by Isaac Asimov
Katherine looked back to Wolruf. “If it doesn’t work, why were you so eager to get it back?”
“Maybe Wolruf can fix,” was her forlorn reply. “Only way to go ‘ome now.”
Just then, they heard a voice calling them from the corridor outside. “Derec — Katherine — come out,” it said. “Derec — Katherine — you do not have to hide.”
Wolruf dropped to her crouch and loosed a barrage of guttural moaning sounds. “Shut up!” Katherine hissed at the alien, then turned to Derec. “Do something,” she urged.
“What?” Derec snapped back. “This room has only one exit.”
At that moment the door slid open, drawing Derec’s attention away from Katherine. He glimpsed a golden robot filling the doorway and advancing across the threshold. Then suddenly Katherine was blocking his view. She had moved closer and was reaching for the key, a determined expression on her face.
Derec’s immediate thought was that she was going to grab the key and try to run. He did not have enough time to snatch the gleaming artifact out of her reach. There was time only to tighten his grip.
Too late he realized Katherine had never meant to take the key. Her hands closed firmly over his, locking them in place. Her thumb drove the small square button back down into the body of the key.
“No!” cried Wolruf.
“Wait —” Derec started to say.
But there was nothing anyone could do to stop it — not Derec, not the robot, not even Katherine. There was a soundless burst of color that stabbed deep into Derec’s eyes, driving out the sight of all else. And when the light faded to gray and his sight was restored, Wolruf, the robot, and the room had all vanished.
They found themselves standing as they had been standing, both gripping the key, at the center of a tiny place within a great space. There was nothing to prevent them from seeing vast distances, except that there was nothing to see.
All around them was a soft gray light that was to the eye what a hum is to the ear. The air had the fuggy, dusty odor of a house that has been closed up for the summer. There was no sound except their own tight, frightened breathing.
They clung to each other and to the key and tried to understand and accept their sudden displacement to this unreal reality. It was a place which could be nowhere in space. They were somewhere outside, thrown there by the staggering power of the little silver bar. It was a place without time, without life.
“Perihelion,” Katherine whispered.
“Wolruf said that it was the nearest place to everywhere,” Derec said. “It feels more like the farthest place from anywhere.”
Katherine twisted her head around, looking. “Where is she?”
“Back on Rockliffe Station, I guess. Left behind.”
“Why didn’t the key bring her with us?”
“Maybe for the same reason it wouldn’t work for her,” Derec said. “Maybe because she was too far away from us. Maybe you have to be touching it, or touching someone who’s touching it. I don’t know. But we have to go back and get her.”
“But the robots —”
Derec shook his head. “It was Alpha. You didn’t even look. It was Alpha.”
“I didn’t know,” Katherine whispered. “Press it again. Let’s go back.”
“How do we know we will?”
“I was thinking about escape when I pushed it. Think about going back.”
Wordlessly Derec complied. The button appeared as before. There was another flash of color, and another few seconds of adjustment. Then their returning vision told them something that should not be, could not be. They were not at Perihelion, but neither were they back in Rockliffe Station.
They were standing in open sunlight atop a great pyramidal tower, looking down at a still greater city spread out before them. The tower they were on was taller by half than any other building in sight. It was like standing on top of the world, like looking down from an eagle’s eyrie.
“What is this?” Katherine hissed. “Where did you send us?”
Derec stared unbelievingly at the towers, cubes, and spires stretching from the base of the pyramid to the horizon. “I don’t know,” he said hoarsely. “I had Rockliffe Station in my mind.”
She released her grip on the key and grabbed tight to his arm. “Are we on Earth?” She asked it as though the prospect frightened her.
Derec looked west at the low-hanging disc of the sun. “No,” he said. “The star is too white and too small.” But he knew why she had asked. No Spacer world had a city this vast. Only on Earth had city-building ever been practiced on this scale, and they were not cities but Cities, enclosed and largely underground. “You don’t recognize it?”
“I’ve never seen such a thing before,” she whispered. “Is it Wolruf’s homeworld? Or Aranimas’s?”
“I don’t know,” Derec said. “We can find the answer easily enough, though.”
“How?”
“By going down there.” He gestured toward the city spread out below them.
“No,” she said with a shudder. “Send us back.”
Derec realized that he was still gripping the key in his unfeeling hands. “I don’t know if I can,” he said.
“Try,” she urged. “Or let me try.”
“We’ll try,” he agreed.
Holding an image of the gray emptiness of Perihelion in his mind, Derec called up the control button and pressed it. This time, nothing happened. “What it did has to take a lot of power. Maybe it has to recharge — or be recharged,” he said. “Either way, it looks like we’re here for a while at least.”
“I don’t want to go down there,” Katherine said. “It’ll be night soon. Let’s stay here until morning and then try the key again.”
The sun had indeed slipped a fraction of a degree toward the horizon, lengthening the already long shadow of the tower on the city below. “Aren’t you afraid of going over the side in your sleep?” he asked. There was no railing or football enclosing the table-flat top of the pyramid.
“I don’t expect to be able to sleep,” she said soberly.
As the sun descended toward the horizon, a breeze kicked up, teasing at their hair and clothing. It carried with it no scent Derec knew. In fact, for a world so obviously teeming with life, it carried remarkably little scent at all.
Below them, the city was becoming alive with lightlight cascading down the sides of buildings, light puddling in the streets. In those streets, hundreds of other lights were in restless motion, reminding Derec of the bustle within a colony of bees or ants.
Too emotionally numbed even to be afraid, they avoided talk. Katherine withdrew into herself, sitting in the lotus position near the center of the tile-covered plaza. Derec wandered near the edges, looking out and trying to abstract the pattern on which the city had been built.
When the stars came out, he studied them, hoping against hope to recognize their patterns. There was a red star as bright as a planet that might have been Betelgeuse, and a fierce white one that might have been Sirius.
But each could just as easily be any of a thousand other stars named or merely numbered. There was no way to tell without a spectrometer to take the optical fingerprint of each suspect and a general astrographical catalog in which to search for matches.
“Do you remember what the stars look like from Aurora?” he called across to Katherine, sitting huddled against herself on the other side of the plaza.
“I never knew,” she admitted. “I wasn’t interested.”
Giving up, he went and sat facing her. She was idly rubbing her right bicep through the sleeve of her Lindbergh blouse.
“Having trouble with the pump?”
“That’s not what hurts,” she said, tugging the sleeve up and showing him a purple crescent bruise.
“Nice.”
“My most convincing scream,” she said with a rueful smile.
“Wolruf?”
“She got carried away and bit me. She’s not as harmless as she wanted us to think.”
“Anything living knows how to defend itself,” he said, then added wistfully, “I wonder what’s happened to her.”
“I don’t understand why you liked her.”
“She’s a victim — a prisoner — just like us.”
“I have trouble thinking of her that way.”
Derec sighed. “Doesn’t matter now, I guess. I’ve abandoned her again.”
Conversation lapsed after that. “I don’t understand why it was Alpha that came after us,” Katherine said finally. “It can’t have been roaming free like Wolruf since we came to the station, can it? Looking for us?”
“Just another one of Jacobson’s tricks,” Derec said. “He knew we wanted the robot back. What better bait to draw us out?”
They were silent together for a while, sitting close but not touching. “Your first name is David,” she said unexpectedly.
Hearing the name brought no sudden revelations, and caution born out of experience kept him from feeling any gratitude. “Why tell me now?”
“So I can stop the mental gymnastics every time I start to talk to you. Because I thought you’d want to know.”
“And because we don’t know what’s going to happen to us?”
“I won’t think like that,” she said. “I don’t believe in it.”
“I should have known better,” Derec said with a faint smile. “Are you going to drop more than one crumb? How is it you know me? Where did we meet?”
She turned her head to look at him. “You were the engineer’s mate on a Settler merchantman — the Daniel O’Neill, I think it was called,” she said. “Does it sound familiar?”
“No,” he said unhappily. “What else can you tell me?”
She hesitated. “I’m afraid I don’t know you as well as I let you think. We crossed paths in the spaceport.”
“If I’m a Settler drudge and you’re a Spacer topcrust —”
“Your captain was having trouble with Customs coming in and we were delayed going out by mechanical problems. We ended up in the same waiting area. We talked for a while.” She hesitated, then added, “You were funny. You made me laugh.”
“Did I talk about my family — my home —”
“You don’t remember any of it, do you? Meeting me — the O’Neill —”
“No.”
“I’m sorry.” She hesitated. “Even so, I thought you’d be happier, knowing.”
“I’d be happier remembering,” he said, and was silent for a moment. “Anyway, it doesn’t seem to matter as much at the moment. I don’t know a thing about this David. At least I know a little about Derec. I think I’ll just stay Derec for the time being.”
“I didn’t tell you everything,” she said. “I didn’t tell you about —”
“Don’t,” he said. “If my name didn’t bring it back, nothing will. Save the rest. You’ll be able to tell me whether I’m remembering or inventing.”
“I know your memory will come back. It has to.”
He nodded absently, acknowledging her words without accepting them. “If you want to try to sleep, I’ll watch to make sure you don’t get restless and try to air-walk.”
Shaking her head, she said, “I can’t sleep without a pillow.”
Derec stretched out on his back and tapped his left shoulder with his right hand. “I have an unoccupied pillow available, no charge.”
He expected her to refuse the offer. But she crawled wordlessly to where he lay and snuggled against his left side, her head resting on his arm. Closing her eyes, she seemed to fall asleep almost at once.
They fit together easily, and, innocent though the embrace was, there was something pleasing about her closeness. Probably it’s just that she’s not talking, Derec told himself. He lay there looking up at the stars and listening to her slow, peaceful breathing until his own eyelids were too heavy to keep open.
David Derec, he thought just before sleep took him. It would be nice to have two names again —
Chapter 20
MORNING ON THE MOUNT
THEY WOKE THOROUGHLY chilled from their night on the exposed promontory, and the early rays of the rising sun did little to warm them. Despite the cold, Katherine quickly separated herself from him as though embarrassed by the contact.
“Let’s try the key,” she said nervously as she stood up.
Derec pulled himself up to a sitting position. “No hello? No good morning?” he said with a half-grin. But he reached for the key, lying an arm’s length away on the tile.
“Come on,” she said impatiently. “I had a bad dream that I’d like to rule out as quickly as possible.”
“What happened?”
“I was stuck here with you.”
Smiling, he stood and held it out toward her. “Do the honors?”
She quickly went through the activation sequence, then glanced up and met Derec’s eyes. “Ready?” she asked.
“What do we think of? Perihelion or the Station?”
“Perihelion first. I think we have to.”
He inclined his head in agreement. “Ready if you are.”
Her thumb went hard against the button, as though the vehemence with which she pushed it would speed their return. Light exploded against their retinas, the sunlight vanished, and they found themselves in the gray world of Perihelion once more.
“Now the Station?” Derec asked.
“How about Aurora?” she asked, her eyes glowing with excitement. “Wolruf said we could go anywhere with it. Why should we take ourselves back to trouble?”
“No,” Derec said. “First we go back to get Wolruf. I owe her.”
“I don’t want to go back there,” Katherine said anxiously. “We won’t be able to use the key again to get away, not for hours. They’ll have us locked up and it locked up by then, and we won’t have done anything for Wolruf. You could get help on Aurora — get a ship and go back for her.”
“How?”
“I have friends on Aurora —”
“The same ones that closed your account?”
She winced at the reminder, but was adamant. “More friends than we have on Rockliffe Station.”
“You’ll have to do the steering. I don’t have a clear enough image of Aurora in my head.”
“Happy to do it. Hold tight,” she said, and triggered the key once more.
Perihelion vanished on cue, but it was not the pastoral landscape of Aurora which replaced it. It took only an instant for Derec to realize that they had returned to the top of the tower that looked out on the great mystery city.
A heartbeat later, the same understanding impressed itself on Katherine. “Frost!” she declared, throwing her hands in the air and rushing to the edge with a vigor that alarmed Derec. “What went wrong?”
Derec looked past her to the nearer structures of the city. “Hard to say, since we don’t really know what happens when it goes right,” he said. “Obviously there’s more to controlling the key than just thinking about where you want to go.”
“But why here, then, a place that neither one of us knows?”
“I don’t know,” Derec said. “But it could be worse.”
“I’d like to know how,” she said, turning to face him and planting her fists on her hips.
“Well, just consider,” he said, stepping closer. “Whatever we are, we’re a long way from Rockliffe Station, and the way we left we’re not easily going to be followed. That means in one fell swoop we got away from Jacobson, Anazon’s robots, and the raiders. And as a little bonus we got away with the key.”
“Which we don’t know how to make work right. We’ve lost Alpha, we don’t know where we are, we have no ship, no money, no food, nothing but the clothes we’re wearing and that useless key.” It could not have been more of a tantrum of self-pity if she had ended it by stamping her foot.
“I didn’t say it was all good. I just said it could be worse.” Squatting on his heels, he stared at the key as he passed it from right hand to left and back again restlessly. �
��I can hardly believe what this thing does. For a machine this size to be able to transport matter ten feet, much less ten light-years, is the most fantastic feat of engineering — damn near magic. I can’t tell you how much I’d love to take it apart and see how it works. And finally I understand why everybody wants it. What I don’t understand is why someone tried to hide it.”
“What do you mean?”
He looked up. “Something Wolruf told me. The asteroid that I woke up on — it was artificial. Somebody meant it to be the final hiding place for this.”
Katherine was quick to pick up the implication. “As though it were dangerous, not just powerful.”
“Exactly.”
“Well — just think what a terrorist or assassin could do with it. Or an army where every soldier had one. Especially an alien army.”
“It’d be impossible to protect yourself against them,” Derec said, staring at the key again. “A lot of responsibility goes along with ownership of this thing. Maybe more responsibility than I want.”
“The monkey getting heavy already?”
Derec nodded. “On top of everything else, I still don’t know what I’m doing mixed up in the middle of this.” He looked up at her. “I suppose you think the pod was from the Daniel O’Neill, that I ejected in some emergency.”
“It’s the straightest line between two points.”
“I guess it is. But you know, there’s something that doesn’t fit in. Why did Monitor 5 think it was so important to give the key to me? Me, who’d been nothing but a nuisance to the robots up till then? It said something like ‘I found the key, Derec. You have to take it.’ How do you explain that?”
She gestured helplessly. “I don’t.”
Derec stood and walked to where she stood, at the edge of the plaza. “And this place,” he said, spreading his hands wide to take in the city surrounding them. “Just look at it. It’s glorious. Doesn’t just seeing it make you feel exhilarated? Can’t you sense the unifying vision, the way it all fits together as one seamless whole? Look at the turrets with mansard roofs-beautiful! Look at the way the five Pythagorean perfect solids are used as structural shapes to focus —”
