Asimov’s Future History Volume 7

by Isaac Asimov

  “But the hyperwave noise is about to drive us all nuts, Synapo. Haven’t those metal morons heard of continuous modulation?”

  “Of course. That’s the way they arrived,” Synapo said. “But their discrete modulation of hyperwave and our small discomfort with the crosstalk on our continuous channels is a minor problem. The real problem is your construction of the node compensator. It’s a mistake, Sarco. You’ll have deactivated the aliens only temporarily. And if I’m right, as I am more and more sure I am, you’ll have succeeded merely in deactivating a bunch of servants, and probably not for long, but you will have irritated their masters sure as the Great Petero is our guide.”

  “And the Cerebrons, what have they come up with? The Myostrians are at least taking action.”

  (In some contexts, the plural Myostrian tribal name is better translated as Myostria, and the racial name Ceremyon is better translated as Myoceron to reflect the Myostrian point of view.)

  “We had a caucus yesterday afternoon,” Synapo said. “All agree I’m close to a breakthrough with Wohler-9. Whatever you do, don’t close the compensator. You’ve already achieved better than 95% compensation. Meteorologically, you’ve already won.”

  “You’ve got until sunpeak day after tomorrow to achieve your breakthrough, Synapo.”

  There was no point in arguing further. Synapo rolled out from under Sarco and drifted off to the left while climbing a temperature gradient to a slightly cooler stratum. That inverted gradient so early in the day was a measure of the meteorological disturbance — the residual effects of the alien creations — the completed dome would eliminate.

  After an hour of charge, he was still quite hungry, but nonetheless he balled and dropped, wind whistling through the feathery frond of his cold-junction, until he neared the top of the dome. Then he slowly spread his wings, braking in a swoop that carried him on a complete circular inspection of the dome.

  He made one more pass around the dome, lower now, looking for any sign of spacetime instability. Why did he care? The dome could nave leaked like Nimbar and it wouldn’t have mattered to him. It was a habit, though, a matter of professional pride, pride in his race, pride in Sarco’s people and the technology they shared with the Cerebrons.

  As he rounded again toward the open sector, he braked to a slow gentle glide and, stirring hardly a wisp of dust, came to rest beside the Avery robot who called himself Wohler-9.

  He now had a fairly good idea what an Avery robot was. He had a modest grasp of the language called Galactic Standard, and even though it was certainly not standard in their part of the galaxy, they had become aware of it from the occasional bursts of discrete hyperwave that had reached them beginning centuries before. Translation of the language had been slow and incomplete, lacking anything that might have served as a Rosetta stone, but they had acquired a feeling for the language, in terms of the mathematical development of the species, and then with Wohler-9 on hand — not quite an analogue of the Rosetta stone — their fluency had progressed to the modest state Synapo now claimed.

  “Good morning, Wohler-9,” Synapo said.

  The robot slowly swiveled his head until the eyes bore intently on Synapo, but otherwise he gave no sign of recognition. That did not distress Synapo. In fact he expected it. He now knew that the robot did not consider him a master, and so he was not worthy of attention unless he somehow violated the robot’s basic programming: a prime directive and three guiding principles.

  The prime directive was to erect the monstrosities that had played such havoc with their weather by energy and particulate emissions, and which were now covered and almost neutralized by the compensator. The disturbance had been almost as great as that caused by the impact of a giant meteor a quarter-century before.

  The function of the monstrosities was still not clear, other than being creations for the masters. With their benign weather — brought under control eons before — the notion of shelter and buildings, if it had ever existed, had long since disappeared from the racial memory of the blackbodies, lost in prehistory.

  “You properly informed your masters of our interference and asked for assistance more than a hand of days ago, if we translated your message correctly. Each day I have asked if you have received further instructions among the numerous messages that we have monitored in both directions. Your responses thus far have not been reassuring. But now we have reason to suspect that you have received some clarification of the situation, if we understand a message you received yesterday morning. I informed you of that message yesterday afternoon. I now ask again. Have you received further instructions?”

  Still the robot did not answer. He had swiveled his head back to watch the procession of robots and vehicles passing out of the dome, heading north across the plain bordered by the forest.

  “We will complete the compensator — the dome — tomorrow, thwarting your prime directive,” Synapo added.

  That brought a response. Wohler-9 turned to face Synapo.

  “Miss Ariel Welsh will deal with you when she arrives this afternoon,” Wohler-9 said, and swiveled back to watch the evacuation.

  There was no point in attempting further dialogue. Synapo took off and headed for charge altitude and a Cerebron caucus.

  Chapter 2

  THE DOMED PIT

  ARIEL WELSH, IN her typical fashion, came in too fast on a trajectory that was accordingly too flat, and she skipped off the planet’s atmosphere like a flat stone hitting the surface of a millpond.

  “Darn,” she said, which seemed to understate the situation somewhat. She turned the controls over to Jacob Winterson, saying, “Here, you do it.”

  “You should have asked me earlier, Miss Ariel,” the robot said. “You must save yourself for the negotiations with the aliens. But I do have a few suggestions with regard to your approach trajectories in general, which should benefit...”

  “Put a lid on it, Jake!” Ariel said impatiently. Nonetheless she watched the robot closely and with a great deal of admiration, not only for his style of piloting but for his superb appearance as well. She particularly liked to watch his biceps flex.

  She had acquired the robot only months before, the whim of a spoiled rich girl, teasing a jealous boyfriend and rebelling against the mores of a bigoted Auroran society.

  Robots like R. Jacob Winterson were not popular on the planet of Aurora. Neither the men nor the women of Aurora wanted to be upstaged by the perfect comeliness and superhuman strength of a humaniform robot. Humaniform was the term their creator, Dr. Han Fastolfe, had used to describe them, searching for a better term than humanoid, which hardly sufficed to describe Jacob. The Avery robots, like the one she had once known as Wohler on the planet Robot City, could also be described as humanoid, but they were a far cry from Jacob.

  The simulation of a well-muscled body that was Jacob Winterson was a reflection of that era when bodybuilding was the vogue of a stagnant Auroran society.

  She watched him now as he plugged himself into the ship, a small two-man jumper with a cockpit just big enough for the two of them. She should have used the ship’s computer to set up the proper approach trajectory, just as he was about to do, instead of coming in cowboy fashion, hands on.

  She watched the thick muscles at work in his bull-like neck, watched the flexing of biceps the size of piano legs, corded by thick veins reaching across his powerful forearms.

  She had prevailed upon the ancient Vasilia Fastolfe, the estranged daughter of the famed Or. Ran, to delve deep into the catacombs below Aurora’s Robotics Institute and bring out Jacob from among the thirteen humaniforms left over from the aborted campaign to sell them to a recalcitrant Auroran public.

  She had never seen Jacob naked, though Derec didn’t know that. Vasilia had brought him up from the depths fully clothed. And then he seemed so real — so alive in the human sense — that Ariel had never explored beneath the surface of the ample wardrobe she had provided him. It seemed too much an invasion of privacy.

  The idea
appealed to her, she had to admit, but not so strongly as to overcome her loyalty to Derec. In her mind, her teasing was not a form of disloyalty, no matter how miserable it made Derec. Like the myriads of young women who preceded her, she had no idea how miserable it really made him or she wouldn’t have teased him.

  On their third orbit, Jacob located their destination: the beleaguered robot city Wohler-9 had described by radio after they had jumped into the system. Derec was apparently not in the city at the time. Ariel had counted on hearing Derec’s voice.

  Their destination was the second-largest iridescent domed pit they had seen on the planet, and the only one with a pie-cut of city buildings that extended to the center of the shimmering pit.

  Jacob laid in a trajectory that would bring them through the atmosphere to a landing on the open plain half a kilometer north of the dome and near the path of evacuation of the Avery robots; and then, with the help of the jumper’s computer, he executed the maneuver flawlessly. They disembarked less than fifty meters from the line of evacuation and commandeered a large courier robot carrying two packages.

  “Return to the city;’ Ariel said as she sat down on one of the packages and motioned Jacob to sit down on the other one. She would like to have said, “Take me to Wohler,” but the non-positronic brain of the courier would not have been capable of interpreting and executing that command.

  As they neared the open sector of the dome, towering a kilometer above them, Ariel said, “Can you raise Wohler on the radio, Jacob?”

  “I have, Miss Ariel,” Jacob replied. “He is standing over to the right of the opening in the dome.” The robot pointed and said, “There by that large open lorry.”

  Up close, the paradoxical nature of the huge iridescent bubble became more dramatic as Ariel looked down through the flickering wall of the dome into a pit that seemed to underlie a city built on solid ground. Looking through the wall and the opening at the same time, the city seemed to float above the excavation. It left her feeling decidedly uneasy.

  “Take us to Wohler,” she said to the courier. They disembarked at the lorry and walked up to Wohler-9, an imposing gold machine standing at the front of the lorry and facing the stream of evacuating robots.

  “I am Ariel Welsh,” she said.

  “I know,” said Wohler-9.

  “What is going on here?” Ariel asked.

  “We are moving the necessary materiel for construction of a second Compass Tower and city on the other side of the plain, five kilometers away.”

  “Why?”

  “This dome will soon be closed by the aliens, blocking all traffic into and out of the city.”

  “Why?”

  “That is not clear.”

  “Where is Derec Avery?”

  “I do not know, since he is not on this planet.”

  Ariel took a moment to absorb that. “When did he leave?”

  “He has never been here,” the golden robot replied.

  Now she felt slightly ill. She had misunderstood that weak relay from a central computer, which had led her to believe Derec would be here. She had to keep talking, or scream. She had thought she would see him so soon.

  “Are all the supervisors here ninth generation?” she asked.

  “No. I am the only ninth. All others are eighth generation.”

  “How did that come about?”

  “Wohler-l sacrificed himself to rescue you from the side of Robot City’s Compass tower during a life-threatening thunderstorm, Miss Welsh.”

  The Burundi’s Fever Dr. Avery had exposed her to — amnemonic plague, so-called — had robbed her of the links to her memory. The memory had still been there, but she had lost the connections to it. Derec had helped restore those links by providing clues from their mutual experiences. That particular experience involving Wohler-l must have been exceptionally potent, for now her mind orchestrated that clue into an unnerving symphony of emotion as the experience condensed into consciousness. The guilt of causing the termination of that magnificent golden robot, laid on top of her misunderstanding of the relayed message from this planet, left her momentarily faint.

  She swallowed hard to regain her composure and then said brusquely, “What is the nature of the dome? Why not simply destroy it?”

  “A simple demonstration will suffice to answer your question, Miss Welsh,” Wohler-9 replied.

  He unclipped a meter-long, chrome-plated crowbar from the side of the lorry and started walking toward the edge that bordered the right side of the opening in the dome’s glimmer.

  Ariel and Jacob followed him, and as Ariel approached the interior of the dome, getting a little ahead of Wohler-9 in her impetuous fashion, she could see up close the soft blackness of the lining, a blackness that demarcated the end of the ground and the beginning of what seemed open space. Looking down at it sent her into a dizzying subjective vertigo. She seemed to spin in that black space as it drew her down, sucking at her mind.

  “Under no circumstances come closer than half a meter, Miss Welsh,” Wohler-9 said as he casually moved his arm in front of her. With that warning she seemed to come to her senses, and she moved back out so that she was facing the edge from a distance of a few meters; her head cleared, and from that position she could now see along both the inside and outside walls.

  Wohler-9 then approached the edge of the wall to almost that half-meter limit himself. He stopped then, facing the inner wall, and said; “And don’t become confused. The wall may seem deceptively far away.”

  He took a baseball batter’s stance then, and with a lusty swing that brought the crowbar around in a horizontal arc perpendicular to the wall, he struck the edge of the dome with the middle of the crowbar. Without a sound, the edge of the dome, like the edge of a supersharp tool, cut the crowbar neatly in half. The far end of the crowbar sailed off. The near end stayed firmly in Wohler-9’s hands as he completed his swing.

  Then he casually tossed the remnant toward the inside wall.

  Ariel’s eyes had naturally followed the flight of the far end of the crowbar until it hit the ground and stopped skidding. She looked back just as Wohler-9 tossed the piece left in his hand toward the interior blackness.

  That piece seemed to curve in toward the blackness a fraction of the distance it would have traveled if he had tossed it straight up in the air with the same force, and then it came shooting back out on a parabolic course obviously calculated to hit no one. It landed behind him a distance equal to the distance it would have traveled in front of him if the wall had not been there.

  “Now, a second demonstration will point up and clarify the dome’s external characteristics,” Wohler-9 said.

  He picked up the half-crowbar that had just sailed back out of the blackness, walked over, tossed it into the lorry, and then unclipped two sections of a tubular pole from the side of the vehicle. When he fitted the two sections together, he had a pole about five meters long. From a locker he took a large piece of white cloth that he unfolded and tied to the pole to form a square flag a little less than four meters on a side. With the flagpole in hand, he walked along the outside of the dome until he was three or four meters from the edge of the opening. Ariel followed him.

  They were walking along the edge of a deep, shimmering hemispherical pit two kilometers across and a kilometer deep. From that viewpoint there was no evidence of the city that they knew existed inside the shimmer.

  “Under no circumstances let any part of your body touch or project into the transparent dome,” Wohler-9 said. “That part of you would go through and never be the same again. Now observe the flag.”

  He pushed the flag through the dome’s glimmer. It seemed to disappear.

  “Perhaps it appears to be gone,” he said, waving the pole, “but look carefully at the far side of the pit.”

  At first Ariel could see nothing unusual on the other side, but after a moment, after looking more carefully, she finally saw a tiny white flag waving, far away, two kilometers away, on the other side of the pit
.

  Wohler-9 laid down the pole so that it still projected into the dome. It did not lie flat on the ground. The near end hung suspended, slanting into the dome at the ground. The tiny flag on the other side of the pit had disappeared into the grass.

  “Two further observations,” Wohler-9 said, “for which we’ll use the lorry.”

  He left the pole projecting into the dome, retrieved the other half of the crowbar from the deep grass, tossed it into the lorry beside the first half, and stepped in to stand at the driver’s station. Ariel took a seat immediately behind the golden robot and Jacob stepped up to stand beside Wohler-9, who immediately took off down the west side of the dome, staying well away from the edge of the pit.

  They were almost halfway around the dome before Wohler-9 spoke again.

  “We should be coming to it now,” he said.

  And then Ariel saw the white flag lying in the grass with the pole sticking out of the dome a few centimeters above the ground.

  Wohler-9 stopped the lorry.

  “You don’t need to get out.”

  He stepped down from the lorry, picked up the pole carefully, as though it were a fragile memento, walked back, and offered the flag end to Ariel.

  “Take hold of the end,” he said.

  When she did, he moved his end as though to bend it in her grip, and it snapped in two.

  “Passing through the dome distorts the crystal structure, setting up fault lines with very little strength. Now one last observation, this time inside the dome.”

  He drove back the way they had come and then drove through the opening, close to the right side. The traffic pouring out of the dome gave way smoothly, shifting to its right to accommodate the lorry, as though a computer were directing all the traffic — which it was, of course: the city central computer.

  “We’ll take the perimeter route to avoid bucking the traffic coming down Main Street,” Wohler-9 said, “even though it will be a little longer this way, half-pi-times longer.”

  Wohler-9 drove rapidly to a point half-way around the perimeter of the dome. He stopped at the same wide street: Main Street, which approached the dome as close as any. Ariel looked back down the street and saw the Compass Tower framed in the opening of the dome.