When the first vivid reexperience faded, she looked up and they had drawn apart. It was no matter; it would be all right tomorrow.
“Never saw myself as nursemaid to a couple of Spacers and a robot,” said Donovan. The agent-in-charge had not trusted any of his men to go outside.
The hospital had an emergency entrance and egress for ambulances, and was a major junction on the motorways. R. Jennie carried Ariel down in its arms, Ariel having chosen that over being wheeled, strapped to a gurney, or in a chair with wheels.
The hospital had supplied an ambulance, but the Terry eyed it with distaste. “We’ll use the Bureau car,” he said. “There’s room for four of us, robot or no.”
R. Jennie gently put Ariel into the back seat and got in beside her, the car creaking and sinking under the weight until the suspension system analyzed the imbalance and compensated for it. Derec and Donovan got into the front seat, and the agent took the controls and sent them surging silently down a ramp and into a lit but dim-seeming tunnel.
For a moment Ariel fought a scream, tensing; the claustrophobia was worse in such tight passages. But she fought it off, helped by the speed of their passage. Signs blurred past soundlessly as the Terry tapped more and more of the beamed power. Once the ceiling lit up in bloody light, and winking yellow arrows along the walls gave obscure warning. Then a blue car whipped by in the other direction, Donovan having avoided it with the warning.
“Like the models we trained on,” murmured Derec, glancing back at her.
For a moment she was blank on that, the she remembered the roofless roads and the emergency vehicle monitors, the remote control sweaty in her hand, and the laughing students crowding around. But that was nothing like this dim, empty wormhole.
GLENDALE, KIRKWOOD, MANCHESTER, WINCHESTER, BALLWIN, ELLISVILLE, the signs flowed past, as fast as the expressway would have taken them. Ariel ignored all the labyrinthine branchings and windings that twisted obscurely away right and left out of sight, peering past Derec to see as far before them as possible.
The tunnel was a rectangle of dim light, two glowing tracks overhead and a pair of glowing, beaded tracks on the sides, the last being the glowing signs, fading into tininess.
At last, though, there came an interruption in the shape of the tunnel. It got dark at the limit of vision, the darkness outlined in light. Presently the outline of light appeared as various warning signs. The darkness was a ramp, leading up.
Donovan slowed sharply, causing R. Jennie to lean forward and prepare itself for a snatch at the controls.
“Don’t worry, boy,” said the Terry, grinning but not looking back. Ariel had him in profile. “I’ve driven for thousands of hours, faster than this, and no problems.”
“Twenty-one point three percent of all major traumas to enter Towner Laney Memorial Hospital occur in the motorways,” said R. Jennie, unperturbed. “Fewer than twenty percent occur on the ways. A few thousand humans use the motorways; seven million use the ways.”
“Damn, I always hated know-it-all robots,” grunted Donovan, taking the ramp with unnecessary flair. “Could never stand to live on any Spacer world. A man should have the right to go to hell in his own way.”
The car eased to a stop at a barrier. Donovan played a tune on his computer controls and the barrier opened. He drove through, they wound a complicated path that apparently avoided heavy traffic-there were thunderous rushing sounds through the walls, but no traffic in their motorway-and they were at a huge entry in the outer wall.
Kilometer-long lines of great trucks full of produce, some robot-driven, most computer-controlled, roared in with noisy, huge tires but silent engines and dived into the City just below them. They were on a higher ramp, one of a dozen that leaped out of the City from high and low. Donovan stopped the car well back from that light-blazing gap.
“You’ll have to walk from here,” he said abruptly. “Car won’t go any further-no beamcast beyond the barrier.”
Chapter 13. Robot City Again
“Paulins,” said R. Jennie. “They are used to cover machinery in the fields against rain and dew. There are no tents available in the immediate vicinity of St. Louis. Perhaps in a day or two there will be a tent.”
The plasticated canvas of the big paulins worked as well as a tent, strung over a couple of poles and tied to a tree limb. It was needed more for shade than shelter. This move to the country had not been a simple one, nor could they keep it up for more than a day or two.
But it was such a relief!
Ariel could tell that Derec felt the same sense of escape that she did. The sky of Earth was wide and blue and very high, and little puffy clouds ambled slowly across it, all framed by the pointed opening of the “tent.” The sunlight was just right. The plants were the familiar green of Earth life everywhere, and they too seemed just right. Except in greenhouses, she had probably never seen Earthly plants in the natural light of the sun in which they evolved. Even the heat was not unpleasant.
“We won’t need a tent, if we have to wait that long,” said Derec grimly.
“You should return to the City as soon as you can,” R. Jennie said. “Mrs. Avery is far from recovered from the fever.”
Ariel felt quite recovered from the fever, though her memory was returning slowly. Weak as she undoubtedly was, she thought with concern, she could have wrestled Derec two falls out of three and won. But he said nothing about his own condition.
“Everything’s so…ordinary,” said Ariel, looking out at the kind of birds and plants and small animals she had seen all her life. A squirrel is a squirrel, and sounds just the same on Aurora. Even the shrilling of the unseen insects was familiar. Humans had taken their familiar symbiotic life-forms with them to the stars. She had expected Earth to be more exotic.
The reality was a relief more than a disappointment.
“It must have been a bad time for you,” she said to Derec, when R. Jennie had stepped out to the…kitchen. They had been supplied with something called a “hot plate” and a dielectric oven.
Derec moodily watched the robot prepare the packaged meals, designed for people with high enough ratings to permit them to eat in their own apartments. This was luxury for their rate.
“Bad, well.” He shrugged, clearly not wishing to discuss it. “I did learn one thing from R. David: there’s a spaceship belonging to Dr. Avery in the New York port. If we could get there-”
“How, if our rating doesn’t permit us to travel that far?”
“We’ll have to get him to make ID with higher ratings for us-”
R. Jennie stepped under the opening with a tray holding coffee and juices. When she had gone, Ariel said, “I hope they don’t discover the apartment.”
“I suspect the Terries know all about it, but won’t make trouble. They want us gone before we get mobbed or something. We’ve been very lucky.”
“Couldn’t we ask Donovan for assistance?” she asked wistfully.
“We could. I thought of it,” Derec said, broodingly. “But that’d be above his level, surely. If Earth can ignore us, it won’t be so badly embarrassed if we’re discovered here, investigating-or spying on-Earth people. But if they have helped us in any way, they can’t deny having known about us.”
“Helping us would be seen as condoning our presence,” she said grayly. “I understand.” Politics seemed to be the same everywhere. “So what can we do? Get new ID-will the Terries spot that, do you think?”
“Frost, I don’t know-”
R. Jennie gave them fruit cups and whipped cream, returned to the kitchen, a rustic scene in the frame of the tent opening.
The fruit was good, but unusual-compotes served in what she thought of as unsweetened ice cream cones. It was like eating warm ice cream with strong fruit flavors. All yeast, she supposed.
“If they do spot us at it, I suppose they’d look the other way. But what worries me is that it would alarm them. They’d know we weren’t telling everything, they’d realize that R. David-or someone-has ID duplicating equipment. They might well raid the apartment.”