The most serious and unusual event in all the strangeness was that a robot was murdered by another robot. Lucius, the creator of Circuit Breaker, was found with all its positronic circuitry deliberately destroyed, so that the brain could never be reconstructed. It seemed a deliberate attempt to stifle the advances made by the Avery robots.
In the midst of this, Avery himself returned to the city, and Derec, Ariel, Wolruf, and Mandelbrot quickly discovered that the doctor was a dangerous megalomaniac. All that mattered to Avery was his work; he could not have cared less about Ariel’s illness or the plight of the others. All that mattered to him was Robot City. He had stationed Hunter-Seeker robots around the area to take all of them prisoner until he could analyze all that had happened here-in whatever way was most convenient to him.
They were taken prisoner, and Derec, unknowingly, was given a dose of chemfets: miniature replicas of the city material that took residence in his bloodstream.
Escaping at last, Derec, Ariel, Wolruf, and Mandelbrot left Robot City on Dr. Avery’s ship. There, in a hidden compartment, they found a Key to Perihelion.
It was obvious that Avery anticipated their escape, for the ship was sabotaged. Without the ability to home in on the navigational beacons, they could not program the jumps through hyperspace. Ariel had also taken a definite turn for the worse. Derec decided that he and Ariel must use the Key to Perihelion to try to get help for her. Wolruf and Mandelbrot would remain with the ship and try to complete repairs or attract help from another ship.
Derec activated the Key, and he and Ariel found themselves in an apartment on Earth. They found Earth society paranoid and isolated, with extremely xenophobic attitudes toward Spacers. However, Ariel was getting progressively weaker, and Derec in desperation took her to a local hospital. If Earth was backward in some ways, it seemed that its medical facilities were better than Aurora’s. They recognized her disease-amnemonic plague-and cured her.
Unfortunately, the chemfets in Derec’s body were asserting their presence, and he was rapidly getting weaker himself. With the help of R. David, an Earth robot, they stole a ship from an Earth spaceport and headed out to rescue Wolruf and Mandelbrot.
Another spaceship followed them: Aranimas, who had tracked the bursts of Key static to Earth. In a tense battle, Derec and Ariel, with Mandelbrot and Wolruf, managed to destroy Aranimas’s ship at great cost to their own vessels. They had only one option left to them with Derec growing weaker: use the Key to jump back to Robot City.
They emerged from the Compass Tower into Avery’s vacant office, intending to force the doctor into helping Derec. To find him, Wolruf and Mandelbrot went into the city, while Derec and Ariel began searching the tunnels underneath the tower.
Mandelbrot and Wolruf found that the robots were all following the orders of what they called the Migration Program. They were leaving the first Robot City and seeking new worlds on which to build. And when they returned to Compass Tower, they found that Hunter-Seeker robots were searching for Derec and Ariel, who had fled.
Above the planet, a small spacecraft arrived, carrying Jeff Leong. Back to normal, he was returning to rescue the others. Meeting with Derec and company, he was determined to help them find Dr. Avery.
It was actually Dr. Avery who found them, the Hunter-Seeker robots capturing the company one by one. The Doctor revealed that Derec was actually David Avery, Dr. Avery’s son, and that the chemfets in his body would one day allow him to control every Avery robot in existence. Derec would become Robot City.
But Avery had believed Derec would be a willing partner in his plans. He was very wrong in that. Derec used his new control of the city to free his companions; Dr. Avery triggered a Key to Perihelion before he could be captured. He fled into the void.
Derec and the others gave no thought to pursuit. At last, they were safe and free to leave.
It seemed reward enough…
Chapter 1. Birth
“I feel uneasy about this, Dr. Anastasi.”
Janet Anastasi glanced up with a half-smile. She brushed blond hair back from bright, hazel eyes cupped in smile lines. “And just how does a robot feel ‘uneasy,’ Basalom?” she asked with a laugh.
Basalom’s eyes blinked, a shutter membrane flickering momentarily over the optical circuits. Janet had deliberately built in that random quirk. She built idiosyncrasies into all her robots-eccentricities of speech, of mannerisms. The foibles seemed to make Basalom and the rest less mechanically predictable. To her, they lent the robots individual personalities they otherwise lacked.
“The term is simply an approximation, Doctor.”
“Hmm.” She wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand and wiped it on the leg of her pants. “Give me a hand with this, will you, my friend?”
The two were in the cargo hold of a small ship. A viewscreen on one wall showed the mottled blue-and-white curve of the planet they were orbiting. Twin moons peered over the shoulder of the world, and the land mass directly below them was green with foliage. It seemed a pastoral land from this distance, no matter what the reality might actually be. Janet knew that the atmosphere of the world was within terran norms, that the earth was fertile, and that there was life, though without any signs of technology: the ship’s instruments had told her that much. The world, whatever the inhabitants might call it, fit her needs. Beyond that, she didn’t care.
Her husband of many years ago, Wendell Avery, had said during their breakup that she didn’t care about anything made of simple flesh-not him, not their son. “You’re afraid to love something that might love you back,” he’d raged.
“Which makes us exactly the same, doesn’t it?” she’d shouted back at him. “Or can’t the genius admit that he has faults? Maybe it’s just because you don’t like the fact that I ’ m the one who’s considered the robotic expert? That’s it, isn’t it, Wendell? You can’t love anyone else because your own self-worship takes up all the space in your heart.”