"Asimov, Isaac - Robot City 05 - Refuge - Robert Chilson 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Asimov Isaac)
The same oyster-white walls as the interior; they might have been in a very cheap hotel, and in fact, Derec surmised, they were. A youth with long, elaborately-coiffed hair and gaudy cheap clothes gave them a sullen look from down the corridor as he entered an apartment. An older woman, heavy and squarish and short, passed them, carrying an open bottle and exhaling the odor of mousey beer. She did not so much not look at them as not see them.
Turning to the right, Derec led them toward a gleam of brighter light. Behind them, two men exited from an apartment, talking casually together about a sports event, oddly called "boxing." Moments later, Derec and Ariel were at the junction.
A wider, busier corridor crossed theirs at right angles. Ariel pointed out the sign that told them that theirs was Sub-Corridor 16. They had just entered Corridor M. Turning left, they followed a small crowd, which quickly resolved itself into an accidental grouping. There must have been fifty people in view at any given moment, Derec estimated, and was slightly staggered.
Abruptly, on the right the wall became transparent and they looked into an open space in which children raced about and bounced balls. A playground. The inside of the wall had crude bits of childish art affixed to it; posters boasted of obscure triumphs, and "recitations" were advertised. It was strange, yet Derec found it familiar. Sometime in his forgotten past he had played in such a playground, though nothing specific came through.
One thing, though, he missed: the gleam of attentive robots along the wall and amid the yelling mobs. Corridor M terminated at a large circular junction. In the angles, four escalator strips spiraled--two up and two down. Beyond, according to the signs, Was another subsection: theirs was Sub-Section G.
Perhaps a hundred men, women, and children were visible, Derec thought. He and Ariel, awed, slowed their pace and drifted to one side of the center of the junction, avoiding both the mouths of the corridors and the escalators. A hundred--and not the same hundred. Moment by moment, people filtered in and filtered out, up or down, away along the corridors, or in from either direction.
Derec supposed wildly that within ten minutes a person might see--oh--five hundred people. Frost! Maybe a thousand!
And now that the playground had alerted him, he noted that none of them were robots.
There were small tables with uncomfortable-looking benches before them, at which people sat, some playing chess. Other benches without tables, equally uncomfortable in appearance, harbored other people. Not far from them an old fellow like a wrinkled apple smiled cherubically at everything he saw; beside him on the bench was an uncapped bottle wrapped in brown paper up to the neck. Others who sat about were also old. Some played chess or other board games at the tables; some snacked on various foodstuffs.
The walls under the escalators had identifying marks high up, but lower down there were large boards with papers affixed to them, announcing various events. Below that still were wide strips running from escalator to corridor mouth, on which crude, vigorous murals had been painted. At one corner an earnest group of youths, younger than Ariel or Derec, were touching the mural lightly with flat applique boards, painting a new mural over the old. Watching them was a young woman all in blue. She looked short, square, sturdy, and wore an odd cap with a bill of translucent blue that threw a blue shadow over her face; above the bill was a golden medal.
She turned and they saw that she had the label C-3 on her upper left chest, and a tool of some sort dangling from her left side: it was half a meter long and had a sturdy grip. C ratings were City functionaries, Derec remembered. Then he realized that the tool was a neuronic whip. No; it was far too big and heavy; the neuronic whip might be in that buttoned-shut pouch in front. The tool had to be a club.
A policewoman. Her eye took them in, paused, went on, and she crossed to speak to one of the old parties at a table. Derec stared in fascination. He had never, to his knowledge, laid eyes on one whose duty was to apply force to other human beings.
"Standing here as we are, we stand out; she's probably trained to notice people who act oddly," Ariel said in a !ow voice.
Derec agreed wordlessly, started toward the down escalator, reflecting that no one could understand them from a little distance if they spoke normally, so great was the noise of people and the murmur of the escalators.
Each escalator flattened out where it met the floor, and there was a three-meter strip of level surface. Ahead of them, Earthmen strode forward and stepped on without breaking stride, then turned about to face their direction of travel. Derec and Ariel tried to imitate that confident stride. At least the example taught them to enter against the direction of travel, a thing Derec wouldn't have guessed. They stepped on with only a slight flexing of the legs and a quick shuffle to retain balance. They turned around and looked down, just as the strip dived down behind the wall.
The escalator, they saw, was not actually a stairway, as they had expected; it was a flat, moving ramp. Overhead was a sloping ceiling from which came the muted rumble of drives; one of the other strips, Derec supposed, probably an up strip. The down escalator did a complete half-circle clockwise, then the wall to their right opened and they were on the other side of the junction at the next level down.
One more half-circle, another junction, then there came a full circle with no exit, and they were at the bottom. The murmur became thunderous. The escalator dived into a slit in the floor, and, Derec presumed, ran "underground" for a few meters, only to reverse itself and climb backward, out of the floor and up. There were only two strips, not four, each going both up and down simultaneously.
Two dozen people got off below them, then they got off, and fifty more followed them, dispersing briskly in all directions, fighting through hundreds of people going eight different ways. This junction was four times as busy as the ones they'd seen above. Derec and Ariel tried not to gape.
Light and noise came through the arches that replaced the corridor mouths above, and they saw people whirling past. If before they'd seen hundreds, now they saw thousands!
Derec swallowed a small knot of fear. So many people! He got the distinct impression he'd never seen that many people together before. He realized he was making quick calculations of how much air they were using, and, more importantly, how much was left for him. No, he thought, /f there's enough for eight billion, there's enough for me.
To right and left, moving strips hurtled past, faster and faster and higher and higher as they got farther from the junction. High overhead were glowing, crawling signs like worms of light, the largest saying WEBSTER GROVES. Before and behind them, the other two arches opened on the non-moving space between the strips. It was dotted with kiosks--some being communications booths, some being the heads of strips that came up from below. Far away down the concourse was another wide tube coming down from the ceiling, with its four escalators. Behind, at the limits of sight, was another.
They drifted out, read the signs, awed. People swarmed about them, the noise was continuous and not so loud as it seemed, the air was warm and humid and thick with the odor of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people.
"So this is Earth."
4. THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME-KITCHEN
| © 2025 Библиотека RealLib.org (support [a t] reallib.org) |