Asimov’s Future History Volume 7

by Isaac Asimov

  Yet was his government so strange? She herself had seen many instances on Aurora — city governments with their bureaus and committees and councils — which Petero’s Principle fit perfectly: all positions filled with incompetents, almost without exception.

  “I guess it’s not so strange that the aliens didn’t buy my proposal,” she said. “They are aliens and can’t possibly think like we do. Yet their government makes sense, odd sense, mind you, as you might expect coming from aliens. Nothing a bunch of humans would ever come up with. It makes too much sense.

  “And I guess it’s just wishful thinking to expect Synapo to change his mind. So when you think about it, I guess I’m not really in a quandary, am I, Jacob?”

  “So it would appear, Miss Ariel,” Jacob replied.

  In a process that was too fast for the human eye to follow, he had torn the lettuce into bits, sliced the tomatoes, and had diced everything else except the bacon bits and croutons. Now he was tossing, in a large bowl, everything but the ham, cheese, bacon bits, and croutons.

  “They’ll close the dome tomorrow,” Ariel said, “and we’ll be camping out.”

  “That seems to be the only logical deduction.”

  “So I’ve got to call Derec for help, right?”

  “Quite so,” Jacob agreed.

  “How do I do that?”

  “I do not have personal knowledge of that function. I will check with Wohler-9 using the comlink.”

  At the same time, he keyed the food processor for milk and thousand island dressing.

  Ariel said nothing, and then, while he set the table, Jacob reported from the comlink.

  “Avernus-8 supervises Mr. Avery’s special monitor link.”

  “Tie in to him,” Ariel said.

  “I now have Avernus-8,” Jacob said.

  “Tell him to transmit the following message to Derec.”

  Ariel hesitated, thinking, while Jacob finished putting everything on the table. He had topped two bowls of salad with diced ham and cheese, ladled out a generous dollop of thousand island dressing onto each, and then sprinkled on the bacon bits and croutons.

  Then she said, “No. Ask him first what’s special about Derec’s link, how does it work?”

  She sat down at the table and motioned for Jacob to do likewise, and they both began to eat.

  “Avernus-8 says that the connection with Derec’s internal monitor is not made over hyperwave,” Jacob said. “It is a special system Dr. Avery developed. The equipment is mounted on the mobile platform supporting the computer mainframe and on the mainframe’s backup platform, but is accessible by all seven supervisor robots.”

  “And who has detailed technical knowledge of the system?” Ariel asked. “User’s manual, wiring diagrams, maintenance manual?”

  “Avernus-8 and the technician on each of the two computer platforms.”

  “I’ll bet a pewter button that Derec’s special link does use hyperwave, but unlike it’s ever been used before. It’s not common, ordinary discrete modulation.

  “Dr. Avery has beat us to it, dam it. He’s already invented the aliens’ continuous modulation.

  “Jacob, hook Keymo into your comlink connection, and tell Avernus to describe Derec’s monitor system to him. See if the two of them don’t agree that it’s continuous modulation of hyperwave as Keymo would define it.”

  That connection and analysis took a little longer than quick, but still consumed less than two minutes.

  “Avernus-8 replies in the affirmative,” Jacob said. “To communicate with all robot cities, Master Derec’s internal monitor metabolically manipulates hyperwave in a manner similar to what Keymo describes as continuous modulation.”

  “Bingo,” Ariel said. “Derec does it and doesn’t even know how he does it. And I don’t need to know anything about engineering to do engineering. Tell Avernus to ring up Derec and give him this message:

  “CRISIS HERE ON OYSTER WORLD. YOU MUST IMMEDIATELY REPROGRAM AVERY ROBOTS. I ALSO HAVE A BIT OF IMPORTANT ENGINEERING TECHNOLOGY TO TEACH YOU, DUM-DUM. IN FACT, YOUR OWN INTERNAL ENGINEERING, SO COME AT ONCE.

  “Sign it: LOVE, ARIEL, and ask for confirmation.”

  For ten minutes Jacob said nothing while Ariel forked salad into her mouth and mooned over Derec. With that wild imagination one has when extrapolating hope, she visualized Synapo meeting with her before Derec arrived, telling her the aliens had changed their minds and would accept her proposal. She would then be the aliens’ kind of Leader.

  No matter what, the robots would have to be reprogrammed. They weren’t going to build any robot city on this planet.

  While they were finishing their lunch, Jacob broke the silence.”

  Avernus-8 has received this reply from Master Derec:

  “ON MY WAY, SMARTY PANTS. LOVE, DEREC.”

  She spent the rest of the afternoon on the balcony, which overlooked Main Street, sitting in the subdued light of the perpetual dusk under the dome, reading a book of poems she took with her whenever she traveled: Selected Poetry of Old Earth.

  It was an ancient book, bound in soft brown imitation suede, and printed in a small, graceful font on one side of thin, translucent, parchment-like paper. It was the only thing her mother had ever given her that she truly treasured. Juliana Welsh had given her a lot of expensive things: clothes, jewelry, cars, fliers, jumpers, but seldom anything with the taste and thought that was reflected in the selection of that little book. She wondered if her mother had picked it out or had merely asked one of their robots to pick up something via the hyperwave shopping service.

  She came to a very short poem she had forgotten, but when she reread it, it seemed like a piece of wisdom that might apply at almost any time in a person’s life — Robert Frost wisdom:

  The Secret Sits

  We dance round in a ring and suppose,

  But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

  That’s what she seemed to be doing. Dancing around the solution to the problem. She had come so close to the answer in that meeting with Synapo and his lieutenants. He had said as much with that elaborate apology he had left her with, as though he would have done things differently if it had been left up to just him. In that case, would he really have bought her proposal?

  She looked up every now and then to stare at the opening in the dome. It made her uneasy. What if they could suddenly close it and trap them all inside that insidious blackness? There would be no way out, no way that human technology could provide.

  But she didn’t want to camp out, and she certainly didn’t want to spend any more time in that tiny, cramped, two-passenger jumper than she absolutely had to.

  After dinner Jacob rigged a viewing screen on the balcony so she could spend the evening keeping an eye on that critical opening in the dome while she watched a library tape of an old hyperwave drama involving Elijah Baley, Gladia Solaria, and the robot Daneel Olivaw..

  She could not see the dome opening when she looked up. The starshine in the black sky was not bright enough to be seen through pupils contracted by the illumination required to present Elijah Baley in all his glory. But she could see the lights of the robot traffic far out on the plain, traffic that was now diminishing as the materiel transfer neared completion.

  When she went to bed, she posted Jacob on the balcony with instructions to call her immediately if he saw any change in the size of the dome opening.

  In the middle of the night, she dreamt that she was trying to escape from that black void inside the dome, piloting her hyperspace jumper with the monster Synapo sitting beside her in the cockpit, heading on a course that would take them down Main Street with the Compass Tower far in the distance. But she was still out in the void, hanging motionless at least a kilometer from where Main Street began, with her throttle pushed to its limit; and stretching away from her toward Main Street were long, long rows of waving green corn; and standing at the end of Main Street, far away down those rows of corn, was Derec waving and beckoning for her to come to him. S
he turned to look at Synapo in the midst of a feeling of disoriented horror, and a crimson flame shot out of the blackness beneath his luminous green eyes and bummed her hand.

  She awoke drenched in perspiration, her hand resting painfully on the sharp corner of the nightstand beside her bed. She finally drifted back to sleep, yearning for Derec to be there in bed beside her, but back on Aurora, not there on Oyster World.

  By ten o’clock the next morning, the materiel transfer dwindled to a halt, and with their limited possessions piled in the runabout beside them, Ariel and Jacob stood outside the dome at the meeting site, keeping vigil with Wohler-9 and his lorry, waiting to witness the final closure of the dome.

  Five minutes passed — 10:05 AM — and no blackbodies had shown up to send their shimmering additions down the edge of the dome, then a half hour, and then an hour, and still no construction activity.

  There weren’t even any signs of preconstruction activity like the long line of blackbodies that had formed on other mornings heading toward the apex of the dome opening, like an outspiraling thread unwinding from a black hole, from a spherical black mass that from far away could not be resolved into individual blackbodies basking on the wing in the light of the sun.

  There was no dull black ball in the sky this morning. The blackbodies were up there like every other morning, but unlike construction days, they were loosely dispersed from horizon to horizon, languidly circling, soaking up the sun’s radiation.

  Ariel and the two robots sat there all day waiting for something to happen and nothing did: no construction activity and no visit from the aliens to explain the lack of activity.

  Ariel ate lunch and dinner from supplies Wohler-9 had stashed in the lorry for her, supplies that were to last a month to give them time to get the Oyster World dilemma resolved.

  Derec was due to arrive in three days: one day to get far enough away from that other planet to allow the jump through hyperspace, and two days to travel in from the jump arrival point, the nearest clearsafe in the Oyster World zone.

  They spent the night in the open. Ariel slept on the long back seat of the open lorry under the stars of a cloudless sky. She refused to spend another night under the dome with the threat of its imminent closure literally hanging over her. One night like that was enough.

  Chapter 12

  WOLRUF STANDS INSPECTION

  THEY ARRIVED AT the clearing well before noon, following a large animal trail Derec had discovered and explored with Mandelbrot a few days before. Although the forest cover discouraged the growth of dense underbrush, there were scattered patches that occasionally blocked the trail for homo sapiens, low branches that the animals who had made the trail — possibly SilverSide’s erstwhile associates — simply walked under.

  The trail was clear now, of course. When they had first explored it, Mandelbrot had simply fashioned his arm into a machete — the arm that was made of Robot City material — and cleared the way with a motion that bore some resemblance to a buzz saw.

  This morning Derec led the way, with Mandelbrot next, then Wolruf, and finally SilverSide bringing up the rear. SilverSide kept up a steady conversation with Wolruf during the hour that it took to reach the clearing.

  Derec could hear the buzz of conversation but was too far in front to make out what they were saying. When he reached the clearing, and as they approached, he could hear them clearly but still couldn’t understand them. They were no longer speaking Standard.

  Mandelbrot was already erecting the tent as Wolruf walked into the clearing.

  “I don’t believe this,” she said. “‘ees already speaking my language. Not fluently’et. But give ‘im another decad and’e’ll be speaking it like a native.”

  “Yes. He has a marvelous affinity for new knowledge,” Derec said. It made him uneasy, that affinity.

  Derec gathered some stones from the brook and built a fireplace. Wolruf put the inside of the tent in order. Mandelbrot gathered firewood.

  SilverSide disappeared. It wasn’t until Derec finished construction of the fireplace that he noticed SilverSide was gone. Wolruf was fast asleep in the tent on one of the cots she had erected. She really wasn’t much of an outdoors person, not at all like Derec in that respect.

  There was no point in looking for SilverSide. This was his habitat far more than theirs. They might never see him again.

  The thought of that filled Derec with dismay. He had become vitally interested in the strange robot — a fascinating study in alien robotics. He had learned a great deal merely by association, but he needed to learn much more, including its origin and the purpose of its original programming.

  And he had sucked Wolruf into the problem as well. He had brought her “half across the galaxy” as she had so emphatically pointed out. How was he going to explain that he would not need her services any longer? That she had come all this way for nothing!

  When Wolruf awoke, she took the news of SilverSide’s disappearance quite calmly.

  “Good,” she said. “Can I go ‘ome now, back to civilissation? Can we at least go back to the city?”

  “He’ll come back,” Derec said more confidently than he felt. “We’ll at least stay overnight. He might not come back to the city, but he’ll come back here.”

  They spent a quiet afternoon. Derec read. Wolruf slept. Mandelbrot stood guard, just outside the clearing, facing away from the campsite, with his back against a tree on the other side of the brook. SilverSide would have a hard time getting at his switch panel that way.

  After dinner, after it got dark, hoping to attract SilverSide, Derec built up the fire so that it lighted the entire clearing.

  Mandelbrot stayed at his guard post. Wolruf dozed in the warmth of the fire. Derec thought about Ariel, and that brought him to Jacob Winterson and, putting Jacob out of his mind, brought him back full circle to worrying about SilverSide.

  The fire died down. Derec was talking when Wolruf quietly laid a hand on his arm and pointed across the fire to the other side of the clearing, the side away from Mandelbrot’s guard post.

  There — just inside the clearing, in the faint light of the dying fire — were two gray wolf-like shapes, sitting on their haunches. When he looked at them, the firelight caught the backsides of their eyes and came back at him as a ghostly green glow. That must have been how Wolruf had seen them in the first place; they were otherwise almost invisible.

  “Master Derec,” Mandelbrot called softly from behind them, “we are surrounded by animals circling around the campsite. Should I take any action?”

  “Can you suggest anything suitable?” Derec asked.

  “Not at the moment,” Mandelbrot replied.

  “Stay at your post then,” Derec said.

  “I ‘ate stuff like this,” Wolruf said. “Why do you alwayss’ave to bring me along?”

  Just then the shape on the right threw back its head and howled, long and piercingly, letting it trail off slowly into a series of soft sobs.

  That howl was answered by an identical howl from the forest that seemed to progress halfway around the campsite before it, too, sobbed to a finish.

  The two shapes rose then and trotted toward the campfire. The one on the left was smaller, Wolruf’s size, and as they approached the campfire, its form became silvery while the form of the other, standing a meter at the shoulder, became more distinctly mottled black and dark gray.

  After coming well into the light of the fire, the larger beast turned and loped into the forest. The small silvery beast came around the fire and sat down on its haunches beside Wolruf.

  “That was LifeCrier,” the small beast said. “He wanted to inspect Wolruf.”

  “SilverSide?” Derec queried.

  “Yes. Surely you can tell it’s me. The imprint is quite realistic.”

  “And did I pass muster?” Wolruf asked.

  “I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t, Mistress Wolruf,” SilverSide replied.

  She had achieved a remarkable likeness to Wolruf, considering
that the robot was an organometallic construction from coarse cellular microbots. The flat face, the pointed ears, the fingered forepaws were all in character. She had even achieved a good simulation of the fur without creating individual hairs.

  “I think the wolves have gone, Master Derec,” Mandelbrot informed them.

  “I would suspect so, Mandelbrot,” Derec said. “SilverSide is back. Perhaps you should come and meet her in this new form.”

  Mandelbrot crossed the brook and walked up to the fire. He hardly glanced at SilverSide.

  “Would you like me to build up the fire, Master Derec?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Derec said, “and then perhaps you should resume guard duty. Other beasties may come calling, some that are not so friendly.”

  Those that had just left had not been nearly so friendly at one time, Derec recalled.

  “And SilverSide, you might post yourself on the other side of the campsite, but don’t stray so far into the forest this time.”

  “Mistress Wolruf?” SilverSide said, questioning with a rising inflection.

  “Yes?”

  “Are those your wishes?”

  “Of course.”

  SilverSide’s fealty had clearly shifted to Wolruf.

  Derec slept well until the middle of the night. With SilverSide back in the fold, his attention had shifted to himself, and he went to sleep yearning to be with Ariel. The gentle snore from the cot next to him reminded him of Ariel and aggravated the desire, but it was not enough to keep him awake long.

  That night he didn’t dream of Ariel or of anything else. The short hike, the outdoor environment, and the relief connected with SilverSide’s return promoted sound sleep, and he didn’t stir until shortly before dawn, when he was awakened by Avernus’s call over his internal monitor, transmitting Ariel’s call for help.

  Chapter 13

  THE VOTE ON SUPERIOR COMPETENCE

  IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING THE last, disastrous meeting with the aliens, Synapo had circled up to charge altitude with Neuronius and Axonius trailing far behind. He was looking neither to left nor right nor up nor down. His eyes were open but staring straight ahead — staring, unseeing, out of a mind closed down by shock.