by Isaac Asimov
Derec faltered for a starting point, said at last, “You remember our argument just before we left, when I wanted to use the animals Lucius had created as the starting point for a real biological ecosystem, but you had the hunter robots kill all of them instead? Well, when we boarded the ship, I told the computer to access my files on balanced ecosystems, and to... well... to make one based on what it found there.”
Avery visibly considered his response to that revelation. His fists clenched and unclenched, and the tendons in his neck worked as he swallowed. Mandelbrot took a step toward Derec, readying to protect his master should Avery decide to attack him physically.
Avery noticed the motion, scowled, and lashed out with a kick to the robot’s midsection instead. The hollow clang of shoe against metal echoed in the control room. Concurrent with the kick, Avery shouted, “Why do you always have to do this to me? Just when I think I’ve got something running smoothly, you go and throw sand in the works. Literally.” He waved at the screen, still showing desert, but at such a low angle now that the atmospheric disturbances between it and the ship made it shimmer as though they were actually standing in its midday heat.
Mandelbrot had rocked back with the kick, absorbing the blow so Avery wouldn’t hurt his foot, but that was his only move. Derec looked from his father to the robot and back again. In a way, Mandelbrot was Derec’s first real achievement in life. He had reconstructed the robot from parts, and in the years since then the robot had grown from a servant to a companion. Perhaps for that reason, Avery had mistreated the poor thing since the day they had met. Derec had been about to apologize for his mistake with the city, but now, in answer to Avery’s question, he said simply, “Maybe it’s a family trait.”
They stared at one another for long seconds, their anger weighing heavy in the room, before Ariel said in disgust, “Boys.” Dismissing them and their argument, she stepped around Derec to stand beside Wolruf’s chair, saying, “Can you find any sign of the city at all?”
“Not visually,” the alien admitted, “but we ‘ave other methods.” She spent a moment at the controls, during which the viewscreen image zoomed out again, blurred, shifted to false color imaging, and displayed what might have been a color-coded topographic map.
“Definitely getting neutrino activity,” she said. “So something’s still using microfusion powerpacks.”
Derec relinquished the staring match in order to see the viewscreen better. “Where?” he asked.
“Everywhere,” Wolruf said. “Many sources, scattered allover the planet. Even more beneath the surface.”
“Has the city gone underground?” asked Ariel.
“We’ll see. “Wolruf worked a few minutes longer at the controls, explaining as she went. “I’m trying penetration radar, looking for ‘ollow spots. And sure enough, there they are.” On the screen a shadowy picture showed the familiar rectangular forms of a city.
“What’s on the surface above them?” It was Avery, his tone almost civil.
Perhaps as a reward, or perhaps out of her own curiosity, Wolruf replaced the radar image with the visual once again and they found themselves looking down on a wide, flatbottomed river valley. The river that had carved it meandered lazily through stands of trees, past low bluffs covered with grass and bushes, and on without hindrance out of the viewscreen’s reach. No remnant of the city that once covered the planet’s entire surface marred the now perfectly natural setting, and nothing visible in normal light indicated that below it lay anything but bedrock.
The sight of bare ground without city on it rekindled Avery’s ire. “And just how are we supposed to get inside?” he demanded.
Without looking up at him, Ariel said, “There must be access hatches or something.”
“And how do we find them?”
“By asking.” Mandelbrot paused for the half second or so it took for everyone to look at him, then added, “I am now in communication with the city’s central computer. It confirms Ariel ‘s assertion: elevators to the surface have been provided in the new city plan. It can direct us to anyone of them we wish to use.”
Wolruf laughed the gurgling laugh of her kind. “What difference does it make? It’s all the same anyway.”
“All except the Compass Tower,” said Avery. He looked from Wolruf to Derec. “Provided it’s still there.”
“It is,” Mandelbrot replied. “The original city programming was inviolate in its case. It is the only building on the planet that remains above the surface.”
“Then that’s where we’ll go.”
Wolruf turned to the controls. “Easy enough,” she said. “Zero degrees latitude, zero longitude. It’s just after dawn there, so we have light. We can make it on this orbit if we go now.”
“Then do it. The sooner we get down, the sooner I can get my city back to normal.” Avery favored Derec with a last crusty look, then stalked out of the control room.
Derec grinned at Ariel and shrugged his shoulders. “Oops.”
She giggled. “‘Oops,’ “he says. “You changed the surface of an entire planet with a single order, and that’s all you have to say about it? Oops?”
Coming from Avery, those words would have stung, but Ariel meant no harm and Derec knew it. She thought it was funny, as did he. Robots were always misinterpreting their orders, always doing things you didn’t expect them to do; this was just an extreme case. Even so, it wasn’t anything to get upset over. They would figure out why the city had done what it had, correct the problem, and that would be that.
“Deceleration coming up in seven minutes,” Wolruf warned.
Derec looked out the viewscreen. Wolruf had aligned the ship so they were aimed just above the horizon behind them in orbit. Internal gravity had kept the ship’s occupants from feeling any of her maneuvering, as it would keep them from feeling the braking thrust, but Wolruf’s warning carried with it an implicit suggestion: time to strap in. Cabin gravity compensated for planned motion like rocket thrust, but it was slow to react to unexpected shifts. Air buffeting on reentry would still throw them around, as would any last-minute maneuvering the gravity generator couldn’t anticipate.
The ship understood Wolruf’s meaning as well. A week earlier it wouldn’t have — while attempting to keep the starship from responding to every comment as if it were an order, Derec and Avery had inadvertently made it ignore the alien’s orders as well — but they had since fixed that. The ship had functioned perfectly the entire way home, and it did so now. When Wolruf issued her warning, two bumps rose up in the floor behind and to either side of her control chair, molded themselves into more human-style chairs, and swiveled around to allow Derec and Ariel to seat themselves. When they were comfortable, waist and shoulder restraints extruded themselves from the arm and back rests, crossed over the chairs’ occupants, and joined seamlessly to hold them in.
Mandelbrot remained standing, but the ship grew a holding bar beside him, which he gripped with his left hand. It seemed inadequate, but with the energy of a microfusion powerpack behind that hand, he wasn’t going anywhere either.
No doubt Avery, wherever he happened to have gone, was also being coaxed into a chair, and the three unresponsive robots in the hold were probably being restrained in some way as well.
The observers in the control cabin watched the planet roll by beneath them while the countdown ran out; then the descent engine fired and they watched it roll by a little slower. They could hear the soft roar of the nuclear engines through the not-quite-soundproof hull, but that and the changing perspective as they began to fall toward the planet were the only indications that something was happening,
As they lost orbital velocity and picked up downward velocity, their apparent speed began to increase. The horizon grew flatter, and they seemed to be rushing away from it faster and faster. Wolruf turned the ship around until they were again facing in the direction of motion, and they fell the rest of the way into the atmosphere. The howl of air rushing past replaced the roar of the descent engine.
Wolruf was an excellent pilot. She had to be; if she were anything less, the robotic ship wouldn’t have let her near the controls, for the ship could have landed itself perfectly without her assistance. That it allowed her to do so without its assistance was a supreme compliment, one which Wolruf proved she deserved only seconds from landing.
They had dropped down through a layer of high, thin cloud, and were gliding now on wings the ship had grown once they’d reached air thick enough to use them in. The ship had reconfigured its engine into an atmospheric jet, which Wolruf let idle while they bled off the last of their orbital speed. Through the viewscreen they could see an undulating sea of treetops rushing by beneath them, and off in the distance a glittering flat-topped pyramid that had to be the Compass Tower. Wolruf steered to the right of it, swinging the ship in a wide circle around the tower while she examined the forest for landing sites.
There were none. The canopy of trees was complete. As she completed the circle, Wolruf turned her head toward Mandelbrot and asked, “So where are we supposed to land?”
“On the —” Mandelbrot started to reply, but Derec, who had not looked away from the viewscreen, saw a sudden flash of movement directly ahead and shouted, “Look out!”
There came a loud thump and a lurch not quite compensated for by internal gravity. Wolruf snapped her head back toward the viewscreen just as another fluttering black shape swept toward them and another thump shook the ship.
In the next instant the air seemed filled with frantic, flapping obstacles. They were huge birds of some sort, easily three or four meters across. The ship shuddered under impact after impact, and ragged sections of the viewscreen went dark as the outside sensors were either obliterated or simply covered up by their remains. Wolruf howled what was no doubt a colorful oath in her own tongue, pushed the throttle all the way forward, and pulled back on the flight controls to take the ship above the flock. Three more birds swept toward them. Wolruf ducked, but so did the birds; there came a triple hammer blow to the ship, and suddenly they heeled over and began falling.
“Engine failure,” the autopilot announced.
“Grow another one,” Wolruf commanded it.
“Fabricating.”
Wolruf struggled to right the ship, got it into a glide again, and peered out between the dark patches in the viewscreen. “We’re too low,” she muttered. “‘urry up with that engine.”
“I am transmogrifying at top speed. Engine will be operational in four minutes.”
“We don’t ‘ave four minutes!” Wolruf howled, then immediately added, “Give me more wing.”
“Expanding wing surface.”
Derec looked over to Ariel, found her looking back at him with wide eyes. “We’ll make it,” he said, surprised at how calm his voice sounded. She nodded, evidently not trusting her own voice, and reached out a hand toward him. He realized that no matter how calm he had sounded, he was gripping his chair hard enough to leave finger depressions in its yielding surface. He unclenched his hand and took hers in it, holding more carefully. Together they looked back to the viewscreen.
The treetops looked as if they were only a few meters below the ship. The view directly ahead was obscured; Wolruf weaved the ship back and forth to see what was in their path. Between one weave and the next an especially tall tree loomed up seemingly from out of nowhere, giving her only time enough to swear and bank sharply to miss it. The ship lurched as the lower wing clipped another treetop, but wing proved stronger than wood, and they flew on. Wolruf leveled them out again and pulled back gently on the flight control to give them more altitude. They were still moving fairly fast, but slowing noticeably now.
“We really need that engine,” Wolruf said.
“Two and a half minutes,” the autopilot responded.
“We’ll be down by then,” she muttered. She looked to her left, out a relatively unobscured section of viewscreen, and came to a decision. With a cry of “‘ang on!” she banked the ship to the left, held the bank until they were aimed directly at the Compass Tower, then leveled off again.
“The tower is too narrow,” the computer began. “You have too much airspeed to land on it without reverse thrust —” but it was too late. The Compass Tower came at them, a slanting wall rising well overhead, visible now through the clear spots to either side and above. Wolruf held their angle of approach until it seemed they were about to smash headlong into it, then at the last moment pulled back hard on the control handle and brought them up almost parallel to the slanting wall.
The pyramid-shaped tower rose up out of the jungle at about a sixty-degree angle. They hit at about fifty, give or take a few degrees. The violent lurch of impact threw everyone against their restraints, and even Mandelbrot took a step to avoid losing his footing; then with a screech of metal sliding on metal they skidded up and over the top edge of the tower.
Cabin gravity had died completely in the collision. They felt a sickening moment of weightlessness, then another lurch as they smashed sideways onto the flat top and continued to skid along its surface. All four of the control room’s occupants watched with morbid fascination as the far edge drew nearer.
“Frost, I should’ve gone comer to comer,” Wolruf growled, and for a moment it seemed as if that would be their epitaph, but as they slid across it the surface of the tower grew rougher ahead of them, and the ship ground to a halt with four or five meters to spare.
Derec found that he had nearly crushed Ariel’s hand in his own. He would have if she hadn’t been gripping him almost as fiercely herself. Breathing hard, neither of them willing to test their voices yet, they loosened their hold on each other and flexed their bruised fingers.
Wolruf let out a sigh, pulled her seat restraints loose, and braced herself to stand on the tilting floor. “Well,” she said, “welcome ‘ome.”
Some hours later, Wolruf stood at the base of the tower and peered out into the dense jungle surrounding it. She had begged off from the congratulatory dinner Ariel had suggested, claiming stomach cramps from the anxiety and excusing herself to go take a run to stretch her muscles. She fully intended to go for a run, if only to guarantee her solitude, but in truth the reason she wished to be alone was not stomach cramps but shame. Despite her companions’ congratulations — even Avery had commended her for her flying skill, while making a not-so-subtle jab at Derec for creating the birds that had made that skill necessary in the first place — despite their heartfelt thanks, Wolruf knew that it was she, not Derec, who was ultimately responsible for the accident in the first place.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, to circle low above a forest and not watch out for birds. Especially an unfamiliar forest, full of unfamiliar and unpredictable species. If she’d pulled a stunt like that at home, she’d have been kicked out of the training academy so fast her tail wouldn’t even have been caught in the slammed door.
Yes, she’d shown some quick thinking afterward, had pulled their collective fat out of the fire, but all the praise she got for that bit of fancy flying simply galled her all the more. Her initial mistake had nearly killed them all.
“So you learn from your mistakes,” she growled in her own language, quoting one of her old instructor’s favorite phrases, but hearing the guttural gnashing and snarling of her native tongue brought a sudden pang of homesickness, and she cocked back her head and let fly a long, plaintive howl.
An echo bounced back at her from the trees. Then, faintly, coming from far deeper in the jungle, she heard an answering cry.
A cold shiver ran down her back at the sound of it. It wasn’t exactly an answer — not in words, at any rate — but the meaning was just as clear as her own howl had been. You are not alone.
And just who might be making so bold an assertion on this planet so recently filled only with robots? Wolruf had no idea. The odds of it being a member of her own species were no odds at all; she was the only one of her kind in human space, and she knew it. But whatever mouth had voiced that cry belonged to a creature at least
similar to herself, and it had given her an open invitation for companionship.
At the moment she wasn’t feeling picky. She took a deep breath, tilted her head back and howled again, forgoing words for deeper meaning: 1 am coming. Not waiting for an answer, she struck off into the trees.
Ariel heard the howling from her room in the apartment they had chosen practically at random from among thousands in the underground city. The windows were viewscreens, currently set to show the scene from partway up the Compass Tower, and they evidently transmitted sound as well. Ariel had been brushing out her hair; she stopped with the brush still tangled in a stubborn knot of dark curls, stepped to the window, and listened. Another howl echoed through the forest, and another. One was recognizably Wolruf, but not both. A bird added a shriek of alarm — or perhaps derision — to the exchange.
Some primitive instinct triggered her hormonal reflexes, dumping adrenaline into her bloodstream, readying her to fight or flee should either need arise. She felt her pulse rate quicken, felt the flush of sudden heat in her skin.
The howls came again.
She swallowed the taste of fear. She was ten levels below ground! “So strange, to hear live animal sounds here,” she whispered.
Derec lay on the bed, one arm draped over his eyes and the other sprawled out at his side. He shifted the one enough to peer under it at Ariel and said, “It is. I think I like it, though.”
“Me too.” Another howl made her shiver, and she added, “As long as I’m inside, anyway.”
“Don’t get too attached to it. Avery’ll probably have the whole thing covered in city again inside of a week.”
Ariel tugged at her brush again, got it through the tangle, and took another swipe at it. “Do you really think he will?”
“I imagine. He sounds pretty intent on it.”
“Couldn’t you stop him? Your order has precedence. If you tell the robots you want it to stay the way it is, they’ll obey you, won’t they?”
“Maybe. I don’t know if it’s worth it.”
