Asimov, Isaac - Robot City 05 - Refuge

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Isaac Asimov's Robot City Book 5: Refuge, by Rob Chilson
ISAAC ASIMOV’S
ROBOT
CITY
BOOK 5: REFUGE
ROB CHILSON
Copyright © 1988
CITIES
ISAAC ASIMOV
Through eighty percent of the history of Homo sapiens, all human beings were
hunters and gatherers. Of necessity, they were wanderers, for to stay in one
place would mean gathering all there was of vegetable food and driving away
all there was of animal food—and starvation would follow.
The only habitations such wanderers (or “nomads”) could have would have to be
either parts of the environment, such as caves, or light and movable
artifacts, such as tents.
Agriculture, however, came into being some ten thousand years ago and that
introduced a great change.
Farms, unlike human beings and animals, are not mobile. The need to take care
of farms and agricultural produce nailed the farmers to the ground. The more
they grew dependent upon the harvest to maintain their swollen numbers (too
great for most to survive if they had to return to hunting and gathering), the
more hopelessly immobile they became. They could not run away, except for
brief intervals, from wild animals, and they could not run away at all from
nomadic raiders who wished to help themselves to the copious foodstores that
they had not worked for.
It followed that farmers had to fight off their enemies; they had no choice.
They had to band together and build their houses in a huddle, for in unity
there was strength. Forethought or, failing that, bitter experience, caused
them to build the huddle of houses on an elevation where there was a natural
water supply, and to lay in foodstores and then build a wall about the whole.
Thus were built the first cities.
Once farmers learned to protect themselves and their farms, and became
reasonably secure, they found they could produce more food than they required
for their own needs. Some of the city-dwellers, therefore, could do work of
other types and exchange their products for some of the excess food produced
by the farmers. The cities became the homes of artisans, merchants,
administrators, priests, and so on. Human existence came to transcend the bare
search for food, clothing, and shelter. In short, civilization became possible
and the very word “civilization” is from the Latin for “citydweller.”
Each city was developed into a political unit, with some sort of ruler, or
decision-maker, for this was required if defense of homes and farms was to be
made efficient and successful. The necessity of being prepared for battle
against nomads led to the development of soldiers and weapons which, during
peaceful periods, could be used to police and control the city population
itself. Thus, there developed the “city-state.”
As population continued to grow, each city-state tried to extend the food-
growing area under its control. Inevitably, neighboring city-states would
collide and there would be disputes, which became armed wars.
The tendency would be for one city-state to grow at the expense of others,
with the result that an “empire” would be established. Such large units
tended to be more effective than smaller ones, for reasons that are easy to
explain.
Consider that agriculture requires fresh water, and that the surest supply of
that is to be found in a sizable river. For that reason, early farming
communities were built along the shores of rivers such as the Nile, the
Euphrates, the Indus, and the Hwang-Ho. (The rivers also served as easy
avenues for commerce, transportation, and communication.)
Rivers, however, took work. Dikes had to be built along the shores to confine
the river and prevent ruin through floods. Irrigation ditches had to be built
to bring a controlled supply of water directly to the farms. To dike a river
and to maintain a system of irrigation requires cooperation not only of
individuals within a given city-state, but among the city-states themselves.
If one city-state allowed its own system to deteriorate, the flood that might
follow would disastrously affect all other city-states downstream. An empire
that controls many city-states can, more effectively, enforce the necessary
cooperation and maintain a general prosperity.
An empire, however, usually means the domination of many people by one
conquering group, and resentment builds up, and struggles for “liberty” break
out. Eventually, under weak rulers, an empire is therefore likely to break up.
World history seems to demonstrate an oscillation between empires (often
prosperous, but despotic), and decentralized political units (often producing
a high culture, but quarrelsome and militarily weak).
On the whole, though, the tendency has been in the direction not only of large
units, but of larger and larger ones, as advancing technology made
transportation and communication easier and more efficient, and as overall
population increase heightened the perceived value of security and prosperity
over liberty and squabbling.
As population grew, cities grew larger and more populous, too. Memphis-Thebes-
Nineveh-Babylon—and then, eventually, Rome, which at its peak in the second
century A.D. may have been the first city to have a population of one million.
The multi-million city became a feature of the modem world after the
Industrial Revolution introduced enormous advances in transportation and
communication. The nineteenth century saw cities of four million people and
the early twentieth century saw cities of six and seven million people.
All through the last ten thousand years, in other words, the world has become
more and more urbanized, and after World War II, the process became a runaway
cancer. In the last forty years, the world population has doubled and the
population of the developing countries, where the birth rate remained high,
has considerably more than doubled. We now have cities, like Mexico City, São
Paulo, Calcutta, with populations climbing toward the twenty million mark and
threatening to go higher still. Such cities are becoming squalid expanses of
shantytowns, endlessly polluted, without adequate sanitation, and with the
very technological factors that encourage the growth beginning to break down.
Where do we go from here? Anywhere other than decay, breakdown and
dissolution?
I tackled the problem of the future city in my novel The Caves of Steel, which
first appeared as a three-part serial in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1953. I was
influenced in my thinking by the fact that I happen to be a claustrophile. I
feel comfortable in crowded and enclosed environments.
Thus, I enjoy living in the center of Manhattan. I move about its crowded
canyons with ease and with no sensation of discomfort. I like to work in a
room with the blinds pulled down, and at a desk that faces a blank wall, so
that I increase my feeling of enclosure.
Naturally, then, I pictured my future New York as a kind of much more extreme
version than the present New York. Some people marveled at my imagination.
“How could you think up such a nightmare existence as that in The Caves of
Steel?”
To which I would reply in puzzled surprise, “What nightmare existence?”
I had added one novelty, to be sure. I had the entire huge city of the future
built underground.
Perhaps that was what made it seem a nightmare existence, but there are
advantages to underground life, if you stop to think of it.
First, weather would no longer be important, since it is primarily a
phenomenon of the atmosphere. Rain, snow, and fog would not trouble the
underground world. Even temperature variations are limited to the open surface
and would not exist underground. Whether day or night, summer or winter,
temperatures in the underground city would remain equable and nearly constant.
In place of spending energy on heating and cooling, you would have to spend
energy on ventilation, to be sure, but I think that this would involve a large
net saving. Electrified transportation would be required to avoid the
pollution of the internal-combustion engine, but then walking (considering the
certainty of good weather) would become much more attractive and that, too,
would not only save energy, but would promote better health.
The only adverse environmental conditions that would affect the underground
world would be volcanoes, earthquakes, and meteoric impacts. However, we know
where volcanoes exist and where earthquakes are common and might avoid those
areas. And perhaps we will have a space patrol to destroy any meteoric objects
likely to bring them uncomfortably close.
Second, local time would no longer be important. On the surface, the tyranny
of day and night cannot be avoided, and when it is morning in one place, it is
noon in another, evening in still another and midnight in yet another. The
rhythm of human life is therefore out of phase. Underground, where artificial
light will determine the day, we can if we wish make a uniform time the planet
over. This would certainly simplify global cooperation and would eliminate jet
lag. (If a global day and global night turn out to have serious deficiencies,
any other system can be set up. The point is it will be our system and not one
forced on us by the accident of Earth’s rotation.)
Third, the ecological structure could be stabilized. Right now, with humanity
on the planetary surface, we encumber the Earth. Our enormous numbers take up
room, as do all the structures we build to house ourselves and our machines,
to make possible our transportation and communication, to offer ourselves rest
and recreation. All these things distort the wild, depriving many species of
plants and animals of their natural habitat—and sometimes, involuntarily,
favoring a few, such as rats and roaches.
If humanity and its structures are removed below ground —well below the level
of the natural world of the burrowing animals—Man would still occupy the
surface with his farms, his forestry, his observation towers, his air
terminals and so on, but the extent of that occupation would be enormously
decreased. Indeed, as one imagines the underground world becoming increasingly
elaborate, one can visualize much of the food supply eventually deriving from
soilless crops grown in artificially illuminated areas underground. The
Earth’s surface might be increasingly turned over to park and to wilderness,
maintained at ecological stability.
Nor would we be depriving ourselves of nature. Indeed, it would be closer. It
might seem that to withdraw underground is to withdraw from the natural world,
but would that be so? Would the withdrawal be more complete than it is now,
when so many people work in city buildings that are often windowless and
artificially conditioned? Even where there are windows, what is the prospect
one views (if one bothers to), but sun, sky, and buildings to the horizon—
plus some limited greenery?
And to get away from the city now? To reach the real countryside? One must
travel horizontally for miles and miles, first across city pavements and then
across suburban sprawls. And the countryside we would be viewing would be
steadily retreating and steadily undergoing damage.
In the underground world, we might have areas of greenery, too, even parks—and
tropical growth in greenhouses. But we don’t have to depend on these makeshift
attempts, comforting though they may be to many. We need only go straight up,
a mere couple of hundred yards above the level of “Main Street, Underground”
and—there you are.
The surface you would visit would be nature—perhaps tamer than it might be,
but relatively unspoiled. The surface would have to be protected from too
frequent, or too intense, or too careless visiting, but however carefully
restricted the upward trips might be the chances are that the dwellers in the
underground world would see more of the natural world, under ecologically
sounder conditions, than dwellers of surface cities do today.
I am interested to see, by the way, that the notion of underground living has
begun to seem more realistic in the decades since I wrote The Caves of Steel.
For instance, many cities in the more northerly latitudes (where cold weather,
ice, and snow inhibit shopping by making it unpleasant) are building
underground shopping malls—more and more elaborate, more and more self-
contained, more and more like my own imagined world.
However, my imagination is not the only one the world possesses. Here we have
Refuge, by Rob Chilson, in which my underground city of the future is
explored by another science-fiction writer skilled in his craft, who has taken
my underground cities as the starting point for his own.
CHAPTER 1
KAPPA WHALE
The stars gave no light. Derec crawled slowly along the ship’s hull, peering
intently through his helmet at the silvery metal. The ship was below him, or
beside him, depending entirely on how one looked at it. He preferred to think
of it as “beside”—he felt less as if he might fall that way.
To his left, to his right, “above” and “below” him, was nothing. But space
was nothing new to Derec, whose memories began only a few months ago in a
space capsule—a lifepod, in fact. At the moment he had no time for memories of
the pod, of the ice asteroid, or of capture by the nonhuman pirate Aranimas.
He was concentrating on swimming.
“I’m at the strut,” he announced.
“Good,” said Ariel, her voice booming in his helmet.
Derec hadn’t time to turn his radio down, nor did he wish to let go just yet.
His crawl along the hull, helped by the electromagnets in knees and palms,
had been slow, but inexorable. When he seized the strut, his hand stopped but
his body continued on past, like a swimmer carried by a wave. A wave.()f
inertia.
Gripping the strut, he found himself slowly swinging around it like a flag,
facing back the way he’d come. He had realized immediately that he shouldn’t
have grabbed the strut, but didn’t compound his error by trying to undo it. He
let the swing take him, absorbed his momentum with his arm—it creaked
painfully—and came to a stop.
A robot, advancing in its tracks, arrested itself on the other side of the
strut in the proper way: a hand braced against it, the arm soaking up the
momentum like a spring. Being a robot, he had no fear of sprained wrists, the
most common injuries in free-fall.
The robot, Mandelbrot, paused courteously while Derec resolved his
entanglement with the strut. Derec gripped it with both hands and bent one
elbow while keeping the other straight. His body revolved slowly around the
bent arm until he had reversed himself. Placing his foot against the strut, he
tippy-toed away from it, letting go, uncoiling, and reaching out for the
hull.
For a moment Derec was in free, dreamy flight, not touching the ship; then
his palms touched down, the magnets clicking against it as he turned on
crawlpower. He slid forward on hands and forearms while his inertia wave was
absorbed by the “beach” of the ship’s hull. His chest and belly and finally
his knees touched down painfully, to slide scraping along.
“Frost!” said Ariel. “What are you doing, sawing the hull in half?”
Derec didn’t reply. Not letting all his momentum be absorbed, he came quickly
to hands and knees, reaching and pulling at the hull. The magnets were
computer controlled and clicked on and off alternately in the crawl pattern.
In a few seconds he braked and all the magnets went on. He skittered slowly to
a stop. Mandelbrot joined him in a similar fashion and looked at the hull,
then moved aside.
“Right, we’re at the hatch,” said Derec. “It doesn’t look like we’ll need any
tools to get in; just a matter of turning inset screws.”
There were two slits in the hull, each in a small circle. The circles were at
one edge of a square outline—the hatch. Derec stuck two fingers in one of the
slits, Mandelbrot copying his motion at the other side, and they twisted the
circles clockwise. There was a pop, and the hatch rode free.
“Got it open,” Derec said.
That was a little premature. He would have to stand up on the hull to raise
the hatch, or else move around. But before he could make up his mind,
Mandelbrot reinserted his fingers into one of the slits and pulled. The hatch
came free easily. Mandelbrot bent his arm like a rope, heaving the hatch up
over his head, put up his other arm, and the hatch stood out from the hull.
“Can’t see a frosted thing,” muttered Derec. His helmet light bounced off the
shiny underside of the hatch and again off the huddled machinery exposed, but
without air to scatter the light, what he saw was a collection of parallel and
crossing lines of light against velvet blackness. After a moment, however, he
made out a handle. These things weren’t meant only for doctorates in
mechanical engineering to understand, after all. There was a release in the
handle.
Squeezing the release, Derec pulled up on the handle. Nothing happened. There
wasn’t room on the handle for Mandelbrot to help him. Gripping it tightly,
Derec stood on the hull and put his back into it. It came free with a creaky
vibration he felt all the way up through the soles of his feet, an odd sort of
hearing.
“Trouble?” Ariel asked, concern in her voice. Perhaps she had heard his
breathing and the gasp when it broke free.
“Stuck, but I got it loose. I think a little ice had frozen around it.”
With the help of the robot, who had released the hatch and now stood upright
on the hull, Derec pulled out a mass of cunningly nested pipes all connected
together, rather like unfolding a sofa-bed. Mandelbrot reached down and pulled
a heavy cord, and a mass of thick, silvery plastic unfolded. As soon as the
plastic balloon was sufficiently unfolded not to suffer damage, Derec peered
down at its root.
He had to move around to the side, but there was the valve, looking uncommonly
like a garden faucet on far-off Aurora. For a moment Derec was shaken by a
perfect memory of a faucet in some dewy garden on the Planet of the Dawn. He’d
had indications before this that he was from that greatest of Spacer planets,
but very few specific memories leaked through his amnesia, fewer still were as
sharp as this one.
After a few moments, though, he realized he was not going to remember what or
where that garden was. All he knew about it was that it was a pleasant memory.
He had liked that garden. Now all he had of it was the memory of its faucet.
It isn’t wise to shrug in freefall, so Derec reached carefully inside the
hatch and, bracing himself, twisted the faucet. There was a hiss he heard
through his fingers and the air in the arm of his suit, as steam under low
pressure rushed into the balloon. In a moment, Mandelbrot was out of sight
behind it.
That wonderful flexible arm came into view, Mandelbrot twisted the return
valve, and in a moment there was the faint murmur of a small pump. Water, too,
was moving through the pipes by now.
The radiator and vacuum distillation sections of the water-purification-and-
cooling system was in operation. They had settled down for a long stay in
space.
Should have done this days ago, Derec thought but didn’t say aloud. An
optimist, he had hoped a ship would have come by before now. Ariel, who tended
to be pessimistic, had doubted.
“I’m coming back by way of the sun side,” he said. “The light’s better.”
Ariel didn’t answer. A punch on a button made his safety line release itself
and reel in from the forward airlock. He reattached it to a ring near the
hatch; the robot mimicked his movements. Feeling better about standing upright
on the hull, Derec strode slowly and carefully around the rather narrow
cylinder until the tiny red lamp of their current “sun” came into view, then
on around until it was overhead.
A class M dwarf, the red star was no doubt very old. It was certainly very
small and it had no real planets. Its biggest daughter was an ancient lump of
rock barely four hundred kilometers in diameter, its next biggest less than
half that in size. Most of its daughters were fragments that ranged from
respectable mountains down to fists—and there weren’t many of any size. A star
that old was formed at a time when the nebulas in the galaxy had only begun to
be enriched with heavy elements. This was not a metalliferous star; no
prospector had ever bothered to check out those lumps of rock for anything of
value; none ever would.
Dim and worthless though it was, the star lit the way... somewhat. Under its
light, the silvery hull looked like burnished copper—a pleasing sight. Shadows
still were sharp-edged, his own shadow an odd-shaped, moving hole, it seemed,
in the hull, a hole into some strange and other-dimensional universe.
Mandelbrot followed him gracefully.
“Detection alert,” said Ariel, sounding bored. “Rock coming our way. Looks
like it might be about a mouthful, if you were hungry for rocks.”
“I’m not,” said Derec, but it made him think of baked potatoes. He was getting
hungry.
Had there been any danger, Ariel would have said so; Derec assumed that the
rock would miss them by a wide margin. They were well out from the star,
sparsely populated though its space was with junk. This was only the second
thing they’d detected in two days, and the first was merely a grain of sand.
Probably both objects were “dirty ice”—the stuff of comets.
Danger or no, Mandelbrot moved closer to him, scanning the sky without
pausing. Derec didn’t notice, and didn’t bother to look for the rock. The sun
drew his eye instead. At this distance, dim as it was and weak in ultraviolet
light, it could be looked at directly.
Pitiful excuse though it was for a star, poor as its family was, still it made
an island of light in a vast sea of darkness where stars hard and unwinking as
diamonds cut at him with their stares. He thought of the space around the red
star as a room, a warmly lit room in an immensity of cold and darkness.
After the circumscribed life of Robot City, he felt free. Space, Derec
thought, is mankind’s natural home.
There came a bark from inside the vessel, and he was reminded with a sudden
chill that others than men used space. One of those others was within this
ship: Wolruf, the doglike alien with whom he’d made alliance on Aranimas’s
ship. She had escaped first from Aranimas with him, then from the hospital
station, then from Robot City.
Things had been worse for them in the past, he thought. If they had to wait
here for a week or two...
Then he thought: I’m worried about Ariel, though.
He moved forward, found the airlock, and crowded in to make room for the bulky
robot.
Frost condensed on his armor as soon as he entered the ship, but Derec ignored
that, knowing that it wasn’t too cold to touch yet; they’d only been out for
minutes. It seemed even more cramped inside after having been out..
“We should spend more time outside,” he said. “It’s not exactly fresh air, but
at least there’s a feeling of freedom.”
Ariel looked momentarily interested, then shrugged. “I’m all right. “
Mandelbrot looked keenly,at her, pausing in his ridiculous motion of scraping
frost off his eyes, but said nothing. He had said nothing to Derec yet, but
Derec knew that he was worried, too. Ariel had a serious disease. A fatal
disease, she had said; It had caused her occasional pain before this, stabbing
muscular aches, and she frequently seemed feverish and headachey and generally
out of it; sometimes she even had hallucinations. But this prolonged gloom was
new, and worrisome.
“So there’s water for showerr, yess?” said Wolruf. She was the size of a
large dog and not infrequently went on all fours, but usually walked upright,
for her front paws were clumsy-seeming hands, ill-shaped by human standards
but clever with tools.
“Give it half an hour,” Derec said. The furry alien needed showers daily in a
ship where there was no escape from each other.
“Derec, shall I prepare food?” Mandelbrot asked. “It approaches the usual
hour for your meals.”
Ariel roused herself, said, “I’ll do that, Mandelbrot. What do you want,
Derec, Wolruf?”
There were no potatoes ready. Of course he did not expect to find real food in
a spaceship, and it took time for the synthesizer to prepare a specialty item.
“Stew would be fine. Keep varying the mix and it’ll be a long time before I
get bored with it.”
“I eat same as ‘ou,” Wolruf said.
“Borscht today,” said Ariel with a smile that seemed natural. “We’ve got lots
of tomato sauce, and besides, I like it.”
“It’s wonderful to have a commercial synthesizer and a large stock of basics,”
Derec said, cheering at her cheer. “Remember our experiments in Robot City?”
She made a face. “Remember? I’m trying to forget.”
Dr. Avery’s ship was well-equipped. Indeed, they could live indefinitely out
here—at least until the micropile gave out, or their air and water leaked
away. The water purifier used yeast and algae to reclaim sewage, the plants
then being stored as basic organic matter for the synthesizer.
Derec, having removed the suit with motions suitable to a contortionist,
stowed it away in its clips beside the airlock. Mandelbrot immediately went to
it and checked it over. Reaching to the ceiling of the cabin, Derec touched
off, tippy-toed off the floor, and back off the ceiling. Called “brachiating,”
it was the most efficient mode of movement within a cabin in free-fall.
He turned on the receiver. It was tuned to BEACON—local. A calm, feminine-
sounding robotic voice spoke. “Beacon Kappa Whale Arcadia. Report, please.
Beacon Kappa Whale Arcadia. Report, please.” Turning off the sound, Derec
glumly checked the indicators. Kappa Whale was coming in on the
electromagnetic band, both laser and microwave. They were getting minimal
detection on the hyperwave, however.
“I don’t understand it,” he muttered. Ariel glanced at him over her shoulder
as she floated before the cooking equipment.
Wolruf joined him. “Wass broken by Doctorr Avery, do ‘ou think?”
“Sabotage? I don’t know. It was picking up Kappa Whale beautifully when we
took off from Robot City.”
They had left the planet of robots hurriedly in this stolen ship. Dr. Avery,
who had created the robots that went on to build Robot City, had been pursuing
them for reasons none of them understood. Though Derec suspected that Ariel
knew more about the enigmatic and less-than-sane doctor than she had said.
Once off the planet and safe from Dr. Avery, they discovered that either there
were no astrogation charts in the ship, or they were well concealed in its
computer. Though positronic, that was not a full-fledged positronic brain. Had
it been, they could have convinced it that without the charts they would die
in space. Under the First Law of Robotics, it would be unable to withhold the
charts, regardless of the orders it had been given.
The First Law of Robotics states: A robot may not knowingly harm a human
being, or knowingly allow a human being to come to harm.
Orders would have come merely under the Second Law, which is: A robot must
obey the orders of a human being, except where this would conflict with the
First Law.
But the computer was merely a more complicated calculator, incapable of the
simplest robotic thought. Robotic ships with positronic brains had been tried,
and had all failed, because all full-sized positronic brains were designed
with the Three Laws built into them. Necessarily, they were too intent on
preventing possible harm to their occupants. Since space travel is inherently
unsafe, they had a tendency to go mad or to refuse to take off.
“I feel like hitting the damn computer, or kicking it,” he said.
Wolruf grinned her rather frightening grin. “Ho! ‘Ou think, like Jeff Leong,
all machines should have place to kick?”
“Or some way to jar information loose. I’m convinced there must be charts in
there somewhere—”
It was a reasonable guess. Nobody could remember all the miles of numbers
that was a star chart. Charts were rarely printed out in whole, though for
convenience in calculation, some sections might be. This little ship didn’t
have a printer. All it had—they presumed—was a recording in its memory.
But they couldn’t find it.
Even that wouldn’t have been too serious if the hyperwave hadn’t gone out on
them. Lacking charts, in orbit about Robot City, they had swept space with the
hyperwave and picked up Kappa Whale Arcadia quite well. The fix was good
enough to Jump toward, and they had done that. Logically, they should then
have been able to pick up other beacons and hop, skip, and jump their way to
anywhere in inhabited space: the fifty Spacer worlds, or the Settler worlds
that Earth had recently begun to occupy.
“We’re somewhere within telescopic distance of Arcadia,” murmured Derec. That
was a minor and distant Spacer world. But they had no idea on which side of it
lay the constellation of the Whale. They knew only that this—Kappa—was the
ninth-brightest star in that constellation, and that there was only one
fainter, Lambda Whale. Constellations, by interstellar agreement, had, for
astrogational purposes, no more than ten stars.
“Sooner or laterr a ship will come,” Wolruf said reassuringly.
Sooner or later. Derec grunted.
He didn’t need to have the argument repeated; it had been mostly his. When
they found that, after the Jump, the hyperwave would only pick up the nearest
beacon, Derec had suggested that they lie low until a ship came by, and
request a copy of the astrogational charts from it. To beam a copy over would
take the ship only a few minutes, and be no trouble at all.
Sooner or later.
“Soup’s on, or stew in this case,” Ariel said. The oven opened with an
exhalation of savory steam. “We still have some of your crusty bread, Derec. I
reheated it. But we’ll want more later.”
“It smells good,” Derec said honestly. Wolruf, with even greater honesty,
licked her chops and grinned. Derec had overcome his irritation at Ariel’s
invasion of the male preserve of the chief of cuisine, and had admitted to her
that she was a better chef than he. (Common cooking was robot work, which no
human admitted to doing.)
They ate in silence for a short while. The stew was served in covered bowls,
but it clung to the inner surfaces. Manipulating their spoons carefully, they
were able to eat without flinging food allover the ship. At first even Ariel’s
appetite was good, but she quickly lost interest.
“Do you think a ship will ever come by here?” she asked finally, her gaze, and
apparently her thought, a long way away.
“Of course,” said Derec quickly. “I admit I was too optimistic. I suspect
we’re well out on the edge of inhabited space; this lane is not too well
traveled. But eventually....”
“Eventually...” she said, almost dreamily. She seemed, often now, in a
drifting, abstracted state.
“Eventually,” Derec repeated weakly.
He was too honest to try to argue her into belief. Ships didn’t fly from star
to star like an aircraft. They Jumped, with massive thrusts of their
hyperatomic motors, going in a direction that was at right angles to time and
all three spatial dimensions simultaneously. Since they went no-distance, it
naturally took no-time to Jump. Therefore there were no lanes of star travel.
For safety reasons, ships Jumped from star to star; if one was stranded for
any reason, rescuers had only to chart the route and check every star along
it. And since not every star had inhabited planets, all along these well-
traveled lanes (as they were called) were the beacon stars. A ship Jumping
into this beacon system was supposed to verify that it had indeed arrived at
Kappa Whale, beam its ship’s log to the beacon’s recorders, and depart.
Periodically, patrol ships copied those records to assure that nothing
untoward had happened.
But days had passed and no ships had appeared. Of course a ship appearing on
the other side of Kappa Whale would not be detected by them on the
electromagnetic band until it had Jumped out. The hyperwave radio, though,
was functioning well enough to detect a ship reporting to the beacon anywhere
in this stellar system. Derec and Wolruf agreed on that.
So: eventually they would be found and rescued.
Wolruf finished her meal by opening her bowl and licking it clean efficiently.
“I wass thinking,” she said. “Maybe Jump-wave shock shifted things in ‘ou’rr
hyperwave antenna.”
“Shifted the elements?” Derec nodded uncertainly. He had no idea where he had
been educated, but he had a good general technical background with a strong
specialty in robotics—not unusual for a Spacer youth, as he assumed himself to
be. But hyperwave technology was a whole other and, if anything, even more
difficult school of knowledge.
“Do ‘ou have—’ou know—things to measure them with?”
Derec had seen a toolbox on the ship’s schematic that he had accessed before
going out to set up the recycling system..There might be.”
There was. A few minutes later, with Ariel listless at the detectors and
Wolruf at the communicator, Derec carefully strode forward outside, followed
by Mandelbrot.
The hyperwave antenna could have been put in any part of the ship, since the
hyperatomo didn’t kowtow to the laws of space-time, but it would have had to
have been well shielded lest its backlash in the small ship damage the
instruments. or even the crew. So in these Star Seeker models it was in a
blister on the bow, as far from everything as possible.
The antenna looked like a series of odd-shaped chunks of metal and coils of
wire, and the testing gear simply shot current through each element in turn.
The readouts were within normal range, as nearly as he could tell from the
manual he had accessed before coming out.
“I don’t get it,” Derec complained, thinking of the classical definition of
Hell: the place where all the instruments test out to be perfect, but none of
them work. “How can I fix it if it isn’t broken?”
“I think,” said Wolruf slowly, “that Dr. Avery hass retuned the antenna. “
“Retuned?” Derec had never heard of such a thing, but knew little about the
subject. “I thought all Spacer talk was in the same range. Is he trying to
pick up—Settlers? Or what?”
“Maybe Aranimass.”
Maybe, Derec thought, chilled. Maybe, indeed. That long-armed pirate was
definitely interested in Dr. Avery’s doings, though he might not know who or
what Dr. Avery was.
Derec stood, looking around the warm room generated by Kappa Whale, and
shivered. For the first time the thought came to him: What if the first ship
that showed up was Aranimas’s? He must be systematically searching the beacon
stars—
A touch on his arm nearly made Derec jump off the hull.
CHAPTER 2
PERIHELION
The burnished, enigmatic face of Mandelbrot approached his. The robot gripped
him with his normal left arm. His Avery-construct right arm bent impossibly,
reached around Derec and switched off his communicator.
Derec had had nightmares about that arm. It was a piece of scrap from an Avery
robot, which Aranimas had had picked up from the ice asteroid where Derec had
first awakened. “Build me a robot,” the alien had said. Derec had put pieces
together to build the robot he called Alpha. It wasn’t a good job, but it
worked.
Then, weeks later, the crudely attached right arm seated itself firmly and
made a few modifications in Alpha’s brain: Alpha informed them that he was now
known as Mandelbrot. Derec had observed the fine structure of the arm: a
series of tiny chips, or scales, that gripped each other and could therefore
mold the arm to any shape that might be desired.
Each unit was a sort of robotic cell; together, they were a brain. And having
integrated themselves, they had—to a degree—taken over Alpha. Derec’s
nightmare was that the cells were eating the robot out from the inside, that
his interior was one solid mass of them, and he was about to become something
—horrifying.
Impossible; the cells couldn’t eat. Also, all the brains were robotic,
Mandelbrot’s normal positronic brain and the units in the cells. The Three
Laws compelled them all. But dreams are not logical.
At the moment, the worst nightmare had come true, until Mandelbrot put his
head against Derec’s helmet. It would have looked to an observer as if the
robot were kissing his cheek: his microphone touched Derec’s helmet and
Mandelbrot spoke.
“Derec, I am worried about Ariel.”
They had been careful to conceal from Mandelbrot the worst of Ariel’s
condition. The robot knew only that she was sick, not that the disease was
usually fatal. The effect on his positronic brain was more than they cared to
risk; the First Law left no loophole for incurable diseases.
“Ariel is bored, as well as ill,” Derec said.
He looked away uneasily from the robot’s expressionless but intense face. The
stars beckoned, promising and threatening; somewhere out there, perhaps, he
might recover his memory. He remembered Jeff Leong, who had crashed on Robot
City after an accident while on his way to college. In a few years, Derec
would have been thinking about college, if this fantastic thing hadn’t
happened to him.
摘要：

IsaacAsimov'sRobotCityBook5:Refuge,byRobChilsonISAACASIMOV’SROBOTCITYBOOK5:REFUGEROBCHILSONCopyright©1988CITIESISAACASIMOVThrougheightypercentofthehistoryofHomosapiens,allhumanbeingswerehuntersandgatherers.Ofnecessity,theywerewanderers,fortostayinoneplacewouldmeangatheringalltherewasofvegetablefooda...

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