Precedence did count for something with robots. A robot ordered by its owner to service a flyer would not leave that job to search for a neighbor child’s missing cat-unless it was the owner, not the child, who made the request. A carefully worded command would hold up against anything but a counterorder rooted in a First Law situation. If the robots had been told not to talk about what they were doing, nothing Derec could do would make them disobey.
Before he dressed, he searched his body for clues to who he was. He found no scars large enough that he would expect to remember when and how he acquired them. He bore no tattoos or skin ornaments, wore no rings or jewelry.
The only distinctive mark he seemed to bear was inside, in the things that he knew. Somewhere, sometime, he had received advanced training in microelectronics. He had more than a passing understanding of robotics and computers. Was that commonplace, a standard curriculum for someone his age? He thought not. And if not, it might be the trail that he could follow to rediscover himself.
The com center was continuing its intransigence, still ignoring his input, still mockingly displaying the words MESSAGE TRANSMITTED. But there was one door that hadn’t yet been slammed in his face. Donning a breather and a spare cartridge pack, Derec left the E-cell to explore the rest of the complex.
Derec began by creating a mental map of the great chamber, assigning arbitrary compass points with the E-cell as his reference for south. The chamber seemed to be roughly rectangular, longer north to south than east to west by a factor of two or more. He started hand-walking northward down the same corridor the custodian robots had used, counting his paces as he went.
Five hundred paces later, his arms were tired and the north wall seemed no closer. Stopping to rest, he surveyed the robot population of the chamber. He tallied seventeen of the humanoid robots, none of which were nearby. Among the nonhumanoid robots, he identified five different types: the pickers, the custodians, a large cargo handler Derec dubbed a porter, some multi-armed micro-assemblers, and an armored robot with oversized grapples whose function he could not guess.
Most of the robots he encountered were moving purposefully through the aisles, carrying out their assignments. But toward the north end of the chamber, Derec spotted a small army of robots standing inert and deenergized, waiting to be called into action. All the varieties were represented among the reserves except for the humanoid robots.
The robot stockpile was Derec’s clue to understanding where he was. The chamber seemed to be primarily a collection of spare parts. True, he had spotted a cluster of injection and extrusion machines in one area, a battery of laser welders in another, a chip-burning shop in a third, all apparently in full-time use. But all those operations were apparently maintenance related.
Whatever they’re doing here, they’re on a very heavy duty cycle-possibly even continuous operations, he told himself. Zero down-time could only be bought with a large-scale repair and maintenance operation. And that high price was only worth paying when time mattered more than money.
There was a steady stream of robot traffic on the lifts located at intervals through the chamber, and the obvious next step was to find out where they were going. Giving up his plan to walk the length of the chamber, Derec headed for the nearest lift.
Like the breather, the lifts were clearly the product of a unique approach to engineering. To Derec, they looked like something either unfinished or nonfunctional. They were also more proof that the complex had been designed with robots alone in mind. No human would have ridden one voluntarily.
The shaft was a vertical boring three meters in diameter, its sides lined with the same synthemesh as the chamber ceiling. Peering out over the edge and down, Derec glimpsed a deep shaft lit at regular intervals by stationary blue glows, which he assumed marked other levels. The shaft seemed to extend much farther down than up. Above the great chamber-which he had begun to think of as the warehouse-he counted only seven levels, while below it he could see at least twenty levels before the traffic in the shaft obscured what might lie beyond.
A descending lift platform on the nearest guide rod obliged Derec to duck back out of the way. The platform, a square grid a meter on a side, reached the floor level and stopped as though waiting for him.
While it waited there, traffic kept moving on the other three guide rods. Watching the robots board and disembark, Derec saw that while the lift was in operation, the robots were clamped to the platforms magnetically. He wondered how he would be able to keep his balance and footing without that assistance. There were no railings to grab on to, and the guide rod itself appeared to be electrically live.
Personal considerations aside, he could not help but admire the engineering aesthetics of the lift. It was a clean and focused solution to the problem of moving the maximum amount of traffic in the minimum time and space, a solution fully integrated with the requirements of the colony.
But clever as the system was, Derec was not eager for a ride in the dark on an open platform above a seemingly bottomless pit. Still, it was that or go back to the E-cell. He swallowed hard once and stepped carefully out onto the waiting platform.
“Up,” he said.
“Level, please?”
“Uh-Level Two.”
Singing a high-pitched song, the car began to climb swiftly. He stood with his arms crossed over his chest and his legs spread wide. Keeping his vision focused upward toward the nearest of the blue glows, he tried not to look at the shaft walls sliding swiftly by.
The platform flashed through several other levels before gradually slowing to let him off. The glimpses he caught of them prepared him for what awaited him on Two. When he stepped off the lift, he was standing at the crossroads of two low-ceilinged tunnels, each six meters wide. The walls, floor and ceiling were covered with the ubiquitous off-white synthemesh. The air was colder than ever, cold enough to make him hunch his shoulders and bury his hands under his arms.
Though the immediate vicinity of the lift was brightly lit by the blue floodlights, the tunnels themselves were illuminated only by dim yellow lamps set at intervals in the ceiling. Each was barely bright enough to mark its own position and make a tiny pool of yellow light on the floor of the tunnel.
The distant ends of the intersecting tunnels were invisible, the lines of ceiling lamps receding into infinity in both directions. The tunnels could be kilometers long, even tens of kilometers for all he could tell.
Have they honeycombed this entire asteroid?Derec wondered.Thousands of levels-shafts a hundred kilometers deep-could this be a mining operation?
But he could not understand why anyone would go to the trouble to mine an asteroid from the inside. The cutters on a prospecting ship could slice all but the densest nickel-iron asteroids into bite-sized chunks for the leviathan processing centers. No ore Derec knew of was worth the expense of tunnel-and-shaft mining on this scale. Even with the energy-and-raw-materials economics which applied with robot labor, it would have to be something a hundred times more precious than the rarest element-unless the value of secrecy was part of the equation.
Who am I dealing with?Derec wondered. Newly sobered, he stepped back onto the lift.
“Level Three,” he said.
The next two levels were just as silent and finished-looking as Two. Derec could notdecide whether they were finished-waiting-to-be-used, like the spare parts in the great chamber, or finished-and-abandoned.
But Level Five was another story. The rumble of heavy machinery assaulted his ears even before the platform reached the lighted zone. When he stepped off the lift, he could feel rolling, low-frequency vibrations in the floor and ceiling of the tunnel.