by Isaac Asimov
He used a hand to wipe the water from his face, then hugged himself, shivering, against the damp cold, taking stock of his position. The overhang protected the building front only for about a meter, and it extended for perhaps three meters in either direction from where he stood.Beyond the awning, he could see nothing. The roaring water was impenetrable. The building front was no better. It was totally blank, no doors or windows. Yet, oddly enough, when he touched it, it felt warm, resisting the chill of the air. He was stuck in a world one meter wide by five meters long. The ground water had risen from his ankles to his calves, its current always pulling at him.
He stood there for several minutes, cold, teeth chattering, cursing the fate that would bring him to this hellhole. His numbness and melancholy soon, inevitably, turned to anger.
"Damn you!" he screamed, to whom, to what, he didn't know. "Why me?"
In frustration, he turned to the wall behind him. Hands balled into fists, he pounded viciously at the wall and--his hands sank right into it!
"Aaaahh!"He screamed in surprise, instinctively jumping backward.
The water cascading from the awning caught him on the face, and as he tried to duck away from it, the ground current took him down.
He went under, then came up gasping for breath. But his control was gone and he was caught in the current. It pulled him back across the street; even the street itself seemed tilted at an angle toward the aqueduct. At this point, trying to regain his footing was out of the question. Keeping his head above water was the only priority. Staying alive was everything.
He felt himself go over the lip of the aqueduct and plunge into its raging waters. He bobbed down, at no point touching bottom, then rose again, totally numb and choking as the swift current carried him away, pulling at him, sucking him ever down.
He had wanted to see the terminal point ofthe waters. He would now see it quickly--if he could stay alive long enough.
Katherine stood with Euler by the opening to the balcony, staring out at a completely opaque wall of water that made her think that Robot City didn't really exist at all, but was simply an image conjured by an overactive brain exposed to too much cosmic radiation. The rain came down in never-ending torrents, rain such as she'd never seen or even thought could exist. It frightened her, a fright that almost overcame her anger at their predicament. Almost.
"Why did he go out?" Euler asked.
"I've already told you," she replied, turning away from the incredible downpour and moving back into the apartment. "He wanted to see the city."
"But we told him it was dangerous."
Katherine sat on the couch, folding her armsacross her chest. A black hole could swallow Derec and his robots for all she cared. "Her either didn't believe you or didn't care," she said. "Why are you standing here asking me the same thing over and over when you could be out there looking for him?"
Rydberg came in from the bedroom, where he had apparently been searching in case Katherine had been lying. "Everything that can be done is being done," he said. "We appreciate your concern. Ours is every bit as great as yours."
"I'm not concerned," she said. "I couldn't care less." The robots exchanged glances. "You don't care about the possible loss of a human life?" Euler asked.
Katherine jumped up from the couch. "You mean he could possibly be . . . be . . . ?"
"Dead?" Rydberg helped. "Of course. We warned you that it was dangerous."
For the fiftieth time since Derec's leaving,she hurried back to the balcony doorway and stared into the blank wall of water. He'd had been gone for several hours, far longer than he should have been. If anything had happened to him--
"Why did he go out?" Euler asked from beside her.
"Again!" she said loudly. "That same question. Why do you keep asking me that?"
"Because we don't understand," Rydberg said, moving up to join them. "You must know that robots don't lie."
"Yes," she replied.
"Then, when we said it was dangerous, why did he risk his life?" Euler asked.
"To begin with, his definition of danger might be different from yours," she said. "But beyond that, he wanted to know about this crazy city of yours more than he was afraid of the danger."
"You mean," Euler said, "that he could havepurposely risked his life just for the sake of curiosity?"
"Something like that."
"Astounding."
"Let me ask you a question," she said, poking Euler in his chest sensors with an index finger. "If you want people to live here so much, why did you pick a place with such dangerous weather?"
Rydberg seemed to hesitate, as if he were weighing the answer he was about to give by some sort of internal scale. "The weather here is not naturally like this," he said at last.
"Naturally," she repeated, zeroing in on the key word. "Does this mean that something has affected the weather adversely?"
"Yes," Euler said.
"What?" she asked.
"We cannot tell you that," Rydberg said, and walked over to peer beneath the couch.
"Will it stop soon?" Kate asked."Probably within the next hour," Euler said. "At which time we can conduct an extensive search for Friend Derec." A thought struck Katherine. She wanted to suppress it, but couldn't. "Is this how the other man . . . David, died?"
"He may have caused the rains," Euler said. "but he didn't die from them."
"I don't understand."
"It is quite late for humans," Rydberg said, moving toward the door. "You must sleep now or risk damaging your health."
With that, the two supervisor robots moved silently into the hallway, the door sliding shut behind them.
Katherine was alone, except for the robot standing guard in the hallway outside. She moved to the couch and curled into a tight ball. "Oh, David," she cried into the sleeve of her jumper. "Why did this have to happen?"
CHAPTER 3
THE EXTRUDER
Derec rode the aqueduct like a log in a sluice, his body numb, his senses and his fate out of control. The waters raged in his ears as his entire existence turned on the simple act of trying to keep his head above water. Nothing else mattered; life had reduced itself to its essence. There was no fear, no time for it, and any yearnings to have his life pass before his eyes went unsatisfied, since he had no life to reflect upon. There was only the water and the numbing cold--and the ubiquitous companionship of Death.
His ride could have lasted a minute or aneternity--he was beyond calculating time--but when he felt himself free-falling in midair, his brain snapped to the new reality and questioned.
He was falling, surrounded by a hot, moist wind. A bare glow of light seemed to envelope him, but before he had a chance to appreciate it, he splashed into hot water.
He had gulped down water with his quickly sucked breath, and when he bobbed to the surface like a cork, he was choking and coughing, his head pounding with a heartbeat throb. He panicked, then forced himself into control when he realized the water he was in wasn't flowing, but pooling.
As he treaded water, he found himself grateful to his former life for giving him the lifesaving advantage of swimming lessons. He leaned back and floated on his back, small currents pulling him this way and that. His body ached horribly from the battering he had taken in theaqueduct; every bit of strength had drained from him.
There was a ceiling of some sort above him, tiny lights making it dimly visible. The roar of waterfalls filled the hollow cavern completely, and he turned his head to the side to get a glimpse of his surroundings.
He was a hundred meters from the edge of a large square pool that stretched perhaps a thousand meters across. Red lights set at regular intervals bathed the entire area in an eerie glow. In the middle of each side of the pool were aqueduct runoffs, four in all, their cascades shimmering like fading pulsars in the red haze. These four runoffs provided the incredible noise that churned inside his head, all of it echoing within the confined space.
Where was he? A collection point of some kind,
perhaps a reservoir. Any city needed a water supply. This was probably connected to a water treatment plant meant to sustain thehuman population that didn't live there. This only strengthened Derec's earlier speculation that this was not a city simply meant for robots. What was going on here was serious colonization.
Another realization occurred to him, too. The reservoir had saved his life. He had been showing the beginning signs of hypothermia during his wild ride down the aqueduct, but the hot water of the reservoir was thawing him out.
Why hot water? The water was definitely warmer than human body temperature, perhaps as much as fifteen degrees, and incredibly hot winds were raging through the chamber, competing with the charging runoff waters in loudness. In fact, the soothing heat and the rest were already beginning to lull his senses, and he realized that if he wasn't careful, he could end up at the other end of the physical spectrum with hyperthermia. Whether hypo orhyper, though, the results were still the same. He was going to have to get out of the water or risk overburdening his heart.
Still on his back, he churned his legs lightly while propelling himself with his arms. There seemed to be robotic movement at the far end of the reservoir, but he didn't have the strength to swim that far. Having no idea of which way to go, he simply moved toward the closest shoreline. The process was time-consuming, though, for the runoffs created their own currents.
He swam with leisure, but determination, taking the time to check out his body. He had taken a beating in his wild ride down the aqueduct, but besides general bruises, nothing major seemed to be wrong.
As he neared the edge of the pool, he could see that the runoff streams had slowed considerably, leading him to speculate that the rain had stopped outside. Fuzzy light was alsobeginning to seep in around the dark edges of the covered pool, and he realized that day had broken.
He finally reached the edge of the pool, its surface made from the same material as the rest of the city. Metal ladders were set at regular intervals around the edge, and he floated to the nearest one to begin his climb out.
The water was barely three meters from the top of the pool, and fortunately so, because as soon as Derec began his climb he knew he wasn't doing well. His body, so light in the water, felt like it weighed a ton. The combination of emotional stress, the ordeal of the aqueduct, and the overheated water of the pool had all had an effect on his body. He dragged himself slowly up the ladder, then rolled, gasping, onto the edge of the pool and lay there.
He closed his eyes, just for a minute, and he was gone. He didn't know how long he hadslept, but when he awoke, it was with a start. A loud rumble assailed his hearing. He sat up quickly, darting his head around, and saw a large vehicle moving around the pool toward him, its engine noises amplified to a roar in the cavern-like surroundings.
Standing was a problem, since Derec still felt weak. But he got up on shaky legs and moved toward the areas of light beyond the reservoir. While he was still out and on the loose, he wanted to see as much as he could. For, this time, the robots wouldn't be so quick to let him out of their sight.
As he moved toward the light, he passed open caverns that were filled with conduits for moving water. The huge pipes were twisted like knotted rope and seemed to be moving, writhing, like a snake pit--almost as if they were alive. He was taken over these areas by railed walkways that simply extended from the edgesof the pit at his approach, growing--like crystals--before his eyes.
After the pits, he passed several squat buildings where he surmised the actual water treatment was performed. Drone robots moved in and out of the facilities rapidly, mostly moving machinery in both directions. Derec briefly considered going into one of the structures to search for a terminal, but the still-approaching vehicle made him change his mind.
"HUMAN!" came a loudspeakered voice. "YOU WILL HALT YOUR PROGRESS WHERE YOU ARE. IT IS UNLAWFUL FOR YOU TO PROCEED."
He turned to the sound. It was coming from the robot-controlled vehicle that was rapidly closing the distance on him. It was time to move!
He ran past the building toward glowing walls of light just beyond.
"HUMAN!" the loudspeaker called again.He raced to the wall, his legs heavy. The entire wall seemed lit and wrapped a circle around the reservoir area. It was translucent, like a shower curtain, and he realized that it was simply so thin that outside light passed right through. He pushed on it, but it felt solid. He pushed harder, and it gave under his hand, just like the wall last night.
Just then, he saw a drone approach the wall twenty meters distant and move right through it. He hurried there, with the robots in the vehicle closing rapidly on him. He stood at the spot, seeing no entry, but when he raised his hands to push against it, the wall irised open and he stepped through into the daylight.
It was morning, bright and calm, with no sign of the deluge that had taken place the previous night. The sun was still low in the sky, but Robot City was alive and active.
He was in the very heart of it here, the hub upon which the wheel of the city turned. Hecould see the aqueduct that had brought him cutting through the city like a spoke, and he could see other aqueducts, other spokes, slicing through the wheel of the city. And he began to think of the areas between the spokes as quadrants.
Robots in large numbers hurried quickly through the streets, always going somewhere, always busy with predetermined tasks. Many of them were disappearing into the treatment plant.
He moved a small distance from his exit point, then looked back at the reservoir, shocked to find a forest there! Then he realized that the forest had been planted above the reservoir, the land area serving double duty. But why a forest? Not for robots, certainly.
Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the large, wheeled vehicle that had been tracking him within the reservoir moving through theexit point to the outside. He looked back at the city, then up at the forest. He would find escape in its random chaos.
Angling himself away from his pursuers, he ran back toward the huge reservoir building, preparing to climb one of the struts that helped support the outside edge of the forest. But as soon as he reached the place and put his hands on the arched strut, it seemed to melt away, changing into a gently sloping stairway.
He hurried up the stairs without a question and entered the forest. The ground was moist and spongy, muddying his already-soaked shoes. The trees were small, in many cases smaller than the underbrush that grew thick around them. A haze seemed to fill the entire forest, and the farther he plunged into it, the hazier it became.
Derec was no expert in vegetation, but he assumed the trees were all offspring, manygenerations removed, of trees that had once grown on Earth. Spacers, though hating to mention any connection to the planet of their ancestry, nevertheless made it a point to bring Earth vegetation and animal life to whatever planet they colonized. Where he' gotten such information, he had no idea; the small glimpses of his own mind were maddening in their incompleteness.
He wandered the forest, pushing through the haze and the dense undergrowth, feeling jittery in untamed surroundings. And he knew that these were also the feelings of a Spacer pushing through his mind. He didn't much like the forest; he longed for the order of the city. But for a human being, this had its place. Untamed but finite, aesthetically pleasing without being uncontrollable. This place existed for the aesthetics--for human aesthetics.
His foot hit something hard and uncompromising, and he tripped, going hard to softground, getting mud all over himself. He turned to the object that had caused his fall and found a small section of pipe sticking out of the ground. A fog-like haze was pumping from the pipe, the same haze that filled the entire area, and Derec began to see a master plan at work here.
He stood, then ducked when he saw a shadow moving through the haze not five meters from him. It was one of the robots. He listened and could hear them thrashing through the brush all around. They were slowly cordoning off the entire area, boxing him in.
He took a deep breath, then scrunched up int
o a ball and lay on the ground, listening as they moved near him. The forest was built over the reservoir so that condensing water could feed up to the trees from beneath and nourish the roots directly. Further, the haze was probably carbon dioxide vapor feeding the forest to promote health and growth. Wheredid the CO2 come from? Perhaps a bleed-off from their industrial processes, which could also explain the heat in the reservoir area. The set-up was sophisticated and civilized, a city built around its ecological needs. Was it all of robot design?
A metal foot clanked down just an arm's reach away from his position. He stifled the urge to rise up for a breath of normal air. Within seconds, the robot moved on.
As he heard the search party sweep past, he jumped to his feet and charged back in the direction he had come. The robots were much faster and stronger than he was, so he was going to have to make things happen quickly at this point.
He reached the edge of the forest in minutes, and rushed to the place where he had climbed up. The strut was already solid again, the steps nowhere to be seen. He looked over the edge of the forest. It was ten meters to theground; jumping was out of the question.
"You, Derec!" came a robot voice behind. "Stop now! Stop!"
He sat on the ground and dangled his legs over the edge of the strut. Steps miraculously formed again. He ran down just as several robots reached the edge of the forest, calling for him to stop.
Amidst the confusion near the water treatment facility, he saw a large flatbed vehicle, filled with what looked like broken computers, ready to pull out. He took the last steps in leaps and charged the machine, the robots behind already reaching the bottom of the stairs.
The truck pulled out before he reached it, but with a burst of speed, he caught it and jumped into the back. A small, round drone the size of his head squeaked at him from among the broken computers.Katherine stood at the wash basin, watching the lukewarm water flow from the tap, and wondered how plumbing could possibly be accomplished in a city that didn't stand still. She splashed her face with water, then stared into the small mirror that was inset above the basin. Her eyes were puffy and dark, showing the results of no sleep, but her face remained calm, remarkably calm considering the terror that had been flashing through her for most of the long night.