by Isaac Asimov
Voices and footfalls approached. They looked around. There were no tiny crannies to escape into, nothing but corridors wide enough for trucks to be driven through. Eventually they’d be run down wherever they went, however fast they ran. And their enemies no longer merely wanted to talk to Derec and Ariel. They had something much more direct in mind.
Chapter 5
ESCAPE?
ARIEL HEARD THEM coming. Heart pounding, she looked around again. No place to run to, no place to hide. After a blank moment Derec took the Key to Perihelion out of his pocket (Ariel gasped), put it in her palm, squeezed the four corners in succession, and closed both their hands around it fiercely. Ariel pushed the button as they held their breath.
The gray nothingness of Perihelion was around them, forever and ever to the limits of vision.
Derec let his breath out. “Frost! I thought they had us!”
“So did I!”
They were in no hurry to return to Earth, yet there was surely no more boring place in hyperspace or normal space, whichever it was, than Perihelion. They looked at each other, and Ariel shrugged, as Derec wiped his brow.
“Oh, no!”
They had moved at the same time, and, releasing each other, had drifted apart. With great presence of mind, Derec lunged for her. Ariel was frozen in shock; had she reached for him at the same time, she could have caught his hand. Too late.
They looked at each other tragically. Inexorably, they drifted further apart.
Ariel felt she had to make up for it. “I’ll throw you the Key!” she cried. “You go back to Earth — forget about me!”
“Nonsense! If you do, I’ll throw it back —”
At that moment his face went blank and he contorted himself into a knot; reaching for his soft shoes, he tore them off. Writhing with a practiced free-fall motion, he turned his back to her and hurled the first shoe away. With the reaction to that throw, he ceased to recede. Now he was rotating. He allowed himself to rotate twice, studying her, then writhed again, and threw the other shoe.
After a prolonged wait they seized each other, Ariel gasping in relief. To her surprise, she felt him shaking.
“Derec, you were marvelous! I thought we were lost!”
Derec grinned shakily. “What you said about throwing the Key gave me the idea.”
“Frost, I’m glad something did.” Ariel took the Key and pressed the corners again, and, with both gripping it, pushed the button.
R. David was against the wall in his usual place.
“Frost,” Ariel said, feeling ready to collapse. She sat down, knees shaking, and so did Derec.
“What did they mean, ‘your little social study of conditions on Earth’ — the yeast farmers?” Derec asked.
Ariel had no idea. They put the question to R. David, careful not to let him know that they had been in serious danger.
He said, “I have no access to news feed, but I believe that Dr. Avery made some public announcement about studying social conditions on Earth when he first contacted Earthly authorities to transfer rare metals for money. He promised not to send in humaniform robots, and of course it did not occur to the authorities that he would enter Earthly society himself.”
“Then how did he expect to make any study of Earth society?” Ariel asked, skeptical.
“He purchased many Earthly studies of the subject, and also me. While ostensibly studying these sources, he quietly developed the medical prophylaxis with which I treated you, and infiltrated Earth society in his own person, learning what kinds of identification and ration media he would need to have to pretend to be an Earthman. Some of those he bought openly as samples for his study. In short, over a period of an Earthly year he was occasionally in the news as he came and went from Earth. And from this study he was allegedly making, I suppose that rumors may have gone abroad that teams of Spacers are studying Earthly sociology on the spot. That is, of course, very unlikely.”
“Very,” said Derec, with a grimace. “Spacers are just not interested in the subject, and if they were, they wouldn’t take the health risk.”
Ariel could not care less about Earth’s rumors. “The important thing is to get back into space,” she said.
“You’re right,” Derec said. “I’m more than tired of concrete caves and the troglodytes that live in them.”
She smiled fleetingly at the term. “So the third thing is to find out how to get to the spaceport. The first being to have those directions to the nearest Personal repeated, and the second, to find a shoe store.”
Ariel grimaced, but said, “You’re right.”
When put to the question, R. David said, “The spaceport is located near New York, Miss Avery.”
They looked at each other blankly. Of course they knew that there were eight hundred Cities on Earth.
They had been thinking in terms of one giant City covering all Earth, the natural extension of their Earthly experience.
“What City is this, then?” Ariel asked.
“The City of Saint Louis,” said R. David. “It is on the same continent as New York, so travel is facilitated. One may take the train, and for a third of the distance the way is enclosed and roofed over. It takes less than twelve hours — half an Earthly rotation, Mr. Avery.” He had detected the question on Derec’s face.
Ariel had no idea what a “train” might be, and wasn’t happy about its being enclosed — she visualized something like the expressway. She looked at Derec, who looked equally unhappy.
“Do we have the money — the rating or whatever — to go on the train?” Derec asked dubiously.
R. David said, “Your travel vouchers have not been touched, but I believe there is an inadequate amount. As Fours, you do not rate much, nor do many Earth people often travel between Cities.”
“Even though we are Transients?”
“You are Transients in this sector, but not necessarily in this City.”
“We’d better visit the Personal first,” said Ariel tiredly. “We’ll think it over when we get back.”
R. David repeated his directions to the Personals, which turned out to be in opposite directions. Rather reluctantly, they split up, and Derec left with a backward glance. Ariel walked slowly toward the women’s Personal, hoping Derec’s stockinged feet would not be too noticeable.
Since this was the Personal assigned to her, Ariel found a shower cubby with the same number as the one on her tag, and took a shower. Again, no towels; she saw a woman carrying a little cloth satchel into a similar cubby and presumed it contained a towel, combs, and so on. She wouldn’t need one, as short a time as they expected to be on Earth. She had, of course, brought a comb, though she should see about getting a brush. Fortunately, her hair wasn’t long.
She made her way back to Sub-Section G, Corridor M, Sub-Corridor 16, Apartment 21, without difficulty, hardly seeing the crowds of Earthers who swarmed through the passageways.
Derec was back before her and full of energy. Despite their brush with the mob, he wanted to go check out the “train station.” He was careful not to say so in front of R. David, who might think it dangerous, but she thought he wanted to see if they could devise a method of stowing away.
Showing them on the map, R. David gave them directions that would take them, by the route they had previously followed, to Old Town and something called the Gateway Arch Plaza. The station was beneath that. They would pass several shoe stores on the way.
Ariel felt distinctly nervous as they threaded their way again through the corridors to the junction and took the down ramp, but nobody paid any attention to them. She would have liked to have changed clothes, but their shipsuits were all they had, and they weren’t all that conspicuous. It still wasn’t rush hour, so they had the freedom of the express platforms, and went straight up to them on the eastbound side.
The clerk in the shoe store was a human, a plump, youngish woman, older than Ariel. She quirked her mouth in a half-humorous fashion at Derec’s socks and said, “Been running the strips,
eh?” She produced neat, cheap shoes expeditiously, checked his ration tag in her machine, accepted the money tag, and waved them away, calling, “Next time be more careful of the edges!”
Back to the expressway.
She heard Derec’s breath speed up beside her, as Old Town Sector came rushing toward them, but they saw none of the yeast farmers from before — less than an hour ago.
“I’ll walk the rest of the way before I’ll ride this thing into — Yeast Town,” she said, leaning over to shout at Derec.
“Yeah,” he said weakly. Ariel saw that he was staring up at the high ceiling, which was higher here than in Webster Groves. There was probably nothing overhead but the roof of the City, for here the ways were in a great slash through the building blocks. No matter — he was having a claustrophobic attack.
Ariel sympathized — she had had several of them herself. At the moment it was the crowds, not the oppressive buildings, that made her own breath come short.
Before she could attempt to reassure him, Derec gripped her arm and pointed: Gateway-Arch Plaza Exit. They descended hastily and rode the ramp down under the ways, found a sign pointing north, and followed it to a localway, also plainly marked.
Presently they entered the Gateway-Arch Plaza.
It was enormous. Gaping like rubes, they stepped out of the way of swarms of chattering Earthers, and frankly stared. The Gateway Arch itself was smaller, perhaps, than the Pillar of the Dawn on Aurora that commemorated the early pioneers, and surely was less moving than the memorial at the pillar’s base, where outstanding men and women of each generation were honored. But at a hundred ninety meters tall, the arch was no small monument. Its span was nearly equal to its height, and the roof was another ten meters above it. It was all matte stainless steel, ancient looking but in good repair.
The room that enclosed the whole mastodonic fabrication was commensurate in size, over two hundred meters in diameter, its circular walls a cliff of concrete and metal around the arch. This cliff was covered with the balconies of high-rated apartments.
Derec walked boldly toward the lower area between the feet of the arch, and Ariel followed, inwardly amused at the awe on the faces of some of the Earthmen — some showed unmistakable signs of agoraphobia, exposed to this much open space.
Below the arch was a museum dating from pre-spaceflight times, which might have been interesting, but they were looking for a train station. Quietly determined to ask no directions, they wasted half an hour, some of it in looking at exhibits. Ariel was struck by the unfinished look of the items people used in the pre-industrial age, all made by crude hand methods. Derec pointed out a plaque that stated that, in the old days, citizens had ridden a sort of tramway up inside the arch
“Agoraphobia,” he said, echoing her thought.
Ariel nodded and led him briskly out of the museum. It felt like underground to her, and the crowds of Earthers swarming around were bringing on another claustrophobic attack. She felt much more sympathetic to them and less inclined to sneer at Earthly phobias.
They had to leave the plaza itself to find the route to the station; they had been following the plaza signs and hadn’t noticed the station signs when they left the localway. The station was a level or two deeper, and a different route took them there.
There were fewer people here, but below the passenger level they found a series of freightways crisscrossing the City, which carried heavy items in bulk containers. Many men in rough clothing rode these ways in handling carts, shunting the big containers off the belts at their destinations. These freightways all traveled at a walking pace, no more.
At the station they also found the terminus of a tube system for small capsules. Letters and small items — parcel post — could be blown about the City very rapidly by this system, and Derec became quite excited by it.
He’d seen a system like this before, on a somewhat different scale. The Robot City robots had generated a tremendous vacuum as a side effect of their Key-manufacturing facility, and Derec and Ariel had ridden the vacuum tubes more than once when they were in a hurry.
But here on Earth they were using the same technology not because they had a vacuum they could use; they had to create a vacuum to make it work. In one form or another, Derec knew, vacuum tubes like these had been used since the early industrial age — and Earth had apparently never discarded their use, because on Earth they made sense.
“Much more efficient than sending a car with a robot,” he said.
It is if your houses are close together, Ariel thought. On the Spacer worlds, they were scattered.
The station seemed to deal mostly in inter-urban freight, but there was a window for passenger traffic.
They avoided it, and prowled along the cars.
The train was no moving beltway, as Ariel had expected. Derec was clearly disappointed; he had expected something like the expressway. These were cars with ridiculously tiny wheels, and after a while Derec decided that they used magnetic levitation under speed. It was a very old technique.
“Now I see what R. David meant by saying that the way is largely roofed over,” Ariel said.
“Twelve hours in one of those, eh?” Derec said, bleakly.
The cars had no windows.
“Hey! Hey, you! You kids!”
They turned, concealing their apprehension.
A rough-looking stranger approached, wearing blue canvas and a peaked cap with stripes of pale gray and darker blue-gray, very distinctive. CONTINENTAL RAILROAD, said the emblem on his chest.
“What are you doing here?”
“Looking at the train, sir,” said Derec, after a moment, trying to mimic the Earth dialect.
The other did not notice that. He closed in and examined them sharply, a beefy individual, taller than either of them and looking as if he worked out every day.
“Why?” he asked, irritably.
“School assignment, sir,” said Ariel, thinking quickly.
He looked at her sharply again in her tight shipsuit, and she realized with a despairing feeling that she no longer had the figure of a schoolgirl. But he nodded, more in appreciation of her than in agreement, and said, more reasonably, “A study of the Continental system, eh? Well, you’ll not learn much by prowling the yards. Read your books. But I can show you the marshaling yard and the loading docks. You should’ve brought visual recorders.”
Evidently their new acquaintance — Peter, or Dieter, Scanlan — had little to do at the moment and was bored. Taking them briskly back the way they had come, he showed them where the cars were pulled aside, their doors opened, and men in handling machines carried forth containers of assorted cargo.
“That lot is bulk cargo, mostly — wheat from Kansas and points north,” Scanlan shouted over the constant rumble of wheels and the whine of electric motors. “Now, over there — see those big blue cars? — that’s pigs of metals from the seawater refineries on the Gulf, down south-away. You’ll see some manufactured goods going out, and quite a bit coming in — St. Louis mostly exports food, especially gourmet items. Not a big manufacturing city like Detroit.”
What Ariel saw was that each of these big cars was crammed full of containers cunningly stacked to fill every corner, leaving no wasted space for even a rat to hide in.
“Come this way,” said Scanlan, and he put them on a tiny truck like a motorized platform.
Its control was purely manual and Ariel fought down fear as she joined the men on it. Scanlan sent it hurtling around the fringes of activity to dive into a bright tunnel, which branched, branched again, and minutes later and two kilometers away he braked to a halt at a balcony.
They looked down on the marshaling yards.
“Trains are made up here,” he shouted — it was noisy here, too.
Ariel looked, and realized why they were called “trains”: each was a long series of units like link sausages. The cars were the units. They were being driven individually along the floor to the marked
“rails” or roads p
ainted on the floor, to the trains they were to make up. Each train was made up in a specific order.
“Over there to your left — passenger train for the West Coast. Three cars in blue, with silver and gold trim.”
It was crawling slowly on its wheels toward, she supposed, the ticket window and embarking ramp.
Once in the tunnels the cars would be lifted off their wheels by the magnetic rails.
On their right was a train of a hundred cars, in various colors according to what cargo they carried. That seemed to be the ratio of passengers to freight, except that there were more freight trains than passenger trains.
“Computer-controlled,” shouted Scanlan. ‘There’s a driver in each car for safety, but the computer does most of the placing. It knows where each car goes in the train. They pick up new cars at each stop on the front end, and drop off cars from the tail. The computer also knows which container is in each car, and what’s in each container.
“Down here!”
Scanlan started the vehicle up again, whirled them down and down, braked in a flood of light. Black water lapped ahead of them, boats bobbing on it under the low ceiling.
“The Mississippi,” he said, hissing like a snake. “Transshipment docks!”
They’d seen enough, but had to submit to another half-hour of education on a subject they could not — now — care less about.
They weren’t going to be using the train.
Chapter 6
STUDIES IN SOCIOLOGY
DEREC SIGHED WITH relief when they reentered the cheerless little apartment.
“I’m — tired,” said Ariel. “I need to rest.”
“Sure, you go lie down,” said Derec, instantly concerned and quite understanding. He was exhausted and disappointed also. It had been a long day.
R. David stepped forward and unnecessarily showed her how to work the dimmer in the bedroom. It felt good to be back where robotic concern, the basis of all truly civilized societies, was available.
