by Isaac Asimov
A huge, gray machine rumbled softly, yet with undeniable strength and power. From it issued what could only be described as a ribbon of city. In five-meter-square slabs, the city appeared to be simply extruding from underground through the medium of the gray machine.
It pushed itself along, the slabs gradually forming and reforming as they moved, following some incredible preprogramming that actually let them build themselves. And as the slabs formed walls and floors and corners and stories and windows, they spun off in every direction in a slow, graceful dance that pushed against the already existing buildings, the mechanism that triggered the entire magnificent clockwork of Robot City.
It was as if the entire city were one mammoth, living organism always growing outward, always changing and replicating like the cells in a body, moving in imprinted patterns toward a complete, fully formed being.
It was a plan of monumental scale, an atmosphere of total, logical control for a given end. As he watched a skyscraper literally build itself from the ground up, each story pushing up the story above it and self-welding according to some unseen plan, he experienced the grandeur of an idea so vast that his limited knowledge was humbled by its power. This civilization was the product of a mind that refused to believe in limited options, a mind that accepted that what the imagination could conceive, the hands could make.
To such a mind, anything was possible. Even, perhaps, Perihelion.
The truck lurched, nearly knocking him from his knees. It had pulled up to the gate. The line of robots was now reaching into his bed for their equipment.
If all the action was happening below ground, that’s where Derec wanted to be. Hurrying out of the truck, he grabbed a small terminal that looked as if it had been shorted out by water, and took his place behind a robot heading toward that doorway into the ground.
He reached the doorway, cradling the computer like a baby. Warm air greeted him as he stepped through into barely lit darkness. He was confronted by a short flight of stairs leading down, and followed the robot that walked down before him.
The stairs terminated in a large holding area, brightly lit, frenetic with activity. Automated carts carried robots and mining equipment at breakneck pace. The cars zipped around one another in seemingly rehearsed fashion, their movements perfected over time, since it seemed impossible to Derec that they could move so quickly without hitting one another.
On the far wall sat a bank of elevators, perhaps twenty in all, some of them remarkably large. The robots that moved down the stairs headed toward these elevators, apparently going from here to a lower level where repair or scrap work was being done.
Having no idea of where to go, Derec chose an elevator at random and moved toward it with his burden. A large elevator nearby slid open, and a group of minerbots, covered with mud and soot, moved out bearing the non-operating carcass of one of their own above their shoulders.
Derec reached the elevator. It had no formal controls, but opened for him as soon as he stepped near.
A voice boomed behind him. “Nothing awaits you below, but death!”
He turned to see a huge supervisor robot, twice the size of a man, glaring down at him with red photocells. The robot’s body was burnished a bright, shimmering black.
“I’ve come to inspect your operation,” Derec said, feigning authority. He turned back to the elevator and began to step in.
The robot’s arm flashed out, his mammoth pincers clanging loudly around Derec’s forearm, squeezing tightly but not painfully.
“You are caught,” the machine said, and Derec’s computer crashed loudly at his feet.
Chapter 4
THE COMPASS TOWER
AS THE DOOR to the apartment slid open, Derec tucked under the arm of the big robot, watched Katherine’s facial expression change from horror, to relief, to unbridled amusement—all in the space of three seconds.
“Let me guess,” she said, putting a finger to her lips, “you’re a ditty bag.”
“Cute,” Derec returned as the robot set him gently on the ground. He looked up at the huge, black machine. “Thanks for the ride, Avernus.”
“My pleasure, Friend Derec,” the robot replied, bending slightly so that the hallway could accommodate his height. “But I must ask you to stay away from the underground. It is no place for a human.”
“I appreciate your concern,” Derec said noncommittally. He walked into the apartment, then turned back to Avernus. “Will we see you at the meeting?”
“Most assuredly,” he returned. “All of us look forward to it with great expectation.”
“You can go now,” Katherine told Avernus coldly, the robot nodding slightly and moving off, the utility robot guard sliding quickly to fill the door space with his squat body.
Katherine punched the door stud, the panel sliding closed. “You missed breakfast and lunch,” she said, moving to sit listlessly on the couch.
“Avernus got me something before he brought me back,” Derec said. “He got my wounds cleaned up, and even let me sleep for a while.” Finally, he couldn’t ignore her mood any longer. “What’s wrong?”
“You,” she said, “this place . . . everything. I don’t know which way is up anymore. Did you find out anything?”
Derec spotted the CRT screen set up on the table and walked to stand before it. “It’s a place designed for humans,” he said, “and the building is going on at a furious pace, as if they’re in some kind of hurry to get finished. I think the buildings may be . . . I don’t know, alive, I guess is the best way to put it.” He pointed to the screen. “Where did this come from?”
“Rydberg brought it,” she answered, “But it only receives. What do you mean, the city’s alive?”
“Watch this,” Derec said, and ran full speed across the room, banging into the far wall. The wall gave with him, caving inward, then gently pushed itself back to a solid position.
“I laid awake all night worrying about you, while you were discovering the walls are made of rubber?” she asked loudly.
He turned to her, smiling. “Did you really worry about me?”
“No,” she replied. “What else?”
He walked over and sat on the couch with her, his tones hushed. “I saw the city building itself, literally extruding itself from the ground. I tried to go down there, but Avernus caught me. I think he’s in charge down there. The only thing I can figure is that there are immense mining operations underway below ground and that the buildings are positronic, some kind of cellular robots that make up a complete whole. It’s fascinating!”
Katherine was unimpressed. “Did you find a way out of here?”
He shook his head. “Not yet,” he answered, “but I don’t really think that’s going to be a problem.”
“That’s because you’re so eaten up with your robot friends you can’t think of anything else!” She suddenly jerked her head toward the wall. “If the walls are robots, I wonder if they can hear us now?”
Just then the screen on the table came to life, Rydberg’s face filling it. “So, you are back, Derec,” he said. “Good. Prepare yourselves. An honor guard is coming right now to bring you to your preliminary trial.”
“Trial?” Derec said.
“Uh oh,” Katherine said, putting a hand to her mouth. “That may be my fault. I all but dared them to put us on trial.”
“But we haven’t had a chance to investigate yet.”
She shrugged. “I was trying to find if we could have access to outside communications.” She snapped her fingers. “Maybe this means we’re going to get it.”
“Yeah . . . maybe,” Derec said, but he was skeptical. Robot City was too precious a gem to be hanging out in the ether for anyone to pluck. At this point, he wasn’t even sure if he wanted to communicate with the outside.
He looked at the screen. It had already gone blank. “Whatever the reason,” he said, “I believe we’re going to get some answers at this point.”
“Let’s hope they’re answers we can live
with,” she sighed. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life here.”
Within minutes, the utility robot was knocking on the door. Derec hurried to open it. Euler greeted him, accompanied by a supervisor robot he’d not seen before. This one was the robot most closely molded to a human that Derec had seen, with chisled, though blank, mannequin-like features.
“Friend Derec,” Euler said, “Friend Katherine Burgess, may I present Arion, who will be in attendance at our meeting.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Derec said.
“Rydberg called it a trial,” Katherine said.
“This is a great moment for us here,” Arion said. “I trust that your stay so far has been satisfactory. I am doing my best with what little time I have to try and prepare some entertainment for you. We know that humans enjoy mind diversions.”
“We’d appreciate anything you could do,” Derec said.
“Sure,” Katherine said. “How about conjuring up a radio for us to call the outside for help?”
“Oh, that’s quite impossible,” Arion said.
“That’s what I thought,” Katherine answered.
“I have a present for each of you,” Euler said, extending his right arm. “Then we must be off to the meeting.”
Derec moved to the robot. His pincers held two large watches, dangling on gold chains. “You may know the time here now,” Euler said. “It is of importance to humans, and so, to us. We will do more to make you feel comfortable in this regard.”
Derec took the watches, giving one of them to Katherine. They had square faces encased in gold. On both of them, the LCD faces read 3:35. “They run on a twenty-four hour day,” said Euler. “We thought it would be more comfortable for you if we adjusted the length of our hour than if you had to adjust to a twenty-and-one-half hour day. Our hours, decads, and centads are approximately eighty-five percent of standard.” Derec walked out onto the veranda and looked into the sky. The sun had already passed its apex and was slowly crawling toward the eventual shadows of evening.
“Right on the money,” he said, returning to the apartment.
“You doubted it?” Arion asked, looking at Euler.
“Do you understand now?” Euler said to him.
“Interesting,” Arion said, cocking his head in an almost human fashion.
“We must go,” Euler said and hurried out of the apartment, the others following.
They rode the elevator to street level and boarded a multi-car tram that had no apparent driver. It started off immediately when they were seated. Euler turned to Derec, who sat, with Katherine, behind him and Arion. “You put yourself in extreme danger last night,” the robot said. “Why?”
“I’ve a better question,” Derec returned. “If this is such a perfect human world, why was it so dangerous?”
“Spacer worlds conquered weather problems eons ago,” Katherine interjected. “For you to have them in such an advanced culture makes no sense.”
Arion turned to her and bowed his head. “Thank you for calling our culture advanced.”
“The weather,” Euler said, “is quite honestly part of our overall problem right now. It is under our control, but also not under our control. Unfortunately, for security reasons, we cannot discuss it in detail.”
“Great,” Katherine said. “Everybody can do something about the weather, but nobody talks about it.”
“To answer your original question,” Derec told Euler, as he watched them move in a direct line toward the tower where they had initially materialized, “I have no memory and no past. My curiosity, my search for answers about myself, leads me to do things not necessarily in my best interest.”
“Amnesia?” Euler asked. “Or something else?”
Derec looked at him in surprise. “What else?”
The robot answered his question with another question, an old one. “How, then, did you come to our planet?”
Derec realized that the robot was playing word games with him that tied directly to the word games Derec had initiated the night before. He decided to keep playing. “What did the dead man, David, say when you asked him that question?”
“He said he didn’t know,” Euler replied, and turned back around in his seat. Over his shoulder, he said, “He claimed he’d had amnesia.”
The tram came to a halt beside the mammoth pyramid that dominated the landscape of Robot City, the place the inhabitants called the Compass Tower. Katherine put a hand on Derec’s arm, squeezing, and he knew she had the same fear that he’d felt. Here, about halfway up the tower, was where they had hidden the Key to Perihelion that had brought them to the city. Had the robots found it? Were they confronting them with the evidence, or, worse yet, taking it away?
But Euler said nothing of the Key. Instead, he simply climbed from the tram and led them directly to the base of the tower, a tower that Derec had surmised was solid.
He’d never been more wrong.
At the robot’s approach, an entire block of the solid matter that formed the base simply melted away, leaving a gently sloping runway leading into the structure, another example of Derec’s theory about the intelligence of the building materials themselves.
They moved into the pyramid through a short, dark hallway that emptied into a maze of criss-crossing aisles and stairs that, in turn, led off in all directions within the structure.
“Try and memorize our path,” Derec whispered to Katherine. “Just in case.”
“In case of what?” she asked. “In case you haven’t figured it out, we’re not going anywhere.”
“This is the most important building in our city,” Euler said, as he took them up a series of stairs and escalators that zig-zagged at every landing and culminated in a long, well-lit hallway. “This is where decisions are made, where . . . understanding takes place.”
They walked the hall, Arion hurrying ahead and disappearing down some stairs. The surrounding walls glowed lightly, with connecting hallways intersecting every ten feet.
They followed Arion’s path, changing direction several times before finding themselves standing in a large, well-lit room whose four walls angled in toward a ceiling, fifteen meters above, that poured in sunshine like a skylight.
The floor of the room was tiled in the form of a large compass, its four points forming the cornerstones of Robot City. In the center of the compass, under the direct rays of the sun, stood six robots in a circle, arms outstretched, their pincers grasping those of their neighbors on either side with space left for one more—Euler.
“This is the place where we seek perfection,” Euler said, and joined the circle, closing it.
“It’s almost religious,” Derec whispered to Katherine.
“Yeah,” she replied. “It give me the creeps.”
Derec looked around the room. There were no chairs or tables, nothing upon which a human being could rest. The walls were inset with CRTs jammed side to side around the entire perimeter. Each screen showed its own view of Robot City. Many showed excavation sites, the large movers pushing and leveling soil. Other pictures were of the extrusion plant he had visited, and he was led to conjecture that there might be more than one. There were pictures of the reservoir he had splashed into, and strange, underground pictures taken through the eyes of roving cambots that showed mining tunnels, kilometer after kilometer of deserted tunnel. And finally, many of the screens simply showed the pinktinged blue of the sky.
“You have come to this place,” Euler said loudly, “to help us in our search for correctness, for perfection, for completeness. We are the keys—human and robot—to the synergy of spirit. Synnoetics is our goal. I will introduce the rest of us and we will begin.”
“Synnoetics?” Katherine whispered.
“Man and machine,” Derec replied, “the whole greater than the sum of the parts.”
“It is religious!” she rasped. “And how did you know that?”
Derec shrugged. “This all feels so . . . comfortable to me.”
“You know Ryd
berg,” Euler said, “and Avernus and Arion.” The robots nodded as their names were called. “The rest of us . . . Waldeyer . . . ”
“Good day,” said a squat, roundish robot with wheels.
“Dante . . . ”
“I welcome you,” Dante said, his telescopic eyes sticking out several inches from his dome.
“And Wohler.”
A magnificent golden machine bowed formally without removing his pincers from his neighbors’. “We are honored,” Wohler said.
“We will answer what questions we can from you,” Euler said, “and hope that you will do the same.”
“If, as you say,” Derec told them, “we are all looking for truth and perfection, then our meeting will be fruitful. I would like to begin by asking you why there are certain areas of life here that you will not discuss with us.”
Rydberg spoke. “We are in a standby security mode that renders certain information classified by our programming.”
“Did our arrival prompt the institution of the security mode?” Katherine asked.
“No,” Euler said. “It was in effect when you arrived. If, in fact, you arrived when you said you did. We must ask you again how you came to be here.”
Derec decided to try a little truth. It couldn’t hurt as long as no mention was made of the Key. Perhaps a dose of the truth might get them to open up about the Key’s existence. “We materialized out of thin air atop this very building.”
“And where were you before that?” Wohler, the gold one, asked.
Derec walked slowly around the circle, studying his questioners. “A Spacer way station named Rockliffe near Nexon, right on the edge of the Settlement Worlds quarantine zone.”
Arion, the mannequin, asked, “What means, then, did you use to get from one place to the other?”
“No means,” Derec said. “We were simply transported here.”
There was silence for a moment. “This does not coordinate with any information extant in memory,” Avernus said, his large dome following Derec’s progress around the circle.”
