Asimov, Isaac - Robot City 01 - Odessey

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ISAAC ASIMOV'S
ISAAC ASIMOV’S
ROBOT
CITY
Book 1: ODYSSEY
MICHAEL P.
KUBE-McDOWELL
Copyright © 1987
For all the students
who made my seven years of teaching time
well spent,
but especially for:
Wendy Armstrong, Todd Bontrager, Kathy Branum, Jay & Joel Carlin, Valerie Eash, Chris Franko, Judy
Fuller, Chris & Bryant Hackett, Kean Hankins, Doug Johsnson, Greg LaRue, Julie Merrick, Kendall
Miller, Matt Mow, Amy Myers, Khai & Vihn Pham, Melanie & Laura Schrock, Sally Sibert, Stephanie
Smith, Tom Williams, Laura Joyce Yoder, Scott Yoder
And for
Joy Von Blon, who made sure they always had something good to read.
— MICHAEL P. KUBE MCDOWELL
MY ROBOTS
by ISAAC ASIMOV
I wrote my first robot story, “Robbie,” in May of 1939, when I was only nineteen years old.
What made it different from robot stories that had been written earlier was that I was determined
not to make my robots symbols. They were not to be symbols of humanity’s over-weening arrogance.
They were not to be examples of human ambitions trespassing on the domain of the Almighty. They
were not to be a new Tower of Babel requiring punishment.
Nor were the robots to be symbols of minority groups. They were not to be pathetic creatures that
were unfairly persecuted so that I could make Aesopic statements about Jews, Blacks or any other
mistreated members of society. Naturally, I was bitterly opposed to such mistreatment and I made
that plain in numerous stories and essays—but not in my robot stories.
In that case, what did I make my robots?—I made them engineering devices. I made them tools. I
made them machines to serve human ends. And I made them objects with built-in safety features. In
other words, I set it up so that a robot could not kill his creator, and having outlawed that
heavily overused plot, I was free to consider other, more rational consequences.
Since I began writing my robot stories in 1939, I did not mention computerization in their
connection. The electronic computer had not yet been invented and I did not foresee it. I did
foresee, however, that the brain had to be electronic in some fashion. However, “electronic”
didn’t seem futuristic enough. The positron—a subatomic particle exactly like the electron but of
opposite electric charge—had been discovered only four years before I wrote my first robot story.
It sounded very science fictional indeed, so I gave my robots “positronic brains” and imagined
their thoughts to consist of flashing streams of positrons, coming into existence, then going out
of existence almost immediately. These stories that I wrote were therefore called “the positronic
robot series,” but there was no greater significance than what I have just described to the use of
positrons rather than electrons.
At first, I did not bother actually systematizing, or putting into words, just what the safeguards
were that I imagined to be built into my robots. From the very start, though, since I wasn’t going
to have it possible for a robot to kill its creator, I had to stress that robots could not harm
human beings; that this was an ingrained part of the makeup of their positronic brains.
Thus, in the very first printed version of “Robbie” (it appeared in the September 1940 Super
Science Stories, under the title of “Strange Playfellow”), I had a character refer to a robot as
follows: “He just can’t help being faithful and loving and kind. He’s a machine, made so.”
After writing “Robbie,” which John Campbell, of Astounding Science Fiction, rejected, I went on to
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other robot stories which Campbell accepted. On December 23, 1940, I came to him with an idea for
a mind-reading robot (which later became “Liar!”) and John was dissatisfied with my explanations
of why the robot behaved as it did. He wanted the safeguard specified precisely so that we could
understand the robot. Together, then, we worked out what came to be known as the “Three Laws of
Robotics.” The concept was mine, for it was obtained out of the stories I had already written, but
the actual wording (if I remember correctly) was beaten out then and there by the two of us.
The Three Laws were logical and made sense. To begin with, there was the question of safety, which
had been foremost in my mind when I began to write stories about my robots. What’s more I was
aware of the fact that even without actively attempting to do harm, one could quietly, by doing
nothing, allow harm to come. What was in my mind was Arthur Hugh Clough’s cynical “The Latest
Decalog,” in which the Ten Commandments are rewritten in deeply satirical Machiavellian fashion.
The one item most frequently quoted is: “Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive/Officiously to
keep alive.”
For that reason I insisted that the First Law (safety) had to be in two parts and it came out this
way:
1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to
harm.
Having got that out of the way, we had to pass on to the second law (service). Naturally, in
giving the robot the built-in necessity to follow orders, you couldn’t forfeit the overall concern
of safety. The second law had to read as follows, then:
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict
with the First Law.
And finally, we had to have a third law (prudence). A robot was bound to be an expensive machine
and it must not needlessly be damaged or destroyed. Naturally, this must not be used as a way of
compromising either safety or service. The Third Law, therefore, had to read as follows:
3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the
First or Second Laws.
Of course, these laws are expressed in words, which is an imperfection. In the positronic brain,
they are competing positronic potentials that are best expressed in terms of advanced mathematics
(which is well beyond my ken, I assure you). However, even so, there are clear ambiguities. What
constitutes “harm” to a human being? Must a robot obey orders given it by a child, by a madman,
by a malevolent human being? Must a robot give up its own expensive and useful existence to
prevent a trivial harm to an unimportant human being? What is trivial and what is unimportant?
These ambiguities are not shortcomings as far as a writer is concerned. If the Three Laws were
perfect and unambiguous there would be no room for stories. It is in the nooks and crannies of the
ambiguities that all one’s plots can lodge, and which provide a foundation, if you’ll excuse the
pun, for Robot City.
I did not specifically state the Three Laws in words in “Liar!” which appeared in the May 1941
Astounding. I did do so, however, in my next robot story, “Runaround,” which appeared in the
March 1942 Astounding. In that issue on line seven of page one hundred, I have a character say,
“Now, look, let’s start with the three fundamental Rules of Robotics,” and I then quote them.
That, incidentally, as far as I or anyone else has been able to tell, represents the first
appearance in print of the word “robotics”—which, apparently, I invented.
Since then, I have never had occasion, over a period of over forty years during which I wrote many
stories and novels dealing with robots, to be forced to modify the Three Laws. However, as time
passed, and as my robots advanced in complexity and versatility, I did feel that they would have
to reach for something still higher. Thus, in Robots and Empire, a novel published by Doubleday in
1985, I talked about the possibility that a sufficiently advanced robot might feel it necessary to
consider the prevention of harm to humanity generally as taking precedence over the prevention of
harm to an individual. This I called the “Zeroth Law of Robotics,” but I’m still working on that.
My invention of the Three Laws of Robotics is probably my most important contribution to science
fiction. They are widely quoted outside the field, and no history of robotics could possibly be
complete without mention of the Three Laws. In 1985, John Wiley and Sons published a huge tome,
Handbook of Industrial Robotics, edited by Shimon Y. Nof, and, at the editor’s request, I wrote
an introduction concerning the Three Laws.
Now it is understood that science fiction writers generally have created a pool of ideas that form
a common stock into which all writers can dip. For that reason, I have never objected to other
writers who have used robots that obey the Three Laws. I have, rather, been flattered and,
honestly, modern science fictional robots can scarcely appear without those Laws.
However, I have firmly resisted the actual quotation of the Three Laws by any other writer. Take
the Laws for granted, is my attitude in this matter, but don’t recite them. The concepts are
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everyone’s but the words are mine.
But, then, I am growing old. I cannot expect to live for very much longer, but I hope that some
of my brainchildren can. And to help those brainchildren attain something approaching long life,
it is just as well if I relax my rules and allow others to make use of them and reinvigorate them.
After all, much has happened in science since my first robot stories were published four decades
ago, and this has to be taken into consideration, too.
Therefore, when Byron Preiss came to me with the notion of setting up a series of novels under
the overall title of Robot City, in which “Asimovian” robots and ideas were to be freely used, I
felt drawn to the notion. Byron said that I would serve as a consultant to make sure that my
robots stay “Asimovian,” that I would answer questions, make suggestions, veto infelicities, and
provide the basic premise for the series as well as challenges for the authors. (And so it was
done. Byron and I sat through a series of breakfasts in which he asked questions and I—and
sometimes my wife, Janet, as well—answered, thus initiating some rather interesting discussions.)
Furthermore, my name was to be used in the title so as to insure the fact that readers would know
that the project was developed in conjunction with me, and was carried through with my help and
knowledge. It is, indeed, a pleasure to have talented young writers devote their intelligence and
ingenuity to the further development of my ideas, doing so each in his or her own way.
The first novel of the series, Robot City Book 1: Odyssey, is by Michael P. Kube-McDowell, the
author of Emprise, and I am very pleased to be connected with it. The prose is entirely Michael’s;
I did none of it. In saying this, I am not trying to disown the novel at all; rather I want to
make sure that Michael gets all the credit from those who like the writing. It is my role, as I
have indicated, only to supply robotic concepts, answer (as best I can) questions posed by Byron
and Michael, and suggest solutions to problems raised by the Three Laws. In fact, Book Two of this
series will introduce three interesting new laws concerning the way robots would deal with humans
in a robotic society, a relationship which is the underpinning of Robot City.
In nearly half a century of writing I have built up a name that is well known and carries weight
and I would like to use it to help pave the way for young writers by way of their novels and to
preserve the names of older writers by the editing of anthologies. The science fiction field in
general and a number of science fiction practitioners in particular have, after all, been very
good to me over the years, and the best repayment I can make is to do for others what it and they
have done for me.
Let me emphasize that this is the first time I have allowed others to enter my world of robots and
to roam about freely there. I am pleased with what I’ve seen so far, including the captivating
artwork of Paul Rivoche, and I look forward to seeing what is done with my ideas and the concepts
I have proposed in the books that follow. The books may not be (indeed, are bound not to be)
exactly as I would have written them, but all the better. We’ll have other minds and other
personalities at work, broadening, raising, and refocusing my ideas.
For you, the reader, the adventure is about to begin.
CHAPTER 1
AWAKENING
The youth strapped in the shock couch at the center of the small chamber appeared to be peacefully
sleeping. The muscles of his narrow face were relaxed, and his eyes were closed. His head had
rolled forward until his chin rested on the burnished metal neck ring of his orange safesuit. With
his smooth cheeks and brush-cut sandy blond hair, he looked even younger than he was—young enough
to raise the doorman’s eyebrow at the least law-abiding spaceport bar.
He came to consciousness slowly, as though he had been cheated of sleep and was reluctant to give
it up. But as the fog cleared, he had a sudden, terrifying sensation of leaning out over the edge
of a cliff.
His eyes flashed open, and he found himself looking down. The couch into which the five-point
harness held him was tipped forward. Without the harness, he would have awakened in a jumbled heap
on the tiny patch of sloping floor plate, wedged against the one-ply hatch that faced him.
He raised his head, and his darting eyes quickly took in the rest of his surroundings. There was
little to see. He was alone in the tiny chamber. If he unstrapped himself, there would be room for
him to stand up, perhaps to turn around, but nothing more ambitious. A safesuit helmet was cached
in a recess on the curving right bulkhead. On the left bulkhead was a dispensary, with its water
tube and delivery chute.
None of what he saw made sense, so he simply continued to catalog it. Above his head, hanging from
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the ceiling, was some sort of command board with a bank of eight square green lamps labeled “P1,”
“P2,” “F,” and the like. The board was in easy reach, except that there appeared to be no switches
or controls for him to manipulate. In one corner of the panel the word MASSEY was etched in
stylized black letters.
Apart from the slight rasp of his own breathing, the little room was nearly silent. From the
machinery which filled the space behind his shoulders and under his feet came the whir of an
impeller and a faint electric hum. But there was no sound from outside, from beyond the walls.
Thin as it was, the catalog was complete, and it was time to try to make something of it. He
realized that, although he did not recognize his surroundings, he was not surprised by them. But
then, since he could not remember where he had fallen asleep, he had carried no expectations about
where he should be when he awoke.
The simple truth was he did not know where he was. Or why he was there. He did not know how long
he had been there, or how he had gotten there.
But at the moment none of those things seemed to matter, for he realized—with rapidly growing
dismay and disquiet—that he also did not know who he was.
He searched his mind for any hint of his identity—of a place he had known, of a face that was
important to him, of a memory that he treasured. There was nothing. It was as though he was trying
to read a blank piece of paper. He could not remember a single event which had taken place before
he had opened his eyes and found himself here. It was as though his life had begun at that moment.
Except he knew that it had not. He was nota crying newborn child, but a man—or near enough to one
to claim the title until challenged. He had existed. He had had an identity and a place in the
world. He had had friends—parents—a home. He had to have had all of that and more.
But it was gone.
It was a different feeling than merely forgetting. At least when you forget something, you have a
sense that you once knew it—
“Are you all right?” a pleasant voice inquired, breaking the silence and making him suddenly tense
all his muscles.
“Who are you?” he demanded. “Where are you? Where am I?”
“I am Darla, your Companion. Please try to remain calm. We’re in no immediate danger.” The voice,
coming from the command panel before him, was more clearly female now. “You are inside a Massey
Corporation Model G-85 Lifepod. Massey has been the leader in spacesafety systems for more than .
. . ”
While Darla continued on with her advertisement, he twisted his head about as he reexamined the
compartment. I should have known that, he thought. Of course. A survival pod. Even the name Massey
was familiar. “Why are there no controls?”
“All G-series pods have been designed to independently evaluate the most productive strategy and
respond appropriately.”
Of course, he thought. You don’t know who’s going to climb into a pod, or what kind of condition
they’ll be in. “You’re not a person. What are you, then? A computer program?”
“I am a positronic personality,” Darla said cheerfully. “The Companion concept is the Massey
Corporation’s unique contribution to humane safety systems.”
Yes. Someone to talk to. Someone to help him pass hours of waiting without thinking about what it
would mean if he weren’t found. The full picture dawned on him. All survival pods were highly
automated. This one was more. It was a robot—presumably programmed as a therapist and charged with
keeping him sane and stable.
A robot—
A human had a childhood. A robot did not. A human learned. A robot was programmed. A robot
deprived of the core identity which was supposed to be integrated before activation might “awake”
and find he had knowledge without experience, and wonder who and what he was—
Suddenly he bit down on his lower lip.
How does a robot experience sensor overload? As pain?
When he tasted blood, he relaxed his jaw. He would take the outcome of his little experiment at
face value. He was human. In some ways, that was the more disturbing answer.
“Why have you done harm to yourself?” Darla intruded.
He sighed. “Just to be sure I could. Do you know who I am?”
“Your badge identifies you as Derec.”
He looked down past the neck ring and saw for the first time that there was a datastrip in the
badge holder on the right breast of the safesuit. The red printing, superimposed on the fractured
black-and-white coding pattern, indeed read DEREC.
He said the name aloud, experimentally: “Derec.” It seemed neither familiar nor foreign to his
tongue. His ear heard it as a first name, even though it was more likely a surname.
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But if I’m Derec, why does the safesuit fit so poorly? The waist ring and chest envelope would
have accommodated someone with a much stockier build. And when he tried to straighten his cramped
legs, he found that the suit’s legs were a centimeter or two short of allowing him to do so
comfortably.
I certainly was shorter once—maybe I was heavier, too. It could be my old suit—one I wouldn’t have
used except in an emergency. Or it could be my ID, but someone else’s suit.
“Can you scan the datastrip on the badge?” he asked hopefully. “There should be a photograph—a
citizenship record—kinship list. Then I’d know for sure.”
“I’m sorry. There’s no data reader in the pod, and my optical sensors can’t resolve a pattern that
fine.”
Frowning, he said, “Then I guess I’ll be Derec, for now.”
He paused and collected his thoughts. To know his name—if it was his name—did nothing to relieve
his feelings of emptiness. It was as though he had lost his internal compass, and with it, the
ability to act on his own behalf. The most he could do now was react.
“All of the pod’s environmental systems are working well,” Darla offered brightly. “Rescue
vessels should be on their way here now.”
Her words reminded him that there was a problem more important in the short run than puzzling out
who he was. Survival had to come first. In time, perhaps the things he did know would tell him
what he had forgotten.
He was in a survival pod. His mind took that one fact and began to build on it. When he shifted
position in his harness, he noted how the slightest movement set the pod to rocking, despite the
fact that its mass could hardly be less than five hundred kilograms. He extended an arm and let
the muscles go limp. It took a full second to fall to his side.
A hundredth of a gee at best. I’m in a survival pod on the surface of a low-gravity world. I was
in a starcraft, on my way somewhere, when something happened. Perhaps that’s why I can’t remember,
or perhaps the shock of landing—
There was no window or port anywhere in the pod, not even a hatch peephole. But if he couldn’t
see, perhaps Darla could.
“Where are we, Darla?” he asked. “What kind of place did you land us on?”
“Would you like me to show you our surroundings? I have a limpet pack available.”
Derec knew the term, though he wondered where he had learned it. A limpet pack was a disc-shaped
sensor array capable of sliding across the outer surface of a smooth-hulled space craft—a cheaper
but more trouble-prone substitute for a full array of sensor mounts. “Let’s see.”
The interior lights dimmed, and the central third of the hatch became the background for a
flatscreen projection directed down from the command board overhead. Derec looked out on an ice
and rock landscape that screamed its wrongness to him. The horizon was too close, too severely
curved. It had to be a distortion created by the camera, or a false horizon created by a
foreground crater.
“Scan right,” he said.
But everywhere it was the same: a jumble of orange-tinged ice studded with gray rock, merging at
the horizon into the velvet curtain of space. He could see no distinct stars in the sky, but that
was likely to be due to the limited resolving power of the limpet, and not because of any
atmosphere. The planetoid’s gravity was too slight to hold even the densest gases, and the jagged
scarps showed no signs of atmospheric weathering.
In truth, it looked like a leftover place, the waste of star-and planet-making, a forgotten world
which had not changed since the day it was made. It was a cold world, and a sterile one, and, in
all probability, a deserted one.
Formerly deserted, he corrected himself. “Moon or asteroid?” he asked Darla.
“No matter where we are, we are safe,” Darla said ingenuously. “We must trust in the authorities
to locate and retrieve us.”
Derec could foresee quickly growing weary of that sort of evasion. “How can I trust in that when I
don’t know where we are and what the chances are that we’ll be found? I know that this pod doesn’t
have a full-recycle environmental system. No pod ever does. Do you deny it?” He waited a moment
for an answer, then plunged on. “How much of a margin did the Massey Corporation decide was
enough? Ten days? Two weeks?”
“Derec, maintaining the proper attitude is crucial to—”
“Save the therapist bit, will you?” Darren sighed. “Look, I know you’re trying to protect me. Some
people cope better that way—what they don’t know and all that. But I’m different. I need
information, not reassurance. I need to know what you know. Understand? Or should I start digging
into your guts and looking for it myself?”
Derec was puzzled when Darla did not answer. It dawned on him slowly that he must have presented
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her with a dilemma which her positronic brain was having difficulty resolving—but there should
have been no dilemma. Darla was obliged by the Second Law of Robotics to answer his questions.
The Second Law said, “A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such
orders would conflict with the First Law.”
A question was an order—and silence was disobedience. Which could only be if Darla was following
her higher obligation under the First Law.
The First Law said, “A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human
being to come to harm.”
Darla had to know how small the chance of rescue was, even within a star system, even along
standard trajectories. And Darla knew as well as any robot could what sort of harm that fact could
do to the emotional balance of a human being. The typical survivor, already terrorized by whatever
events brought him into the lifepod, would respond with despair, a loss of the will to live.
It made sense to him now. Of course Darla would try to protect him from the consequences of his
own curiosity—unless he could make her see that he was different.
“Darla, I’m not the kind of person you were told to expect,” he said gently. “I need something to
do, something to think about. I can’t just sit here and wait. I can deal with bad news, if that’s
what you’re hiding. What I can’t take is feeling helpless.”
It seemed as though she were prepared for his kind too, after all, but had only needed convincing
that he was one. “I understand, Derec. Of course I’ll be happy to tell you what I know.”
“Good. What ship are we from?” he asked. “There’s no shipper’s crest or ship logo anywhere in the
cabin.”
“This is a Massey Corporation G-85 Lifepod—”
“You told me that already. What ship are we from?”
Darla was silent for a moment. “Massey Lifepods are the primary safety system on six of the eight
largest general commercial space carriers—”
“You don’t know?”
“My customization option has not been initialized. Would you care for a game of chess?”
“No.” Derec mused for a moment. “So all you know how to do is shill for the manufacturer. Which
means that we probably came from a privately owned ship—all the commercial carriers customize
their gear.”
“I have no information in that area.”
Derec clucked. “In fact, I think you do. Somewhere among your systems there has to be a data
recorder, activated the moment the pod was ejected. It should tell you not only what ship we came
from and where it was headed, but what’s happened since. It’s time to find out how smart you
really are, Darla,” he said. “We need to find that recorder and get into it.”
“I have no information about such a recorder.”
“Trust me, it’s there. If it wasn’t, there’d be no way to do postmortems after a ship disaster.
Are you in control of the pod’s power bus?”
“Yes.”
“Look for an uninterruptible line. That’ll be it.”
“Just a moment. Yes, there are two.”
“What are they called?”
“My system map labels them 1402 and 1632. I have no further information.”
Derec reached for the water tube again. “That’s all right. One will be the recorder, and the
other is probably the locator beacon. We’re making progress. Now find the data paths that
correspond with those power taps. They should tell us which one is which.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t.”
“They have to be there. The recorder will be taking data from your navigation module, from the
environmental system, probably even an abstract of this conversation. There ought to be a whole
forest of data paths.”
“I’m sorry, Derec. I am unable to do what you ask.”
“Why?”
“When I run a diagnostic trace in that portion of the system, I am unable to find any unlabeled
paths.”
“Can you show me your service schematic? Maybe I can find something.”
The icescape vanished and was replaced by a finely detailed projection of the lifepod’s logic
circuits. Scanning it, Derec quickly found the answer. A smart data gate—a Maxwell junction—was
guarding the data line to the recorder. The two systems were effectively isolated. Similar
junctions stood between Darla and the inertial navigator, the locator beacon, and the
environmental system.
This is all very odd, Derec thought. It wasn’t surprising that there was a lower-level autonomous
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system regulating routine functions. What was strange was how Darla was locked out of getting any
information from it.
Coddling frightened survivors required tact and discretion. But robots were strongly disposed
toward an almost painful honesty. Perhaps it had proven too difficult to program a Companion to
put on a happy face while keeping grim secrets. Lying did unpredictable things to the potentials
inside a positronic brain.
And there were Third Law considerations as well. The Third Law went, “A robot must protect its own
existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.”
How would a robot balance its responsibility to preserve itself with the increasing probability of
its demise? It was as though the designers had concluded that there were things Darla was better
off not knowing, and thrown up barriers to prevent her from finding out. They had kept her
ignorant of herself, and even of her ignorance.
There was a disturbing parallel in that to Derec’s own situation. Is that what happened to me? he
wondered. He had hoped almost from the first that his loss of memory was the consequence of
whatever disaster had put him in the lifepod, perhaps along with the shock of a hard landing on
this world.
Now he had to ask whether such selective amnesia could be an accident. He had read the schematic
easily, but he could not remember where or why he had acquired that skill. Obviously he had some
technical training, a fact which—if he survived—might prove a useful clue to his identity. But why
would he remember the lessons, but not the teacher? Could his brain have been that badly
scrambled?
Yet reading the schematic was a complex task which clearly required that his mind and memory be
unimpaired. As well as he could judge, his reasoning was measured and clear. If he were in shock
or suffering from a concussion, wouldn’t all his faculties be affected?
Perhaps this wasn’t something that had happened to him. Perhaps, as with Darla, it was something
that had been done to him.
Derec grimaced. It was unsettling enough looking at the blank wall of his past, but more
unsettling to think that hiding behind that wall might be the reason why it had been built.
By this time Darla had grown impatient. “Have you found anything?” Darla asked with a note of
anxiety.
Blinking, Derec looked up at the status board. “The recorder’s tied in through a Maxwell
junction. The junction won’t pass through to the recorder anything it doesn’t recognize, which is
why you can’t find it with a trace. And why we’re not going to be able to read it through you. But
there has to be a data port somewhere, probably on the outer hull—”
At that moment, the whole pod lurched and seemed to become buoyant. Derec had the sensation that
it was no longer in contact with the frozen surface of the asteroid. “What’s going on?” he
demanded.
“Please stay calm,” Darla said.
“What is it? Have we been found?”
“Yes. I believe we have. But I am unable to say by whom.”
Derec gaped openmouthed for a moment. “Put the exterior video up again! Quickly!”
“I am becoming concerned about your level of agitation, Derec. Please close your eyes and take
several deep breaths.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” he said angrily. “I want to see what’s going on.”
There was a moment’s hesitation, and then Darla acquiesced. “Very well.”
The sight that greeted Derec’s eyes made his breath catch in his throat. The limpet’s cameras were
no longer trained on the horizon, but down at the ground. A half-dozen machines, each different
from the next, were arrayed around the pod. The largest was taller than a man, the smallest
barely the size of a safesuit helmet. The tiny ones hovered on tiny jets of white gas, while the
larger ones were on wheels or articulated tracks.
He could also see a portion of some sort of cradle or deck which seemed to be centered below the
pod. And all of them—the machines, the cradle, and the pod—were moving, proceeding along together
toward some unknowable destination like some sort of ice-desert caravan.
“What’s going on?” he demanded of Darla. “Can you identify them? Did they make any contact with
us?”
“The device below us appears to be a cargo sled. I have no information on the other mechanisms.”
Derec reached for his helmet and unsnapped the catch holding it in place. “I’m going out. I’m not
going to let us be hijacked like this with no explanation.”
“Leaving the pod would be too dangerous,” Darla said. “In addition, you will lose a minimum of
four hours’ oxygen opening the hatch.”
“It’s worth it to find out what’s going on.”
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“I can’t allow that, Derec.”
“It’s not your decision,” he said, reaching for the harness release with his free hand.
“I am sorry, Derec. It is,” Darla said.
Too late, Derec realized that a Massey Companion was equipped to calm a distraught survivor not
only verbally, but chemically. The dual jets of mist from either side of the headrest caught him
full in the face, and he inhaled the sickly sweet droplets in the gasp of surprise.
Derec had barely enough time to be astonished at how quickly the drug acted. Both his arms went
limp, the right falling well short of the harness release, the left losing its grasp on the
helmet. His vision rapidly grayed. As though from a distance, he heard dimly the sound of the
helmet hitting the floor. But between the first bounce and the second, he drifted away into the
silent darkness of unconsciousness, and saw and heard nothing more.
CHAPTER 2
UNDER THE ICE
For the second time in one day, Derec awoke in strange surroundings.
This time, he was lying flat on his back staring up at the ceiling. There was a sour taste in his
mouth and an empty, growly sensation in his stomach. He lay there for a moment, remembering, then
sat up suddenly, his muscles tensed defensively as he looked about him.
As before, Derec was alone. But this time he found himself in more domestic surroundings—a four-
man efficiency cabin, three meters wide by five meters long. The bed he had been lying in was a
fold-down bunk, one of four mounted on the side walls. To his right as he sat on the edge of the
bunk was a bank of storage lockers of assorted sizes. To his left was a closed door.
That damned Darla, he thought fiercely.
Though what he saw around him struck a vaguely familiar chord, Derec dismissed it as
meaningless—there was a tedious sameness to all modular living designs. A more important question
was whether the cabin was part of a work camp on the surface of the asteroid, tucked away
somewhere inside a speeding spacecraft, or somewhere else he couldn’t imagine. The cabin itself
offered no clue. Nor could it tell him whether he had been rescued or captured.
Glancing down at himself, he saw that he was no longer wearing the safesuit. His torso and legs
were covered by a formfitting white jumpsweat, the sort of garment a space worker would wear
inside his work jitney or augment.
It was clean and relatively new, but there was some wear on the abrasion pads at heel and knee and
waist. It might have been what he was wearing under the safesuit, or—
“The suit,” he said with sudden dismay.
He jumped to his feet and looked around wildly. There was only one locker large enough to hold a
safesuit. It was unlocked, but it was also empty. He went through the other lockers mechanically.
All were empty.
No, they were more than empty, he decided. They looked as though they’d never been used.
Derec felt a twinge of panic. If he didn’t find the suit, he would never learn whatever
information the datastrip on its name badge had to offer. And he had to find Darla as well, or
lose the irreplaceable data stored in her event recorder.
Half afraid that he would find it locked, Derec crossed to the door and touched the keyplate. The
door slid aside with a hiss. Outside was a short corridor flanked by four doors. The corridor was
deserted, the other doors all closed.
To Derec’s left, the corridor terminated in a blank wall. The other end was sealed by an airlock,
suggesting that the four rooms formed a self-contained environmental cell. Through the small
window in the inner pressure door he caught a glimpse of another corridor lying beyond.
“Hello?” Derec called. There was no answer.
The door facing him was labeled WARDROOM. Inside, he found a table large enough to seat eight for
a meeting or a meal, a compact autogalley, and a sophisticated computer terminal and
communications center.
Derec ran his fingertips across the surface of the table, and they came away clean, without even
a coating of dust. The status lights on the galley told him that the unit was in Extended Standby,
which meant that its food stores had been irradiated and deep-frozen. No one had eaten here for
some time.
Was it all for him? Was that why it was unused? Or was he a surprise visitor in an empty house?
He switched the galley to Demand status, and a timer began counting down the two hours it would
take to bring it on line. But when he tried to activate the com center, it demanded a password.
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“Derec,” he offered.
INVALID PASSWORD, the screen advised him.
He had only the most infinitesimal chance of guessing a truly random password. His only chance was
if a lazy systems engineer had left one of the classic wild-card passwords in the security
database. “Test,” he suggested.
INVALID PASSWORD.
“Password,” Derec said.
INVALID PASSWORD. ACCESS DENIED.
From that point on, the center ignored him. The silent-entry keypad was disabled, and nothing he
said evoked any response. Apparently the center had not only rejected his passwords, but
blacklisted him as well. The systems engineer had not been lazy.
Returning to the corridor, Derec briefly checked the other two rooms. One was another cabin,
mirror-image to the one in which he had woken up. The other, labeled MECHANICAL, contained several
racks of lockers and what appeared to be maintenance modules for environmental subsystems. Both
rooms were as tidy and deserted as everything else Derec had seen since waking.
That left only the airlock and the mysteries beyond it to explore. The inner door bore the
sonograph-in-a-circle emblem which meant VoiceCommand. “Open,” he said, and the inner door of the
hatch cracked open with the ripping sound of adhesion seals separating. Derec stepped into the
tiny enclosure and the door closed behind him. Peering through the window of the outer door, Derec
could see no reason why the airlock was even there. The corridor beyond looked little different
than the one he was leaving. “Cycle,” he said.
The inner door closed behind him, the momentary surge of pressure on his eardrums telling him it
had sealed. “Warning. There is a reduced-pressure nitrogen atmosphere beyond this point,” the
hatch advised him. “Please select a breather.”
“Nitrogen?”
Only then did Derec notice the small delivery door in the side wall. Inside he found several
gogglelike masks made of gray plastic. Selecting one, he saw that the mask was meant to fit over
the middle third of his face, like a pair of wraparound sunglasses that had slipped down his nose.
The breather’s “straps” were hollow elastic tubes that met behind his neck. A flexible gas
delivery tube led from there to the cartridge pack, which was small enough to strap to the upper
arm.
When he put the breather on, however, he could not make the bottom edge of the mask seal against
his upper lip to keep out the outside air. With the gap, the breaths he drew would be a mixture of
free nitrogen and oxygen from the breather.
Belatedly, Derec realized that that was intentional. It was an arrangement that not only reduced
the size of the cartridge pack, but also left his sense of smell unimpeded. A clever bit of
engineering, with a minimalist flavor.
“Ready,” Derec said.
“Warning: reduced gravity beyond this point,” the hatch advised him.
“I hear you,” he said as the outer door began to open. Nitrogen? Low-G? he wondered as he stepped
out. Where am I? What’s going on?
There were no immediate answers. It was cold—cold enough to bring a flush of color to his cheeks.
The chill seemed to radiate equally from the ceiling and floor, though they were both made of an
insulating synthetic mesh.
Standing there just outside the pressure hatch, Derec could hear a cacophony of machine
noises—hissing, rumbling, grinding, squealing. But the drop in pressure, which distended his
eardrums, made it seem as though he were trying to hear through a pillow. Aside from the fact that
there was activity somewhere, he got nothing useful out of what he heard. He could not tell what
kinds of machines he was hearing, or what they were doing.
Determined to follow the sounds to their source, he started down the corridor—or tried to. He
ended up flat on his face on the cold decking, uninjured but chastened. Collecting himself, he
tried again, this time pulling himself along the corridor by the center handrail.
Thirty meters ahead, the corridor opened into an enormous low-ceilinged chamber. Derec gaped as he
took in its dimensions. It suggested armories, playing arenas, open-plan factories. He forced a
yawn and swallowed hard, and the pressure in his left ear equalized. Yes, those were definitely
machine noises. But what kind of machines, doing what kind of work?
Between the cold and low gravity, Derec concluded that he was still on the asteroid where his
lifepod had crashed. From the structure of the chamber, he concluded that he was most probably
underground.
More important, he was not alone. There were robots moving among the stacks and aisles—dozens of
them, of a half-dozen varieties. But in another sense, he was alone, for there were no other
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people. There were not even any handrails in the aisles to make the chamber human-accessible. The
chamber belonged to the robots by default. What task they were so busily attending to, he could
not divine.
The nearest of the robots, a squat boxlike unit with a single telescoping arm, was only a few
dozen meters from Derec. As Derec watched, it plucked a fist-sized component from a rack, stowed
it in a cargo basket, and retracted its manipulator arm. Its mission apparently accomplished, the
robot started away, coasting on a cushion of air from under its venturi skirt.
“Stop!” Derec called out.
But the robot continued on, seemingly deaf to Derec’s command. On impulse, Derec released the
handrail and went in pursuit. But in the asteroid’s minimal gravity field, it was like trying to
run with both legs asleep. He was perpetually off-balance, his slippered feet failing to give him
the traction he expected. When he came to his first ninety-degree turn, he went sprawling,
scattering a rack of small chromium cylinders.
Not even the racket from his spill slowed the robot’s retreat. It continued on toward what
appeared to be a lift shaft—a circular black pit in the floor and a matching one in the ceiling,
linked by four chrome guide rods.
“How am I supposed to catch you?” he complained, climbing to his feet. “I can’t fly.”
There had to be a better way, and looking more closely at two robots heading down the aisle toward
him, Derec saw what it was. Unlike the picker, the man-sized robots were built on standard three-
point ball-drive chassis—like three marbles under a bottle cap. Ball-drive chassis were standard
in clean environments because they offered complete freedom of movement. The drawback: here, with
the reduced friction due to the low gravity, the drive balls should do more spinning than pushing.
But each large robot had a second ball-drive chassis mounted at the top of a telescoping rod.
Pushing against the ceiling, the second chassis provided the necessary pressure for the dual
drives to grab. Like the bumper cars at a revival carnival, each robot needed to be in constant
contact with both surfaces to operate.
Derec realized that he could use that trick, too. The ceiling was low enough that he could push
against it with his fingertips while standing flat-footed. “Hand-walking,” as he dubbed the
technique, he could have caught the picker.
Now he waited to see what the two approaching robots would do about him. They stopped short of
where he stood and began to restore order where he had fallen down, deftly using their three-
fingered grapples to replace the cylinders on the shelving. He waited, wondering if they would
notice him. They did not.
“I’m in danger,” he called to them. “I need your help.”
The two robots continued their housekeeping, apparently oblivious to his presence. He drew closer
and examined the nearer of the two as it worked. It had normal audio sensors, but no evidence of a
vocalizer. In short, it was mute. It could not answer.
But there had to be some higher-level robots in the complex, ones capable of recognizing him for
what he was and responding to his needs. The pickers and custodians he’d crossed paths with could
hardly be working without supervision.
Likewise, the E-cell he awoke in couldn’t be the only structure for humans within the complex.
Somewhere there was a management team, programmers, supervisors. There was no such thing as a
completely autonomous robot community.
Thinking that there had to be a way to call the control room from the E-cell, Derec started back.
As he did, he saw a sight that brought him up short. A tall humanoid robot was standing at the end
of the corridor to the E-cell, studying him.
They stared at each other for a long moment. The robot’s skin was a gleaming pale blue, a vivid
declaration of its machine nature. Its optical sensors were silver slits in its helmet-like head,
lacking the customary red tracking marker which telegraphed when the robot was looking in your
direction. Even so, there was no doubt in Derec’s mind that he was the object of the robot’s rapt
and unnaturally focused attention.
The robot was the first to move, turning away and disappearing into the corridor, hand-walking
with easy coordination. Derec followed as quickly as he was able, but by the time he reached the
corridor, the robot was already inside the airlock. It took no more than fifteen seconds for Derec
to reach the outer hatch and pass through into the E-cell. Even so, when he stepped out into the
inner corridor, the robot was already emerging from the wardroom, its business apparently
finished.
“I’m in danger,” Derec said. “I need your help.”
“False assessment: you are not now in danger,” the humanoid robot said. “Should you be in danger,
help will be provided.”
The robot took one step toward the pressure hatch, and Derec moved to place himself in its path.
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