Robert Silverberg - The World Outside

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The World Outside

Robert Silverberg

A DF Books NERD’s Release

First published in Galaxy Magazine, October 1970

Interface Crew Nine works in a flat, high strip of gloomy space stretching along the

outside of the service core of Urban Monad 116 from the 700th to the 730th floors.

Though the work area is lofty, it is scarcely more than five meters deep, a skimpy

envelope through which dust motes dance toward sucking filters. Standing within it,

the ten men of Interface Crew Nine are sandwiched between the urbmon's outlayer of

residential and commercial sectors and its hidden heart, the service core, in which the

computers are housed.

The crewmen rarely enter the core itself. They function on its periphery, keeping

watch over the looming wall that bears the access nodes of the building's master

computer nexus. Soft green and yellow lights gleam on the nodes, constantly relaying

information about the health of the unseen mechanisms. The men of Interface Crew

Nine serve as the ultimate backup for the platoons of self-regulating devices that

monitor the workings of the computers. Whenever heavy load causes some facet of

the control system to sag, the crewmen quickly prime it so that it can go on bearing its

burden. It is not difficult work, but it is vital to the life of the entire gigantic building.

Each day at 1230, when their shift-time begins, Michael Statler and his nine

crewmates crawl through the Edinburgh iris-hatch on 700 and make their way into the

perpetual dusk of the interface to take up their primer stations. Pushchairs carry them

to their assigned levels—Michael starts by monitoring the nodes spanning floors 709

to 712—and as the day progresses they slide up and down the interface to the

changing zones of trouble.

Michael is twenty-three years old. He has been a computer-primer in this interface

crew for eleven years. By now the work is purely automatic for him; he has become

simply an extension of the machinery. Drifting along the interface, he boosts or

drains, shunts or couples, blends or splits, meeting every need of the computer he

serves, and does it all in cool mindless efficiency, operating on reflex alone. There is

nothing reprehensible about this. It is not desirable for a primer to think, merely to act

correctly; even here in the fifth century of computer technology the human brain is

still given a high rating for its information handling capacity per cubic centimeter,

and a properly trained interface crew is in effect a group of ten of these excellent little

organically grown computers jacked into the main unit. So Michael follows the

shifting patterns of lights, making all necessary adjustments, and the cerebral centers

of his mind are left free for other things.

He dreams a great deal as he works.

He dreams of all the strange places outside Urban Monad 116, places that he has seen

on the screen. He and his wife Stacion are devoted screen-viewers, and they rarely

miss one of the travelog shows. The portrayals of the old pre-urbmon world, of the

relics, the dusty remnants. Jerusalem. Istanbul. Rome. The Taj Mahal. The stumps of

New York. The tips of London's buildings above the waves. All the bizarre, romantic,

alien places beyond the urbmon's skin. Mount Vesuvius. The geysers of Yellowstone.

The African plains. The isles of the South Pacific. The Sahara. The North Pole.

Vienna. Copenhagen. Moscow. Angkor Wat. The Great Pyramid and the Sphinx. The

Grand Canyon. Chichén Itzá. The Amazon jungle. The Great Wall of China.

Do any of these places still exist?

Michael has no idea. A lot of what they show on the screen is a hundred years old or

older. He knows that the spread of urbmon civilization has required the demolition of

much that is ancient. The wiping away of the cultured past. Everything carefully

recorded in three dimensions first, of course. But gone. A puff of white smoke; the

smell of pulverized stone, dry on the nostrils, bitter. Gone. Doubtless they've saved

the famous monuments. No need to chew up the Pyramids just to make room for more

urbmons. But the big sprawls must have been cleaned away. The former cities. After

all, here we are in the Chipitts constellation, and he has heard his brother-in-law Jason

Quevedo, the historian, say that once there were two cities called Chicago and

Pittsburgh that marked the polar ends of the constellation, with a continuous strip of

urban settlement between them. Where are Chicago and Pittsburgh now? Not a trace

left, Michael knows; the fifty-one towers of the Chipitts constellation rise along that

strip. Everything neat and well-organized. We eat our past and excrete urbmons. Poor

Jason; he must miss the ancient world. As do I. As do I.

Michael dreams of adventure outside Urban Monad 116.

Why not go outside? Must he spend all his remaining years hanging here in a

pushchair on the interface, tickling access nodes? To go out. To breathe the strange

unfiltered air with the smell of green plants on it. To see a river. To fly, somehow,

around this barbered planet, looking for the shaggy places. Climb the Great Pyramid!

Swim in an ocean, any ocean!Salt water. How curious. Stand under the naked sky,

exposing his skin to the dread solar blaze, letting the chilly moonlight bathe him. The

orange glow of Mars. At dawn to blink at Venus.

“Look, I could do it,” he tells his wife. Placid bulgy Stacion. Carrying their fifth

little, a girl, coming a few months hence. “It wouldn't be any trouble at all to reprime

a node so it would give me an egress pass. And down the shaft and out the building

before anybody's the wiser. Running in the grass. Traveling cross-country. I'd go east,

I'd go to New York, right by the edge of the sea. They didn't tear New York down,

Jason. says so. They just went right around it. A monument to the troubles.”

“How would you get food?” Stacion asks. A practical girl.

“I'd live off the land. Wild seeds and nuts, like the Indians did. Hunt! The herds of

bison. Big, slow brown things; I'd come up behind one and jump on its back, right up

there on the smelly greasy hump, and my hands into its throat,yank! It wouldn't

understand. No one hunts any more. Fall down dead, and I'd have meat for weeks.

Even eat it raw.”

“There aren't any bison, Michael. There aren't any wild animals at all. You know

that.”

“Wasn't serious. Do you think I'd really kill?Kill? God bless, I may be peculiar, but

I'm not crazy! No. Listen, I'd raid the communes. Sneak in at night, grab off

vegetables, a load of proteoid steak, anything that's loose. Those places aren't

guarded. They don'texpect urbmon folk to come sneaking around. I'd eat. And I'd see

New York, Stacion, I'd see New York! Maybe even find a whole society of wild men

there. With boats, planes, something to take me across the ocean. To Jerusalem! To

London! To Africa!”

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