Intruder

Chapter 3. Something Is Rotten In The City Of Robots

Derec’s apprehension grew as his ship, piloted by the robot Mandelbrot, settled down onto a landing platform at the Robot City spaceport. His chemfets seemed to be in turmoil, as if they were struggling to process information that had been deliberately scrambled. At the same time his emotions were becoming scrambled, too. He snapped at Mandelbrot even while he was struggling to control his temper. Before the landing, Mandelbrot made a routine request for orders, and Derec responded testily, “We’ll land when I feel it’s right and not before.”

Of course Ariel, at that moment, had to be standing nearby, examining the cubes, spires, and blocks of the city from a view-portal, and of course she had to throw her two credits in.

“Whatever’s wrong with you, you don’t have to take it out on Mandelbrot,” she muttered.

He could have merely acknowledged the truth of what she said, but he had to top her two credits with a pair of his own.

“I’m not taking anything out on Mandelbrot, Ariel. You know as well as I do that it doesn’t make any difference to him what I say or how I say it, so long as he doesn’t have to remove me from harm or save my life. First Law and all that. I know I can be a real bandersnatch, call him every name in the dictionary of insults, foam at the mouth and jump up and down-and it all won’t make any difference to him. Only humans brood over other humans’ words.”

“How epigrammatic.”

He didn’t want to tell her he didn’t know what epigrammatic meant. It was already clear she had more general knowledge in her brain than he, and he didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of supplying a definition.

The anger in her face softened, and she moved toward him, patting him on his arm. “Honey, there’s no reason to be a grouch, even with a robot. Anyway, how can you be sure he’s not aware of your irritation?”

Derec glanced at Mandelbrot, who calmly sat at the controls.

“Oh, he’s aware all right. He has to be. Again, the ever-present Laws. He has to know what mood I’m in, what my nuances might mean, what my attitude is toward him-it’s all information which he processes in his positronic brain, and it helps him to judge how to react when the laws need to be applied. A robot can simulate emotion for a human being’s comfort or pleasure, but a robot’s emotion is only specific positronic activity. Aware, yes, but insulted, no.”

Ariel sighed. Derec hated that sigh. It clearly indicated she didn’t agree with him but was finding the argument too tiresome to continue with. The sigh dismissed the argument along with him and his moods. Yet, when she was moody, they had to play by different rules. Ariel could achieve a righteousness that would make a moral philosopher blush.

She walked back to the view-portal, muttering, “Well, when do you expect us to land, then?”

“Soon enough. I just have to look, make sure everything is all right down there.”

“I don’t understand, what could be wrong?”

“With what we’ve been through, you can ask that?”

“Frost, you really are in a blue funk today. I’m not going to put up with it. Summon me when you need me, master.”

After she had stalked out, Derec said under his breath, “Oh, Ariel.”

Apparently Mandelbrot heard him, for he asked, “Is there something wrong, Friend Derec?”

“Nothing that need involve you, Mandelbrot.” If the robot was at all bothered by Derec’s irritability there was no way for him to show it in his face or body. Derec wondered if Ariel was right about robots having feelings. Certainly the humaniform robots like R. Daneel Olivaw or Ariel’s precious Jacob Winterson appeared to have emotions. They seemed so human, it was hard for observers not to apply an emotional overlay to them.

“We are closing in on the Compass Tower,” Mandelbrot said.

The large view-screen in front of the pilot seat displayed the tower, the first Robot City structure Derec had ever known. He and Ariel (then known as Katherine) had arrived there from the gray misty spot known as Perihelion, when they had pressed the corners of a Key to Perihelion. That particular key had been set for Robot City, and they found they could travel nowhere else, except back to Perihelion, with it. The tower was a pyramidal building that was larger and higher than any other building in the city. Inside it was the office in which Dr. Avery had secreted himself to observe Robot City. Derec wondered if his father were in there now, messing up the workings of the place just so he could mess up the workings of his son’s chemfets and, for that matter, his mind.

“Hover here for a while, Mandelbrot.”

Derec stared down at the city, his city now and not Avery’s, uncertain of what looked strange about it at this moment. The Compass Tower was the same tiered structure it had always been. There were none of the odd lumps upon its surface that he had seen in his nightmare. The city itself, as it always had, stretched from horizon to horizon, except for some parkland to the south. New buildings had sprung up while old ones had been disassembled by the robots, whose job it was to continually refine the city, making it even fitter and more luxurious for human habitation. Someday, human colonists would actually be admitted into the place. Normally Derec would not have been aware of such architectural alterations, but his chemfets kept him up-to-date on all of the city’s transformations.

The robots in the streets below moved busily enough and appeared to be concerned with their usual goals. Yet, even their movement didn’t look right to him, didn’t feel right. And many of the usually busy thoroughfares seemed deserted. Perhaps Robot City had indeed turned into the city of his nightmare.

It was probably his imagination. The Silversides, Ariel, all his responsibilities were making it work overtime. He was just plain exhausted, frustrated-that was probably the answer. He would have to make himself human again, rebuild his own personality the way the figures below rebuilt the city.

Lately Derec had had the sense that since his awakening in an amnesiac state, he had become a robot himself. He was increasingly concerned with his duties (one crisis after another, it seemed) and, like the robots below, rushing to goals that were usually shadowy and mysterious.

Sometimes he felt he was divided inside between the human and robot sides of his personality. Certainly, because of the chemfets, he was at least part robot. At times the human side ruled his life and emotions; at other times the robot part took over. He was human at the height of a crisis, when a battle had to be fought or a decision made; human when he was with Ariel, at least in the loving and tender times, or even the angry ones; human when he had to instruct and guide the robots or intellectually confront Avery. On the other hand, in between these active human periods, there were times when he allowed the robot inside him to take over. The robot was in charge when he had to do the dirty work, the menial activities that occupied so much of his duties. He was also robot when he felt nothing but an emptiness inside toward Ariel or Wolruf or Mandelbrot, the trio who meant so much to him now. There were times when he suddenly realized that time had passed and he had only the vaguest idea of what he had done during it, and in his mind that became the robot’s time rather than the human’s. He wondered if a robot, along some pathway of his positronic brain, was ever conscious of everyday routine.

After landing, Derec was surprised to find the spaceport deserted. Usually a few maintenance robots were in evidence, searching for rarely found trash, shining up already shiny surfaces. The spaceport seemed to Derec like an enormous white elephant, an area that functioned only when he or Ariel used it. Of course, much of Robot City was like this-structures designed for thousands or even millions of human immigrants, magnificent living quarters for people-to-come, commercial setups for invisible shoppers, workplaces used now only by programmed robots who mainly made tests of equipment.

As they passed through the deserted terminal, Adam and Eve looked about, their heads snapping from side to side as they tried to absorb all the new information. To Derec it looked as if the two chameleonic robots were searching for someone or something to copy. He smiled. There’d be no new beings to change into in Robot City. The robots they’d encounter were so much like ones they’d already seen, they would, as Wolruf predicted, grow bored and become more malleable to human manipulation. Then perhaps Derec could straighten the two little buggers out.

“Shouldn’t someone be welcoming us or something?” Ariel asked.

“I’m not sure,” Derec answered. “I’m not up on spaceport protocol. It just seems that we should be seeing a few robots behind a few counters or something.”

Outside the terminal, at the proper station, they found a floater, so called because it went down Robot City roadways without actually touching pavement. It was a two-seater, so Derec told Wolruf and Mandelbrot to locate a larger vehicle and follow him and Ariel into the city. “Keep a lookout for anything that looks out of sync,” he said to them. “We’ll rendezvous at the Compass Tower and compare notes.”

On the ride down the long access road to the city, Ariel said, “Now that you’re here, what do you feel, Derec?”

“I still can’t make any sense out of the chemfets. But I don’t know what’s wrong. Something has changed here, but I can’t see it yet.”

“If you don’t see something, how do you know it exists?”

“That sounds faintly philosophical.”

“My habit. Sorry.”

The floater was small, so small that their shoulders, hips, and legs were pressed together. Normally he liked being this close to her, but today there was a stiffness in the way she held herself. It made him uncomfortable to be touching her at all.

He smiled at her. She stubbornly refused to smile back. Although she tried to look relaxed, her tension was apparent in her eyes.

Touching the bar that controlled the vehicle, Derec brought it to a stop at the first block of buildings after they crossed into the city proper. He got out before the floater had settled down onto the pavement.

“Where’re you going?” Ariel asked, as she, too, squeezed out of the vehicle.

“Just a look around.”

He approached the side of a cube-shaped building and stared at it. “Look at this.”

Standing beside him, she tried to see what he saw.

“What is it?”

“That seam there.” She had to squint to see it. “The city is assembled from five-meter-square slabs that come out of an extruder in a sort of ribbon. The material forms and reforms, following some sort of predetermined programming. It becomes windows, walls, rooms, entire storeys of buildings, structuring itself. It’s done so flawlessly there should be no seams, cracks, openings, except where architecturally logical. This seam isn’t logical.”

Looking closer, she could see that there was indeed a tiny separation. Only a very thin coin could get through it, but it was certainly a flaw.

He strode away from her, running his hand along the wall and around a corner. When he was out of sight, she heard him yelp. She ran around the corner to find him staring down at his little finger.

“Look,” he said, holding out the finger to her. There was a tiny cut at its tip and a minuscule drop of blood had oozed out. She was always surprised by how much darker than hers his blood was.

“What happened?”

“The damn thing cut me, that sliver there.”

“Sliver? But that’s impossible. You once told me the building material is programmed with the First Law. It can’t allow you to get hurt, especially on it.”

“That’s right. By all rights, I shouldn’t be bleeding. Well, take a gander.”

The sliver was even more minuscule than the split seam, but it was there, all right. A tiny bit of red at its tip made it slightly more visible.

“What’s happened?”

Derec did not stand around long enough to respond to her question. He was several steps farther on, his eyes nervously inspecting another building, a small sloping structure that thrust upward into the sky, ending in a spire.

“Look up there!” he cried.

He meant the spire. As she peered at it, she realized that there was something just slightly out of kilter about it.

“It’s tilted a bit,” she said.

“Right,” he said. There was an offensive tone in his voice, as if he were condemning her for verifying the obvious.

“No Supervisor robot would allow such a deviation from the norm.”

“I don’t know. I seem to remember something I read about Earth and a leaning tower there. It was quite a tourist attraction.”

“Well, I’ll refer your observation to our Tourist Board.”

“Don’t be sarcastic. I’m trying to help.”

Again he didn’t respond. He was now running, eager to examine another building. Ariel clapped her hands twice as a signal to the floater. The pair of claps made the vehicle rise from the ground and follow her as she walked to Derec.

He stood in front of the building’s entrance and stared at it.

“Anything wrong with this one?” she asked.

“Nothing I can see. I’m sorry I snapped at you. I just feel at-”

“Forget it, buddy. I ragged you pretty hard back on Aranimas’s ship when we first met. We’ll just consider your present mood a paying back.”

“Thanks.”

As his eyes scanned the wall in front of him, his concentration was broken by a loud thumping sound.

“What was that?” Ariel asked.

“I don’t know. Let’s go in and find out.”

“Every time I turn around, you’re being brave. Okay, you lead.”

The building’s entrance was situated in a corner of the street facade. Next to the door was a handplate that could identify both human and robot personnel. This meant it was considered a security area, and only registered individuals would be allowed into the building. That didn’t worry Derec. His handprint was automatically registered with all Robot City identity systems, so he placed his hand against the handplate confidently and casually, expecting the door to pop open immediately. It did not. He pressed his hand harder against the plate. Again nothing happened.

“What’s wrong?” Ariel asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe it hasn’t been connected yet.”

“Here. Let me try.”

Brushing past him, she placed her hand on the plate. Derec was again impressed by the thin angular look of her fingers and would have been willing at that moment to take her hand and lead her to someplace dark, comfortable, and quiet where they could concentrate on kissing and making up.

The door wouldn’t open for her, either. Irritated, she slammed her fist against the door itself, and it slowly, creakily, came open. The sound was especially disconcerting. It was another anomaly. No door in this Robot City should squeak.

“Well, fancy that,” Ariel said, “it was already open. Shall we?”

She gestured toward the dark interior.

When they entered the building, they should have triggered a force field that would immediately switch on the lighting. But after a few steps, they still stood in what seemed like absolute darkness, broken only by the light streaming in from the doorway. That light was soon lost as the door slowly swung shut. The air seemed stale, and Derec wondered if the circulation systems had broken down, too. Instinctively, he reached for Ariel in time to feel a shudder go through her body.

“You’re right,” she muttered. “Something’s wrong here.” She hugged him tightly. “Derec, let’s inspect some other building.”

“I’m with you on that. The doorway should be-”

She suddenly screamed, not a scream of fear so much as of startlement. With her head so close to his, the sound of it nearly deafened him.

“What happened?”

“Something brushed against my leg.”

“What?”

“I couldn’t tell. Felt like an animal. Like a rat or something.”

“What kind of animal could it possibly be? You’re imagining things. There’re no animals in Robot City. They-”

“There it is again! It just slammed into my calf.”

“Maybe it’s a robot. A delivery or cargo-”

“Didn’t feel like a robot. Too soft, too-”

Derec felt a forceful nudge against his ankle. Ariel was right. It did feel like an animal. Must be the power of suggestion.

“Ariel, everything is all right. We’ll just make our way to the door and get out of-”

To his left there was a faint animal-like noise. It sounded like a subdued cackle. An elf or tiny demon pleased with his or her work. There was another small cackle on the other side of him. A third behind Ariel. In a moment there were cackles all around them, and they had become louder. Whatever was inside this building seemed to like chattering to each other.

Taking Ariel’s hand, Derec fled backward toward the door that was faintly outlined from outside daylight. Near the door, before the two of them had flung it open and fled from the building, he nearly tripped over something, something that screeched back angrily at him.