through a certain portion of the foundation before they can really begin to get with their program. You see, the atoms of metal form a lattice in three dimensions, which is why metals occur in polycrystalline form — that is, large numbers of small crystals. The cells in this part of the underground haven’t crystallized yet.
Ariel?”
She had looked away. She was nodding as if she understood his explanation, but her face was perspiring, and she had grown noticeably paler, even in the dim light. Derec reached for her as if to steady her, but she pulled away from him.
“Don’t —” she said, waving him away. “I-I’m getting claustrophobic. It’s too narrow in here. I-I’m feeling all this weight on top of me.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Derec. “The foundation is secure. Nothing’s going to happen.”
“What are we going to do if the Hunters come?”
“They may not be able to find us here. Even with infrared sensors. If the program ‘s not complete in this sector, then it’ s possible that they won’t be able to detect us.”
“Only possibly,” said Wolruf. “Even if they don’ come, we’ll hav’ to leave sooner orr la’err. Then they find us.”
Now Derec waved them both away. “All right, all right. I know all this. I’m sorry.”
“U could no’ help ur-self.”
Derec snorted, which was about as close to a self-mocking laugh as he could muster at the moment. It was bad enough that they had come to a literal dead end — they had arrived at the end of the road in more ways than one.
How he wished Mandelbrot was with them now! He felt like a callous coward, having left him behind that way. He had left in the hope that he would be able to come back for the robot, but now he feared Avery would dismantle the brain and scatter the parts all over the city, thus making it possible to rebuild him only if all the parts could be found.
Derec looked at his open palms. He had put Mandelbrot together with these hands and his brain, from the spare parts he’d had available. Now his hands and brain seemed hopelessly inadequate to cope with the problems besetting him. He could not help Ariel. He could not help Wolruf and Mandelbrot. He had been unable to make Canute confess and to bring the robot to whatever kind of justice might be appropriate. Hell, he may not even have solved the question of who killed Lucius in the first place.
Last — but at the moment the very least — he had been unable to help himself.
Wolruf made a gurgling sound deep in her throat. “Derec, a prroblem.”
“Another one?”
“Oh, yes!”
Derec looked up to see, at the edge of the darkness above them, the Hunter robots advancing.
Chapter 11
DREAMS OUT OF JOINT
DEREC AWOKE IN a place that he knew was not real. Otherwise, he had no idea where he was. He stood on a smooth copper plane extending unbroken in all directions. Above him was a pitch-black sky.
Theoretically, he should have been engulfed in darkness as well, since the copper was hardly an obvious source of illumination, but vision was no problem.
In fact, Derec realized, his range of sight extended into the ultraviolet and infrared range. When he looked down to inspect his hand, his neck joints creaked: he would not have been able to hear that sound if he had been human. For he was now a robot. His metal hand proved that beyond doubt.
Normally, such a turn of events would have sent him into a fit of deep depression, but, now that the deed was done, Derec accepted it quite readily. He did not know why or how he had changed, nor did he think the reasons mattered much. All that remained was for him to figure out what he wanted to do next.
Logically, he should walk. Since there was no logical way to determine if one direction was preferable to any other, he simply started off in the direction he happened to be facing.
And as he walked, he saw that something was growing in the distance. He walked more quickly, hoping to reach his destination that much faster, but it always remained the same distance away.
So he ran, and the something seemed to glide across the copper surface away from him, maintaining the distance between them.
He saw that at the upper regions of the something were the spires of a city, streaking against the sky as the foundation glided away. Streaking against the sky and cutting through it, tearing it, exposing the whiteness beyond. Ribbons of whiteness dangled from the nothingness, and though Derec could not reach the city, eventually he did stand directly beneath the ribbons. Reason told him that they were far away, probably at least a kilometer above him, but he gave in to the urge to reach out and touch one.
He grabbed it, and felt a flash of searing heat blaze through his soul. He tried to scream, but could not make a sound.
He tried to release the ribbon, but it clung to his fingers. It expanded. It enveloped him, smothering the copper and the blackness of the world.
Or was he falling inside the ribbon? It was hard to tell. Reason also began to tell him that this was a dream of some sort that he was living, and that it would be better if he went along with it and tried not to fight it. Perhaps his mind was trying to tell him something.
He fell through the whiteness until he came to a school of giant amoebae, but instead of being creatures of proteins they were composed of circuits laid out like a lattice. He kicked his legs and waved his arms, and discovered that he could swim the currents of whiteness just as they could. He swam with them...
… Until they swept ‘round and’round in circles, disappearing into a point in the whiteness as if it was the center of a whirlpool. Derec tried to swim against the current, but he was inexorably pulled down into the point.
He came out on the other side, surrounded not by amoebae, but by molten ore rapidly being solidified into meteors by the near-absolute-zero temperatures i
n this space. Now he was in a void where there was no current to swim. He thought that he should be afraid, yet he was facing the situation with incredible calm. Perhaps that was because in this dream he was a robot both in mind and in body His body was unaffected by the cold, and he required no air to breathe, so, except for the danger of being struck by a solidifying slag heap, he was in no danger. Hence he had nothing to fear, nothing to worry about.
Nothing, perhaps, except for where he might be going. He wished he could resist the trajectory he was taking, but there was nothing he could do about it, for there was nothing for him to grab onto or to kick against. He had no choice but to submit to his momentum, and hope to be able to act later.
He had no way to judge how much time had passed when he plummeted from the void into a dark-blue sky, nor could he explain how he had managed to fall so far, so fast, without bursting into flames upon his entry into the atmosphere.
He landed in a vast sea, and swam to a shore where the waves pounded against the rocks. He crawled onto the beach, feeling as strong and as fit as when he had first began this dream, but now a bit afraid that he might rust. However, once he had walked away from the beach and could once again see the city in the distance, his metal body was perfectly dry, and none the worse for wear.
He walked toward the city. Now it remained stationary, and the closer he came to it, the more brilliant it gleamed in the sunlight, with rainbow colors that glistened as if the towers and pyramids and flying buttresses were sparkling with the fresh dew of morning.
And inside the boundaries of the city were buildings shaped like hexagonal prisms, ditetragonal prisms, dodecahedrons, and hexoctahedrons — complex geometric shapes all, but each with its own purity arising from its simplicity. Yet there seemed to be nothing inside the buildings; there were no doors, no windows, no entrances of any kind. The colors of the buildings glistened in the sunlight: crimson, wheat, ochre, sapphire, gold, sable, and emerald, each and every one so pleasing to his logic integrals, all so constant and pure.
Yet the deeper he walked into the city, the fewer buildings there were. They were spaced further apart, until the emptiness formed a tremendous square in the center. And in the square was an array of mysterious machinery, surrounded by transparent plastic packages of dry chemicals scattered on the ground. They all seemed to be asking to be used.