"Asimov, Isaac - Robot City 01 - Odyssey - Michael P Kube-McDowell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Asimov Isaac)

As Derec drew closer, he saw that the gateway was actually crawling slowly forward. Like some mechanical larva, the gateway was burrowing through the asteroidal mass and leaving a finished tunnel in its wake. Everything?the raw material of the walls, the covering of reinforcing synthemesh, even the overhead lamps?was being handled in one continuous operation. The gateway was a four-surface paving machine.
But Derec?s real interest was in the excavation beyond. He stepped up onto the gateway and threaded his way between the shoulder-high cylinders, aware as he did that one of the humanoid robots was following him. There was a strong draft through the walkway, from the tunnel to the chamber beyond. Even so, the odor of ammonia was almost strong enough to make him gag.
At the forward end, the narrow walkway widened into a control cabin, where two humanoid robots sat behind a bank of transparent panels looking out into the excavation chamber that surrounded the gateway on three sides. Derec stopped a few steps short of the ramp into the excavation and tried to sort out the functions of the equipment that filled it.
The uncut face of the asteroidal material was some thirty meters away. A two-headed boom cutter was working it, one boom bearing rotary grinders, the other microwave lasers. They moved back and forth like weaving cobras, and the ice and rock wall crumbled before them.
The lasers seemed to be doing most of the damage. Suddenly released from its icy glue, loose rock sloughed off the face with a cracking sound. More resistant deposits were gouged off by the rotating teeth of the grinder. The gases boiling off the face were being sucked into the wide-mouthed exhaust vents that loomed over the work face.
As he studied the work rig, a metallic hand touched his shoulder.
?You may not enter the processing zone during operations,? the robot said.
The robot?s edict stirred a flash of annoyance. ?I will if I want to,? Derec snapped back over his shoulder.
The robot tightened its grip pointedly. ?You may not enter the processing zone during operations,? the robot repeated. ?Untrained personnel are to be considered at risk.?
Shrugging off its touch, Derec turned his back on the robot and looked once more into the excavation. Like the gateway, the mining unit was slowly advancing toward an ever-receding rock face. The motion brought the jumble of loose rock within reach of scuttling scooper arms, which funneled it up a ramp to an enormous hopper. A pair of high-sided conveyors carried material away from the hopper, one to the left and one to the right. While on the conveyor it passed through an N-ray station, an X-ray station, and a magnetometer.
From that point on, things got confusing. It was as though after having gone to all that trouble to mine the asteroid, the robots had forgotten to sort out the part of it they wanted to keep.
Some of the tailings were diverted to a spur conveyor, run through a crusher, and then used as the raw material for the fifteen-centimeter thick walls of the tunnel. To Derec?s astonishment, the rest was carried to the back wall of the work chamber, reunited with the captured methane and ammonia, and built up into a wall of ice and rock again. The excavation never got any larger.
But what about the tunnel? Derec wondered. They have to be taking something out?
Closer study showed him otherwise. The empty volume of the ever-lengthening access tunnel meant only that the asteroidal material surrounding it was being replaced in a more compressed state than it was in when mined. Nothing was being extracted. Nothing was being carried away for later refining or shipment.
It just didn?t make sense.
The depletion alarm on Derec?s first cartridge pack began to sound, and he transferred the delivery tube to the backup. He would have to leave soon or risk dying of nitrogen poisoning before he could return to the E-cell. But it was hard to tear himself away from the incomprehensible sight of a dozen robots and a few million dollars worth of heavy equipment engaged in a task as senseless as trying to dig a hole in water. And how many other excavations just like this were underway elsewhere in the complex? Ten? Fifty? Five hundred?
Trying to understand, Derec focused his attention on the robots. Three of the armored type patrolled the hopper, breaking up snags with their grapples. A fourth stood on a small platform under the booms of the cutter, shattering oversized rocks as they fell from the face with blasts from its chest-mounted laser. Two humanoids stood at the N-ray stations, intently studying the scanning screen.
Derec?s guardian angel was still standing within arm?s reach behind him, and he turned and sought the robot?s eyes. ?What are you mining here?? he demanded. ?What?s the point of all this??
But the robot said nothing, gazing back with its expressionless eyes.
?Get out of the way,? Derec said disgustedly, and the robot stepped aside into the control booth to let him pass.
His annoyance spilling over into anger, Derec stalked down the narrow walkway and jumped down to the tunnel. It was then he realized his mistake: there were no porter robots there to carry him back to the lift.
?I need a ride,? Derec said sharply to the nearest humanoid robot. ?Can you tell me when the next porter robot will be making a delivery??
?What is your need??
?I need a ride.?
?That is not an approved allocation of resources.?
Derec did not even bother to argue. Turning away, he stalked away northward, his mind unsettled, churning with unconnected thoughts. He felt as though the answer to all his questions was already in his grasp, except he couldn?t recognize it. How did it all add up? What was wrong with the picture?
As he hand-walked along the tunnel, his thoughts kept carrying him back to the robots. There was something about the way they behaved, the way they worked together. Throughout the complex, all the routine, repetitive jobs were being done by the nonhumanoid robots. The blue-skinned humanoid robots were supervisors, trouble-shooters, technicians, repair specialists. But they could have just as easily done the repetitive jobs as well, even tending the front line in the excavation. Instead, there were a half-dozen specialized varieties, porters and pickers and miners that didn?t act like robots at all?
Derec stopped short and turned to stare back down the tunnel toward the excavation. Of course. Of course. The picker and the custodians, the tenders and the porters weren?t specialized robots working with the blue robots. They were tools being used by the blue robots. Their intelligence was limited?perhaps not even positronic in nature. The real intelligence resided in the humanoid robots, which might well be more sophisticated than any Derec had previously known of.
But why were they all here?
Derec thought of all the levels, all the tunnels that had already been bored out, all the mass of the asteroid still waiting undisturbed. Could he have stumbled on an industrial test site? It might explain much?the secrecy, the distinctive stamp of the unknown designer, the unending but pointless excavation.
Focus on the robots, Derec told himself. The tasks they?re handling themselves are the ones they consider critical?
In a flash of memory, he saw the two humanoid robots tending the scanning instruments on the conveyor line, and suddenly Derec knew. The realization staggered him, and yet there was no pushing the notion away once it had formed in his mind.
The robots weren?t mining the asteroid at all. They were sifting it. They were searching for something, something lost or buried or hidden, something so unique and valuable that it was worth any price, any effort.
What that something was, Derec could not imagine. And just at that moment, he was not sure that he ever wanted to find out.


CHAPTER 4

YOU CAN?T GET THERE
FROM HERE

It was a very long way back to the lift. How fast had the porter gone when carrying him to the excavation? Forty kilometers per hour? Then the shaft lay ten kilometers away. Sixty? Then a fifteen-kilometer hike awaited him, at a thousand strides, a thousand arm-swings to a kilometer. Even in a gravity field this weak, that was asking a lot from his body.
He did not turn back only because he was sure that the Supervisors, as he had begun to think of the humanoid robots, knew where he was and how much oxygen he had. At some point the two changing variables would intersect at a value which said that he was in danger, and they would send a porter to fetch him and whisk him back to the E-cell.
Each time he saw a robot coming toward him, or heard one closing on him from behind, he began to anticipate relief for his weary arms and legs. But each time, the robot sped past without even slowing. He considered trying to stop a porter by blocking the tunnel, but the only porters that came by were burdened with a full load of chemical tanks or machine parts. There was no room for him.
Because there was no choice, Derec pressed on. For a time he tried counting the yellow ceiling lamps to prove to himself that he was making progress, but his mind wandered and he lost count. There was a terrible sameness to the tunnel, with its unrelieved stretches of white. It seemed as though he were caught in limbo, trapped on a subterranean treadmill.
As it turned out, he was not wrong in thinking that the Supervisors were aware of him. But he was quite wrong about the form their help would take.
He had sat down to rest, his back against the west wall, when a picker came racing up and stopped half a meter away. From its cargo basket it plucked a pair of fresh cartridge packs, laying them at his feet. Before he could react, it backed up, pivoted, and raced away. The timing was so perfect that the pack Derec was using began to sound its depletion alarm just as the picker vanished from sight in the distance.
?Consistent,? he said crossly, addressing the absent Supervisors as he swapped the depleted packs for the new ones. ?You?ve done as little as possible to help me right from the start. And this really is the very least you could do.?
Hours later, he reached the E-cell with barely enough energy to fold down one of the bunks before he collapsed in it. He was asleep in minutes, his body claiming its rest. But his troubles pursued him even in his dreams, which were full of silent blue robots moving through dark places ripe with the cold scent of danger.