by Isaac Asimov
It got worse; something like eighteen hundred people must have entered in the ten minutes it took them to work their way to the entry. A turnstile barred their way. Derec boldly thrust his tag into the slot of the machine. It blinked at him (non-positronic computer, he thought), lit up with the legend TABLE J-9/NO
FREE CHOICE, and ejected the tag. Derec took it and found that the turnstile gave under pressure from his knee. Ariel followed in a moment, but there was no time to breathe easily.
Beyond stretched an enormous room.
The whole City was one gigantic steel and concrete cavern, and this was the largest opening in it that they had seen, except for the slash of the moving ways. It went on, it seemed, forever. From the ceiling, which glowed coolly, descended pillars in an orderly array, short sections of transparent wall (apparently to minimize noise) and columns apparently full of tubes and cables. Between them stretched the tables — kilometers of tables, in ranks and files. All was confusion, and the Earthers were swarming past them while they stood gaping: the gleam of light on polished imitation wood, the clatter of plastic flatware on plastic plates, the babble of thousands of voices, the crying of children. Behind manual windows to their right and left, men and women dealt with those whose feeding could not be automated.
Overhead, light-signs indicated the rows, and at Ariel’s nudge Derec started the long trudge to row J.
Because of his Spacer conditioning, he had been thinking of this kitchen as a Spacer restaurant, with maybe a dozen tables, most for four people, some for two, a few for eight or ten. But these tables each seated — he guessed fifty on each side. Even after they reached row J, table 9 was a long way away.
Hesitantly, they approached it — at least it was plainly marked — and found two seats together. The people they passed were grumbling because choice was suspended. “Too many transients,” growled someone, and they felt guilty.
“Food is probably one of the few high spots of their days,” Ariel whispered.
They took their seats and looked at the raised section of the table before them.
NO FREE CHOICE glowed to the right. On the left was a panel that said: Chicken — Sundays, opt.
Mon. Fish — Fridays. opt. Sat. On Earth, there was a seven-day week, but Derec had no idea which day was which. There being no choice, he shrugged, glanced at Ariel, and pressed the contact. The panel immediately lit with: Zymosteak: Rare, Med.. Well-D? Not Sunday or Friday, he thought. Derec chose well-done and the sign vanished, replaced with Salad: Tonantzin, Calais, Del Fuego, Pepper Tom?
Ariel shrugged, glancing at him, and they chose, suppressing smiles; neither had heard of any of these dressings.
ORDER PLACED. That sign stared at them for several minutes. The Earthmen around them were a scruffy lot, and Derec realized that he had been subliminally aware of that for some time. Earthers were short, and tended to be plain, if not actually homely. Here and there a handsome man or a beautiful woman attracted admiring glances, but they were a minority.
At least Earth people weren’t starving, as Derec had expected. He knew vaguely that it took a major effort on the part of the population and its robots — restricted to the countryside — to feed Earth.
Standard food synthesizers were too expensive, and used much too much energy for Earth to afford. But a large minority of these people were fat, and many more were plump.
At this table they waited patiently, not talking or laughing as at other tables.
“Probably a table for Transients who don’t know each other,” Ariel said, low-toned. There were only a couple of quiet conversations at the table.
Presently, the food ended their embarrassment; a disk slid aside in front of each of them and another rose into position, the second one holding a covered server of plastic. When they removed the servers from the service disks, the latter closed smoothly.
The food looked like steak, baked potato with shrimp sauce, and a salad with dressing on the side.
Crusty, faintly yellow bread. It smelled marvelous and, to Derec’s amazement, it was natural. His first bite confirmed that: the rich, subtle, varied flavor of real food was unmistakable. And yet it wasn’t real food, either. Zymosteak? It was plain these people normally got meat only twice a week, with a chance at it on two more days. Four days out of seven.
“I can’t believe it’s so good,” Ariel said under the cover of the clatter of Earthers opening their servers.
Derec hadn’t realized he was so hungry; it hadn’t been that long since breakfast. Perhaps he’d gotten so bored with synthetic food that he’d been eating less and less.
He turned his attention to another problem. They had been served with amazing rapidity. He couldn’t remember service on any Spacer world, but he was sure it wasn’t this fast. There had to be automation behind the scenes. Of course, with no free choice, they had merely to drop the chosen kind of dressing into the server, clamp the lid down, and pop it into an oven for the few seconds required to cook the zymosteak to the desired degree. Probably ran it through the oven on a belt. With a good oven, there could have been ice cream on the same plate and it wouldn’t have melted before the meat was done.
Even so, row J was the last: ten rows of ten tables each; a hundred tables, each seating a hundred. This commissary was equipped to feed ten thousand people. Derec mentioned as much to Ariel, who was as dumbfounded as he. It wasn’t at capacity now; perhaps there were only six thousand people in the room.
On Aurora, a sports arena that seated ten thousand was a big one.
Halfway through the meal, Derec found his breath coming fast: it was too much. He felt trapped in this concrete cavern, felt that the spacious room was closing in, the ceiling, not low but not high, was the lid of a trap, the mobs of unconscious people around him weren’t real. They probably went all their lives without seeing the sun or open air, he thought, and that made it worse. With difficulty, he fought off the panic, panting.
When they had finished their meals, they put the servers and flatware back on the disk and pressed the same contact again, as they’d seen their neighbors do, and watched them vanish. The exit was on the opposite side. Once outside (an elaborate turnstile permitted exit only), Derec breathed more freely.
They were a little at a loss, this not being the way they’d come in, but the sound of the ways was obvious, and they soon found their way back to them.
“The trouble is, there’s no quiet, no private place to talk,” Ariel complained as they hesitated.
“I know. We want to go to the spaceport, but I don’t feel like unfolding the map here.”
“Look ….” Ariel fell silent until a chattering cluster of pre-teenage girls had passed, not even noticing them. “Look, the signs indicate that it isn’t ‘rush hour’ — whatever that is — R. David mentioned it.”
“Right, and lowly Fours like ourselves can ride the express platforms for many hours yet.”
They made their way up the strips of the local, down again to the motionless strip between the locals and the express, then up again, faster and faster. Derec realized uneasily that if they were to trip and fall at these speeds they might be seriously injured. Nor was there an attentive robot to rush forward and grasp their arms if they should fall. Earthers never fell, he supposed. They learned when very young.
On up they went, till the wind whipped their hair and stung their eyes, up and up to the top, where each platform had a windbreak at the front of it. There they found an empty one behind a platform occupied by a man with the Mad Hatter’s huge hat and sat, breathing heavily. Ariel grinned at him and Derec laughed back.
Carefully, in the shelter of the windbreak, they unfolded the map and studied it. They knew that they were in Webster Groves Section, proceeding east, and quickly found the spot, just as they passed under the sign that said SHREWSBURY SECTION. But study the map how they would, they saw no sign of any spaceport.
Derec looked blankly at Ariel. “It’s got to be here somewhere!”
A group of teen
agers, mostly male, passed by two platforms away, one fleeing, the others pursuing, expertly negotiating the strips. A whistle shrilled, over the shrilling of the wind, and a blue-uniformed man waved his club and set off in pursuit of the children, who scattered down the strips. Adults scowled at them.
They studied it all over again, until the signs overhead said TOWER GROVE SECTOR.
“Possibly it isn’t on the map,” Ariel said. “Earthers are prejudiced against Spacers. They might not like to advertise the port.”
“If you have business there, you’re told how to find it, I suppose,” said Derec glumly. “We should have asked R. David how to get there.”
The expressway was not straight, and as Derec looked down now, he saw that the local had spun off; another came in, made a turn, and paralleled the expressway in its place. A storefront gave way to a palatial entry that faced the oncoming expressway obliquely; above the entry was a glowing marquee on which the back view of a woman wearing tight pants appeared. She vanished, replaced by the slogan IF I WIGGLE. She reappeared, peering archly over her shoulder at the viewer: WILL YOU FOLLOW?
Derec supposed that there were as many people in view as there had been in the kitchen, and the ways were not half full, maybe not a quarter full. “Rush hour must be when the ways are full,” he said.
“Yes. If they all go to work at the same time —” Ariel said, and he snapped his fingers.
“Rush, indeed.” They looked about and tried to picture the swarming mobs going up and down the strips multiplied by three or four.
OLD TOWN SECTOR.
“You know,” said Ariel, “Daneel Olivaw might have sat on this very platform, or at least ridden this very way.”
Derec nodded. He had no memory of ever having met the famous humaniform robot, Daneel Olivaw.
Daneel was designed to look exactly like a man — like Roj Nemmenuh Sarton, in fact, who had built his body. He had helped the Earthman, Plainclothesman Elijah Baley, solve the murder of Dr. Sarton, and later had gone to Solaria, where he had helped Baley solve another murder.
Han Fastolfe had built two humaniforms, the first with Sarton’s help. The intricate programming that enabled a humaniform to play the part of a human being, hampered as it was by the Three Laws, was a triumph of robotics that had never been recreated. Fastolfe had refused to make more than two such robots, and one had been deactivated. Daneel Olivaw, he supposed, was still extant, somewhere on Aurora.
“Look at that hat.”
Derec looked, then gaped. They had seen odd hats all along, but this woman’s head was a flower garden, except that many of the “flowers” were bows. As in all Earthly hats, though, there was a prominent band for the insertion of the rating ticket that entitled them to such things as a seat during rush hour.
“You know, maybe some of these people know the way to the port,” Ariel said.
That was a thought Derec had hoped she wouldn’t have, but he nodded tightly. Frankly, he didn’t want to speak to anyone. Perhaps because they were Earthers and he was a Spacer — with all his prejudices intact. It was a sore point with him that only Earth was exploring and settling new planets. It was not that he objected to Earth’s doing that, he objected that the Spacer worlds weren’t. Not these people’s fault, but —
Standing up, he leaned out and got the attention of a young man — a little older than himself, he thought — who was making his way toward an unoccupied platform.
“Pardon me, sir, could you direct us to the spaceport?”
The other’s rather blank expression broke into one of handsome good cheer. “Hey, gato, you do the Spacer accent ex good!” he exclaimed. “Too bad you don’t have the fabric to match, but that speech’ll get you on any subetheric for the asking!”
Derec concealed his confusion, lifted an eyebrow. “Yes?”
“Oh, ex, ex, that haughty look’s the highest!” The other glanced around, lost his cheer, and said quietly,
“But, look, this’s fun and all, but I wouldn’t try that speech in Yeast Town, savvy?” And with that, he was gone.
They looked at each other and shook their heads, dumbfounded.
“Do you think you could ape that — that speech of his?” Derec asked. Ariel shook her head again.
They were in a much more exalted district than Webster Groves; this Old Town Sector looked spanking new, with neat, clean, shiny buildings and prosperous-looking shops. Places of entertainment seemed more common and more lavish, as if the people who lived here had more leisure and more ration points, or money, or whichever it took, for entertainment.
“What did he mean, ‘subetherics’?”
Derec thought a moment. “Hyperwave broadcasts, I think. I’m not up on that technology, but I think at one time hyperwave transmission was called that. Probably cheaper than piping cables through all these man-made caves.”
Derec’s voice thinned as he glanced up to where the sun should be but wasn’t. Steadying his voice, he added, “I think he meant we could be entertainment stars pretending to be Spacers for Earther novels.”
They grinned at each other.
EAST ST. LOUIS SECTOR.
“What does the ‘ST’ mean?” Neither knew.
“Derec, we’re getting a long way from … home-kitchen. Maybe we should turn around and go back.”
Derec wasn’t happy about that either, but was reluctant to give up.
“Maybe one more try,” he said.
He looked around for someone to ask, and was struck by the buildings in this new sector. They seemed industrial; blank fronts, a minimum of signs, a lot of which didn’t even glow. All the color and gaiety seemed to have gone out of the City. Half the people on the ways had left in Old Town Sector, and no wonder.
Those who remained were far less prepossessing. They were poorly dressed and few wore hats, which meant, as Derec had gathered, that they had no passes for platform rides. Low ratings, like he and Ariel.
“What’s that funny smell?” Ariel asked.
Derec sniffed, became aware of an odor. Not bread. “Something living. Maybe the ventilators don’t work so good here.”
“You mean we’re smelling people?”
Derec felt a little sick himself at the thought.
“Pardon me, sir, could you direct me to the spaceport?” he asked a sullen man.
“Buzz off, gato.”
Seething, Derec waited for another prospect. A woman seized a seat on a platform with such an angry, triumphant expression that he crossed her off. Then a group of young men and women approached, four men and two women, the latter in gaudy, tight pants, the former all in brown corduroy. Derec repeated his question.
The first man looked at him sharply. “Whattaya tryina pull, gato? Spaceport! Spacer speech! Whod’ya thinkya are, huh?”
Clamping his jaw on his anger, Derec said, “I merely asked —”
“Oh, you merely ahsked, didja, haughty har? Whod’ya thinkya are, I asked you, gato.”
“I just wanted —”
“Clamp down, haughty har, don’t go gittin’ high horse with me. Keep a civil tongue, and also a polite face, hear?”
Seething, Derec fought for control. and another Earther spoke. He had a warm, dark-brown complexion and the eyes of a hawk: racial types had remained more distinct on Earth than on the Spacer worlds.
“Hey, Jake, I think he’s rilly a Spacer. Both of’em. Lookit those ex fabrics.”
He and Ariel were wearing plain shipsuits of synthetic fabric, a quiet, glossy substance in different shades of gray, hers lighter than his. Nobody had remarked on their clothes before, but nobody had looked closely at them.
Jake stared in amazed disbelief. “Naw!”
“Yeah, Jake,” one of the women shrilled, looking closely at Ariel. “And look at’em, both of’em — tall and handsome, like. Spacers!”
“Spacers!” said Jake in almost reverent tones. His eyes sharpened. “I always wanted t’meet a Spacer. Just to tell’em what I think of’em!”
“Ye
ah!”
“You think you’re so smart, doin’ your little social science investigation of ‘Earther’ society, huh, Spacer?” This time it sounded like a spit.
Derec’s anger cooled in apprehension; Ariel had unobtrusively taken his arm. “Thanks for your help, but we’ve got to be going.”
Again his accent aroused their ire.
They all began to jabber hostilely as he and Ariel stepped to one side, were struck by the wind, and fell behind on their slower strip.
“Stop! We ain’t done talkin’ atya!” cried Jake, and the Earthers swarmed off the platform level and started down.
Ariel gasped and Derec realized that they would soon be below them, on the slower strips, between them and the locals.
“Back up!” Derec said tensely, and in a moment they were squeezing between platforms. Their persecutors caught the change of direction instantly and were in full cry.
He hurried Ariel rapidly down the strips on the inside, their enemies gaining rapidly with a lifetime’s expertise. At the motionless median between expressways, he looked around wildly. There was no possibility of their climbing the reverse ways and staying ahead.
“In here!” said Ariel, and they dived into a kiosk and ran down the strip, not waiting for it to carry them.
They ran under the ways, hearing voices crying “Spacer! Spacer!” behind them.
At the other end, they had a choice of a moving strip that would take them up beside the expressway, or a maze of corridors at this level: poorly lit, poorly cleaned, sparsely populated, and thick with nameless organic odors.
There was quite a mob behind them, by the sound. Panting, they ran into the first corridor, took the first branching, then the next. They paused, listening. A derelict lay on a low platform beside a wide freight door, scruffy and unshaven. ST. LOUIS YEAST, PLANT 17, said the door.
Derec had a sudden flashing memory of having viewed a novel set on Earth in the medieval days, when a derelict like this turned out to be a crusty, cheerful, picaresque, heart-of-gold character who saved the day for the hero and became his closest buddy.
This one had more the attitude of a rat. Rousing himself with surprising energy, he listened, rubbed his graying whiskers, and, growling something about “stirring up the damn yeast farmers,” he dived into a small door beside the freight door, and slammed it. They heard it lock.