Laura's eyes rose to him, a wry smile on her face. "Plain English?" she asked.
Griffith just cocked his head — perplexed by her question. "Or Japanese, or German, or French, or whatever you speak," he said, misunderstanding. "Anyway, halfway into your session, the computer would start asking 'Is that all you wanted to know?' or something like that. If you said, 'Yes,' then it'd say, 'Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?'" Griffith laughed. "You could see it coming a mile away. And it would wear your fingers to the bone typing out your answers. Back then, you understand, it was socially immature. If you typed something like, 'Boy, look at the time. It's midnight already,' it would say, 'I show nothing on your calendar for midnight.'"
Laura laughed and asked, "So why didn't you just log off?"
"Well…" Griffith began, but then seemed to struggle to find the right words. "You know, that wouldn't have been very… nice, would it?"
13
"Just don't look up," Griffith said helpfully as Laura clung to the cool metal railing. They headed down the steps leading to the assembly building entrance, which — like its counterpart at the computer center — was sunk slightly below ground level. Laura had looked up at the sixteen-story wall that ran almost half a mile in either direction.
It was as if seeing the unexpected plane rising perpendicular to the earth caused her brain to question which was the true horizon. She'd almost instantly grown dizzy and faintly nauseated. "That happens more often than you'd think," Griffith said. "Let's get inside. It'll be better in there."
She edged her way down the steps, grasping the rail hand over hand and keeping her head bowed. Passing through a thick vault door, they entered yet another of the infernal "dusters." This time, however, she knew to hold on to her skirt. Again her hair lashed wildly at her face, but again the gale dissipated quickly.
"Maybe I should just shave my head," Laura said as she raked the hair off her face.
Griffith seemed totally unbothered by the experience. "Oh, look," he said, pointing to a small black marble [missing] mounted on the wall beside the door. "That's a wide-angle retinal chip. You'll see them all over the place." He mugged for the camera, sticking his thumbs in his ears and his tongue from his mouth.
The inner door glided open, and the sound of activity echoed through the enclosed space ahead. She followed Griffith into a small, well-lit room — touching the antistatic pad, and receiving the expected snap on her fingertips. Laura looked but didn't find a vanity or brush beside this door. What she found was another black eyeball staring out at the room.
"Here," Griffith said, holding goggles with large, clear lenses and ear protectors that looked like ancient stereo headphones.
Laura put the goggles on — the soft plastic wrapping around her eyes and fitting tightly against her face. The ear protectors dampened the sound from outside the room to a mere hum. Griffith then handed her a white hard hat, which fit snugly over her gear and mercifully covered the tortured mess of her hair.
"It gets a little loud in there," Griffith shouted once his equipment was on, and they headed for the inner door.
It disappeared into the wall as they approached, revealing the brilliant light of an artificial day just beyond. The massive [unclear] world of the assembly building was bathed in that remarkably white illumination, and it was alive with movement and activity. As they passed through the door, which was at least a foot thick and looked like an airlock, Laura couldn't shake the feeling they were entering a well-built vessel of some sort. Like the computer center, everything was solid and sealed tight — designed and constructed with a quality usually reserved for submarines or spacecraft. And like the computer center, it was all so new, so pristine.
Laura wandered into the factory like a tourist, her eyes wide and her mouth agape. The mostly hollow building was of a scale that was experienced more physically than through sight or sound.
It was a sensation she'd felt previously only in the largest indoor sports arenas. But this arena was filled not with people but with hundreds upon hundreds of moving machines.
High above it all, giant cranes glided smoothly along rails crisscrossing the ceiling. As the carriages passed overhead, they eclipsed thick tubes that ran the length of the building. The tubes glowed so brightly Laura had to shield her eyes.
"Light pipes!" Griffith said in a raised voice that barely carried over the din of the busy plant. He pointed to the ceiling — to the thick tubes of light. "Microwave generators shoot beams through the pipes from both ends of the building! The energy excites sulfur elements, which produce the same full-spectrum light as the sun!"
Laura couldn't care less about the lights in the building. It was like the tour guide at Hoover Dam pointing out the portrait of Herbert Hoover on first entering the room with the mammoth turbines.
A Model Six like the lawnmower from before trundled by, towing a trailer loaded with machine parts of various shapes and sizes. It wove its way around another Model Six, which was headed in the opposite direction with a rotary sander mounted at the end of its arm. A massive conveyer belt down the center of the building sent scattered objects past manipulator arms permanently mounted along the side of the line. From up and down the long belt, sparks flew or drills whined or the searing sound of fusing heat crackled in the air. It was unlike anything she'd ever seen. It was unlike anything she'd ever even imagined.
"Pretty rad, eh?" Griffith said, grinning. Laura started to walk out onto the dark concrete floor for a better view, but Griffith reached out and grabbed her arm to restrain her. "Sorry!" he said, pointing down at a bright yellow line about three feet wide painted just in front of her toes. Regularly stenciled down the line's length were the words "WORK ENVELOPE — No humans beyond this point!" Laura read and reread the warning. It had some deeper significance, she felt, but couldn't quite decide what that was.
"Safety precaution!" Griffith said, and Laura watched as another of the Model Sixes hurried by — the claw at the end of its single mechanical arm replaced with a shiny silver piston about a foot in diameter. "Come this way!" Griffith said, motioning for her to follow. He stayed well away from the thick yellow line, she noted, which angled out onto the floor to allow access to a metal ladder.
The busy robots, for their part, also steered clear of the conspicuous boundary. That's when it hit her. It's a border, she thought, that separates man from the machine. A border between two lands at war.
Laura swam through a sea of novel thoughts, each sweeping her up in its powerful emotional crosscurrents. She grew lightheaded and firmly gripped the ladders' railing. She felt like an alien in a space suit behind her goggles, ear protectors, and hard hat.
New thoughts, new perspectives, hit her with dizzying rapidity.
A Stranger in a Strange Land, she recalled the title of the old book.
It described perfectly how she felt at that moment.
As they climbed to a catwalk suspended twenty feet above the main floor, Laura was again taken aback by the building's size. The full length of the facility was visible now except where obscured by the outcroppings of structures. The assembly line ran down the center of the building for as far as the eye could see. Smaller belts joined the main line or passed over or under the rolling stream of Gray's products in a maze of highways and byways. They led into and out of metal compartments and tanks and steel chambers wrapped in pipes coated in ice. And everywhere there moved machines — robots.
It was a beehive of continuous activity, and the hive queen lay immersed in nitrogen a thousand feet below sea level.