RA3 - Intruder, Isaac Asimov's Robot City-Robots and Aliens Book 3 - Robert Thurston

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Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots And Aliens Book 3: Intruder by Robert Thurston

ISAAC ASIMOV’S

ROBOT CITY

ROBOTS

AND ALIENS

Intruder by Robert Thurston

For My Lovely Ladies,

Rosemary and Charlotte

WHAT IS A HUMAN BEING?

ISAAC ASIMOV

It sounds like a simple question. Biologically, a human being is a member of the species Homo sapiens. If we agree

that one particular organism (say, a male) is a human being, then any female with which he can breed is also a human

being. And any males with whom any of these females can breed are also human beings. This instantly marks up

billions of organisms on Earth as human beings.

It may be that there are organisms that are too old to breed, or too young, or too imperfect in one way or another, but

who resemble human beings more than they resemble any other species. They, too, are human beings.

We thus end up with something over 5 billion human beings on Earth right now, and perhaps 60 billion who have

lived on Earth since Homo sapiens evolved.

That’s simple, isn’t it? From the biological standpoint, we are all human beings, whether we speak English, Turkish,

or Japanese; whether we have pale skin or dark; red hair or black; blue eyes or brown; flat noses or beaky ones; and

so on.

That, however, is a biological definition, a sophisticated one. Now suppose that you are a member of a primitive

tribe, homogeneous in appearance, language and culture, and you suddenly encounter someone who looks

superficially like you but has red hair, where you’ve seen only black; fair skin where you’ve seen only dark; and,

worst of all, who cannot understand “people language” but makes odd sounds, which he seems to understand, but

which clearly make no sense whatever.

Are these strangers human beings in the sense that you yourself are? I’m afraid the consensus would be that they are

not. Nor is it entirely a matter of lack of sophistication. The ancient Greeks, who were certainly among the most

sophisticated human beings who ever lived, divided all human beings into two groups: Greeks and barbarians.

By barbarians, they didn’t mean people who were uncivilized or bestial. They recognized that some barbarians, like

the Egyptians and Babylonians and Persians were highly cultivated. It was just that non-Greeks didn’t speak Greek;

they made sounds that made no more sense (to a Greek encountering other languages for the first time) than a silly

sound like “bar-bar-bar.”

You might feel that Greeks may have made that division as a matter of convenience, but that they didn’t go so far as

to think that barbarians weren’t human.

Oh, didn’t they? Aristotle, one of the most sophisticated of all the ancient Greeks, was quite certain that barbarians

were slave-material by nature, while Greeks were free men by nature. Clearly, he felt that there was something sub-

human about barbarians.

But they were ancients, however sophisticated they might have been. They had limited experience, knew only a small

portion of the world. Nowadays, we have learned so much we don’t come to those foolish conclusions. We know that

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Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots And Aliens Book 3: Intruder by Robert Thurston

all human-like creatures are a single species.

Yes? Was it so long ago that most White Americans were quite certain that African Blacks were not human in the

sense that they themselves were; that the Blacks were inferior and that to enslave them and let them live on the

outskirts of a White society was doing them a great favor? I wouldn’t be surprised if some Americans believe that

right now.

It was not so long ago that Germans maintained loudly that Slavs and Jews were sub-human, so that they were right

to do their best to rid “true” human beings of such vermin. And I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if there were lots

of people right now who harbor similar notions.

Almost everyone thinks of other groups as “inferior,” although often they do not care to say so out loud. They tend to

divide humanity into groups of which only a small part (a part which invariably includes themselves) are “true”

human beings.

The Bible, of course, teaches universality (at least, in places). Thus, consider one of my own favorite passages in the

New Testament, the parable of the “good Samaritan” (Luke 10:25-37). Someone tells Jesus that one of the beliefs

one must have if one is to go to Heaven is “to love...thy neighbour as thyself. “ Jesus says he is correct and the man

asks, “And who is my neighbour?” (In other words, does he love only his friends and people he likes, or is he

supposed to love all sorts of bums and rotters?)

And here comes the parable of the good Samaritan. To put it briefly, a man needs help, and both a Priest and a Levite

(professional do-gooders, who are highly esteemed by pious people) ignore the whole matter, but a Samaritan offers

a great deal of help.

Now we talk so much about a “good” Samaritan because of this parable, that we think of the Samaritans as all good

and are not surprised at the help he offers. However, to the pious Jews of Jesus’ time, Samaritans were heretics,

things of evil, objects of hatred—and here we have a despised Samaritan doing good when Priests and Levites do

not.

And then Jesus asks, “Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?”

And the man is forced to say, “He that shewed mercy on him.”

This is as much to say that all good people are neighbors even when they are the kind of beneath-contempt

individuals as Samaritans are. And it follows, since all human beings have the capacity to be good, all people are

neighbors and love should extend to all.

St. Paul says in Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither bond nor free; there is neither male

nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

That is a flat statement of universality.

I know that there are many pious people who know these passages and who nevertheless maintain racist views of one

sort or another. Such is the desire to be part of a superior group that nothing can wipe out the tendency to picture

others as inferior; to divide human beings into a)human, b)semihuman, and c)sub-human, being careful always to put

yourself into the first class.

And if we have such trouble in getting human beings to define what a human being is, imagine the problem a robot

would have. How does a robot define a human being?

In the old days, when I was first beginning to write my robot stories, John W. Campbell (my editor and mentor)

challenged me on several occasions to write a story that hinged on the difficulty of defining a human being. I always

backed off. I did not have to try writing such a story to know that it would be a particularly difficult one to write and

that I couldn’t do it. At least, not then.

In 1976, however, I finally tackled the job and wrote “The Bicentennial Man. “ It dealt essentially with a robot that

became more and more human, without ever being accepted as a human being. He became physically like a human

being, mentally like a human being, and yet he never crossed the line. Finally, he did, by crossing the last barrier. He

made himself mortal, and as he was dying, he was finally accepted as a human being.

It made a good story (winning both the Hugo and the Nebula) but it didn’t offer a practical way of distinguishing

between robot and human being, because a robot couldn’t wait for years to see if a possible human being died and

thus proved itself to be a human being.

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Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots And Aliens Book 3: Intruder by Robert Thurston

Suppose you are a robot and you have to decide whether something that looks like a human being is really a human

being, and you have to do it reasonably quickly.

If the only robots that exist are primitive, there is no problem. If an object looks like a human being but is made of

metal, it is a robot. If it talks in a mechanical kind of voice. moves with awkward jerky motions, and so on and so on,

it is a robot.

But what if the robot looks, superficially, exactly like a human being (like my robot, Daneel Olivaw), How can you

tell that he’s a robot? Well, in my later robot novels, you can’t, really. Daneel Olivaw is a human being in all respects

except that he’s a lot more intelligent than most human beings, a lot more ethical, a lot kinder and more decent, a lot

more human. That makes for a good story, too, but it doesn’t help identify a robot in any practical sense. You can’t

follow a robot around to see if it is better than a human being, for you then have to ask yourself—is he (she) a robot

or just an unusually good human being?

There’s this—

A robot is bound by the Three Laws of Robotics, and a human being is not. That means, for instance, that if you are a

human being and you punch someone you think may be a robot and he punches you back, then he is not a robot. If

you yourself are a robot, then if you punch him and he punches you back, he may nevertheless be a robot, since he

may know that you are a robot, and First Law does not prevent him from hitting you. (That was a key point in my

early story, “Evidence.”) In that case, though, you must ask a human being to punch the suspected robot, and if he

punches back he is no robot.

However, it doesn’t work the other way around. If you are a human being and you hit a suspected robot, and he

doesn’t hit you back, that doesn’t mean he is a robot. He may be a human being, but a coward. He may be a human

being but an idealist, who believes in turning the other cheek.

In fact, if you are a human being and you punch a suspected robot and he punches you back, then he may still be a

robot, nevertheless.

After all, the First Law says,..A robot may not harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to

come to harm.” That, however, begs the question, for it assumes that a robot knows what a human being is in the first

place.

Suppose a robot is manufactured to be no better than a human being. Human beings often suppose other people are

inferior, and not fully human, if they simply don’t speak your language, or speak it with an odd accent. (That’s the

whole point of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.) In that case, it should be simple to build a robot within whom

the definition of a human being includes the speaking of a specific language with a specific accent. Any failure in

that respect makes a person the robot must deal with not a human being and the robot can harm or even kill him

without breaking the First Law.

In fact, I have a robot in my book Robots and Empire for which a human being is defined as speaking with a Solarian

accent, and my hero is in danger of death for that very reason.

So you see it is not easy to differentiate between a robot and a human being.

We can make the matter even more difficult, if we suppose a world of robots that have never seen human beings.

(This would be like our early unsophisticated human beings who have never met anyone outside their own tribe.)

They might still have the First Law and might still know that they must not harm a human being—but what is this

human being they must not harm?

They might well think that a human being is superior to a robot in some ways, since that would be one reason why he

must not be harmed. You ought not to offer violence to someone worthier than yourself.

On the other hand, if someone were superior to you, wouldn’t it be sensible to suppose that you couldn’t harm him?

If you could, wouldn’t that make him inferior to you? The fallacy there ought to be obvious. A robot is certainly

superior to an unthinking rock, yet a falling rock might easily harm or even destroy a robot. Therefore the inferior

can harm the superior, but in a well-run Universe it should not do so.

In that case, a robot beginning only with the Laws of Robotics might well conclude that human beings were superior

to robots.

But then, suppose that in this world of robots, one robot is superior to all the rest. Is it possible, in that case, that this

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Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots And Aliens Book 3: Intruder by Robert Thurston

superior robot, who has never seen a human being, might conclude that he himself is a human being?

If he can persuade the other robots that this is so then the Laws of Robotics will govern their behavior toward him

and he may well establish a despotism over them. But will it differ from a human despotism in any way? Will this

robot-human still be governed and limited by the Three Laws in certain respects, or will it be totally free of them?

In that case, if it has the appearance and mentality and behavior of a human being, and if it lacks the Three Laws, in

what way is it not a human being? Has it not become a human being in actuality?

And what happens if, then, real human beings appear on the scene? Do the Three Laws suddenly begin to function

again in the robot-human, or does he persist in considering himself human? In my very first published robot story,

“Reason,” come to think of it, I described a robot that considered himself to be superior to human beings and could

not be argued out of it.

So what with one thing or another, the problem of defining a human being is enormously complex, and while in my

various stories I’ve dealt with different aspects of it, I am glad to leave the further consideration of that problem to

Robert Thurston in this third book of the Robots and Aliens series.

CHAPTER 1

ROBOT CITY DREAMS

Derec knew he was dreaming. The street he now ambled down wasn’t real. There had never been a street anywhere

in Robot City like this distorted thoroughfare. Still, too much was familiar about it, and that really scared him.

The Compass Tower, now too far in the distance, had changed, too. There seemed to be lumps allover its surfaces,

but that was impossible. In a city where buildings could appear and disappear overnight, the Compass Tower was the

only permanent, unchangeable structure.

It was possible this strange street was newly created, but he doubted that. It was a dream-street, plain and simple, and

this had to be a dream. Anyway, where were the robots? Nobody could travel this far along a Robot City street

without encountering at least a utility robot scurrying along, on its way to some regular task; or a courier robot, its

claws clutching tools; or a witness robot, checking the movements of the humans. During a stroll like this, Derec

should have encountered a robot every few steps.

No, it was absolutely certain this was a dream. What he was doing was sleeping in his ship somewhere in space

between the blackbody planet and Robot City. He had just come off duty after dealing with the Silversides for hours,

a task that would tire a saint.

At one time, just after his father had injected chemfets into his bloodstream, he had regularly dreamed of Robot City,

but it turned out that his harrowing nightmares had all been induced by a monitor that his father had implanted in his

brain. The monitor had been trying to establish contact so he could be aware of the nature of the chemfets, which

were tiny circuit boards that grew in much the same manner as the city itself had. Replicating in his bloodstream and

programmed by his father, they were a tiny robot city in his body, one that gave him psycho-electronic control over

the city’s core computer and therefore all its robots. After he had known this and the chemfets’ replication process

had stabilized, he had had no more nightmares of a distorted Robot City.

Until now.

Since he was so aware he was dreaming, perhaps this was what Ariel had explained to him as a “lucid dream.” In the

lucid dream state, she said, the dreamer could control the events of the dream. He wanted to control this dream, but at

the moment he couldn’t think of anything particular to do.

He looked around him. The immediate streetscape seemed composed of bits and pieces from several stages of the

city’s development, a weird composite of what Derec had observed during his several stays there.

But where were the robots?

If this was a lucid dream, maybe the reason he hadn’t seen any yet was that he hadn’t guided any into the scene.

Maybe they were waiting inside the buildings to be summoned. Maybe he should do so, before he panicked. But

which one could he bring onstage? How about Lucius, the robot who had created the city’s one authentic artistic

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Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots And Aliens Book 3: Intruder by Robert Thurston

masterpiece, the breathtaking tetragonal, pyramidal building-sculpture entitled “Circuit Breaker”? He’d be a good

choice since, as the victim of a bizarre roboticide, he no longer existed. It certainly would be pleasant to see old

Lucius again, his body so unrobotically stooped, if only to chat with him about art. There hadn’t been much art in his

life lately, especially if you didn’t count the rather breathtaking spectacle of a thousand blackbodies spread across the

sky. That was pretty, but it wasn’t art.

He wondered why his thoughts were rambling so. Had the Silversides disturbed his mind’s equilibrium that much?

Forget them. Forget them now. Get a normal robot into the dream. One of the most unforgettable robots he had

known. Avernus, say. Let’s see his stern visage again, his jet-black metallic skin, his interchangeable hands. He

concentrated on Avernus, but the robot didn’t appear. How about Euler and his glowing photocell eyes? Nope, no

deal. Let’s try for Wohler, then, before he went nonfunctional trying to save Ariel on the outer wall of the Compass

Tower. Golden and impressive, Wohler would be a wonderful choice. But no Wohler responded to his summons. He

would have to talk to Ariel about this. As a lucid dream, it was shaping up as one hell of a failure.

Ariel, in her compartment aboard the ship, was also dreaming. Hers was not, however, a lucid dream. Deeper than

that, it was a clearcut nightmare.

Jacob Winterson, the humaniform robot who had been her servant, existed again. Jacob had been destroyed by

Neuronius, one of the flying aliens called blackbodies. He had blown up and mangled most of Jacob (and himself in

the bargain). The few charred pieces that remained were now buried in some unmarked area of the agricultural

community she had initiated as a political compromise with the blackbodies. The compromise had worked. They had

been about to destroy their planet’s new robot city entirely because it was a threat to their weather systems; however,

an agricultural community was acceptable to all sides.

She missed Jacob. Very much. In that comfortable, detached way a human could love a robot, she had loved him.

Not that it could ever have been real love. She was too much in love with Derec to be unfaithful to him except in

dreams. On the other hand, she could not deny that she had not sometimes been romantically attracted toward the

handsome and imperturbable humaniform robot.

In the dream, Jacob sat in front of a computer terminal, his humanlike fingers flying over the keyboard, pressing keys

as if he wanted to push them all the way through, making the screen shake with the ferocity of his entries.

She asked him what he was doing. He said he was searching for the formula that would transform a humaniform

robot into a human being. There was no such formula, she told him. When he turned toward her, his eyes seemed

filled with a frightening human anger. He protested that there were at least a hundred Earth and Spacer legends in

which creatures changed into human beings. Statues, puppets, fish, trees, all became human in such myths. He was

certain, he said with an un-Jacobian shrillness, that there had to be a formula by which he, too, could be

transmogrified.

Why did the Compass Tower look so diseased? Derec asked himself. Was it possible for him, as a lucid dreamer, to

change that? He concentrated on the building’s shape, trying to restore it to its architecturally magnificent pyramidal

form. But nothing happened. If anything, the tower became uglier, and he had to look away from it.

In the distance something came toward him, traveling down the street at a high speed. As it passed by buildings, the

buildings changed. When it neared, he saw it was a vehicle, but one quite unlike any Robot City mode of

transportation. It ran on three thick wheels, making it vaguely resemble a jitney, the smaller, lighter utility type of

vehicle used for taxiing around the city. The vehicle’s body was misshapen, as if a lot of ungeometric chunks had

been welded together on a long central stem. It was colored black and gray in an illogical and splotchy fashion.

Still certain he was in the midst of a lucid dream, Derec stood defiantly in the center of the roadway —daring the

vehicle to come to a screeching stop at his feet. Which it did. Good, he thought, I’m in control of the dream at last.

Just watch me now.

A large hatch at the top of the vehicle sprang open with an explosive sound, and Dr. Avery, his father, pulled himself

through the opening. What kind of a lucid dream was this? The last person he wanted to see was his megalomaniacal

father, interfering in a dream in just the way he’d interfered with Derec’s life, injecting him with chemfets and

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Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots And Aliens Book 3: Intruder by Robert Thurston

transforming him into a walking computer. Half-computer, anyway.

Avery was looking more demented than usual. His eyes, usually intense, now glowed with an overdramatic madness.

In fact, Avery looked so exaggerated that Derec felt he could relax. No reason to be afraid, after all, just a dream. A

dream he would seize control of at any moment.

Ariel placed her hand upon Jacob’s. His hand, she noted, felt soft, more like human than humaniform. She told him

to stop. There was no need for him to become human. Even if he found a formula, it would be foolish to use it. As a

humaniform robot, Jacob had all the virtues of human existence without all the miseries, without human physical and

emotional pains.

Jacob turned away from the computer and looked at Ariel, for a moment a humanlike sadness in his eyes.

“Don’t you see?” he said, “I want the misery. I want to feel what a human feels. Pain, happiness, love. I want to love

you, Mistress Ariel.”

She put a finger on his lips. In contrast to his hand, they felt robotic, hard metal lips that could, if she pressed hard

enough, make her fingertip bleed. She almost wanted to test that out. If she tried to cut her hand, would Jacob be able

to invoke the First Law of Robotics—the part stating that a robot could not allow a human to come to harm—fast

enough to prevent her from succeeding?

“You can’t love me, Jacob,” she said tenderly. “I love Derec, so there’s no point in your loving me. It would be—

what do they call it in romances—unrequited.”

“That wouldn’t matter. I would be happy with that, too. I could respond to it, as in your great literary works. I could,

like one of your legendary lovers, die falling off a bridge or swimming a river or with a vial of poison and a great

dagger plunging in—”

“Hush, Jacob. Please stop. I wouldn’t want you to die for me.”

“I am already dead.”

“No, don’t say that. You’re here. You’re—”

“In a grave.”

“Jacob—”

“A rotting scrap pile of metal, spare parts covered by soil.”

His words were so fiercely spoken they frightened her. She backed away from him.

Dr. Avery was dressed in a black-and-gray silver-buttoned uniform that seemed too militaristic for a scientist.

“You look bemused,” he said, then added almost contemptuously: “...my son. What is bothering you?”

“It’s well, it’s that this is my dream, and I’m supposed to be in control, and you’re not welcome in it.”

Avery smiled sinisterly. “You can’t get me out of it. I am everywhere. In the city, in your dreams, in your hat.”

“My hat? I don’t even wear a—”

“Just an old Earth expression. I am an expert in old Earth expressions. Can it, flip out, you’re the bee’s knees, life is

hard and then you die. I know Earth expressions from all parts of its history.”

“But I wouldn’t know any, and this is my dream, and you come out of my mind.”

“Are you sure?”

“I know you’re nowhere near. I am on a ship heading for Robot City. You may be in the city, muddling things up as

usual, but you’re not on this ship.”

“Maybe I am. I am, after all, omniscient and omnipotent.”

“I know, I know. Always a god in your own mind.”

“Yes.”

If this was a lucid dream, Derec thought, then he should be able to flee from the old bastard. He whirled around and

started running down the street. On both sides of him buildings seemed to slip into the ground while new ones

popped out.

Many buildings were oddly shaped, not at all like any existing Robot City ones. Some were tilted at odd angles, with

several leaning into others while others leaned away. In the distance a tall edifice swayed from side to side as if

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Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots And Aliens Book 3: Intruder by Robert Thurston

caught in a violent wind. But there was a rhythm to its swaying, reminding him of a dance. What dance? Something

intruding from his past, a vague memory that would not get focused. His past had a way of doing that, with some

memory fragment flashing into his mind and going right out again before he could make any connection with it.

There were so many parts of his past life that were still blocked from his mind by the amnesia that had once been

total.

Ariel suddenly found herself in an underground corridor on Earth, but it looked nothing like any of the tunnels she

had seen during her actual visit there. For one thing, it was deserted. You never saw an empty passageway on Earth.

Human bodies were visible everywhere, except in private quarters.

Her steps echoed hollowly through the corridor, with a hundred echoes of echoes. She felt as if she were being

hounded by a mob of people all walking at her exact pace. Each time she turned around to confront her trackers,

there was no one in sight.

She came to a Section Kitchen, the kind of public eating area she’d come to despise. Plenty of food steamed on

cafeteria-style trays, but no people sat at the many numbered tables or worked behind the counters. The room looked

as if there had been a sudden alarm and everyone had scurried out.

She felt hungry, and, taking a spoon and wiping it thoroughly on a paper napkin (she was an Auroran, after all, who

was repelled by Earth’s poor hygienic habits), she scooped out a biteful of something soft and white. However, when

she put it in her mouth, it seemed to flame up and singe her tongue and the roof of her mouth. She spit it out.

“Are you poisoned, Mistress Ariel?” It was Jacob again, appearing at her side as if by magic.

“No. But it is good of you to ask.”

“I must. First Law.”

“Oh, of course. If you decide to become human, Jacob, you won’t have to obey the Laws of Robotics any more. I’ll

miss the advantage of having you protect me.”

“I would protect you, mistress, whether I were human or robot.”

There was something so touching, something so sad and vulnerable about this dream version of her dead robot

companion, that Ariel began to cry. She cried in her dream, and she was still crying when she woke up.

Derec looked back. Avery and his strange vehicle had vanished from the center of the street. Good, at least

something in this lucid dream had worked out right.

Ahead of him there was a park. Derec could see tall trees, thick with branches, heavy with green leaves. Brightly

colored flowers lined cobblestone paths. Metal umbrellas shaded soft lights that were spaced evenly along the

pathways. At the top of a slight rise, he could see swings, slides, see-saws, monkey bars, all the equipment of a

playground.

He raced toward the park, picking up his pace. The street seemed to speed beneath him as if he were powering a

treadmill. Before he reached the park, the buildings lining the street grew larger, towering over the thoroughfare,

bending toward it, shading the light and making everything darker.

His last step from the city street onto the park’s cobbled path was an impressive leap, one longer than he could

normally accomplish. Landing, he stumbled forward for several steps.

He started walking toward the playground. The pathway was soft, resilient. He decided to trot, and the bounciness of

the path added a spring to his steps. He attained such a speed that he nearly skidded past the playground entrance.

A closed gate blocked the way into the playground. Above the gate was a gilded sign that read, A VERY PARK. The

old reprobate, he’d named a park after himself. What gall! playgrounds were supposed to represent happiness and

joy. In no way did they suggest the doctor’s monstrous cynicism.

Underneath the large sign was a smaller one that read, STAND ON SOAP, ALL GEEKS WHO MENTOR HERE.

What did Avery mean by that? And how could he, after all, mean anything? He was merely a figure in Derec’s

dream. The real question was how could Derec’s mind have formed this unusual scene, these strange words. He

would have to discuss all this with Ariel, the expert on such matters.

When he opened the gate, there was a sonorous beep as the gate-latch separated from its fastening. A deep voice that

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seemed to come from above said, “Welcome. Enjoy.”

“Enjoy what?” Derec asked. There was no reply, no doubt because the voice was a recording cued by the opening of

the gate.

Tentatively he took a couple of steps into the playground. To his immediate right was a high slide. Even though he

didn’t remember his childhood, he knew it was a slide. It even looked like a familiar one. Walking up to it, he

discovered it was incomplete. No ladder led up to the platform from which a child would start his downward plunge.

The slide appeared to stand without any support.

An overwhelming urge to try out the slide came over him. Although he could have climbed from the bottom edge of

the slide up to the platform at its top, he knew he had to start from the platform itself. This was his lucid dream and

he could do anything he wanted to, including jump higher than was physically possible. Crouching down as close to

the ground as he could get, he jumped up. He reached for the edge of the platform, but just missed. Back on the

ground, he scrunched down again and made a second, magnificent leap that took him higher than the level of the

platform. Reaching out, he grabbed its rim. Struggling and grunting, he pulled himself onto the small platform. It

bounced up and down like a diving board, nearly flinging him back to the ground.

The slide seemed even taller than it had from ground level, or else he had become very small, a child again. Looking

down at his hands, he saw they’d shrunk. They were child’s hands. Not only that, his clothing had been magically

transformed. He was now dressed in one of those silver jumpers that were once all the rage for toddlers. (How did he

know about silver jumpers?) Before he could even speculate on this mystery, a voice from down below called to him:

“C’mon down the slide, honey. I’ll catch you.”

There was a woman standing at the foot of the slide. She seemed tall and thin, but he could not make out the details

of her face, even though it was turned upward at him. Her voice was soft and wonderfully friendly. He felt ready to

slide down to her. But, even as he stared at her, her shape changed. Now she was a short, rather plump lady in odd,

out-of-date clothes, but the face was still not discernible. Was this some trick of one of the Silversides? Were they

experimenting with human shapes, using pictures they extracted from the ship computer?

“Don’t be afraid, honey,” the woman said. Was he mistaken, or was that Eve Silverside’s voice? “You won’t falloff

the slide. It’ll be all right.”

If it was a Silverside, he or she just might make him fall to the ground by pulling her hands away just as he reached

the bottom edge. He shrunk back, no longer wanting to slide down.

The woman was now medium height, medium build, wearing a pristinely white lab smock. No matter what shape she

took, what clothes she wore, he still saw no face. He knew there was a face there. It just wouldn’t come into focus for

him in spite of the vivid details of the rest of her.

“Let go of those bars, dear, and come down. Don’t worry. Mommy’ll catch you.”

Mommy! This was his mother? No, it must be a Silverside, playing a joke. He didn’t know his mother and, in fact,

knew very little about her. His father had provided no information. How could a Silverside even hope to duplicate

her? Wait. This was a dream. The woman below was neither Silverside nor his mother. It was an apparition from his

own mind.

One thing he did know now. He didn’t want to go down the slide, not even to his mother’s eagerly awaiting arms. He

started to scream. His screams sounded childlike, shrill, highpitched, tremulous.

“No, I’m not coming down. I’m not! I’m not!”

“It’s all right, David. Mommy’s right here.”

David: his real name, or at least the one that Ariel and his father had said was the right one. Perhaps this was no

dream and this was really his mother. If he slid down, he could see her better. But her arms might turn into knives,

fire, pain. He was suddenly very afraid of her.

“Leave me alone!” he screamed. “Leave me alone!”

Suddenly the bars he was clutching became red-hot, and so did the metal beneath him. It felt the way a slide did

when it had been standing in the sun at high noon on the hottest day of the year. (How did he know that?)

He could not hold on.

He had to let go.

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Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots And Aliens Book 3: Intruder by Robert Thurston

He slid down, screaming.

His mother’s face seemed to come up at him, but there were still no recognizable features on it.

He saw her reach out toward him.

And woke up.

He could feel the sweat on his face as he stared up into the lovely face of Ariel Welsh. She stood beside his bunk, her

arms reaching out to him just like his dream-mother’s had.

CHAPTER 2

DEALING WITH THE SILVERSIDES

Ariel rubbed Derec’s forehead gently. The way she touched him was now one of his favorite things in life. It seemed

to him that her fingertips did not actually make contact with his skin but merely gave off comforting rays as they

passed above it. Ariel had told him that there were people who appeared to heal the sick because of the comforting

warm emanations that came from their hands. The warmth had actually been measured and was sometimes burning

hot. On the planet Solaria, she told him, such affection or healing was rare. Solarians obeyed taboos against touching

others, and that seemed sad to her.

“You’re positively drenched in sweat, Derec. That must have been one whale of a dream.”

“It was. Awful.”

“I know how you feel. I just had a lulu of a nightmare myself.”

“What was your dream about?”

She didn’t want to tell him that it concerned Jacob Winterson or that she had awakened crying. He’d been somewhat

jealous of Jacob, so the subject was best ignored right now.

“Nothing special. Tell me yours.”

“There was the city, Robot City, and it was all strange, mixed up. And my father in a car that looked like a disease.

And...and...my mother...”

“Hush, hush. Take it easy. When you’re ready, tell me all about it, calmly and in order.”

He nodded. Getting up from the bunk, he brushed past her. As he paced, he concentrated on stretching the sleep out

of his muscles and lowering his breathing to an acceptable rhythm, “I thought I was having a lucid dream, but, you

know, I was never able to control it, not even for a second.”

As he related the dream, Ariel noted that his face and voice were childlike. Sometimes she forgot how young they

actually were. All the responsibility and strain of their lives since they had first come to Robot City had seemed to

age them incredibly. Sometimes her mental image of herself was of a much older woman, one who’d been coping

with adversity for so long that the experience registered in deep lines on her face. However, a look into any mirror

showed her the same young, almost adolescent, mien: the baby fat of her cheeks, the brightness of her eyes, the

radiance of her long black hair, the youthful sheen of her skin. Her figure, once fairly gaunt, had filled out well, too—

as Derec so often reminded her.

Looking into his tired eyes, realizing he had not slept well for some time, she wondered how a couple of kids like

them had stumbled into a life filled with so much tension and danger. Why couldn’t they go back to Aurora (they had

been there, excited with their love, for too brief a time) and romp without care through one of its lovely forests or

swim in a placid lake? If not Aurora, the strictly regimented, uncomfortably overpopulated Earth might even do.

Anywhere where they could be suitably young for a while.

“What do you make of it, Ariel? The dream?”

She wondered how much analysis he could take right now. His face pale beneath his damp, sandy hair, he looked

vulnerable.

“Well, I don’t really know. Maybe all the worries you’ve had, what with the strange messages you’ve been getting

from Robot City, maybe they’re just coming out in your dreams.”

Derec’s chemfets had gone haywire when he had tried to contact Robot City. Normally he could easily check on

operations there from vast distances across space, but all he could sense these days was some vague activity and

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Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots And Aliens Book 3: Intruder by Robert Thurston

some nonsense he could not interpret. The last time he’d tried, he could swear the central computer was too occupied

with transmitting a medley of unusual songs to bother responding to him. That wasn’t the way the chemfet system

was supposed to work. The computer was the conduit between Derec’s chemfets and Robot City, allowing him to run

the place and, since the responsibility was so awesome, to delegate authority properly to the appropriate robots. In a

way, Robot City had become an extension of Derec, or at least of him and his wishes, his orders, his plans and

dreams for the city’s future. He had previously been able to take charge of any part of the city’s operations in an

instant, without having to accept musical digressions from a computer. Now a good part of the city’s activities

seemed shut off from him.

He felt isolated, as if the chemfets, unable to sustain normal contact with the city, were idly traveling through his

bloodstream to no useful purpose. It was a nerve-wracking feeling that may have been something like the detachment

and distortion of reality that a disturbed person must feel, and he didn’t like it. His father was, Derec believed,

insane, and he sometimes worried that genetics would win out, and he’d wind up in a loony bin himself.

Dr. Avery could very well be behind the present looniness in Robot City. Whenever there was trouble there, he was

always the first logical suspect. Since he was the creator of the city, no one would know better than he how to disrupt

it.

Ariel now smiled at him. What must she be thinking as his mind drifted off like this?

“Frost,” he said, “it all seems pretty warped when I think of it. Maybe it’s just worry about Robot City. But that part

where I can’t see my mother’s face, that really scares me.”

“Take it easy, darling. Maybe you dream about her because you want to see her—”

“I never think of her! I don’t want to think of her!”

She hadn’t expected him to be so vehement on the subject of his mother, a woman whose name neither she nor Derec

knew. Ariel had conducted an extensive computer search of genetic records on Robot City and Aurora, but had not

been able to locate a single fact about Derec except the skimpy details accumulated since their arrival in Robot City.

She had no idea why so few records of him existed. She thought his father might have blocked or erased any file on

Derec, or that even her mother, Juliana Welsh, who had financed Dr. Avery’s work, had pulled some strings to

suppress any bureaucratic documentation on Derec’s earlier life. Derec himself remembered enough to know that he

was, indeed, a Spacer, that he had some training as a roboticist, and that his memory had been deliberately erased.

None of the memory that his father had restored had provided any solutions to the other mysteries surrounding his

existence.

She put her arms around him and hugged him. “Forget it, Derec. I’m just psychologizing, and I’m not really good at

it. It was just a dream, only a dream. Nothing to worry about. Really.”

“You’re right, probably.” His voice was calmer. “What I need is some real rest. I never could sleep in one of those

tubelike contraptions.” He gestured toward the bunk, which did, indeed, look like half a tube. “Maybe there’ll be

some time to relax in Robot City, especially if everything’s okay there. And if we can get the Silversides straightened

away.”

“Adam and Eve. You’d seem friendlier to them if you’d use their first names. Old human custom.”

Ariel was happy to see a smile briefly cross Derec’s face. “Sorry, just can’t get used to those names, especially since

they tend to look like us when they’re in the mood to look human. Anyway, it’s a wonder I didn’t dream of them!”

“I think they’ve invaded some of my dreams. And I’d much rather dream about you, darling.”

She kissed him and said, “I think I’ll check in with Wolruf. She’s with Adam and Eve right now. You know their

new game?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Adam’s taught Eve a version of the wolf-state.”

Adam had arrived on the planet of the kin, intelligent wolf-creatures, in an egglike vehicle. Because he had not yet

encountered sentient life, he had been shapeless. When he joined the kin, he transformed himself into kin-shape. He

had a tendency even now to return to that form regularly. The kin had dubbed him SilverSide because, even when he

changed his overall appearance, he still retained the metallic, silvery surface of a robot.

“Now the two of them become wolves and start nipping at each other while barking out that strange language. It’s

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