“I cannot allow you to harm Derec,” the robot said.

“You are my servant. Obey my orders! Release me!”

“No, Aranimas,” Derec said, stepping forward. “Alpha is my servant, and always was.” Then he called back over his shoulder, “Wolruf! You can come in now!”

Retrieving the stylus from the floor, Derec turned it over in his hand. There were no obvious switches or controls on it. Holding it the way Aranimas had, Derec pointed it at the alien. Aranimas remained unaffected.

“My own weapons cannot be used against me,” Aranimas said with stiff pride.

“A very clever management technique,” Derec said. He reached into the tool clutch and retrieved the little toy he had made earlier that day. Attached to a small pressure bottle half full of mustard-yellow liquid was a miniature pump salvaged from the disabled robot. “But I have my own weapon.”

As Wolruf joined him, Derec pointed the pump’s outlet valve at Aranimas and pressed the switch. A fine mist blasted from the tiny opening and caught the alien in the face.

A human would have gasped in surprise. Aranimas lunged for the aerosol with his freehand and nearly got it, his arm span being almost equal to the makeshift device’s range.

But a moment later, a reddish liquid began streaming from Aranimas’s eyes, and the skin of his face seemed to pucker. He went rigid and reached high in the air with his free hand, the fingers curling as though grasping for something, the ropelike muscles of his arm and shoulder visible under the skin for the first time. As the aerosol began to sputter, the alien’s eyes closed, and his arm dropped limply to his side.

“Release him,” Derec said, thumbing the switch. The robot’s hand opened, and the alien crumpled to the deck and lay there motionless.

“I—detect—no respiration,” the robot said haltingly.

The robot’s speech impediment was a warning sign to Derec. I should have warned it what was going to happen, he realized belatedly. “He’s not dead,” Derec said. “His system has received a poison shock, but he will recover.”

“I—will try—to integrate—”

“Alpha—analyze the situation. This is Aranimas’s ship. He had all the advantages. He could have done a hundred things to stop us and we’d never have known until it was too late. He had to be neutralized.”

“I understand—and accept.”

“Are you all right?”

“I detect a moderate disturbance—in my brain potentials which I attribute—to witnessing violence against an intelligent-being-not-a-human,” the robot said, its speech gradually returning to normal. “The disturbance is abating and I do not believe that it will affect my functioning.”

“Good,” Derec said, dropping the spent aerosol on top of the tools. “What did you find out?”

“We are approaching an independent free-flying space station.”

“Frost,” Derec said emphatically. “I was hoping he’d take us right in to one of the Spacer worlds. How much time do we have?”

“I am unable to accurately estimate our arrival time. However, I did determine that the ship’s crew is presently at the lowest level of alert.”

“So we probably have more than a few hours,” Derec said. “Has Aranimas been in contact with the station?”

“Not that I am aware of, sir. This vessel does not appear to have hyperwave communications—only simple carrier-wave radio.”

That agreed with Derec’s experience on the asteroid, but it raised a puzzle. How had the aliens found the asteroid? Derec had assumed along with Monitor 5 that they had intercepted the distress message sent on his behalf. But without a hyperwave viewer, that was clearly impossible.

Perhaps Wolruf could shed some light—but it would have to wait. “Okay. What about the key? Do you know where it is?”

“Within limits. I believe it is concealed beneath one of the deck tiles of the command center.”

The last time he had been in the command center, Derec had been in too much pain to pay attention to his surroundings. “Let’s go see,” Derec said, starting off. “How did you find it?” he called back over his shoulder.

“Aranimas showed the key to me and questioned me about it,” the robot said. “When he left with it, I was not able to see precisely what disposition he made of it. However, the time he was gone limited the radius of concealment to this deck, and the sounds I heard were consistent with the removal and replacement of a floor tile.”

They reached the command center then, and Derec saw that the deck was a mosaic of several hundred hexagonal metal tiles the size of a dinner plate. The surface of each tile had a pattern of small holes, but there was no obvious fingerlift—in fact, no obvious way to lift an individual tile. All six edges were flush with the adjoining tiles.

“Any idea where I should start?”

“The strategy of concealment would argue against obvious positions such as the center and corners. Beyond that, I cannot say.”

“You can’t detect it under the deck? It’s not giving off some kind of radio signal, or generating a magnetic field?”

“Not that I am able to detect.”

That, too, was consistent with what had happened on the asteroid. If the key had declared its presence in any measurable way, the robots’ scans would have turned it up long before the raider ship arrived.

“All right,” Derec said slowly. He turned to Wolruf, who had been a silent spectator since joining them. “We need a place to lock up Aranimas.”

Wolruf glanced nervously back toward where they had left the Erani. “Therr arr some lockers outside, on the side passage, which would be large enough—”

Derec nodded. “Alpha—pick up Aranimas and go with Wolruf. She will show you where to put him. Wolruf, make sure it’s something Aranimas can’t open from the inside. Then both of you come back here.” He caught the look of apprehension in Wolruf’s eyes and added. “I know—you don’t like the robot.”

“Maybe ‘u surprise Wolruf like ‘u surprise Aranimas.”

“I promise you, it’ll be all right,” Derec said, patting the caninoid’s arm. “No surprises. I’ll be waiting for you here.”

When the robot was gone, Derec lowered himself to his hands and knees to examine the holes in the tiles. They proved to be tapered pits barely a half-centimeter deep. There seemed to be no way of hooking anything into one to lift the tile. Derec wondered if he would have to build some sort of vacuum clamp before he could locate the key.

Then he realized that the openings were about the diameter of the tip of Aranimas’s stylus. Of course, Derec thought as he fumbled for the instrument. Let’s hope this feature doesn’t work only for Aranimas, too—

He touched the conical tip to one of the openings, and the tile seemed to seize hold of the stylus and stand it straight up. Gripping the stylus with one and then both hands, Derec tried to lift the tile straight up. The tile did not budge. But when he used the stylus as a lever, he was easily able to tip the tile back, like peeling the lid off a can. Underneath was a small hexagonal compartment—empty.

No beginner’s luck, eh? he thought. When he replaced the tile, the stylus came free. Very nice, he thought, touching the stylus to the adjacent tile. The trick wasn’t done with magnetics; the stylus seemed to actually bond to the tile. Perhaps a metallic affinity, followed by a little shot of current to jostle the atoms and break the bonds. Cute trick—

There was a humming sound behind him, and Derec whirled. Half a dozen meters down the central corridor, a circular platform was descending from the ceiling, suspended on four slender wires. And standing on the platform was a woman—a young human female, no more than a year or two older than Derec but a good eight centimeters taller. The broad-shouldered sash blazer she was wearing was cut in an aristocratic style, but showed many days of wear.

Her expression was one of surprise, even shock. Her mouth worked as though trying to form a word. “You?” she said disbelievingly as the platform reached floor level. “Here?”

Wild thoughts filled Derec’s head, and reason had to fight for control. That would sure help explain Aranimas’s success—if he had had a human consort all along to guide him—

“You’d better tell me real fast who you are and what you’re doing here,” he said, slowly coming to his feet. “I don’t have a lot of time to decide what to do about you.”

“What to do about me?” she echoed angrily. “I don’t know why I owe you any answers, not after what you did.”

The meaning of the condition of the girl’s clothes finally impressed itself on Derec. She was a prisoner, just as he. But Derec realized that to her, he might be the one who seemed to have thrown in with the raiders.

“I only helped Aranimas to buy time and save my neck. The robot’s mine now, and Aranimas can’t hurt you,” Derec said. “We’re going to get of here.”

The hostility faded from her face, leaving behind bewilderment. “But what are you doing here? How long have you been on board?”

Derec took a step toward her. “It doesn’t take long to tell. Five days ago I woke up in a survival pod on the surface of an asteroid. I was found by a colony of robots mining the asteroid. Aranimas raided the colony and took me prisoner.” That’s enough. No sense muddying the waters with details even I don’t understand yet, he thought.

She was looking at him curiously. “So you weren’t looking for me.”

“I didn’t know anyone else was on the ship,” he said, throwing his hands in the air. “Wolruf told me that they had captured a couple of human ships, but she left the impression the crews were all—gone.”

“I think Aranimas kept me alive because he was interested in my robots,” she said. “Are you the one that repaired Capek?”

“Was that its old name? It answers to Alpha now. Yes, I’m the one who fixed it.”

“You did a rotten job,” she said with a hint of childish petulance. “It doesn’t remember me. The new arm is ugly, too.”

“I’m sorry.”

“And you don’t remember me, either.”

Derec swallowed. “I had the feeling you thought I should—”

“I thought you were just being cruel,” she said slowly. “I didn’t want to give you the satisfaction. But you don’t know who I am, do you?”

“I don’t even know who I am,” Derec answered with a weak smile. “When I woke up on the asteroid, I was wearing a safesuit with the name Derec on the chest, so I’ve been calling myself that. But I can’t remember anything that happened before I woke up on the asteroid.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Nothing personal. I remember a lot of facts—things I learned sometime, I guess. But I don’t know where I’m from or where I was going.” Derec was badly confused. “So you know me?”

“I thought I did,” she said.

“Then for mercy’s sake, tell me—”

A chirping sound came from the huge control console at that moment.

“Someone’s paging Aranimas,” the girl said, a flash of nervousness crossing her face. “You said we were going to get out of here. Maybe we should worry about that first. What were you doing when I surprised you? What were you looking for?”

“Some of my property—that Aranimas took when I came aboard.”

“The key? Was that yours?”

“You know about it?”

“Aranimas showed it to me. Is that where it’s hidden?”

“According to Alpha.”

“Is it important?”

“I think so.”

“Then let’s get it and get out of here,” she said anxiously.

Wondering what was keeping Alpha and Wolruf, Derec slowly turned back to the floor grid. He checked the second tile, stole a glance back over his shoulder at her, then moved crabwise to the right to try a third.

“I can look for the key and listen at the same time,” he said, attaching the stylus to the next tile. “Can’t you tell me what you know about me?”

If she gave an answer, Derec never heard it. One moment he was starting to lift the tile, and the next there was a flash, a roaring sound, and a tremendous wash of heat. Something heavy struck Derec across the back and he toppled forward, catching the hard edge of the tile across his chest and driving the air from his lungs. His mind had time to think one word—booby trap—before it retreated from the fury to a dark, quiet recess where it would not be disturbed.

CHAPTER 13

ROCKLIFFE STATION

Soft-edged images drifted through a dreamlike haze. A sea of light surrounded Derec, buoying him up. He was as transparent as glass, as inconsequential as the wind. His consciousness resided on a mote of dust, floating on gentle currents of time.

Faceless figures floated there with him. Some drew near as though aware of him, only to turn away again and withdraw. The only sounds were the fragrance-songs of flowers and the color-songs of sunsets, and those played in his head without understanding.

None of it seemed to make sense, and yet he did not care. He only thought that after everything that had happened, all that he had survived, it would be a terrible disappointment to be dead.

After a time, his body returned to him. He was still floating, still adrift, but his consciousness again inhabited its familiar place, filled its familiar space. But his thoughts were as sluggish as his limbs, as though the burdens of once again managing his body’s functions had overwhelmed the simple processes of his mind.

Presently he became aware that the dreamlike world of light and shadow which he was inhabiting existed entirely within himself. If he chose to, he could open his eyes to the larger world beyond, to survey it, to enter it. He was certain that when he saw that world he would know his place in it, would know then who and what he was. But he would pay a price in peace and silence, and that was too high a price to pay.

No, Derec thought firmly. There are limits. I don’t want to see it, he told himself. I don’t want to know.

Time passed, and the enveloping womb of solitude slowly became a prison. Silence became deafness. Stillness became death. Whether because he was healed or haunted, what he had was not enough.

The larger world outside himself still beckoned. It was not a friendly world, he knew. At best it was indifferent to him. Unlike the gentle currents that had borne him as he healed, the larger world was filled with forces that could bear him along like driftwood in the spume of a breaking wave.

But he was not without power himself. Perhaps he could not turn back the wave, but he could ride it, and set his own course.

It was that realization which freed him. He saw that he was not a prisoner, and never had been. There were five doors through which he could free himself—the five doors of his senses. All were unlocked, waiting only his touch to swing open and let the world in and himself out.

And he would open them, he knew. But not yet. Not until he had floated with the gentle currents awhile longer. For if he could leave whenever he chose to, then the womb of solitude was not such an unpleasant place to be after all—

The first door Derec tried to open was hearing. At first he wondered if he had succeeded, for the silence without was as complete as the silence within. Then he became aware of the faint rhythmic sound of his own breathing. It was a small step, but it was the first information to come from outside his cocoon in what felt like a very long time.

Experimentally, Derec opened his eyes a crack, and immediately closed them again. The world outside was disturbingly familiar. He was floating enveloped in light—light that was somehow bright without being harsh. A faceless shadow, tall and slender, moved gracefully through the haze which seemed to surround him.

Reality had been inverted. The dream had become reality, or the dream world and the real world were one and the same. It seemed like some sort of perverse trick, one in spirit with a “present” which turns out to be a series of ever smaller empty boxes. Would every doorway lead to the same place? Would each step he took only hold him more firmly where he was?

“Good morning.”

Derec was puzzled at the sound of another voice. If he was alone, then he had to be the one who had spoken. But he had not spoken, and so he was not alone. But if he was not alone, then he could not still be inside his dream world, and what he had seen when he had opened his eyes must be real.

But if it was real, then he was alive. He tried to remember the last incontrovertibly real thing he had known. It was a difficult business, remembering. There had been sunsets and flower-songs, but they had not been real. Before that . . . before that . . . 

Before that there had been a terrible moment, a moment so full of surprise and pain that even in fleeing it, he had brought it inside his cocoon. He had transformed the eruption into the blossoming of a flower, the flame into the colors of a spectacular sunset. Then he had replayed the moment endlessly to render it harmless.

Yes! The last real thing he had known had been the explosion.

Derec opened his eyes once more to the light. A shadow loomed over him, faceless and nearly formless, as before. He tried to reach out and touch it, but his limbs would not obey.

“Turn off the sterilization field,” the voice said, and the haze of light vanished. The shadow became the copper-colored head and clothed torso of a robot. The robot was gazing solicitously down at him. “Good morning,” it repeated. “Please don’t try to move.”

Derec’s mind was slowly working its way backward from the explosion. He understood that he was no longer in the command center. The robot hovering over him was not Alpha. Which meant—

“Aranimas got his robots,” Derec croaked.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“He won,” Derec whispered. “I didn’t get away.”

“Sir?”

“Tell Aranimas I won’t stop trying—”

“Sir, I would be happy to deliver the message for you. However, the person you named is unknown to me. Where may this individual be found?”

“Aranimas is the ship’s boss—”

“This individual was a member of the ship’s company?”

“Yes—” The robot’s responses were beginning to puzzle Derec.

“Sir, I regret to inform you that no person of that name was found when the paramedics boarded—”

“I’m not on the ship?”

“You are resting on a therapeutic diamagnetic force field, more commonly known as an airbed. The airbed is in the Intensive Care Ward of the hospital at Rockliffe Station.”

The wave of relief that swept through Derec on hearing those words seemed to take all his energy with it. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to float on the gentle currents of sleep once more. Distantly, he heard voices, but could not rouse himself to think about what they were saying.

“He is fatigued,” the robot said.

“We need his assistance,” a new voice answered.

“Our needs are less pressing than his own,” the robot said. “We will wait.”

The next time Derec awoke, the copper-skinned robot was again nearby.

“Good evening,” it said, coming to his side. “How are you feeling?”

Derec managed an anemic smile. “I was just lying here thinking about all the times in the last week that I closed my eyes one place and opened them somewhere else. Every time it happened I found myself in worse surroundings and deeper trouble—until the first time I woke up here.”

The robot nodded gravely. “I promise that you will receive the best of care.”

“I know I will,” Derec said. “Do you have a name?”

“My assigned designation is Human Diagnostic Medicine Specialist 4. However, the supervisor of medicine for this district refers to me as Dr. Galen.”

“Why?”

“He has never explained this to me. However, I have determined that Galen was the name of a Greek physician of the classical age who wrote on the subject of the ‘vital forces’ inhabiting the body. I believe that my supervisor found it amusing to call an advanced diagnostic technician by the name of a primitive medical mystic. Since this question concerns humor, I cannot offer an authoritative conclusion.”

“I think you’re probably right,” Derec said. “You won’t be offended if I call you Dr. Galen? It’s a good bit handier than your other name.”

“Why should I be offended, sir?”

“No reason,” Derec said. At least not when I say it, he added silently. But that supervisor is definitely expressing some hostility. Probably has a secret fantasy of being a family practice doctor on a Settler world instead of tender-to-robots. “Where is your supervisor?”

“On Nexon.”

Derec knew the name: it was one of the larger Spacer worlds, and the second-farthest from Earth. “You said this is Rockliffe Station?”

“That is correct, sir.”

“Where is your local supervisor? The hospital director?”

“Sir, I am hospital director at present.”

Derec frowned. “Maybe you’d better tell me some more about Rockliffe Station, then.”

“Certainly, sir. What would you like to know?”

Rockliffe Station, Dr. Galen explained, was a centuries old Spacer facility, a way station dating from the days when a long interstellar journey could only be managed through a series of shorter Jumps. Dozens of way stations had been built while the Earth emigrants who would become the Spacers were colonizing the fifty worlds that would become their homes.

With the coming of more powerful drives capable of spanning known space in one or two Jumps, most of the way stations had long since been abandoned. A few, of which this was one, had been fortunately enough placed that they outlived their original function.

Rockliffe Station lay in the middle of one of the largest “open” regions along the fringes of Spacer territory, looking out toward the quarantine zone beyond which lay the Settler worlds. There were no livable worlds in the nearest star system, but there was one planet with a crust rich enough in iridium to justify a small mining and processing center.

So Rockliffe had survived on the strength of its usefulness as a listening post on the frontier, as a transshipment point for processed iridium, and a military outpost should relations with the Settlers deteriorate. But those were not reason enough to keep it active at the peak level of the early days—not enough even to maintain a human presence there.

According to Dr. Galen, less than ten percent of the station was occupied, and that entirely by robots. The human supervision they required was provided by means of hypervision and the ships that called every two months.

Only because of the chance that those visiting crews might need its services had the hospital been kept staffed. But the managers on Nexon were realists. Dr. Galen was hospital administrator because his caseload was usually zero, while the only other medical robot on station, a nurse-orderly, had a full schedule of cleaning and maintenance.

No wonder the supervisor makes jokes at Dr.Galen’s expense, Derec thought.

“You seem disturbed by this information,” Dr. Galen said. “Is there a problem?”

Derec thought about the question for a moment. He had grown progressively unhappier as Dr. Galen’s explanation had proceeded. But did it matter so much that he apparently was still alone? At least Rockliffe Station was more or less familiar territory, unlike the asteroid colony or the raider ship. He should be able to have his own way more easily here.

“No. No problem,” Derec said. “Except I’d like to know a little more about what happened. How did I get here? You said something about paramedics—”

“I do not know all the details. The dispatcher or dock supervisor would be better sources of information.”

“Tell me what you know.”

“Apparently your ship was disabled following its Jump. Exactly what happened next is not clear. The dispatcher will no doubt want to inquire about the circumstances. However, it appeared as though your ship discarded or released a smaller vessel, a shuttle or lifeboat, before changing course and heading into the Q-zone.”

“They must have cut us loose after the explosion—” Derec said thoughtfully.

“The smaller vessel apparently was following an unacceptable approach vector and did not respond to the dispatcher’s commands. On the assumption that it was a derelict, a tug was dispatched to intercept it and bring it in. When the derelict was boarded you were found and brought here.”

“Did they bring the ship—our ship—in, then?”

“That is my understanding. Of course, my concern since that time has been with your care.”

“Of course,” Derec echoed. If Aranimas’s ship is here, maybe I didn’t lose the artifact after all, he thought joyously. “Listen, Dr. Galen, what would you say to my getting up and doing a little walking? Airbeds are as comfortable as beds get, but I’m tired of just lying here. Maybe I could go see what kind of shape the ship is in, answer any questions the dispatcher has.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Dr. Galen said. “Your injuries are not yet sufficiently healed to permit that.”

“What are my injuries?”

“You suffered flash burns over fifteen percent of your body, primarily over your arms, face, and neck. Three of your ribs were cracked—”

“I must have fallen on the tile I was lifting.”

“—one puncturing your right lung and causing it to collapse. Your right eardrum was perforated and had to be replaced.”

“Frost! How long have I been here?”

“The ship on which you were found was boarded six weeks ago.”

“Six weeks! Was I in a coma or something?”

“Burns are extremely painful, as is reconstructive epidermal surgery,” Dr. Galen said. “I kept you under chemical narcosis during treatment and the initial phase of recovery.”

“I guess I should be grateful. But six weeks—” Belatedly Derec remembered that he had not been alone on the raider ship. “Where’re the others? Wolruf—Alpha—the girl. What’ve they been doing while I was narc’d?”

“I am sorry. The only persons found were yourself and a female human.”

Feeling a sudden tightness in his chest, Derec looked away. It did not mean that Wolruf was dead and Alpha destroyed—there was a chance, perhaps even a good one, that they were on the larger portion of the ship still in space. But it did mean that while Derec had escaped and survived, he had not lived up to his promises to the caninoid. “I’m sorry, Wolruf,” he whispered.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“Never mind,” Derec said. “Tell me about the girl.”

“She was found near you inside the ship—”

“That’s not what I mean. Tell me how she is.”

“Patient Katherine’s physical—”

“Katherine—is that her name?”

“Is there some error?”

“No—no, that’s her,” Derec said. “Where is she?”

Dr. Galen turned away to the right and gestured with his hand. “Orderly, draw the curtain back.”

Derec turned his head to the right. What appeared to be the wall of his room suddenly become transparent, allowing him to see a slight human figure floating in a halo of light. She was naked, and he looked away, faintly embarrassed. When he did, he realized that he was naked, too. It was very straightforward and practical for them to be naked in a hospital, but something of a surprise all the same.

“How is she?”

“Her integumentary injuries were more extensive than your own, but she is healing well. Of course, her chronic condition remains unchanged.”

“What condition is that?”

“I’m sorry.” The robot paused. “I see that I have made an error. Since you were traveling together, I did not think that I was betraying any secrets by discussing Katherine’s chart. I will have to report myself for this indiscretion.”

“I don’t care about that,” Derec said impatiently. “Has she been awake?”

“No. Nor would we have allowed you to awaken if we did not need your assistance.” Dr. Galen gestured with his right hand. “Close the curtain.”

“Assistance with what?” Derec asked as the wall became opaque again.

“Sir, in the course of your care certain services have been rendered on account. It has not only been our obligation but our pleasure to be able to help you. However, as hospital administrator I am obliged to determine whether this account is collectable or is to be charged against regular station operations.”

“You woke me up to ask me for my insurance card?”

“There is also the question of medical history. We can determine genetic endowment directly, but it is not always possible to determine all the synergistic outcomes of a particular gene complex. Without direct evidence, I have been obliged to follow more conservative parameters in your care, which in turn has had the effect of prolonging your recovery somewhat.”

“I don’t understand. What about her?” Derec demanded. “You said she was hurt more badly than I was. Wouldn’t it be even more important to find out who she is and get her medical history? Why me and not her?”

“Sir, while you were unconscious, we attempted to identify you by means of all the standard systems. We were not successful.”

“Standard systems—”

“Fingerprint, retinagraph, absolute blood protein typing, and twenty-third chromosome codon map. We were not able to establish a match.”

“Of course you weren’t. I’m not from here.”

“Sir, by hyperwave we have direct access to the records of all fifty Spacer worlds.”

“Did you check the records for Aurora?”

“Yes. We were not able to establish a match.”

“But I’m from there—I know I am.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible. Aurora keeps scrupulous records on their citizens as part of their population-control program. If you were an Auroran, this conversation would not have been necessary.”

“But you found out who she is,” he said.

“That is correct. Katherine’s full records were made available to me.”

With sudden fury, Derec demanded, “Are you telling me that you searched the citizenship records of fifty planets and can’t find out who I am?”

“No,” Dr. Galen said. “We have searched the records of fifty-five worlds, including Earth and the four nearest Settler planets. We do have a right of request with most Settler worlds for access to their records. Unfortunately those records are not as complete as we are accustomed to dealing with, and in some cases are not even centralized. Also, certain worlds charge exorbitant fees to respond to data requests from Spacers and then are exceedingly slow to respond. For all these reasons, it seemed to us that a more straightforward inquiry was in order.

“Therefore, could you please tell us who you are?”

The empty feeling had returned full force. “I wish I could,” Derec said hoarsely. “Stars, how I wish I could.”

CHAPTER 14

KATE

“How interesting!” Dr. Galen exclaimed. “Do you mean to say that you have no personal memories whatsoever?”

Derec repeated the now familiar litany of events which began with his waking in the survival capsule. Partly because he was growing weary of the tale himself and partly to minimize questions, he glossed over some of the details, including the fact that the raider had been screwed by aliens.

“I will have to amend your chart to reflect this state of retrograde amnesia,” Dr. Galen said when Derec was through. “This is a much more fascinating problem than your other injuries. As a matter of fact, amnesia is a hobby of mine.”

“What do you mean, a hobby?”

“Perhaps I should say specialty, but that does not convey the deep intellectual satisfaction it gives me.”

“How many cases have you treated?”

“You will be my first,” Dr, Galen said. “I am tremendously pleased by the opportunity.”

“Your first?” Derec said, incredulous. “How can you call yourself a specialist, then? And what do you mean saying that you’re ‘fascinated’ or ‘pleased’? You’re not programmed to experience emotion.”

“Strictly speaking, that is correct,” Dr. Galen agreed. “But the concept of losing one’s sense of identity has always created the kind of positive positronic state which I associate with the term fascination. You see, due to the memory structure of the positronic brain, it is quite impossible for a robot to forget anything, least of all its own identity. Amnesia represents a state for which robot experience offers no analogue.”

“The lure of the unknown.”

“Diagnostic robots such as myself are constructed with a reinforced curiosity integral,” Dr. Galen said. “Perhaps that is a contributing factor.”

Derec felt as though he were being lectured in his own specialty. “But positronic brains go south all the time,” he protested. “They’re vulnerable to hard radiation, to glitches in the power supply—lots of things can go wrong.”

“That is correct, Derec. But those conditions you describe would result in mental shutdown, and in some instances the complete destruction of the positronic brain. However, humans are frequently able to continue to function with such a major system failure. That is what I find fascinating. Beyond that, I believe that robots have much to contribute to the investigation of human brain function, including memory defects.”

“Why is that?”

“I note that many human philosophers have recognized that the search for self-knowledge is the hardest search of all. It is extremely difficult for the human brain to contemplate and analyze the human brain. Its limitations make it impossible to see its limitations.”

Derec found himself in agreement with the robot. “The only thing a camera can’t see is itself. The only thing a ruler can’t measure is itself.”

“Quite. Questions of human brain functions have therefore been the slowest to yield to investigation by human researchers. Many aspects of human behavior are still puzzles despite centuries of neurological and biochemical studies.”

“So what do you think you can do?”

Dr. Galen spread his hands wide. “Positronic brains were not developed by copying how human brains function. They were developed by copying how human beings behave. Therefore, though the positronic brain is the product of the human brain, it represents a distinct form of intelligence and a different perspective.”

“Are you saying that positronic brains are more capable than human brains?”

“The key is that a robot does what it does differently than a human brain,” Dr. Galen said diplomatically. “I am convinced that it is an invention of the human brain which will eventually unlock the secrets of the human brain. So I am pleased to have the opportunity to do more than study and speculate.”

Derec shook his head. “Forget it. I don’t want to be a lab animal.”

“Forgive me,” Dr. Galen said. “In my enthusiasm I neglected to make clear that my primary interest is to help you. There are tests which I can perform to determine the cause of your condition. Depending on the cause, there may be measures which can be taken to reverse your condition.”

“Do you mean you can bring my memory back?”

“I will not know the likelihood of that until I have examined you.”

Derec regarded the promise of a magic cure with skepticism. “Look, I’m not going to be here very long,” he said. “Let’s not start something we won’t have time to finish.”

“I do not understand.”

“You said that ships call here every two months. If I’ve been here six weeks, my ride out of here should show up in two weeks—probably less.”

“No, Derec,” Dr. Galen corrected. “Fariis came and went while you were recovering. The next vessel, the Heritage, is due in six weeks, three days.”

Derec stared. “A ship’s already been here? Then why am I still here?” he demanded.

“This station’s medical facilities are superior to those on board Fariis. It was not possible to release you to them in your condition.”

Derec closed his eyes and sighed. “All right. Probe away.” His eyes opened and he struggled to a seated position. “But I want to know what you’re doing before you do it, do you hear?”

“Thank you, Derec,” Dr. Galen said politely. “What do you know of amnesia?”

“Just what I see on the hypervision.”

“That is unfortunate,” Dr. Galen said.

“It’s just a saying. Actually, I don’t even remember that.”

“That is just as well,” Dr. Galen replied. “Amnesia has been used as a convenient device in fiction for centuries, usually in defiance of known facts. A common plot is for a victim to suffer a blow to the head, forget everything and everyone and begin leading a new life, then be restored in the closing scene by another blow.”

“That does sound sort of familiar. Maybe I have seen one or two like that,” Derec admitted.

“Please do your best to forget them,” Dr. Galen said disapprovingly. “They will only hinder understanding.”

Over the next three days, Derec learned a great deal about amnesia. He had had no idea how many kinds of amnesia there were and how many different causes had been identified. Under other circumstances, it would have been more than he wanted to know. But since he was personally affected, he avidly absorbed everything Dr. Galen told him.

Amnesia could affect the past (retrograde) or the present (anterograde). It could have physical causes (organic) or emotional ones (psychogenic). Some amnesiacs were unable to remember anything for more than a few seconds, while others would forget everything for only a few seconds at a time. Some victims knew that they were having difficulty, while others passionately denied it.

Nine out of every ten cases of amnesia, Derec learned, had some specific physical cause. Those causes were as different as inflammation of the whorled and folded outer layer of the brain, hardening of the cerebral arteries, electric shock, and deficiency of B vitamins. (Also on the list, but nowhere near the top, was a blow to the head.)

“In more primitive times, many cases of true organic amnesia were wrongly diagnosed as psychogenic,” Dr. Galen said as though outraged by the fact. “Patients who needed drugs or surgery were offered hypnosis and psychotherapy.”

“Maybe all amnesias have some physical cause,” Derec suggested. “Maybe the ten percent we still think are psychogenic are the ones we just haven’t found the organic cause for.”

But Dr. Galen dissented. “The distinction between mind and brain has not been completely erased by medical science. The mind is more than the sum of the brain’s parts. There are things that happen at that level of synergy which cannot be traced to specific physical events.”

Even so, the testing focused first on the possible physical causes. Dr. Galen subjected him to cortical analysis, an endorphin response test, three different nondestructive scans of his brain, and even a biopsy and culture for encephalitis.

“Your own awareness of your loss of memory is a clue, as your apparently unimpaired intelligence,” Dr. Galen told Derec. “You retain your sense of time and of the connectedness of events. All of these things are meaningful.”

But the unhappy truth was that all the clues added up to naught, and all the tests revealed nothing. Derec learned several new words to describe his condition—”fractionated retrograde hypnosis-resistant psychogenic amnesia”—but he learned nothing about himself.

“I can find no physical cause,” Dr. Galen concluded reluctantly at the end of a week. “Your cortex, thalamus, mammillary bodies, and fornix bundle are all normal. And yet you have not responded to any psychogenic therapy I am aware of. I am sorry, Derec, I have failed you.”

“Don’t take it so hard,” Derec said, sighing. “I’m beginning to get used to life in the dark.”

In the course of the testing, Dr. Galen had gradually allowed Derec more and more freedom of movement until he had the run of the small hospital complex. Physically, he was nearly completely restored. His new skin was no longer painful to the touch and was gradually becoming less sensitive to variations in temperature. His ribs had knitted while he was kept unconscious, and the only sign they had even been broken was an occasional stitch of dull pain when he drew a deep breath or stretched the wrong way.

Despite that progress, Dr. Galen resisted releasing Derec from his care. The furthest he would go was to allow Derec to move from the ICU to a private room with more traditional accommodations. But the robot’s recalcitrance was not entirely a surprise. With their special First Law responsibility as healers, robot doctors were notorious for their caution.

But Derec suspected that it was not the injuries to his body that concerned Dr. Galen, but the injury to Derec’s mind. The real reason for keeping Derec nearby was to keep him under observation while he treated Katherine. Since Dr. Galen could not be in two places at once, he was keeping his two patients in one place.

Derec could not order Dr. Galen to stop worrying about him, so he resigned himself to living within the robot’s restrictions. In some ways, Derec welcomed the vacation from responsibility. His body had had time to heal, but his mind still vividly remembered the erupting surface of the asteroid, the electric blue pain from Aranimas’s stylus, the sudden flash of the booby trap exploding in his face. He had a right to a few days of peace.

Or so Derec thought. But one day of idleness was enough to satisfy that need. The next morning he did not wait for Dr. Galen’s ritual visit and examination, but went looking for the robot himself. He found him standing at the biomedical monitor at the foot of Katherine’s bed in the ICU.

“Good morning, Derec,” the robot said. “I am sorry that I was delayed. How are you feeling today?”

“Restless,” Derec said. “I’m ready to get back to a normal life.”

“But you are in the fugue state of an amnesiac episode,” Dr. Galen said. “A normal life is not possible for you now.”

“I’ll settle for the substitute at hand,” Derec said. “I can’t just sit around here hoping my memory will come back.”

“What is it you wish to do?”

“I guess I won’t know until I find out what’s already been done for me,” Derec said. “Outside of the robots on the station, who knows that I’m here? Is anybody trying to find out who I am?”

“I cannot say,” Dr. Galen said. “I am certain that the station manager reported your arrival to the district supervisor at Nexon, as I did to the medical supervisor. That information may have been passed to any number of interested parties in the interval since. Why, is there someone you would like to contact?”

Derec pointed across the room at the sleeping Katherine. “Her. How much longer till you bring her out?”

“I concluded some days ago that she might hold the key to unlocking your loss of memory, and decided to allow her to wake at the earliest opportunity when her own health and comfort would not be at risk,” said Dr. Galen. “She was taken off the sleep-inducing drug at midnight. According to her brain waves, she is dreaming now. I expect her to wake sometime this morning.”

Derec glanced around the ward. There was nowhere to sit except the floor.

“There is no need for you to conduct a vigil,” Dr. Galen said as though reading his thoughts.

“I want to be here when she wakes up.”

Dr. Galen nodded understandingly. “I promise, I will call you.”

Derec whiled away one hour, then another, with a bookfilm titled “The Architects of the Machine.” He hoped to find among its profiles of notable designers and engineers a clue as to who the “minimalist” behind the asteroid colony might have been. With all the more tangible evidence lost or destroyed, it was one of the few unexplored leads left to him. Genius of that sort had to have left a trail.

But only three of the biographies were of contemporary designers, and the choices were entirely predictable. The roboticist Fastolfe. March, the Havalean wizard of micromagnetics. The human ecologist Rutan, whose services were so much in demand by the wealthy on a dozen Spacer worlds.

All three had become celebrities, acclaimed by those who knew nothing about what it took to do what they did. But the engineering community had its own celebrities, based on its own standards. Every exclusive group did—those persons who had won the respect and admiration of their peers but were completely unknown outside the circle. Fastolfe ranked here, too, but March was regarded as a toy-maker and Rutan as a joke.

Yes, he needed an insider’s perspective. Someone would know Derec’s mysterious genius—

“Master Derec, if I may interrupt.”

Derec’s head jerked up. It was the medical orderly. Like Dr. Galen, the orderly had fallen victim to the supervisor’s perverse sense of humor. “Yes, Florence.”

“Dr. Galen said that you should come right away.”

Pushing back the viewer, Derec jumped to his feet. “Coming.”

When he reached the ICU, the sterilization lights were already off and Katherine was beginning to stir. She now wore an ankle-to-neck beige gown, etiquette having changed along with Dr. Galen’s changing perception of their relationship. Derec hung back as Dr. Galen bent over Katherine and spoke softly to her.

“Good morning,” he said. “Don’t try to move.”

But she lifted her head a few centimeters all the same and surveyed the room. “Hospital?” she asked hoarsely.

“Yes, Katherine. I am Dr. Galen.”

“On what station?”

“Rockliffe Station.”

She nodded and looked past Dr. Galen to Derec. “Some rescue,” she said.

Despite her hoarseness, there was a laughing note to her voice that Derec did not like. Taking a step closer, he said stiffly, “We’re both alive, aren’t we?”

“Which just goes to show that there’s no justice in the Galaxy,” she answered, closing her eyes. “I thought you’d have been smart enough to disable Aranimas’s security system before you started to poke around in his hidey-hole.”

“Look, I’m sorry it didn’t go more smoothly,” Derec said, coming to the side of the bed. “But we did get away. And there was something we were going to talk about once we did—”

Her eyes fluttered open and searched past Derec for the robot’s face. “Dr. Galen, the headaches are back,” she said. “Would you ask Derec to leave, please? I just don’t think I can deal with company now.”

“How long could it take to tell me my surname, my homeworld—”

But Dr. Galen intervened, gently pushing Derec back toward the door. “I understand your impatience, Derec. But I must consider Katherine’s health, too. Please leave. I will find out what I can. When she is stronger you can talk with her again, if she consents.”

Derec took his frustration for a walk, leaving the hospital by the main entrance. He was sure that Dr. Galen would report him or send a robot after him to bring him back, but he did not care. He simply could not calmly stay there and wait. To be so close to answers, to the promise of being whole again, was too great a test for his patience.

The section of the station where the hospital was located was a tomb. He walked dimly lit streets past ranks of closed stores and sealed residential blocks. Only the main throughway was even lit. The side streets and courtyards were black pits.

No robot pursued him. He walked and walked until the edge was off his jumbled emotions, and then he turned back. He stalked through the reception area and into Dr. Galen’s office.

“Did she tell you anything?”

“She was not able to offer any insight into your affliction.”

“You discussed my condition with her? But you wouldn’t tell me—”

“Correction. She was already aware of your condition.”

“What did she do, ask your advice on how to deal with me?”

“Derec, I promised Katherine that I would not discuss our conversation with you.”

Crossing his arms over his chest, Derec blew a sigh ceiling-ward. “I don’t understand why she’s being so secretive. If she knows something about me, she should just tell me.” He cast a raised-eyebrow glance in Dr. Galen’s direction. “Isn’t that right?”

“The advisability of that would vary from case to case, depending on the individual, the cause of the dysfunction, and the particular personal data concerned,” was Dr. Galen’s measured answer.

“You won’t even give me a hint, will you?” Derec said ruefully.

“I regret that I may not.”

Derec frowned. “Can I see her, at least?”

The robot turned to one of the two active displays on the wall behind him. “She is awake and her algesia has moderated. But she is the final arbiter.”

“Then I’m going to go see what she has to say.”

They found Katherine sitting up in her bed. “I was hoping someone would come to see me,” she said with a smile.

“You left me with some good reasons to,” Derec said, scanning the room fruitlessly for a chair to move beside the bed.

Her face clouded over. “Da—Derec,” she said, stumbling over his name as though she had forgotten it. “I’m afraid you’re going to be angry with me. We have a lot of ground to make up together—all the things that happened on the ship. I don’t think we should start with the little I know about you.”

The look that Derec shot at Dr. Galen was black and poisonous. “What is this? What did you tell her? I thought you were trying to help me—”

“I cannot do otherwise,” the robot said calmly.

The truth of that slowed Derec’s rush to anger. He turned back to Katherine and said, “So you’re going to keep secrets from me.”

She shook her head. “Derec—let’s say that you were President of New Liberty—”

“New Liberty has a council-manager government,” Derec interrupted.

“It doesn’t matter. Let’s say you were President of New Liberty and lost your memory. If I tell you that you’re the President, does that make you the President? Can you start acting like the person you used to be just because you know that?”

Derec avoided her eyes. “I suppose not. But hearing it could make me remember—”

“It is far more likely to cause you severe anxiety,” Dr. Galen began. “Most often—”

Derec opened his mouth to answer, but Katherine was faster. “Dr. Galen, go away,” she snapped. “Go back to your office and leave us alone. Don’t monitor me and don’t listen in. We’ll call you if we need you.”

The robot stared a moment, then lowered its head and exited.

“You didn’t have to get so personal,” Derec said, surprised at her forcefulness. “I’ll bet you put a kink in poor Dr. Galen’s self-worth integral that he’ll be an hour working out.”

“Oh, I don’t care,” Katherine said peevishly, staring at the empty doorway. “Medical robots are such busybodies. They’ve got ten thousand opinions but they don’t really know anything. And they can’t really understand what someone’s feeling when they’re sick, now, can they? Because they’re machines and they never get sick, or die.”

Is that what’s the matter with you? Derec wondered, looking at her face. Are you dying from something the doctors can’t cure? Is that what Dr. Galen wouldn’t talk about?

Before he could find the courage to ask her aloud, she looked toward him and patted the bed beside her. “Are you going to stand all the way over there? The field can hold both of us.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Derec settled on the edge of the bed by Katherine’s feet.

“There, that’s better,” she said. “Now I don’t feel so much like a prisoner being questioned.”

“I’m not sure what we have left to talk about.”

“Well—I’m sure there’s more to what happened on the asteroid than you told me on the ship. Then there’s the ship and what we went through there. And there’s me.”

“Let’s start there. Your name, for starters. The robot called you Katherine—”

“I am Katherine Ariel Burgess to my mother and the computers. Everyone else calls me Kate,” she said. “My father says that calling me Katherine is false advertising—that it doesn’t give people any warning what they’re in for. Katherine is please and thank you and dresses that cover you to the neck. Kate is—”

“Sharp-tongued and strong-willed and I-can-take-care-of-my-self-thank-you,” Derec supplied.

Katherine brightened as though she had been complimented. “Something like that. My father says that I have spice.”

“I think I’ll stick to Katherine. What were you doing on Aranimas’s ship?”

“Why, I was a prisoner just like you were. My robots and I were kidnapped off a courier ship.” She snapped her fingers. “I just remembered. Where’s the key? You didn’t let the robots have it, did you?”

“I don’t know where it is,” he said. “I don’t even know that it was ever where I thought it was.”

“Is the ship here? Have you been back in it?”

“Frost, I don’t know. I hadn’t even been out of the hospital until this morning,” Derec said, annoyed. “Will you tell me this—why is that key so important? What is it? What’s it the key to?”

“I don’t know,” Katherine said soberly. “I only know that Aranimas thought it was worth anything to get. Wait—I thought you said the key was your property. Don’t you know why it’s important?”

“It is my property,” Derec asserted. “Space salvage. Or a gift. Either way, I have the best claim to it.”

“But you don’t know what it is?”

“No.”

She seemed disappointed. “Maybe you do know—but it’s one of the things you’ve forgotten.”

“I guess that’s possible,” Derec acceded. “Did Aranimas come to the asteroid specifically looking for the key? Not because I was there?”

“I don’t think so—”

“You don’t think so what?”

“I think he went to the asteroid on purpose. I don’t think he knew the key was there. I’m almost positive he didn’t know you were there,” she said. “I think you were just lucky—or would it be unlucky?”

Derec considered. “Lucky, the way it fell out. I’d sure rather be here on Rockliffe Station than back on that asteroid.”

“Lucky, then.” She paused. “Look, if it is yours, maybe getting it back in your hands would help you remember something. And even if it doesn’t, we need to find out what happened to the key. Aranimas had to have some reason for wanting it.”

“Wolruf called it ‘the jewel’ when she talked to Aranimas,” Derec said thoughtfully. “But I don’t think she meant it literally.”

“Either way, it’s something valuable. Are we going to try to find it, or not?”

“We?” For a brief moment, Derec bristled defensively. Then he reminded himself what it had been like to be a loner on the raider ship. He felt at home here—but Katherine clearly didn’t. She was hurting, and she was alone, and she wanted to be his friend. And beyond that, she knew something about who he was—and wanted to help him remember.

“Sure,” he said. “Of course we are.”

CHAPTER 15

OH SEVEN B

Despite all the good intentions, the partnership almost fell apart before it began. Derec had somehow visualized the arrangement with himself making all the decisions and Katherine gratefully following his lead. But he found out very quickly that it was Kate, not Katherine, with whom he’d made his pact.

Derec was eager to get started looking for the artifact. Since Dr. Galen had raised no protest about Derec’s excursion out of the hospital, he felt he had won the right to roam where he wanted. At the very least, it would be several days before Kate was accorded the same freedom.

But when Derec proposed that he go scouting alone and then report back to Katherine on his discoveries, she balked. “We go together or all promises are off,” she said firmly. “If we’re going to be a team, we have to work as a team.”

“Being a team doesn’t mean we have to be handcuffed together,” Derec argued. “Everybody should do what they do best, and right now what I can do best is be our eyes and ears.”

“What are you going to do?”

Derec shrugged. “Talk to the dock supervisor and the station manager. Start finding out what’s happened while we were here.”

“They’re robots,” she said. “Let them come here.”

It was a perfectly reasonable idea, and the fact that it had not occurred to Derec jarred him for a moment. He had been thinking of talking to the station staff ever since he had regained consciousness, but always in terms of going to see them. He realized that he had made an unspoken assumption: they’re busy—they don’t have time to come down here to talk to me.

He had never once thought of ordering them to leave their work. Katherine had thought of it immediately. Derec knew somehow that the difference said something important about the two of them—something about their background, the subculture which had shaped their attitudes about robots.

It was as though he respected the importance of the robots’ work and saw them more or less as equals, while she thought of them only as servants. But whether it meant he had more experience with robots than she or less, he could not say.

All the same, it was another tiny piece in his puzzle. He was not like Katherine. They came from different worlds—culturally if not geographically. It made him wonder how it was she knew him.

All these thoughts cascaded through Derec’s mind in a fraction of a second, allowing him to carry on the conversation with only the faintest hesitation. “Look, I’m willing to share the decision-making. Maybe we could get the robots to come here,” he said. “There’s still the ship. I should go have a look at it.”

“That’s something we should do together.”

“Why? What’s hidden there that you don’t want me to find?”

Katherine crossed her arms and sighed. “If you’re going to be suspicious of me all the time, this isn’t going to work.”

“I’m not suspicious of you!” Derec exclaimed, throwing his hands in the air. “I just don’t understand why you don’t seem to want to let me out of your sight.”

“And I don’t understand your hurry,” Katherine said stiffly. “You say that we’re a team, but you want to go run off and do everything yourself.”

“The hurry is because we want to get there first,” Derec said impatiently. “We don’t want anyone else taking it.”

She looked at him quizzically. “We’ve been here six weeks. Do you really think that they pulled us out and then locked the ship up somewhere until we could claim it? Think! That’s an alien starship. How long do you think it took them to realize they’d never seen one like it before—not just the design, but the whole technology? This is a frontier base. Do you think they just take it in stride when an unregistered ship shows up with two injured humans aboard?”

Belatedly, Derec understood. “So they’ve been all over it. Photographed it, X-rayed it, the whole works. They might have even torn it down, sent pieces of it out on Fariis to the district offices. They’re probably wondering about us, too.”

“Of course they are. That’s why I sent Dr. Galen away.”

“Do you think he’s been spying on us?”

“All robots are spies for their masters,” she said bitterly.

“What?” Derec asked, surprised by her intensity.

“Nevermind,” she said. “I just think we ought to play innocents abroad for a while, do all the things they expect us to—until we understand what kind of game we’re in.”

“Be helpless and worried. Play dumb.”

“Just so,” Katherine said. “Sometimes it’s the smartest thing you can do.”

At their request, Dr. Galen had a multicom brought to the ICU and tied into the station net. Very quickly, they learned that the Rockliffe Station welcome mat was a bit threadbare.

The station manager was fully scheduled until the following morning and thought that they really wanted to talk to the dock supervisor anyway. The dock supervisor was conducting an overhaul of the dock pressurization system, a priority task which had to be completed in the shortest possible time, and had they tried the dispatcher?

The dispatcher couldn’t answer their questions without clearance from the security chief, who deferred to the associate manager for station operations. The AMSOP was one step down the ladder from the station manager and probably the robot to which they should have been recommended in the first place.

The AMSOP was busy at the moment but would be free in an hour if they wanted to make an appointment. It seemed to be the best they could do, so they took it.

“So what do we do while we’re waiting?” Derec said as he turned off the viewer.

“We could spend the time getting to know each other better—”

“Should I entertain you with stories about my family?”

She laughed—a nice laugh. “Maybe not.”

“You could tell me stories about my family.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“Katherine—the only person who knows anything about me is you,” Derec said pleadingly. “Why don’t you tell me some of it now?”

“Not yet.”

“Still following Dr. Galen’s advice?”

“This really is the best way,” she said, touching his hand.

“It doesn’t feel like it to me,” he said gruffly. “All right. Tell me about you, then.”

“It’s boring,” she warned.

He cocked an eyebrow. “Being hijacked by an alien spacecraft was boring?”

“My life is boring. That’s the first exciting thing that ever happened.” She added, “Except it wasn’t exactly a hijacking.”

“Tell me about it. What was the name of your courier ship?”

“Golden Eagle, out of Viking. We were carrying a diplomatic pouch to Frier’s Planet—”

At least in a first reading, the story had the ring of truth.

According to Katherine, she and her robots had been outbound from Viking on the courier ship Golden Eagle, along with a pilot and two diplomats. Just before they were about to make their Jump at the fringe of the Viking system, the pilot spotted Aranimas’s ship, apparently adrift.

Taking it for an uncharted wreck—in part because of its appearance and in part because they could not raise it on any channel—they abandoned their exit trajectory and went to investigate. Suddenly they were fired upon, and their ship disabled. Katherine and the robots were taken off the courier by the Narwe, and then the courier was set adrift. A short time later the courier exploded, probably, Katherine said, because of a bomb that had been placed aboard.

There were no screaming contradictions in the story, but there were several little points that nagged at Derec. Katherine was vague about just why she was on the courier. At first she seemed to want him to think that she was part of the diplomatic mission. But even though she wanted him to think that she was old enough for such duty, she clearly was not.

When he questioned her on it, she hastily explained that she had been a passenger, using the courier instead of a commercial carrier because she wanted privacy. He wondered aloud at a courier taking on passengers. She responded by hinting that she was important enough to justify any exception that might have been required.

But the biggest sticking point, and the one on which he kept his own counsel, was the behavior of the courier pilot. Couriers carried important people, emergency supplies, engineering prototypes, irreplaceable documents. It didn’t make sense that a courier pilot would endanger his cargo by poking around a wreck. It seemed far more likely that the pilot would report the sighting to the Patrol post on Viking, then make his Jump on schedule.

Derec recalled that the first time her capture had come up, Katherine had quickly changed the subject. He wondered now if that was because she didn’t have her story ready. Perhaps he was being fed half-truths as some sort of test—Dr. Galen’s prescription for crippled minds. If so, he resented it.

But the arrival at last of the Assistant Manager for Station Operations pushed those thoughts to the back of Derec’s mind.

“I am called Hajime,” the AMSOP said, “Dr.Galen tells me that both of you are recovering from your injuries. That is good news.”

“Especially to us,” Derec said under his breath.

“I understand that you have questions about your presence here. I hope that I will be able to answer them.”

Derec opened his mouth to answer, but before he could speak Katherine jumped in. “Begin with when the station first detected our ship and tell us what you observed,” she ordered.

“Yes, madam. The station’s sensors detected an unidentified ship immediately after it emerged from its Jump—as you may know, the termination of a Jump is accompanied by a minor spacetime disturbance comparable to the atmospheric disturbance caused by a discharge of lightning—”

“We know all that,” Derec said. “Get on with it.”

“Forgive me, sir,” the robot said with a slight bow. “I only wanted to be certain that you understood how we were able to detect your ship at such a great distance.”

“Why? How far out were we?”

“Eighty-three astronomical units. At such a distance, the station’s sensors were only able to determine the position and velocity of the vessel. Since there was no direct identification through a transponder or indirect identification through sensor data, this vessel was designated UPH-07.”

“UPH?” Katherine asked.

“Forgive me. Unidentified, Potentially Hostile,” Hajime supplied.

“Go on, Hajime.”

“Thank you, sir. We tracked Oh Seven inbound for two days. We were just beginning to acquire some preliminary data on its mass and profile when an anomalous event took place. UPH-07 divided into two independentbodies, UPH-07A and UPH-07B. The larger vessel, Oh Seven A, made a course correction which carried it out of the station’s zone of control—”

“They cut us loose and then turned around and went away,” Katherine said.

“Looks like it,” Derec said. “Did the big ship Jump?”

“Not while it was within range of our sensors, sir,” Hajime answered. “It is not possible to say what happened once contact was lost.”

Derec and Katherine exchanged glances that said, So they could still be out there somewhere, waiting.

“And the other vessel, Oh Seven B, it continued inbound?” Katherine asked. “That’s where you found us?”

“Yes, madam. A scout with a rescue and retrieval team aboard was dispatched immediately.”

“Can you show us a navigational plot of all this?” Derec asked.

“Certainly, sir.” The robot went to the hyperviewer and entered a code on the keyboard, and a moment later the far wall dissolved into the black of space.

It was all there as the robot had described it. A blue trace from the top of the plot traced the raider’s approach to the station, represented by a golden hexagon at the bottom. One-third of the way there, the blue trace split. A thick green trace angled off the plot to the upper right, while a thin red one continued curling inbound on the original trajectory. Two-thirds of the way down the plot, the red trace intersected a golden trace climbing up out of the station: the rescue ship.

“Can we have a copy of that?” Derec said.

“I will file it in a directory under your name,” Hajime said, his touch on the controls turning the far wall into a wall once more.

“Was the boarding recorded?” Katherine asked.

“Yes, madam.”

“I’d like to see the recording,” Katherine said, beckoning Derec to come sit on the edge of the bed beside her. When he did, she took his hand and gripped it tightly, as though seeking reassurance. The skin contact surprised and unsettled Derec.

“The recording was made by means of a witness robot,” Hajime said. “The multicom will not be able to display the full bandwidth—”

“What’s a witness robot?” Katherine whispered to Derec.

“I’ll explain later,” Derec whispered back. Witness robots were odd-looking, with their bullet heads and 360-degree scanning slit instead of eye sensors, but invaluable for such operations. Their sole responsibility was to position themselves so that their scanners and recorders captured unfolding events clearly. Many a bungled operation had been reconstructed from the data supplied by witness robots before they were destroyed.

“—so if you wish to move the window left or right at any point please tell me so.”

From the outside, Aranimas’s ship looked like a fat arrowhead trailing bits of the twine which had held it to the shaft. The arrowhead was in fact an atmosphere-piercing lifting body, and the twine the tattered remnants of several transfer corridors which had been attached to the hexagonal junction between the engine exhaust bells at the stern.

Together Derec and Katherine watched as the rescue robots fit a self-cutting emergency hatch to the upper hull. When the hatch’s contact ring had burned through the hull and fused itself in place, the robots entered—one at a time, the witness first.

“This is where Aranimas had me living,” she whispered as the hypervision panned the atticlike upper deck.

“How long were you there?”

“Two months. Believe me, it seemed longer.”

When the witness robot led the way down to the main deck, the first thing they saw was a robot standing in the central corridor.

“Alpha,” Derec cried.

“Capek,” Katherine said at the same instant. “Where’s my robot?”

Hajime suspended the recording. “This robot was removed and taken away for diagnostic examination and repair.”

“I want him back, just the way he was,” Derec said. “You’ve got no right to tinker with him without a work order.”

“The robot resisted our efforts to rescue you. It was judged to be operating in a substandard and hazardous manner and was deactivated. Standard procedure in such cases is to perform a full examination so that the anomaly may be reported to the manufacturer.”

Katherine was nodding in reluctant agreement, and Derec took his cue from her. “All right,” he said. “Go on.”

When the recording continued, they saw themselves for the first time. They were lying head to foot along one wall in the central walkway of the main deck. Katherine winced and turned away at the sight of her own burn-blistered face and bloody clothing. Derec gritted his teeth and tried not to feel the pain all over again that was reflected in his burned skin.

“I thought so,” Derec whispered under his breath. “I thought so.”

“What?” Katherine demanded. “What are you talking about?”

“Alpha. He kept us alive.”

“You heard Hajime—the robot was abnormal. He wouldn’t let them rescue us.”

“That was just the PD cube being careful. Look,” Derec said, gesturing. “Those aren’t positions that you fall into naturally after an accident like that, or even crawl into. We were moved. And more: we were at least five days out when I tripped the booby trap. It took the rescue ship two and a half days to reach us. There’s no quarreling with the fact that we were badly injured—”

“No,” she said with a little shiver.

“I was wondering how we survived until the paramedics got to us. We should have died right there on the ship. All they should have found were corpses. Alpha is the reason they didn’t.” Derec looked toward the robot. “Hajime, could you pause the recording and give us privacy, please?”

“Of course, Derec.” The image and the robot both froze.

“What? What’s going on?”

“I just want to point out that someone else might have been on the ship, too.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“I had wondered why Wolruf and the robot were taking so long to get back from their errand. What if Aranimas regained consciousness? They might still have been trying to lock him up when the bomb went off. Alpha would have come running back. He wouldn’t worry about Aranimas. He probably wouldn’t even worry about what Aranimas might do to Wolruf. Aranimas and Alpha could both have gotten back into Hull A before it was cut loose.”

“And Alpha would have protected us from him, just as it tried to protect us from the rescue crew.”

“That might even explain why Alpha gave the robots trouble.”

“He could have hidden,” Katherine said thoughtfully. “It was his ship. He would have known where he’d be safe. Until the ship was brought in—”

“Just what I was thinking. If he doesn’t have the key, he’s looking for it—or us. If he’s got it, he still may be looking for us. Either way, the key’s not safe, and neither are we. And we can’t just sit around and tell ourselves there’s no rush. We have to start doing something right now.”

Katherine cast her gaze downward into her lap. “All right,” she said at last.

“Hajime,” Derec said. “You can rejoin us.”

The robot stirred again. “Thank you, sir. Shall I continue with the recording?”

“No. Terminate the replay. We’ve seen enough,” Katherine said.

“Very well, madam,” the robot said, complying. “Do you have other questions?”

“Yes. Where is Oh Seven B now?”

“I do not know, madam.”

The answer brought Derec up off the bed, his face reddening. “What do you mean, you don’t know?” he demanded. “You’re the second highest ranking staffer on the station.”

“That is correct, sir.”

“And you don’t know where our ship is?”

“I only know that Oh Seven B is no longer in the berth at which it was moored when first towed into the station.”

“Was it stolen?” Derec pressed. “Are you trying to tell me it’s gone?”

“It was not stolen. It was moved under the authorization of the station manager.”

“Why didn’t you say so from the start?” Katherine snapped.

“Derec asked if I knew where Oh Seven B was berthed. I do not, and so informed him.”

“Then find out where our ship is. I want you to take us to it.”

“I am sorry,” Hajime said. “I am not permitted to do that.”

“Then find us a robot who is permitted,” Derec snapped.

“I have been instructed to refer all inquiries of this sort to the station manager.”

Derec sighed. “All right. You can go.”

“Thank you, sir.” The robot paused. “May I make an inquiry, sir?”

“What about?”

“Do you continue to refer to Oh Seven B as ‘our ship’ out of habit or as a matter of affection?”

“What do you mean?”

“I have been informed that the vessel known as Oh Seven B is no longer your property.”

CHAPTER 16

INTO THE DARKNESS

The station manager, a robot named Anazon, would not come to see them, but agreed to a brief vidcall.

“Is the care you are receiving satisfactory?” Anazon asked politely. “I hope that Hajime is seeing to your other needs—”

Derec did not waste any time on pleasantries. “Where is our ship? Where is Oh Seven B?” he demanded.

“I regret, sir, that I am not permitted to tell you,” the robot said without a hint of regret in his voice.

“Who gave that order?”

“I regret, sir, that I am not permitted to tell you that, either.”

Derec was determined not to be thwarted. “Who is your supervisor? What’s his name?”

“My supervisor’s name is Aram Jacobson.”

“Get him on this channel.”

“Mr. Jacobson may not be available at this time—”

“Do it. Use whatever priority you have to to get him to answer. And keep the line open. I want to hear what you say.”

The robot reached forward for the hyperviewer controls. “This is Anazon, Manager of Rockliffe Station, requesting a conference with Mr. Jacobson.”

A voice said “One moment,” and there was a pause.

“Yes, Anazon,” a new voice said. The words were muddied by the faint electronic echo which was the telltale sign of a scrambler somewhere in the link. “What is it?”

“Anazon called you on my behalf,” Derec cut in. “Your robots have appropriated my ship. I expect you to order them to return it.”

“And our robot,” Katherine added. “We want Capek back, too.”

The hypervision image of Anazon faded and was replaced an instant later by one of a round-faced man with narrow eyes and shiny black hair. In sharp contrast to the robot’s slender physique, Jacobson’s stout body was perched precariously on his executive chair like an egg on a teaspoon.

“Excuse me, by whom do I have the pleasure of being ordered about?” he asked with exaggerated politeness.

“My name is Derec. This is—”

“Just Derec? No last name, like a robot?”

“Don’t be cute. You know all about me. I’m sure there’s a file on me in your library.”

“I have many files in my library,” Jacobson said. “I’m responsible for facilities which employ twenty-six hundred humans and nearly eight thousand robots. Believe me when I tell you that neither your name nor your face are familiar to me.” His gaze flicked toward Katherine. “And you, miss?”

“Katherine Burgess. And don’t call me miss.”

“My apologies if I insulted you,” Jacobson said, bowing his head slightly. “Now if I could ask you to restate your complaint—this is most irregular, to have someone barge in on a private call. I’m afraid it rather distracted me.”

Derec was too furious for words, but Katherine took over smoothly. “We were found on a damaged spacecraft and brought here to Rockliffe Station. Now the station manager refuses to allow us access to our ship.”

“Refuses you access?” Jacobson asked, wrinkling his forehead. “Whatever for?”

“It won’t tell us,” Derec said. “It says it’s been ordered not to tell us—my guess is by you.”

“I assure you not,” Jacobson said, reaching for his computer. “If you’ll just allow me a moment to check the records—” He turned his back to them briefly. “Oh yes, of course,” he said to himself as he studied the screen.

“Of course what?”

Jacobson turned back to face them. “I do recall hearing about you after all, Derec. You’re the amnesia case Dr. Galen is studying. That explains a great deal.”

“Not to me.”

“But it does all the same. You see, the care you’ve been receiving is quite costly—”

“Dr. Galen said my bill would be charged against a station account.”

“I’m afraid Dr. Galen made an error,” Jacobson said. “That would be the case if you were indigent and unable to pay, or if the costs of your care exceeded the guarantee made by your homeworld on behalf of its citizens.”

“But my case is different—”

“Indeed. Your citizenship is unknown. Your financial assets are unknown. Indeed, there is even some question about your majority under Spacer law,” said Jacobson.

“I’m old enough.”

“We have decided to presume so,” he said. “But in any case, since you have not been able to supply us with identification, we have no choice but to seize your tangible personal assets in payment of your account.”

“My tangible assets—”

“Your ship and its contents have been appraised generously, I assure you,” Jacobson said, glancing back at his computer. “Even so, I’m afraid there’s not much left after subtracting the salvage fee and the expenses of the rescue operation. Still, there’s more than enough to cover passage to Nexon on the next shuttle and keep you fed in the meantime.”

Derec gaped disbelievingly. “You can’t do that. You can’t just take everything a man owns.”

“It’s the judgment of the minister of finance that anyone who has assets enough to own such a ship in the first place can quite afford to pay his bills,” Jacobson said, sitting back in his chair. “If we were to let you get away with this, I’d be overwhelmed by freeloaders, all claiming to have forgotten where their funds are held.”

“Are you accusing me of making this up? Ask Dr. Galen—”

“Dr. Galen does not set policy for the station. I do.”

“At least you finally admit that this is your doing,” Derec retorted. “I can’t believe you have the nerve to charge me for rescuing me. You’d have gone out to intercept that ship whether we’d been on it or not.”

“From our point of view, that ship wouldn’t have been there endangering our facility unless you were in it,” Jacobson said lightly.

“Just a moment,” Katherine said. “That ship is half mine. Maybe you can grab his half for payment, but you can’t touch mine. You know who I am. I authorized a draft on my account at the Auroran Exchange.”

“So you did,” Jacobson said. “Tell me, what sort of account was it?”

“A Living Share—a family trust—” Katherine’s face was beginning to go gray.

“Which is a revocable trust, is it not?”

“I—I guess.”

“I regret to inform you that on May 26, your account was closed and all funds withdrawn. Have you other assets of which we may not be aware?”

“No,” Katherine said, her expression acutely pained. “That was my Living Share. How could they take it back? How could they do such a thing?”

“I cannot say. The fact remains, they did. You are legally an adult and responsible for your own debts. Therefore we have been obliged to exercise our rights to your portion of the property as well.”

“You won’t get away with this,” Derec threatened feebly.

“It is not a question of ‘getting away with’ anything,” Jacobson replied. “We are well within our rights. You should be grateful that you’re alive, instead of fussing over a ship which I understand is not in flyable condition in any case. Since you couldn’t have paid for its repair, you would have had to try to sell it anyway, and I doubt very much you could have gotten anything near the price you were paid by us.”

“You—” Derec sputtered.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have other business to attend to.”

The link dissolved before Derec could reply. “Do you believe that performance?” he exclaimed, turning to Katherine. He was shocked to see how empty of spirit her eyes were.

“Performance?” she asked mechanically.

“This isn’t what it looks like. This is just a way of separating us from the ship. To pay us for it they’d have to have proof that we own it—more than our word and the fact that they found us in it. Do you know why they’re not asking us for that proof? They don’t want to know. Just like they don’t want to know whether I’m too young to be responsible for my own debts.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “None of it matters.”

Derec stared at her. “What’s bothering you?”

“My money. My family took my money—”

“Is that any great surprise? The Patrol probably reported you missing when they went out and picked over what was left of the Golden Eagle.”

“They didn’t even give me a chance to explain—” she said despairingly.

“Explain to who?” he asked gently.

But his question seemed to awaken her to her loss of control. The line of her jaw stiffened and her eyes hardened. “Frost them. Frost them all,” she said tersely. “It’s ancient history. What do we do now?”

“What are you game for?”

“I’ll tell you what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to wait around quietly until the next freighter comes and then meekly traipse off to Nexon,” she declared. “And I’m not about to let a bunch of robots keep me away from my property, even if they are following the orders of that milkface.”

“Sounds like I’m going to need to start calling you Kate.”

Surprised, she smiled. “Maybe you’d better.”

“Good. Because I think we’re going to need her,” Derec said. “This isn’t going to be easy.”

“I know. But there’s a limit to how many places you can hide a ship of that size, even in a station this large. If it’s still here, we’ll find it.”

“Probably so,” Derec agreed. “Chances are they moved it from the active dock to one of the deactivated ones—in the military wing, would be my guess. Even if the station directory won’t tell us where the other dock facilities are, we can figure it out. But that won’t help us much.”

“Why not?”

“Because the key is what matters, not the ship. Jacobson is right. We don’t have any use for the ship.”

“We find the ship, we find the key.”

Derec shook his head unhappily. “The key won’t be there. The robots have it.”

“Jacobson didn’t say anything about it.”

“Why should he take the chance of being the first to call our attention to it?” Derec asked rhetorically. “I just know that the whole time we talked to him, he was sitting there waiting for us to ask about our personal effects or give some sign we know about the key—waiting to pounce if we did. It was a test. We passed, so they’re going to let us go. If we hadn’t—”

“Why should they take any special notice of the key? It doesn’t look like anything special. They don’t know what Aranimas went through to get it. I do, and I still don’t’ know why it’s so important.”

“So you say.”

“Do you think I’m lying?”

Yes, he thought. Or at least not telling the whole truth. I’m starting to believe that everybody knows what this thing is but me—that you’re pretending that you’re just as ignorant as I am, while all the time you know exactly what it is and why it’s important.

But he said none of that. “I don’t know what to think,” Derec said, frustration thick in his voice.

“I think the key’s still hidden wherever Aranimas kept it. Jacobson didn’t mention the key because he doesn’t know anything about it. He’s just worried about the ship in general.”

“He knows. I’m sure of it,” Derec said stubbornly.

“Look, if Jacobson knows about the key and the robots found it, then it went out on Fariis. Which means he has it by now. End of story.”

“Not necessarily,” Derec said, shaking his head. “The packets are contract haulers, not Nexonian nationals. Do you think he’d trust them with something that’s probably ten times more valuable than their whole fleet contract? For that matter, do you think he’d put it on an unarmed vessel with the raiders still sitting out there somewhere trying to figure out how to get it back?”

“What, then?”

“Put yourself in their shoes. First you protect your find from being disturbed, and then you get together a team to go retrieve and investigate it. As long as you’ve done the first one right, you can take your time doing the second. They’ll be here when they’ve assembled the people and the hardware they need. At the very least they’ll need to scare up a bulk freighter to carry the spacecraft back and a warship to give the raiders second thoughts.”

Katherine sighed. “What a mess. Maybe we ought to just let them have it.”

“The hell with that,” Derec spat. “As long as Aranimas doesn’t have the key, and the raiders don’t attack, and Jacobson is still on Nexon—we’ve got a chance.”

“But it’s a race.”

“Yes. It’s a race. And we can’t wait around for you to get a clean bill of health from Dr. Galen before we start,” Derec said pointedly, bracing for an argument.

The argument never came. “You’re right,” she said simply, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and feeling for the floor. “Where to?”

Before that question could be considered, there was Dr. Galen to deal with. The robot came bursting into the room before Katherine’s bare feet even had a chance to pick up a chill from the floor.

“Please return to the bed, patient Katherine,” Dr. Galen requested. “Florence can see to whatever needs you might have.”

Derec was girding himself for another protracted argument, but Katherine surprised him. “I’ll go where I want when I want,” she snapped. “And if you start trying to act like a warden instead of a doctor I’ll have your brain reprogrammed for basket-weaving.”

“I must protest strongly—”

“Am I in danger of dying?”

“No, patient Katherine. But your recovery—”

“Then save your protest for your medical log: ‘Patient Katherine Burgess disregarded recommended rehabilitation program.’ Isn’t that the phraseology? Derec and I are going for a walk. If you don’t want me catching pneumonia you’d better get me some normal clothes. And something for my feet.”

Any human addressed in that tone would have been clenching his fists and strongly considering using them. But Dr. Galen only nodded slightly. “I will have clothing brought.”

“If it’s not here in five minutes I’m going out like this,” she warned him. “And don’t get any ideas about following us around. If I have any problems, Derec will be there to bring me back.”

When the robot left, Derec stared at Katherine in amazement. “How’d you learn how to do that?”

She shrugged. “Medical robots are as bossy as they come, but they can’t make it stick unless you’re really in some danger. I’m not.”

“All the same, it would have taken me twenty minutes to get to the same point, if I’d ever gotten there at all.”

“That’s because you always let yourself get suckered into arguing with the robots. I just give them orders. Much more efficient.”

“I guess it is, sometimes,” Derec said. “But you ought to know, in about four hours your dermal analgesic is going to wear off and your skin is going to start feeling like someone’s scraping it off with a spatula.”

As Derec spoke, Florence entered, wordlessly laid a sleeveless jump suit and a pair of foot pillows on the end of the bed, and then left.

“Thanks for the warning. Let’s make a point of being back in three and a half,” Katherine said. “Now get out of here while I change.”

By the time Katherine emerged from the ward, Derec had decided to go along with her proposal that they look for Aranimas’s ship first. He had several reasons for surrendering that the ship was the last known location of the key, that even if the key had been found and removed it might logically be kept nearby. But the most important reason was that if he didn’t show her early that she was wrong, she’d soon be trying to order him around as she did the robots.

The electronic map on the wall of the lobby offered little help, Rockliffe Station was built out of three connected spheres. The central sphere, called C Section, contained some forty levels from top to bottom. Two satellite spheres barely half as large were anchored to it by cylindrical pylons only a few levels in diameter.

Large areas within the station’s outline were colored black and labeled “Inactive.” No amount of coaxing could persuade the map’s controller to reveal what facilities were in those areas or even show the traffic grid.

Less than fifteen percent of C Section was drawn in with the pale blue color, labels, and identifying symbols of the active zone. Most of E Section, which contained the known dock facilities, was blue. But W Section, together with its connecting pylon, was completely black.

“There,” Katherine said, pointing to W Section. “They probably had an east terminal and a west terminal.”

“Symmetrical design,” Derec agreed. “Makes sense.”

“It’s a good place to start, anyway.”

“Let’s hope that those sections are just closed down, not closed off.”

The hospital was located near the center of C Section, three levels down from the main thoroughfare. Together, Katherine and Derec climbed up to the main level and headed west. There were no physical barriers, though the four-lane express slidewalk was not operating, obliging them to walk.

But past the boundary of subsection 42, the corridor lights were out and the directional “lightworms” were off. Based on what he had seen during his earlier excursion, Derec had thought that might be the case. He had hoped for either a local control option or a presence sensor, but in vain. With eighteen subsections of blackness ahead of them, they were forced to turn back.

They recruited the first robot they encountered to show them where hand lanterns were kept, and soon returned to the subsection 42 threshold. The beams of the powerful portable lights stabbed deep into the cavelike corridor and created a cozy island of light around them. But they were very aware of the darkness beyond, the way their footsteps echoed hollowly, the chill of the unused spaces they were entering.

Ten minutes of walking brought them to the great triple pressure seal doors at the outerboundary of C Section. The doors were resting retracted in their grooves, apparently deactivated. Past the interlock, the throughway narrowed to a single-lane slidewalk in each direction with far fewer jumpoffs and side passages than before.

Derec expected to find robots guarding the entry to W Section, and told Katherine so. But when they reached the far end of the slidewalk, they were still alone. The west docks were there, just as they had guessed. But the main public entrance to the complex was not even locked.

“No guards, no locks,” Derec said as they stood on the threshold. “This looks very bad. Maybe they had one of the tugs take the ship and stand off a hundred klicks from the base.”

“Let’s find out,” Katherine said, starting ahead.

If the west docks were being held for possible military use as Dr. Galen had implied, it was merely as a line item on some logistics officer’s list of resources. There was no sign that the complex had even been or ever would be anything other than a general purpose cargo and passenger transfer node. All the familiar facilities were there: Import Registry, Customs, the travelers’ Personals.

Katherine led Derec past the unstaffed security stations and up the loading ramp to the upper concourse. Along the length of the high-ceilinged room were six check-in stations, six glassed-in waiting areas, and six two-story viewports each of which looked out onto an enormous docking slip and space beyond. All six slips were empty and dark. Nothing could be seen through the viewports except a few dim and distant stars.

“Downstairs?” Derec asked.

Her lips pressed into a tight line, Katherine answered by leading the way back down the ramp. The lower concourse seemed like a mirror image of the upper. All six bays on the lower concourse were dark—but one was not empty.

“Bingo,” Derec said, sprinting through the check-in station and up the boarding tunnel.

“I don’t understand,” she said, dogging his heels. “Where are the guards? There ought to be guards.”

“Maybe they’re inside,” Derec said, pulling up short. The boarding tunnel was connected to the emergency hatch they had seen being installed, and across the lock-side seam there was a security seal. It was a token seal, however, meant only to give notice that the hatch had been opened. It could not stop them from going aboard.

Nothing inside had been disturbed, it seemed, since they had been found and removed. For that matter, except for cracks in three of the screens above the great command console, it did not even seem as though there had been an explosion on the main deck. Yet there were a dozen blackened fist-sized pits in the walls and ceiling to mark where the charges had been.

“You don’t blow up your house because a burglar breaks in,” Katherine observed. “Aranimas’s security would have been tailored to his own species. Whatever you want to call what we tripped—”

“Radiation bomb, maybe.”

“—must have been designed to kill or disable an Erani without doing serious damage to the ship.”

“It did a good enough job on us.”

Though they could not find Aranimas’s stylus, whatever locked the deck plates in place had apparently been disabled when the ship was powered down. Twenty minutes later, they had torn up the whole floor, but found nothing.

“Shall we put it back?” Katherine asked, gesturing at the mess they had created.

“No point. The robots are going to know we were here anyway.”

“They have the key, don’t they?”

“Almost certainly. If they don’t, Jacobson does.”

Katherine sighed. “How are we ever going to find it? The size of this station—even if it were just lying in open view in a corridor somewhere, it’d take us weeks to find it. And you know that they’ve hidden it better than that.”

“There’s a lot of places they could put it that you can be sure they didn’t,” Derec said, looking around the main cabin one last time. “They won’t leave it unattended, you can count on that. Not like they left this ship.”

“Do you have any idea why they let us in here?”

Derec nodded slowly. “I think so. To send us a message. To tell us just how harmless they think we are. That there’s nothing we can do to them.” He sighed. “And they may just be right. Let’s get out of here, huh?”

CHAPTER 17

PARTNERS IN CRIME

Squeak.

Brush.

Squeak.

Brush.

The sounds were soft and distant, but they were there, all right. If either he or Katherine had been talking, as they had been the first third of the way back, there would have been no way he would have heard them. But ever since they had fallen silent in individual introspection, the sounds had played at the threshold of Derec’s hearing.

At first he had thought them echoes of their own footsteps, or merely the product of paranoia. But as they were passing into subsection 51, Derec decided that they were real and not imagined. Something was following them.

“Don’t say anything and don’t turn around,” Derec whispered. “You hold both lamps. Keep walking.”

“What?”

“Ssssh. Keep walking. Keep the beams angled down so you won’t be silhouetted. Try to make it look like you’re two people.”

“What’s this about?” she demanded. But she contained her curiosity to a whisper, and kept walking as he had asked.

Handing the torch to her at arm’s length, Derec slipped away into the darkness and squeezed back against the wall. As he waited, he wondered who he was waiting for. One of Dr. Galen’s robots? One of Jacobson’s? Or Aranimas? He wished he still had the gas aerosol, or had kept his torch to use as a club.

Have to do it on your own, he told himself, dropping to his knees and huddling against the base of the wall.

The shadow was past Derec before he even saw it. Only when he looked back toward Katherine and caught a glimpse of it silhouetted against the glow of her torch did he move. Gathering himself up, he took three running steps and launched himself at the figure’s legs. He struck cloth and bone, not syntheskin and metal, and the stranger came down in a heap on top of Derec, squealing protest.

They wrestled furiously in the darkness, each with different objectives. Derec was trying to get a firm grip on an arm, leg, or neck and pin the other to the floor. His adversary was trying only to break Derec’s grip and escape.

Derec was much the more skilled. He had no difficulty getting what he thought were solid holds on the other. The difficulty was in maintaining them for more than a few seconds. Had they been wrestling in competition, he would have been getting the takedowns, his opponent the escape points. Part of the reason was the other’s compact strength, and part the slippery fabric its clothes were made of.

But in the dark, luck counted for more than skill or strength, and neutralized both. The two combatants rolled from one side of the passageway to the other, neither able to gain a lasting advantage. Then, with a sudden twist and a lucky grab, Derec found himself on top, straddling the other’s waist and with each of his hands locked in an iron grip on one of his opponent’s wrists.

Just then Katherine shone one of the lamps full on the shadow’s face. His adversary squinted up at him out of eyes nearly hidden by mottled gold and brown fur, and its mouth twisted into a familiar grimace.

“Wolruf!” Derec exclaimed.

“‘Ur stronger than ‘u look, Derec,” Wolruf said, still grinning. “But I ‘ope ‘u know I let ‘u win.”

Derec grinned back. “As ugly as you are, I’m awfully glad to see you. I was afraid we’d lost you when we were cut loose.”

“Why are you treating it like some long-lost friend?” Katherine demanded. “It’s Aranimas’s fetch-boy.”

“Girl,” he corrected. “Besides, you don’t understand,” he added, helping Wolruf to her feet. “She’s my friend.”

“Partners,” Wolruf said proudly.

“Oh? Then why was it skulking along behind us like that?”

“Following,” Wolruf said.

“What were you planning to do?”

“I never ‘urt ‘u—”

“You were waiting for us to find the key, weren’t you? And then you were going to steal it—”

“Katherine—she’s sick,” Derec said suddenly.

“What?”

“Look at her,” he urged. “Look at me,” he added, reclaiming his torch and turning its beam on himself. His clothing was covered with long gold and brown hairs. In the light of Katherine’s torch, the alien’s fur was so thin in patches that Derec could see the pale leathery skin beneath. And there was something about Wolruf’s eyes that telegraphed the distress she had been enduring.

“What’s wrong with you?” Katherine asked, a faint note of suspicion tainting her concern.

“ ’Ungry,” she said simply.

“Of course,” Derec said. “She’s starving. There isn’t even any food she could steal here.”

Katherine squinted at the alien through narrow-slitted eyes. “Is that why you were following us? Not to get the key, but to find out where we were getting our food?”

“I don’ care about the jewel,” Wolruf said. “Juss ‘ungry. I ‘ide, follow the robots, look for food. I follow them everywherr and never smell food.”

“You don’t like the robots, do you? It isn’t just Alpha,” Derec said.

“Brood-captain tell me a ‘undred times, never trust strange animal until ‘u’ve seen its meal table,” she said weakly.

It sounded like an attempt at a joke. “And robots never eat,” Derec completed. “Well, we’ll get you something. I hope we can get you something. Can you eat what we eat?”

“Just hold on,” Katherine interrupted. “You were on the ship with us the whole time? And you’ve been hiding out ever since?”

“I wass coming through interlock—Alpha, too—when heard the bomb go off,” Wolruf said. “Noise bring other Erani. Controls dead an’ ‘u not much better. So I cut us loose. When robots come I ‘ide, when ship dock I slip out. Been ‘iding ever since.”

“Where’s Aranimas?”

“Don’t know. Left behind.” Wolruf was noticeably unsteady on her feet.

“We can sort the rest of this out later,” Derec said sharply. “We’ve got to get her something, quickly.”

“Not so quickly,” Katherine said, stepping closer. “Where have you been hiding? Here, in the dark sections?”

“Mostly. No robots here. I like the dark better than I like robots.”

“How much of the dark sections have you been through, looking for food?”

“Lots,” Wolruf said. “But the jewel’s not there, if thass what ‘u’re wondering.”

“How do you know?” Katherine demanded. “Because you put it somewhere else?”

“I don’ want the jewel. Juss trouble for everyone,” Wolruf said. “But I know wherr it iss.”

Derec impulsively grabbed the alien by both cheeks and planted a kiss on her forehead. “All right!” he declared. “We’re in business!”

Katherine held her enthusiasm in check. “How do you know?” she repeated.

“I follow when they took it from the ship. I think they take it to ‘umans, ‘umans ‘ave food. Wrong. Robots took it wherr therr are lots of robots, no ‘umans, no food. I almoss got caught”

“Do you remember exactly where? Can you take us there?” Katherine asked.

“Thought robots ‘ur servants,” Wolruf said, wrinkling her face in puzzlement. “Why not juss ask them to bring it to ‘u?”

“Nevermind about that,” Derec said gently. Answer Katherine’s questions. Do you remember the way? Can you take us there?”

“I remember, always, so I can take ‘u. Don’ want to. Don’ want key, don’ want to see robots or robots to see me. But ‘u be my friend and feed me and I be ‘ur friend and show ‘u. Okay?”

Derec looked to Katherine. “I’m taking her to find some food,” he said. “If you don’t like it, you’re welcome to go solo from here on.”

“Oh, no, you don’t,” she said quickly. “You can’t get rid of me that easily.”

“Come on, then,” he said as he started brushing futilely at the fur clinging to his clothing. He looked back to Wolruf and smiled. “Let’s see if we find you some food before I choke to death on your dander.”

They ended up returning to the hospital, both because it was relatively close and because it was one of the few facilities they knew anything about. Katherine entered first, demanding care and attention as she swept through toward the ICU and making sure to gather up both Dr. Galen and Florence along the way. A minute later, Derec and Wolruf slipped inside and headed in the other direction, toward the kitchens.

“Meat, breads, vegetables—what’s best for you?” Derec said, scanning the menu of the autogalley.

“Plants,” Wolruf said, crouching. “Something to work my teeth on.”

“Everything’s synthetic, I’m afraid—the farm is one of the things they closed down. Let’s see—I think they make the apple wedges with a lot of fiber.”

“Do ‘u know what ‘ur going to do with the key when ‘u find it?” Wolruf asked from behind.

“No.” Derec turned around and presented the alien with a white tray filled with pale yellow pulpy slices of apple. With surprising patience, Wolruf selected a wedge, sniffed it experimentally, then balanced it on her narrow tongue and delicately took it into her mouth. As far as Derec could tell, she did not chew it, but swallowed it whole.

That created a minor paradox—though Wolruf did not appear to be eating quickly, the plate rapidly emptied. She ate as though she were trying to make up for all seven weeks of deprivation at one sitting, and yet was scrupulously neat and almost completely silent. There were none of the wet crunching noises that any human trying to keep pace would have made.

I wouldn’t be surprised if she finds our eating habits repulsive, he thought as he watched her.

When the tray was empty, Wolruf offered it up to Derec with a hopeful look. “I guess ‘u can trust me now, right?” she said.

“Except I’m not the one you have to win over,” he said, taking the tray and turning back to the autogalley for a refill. “Katherine is. Which reminds me—why didn’t you tell me she was on board?”

Wolruf shrugged. “No chance to. Always something ‘appening, somebody ‘terrupting.”

“That’s true enough,” Derec said, surrendering the replenished tray. “There’s questions I’ve been wanting to ask you since that first night and I haven’t gotten a chance to.”

“Ask,” Wolruf said, then rolled out her tongue for another bite.

Derec considered a moment. “This one isn’t important to anyone but me. You didn’t know I was on the asteroid, did you?”

“Not until gunners spot you. Then thought you were robot.”

“Which is why you didn’t fire at me—”

“Aranimas’s orders—not perfectly followed.”

“You meant the robot that was with me? That was a self-destruct.”

“Fine distinctions escape Aranimas. Ask gunner who hit him.”

Derec smiled. “Did you know the key was on the asteroid?”

“No twice.”

“That’s what I thought. But then why were you there? Was it just the dumbest luck that you showed up?”

“Purpose, not luck. Aranimas build very fine starglass. Saw ast’roid being made and became very curious.”

“Say that again? I didn’t catch your meaning.”

She cupped her hands and made motions like forming a snowball. “With starglass, Aranimas watched the ast’roid-making. Boss very curious. Not something Erani ever do. ‘U do it often?”

“No,” Derec said, still blinking in surprise. An artificial world—it was remotely possible. Use a small fleet of haulers to bring in the raw material—maybe just smaller planetoids brought in from the nearest dirty system. Drive the pieces together at just the right speed and fuse them into a larger body—but why?

The answer came to him almost immediately. To hide the key. To bury it away where no one would ever find it, as though it were as dangerous as a cask of plutonium waste. Buried cleverly, not at the heart of the asteroid where the first shaft sunk would uncover it, but tucked invisibly under the surface.

Except that someone saw or found out, and sent the robots to retrieve it.

“Are you sure about this?” Derec demanded.

“Sure. Aranimas saw it all. Very good starglass.” She offered up the empty tray hopefully.

Then we’re in over our heads, Derec thought as he turned back to the autogalley. Way over—

Wolruf was finishing her third helping when Katherine joined them. She had drawn on station supply for a longsleeved blouse to wear over the jump suit, and traded the foot pillows for soft-soled shoes.

“I sent Florence on an errand and gave Dr. Galen a task that should keep him out of the lobby for at least half an hour,” she said. “And I made Dr. Galen fit me with a loaded medipump just in case it’s not convenient to come back. Though my skin really doesn’t feel too bad. Are you two almost ready?”

Wolruf made the last two wedges disappear. “I am.”

“Then it’s time to pay the bill for the meal,” Katherine said, reclaiming the empty plate. “Let’s go look at the map.” They stood elbow to elbow in the deserted lobby, Wolruf in the middle.

“Here’s where we are,” Katherine said, pointing. “And here’s about the spot you and Derec went to the mat. All you have to do now is tell us where the key is, and we’ll go get it. You can go back to the dark and never have to see another robot.”

But Wolruf was unable to understand the map in any of its modes or projections, even though both Derec and Katherine made labored efforts to try to explain it. “I know it in my feet and my nose,” Wolruf said. “I go with ‘u and show ‘u.”

Katherine frowned and looked to Derec. “How are we going to smuggle her through the halls? It was risky enough bringing her here. And she said she almost got caught the first time.”

“I was thinking while we were walking that a place this large probably used to have some kind of personal transport.”

“Jitneys,” she said.

“That’s the word.” An image of a three-wheeled utility vehicle snapped into focus in his mind. In automatic mode, they were essentially wheeled robots. In semi-auto, they served as smart taxis for visitors to the station. But in manual mode, they should offer freedom from Central Services control and privacy from Security curiosity. “The robots don’t need them, but I’ll bet they’re all lined up somewhere ready to roll.”

“Won’t the robots think it’s unusual, seeing one out in the streets?”

“I don’t think so,” Derec said. “When a ship’s in port the crew probably uses them. And seeing one of the carts won’t strike them as any more strange than our presence alone would. Robots notice people. It’s the way they’re made. But we don’t need to be invisible—we just need to be left alone. What do you say?”

Katherine pursed her lips and considered. “I think if we don’t find any jitneys, it doesn’t matter what I think.”

CHAPTER 18

THEATER

Happily, the jitney accumulator areas were clearly marked on the station map. It took less than five minutes for Derec to walk to the nearest one and return with one of the nimble little electric carts. The version he had chosen had a single driver’s seat in back over the solo wheel, and an open passenger cab slung between the other wheels in front.

Wolruf curled up on the floor of the passenger cab under a white hospital robe. Katherine sat in one of the two seats, her legs further helping to conceal the alien, and Derec took the controls.

For Wolruf to find her place in her scent map, they were forced to backtrack into the dark sections. From there it was relatively simple: up three levels, north two subsections, up another level, and then west five blocks into a large plaza.

When Wolruf warned them they were nearing their destination, Derec slowed the vehicle to a moderate walking pace. A moment later the alien stole a peek over the edge of the cab, then jabbed a fat finger in the direction of the circular building at the center of the plaza.

“In there? Are you sure?” Derec hissed.

“Yes, Derec. Thass wherr the jewel iss.”

The lightworm sign outside the main entrance said “Station Operations Center—Restricted,” and robots were everywhere. The center itself was a single room twenty meters in diameter and encircled with windows looking out on the plaza.

“Great. Just great,” Derec grumbled, driving slowly across the plaza at an oblique angel. “How are we going to get in there? We can’t sneak up.”

“How about the front door?” Katherine said, twisting around to look at him. “Maybe they’ll let you in.”

Derec regarded her dubiously.

“Go ahead—it’s worth a try.”

“I still don’t understand,” Wolruf chimed in. “Aren’t robots ‘ur servants?”

Before answering, Derec drove the jitney a short distance down a connecting corridor, then pulled to one side and stopped. “I don’t know about this,” he said to Katherine. “Maybe they’re just setting up, like with Aranimas’s ship. If we try to get in there, if we show any interest in the thing at all, maybe that’s just going to bring them down on our necks like a tonne of slag.”

“You want to just leave it with them? After all we’ve gone through because of it?”

“When we were prisoners on the ship, I thought it was important to get the thing away from the aliens and back in human hands. Well, that’s where it is. Jacobson made it clear they’re willing to let us walk away and leave this mess to them. Maybe that’s what we ought to do.”

“Don’t you have any curiosity?” she demanded. “Don’t you want to know what this has all been about?”

“Sure, I’ve got curiosity. I’ve also got problems of my own to sort out. I don’t see where that thing is going to help any.”

“What’s happened to your nerve?” she said. “Look, these are the same people that stole our spacecraft, spirited away my robot, and then tried to tell us we should be grateful that they’re sending us away as paupers instead of criminals. I’m not about to let them get away with it.”

“Don’t you understand?” Derec shouted angrily. “You think we’re going to be able to just walk in there, put it under our arm, and say ‘Thanks for looking after it’? This thing came off a heavily armed alien ship—”

“They don’t know that,” Katherine pointed out. “They never saw Aranimas, or even Wolruf.”

“All right,” Derec said tiredly. “Maybe you’re right. If they did think it was an alien ship, they probably wouldn’t let us go. But these people aren’t playing. They wanted the ship, and they took it. They wanted the robot, and they took it. They want the jewel, and they have it. We’re not going to be able to take it back. We won’t even get in the door.”

“Maybe their orders weren’t that specific.”

“I’d have made them so.”

“You didn’t give them. Go on—try.”

“What’s the point? Wolruf’s right—the key is just trouble for everybody.”

Katherine sighed. “If you want something done—” And before Derec could stop her, she climbed out of the jitney and headed back to the plaza on foot.

In less than ten minutes Katherine was clambering back into her seat. “They let me in, even gave me a little tour,” she said breezily. “Very accommodating.”

“I figured that out when you weren’t back in two minutes. What about the key?”

“It’s there all right, sitting out in plain sight. What idiots!”

Derec eased the jitney into motion down the corridor, mulling over Katherine’s news. “Not really. Describe what you saw.”

“It’s a big semicircular room, with glass all around except for the offices at the back. There’re five robots at work stations, including Anazon. Then there’re two more near the center of the room doing nothing but sitting facing each other with the artifact on a table between them. There was some sort of funny emblem on the shoulder of those robots, a blue F in a double gold circle—”

Derec groaned. “Falke X-50s.”

“Does that mean something?”

“It means trouble. They have superfast reflexes. If a bomb went off five meters in the opposite direction, they might be distracted long enough for you to get your hands on the key, but you’d never get out of the room with it. If we’re going to get it back, we’re going to have to have some way to neutralize seven robots at once—and I don’t know any.”

“Can you explain to me why it’s out in plain sight? Could it be a copy, a fake? Maybe you’re right about the trap.”

“No,” Derec said with a shake of his head. “I’d guess the robots were probably ordered to watch it constantly, in principle if not in so many words.”

“If you put it in a vault and nobody opens the vault, it isn’t going to vanish into the ozone.”

“No,” Derec agreed, “but that understanding requires a fairly advanced and rather subtle mental function called object permanence. Robots are strongly biased toward the concrete and away from the inferred. If they lock something away out of sight, they don’t really know it’s there except when they check on it.”

“That’s illogical. No human would think that way.”

“Some would,” Derec dissented. “But you’re right, it’s not logical.”

“So why do the roboticists let that happen?”

“No engineered system is perfect,” Derec said with a shrug. “This is just one of those little things that doesn’t always behave the way you wish it would. A robot’s uncertainty about whether it’s satisfactorily fulfilling its orders can drive it into an anxiety state—specifically, they develop an elevated K-integral in the W14 level. So they begin checking on the thing they’re guarding more and more often at shorter and shorter intervals.”

“And eventually it ends up sitting on the table next to them,” Katherine said.

“Right.” Derec fell into a thoughtful silence, then suddenly caught himself. “Damn it all, you’ve got me trying to figure out how to get to it.”

“See, I knew you didn’t want to let them have it,” Katherine said with a bemused smile. “Any ideas?”

“Not yet.” A moment later he added, “Except that no matter how carefully worded and strongly impressed their orders to protect the key are, they’re only covered by the Second Law.”

Katherine was mute for a time, as Derec drove aimlessly through the streets bounding the Operations bloc.

“Following orders is Second Law,” she said finally.

“That’s what I just said.”

“What if Wolruf and I gave them a First Law reason to disregard them?”

Wolruf peeked out from under the robe at the mention of her name and looked hopefully at Derec.

“That’s the way to go, obviously,” Derec said. “But how?”

“I’ve got some ideas. A little—robot theater, shall we say.”

“Do you think you can be convincing?” Derec asked skeptically.

“I’d rather try than not,” she said. “Let’s not stop ourselves. Let’s make them stop us.”

“Wolruf?” he asked. “Do you want to try?”

“Whatever ‘u want, Derec.”

The burden was back on him, whether he wanted it or not. “All right, then,” Derec said slowly. “Let’s go somewhere more private and talk it through.”

Peering down the corridor into the plaza, Derec shook his head. “This will never work,” he whispered.

“It’s worked so far, hasn’t it?”

Derec had to admit that it had. The first problem had been to eliminate most of the robot traffic in the plaza. They had considered half a dozen ideas for accomplishing that, from setting up hallblocks with robot monitors to trying to draw them away with invented errands elsewhere in the station.

In the end, they settled for a whisper campaign, a simple variation on the unkind children’s game—”Billy is a cootie; pass it on.” Derec had stopped a robot at random just outside the Operations bloc and spoken briefly to it:

“Robot. Management has ordered that there be a test of station emergency communications in this subsection. Your instructions are as follows. First, you are not to discuss the test or your part in it over the command link. Second, you are not to enter or remain in subsector 100 at any time between 1200 hours and 1400 hours today. Third, you are to relay these orders to the next robot that you see.”

The instructions were innocuous enough that the robot did not challenge them. Like a runaway infection, the whisper had raced through the body of the station staff. Within half an hour, the traffic in the plaza had thinned dramatically. Within the hour, the plaza was deserted, and several robots had even left the Operations Center.

Three robots remained. From where he was crouching beside the jitney, Derec could see them inside the Operations Center—the two X-50s guarding the artifact, and Anazon, darting from one work station to the next trying to oversee critical operations. Their particular responsibilities were too strongly impressed on them for Derec’s little trick to pull them away.

“It’ll work,” Katherine prodded. “Go on. We’ll do our part. You just make sure you do yours.”

Swallowing hard, Derec nodded and started off down the corridor. He crossed the empty plaza and climbed the single step up into the Operations Center. None of the robots took any notice of him.

“Anazon.”

“Yes, Derec.”

“I’ve decided not to wait for the Nexon shuttle. I want to charter a ship to come and get me and take me to Aurora. Tell me the procedure I should follow.”

Without ever turning away from the console, the robot began to answer. “There are seven ships of Nexonian registry licensed for Auroran space and available for hire. You may contact any of their owners by hyperwave—”

Suddenly the peace of the plaza was broken by the roaring sound of a jitney in high gear. A moment later the vehicle burst out of one of the connecting corridors, Katherine at the controls. Pursuing close behind was Wolruf, running with an easy loping gait that used all four of her limbs.

Halfway across the plaza, Wolruf got close enough to reach out and catch Katherine by the arm from behind. The jitney veered suddenly, breaking the alien’s grip. But the veer turned into a skid that ended with the jitney sliding sideways with a jolt into the rockform base of a tree planter. In a moment, Wolruf caught up and pounced on Katherine. The air was filled with her convincingly terrified cries of “It’s killing me!” and the alien’s ominous growls.

When the jitney veered, Anazon had started toward the exit and one of the X-50s began to rise. But when the guard robot saw Anazon responding, it sat back down again. Derec knew immediately that meant the guards’ instructions were so strongly worded that the expectation that Anazon would handle the First Law situation relieved them of responsibility. Only if Anazon failed would they act.

The moment was slipping away quickly. “Robots—help that woman,” Derec said sharply, stepping forward. “She is being harmed. She may be killed.”

One of the X-50s stirred slightly. “Anazon will protect her—”

“The creature attacking her is strong and fast. Anazon will not be able to protect her from injury. Go! Help her! Now!”

First one, then the other guard rose and took a halting step or two toward the exit. Then they hesitated, the conflicting positronic potentials having reached a new equilibrium. Anazon would reach Katherine and Wolruf in a few more strides and the stunt would be over, a failure.

Just then, Katherine loosed a blood-chilling cry that even Derec thought real, and the guard robots started forward again. Derec waited no longer. Snatching the artifact up from the table, he turned and ran the other way, vaulting over a console and out through the window.

His heart pounding, Derec fled the plaza and down an empty corridor. He heard the jitney’s motors whine, but he did not look back. He could not afford to worry about Katherine and Wolruf. He thought he heard the metronomelike running strides of a robot, but he did not look back. Even if he was being chased, knowing it could not make his legs pump faster.

All he wanted was to reach the dark sections unmolested. All he could think of were the escape route and the rendezvous he had chosen. He ran until his chest ached and his legs were iron, until each breath was pain, until darkness swallowed him and hid him from those who wanted to find him.

CHAPTER 19

THE KEY TO PERIHELION

Derec huddled in pitch blackness in the corner of the room and waited. He could not say how long he had been alone there, except that it seemed an eternity. He held the artifact tightly in both hands and sat, rigid and silent.

Then without warning, he was not alone. Since the corridor outside was as dark as the room inside, Derec could not see when the door opened. But he heard it slide back, and rustling steps as someone entered. His heart began to beat faster and his nerves jangled.

“Derec?”

He sighed, and the tension flowed out of him. It was Katherine’s voice. “Here,” he said. “In the corner.”

She thumbed her torch on and swung it in his direction, and the polished surface of the object he held in his hands sent an answering beam of light back at her and Wolruf. “You did it!” she exulted. “Let me see.”

Derec crossed his arms protectively over the artifact. “No. Don’t come near me.”

“What’s going on? What’s happening to you?” Katherine demanded. “We did it. We’ve got it.”

“So we do. It’s confessions time, that’s all,” Derec said, sliding up the wall to a standing position. “I’ve had some time to sit here and think about things. It’s amazing how being scared will focus your thoughts.”

“What are you talking about?” Katherine demanded.

He waggled the key above his head. “It’s real simple. Which one of you is going to stop playing dumb and tell me just what it is we’ve got?”

Katherine stared at him. “If you’re trying to say that I’ve been holding out on you—”

“Haven’t you been?” Derec interrupted. “You and Wolruf both. I’m tired of being the one in the dark, the one who’s always one step behind. I want to know everything you know. I’d rather give it back to the robots than have it and not know what it is.”

“Derec, I don’t know anything more than I already told you,” Katherine said pleadingly, taking a step forward.

Derec stiffened and gripped the artifact even more tightly. “Don’t try it. Talk to me.”

Katherine retreated a step. “Derec, I don’t want to fight you. But this is crazy. We’re all part of a team. I’m not keeping any secrets from you. I never saw or heard of that thing before Aranimas asked me about it. I couldn’t tell him anything and he didn’t tell me anything.”

She turned and looked into the half-shadow where Wolruf stood. “But Wolruf was Aranimas’s top aide. And when the robots took the key from the spacecraft, she thought it was worth the risk to follow and find out where it was taken. How about it, Wolruf?”

“I was ‘ungry. I thought there would be food.”

“Really? How hungry? Not six weeks’ worth. Three days, that’s all. Is that hungry enough to send you out where the robots were and take the chance of being caught by them? Especially considering how you feel about robots.”

“If anyone’s keeping secrets, p’rhaps iss ‘u, Derec,” Wolruf said challengingly. “The key was found on the asteroid ‘u claim ‘u were shipwrecked on. Why did ‘u go to that spot when ‘u were escaping? Because ‘u knew that it was therr? Maybe because ‘u’d put it therr and wanted to get it back?”

Without warning, the lights in the room suddenly flared to life. The only one who did not jump was Derec; he had been expecting it. “The robots are looking for us,” he said. “They’ve reactivated this section, maybe the whole station. They can use the environmental systems to find out where lights are being used, where the oxygen demand is up.”

“We can’t stay here,” Katherine said simply. “We’ve got to move. We’ve got to get the key hidden again before they find us.”

Derec shook his head. “Wrong. Unless one of you starts talking, I’m going to wait right here until the robots show up and then hand it to them,” he said with quiet calm. “It’s up to you.”

“If you let them have it back, we’ll never be able to get it again,” Katherine said angrily.

“I think you can count on that,” Derec said, undisturbed.

She turned on Wolruf. “If you do know something, you’d better tell him straight and tell him fast, or the key’s lost,” she ordered. “If you wait any longer we’ll never get away.”

A wild look in her eyes, Wolruf backed away a step. “ ’U’ll take it and leave me and I’ll never get ‘ome,” she said desperately.

“That won’t happen,” Katherine said. “We won’t abandon you.”

“I already promised you that,” Derec said. “I meant it.”

“Tell him,” Katherine prodded. “Tell us.”

Wolruf’s darting eyes fixed first on Katherine’s face, then on Derec’s. “Iss one of the Keys to Perihelion,” she said finally.

“Perihelion? What’s that?” Katherine said.

“Iss said to be the place nearest to every other place in the universe,” Wolruf said. “ ’U ‘old the key to the room which is the center of all. With the key, through Perihelion, ‘u should be able to travel anywhere.”

Derec shook his head in disbelief. “Some kind of matter transporter?”

“No,” Wolruf said. “It is a key that opens the door to Perihelion.”

Her anger forgotten for the moment, Katherine looked to Derec. “Could it be something that uses the same principle as the Jump?”

“In a package this size?” he asked skeptically. To Wolruf he added, “You said one of the keys. How many are there?”

“By the stories Aranimas ‘eard, seven.”

“What stories? Where did he hear them?”

“Therr werr three ships before this one came aboard,” Wolruf said, gesturing toward Katherine. “Aranimas learned much from the ‘umans aboard before he ‘urt them so much they died. Learn ‘ur language. ‘ear many stories.”

Katherine looked at Derec. “I’ve never heard any stories about a Key to Perihelion. They must have been Settler ships.”

“That fits—otherwise Aranimas would have run into robots sooner.” Derec turned to Wolruf. “Where did the keys come from?”

Wolruf twitched her cheeks, a gesture equivalent to a shrug. “Aranimas could not even learn wherr the tales came from.”

Derec looked back to the key and turned it over in his hands. “How does it work? Where are the controls?”

“There iss only one control that Aranimas could find,” Wolruf said. “Push each corner in turn. A button will appear.”

“Press the corners clockwise or counterclockwise? Starting where? And which side?”

“It does not matter,” Wolruf said. “Turn it any way ‘u choose. The button always appears in the last corner ‘u touch and always on the side facing ‘u. If ‘u do nothing, the button disappears again.”

“And if you push the button you go to Perihelion?” asked Katherine.

“No,” Wolruf said sadly. “That is what should happen, I think. But it does not. The key does not function.”

“You tried it? With Aranimas?”

“Many times.”

Derec looked down at the glittering metal bar resting in his hands. Its finish was mirror-smooth and seamless. There was no sign of a concealed switch. When he squeezed the upper right corner between thumb and forefinger, there was no give, no sign he had done anything at all.

But when Derec pressed the fourth corner, it pressed back against his thumb. A three-centimeter square section on the corner sprang smoothly upward, looking just like a button waiting to be pushed. At the same time, it seemed to be an immovable part of the rest of the artifact, as though the silver covering was some sort of metallic membrane.

Katherine looked back to Wolruf. “If it doesn’t work, why were you so eager to get it back?”

“Maybe Wolruf can fix,” was her forlorn reply. “Only way to go ‘ome now.”

Just then, they heard a voice calling them from the corridor outside. “Derec—Katherine—come out,” it said. “Derec—Katherine—you do not have to hide.”

Wolruf dropped to her crouch and loosed a barrage of guttural moaning sounds. “Shut up!” Katherine hissed at the alien, then turned to Derec. “Do something,” she urged.

“What?” Derec snapped back. “This room has only one exit.”

At that moment the door slid open, drawing Derec’s attention away from Katherine. He glimpsed a golden robot filling the doorway and advancing across the threshold. Then suddenly Katherine was blocking his view. She had moved closer and was reaching for the key, a determined expression on her face.

Derec’s immediate thought was that she was going to grab the key and try to run. He did not have enough time to snatch the gleaming artifact out of her reach. There was time only to tighten his grip.

Too late he realized Katherine had never meant to take the key. Her hands closed firmly over his, locking them in place. Her thumb drove the small square button back down into the body of the key.

“No!” cried Wolruf.

“Wait—” Derec started to say.

But there was nothing anyone could do to stop it—not Derec, not the robot, not even Katherine. There was a soundless burst of color that stabbed deep into Derec’s eyes, driving out the sight of all else. And when the light faded to gray and his sight was restored, Wolruf, the robot, and the room had all vanished.

They found themselves standing as they had been standing, both gripping the key, at the center of a tiny place within a great space. There was nothing to prevent them from seeing vast distances, except that there was nothing to see.

All around them was a soft gray light that was to the eye what a hum is to the ear. The air had the fuggy, dusty odor of a house that has been closed up for the summer. There was no sound except their own tight, frightened breathing.

They clung to each other and to the key and tried to understand and accept their sudden displacement to this unreal reality. It was a place which could be nowhere in space. They were somewhere outside, thrown there by the staggering power of the little silver bar. It was a place without time, without life.

“Perihelion,” Katherine whispered.

“Wolruf said that it was the nearest place to everywhere,” Derec said. “It feels more like the farthest place from anywhere.”

Katherine twisted her head around, looking. “Where is she?”

“Back on Rockliffe Station, I guess. Left behind.”

“Why didn’t the key bring her with us?”

“Maybe for the same reason it wouldn’t work for her,” Derec said. “Maybe because she was too far away from us. Maybe you have to be touching it, or touching someone who’s touching it. I don’t know. But we have to go back and get her.”

“But the robots—”

Derec shook his head. “It was Alpha. You didn’t even look. It was Alpha.”

“I didn’t know,” Katherine whispered. “Press it again. Let’s go back.”

“How do we know we will?”

“I was thinking about escape when I pushed it. Think about going back.”

Wordlessly Derec complied. The button appeared as before. There was another flash of color, and another few seconds of adjustment. Then their returning vision told them something that should not be, could not be. They were not at Perihelion, but neither were they back in Rockliffe Station.

They were standing in open sunlight atop a great pyramidal tower, looking down at a still greater city spread out before them. The tower they were on was taller by half than any other building in sight. It was like standing on top of the world, like looking down from an eagle’s eyrie.

“What is this?” Katherine hissed. “Where did you send us?”

Derec stared unbelievingly at the towers, cubes, and spires stretching from the base of the pyramid to the horizon. “I don’t know,” he said hoarsely. “I had Rockliffe Station in my mind.”

She released her grip on the key and grabbed tight to his arm. “Are we on Earth?” She asked it as though the prospect frightened her.

Derec looked west at the low-hanging disc of the sun. “No,” he said. “The star is too white and too small.” But he knew why she had asked. No Spacer world had a city this vast. Only on Earth had city-building ever been practiced on this scale, and they were not cities but Cities, enclosed and largely underground. “You don’t recognize it?”

“I’ve never seen such a thing before,” she whispered. “Is it Wolruf’s homeworld? Or Aranimas’s?”

“I don’t know,” Derec said. “We can find the answer easily enough, though.”

“How?”

“By going down there.” He gestured toward the city spread out below them.

“No,” she said with a shudder. “Send us back.”

Derec realized that he was still gripping the key in his unfeeling hands. “I don’t know if I can,” he said.

“Try,” she urged. “Or let me try.”

“We’ll try,” he agreed.

Holding an image of the gray emptiness of Perihelion in his mind, Derec called up the control button and pressed it. This time, nothing happened. “What it did has to take a lot of power. Maybe it has to recharge—or be recharged,” he said. “Either way, it looks like we’re here for a while at least.”

“I don’t want to go down there,” Katherine said. “It’ll be night soon. Let’s stay here until morning and then try the key again.”

The sun had indeed slipped a fraction of a degree toward the horizon, lengthening the already long shadow of the tower on the city below. “Aren’t you afraid of going over the side in your sleep?” he asked. There was no railing or football enclosing the table-flat top of the pyramid.

“I don’t expect to be able to sleep,” she said soberly.

As the sun descended toward the horizon, a breeze kicked up, teasing at their hair and clothing. It carried with it no scent Derec knew. In fact, for a world so obviously teeming with life, it carried remarkably little scent at all.

Below them, the city was becoming alive with lightlight cascading down the sides of buildings, light puddling in the streets. In those streets, hundreds of other lights were in restless motion, reminding Derec of the bustle within a colony of bees or ants.

Too emotionally numbed even to be afraid, they avoided talk. Katherine withdrew into herself, sitting in the lotus position near the center of the tile-covered plaza. Derec wandered near the edges, looking out and trying to abstract the pattern on which the city had been built.

When the stars came out, he studied them, hoping against hope to recognize their patterns. There was a red star as bright as a planet that might have been Betelgeuse, and a fierce white one that might have been Sirius.

But each could just as easily be any of a thousand other stars named or merely numbered. There was no way to tell without a spectrometer to take the optical fingerprint of each suspect and a general astrographical catalog in which to search for matches.

“Do you remember what the stars look like from Aurora?” he called across to Katherine, sitting huddled against herself on the other side of the plaza.

“I never knew,” she admitted. “I wasn’t interested.”

Giving up, he went and sat facing her. She was idly rubbing her right bicep through the sleeve of her Lindbergh blouse.

“Having trouble with the pump?”

“That’s not what hurts,” she said, tugging the sleeve up and showing him a purple crescent bruise.

“Nice.”

“My most convincing scream,” she said with a rueful smile.

“Wolruf?”

“She got carried away and bit me. She’s not as harmless as she wanted us to think.”

“Anything living knows how to defend itself,” he said, then added wistfully, “I wonder what’s happened to her.”

“I don’t understand why you liked her.”

“She’s a victim—a prisoner—just like us.”

“I have trouble thinking of her that way.”

Derec sighed. “Doesn’t matter now, I guess. I’ve abandoned her again.”

Conversation lapsed after that. “I don’t understand why it was Alpha that came after us,” Katherine said finally. “It can’t have been roaming free like Wolruf since we came to the station, can it? Looking for us?”

“Just another one of Jacobson’s tricks,” Derec said. “He knew we wanted the robot back. What better bait to draw us out?”

They were silent together for a while, sitting close but not touching. “Your first name is David,” she said unexpectedly.

Hearing the name brought no sudden revelations, and caution born out of experience kept him from feeling any gratitude. “Why tell me now?”

“So I can stop the mental gymnastics every time I start to talk to you. Because I thought you’d want to know.”

“And because we don’t know what’s going to happen to us?”

“I won’t think like that,” she said. “I don’t believe in it.”

“I should have known better,” Derec said with a faint smile. “Are you going to drop more than one crumb? How is it you know me? Where did we meet?”

She turned her head to look at him. “You were the engineer’s mate on a Settler merchantman—the Daniel O’Neill, I think it was called,” she said. “Does it sound familiar?”

“No,” he said unhappily. “What else can you tell me?”

She hesitated. “I’m afraid I don’t know you as well as I let you think. We crossed paths in the spaceport.”

“If I’m a Settler drudge and you’re a Spacer topcrust—”

“Your captain was having trouble with Customs coming in and we were delayed going out by mechanical problems. We ended up in the same waiting area. We talked for a while.” She hesitated, then added, “You were funny. You made me laugh.”

“Did I talk about my family—my home—”

“You don’t remember any of it, do you? Meeting me—the O’Neill—”

“No.”

“I’m sorry.” She hesitated. “Even so, I thought you’d be happier, knowing.”

“I’d be happier remembering,” he said, and was silent for a moment. “Anyway, it doesn’t seem to matter as much at the moment. I don’t know a thing about this David. At least I know a little about Derec. I think I’ll just stay Derec for the time being.”

“I didn’t tell you everything,” she said. “I didn’t tell you about—”

“Don’t,” he said. “If my name didn’t bring it back, nothing will. Save the rest. You’ll be able to tell me whether I’m remembering or inventing.”

“I know your memory will come back. It has to.”

He nodded absently, acknowledging her words without accepting them. “If you want to try to sleep, I’ll watch to make sure you don’t get restless and try to air-walk.”

Shaking her head, she said, “I can’t sleep without a pillow.”

Derec stretched out on his back and tapped his left shoulder with his right hand. “I have an unoccupied pillow available, no charge.”

He expected her to refuse the offer. But she crawled wordlessly to where he lay and snuggled against his left side, her head resting on his arm. Closing her eyes, she seemed to fall asleep almost at once.

They fit together easily, and, innocent though the embrace was, there was something pleasing about her closeness. Probably it’s just that she’s not talking, Derec told himself. He lay there looking up at the stars and listening to her slow, peaceful breathing until his own eyelids were too heavy to keep open.

David Derec, he thought just before sleep took him. It would be nice to have two names again—

CHAPTER 20

MORNING ON THE MOUNT

They woke thoroughly chilled from their night on the exposed promontory, and the early rays of the rising sun did little to warm them. Despite the cold, Katherine quickly separated herself from him as though embarrassed by the contact.

“Let’s try the key,” she said nervously as she stood up.

Derec pulled himself up to a sitting position. “No hello? No good morning?” he said with a half-grin. But he reached for the key, lying an arm’s length away on the tile.

“Come on,” she said impatiently. “I had a bad dream that I’d like to rule out as quickly as possible.”

“What happened?”

“I was stuck here with you.”

Smiling, he stood and held it out toward her. “Do the honors?”

She quickly went through the activation sequence, then glanced up and met Derec’s eyes. “Ready?” she asked.

“What do we think of? Perihelion or the Station?”

“Perihelion first. I think we have to.”

He inclined his head in agreement. “Ready if you are.”

Her thumb went hard against the button, as though the vehemence with which she pushed it would speed their return. Light exploded against their retinas, the sunlight vanished, and they found themselves in the gray world of Perihelion once more.

“Now the Station?” Derec asked.

“How about Aurora?” she asked, her eyes glowing with excitement. “Wolruf said we could go anywhere with it. Why should we take ourselves back to trouble?”

“No,” Derec said. “First we go back to get Wolruf. I owe her.”

“I don’t want to go back there,” Katherine said anxiously. “We won’t be able to use the key again to get away, not for hours. They’ll have us locked up and it locked up by then, and we won’t have done anything for Wolruf. You could get help on Aurora—get a ship and go back for her.”

“How?”

“I have friends on Aurora—”

“The same ones that closed your account?”

She winced at the reminder, but was adamant. “More friends than we have on Rockliffe Station.”

“You’ll have to do the steering. I don’t have a clear enough image of Aurora in my head.”

“Happy to do it. Hold tight,” she said, and triggered the key once more.

Perihelion vanished on cue, but it was not the pastoral landscape of Aurora which replaced it. It took only an instant for Derec to realize that they had returned to the top of the tower that looked out on the great mystery city.

A heartbeat later, the same understanding impressed itself on Katherine. “Frost!” she declared, throwing her hands in the air and rushing to the edge with a vigor that alarmed Derec. “What went wrong?”

Derec looked past her to the nearer structures of the city. “Hard to say, since we don’t really know what happens when it goes right,” he said. “Obviously there’s more to controlling the key than just thinking about where you want to go.”

“But why here, then, a place that neither one of us knows?”

“I don’t know,” Derec said. “But it could be worse.”

“I’d like to know how,” she said, turning to face him and planting her fists on her hips.

“Well, just consider,” he said, stepping closer. “Whatever we are, we’re a long way from Rockliffe Station, and the way we left we’re not easily going to be followed. That means in one fell swoop we got away from Jacobson, Anazon’s robots, and the raiders. And as a little bonus we got away with the key.”

“Which we don’t know how to make work right. We’ve lost Alpha, we don’t know where we are, we have no ship, no money, no food, nothing but the clothes we’re wearing and that useless key.” It could not have been more of a tantrum of self-pity if she had ended it by stamping her foot.

“I didn’t say it was all good. I just said it could be worse.” Squatting on his heels, he stared at the key as he passed it from right hand to left and back again restlessly. “I can hardly believe what this thing does. For a machine this size to be able to transport matter ten feet, much less ten light-years, is the most fantastic feat of engineering—damn near magic. I can’t tell you how much I’d love to take it apart and see how it works. And finally I understand why everybody wants it. What I don’t understand is why someone tried to hide it.”

“What do you mean?”

He looked up. “Something Wolruf told me. The asteroid that I woke up on—it was artificial. Somebody meant it to be the final hiding place for this.”

Katherine was quick to pick up the implication. “As though it were dangerous, not just powerful.”

“Exactly.”

“Well—just think what a terrorist or assassin could do with it. Or an army where every soldier had one. Especially an alien army.”

“It’d be impossible to protect yourself against them,” Derec said, staring at the key again. “A lot of responsibility goes along with ownership of this thing. Maybe more responsibility than I want.”

“The monkey getting heavy already?”

Derec nodded. “On top of everything else, I still don’t know what I’m doing mixed up in the middle of this.” He looked up at her. “I suppose you think the pod was from the Daniel O’Neill, that I ejected in some emergency.”

“It’s the straightest line between two points.”

“I guess it is. But you know, there’s something that doesn’t fit in. Why did Monitor 5 think it was so important to give the key to me? Me, who’d been nothing but a nuisance to the robots up till then? It said something like ‘I found the key, Derec. You have to take it.’ How do you explain that?”

She gestured helplessly. “I don’t.”

Derec stood and walked to where she stood, at the edge of the plaza. “And this place,” he said, spreading his hands wide to take in the city surrounding them. “Just look at it. It’s glorious. Doesn’t just seeing it make you feel exhilarated? Can’t you sense the unifying vision, the way it all fits together as one seamless whole? Look at the turrets with mansard roofs-beautiful! Look at the way the five Pythagorean perfect solids are used as structural shapes to focus—”

As he looked to the north, he stopped short. “That’s funny,” he said, puzzled. “I would have sworn that last night there was a grouping of three icosahedrons right there along that boulevard.”

“Icosahedrons?”

“The most complex perfect solid—twenty triangular faces.” He shook his head. “I must have been mistaken about the grouping. Maybe I was dreaming about this place last night. Anyway, I’m almost looking forward to going down there. If we’d managed to get back to Rockliffe Station last night or on to Aurora this morning, I’d have felt cheated by not having my chance to explore.”

“Have you bothered to notice that this city isn’t just a collection of buildings?” she asked petulantly.

“What do you mean?”

She pointed down over the edge at the small figures moving in the streets. “You go down there and you’re going to have to deal with the creatures that built this city. Is it as much fun thinking about having a hundred thousand monsters like Aranimas after you? We’re trespassers, you know. We weren’t invited.”

Derec folded his arms over his chest and scanned the city outward to the horizon. “I’d say more like a million or more inhabitants in a city this size. But they won’t be like Aranimas-or like Wolruf, for that matter.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“First, because Wolruf told me about his world and the Erani world, and this doesn’t fit the description—”

“She could have lied.”

“True. But you say you didn’t pick this destination, and I know I didn’t. That means it was the key that decided to bring us here.”

“So?”

“So, the key wasn’t made by Aranimas’s people, and it wasn’t made by Wolruf’s. If it was, they’d have known how to make the key work. They could probably even have made one with a lot less trouble than they seem to have gone through to find this one,” Derec said. “So why should it take us to either of their worlds?”

“Maybe they did learn how to set the destination,” she pointed out.

“Maybe. Or maybe the key was built to return to a certain place when it’s activated without guidance—as a way of reclaiming them when they fall into the wrong hands.”

“Then the creatures down there—”

“Might be not only the builders of this city, but the builders of the key,” Derec completed. “Which means that maybe we were invited.”

She squinted in his direction. “You’re going to go down there whether I do or not, aren’t you.”

“Yes. I’ll leave the key with you, if you want.”

“I thought we were a team.”

“Are we still?” he said, raising an eyebrow questioningly.

“Don’t you want to be?”

“I don’t know if we want the same things,” he said slowly. “You want to get back to Aurora. I want to do something to help Wolruf—and then look into this business of the Daniel O’Neill.”

“Both of which require getting off this planet,” she pointed out. “Our interests overlap at least that far.”

“They do, indeed,” Derec admitted. “All right, then. We’re still a team.”

“At least until we beg, borrow, or steal a spaceship.”

“Or learn how to control the Key to Perihelion, whichever comes first,” he amended.

“Or Aranimas shows up with fire in his eye and uses us for thrust mass,” Katherine said with a grin. She peeked over the side again. “Or we kill ourselves trying to get down from here. Maybe we can make them come to us?”

Katherine’s concern was justified. The only way down from the promontory seemed to be to climb down one of the sloping faces of the pyramid. Those faces were steep, much more nearly vertical than the faces of the Incan and Mayan temples of ancient Earth which the tower otherwise resembled. But unlike those temples, there were no wide ceremonial staircases cut into any of the four faces.

Instead, there was a regular pattern of holes down the center of each plasticrete face, a pattern that seemed to extend all the way to the ground. Each hole was wider than his handspan and twenty centimeters deep, and they were spaced in such a way that they would make convenient handholds and footholds.

It was possible they had been placed there purely for decorative reasons. “The fact is, I can’t see why anyone would want to climb up here—there’s nothing up here except a good view,” he told Katherine. “And if the view was important to them, they could have run a lift up through the center of the tower.”

Even so, the holes were in some ways better than a staircase. Hugging the face of the tower, with both hands and feet to provide good purchase and their backs to the view out and down that could inspire vertigo, they might just make it.

“You’re going to be hurting by the time we get to the bottom,” he told Katherine.

“I’ve got an eighty percent charge in my medipump and I feel fine. Besides, didn’t anyone ever tell you that women have more endurance than men?” she teased. “Let’s stop talking and get going.”

The worst part was going over the edge and feeling for that first foothold. Derec led the way, being careful not to dislodge the key from its spot tucked into his waistband. A moment later Katherine was beside him, clinging more tightly than she needed to the lip of the holes she was using as handholds.

“I almost hate to bring this up, but I wonder what sort of creatures might have decided these holes would make great nests,” Katherine said breathlessly.

“Flying snakes,” Derec said straight-faced. “A meter long with three rows of sharp teeth. Nothing to worry about.”

“You’re so considerate,” she said crossly, starting down.

“No charge,” he said with a smile, and followed after her.

If he had ever thought that Katherine would be the kind to pick her way timidly down the wall, letting him lead the way and guide her steps, the first few minutes would have banished that notion. Katherine—Kate—was agile and aggressive and, most of all, fast. In ten minutes they were a fourth of the way down the tower’s face. Since he had to be wary of moving too quickly and dislodging the key, Derec had trouble keeping pace.

“Hey, partner,” he called down to her. “Time-out for a conference.”

“I thought you were already taking a time-out, as slow as you move,” she shot back. But she stopped and waited for him all the same. “What’s up?” she asked as he joined her.

“A thought about the key. Do we really want to take it down there, not knowing what we’re walking into?”

She frowned. “That would be taking a risk, wouldn’t it?

If we knew how to control it, I’d say keep it with us. We could always use it to escape from a tight spot—”

“If we knew how to control it, we wouldn’t have to do this,” Derec said.

“You want to leave it here, in one of these holes?”

“That’s what I was thinking. The key is heavy enough and the holes deep enough that nothing’s going to dislodge it.”

“I don’t much like the idea of being separated from it,” Katherine said, her eyes clouded by concern. “It’s one of our two chances to get out of here, maybe the better one, for all we know.”

“I like the idea of being separated from it by force even less,” Derec said. “What do you say?”

She nodded reluctantly. “You’re right. Let’s hide it.”

At Katherine’s insistence, they left the key right there where they were, in the leftmost hole of the pattern.

“It’s going to be a harder climb up than it is down,” Derec warned as they started down again.

“For them, too,” she said.

Freed from his burden, Derec could more readily keep pace, and the rest of the descent turned into an undeclared race. But the race ended prematurely when, sneaking a peek over her shoulder to see how much farther they had to go, Katherine saw something that made her want to start climbing upward again.

“Reception committee,” she hissed, reaching out and seizing Derec by the sleeve.

Letting go with his right hand, Derec twisted at the waist and looked down. At ground level, a hundred meters below their feet, a dozen figures stood in a half-circle. All twelve faces were tipped upward, looking back at him.

A happy grin spread slowly across Derec’s face. “But look who’s on the committee,” he exulted. “They’re robots!”

Katherine stole another glance down. “Considering recent history, I don’t know why that’s such good news,” she said.

“It means that this has to be a Spacer world—”

“Rockliffe was a Spacer station,” she said.

“—which means that our biggest problem from here on out is going to be bureaucratic red tape.”

“Optimist.”

“You’ll see,” he said, starting down.

The only response came from one of the robots waiting below. “Please move slowly and exercise all possible care,” it called up to them. “Climbing the Compass Tower is a dangerous activity.”

CHAPTER 21

ROBOT CITY

Eager to hasten the meeting, Derec skipped the last few steps, swinging out and jumping down to the ground. As Katherine clambered down behind him, he turned to face the robots.

Several were already leaving. Derec presumed that they were medical specialists who had been there in case of a fall, plus perhaps a few riggers who could have climbed up the wall to help them. Their skills no longer needed, they were efficiently moving on to other tasks.

The robots that remained were similar in appearance to each other, but not identical variations on a theme. One had a seemingly purposeless swatch of blue enamel above the right ear, a second brilliant green optical scanner, still another sensor mesh wrapped around its skull like a headband.

“What’s your name?” Derec asked, singling one of them out.

The robot took a step forward. “I am M-3323.”

“Very well. M-3323, take me—us—to the city manager.”

“The city as presently constituted does not have a manager,” the robot replied. “What is your name, please?”

“Derec,” he said. “David Derec. But—”

“And I’m Katherine Burgess,” she said, stepping forward. “Look, we don’t need to talk to the person on top, no matter what you call them—city manager, king, president, god. We need a place to see to our hygienic needs—something with a shower and a Personal. While we’re busy with that, you can arrange a meeting for us with someone who can help us with our other problems. Is there any problem with that?”

“No, Katherine,” M-3323 said. “Arrangements are now being made. If you will follow me, I will lead you to the appropriate facilities.”

Mercifully, the house they were taken to was less than a minute’s walk away. It was nestled between two great six-sided towers like a child hiding amongst its mother’s skirts. The interior was startlingly new and pristine, as though the house had not only never been occupied, but never entered.

But the house contained everything they needed, including two Personals that opened off a room containing a futonlike sleeping platform. The three robots which had accompanied them inside waited downstairs, which afforded them an extra measure of privacy.

“There,” Katherine said, emerging from her Personal after twenty minutes. “More presentable?”

Derec rose from where he had been seated on the edge of the platform. “You’re very easy on the eyes.”

“A quaint expression,” she said, obviously pleased. “Do you have any idea where we are?”

“None whatsoever,” Derec confessed.

“But we’re on our way out of this,” she said with some anxiety. “I’m going to get to go home. You’re going to get to go find home.”

He held up crossed fingers.

“You promised me there’d be nothing more than red tape,” she said warningly.

“That was a prediction, not a promise.”

“Still stand behind your forecast?”

“Sure,” Derec said. “Let’s go start hacking through the tangle.”

M-3323 led them out of the house and guided them back the way they had come, up the street toward the great central tower. It was a strange little procession—a pair of robots in the lead, matching stride for stride—M-3323 walking between Derec and Katherine like a vigilant chaperone—another pair of robots trailing a few steps behind.

Were the extra robots an honor guard, bodyguards, or prison guards? The pair following silently behind bothered Derec the most. Before they had gone half a block, he glanced back over his shoulder to check on what they were doing. What he saw behind the robots—or, more to the point, what he did not see—made him do a double-take. The house they had just left was gone. The gap between the two towers which had flanked it had closed.

He shook his head and chided himself for foolishness. It must be the angle, he told himself. The house is set farther back than you realized. It’s there, between the towers. You just can’t see it. Then he remembered the grouping of icosahedrons he had seen, and then not seen, from the high plaza.

“Excuse me,” he said to Katherine and M-3323. “I’ll be right back.”

He ran back down the street until he had gone far enough that he should have been able to see the house, and then slowed to a walk. He could scarcely believe his eyes. The house was gone. The two towers now flanked an open courtyard.

He looked around wildly, wanting to believe that he had taken a wrong turn, that he was the victim of some sort of illusion. The house had been just what Katherine had asked for, and so conveniently located. Could they possibly have built it just for us, and then torn it down again?

It was an insane thought, and he did not want to deal with it just then. Demand-driven architecture—a modular structure that swapped whole buildings around like toy blocks or fabricated them from elemental forms—what kind of society was this? How could people live in a city like this?

With an effort, he tore himself away from the sight of the empty courtyard and found two of the escort robots standing two steps away behind him.

“Are you finished here, sir?” one asked politely.

He grunted. “Yeah, I’m finished.”

There was no keeping the troubled expression off his face as he rejoined the others.

“Is there a problem, David Derec?” asked M-3323.

“You bet there’s a problem. What happened to the house we were just in?”

“My apologies. Did you have other needs that you did not previously identify? Or do you have additional personal needs?”

“I need a straight answer. Where’s the house?”

“That facility has been released to the general inventory.”

“So I’m not just imagining that it’s gone—you brought it there for us and then cleaned up when we were done.”

“Yes, David Derec.”

“Do you do that all the time around here?”

“All physical resources are managed for maximum efficiency.”

“I’ll take that as yes. Crazy,” Derec shook his head.

“But it doesn’t matter to us,” Katherine said.

“No,” Derec agreed. “So forget it and let’s get on with this.”

They walked on until they came to a great plaza at the convergence of several main streets. In the center of the plaza was a great white tetrahedron perhaps fifteen stories tall. Their guides directed them toward an entrance on the right.

“M-3323—”

“Yes, David Derec?”

“Is this part of the city exclusively used by robots? I didn’t see any people along the way here.”

“Yes, Derec.”

“I thought so. Where are all the people?”

“I do not know, sir,” M-3323 said. “This way, please.” It led them through a lobby area which was itself a tetrahedron and down a corridor. At the third door, the robot turned and paused. “In here, please.”

“Who are we meeting?” Katherine asked, pausing in the open doorway.

“Rydberg and Euler,” M-3323 said. “They are waiting for you in the inner office.”

Rydberg—Euler—The names gnawed familiarly at Derec’s memory as he followed Katherine first through one doorway, then through another. Where have I heard them before—

Preoccupied, he entered the inner office with his eyes lowered. When he looked up, he received a jolt. The spartan compartment contained three straight-backed chairs, a quarter-circle work station with a sophisticated hypervision computer terminal, and two blue-skinned robots with silver slits for optical sensors.

This can’t be—A chill went through Derec as he stared at robots that were clones of the supervisors on the asteroid. It’s all connected. I don’t understand—”Kate—” he started.

Just ‘ on the left stepped forward. “I am Rydberg.”

“I am Euler,” the other robot said.

“I’m afraid there’s some mistake,” Katherine said. “We want to talk to people.”

“There is no error. We are the representatives assigned to your case,” Euler said.

“Kate, this is wrong,” Derec said hoarsely.

Pursing her lips, Katherine decided, “If they want to do it this way, I don’t care.” She addressed Euler. “We need to see about transportation to Aurora and Nexon—that is where you’re going to go, isn’t it, Derec?—and temporary accommodations.”

“I am afraid that that is not possible,” Euler said, shaking his head gravely.

“What?” exclaimed Katherine. “Why not?”

“Friend Euler’s statement was imprecise,” Rydberg said. “It is possible to leave. But there is a problem. A human being has been killed—”

“Why does that involve us?” Derec asked.

“It would be an unthinkable violation of the Laws of Robotics for a robot to harm a human being,” Rydberg said. “I am unable even to form the thought without experiencing distress.”

“Of course it wasn’t a robot,” Derec said impatiently. “Another human being did it, obviously.”

Euler said, “Disregarding yourselves, there are no other humans here.”

“Our guide said something about that,” Derec said. “But just because they have no business here doesn’t mean that they didn’t come over from some other sector anyway. Someone who’d murder wouldn’t worry too long about proper travel passes or whatever it is you use here.”

“I will clarify,” Rydberg interjected. “Friend Euler meant to say that there are no other human beings in this city.”

“Then from one of the other cities—,” Katherine began.

“There are no other cities on this planet.”

“What are you saying? Where are we?” she demanded.

“I regret that I may not identify this planet or its star,” Rydberg said. “But we who live here call this place Robot City.”

“There’s nothing but robots here?” Derec said slowly, an uncomfortable idea pricking at him.”

Discounting yourselves, that is correct,” Euler said.

Katherine gaped. “No one in this whole city—it must be fifty hectares—”

“Two hundred five,” Euler corrected.

Derec interrupted. “Where are the inhabitants? The builders? Where did they go?”

Rydberg cocked his head slightly. “We are the inhabitants, and the builders, Friend Derec,” he said matter-of-factly.

It was the answer he had been expecting, but he still resisted its implications. “Where are your owners?” Derec persisted. “Where are the people you report to?”

“Your question is based on an erroneous assumption,” Euler replied. “Robot City is a free and autonomous community.”

“That can’t be,” he protested. “Maybe there are no humans here now. Maybe you’re not presently in contact with any. But they must have brought you here, or sent you here. You must still be following their directives.”

“No, Friend Derec. We are self-directed,” Euler said. “But we are not unaware of human beings. We have a vast library of book-films by and about human beings. And we have accepted our responsibility to see that humans do not come to harm.”

“I hope you understand, Friend Derec, why we are obliged to delay your departure,” Rydberg said. “This is our first experience with death. We need your help in understanding how it happened, and in understanding how the experience of death should be integrated into our study of the Laws of Humanics.”

“The Laws of Humanics? What are they?” Katherine asked, puzzled.

“The human counterparts of the Laws of Robotics—those guiding principles which govern human behavior.”

Euler continued, “At present the Laws of Humanics are a theoretical construct. We are attempting to determine if Laws of Humanics exist, and if they do, what they are. This incident has placed the research project in crisis. You must help us. I assure you that you will be afforded every possible comfort.”

As Euler was speaking, Katherine had slowly ‘ and closer to Derec, and now was standing at his elbow. “This is crazy,” she said under her breath. “A city of robots, with no one to guide them? Doing research on human beings, like we were some curiosity?”

And in that moment, Derec stopped fighting the truth and embraced it: The community on the asteroid and the great city surrounding him were products of the same mind, the same plan. He hadn’t escaped at all.

But at least he at last understood why—why he was given the key, and why it had brought them there. For the last to touch it had been Monitor 5, an advanced robot desperate to fulfill its First Law obligation to save him. Knowing what it was and what it was capable of, the robot could do nothing other than give it to him—programmed for what it knew would be a safe destination, a sister colony of robots light-years away.

“Sssh,” he said to Katherine, then looked to the robots. “Could you excuse us for a moment? We need to talk.”

“Certainly, Friend Derec,” Euler replied, “We will—”

“You stay. We’ll leave,” Derec said, taking Katherine’s hand and leading her out the door.

“Where are we going?” she asked breathlessly as he guided her a dozen meters down the corridor. “They’re going to follow us.”

He stopped short and released her hand. “We’re not going anywhere. At least I’m not. I really did want to talk privately.”

“What do you mean, you’re not going anywhere?”

“I’m going to stay,” he said. “I won’t tell them that, though. I’ll offer to stay and cooperate on the condition they arrange transportation for you. They don’t need both of us.”

“No!” she said emphatically. “You don’t have to do that. They’ve got no right to hold us. They have to let us both go. They’re robots, aren’t they? They have to help us.”

“They’re robots, yes. But not like any you’re used to. I don’t think they’d agree with your definition of their obligations,” Derec said, shaking his head. “But that’s not the point. I’m not going to stay just to appease them, or to get them to let you go. I’m staying because I want to.”

“Want to! Why?”

Derec flashed a tight-lipped smile. “I started thinking about how I’d feel if they did what we asked and put us on a ship to Aurora, or wherever. How I’d feel if I never found out any more about the key—”

“We could take it with us.”

“—never found out where this planet is or why the robots are here—never went back for Wolruf or found out what happened to her. I thought about it and realized I couldn’t just walk away. It’s true that I don’t know who I am. Even so, I know that’s not the kind of person I want to be.”

There was a studied silence, which Derec finally broke. “Part friends?”

Her eyes flicked upward and her gaze met his. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Because if you’re staying, I’m staying, too.”

It was his turn to protest. “You don’t have to do that. They’re my causes, not yours. This is a safe world. I’ll be fine alone.”

“You don’t like my company?”

He shrugged. “We get on all right.”

“Then are you trying to tell me that this is something a girl can’t handle or shouldn’t worry her head about?”

“Of course not.”

“Then it’s okay if I stay just because I want to?”

Derec surrendered. “Sure.”

“Then let’s go tell Euler and Rydberg.”

“After you,” he said, bowing with a flourish of his hand.

Wearing a contented smile, Katherine led the way back to the office. As the door opened, she turned and whispered back over her shoulder. “Just tell me this—when do our lives turn normal again?”

Derec laughed aloud, startling the robots. “Maybe never, Katherine,” he said. “Why are you complaining? You said your life was dull, didn’t you?”

“Dull isn’t so bad,” she said wistfully. “Dull has its good points.”

Chuckling to himself, Derec picked out a chair and settled in it as though planning to stay for a while. “We’ll do what we can to help,” he said to Rydberg. “Tell us the story. Who’re the suspects?”

But the robot’s dispassionate answer erased the smiles from both their faces so thoroughly it was as though they had never been there. Like a bitter aftertaste to a sweet drink, it stole all the pleasure that had come before.

“Yes, David Derec,” Rydberg said. “There are two suspects. Yourself—and Katherine Burgess. We are most curious to learn which of you committed the act, and why.”

DATA BANK

Illustrations by Paul Rivoche

Derec: An amnesiac who awakens inside a Massey survival pod, marooned on an asteroid composed of ice, his past and identity are total mysteries to him. Despite his amnesia, his intelligence remains unaffected, and he knows a great deal about robotics. He has adopted the name found in his clothing, apparently the name of the manufacturer.

ARANIMAS: Like all Erani, he is ambitious, aggressive, inventive and acquisitive. The Erani are the dominant species in their solar system and treat all other races as their servants and inferiors, including humans, whom they have only recently encountered.

Aranimas is the youngest member of one of the larger, more powerful Erani clans, which are organized into trading groups. Aranimas is a perfect exemplar of one of his race’s most important traits: he is a technical genius. He invented the hyperdrive that powers his patched-together mega-vessel. Due to the politics of Erani, he didn’t share his invention with other Erani clans, or even within his own clan. He kept it to himself in hopes of enriching his trading house and enhancing his personal prestige. Aranimas is also a gifted astronomer. His invention of a special long-range telescope helped him discover the asteroid where he encountered Derec.

Physically, Erani are tall and slender with pale, hairless skin. Their eyes are large, set in the sides of their heads, and are capable of independent functioning, like a chameleon’s. Their voices are high-pitched, and when speaking Galactic Standard they trill their “r”s.

CARGO “PORTER” ROBOT: There are various classes of non-supervisor robots within the asteroid community. The one shown here is the basic porter, a large, wheeled robot with a forward cargo platform and articulated loading arms. Their intelligence is limited and non-positronic.

AUGMENTED WORKSUIT: This is a self-contained field-reparable hardsuit for humans working in hostile environments. The suit sports high-intensity worklamps and a radio equipped with an omnidirectional antenna. The suit systems are completely computerized and include diagnostic computers for on-the-spot trouble-shooting and field repairs.

The name derives from the fact that the suit augments the worker’s movements. In addition to greatly amplifying human strength, the suits are extremely flexible. They carry extra “hands” for the tips of the extensors, which are stored in re-sealable pockets on the thighs of the suit. The basic “hands” are multi-purpose grapples, but the suit also comes equipped with illuminated micro-manipulators, for fine work in darkness, and laser spot-welders, among others.

THE KEYS TO PERIHELION: The Keys are transport devices capable of transporting the user to Perihelion, the place nearest all other places in the universe. Keys are metallic silver in color, mirror-smooth and seamless. They are operated by pressing each of the four corners, one after another, which makes the operating button appear in the last corner touched. When used properly, the Key will first transport the user to Perihelion, then to the selected destination.

Rather than being preprogrammed for different species, the Keys are “initialized” when first used, and thereafter will only work for that type of organism, although it is possible to “reset” a key to an “uninitialized” state. The Keys can be used by any species, even robots, so robots don’t need a “robot specific” Key.

BREATHER: These masks are made of gray plastic and designed to fit over the middle third of the face, like a pair of wraparound sunglasses. The breathers’ straps are hollow elastic tubes that meet behind the neck. A flexible gas delivery tube leads from the back of the neck to the cartridge pack, which is small enough to strap to the upper arm. The bottom edge of this particular style of mask does not fit flush with the wearer’s upper lip, creating an imperfect seal that allows outside atmosphere to mix with the pure oxygen flow produced by the cartridges. This arrangement not only reduces the size of the cartridge pack, but leaves the wearer’s sense of smell unimpeded.

MASSEY G-85 SURVIVAL POD: This is a limited-duration, self-contained emergency survival pod equipped with a positronic companion.

The G-85 provides a complete environment for stranded survivors, including food, water, oxygen, a viewing screen, and entertainment facilities. The positronic companion is programmed to act as a therapist and ensure the best chance of survival for a space-wrecked castaway, even to the point of sedation.

Massey survival pods are not equipped with windows. Instead they have a limpet pack, a disc-shaped sensor array capable of sliding across the outer surface of smooth-hulled spacecraft. The G-85 does not have a full environmental recycle system, and its resources are limited to approximately two weeks. They are also equipped with locator beacons, which broadcast the pods’ locations constantly. Massey survival pods are the primary safety system on most of the large commercial carriers, the equivalent of the lifeboat.

MONITOR 5: Supervisor robots are marvels of simplicity and elegance of design. Their structure is composed of flexible, inert, non-organic duodecahedral fragments capable of directed rearrangement (morphallaxis). These fragments contain kilometers of circuitry and megabytes of programming. With the right command codes the forms of these robots are infinitely malleable.

Supervisor robots are an infinity of specialized forms with one generalized package. Their skin is a metallic pale blue. The supervisors Derec encounters lack the customary red tracking marker that telegraphs the direction of the robot’s visual sensors. Like all robots, they are incapable of violating the Three Laws of Robotics. Their positronic brains are incapable of forgetting.

ALPHA: This robot is constructed by Derec from salvage aboard Aranimas’s ship. The basic data library is contained in five removable memory cubes in a compartment located in the chest area.

Its extensive positronic memory is reserved completely for the business of learning from experience. Its artificial intelligence is expandable and flexible. The positronic brain is a three-pound lump of platinum-iridium that is the repository for the fundamental postitronic potentials governing its activity, for the temporary potentials representing thought and decision, and for the pathways representing learning.

Like Derec, Alpha is an amnesiac, though in this case its memories were wiped when it was destroyed. As an essentially new construct, it has been reprogrammed. Alpha’s new arm comes from a Supervisor robot and is constructed of the same infinitely malleable material that all supervisors are composed of.

MICHAEL P. KUBE-McDOWELL

Michael P. Kube-McDowell was raised in Camden, New Jersey. He attended Michigan State University as a National Merit Scholar, holds a master’s degree in science education, and was honored for teaching excellence by the 1985 White House Commission on Presidential scholars. Kube-McDowell’s stories have appeared in such magazines as Analog, Asimov’s, Amazing, and Fantasy and Science Fiction, as well as in various anthologies published in the U. S. and Europe. Three of his stories were adapted as episodes for the TV series Tales from the Darkside. He is the author of a highly praised future-history trilogy consisting of the novels Emprise, Enigma, and Empery.