by Isaac Asimov
Derec!
After a moment she asked, hesitantly, half knowing it was wrong, half fearing it was wrong, “Husband?”
“Why, of course,” said he, smiling. He looked so thin, the smile was a grimace on his wasted cheeks.
Her heart bumped painfully, and she felt a pricking in her eyes. One of his eyes closed and opened as he continued confidently, “Some things come back faster than others, they tell me — not much of a compliment to me that our wedding wasn’t the first thing you remembered!”
Ariel smiled and thought: Avery! She couldn’t remember how that name of all names was stuck on them — she knew he hadn’t been going under it. But no doubt there was a logical explanation that she would remember in due time. She remembered now their escape from Robot City, their use of the Key, leaving Wolruf and Mandelbrot, and their arrival on Earth in a sparse apartment.
Still smiling faintly, she leaned back and said, “I do remember now, but it’s all a little faint — like, like a remembered dream. I hope you won’t quiz me on it till I’ve had time to remember more.”
“Of course not,” he said, and the instant he had completed the phrase, a robot broke in.
“The doctors’ directions are that you not attempt to force the memories. It would be better, Mr. Avery, if you never questioned her about your past or hers.”
“Yes, I’ve been told. Thank you,” he said, with true Spacer politeness toward robots. Here in the hospital, the medtechs and nurses called them all boy!
“So when can I get out of this place and — and out?” she asked, feeling the suffocating terror of claustrophobia closing in. Gamely, she fought against it. It had been her constant companion since arriving in the hospital, and all during her illness she had battled it. If not for tranquilizers, she’d have lost her mind while losing her memory.
“Well, you’re still pretty weak physically, and the doctors are not sure yet about your memory. They want to keep you here for a couple more days just on mind games. After that — I dunno. R. Jennie, do you know?”
“Mrs. Avery must have several days of physical therapy before she can safely leave the hospital, Mr.
Avery,” said the robot. “As for her memory, and her mind generally, I have not been informed.”
“If I don’t get out of here soon, I’ll go mad!” she said with a sudden vehemence that startled her. There was an impulse to resist what her conditioning told her was a lapse into madness, but she had had all she could take of concrete caverns and crowds of — of troglodytes. “I want to see the sun again, and breathe air, and — and feel the grass, and —”
Abruptly she was weeping, for in the midst of this catalog of sights that she had not seen since her memory began, there came a sudden demanding vision: an image of a garden, somewhere; of bright light and flowers and warmth, drowzy warmth, with bees humming sweetly on key, and the scent of orange blossoms. Someone she loved lay just out of sight.
Ariel turned over and wept passionately for some minutes, her face in her pillow. She felt a hand on her shoulder, not a robotic hand, and felt faintly grateful, but was too wretched to turn.
A detached, floating calm gradually washed away her tears, leaving her tired but spent. Tranquilizer; the robots never gave her more than a few minutes to weep. They usually allowed her that — or she’d have gone mad from the inability to express her emotions at all.
When she turned, Korolenko was there, frowning in conversation with — Derec, she must remember always to call him. That was right, that was what the Earthers called him. But there was another reason, which she couldn’t quite recall, why she must not use his true name. Or did she know his true name, after all? She had forgotten so much, could she trust that memory too?
Avery! she thought, remotely astonished. The drug made all emotions remote.
She wondered vaguely where Dr. Avery was now. Still on Robot City, she supposed. For a moment she felt an ironic amusement at the thought that they had been using his apartment, his robot, and his funds on Earth. Then she knew that this was an old amusement, she’d had this thought before; and with that thought, she remembered having had the amusement before.
“Memory is like drink,” she said to the uncomprehending robot. She felt a little light-headed.
The nurse and a robot stepped aside as they spoke together and Ariel looked, shocked, at … Derec.
“Why is … he so — thin?” she demanded abruptly.
“Mr. Avery? He had been under a strain, Mrs. Avery. He has been worried about you and has not been eating sufficiently.”
“Does he have —” Her heart stopped, started painfully. “— Burundi’s fever?” Again her heart shook her.
“No, Mrs. Avery. He is merely under a strain.”
“He’s sick,” she said.
“No, Mrs. Avery.”
“He is sick,” Ariel said positively, peering at him narrowly with the observant eyes of one who has recently passed near to the gates of death. “He is — dying.”
Nurse Korolenko heard enough of that to frown at her, and one of the robots — R. Jennie, Ariel thought — went to the control board at the head of the bed, but merely checked the readings.
“Derec is a young fool who has neither been sleeping nor eating, and who has spent all his time brooding over you,” said Korolenko, angry not at her or at Derec, but at his stupidity.
“There’s nothing else to do in that stupid apartment but stare at the ceiling,” Ariel said, irritated on his behalf. Why did he keep staring at her with eyes like holes in space? “Frost, there’s not even a trimensional there.”
“You wanted to experience life as Earth people do, and apparently low-rated Earth people at that, so you have no more than they do,” Korolenko said, shrugging.
Wanted … to experience …? She turned eyes in inquiry on … Derec, who shrugged also, grimacing ruefully.
“Perhaps you don’t remember that the Institute wiped our memories temporarily before we came to Earth, so we wouldn’t be able to reveal their techniques,” he said.
Ariel could only stare in amazement. “When you are well enough to travel, we will leave. Of course, since we’ve been discovered here, our purpose of sociological study is negated. And once back on Aurora, we will have our own recorded memories reimplanted.”
She had heard of none of this. The Institute? Institute of what? Study? Of Earth? But, own recorded memories reimplanted.... Ariel leaned back and for a moment thought tears would leak from her eyes.
“So you’ve lost your memory twice over, but it’s only temporary.”
“I’d like to know just how that’s done,” growled a baritone voice. After a moment Ariel identified it: Dr.
Powell. She had heard it often enough in the past weeks. “I know, I know, you haven’t the foggiest — only a brief layman’s description that doesn’t describe.”
When she opened her eyes, they were all around her bed, with R. Jennie at the controls.
“Well, young lady, your request for a visit to the outdoors is a bit … unusual.” He visibly repressed a shudder of distaste at the thought, and Ariel, fascinated, realized that to this man the outside was more fear-inspiring than the claustrophobic City was to her.
“We can’t very well add you to the list on a Settler Acclimatization Group, and the only other people who go … outside are the odd Farming, Mining, and Pelagic Overseers. They are solitary as well as agoraphilic, very strange types; they wouldn’t welcome an addition. Certainly not a sick Spacer. And there’s nobody else to take care of you.”
“Robots?” she asked weakly, looking at R. Jennie.
The doctor frowned, shook his head. “It’s difficult to move a robot through the City without having it mobbed and destroyed. Robots are being restricted more and more each year; we have half as many here now at Towner Laney than when I was an intern. That leaves only your husband, and frankly, within a couple of days you’ll be taking care of him.”
“I’m all right,” said Derec with a flash of
irritation that for a moment brought back the companion of the hospital station — Ariel couldn’t remember the name, but she remembered the station — and of Robot City. “What’s the signal coding of the local office of the TBI?”
“The what?” Dr. Powell stared at him. “The comm number? Why would you want to call the Terries?”
From his tone it was obvious he had guessed, and seethed at the thought.
“To get authorization to have robots moved through the motorways, and for permission to leave the City, if only for a short period.”
“Hmmph! Medically —”
“Medically it would do her good, Doctor,” said the nurse quietly.
“True, damn it, but we need to be sure that her mental condition — the implants —”
“We can’t keep bringing her back and forth, I admit,” said Korolenko.
“Ariel, could you … hold off till tomorrow?” Derec asked.
Tomorrow … she was so tired, from inaction and drugs, that she’d sleep till then anyway … Ariel could have stood anything for a tomorrow in the sun.
“Oh, yes, yes.” She’d be good, she’d
Ariel had a moment of vivid memory, herself quite young, promising her mother that she would be very, very good. Was that when she’d been given her first robot? Or was that Boopsie, the pup?
When the first vivid reexperience faded, she looked up and they had drawn apart. It was no matter; it would be all right tomorrow.
“Never saw myself as nursemaid to a couple of Spacers and a robot,” said Donovan. The agent-in-charge had not trusted any of his men to go outside.
The hospital had an emergency entrance and egress for ambulances, and was a major junction on the motorways. R. Jennie carried Ariel down in its arms, Ariel having chosen that over being wheeled, strapped to a gurney, or in a chair with wheels.
The hospital had supplied an ambulance, but the Terry eyed it with distaste. “We’ll use the Bureau car,”
he said. “There’s room for four of us, robot or no.”
R. Jennie gently put Ariel into the back seat and got in beside her, the car creaking and sinking under the weight until the suspension system analyzed the imbalance and compensated for it. Derec and Donovan got into the front seat, and the agent took the controls and sent them surging silently down a ramp and into a lit but dim-seeming tunnel.
For a moment Ariel fought a scream, tensing; the claustrophobia was worse in such tight passages. But she fought it off, helped by the speed of their passage. Signs blurred past soundlessly as the Terry tapped more and more of the beamed power. Once the ceiling lit up in bloody light, and winking yellow arrows along the walls gave obscure warning. Then a blue car whipped by in the other direction, Donovan having avoided it with the warning.
“Like the models we trained on,” murmured Derec, glancing back at her.
For a moment she was blank on that, the she remembered the roofless roads and the emergency vehicle monitors, the remote control sweaty in her hand, and the laughing students crowding around. But that was nothing like this dim, empty wormhole.
GLENDALE, KIRKWOOD, MANCHESTER, WINCHESTER, BALLWIN, ELLISVILLE, the signs flowed past, as fast as the expressway would have taken them. Ariel ignored all the labyrinthine branchings and windings that twisted obscurely away right and left out of sight, peering past Derec to see as far before them as possible.
The tunnel was a rectangle of dim light, two glowing tracks overhead and a pair of glowing, beaded tracks on the sides, the last being the glowing signs, fading into tininess.
At last, though, there came an interruption in the shape of the tunnel. It got dark at the limit of vision, the darkness outlined in light. Presently the outline of light appeared as various warning signs. The darkness was a ramp, leading up.
Donovan slowed sharply, causing R. Jennie to lean forward and prepare itself for a snatch at the controls.
“Don’t worry, boy,” said the Terry, grinning but not looking back. Ariel had him in profile. “I’ve driven for thousands of hours, faster than this, and no problems.”
“Twenty-one point three percent of all major traumas to enter Towner Laney Memorial Hospital occur in the motorways,” said R. Jennie, unperturbed. “Fewer than twenty percent occur on the ways. A few thousand humans use the motorways; seven million use the ways.”
“Damn, I always hated know-it-all robots,” grunted Donovan, taking the ramp with unnecessary flair.
“Could never stand to live on any Spacer world. A man should have the right to go to hell in his own way.”
The car eased to a stop at a barrier. Donovan played a tune on his computer controls and the barrier opened. He drove through, they wound a complicated path that apparently avoided heavy traffic — there were thunderous rushing sounds through the walls, but no traffic in their motorway — and they were at a huge entry in the outer wall.
Kilometer-long lines of great trucks full of produce, some robot-driven, most computer-controlled, roared in with noisy, huge tires but silent engines and dived into the City just below them. They were on a higher ramp, one of a dozen that leaped out of the City from high and low. Donovan stopped the car well back from that light-blazing gap.
“You’ll have to walk from here,” he said abruptly. “Car won’t go any further — no beamcast beyond the barrier.”
Chapter 13
ROBOT CITY AGAIN
“PAULINS,” SAID R. Jennie. “They are used to cover machinery in the fields against rain and dew. There are no tents available in the immediate vicinity of St. Louis. Perhaps in a day or two there will be a tent.”
The plasticated canvas of the big paulins worked as well as a tent, strung over a couple of poles and tied to a tree limb. It was needed more for shade than shelter. This move to the country had not been a simple one, nor could they keep it up for more than a day or two.
But it was such a relief!
Ariel could tell that Derec felt the same sense of escape that she did. The sky of Earth was wide and blue and very high, and little puffy clouds ambled slowly across it, all framed by the pointed opening of the “tent.” The sunlight was just right. The plants were the familiar green of Earth life everywhere, and they too seemed just right. Except in greenhouses, she had probably never seen Earthly plants in the natural light of the sun in which they evolved. Even the heat was not unpleasant.
“We won’t need a tent, if we have to wait that long,” said Derec grimly.
“You should return to the City as soon as you can,” R. Jennie said. “Mrs. Avery is far from recovered from the fever.”
Ariel felt quite recovered from the fever, though her memory was returning slowly. Weak as she undoubtedly was, she thought with concern, she could have wrestled Derec two falls out of three and won. But he said nothing about his own condition.
“Everything’s so … ordinary,” said Ariel, looking out at the kind of birds and plants and small animals she had seen all her life. A squirrel is a squirrel, and sounds just the same on Aurora. Even the shrilling of the unseen insects was familiar. Humans had taken their familiar symbiotic life-forms with them to the stars.
She had expected Earth to be more exotic.
The reality was a relief more than a disappointment.
“It must have been a bad time for you,” she said to Derec, when R. Jennie had stepped out to the … kitchen. They had been supplied with something called a “hot plate” and a dielectric oven.
Derec moodily watched the robot prepare the packaged meals, designed for people with high enough ratings to permit them to eat in their own apartments. This was luxury for their rate.
“Bad, well.” He shrugged, clearly not wishing to discuss it. “I did learn one thing from R. David: there’s a spaceship belonging to Dr. Avery in the New York port. If we could get there —”
“How, if our rating doesn’t permit us to travel that far?”
“We’ll have to get him to make ID with higher ratings for us —”
R. Jennie stepped under
the opening with a tray holding coffee and juices. When she had gone, Ariel said, “I hope they don’t discover the apartment.”
“I suspect the Terries know all about it, but won’t make trouble. They want us gone before we get mobbed or something. We’ve been very lucky.”
“Couldn’t we ask Donovan for assistance?” she asked wistfully.
“We could. I thought of it,” Derec said, broodingly. “But that’d be above his level, surely. If Earth can ignore us, it won’t be so badly embarrassed if we’re discovered here, investigating — or spying on — Earth people. But if they have helped us in any way, they can’t deny having known about us.”
“Helping us would be seen as condoning our presence,” she said grayly. “I understand.” Politics seemed to be the same everywhere. “So what can we do? Get new ID — will the Terries spot that, do you think?”
“Frost, I don’t know —”
R. Jennie gave them fruit cups and whipped cream, returned to the kitchen, a rustic scene in the frame of the tent opening.
The fruit was good, but unusual — compotes served in what she thought of as unsweetened ice cream cones. It was like eating warm ice cream with strong fruit flavors. All yeast, she supposed.
“If they do spot us at it, I suppose they’d look the other way. But what worries me is that it would alarm them. They’d know we weren’t telling everything, they’d realize that R. David — or someone — has ID
duplicating equipment. They might well raid the apartment.”
Ariel thought about that for a moment. As long as they weren’t arrested and the Key to Perihelion taken from them, it didn’t matter.
“Oh. The Key is focused on the apartment,” she said. “We’d be unable to retreat to it.” She remembered well the occasion when they’d had to do so.
“We will be in any case; we couldn’t begin to explain our reappearance,” Derec said. “They’d guess too much —”
“Zymoveal,” said R. Jennie. “There is also a chicken wing for each of you. Chicken soup, made of real chicken with yeast enhancement. Bread, real potatoes, gravy.”