by Isaac Asimov
Wohler-9 led them now to the dome wall opposite the end of the street and handed Ariel a pair of binoculars as he pointed to a small bright object in the soft darkness of the inner wall.
Ariel put the binoculars to her eyes, and with the focus wheel at the infinite setting, she could just barely make out a shape that had the appearance of a small two-man flier headed toward them with its landing lights on.
“This is our final test of the dome, which we began earlier this afternoon,” Wohler-9 said. “Right now the flier is held by the gravity of the black concavity at a virtual distance of four kilometers. It is headed toward us, but held motionless by the black concavity with the flier’s impulse engines throttled back to 75% capacity, equivalent to an acceleration of ten gees. We plan to bring it in now. Its fuel is almost depleted.”
Ariel had a hard time taking the binoculars away from her eyes. She turned to hand them to Jacob.
“Here, I want you to record this,” she said. “I want you as a witness. Derec’s not apt to believe any of this.”
“Thank you, Miss Ariel,” Jacob said, “but with my 50-power binocular vision I have already recorded the unusual operation of this flier.”
Ariel was tired. It had been a long day already. Altogether too much for one day. Too much sensory stimulation, too many strange ideas, too much emotion. She missed Derec and felt inadequate to the challenge presented by this alien world.
“Unless you have further exhibits and demonstrations, Wohler,” Ariel said, “I would like to shower and freshen up. Later, after some dinner, you can give me a detailed report.”
“I have just ordered in the flier, Miss Welsh,” Wohler-9 said. “We shall now proceed immediately to your apartment.”
As they drove down the broad street toward the Compass Tower, the faint sound of the flier grew louder. Ariel turned to watch its lights growing brighter now in the soft darkness surrounding the city. She had a hard time taking in everything she had seen in the short time she had known Wohler-9.
Then she could see the flier growing larger with her naked eye, until it came hurtling out of the wall and screamed by overhead, spiraling up over the Compass Tower and out the opening in the dome.
Chapter 3
WOHLER-9’S STORY
THE LAWS OF ROBOTICS
1. A ROBOT MAY NOT INJURE A HUMAN BEING, OR, THROUGH INACTION, ALLOW A HUMAN BEING TO COME TO HARM.
2. A ROBOT MUST OBEY THE ORDERS GIVEN IT BY HUMAN BEINGS EXCEPT WHERE SUCH ORDERS WOULD CONFLICT WITH THE FIRST LAW.
3. A ROBOT MUST PROTECT ITS OWN EXISTENCE, AS LONG AS SUCH PROTECTION DOES NOT CONFLICT WITH THE FIRST OR SECOND LAWS.
HAN FASTOLFE, AN INTRODUCTION TO ROBOTICS,
CHAPTER 1, ANCIENT TECHNOLOGY.
“NOW, WOHLER, I would like to hear this from the very beginning,” Ariel said.
She had just sat down to eat dinner. They had arrived at the apartment an hour before — a small two-bedroom flat on the second and top floor of a small building on Main Street, halfway toward the opening in the dome from the Compass Tower.
Jacob stood quietly in a wall niche near the entrance to the apartment. Wohler-9 was standing attentively on the other side of the table from Ariel.
“I was the seventh and last of the supervisors to arrive by Key teleportation on the morning of...” Wohler intoned when Ariel interrupted him.
“No, Wohler, not in quite that much detail,” she said.
“You do not want it from the very beginning, Miss Welsh? You would like more of a summary?”
“Yes. And confine the summary to your interactions with the aliens and their erection of the dome.”
“Very well. We began cityforming the planetary surface with construction of the Compass Tower on the open plain one-point-zero-two kilometers from the nearest forest vegetation.
“We had progressed to the third floor of the Compass Tower when an unusual incident involving a witness occurred at the edge of the forest.”
Ariel interrupted him. “A witness robot?”
“Yes, Miss Welsh. To alert us to the migration of planetary life into the construction arena, we had established a rapid circular patrol of twelve witnesses on a perimeter two kilometers in diameter centered on the Compass Tower.
“The unusual incident involved destructive bisection of a witness as it passed near the forest.”
“Bisection, Wohler?”
“Yes, Miss Welsh. The witness was cut in half. Just before the incident, that same witness had been observing the flight of several of the aliens we now call blackbodies to a point near the forest about twenty meters above where the incident occurred.
“Those observations by the witness constitute its last transmissions to core memory over the comlink.”
“Switch to memory detail, Wohler,” Ariel said quietly.
“The blackbody flight pattern began just after the preceding witness had passed by. A blackbody would fly to a point about twenty meters above the incident point, stall out, collapse into a ball, and drop to five meters above the ground. At that point it would spread its wings and resume flight, swooping down and back up into the air, narrowly missing a collision with the ground.
“A careful inspection of the witness’s transmission shows a faint shimmering in the air coincident with the blackbody’s resumption of flight. The shimmering progressed rapidly toward the ground from the point of flight resumption. The performance was repeated by a succession of blackbodies, and as the witness approached closer, it became apparent that on each cycle, the shimmering proceeded not only to the ground, but also back up, traversing the perimeter of a thin vertical area that grew taller with each successive pass. The pattern was repeated rapidly by twenty-one blackbodies before the witness arrived. The blackness we see from the inside was not visible to the witness as he approached. He was looking at the blackbody construction almost edge-on, but slightly outside, moving in for a close-up view.”
“The record ended at that point, of course,” Ariel said.
“Yes. Since that time, witness records show that to be the pattern of blackbody operation in constructing the dome. As the construction progressed, the intersecting arcs traversed by the shimmer, and the point to which the blackbodies flew to begin each pass, rose in the air until it reached its present location. That operation now begins at midmorning at a height of a little more than a kilometer directly over the Compass Tower and lasts for one hundred twenty passes of the blackbodies, which generally takes a little over an hour.”
“Hour?”
“An ancient term from the vocabulary file. It means one-twenty-fourth part. The blackbody I conversed with used my access to central’s files to search for an exact translation of their terminology, one-twenty-fourth part of the period of planetary rotation.”
“And do they divide that further, as we do with our centads?”
“Yes. Their next division, into sixty parts, can be labeled ‘minutes’ according to central. The conversion of those units into our decads and centads gives, for the hour...”
“I am quite capable of making that conversion, Wohler.”
“Thus construction of the dome begins each day at ten AM, and...”
“Ten AM?”
“At ten hours antemidday, or more exactly in the ancient terminology, ante meridiem, being before noon. Their day is divided into two twelve-hour parts: AM, before noon, and PM for post midday or after noon.”
“Didn’t it seem odd to your alien that he could find terms that seem to describe their technology in our ancient history files?”
“No. By my recording, specifically in that regard, he remarked, ‘How satisfying to find our own circadian rhythms — the metabolic divisions of our natural clocks — so faithfully reproduced in another species.’”
“It seems darn odd to me,” Ariel said. “But to get on with this, at the time of the incident, the witness robot was sliced in half by the first elements of the present dome as its momentum carried it past the edge, just as the crowbar wa
s cut in half earlier today.”
“Yes,” Wohler replied.
“You had had no interaction with the blackbodies until then,” Ariel said.
“That is correct.”
“But then you began a dialogue.”
“No. Not immediately.”
“But not to do so was to violate the Third Law, Wohler.”
“On the contrary, Miss Welsh, we chose to comply with the Third Law by retaliation.”
“But, Wohler, that violated the First Law, which protects intelligent life.”
“No, Miss Welsh, it does not. It protects humans.”
“It protects Wolruf.”
Wolruf was a dog-like alien, a friend of both Ariel and Derec. They had been through several unpleasant experiences together, starting with an alien pirate by the name of Aranimus who had held all three of them prisoner at one time. That was when they had first met Wolruf.
“But only because Master Derec chose to make an exception,” Wohler-9 said. “Dr. Avery’s original programming made no such exceptions. The first law now protects humans and Wolruf. But our definition of a human being is quite narrow. It certainly does not include the blackbodies.”
Dr. Avery was Derec Avery’s father and the erratic, egocentric scientist who had created the original planetary Robot City. He had suppressed his teenage son’s memory and subjected him to irrational experiments in bizarre situations on and off the Robot City planet. Derec had learned a great deal about himself, but Avery left Robot City without restoring Derec’s memory.
“Proceed, Wohler,” Ariel said. “How did you retaliate?”
“We attempted to stop construction of the dome by intercepting the flight path of the aliens, ramming them with a one-man flier, but it was not entirely successful. The alien was destroyed, but so was the flier and the robot pilot. Spectrographic and flame temperature records support a hydrogen explosion as the cause of failure.”
“So then you started a dialogue,” Ariel said.
“No. Logic dictated that we determine why a hydrogen explosion caused the failure, so we decided to trap and examine an alien.
“At night, the blackbodies convert into silver balloons which they anchor to the tops of trees. We successfully captured one which had anchored to a tree on the very edge of the forest five kilometers away. We easily unhooked its anchor line after cutting the tree down.
“However, in order to examine the alien, it was necessary to first remove the balloon which surrounded it. Again a hydrogen explosion destroyed the alien and the surgeon when he attempted to cut the balloon away with a laser scalpel.”
“It figures,” Ariel said with a sigh. “So then you initiated a dialogue. Surely.”
“No. One or more of the aliens had been confronting robots all around the Compass Tower construction site for three and a half days, but our programming did not require us to grant recognition, and we were, of course, quite busy erecting the Compass Tower, which had to be completed before work on the general city could begin. Understandably, we paid no attention to their confrontations, until I personally was confronted by one of the blackbodies. That happened immediately after we lost the surgeon and his laser scalpel. It then occurred to me, when I was confronted, that by conversing with the alien, I might find out what the surgeon was seeking, and I was then compelled by the Third Law to do so. The Third Law says...”
“I know, I know,” Ariel said. “So then you initiated the dialogue.”
“No. Surely it is clear by now, Miss Welsh, that the alien initiated the dialogue.”
“So it seems,” Ariel said with resignation coloring her voice. “I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
“On the contrary. It is now quite apparent that if I had initiated the dialogue earlier...”
“You’re quite right, Wohler. But you need not feel bad for all that.”
“I understand technically that you can be affected in that manner, but I am incapable of experiencing such an emotion, Miss Welsh.”
“Clearly,” Ariel said. “Clearly. Now what has your dialogue with this alien revealed?”
“Not a great deal, Miss Welsh. I have spent most of the time teaching him Galactic Standard, since I have no linguistic capacity for understanding his language. And teaching him has been most difficult because of that lack of linguistic knowledge. But he seems now to have a rudimentary knowledge of our language, which should prove useful in your dialogue with him.”
“I take it you are speaking of a male alien, then?”
“I loosely ascribe that gender, but it is more a description of his manner and conduct, a similarity to the attributes of a male human, which I perceive by the behavioral differences between the males and females of the human species.”
“Male chauvinism in a robot? Is that what I am detecting, Wohler?”
“Not at all, Miss Welsh. My analysis is quite objective.”
“On the contrary, Wohler. I would say it is quite programmed, and of the Dr. Avery variety. But let’s get on. What else did you learn?”
“In reviewing my records,” Wohler replied, “I found that I taught the alien our language and much about humans, but learned little about them, other than the fact that the construction of our city is disturbing their equilibrium. He used the terms inversions and puncture nodes and abnormal thermoclines, but the terms have little meaning for me, and so little meaning for me to pass on to you.”
“The terms do not help me a great deal, either,” Ariel said. “Do they mean anything to you, Jacob?”
Up to that point, Jacob in his niche had not entered into the conversation, nor moved at all. He had appeared frozen in position. Now his head gave a little twitch. A glimmer came into his eyes.
“They are meteorological terms, Miss Ariel,” Jacob said. “Like in weather?”
“Yes.”
“We’re disturbing their weather!” she exclaimed.
“It would seem so, Miss Ariel,” Jacob confirmed.
“Wohler, I must speak to this alien — now, tonight.”
“That will not be possible, Miss Welsh,” Wohler said. “He has already retired to his balloon.”
“What to do, Jacob?” she said in exasperation, as much to herself as to Jacob. “What to do?”
“It appears you can do nothing until morning, Miss Ariel,” Jacob said.
“How do we contact him in the morning, Wohler?” Ariel asked.
“I know of no way to contact him, Miss Welsh, nor to lead you to him. I can’t tell one of the blackbodies from another. And even if I could, they are seldom on the ground except at night, and then they are isolated in a hydrogen-filled balloon.”
“So what do we do?” Ariel asked.
“We must wait for him to come to us.”
“And when will that be?”
“He generally comes to the west side of the opening in the dome each morning.”
“That reminds me, Wohler, pass the word over the comlink that all future references to time of day and passage of time in general are to be expressed in alien terminology. I want to become accustomed to their way of thinking. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
“So when will this blackbody come to the dome?”
There was a pause before Wohler replied.
“I beg your pardon, Miss Welsh, but the encyclopedic file shows nothing regarding behavior under either Rome or Romans.”
“Forget that, Wohler. Just an old saying. I wouldn’t know a Roman if I saw one. Answer my question please.”
“He comes to the dome near ten AM each morning, just before the aliens begin their construction work. He seems to be inspecting that effort.”
“A good supervisor,” Ariel said.
“No. I have the impression that he does not approve of the construction; that it is being performed by a tribe to which he does not belong. His terse comments seem to be more a critique of their work in an artistic sense.”
Ariel did not sleep well that night. She longed for Derec to be there beside her, and
she was homesick as well. Compared to this alien planet with its insidious dome and its blackbody creatures straight out of hell, Aurora seemed the most desirable of places: comfortable and quiet, typical of Spacer worlds. She longed for its cultivated farms and green fields, its open, hardly discernible cities with their manicured lawns and gardens, its junk food shops and underground malls where she and Derec had had such fun with their friends. It startled her then to realize she had had fun. She had ignored the old friends who had ostracized her, but the new ones — though they might still covet her wealth as much as those old ones — had been genuine fun.
And fun with Derec. She yearned to see him intensely; she missed him so.
She had become quite fond of Jacob and didn’t think of him as a robot with her fun mind, for he was fun to be with. He had a wry way of saying things that was quite amusing, and Ariel suspected he had cultivated it for that very reason, but of course, he would never admit that he had the faintest conception of human humor. Yes, she had become quite fond of Jacob.
But it was Derec she longed for: his pinched face, his skinny frame. Typically male, his rapid teen growth had sacrificed meat and breadth to bones and height. Yet she could still look down on him by several centimeters. But she had stopped growing, while he would probably reach and pass her as he filled out. For the time she had, she was going to enjoy being taller than he and use it to advantage whenever that seemed appropriate. She loved teasing him. He was so loveable.
And she slipped off into a lonely, scary dream.
Chapter 4
DIALOGUE
SYNAPO HAD NEVER drained himself quite so low before. The musculature of the legs particularly seemed weak as he walked toward the brook that morning. He had exhausted the fat juice cells for long-term storage around his chest and waist and buttocks and now he was drawing on the prompt supply cells that fed his muscles. And those in his legs were nowhere near as plentiful as those that supplied the large pectoral muscles that powered the downbeat of his wings. The legs were always the first to go. That was an old Myostrian saying that Sarco and his ilk were fond of iterating for some reason beyond the fact that it was true.
