“Derec!” came Euler’s voice from the newly built tunnel behind; it was the first time the robot had spoken to them since the operation had begun.
Derec looked at his watch. It was nearly five a.m. He shared a glance with Avernus. “Yes!” he called back.
“The rain has abated,” Euler returned. “The missing have been located!”
Derec resisted the urge to jump from the controls and charge out of there. He still had work to do. He looked at Avernus. “What now?”
“Now we will see,” the robot said. “We must locate the core and reprogram.”
“Should I leave you here to continue operations and go with someone else to the core?”
“No,” Avernus said with authority. “I am supervisor of the underground and know my way around it. I also… must know the outcome. Can you understand that?”
Derec reached out and punched off the control board, stopping new digging and bringing all operants to the standby position. “You bet I can understand it. Let’s go!”
They moved out of the gateway, squeezing past stacked up cylinders to join the other supervisors in the tunnel behind. It was the first time Derec had looked back at their handiwork. The tunnel he and Avernus had made stretched several hundred yards behind them, nearly as far he could see.
“Where are Katherine and Wohler?” he asked. “Are they all right?”
“No one knows,” Rydberg said. “They are clinging to the side of the Compass Tower, nearly a hundred meters above the surface, but they have not responded to voice communication, nor have they attempted to come down.”
Derec’s heart sank. They’d been out all night in the rain.
It looked bad.
“Are rescue operations underway?” he asked.
“Utility robots are now scaling the Tower to determine the extent of the problem for emergency disposition,” Euler said.
“The central core,” Avernus said to Dante. “Tell me where it is right now.”
“Tell me honestly, Euler,” Derec said. “Will my presence at the Tower facilitate the rescue operation?”
“Tower rescue has always been part of our basic program, for reasons no one can fathom,” the robot said. “Standard operating procedure has already been initiated. You could only hinder the operation.”
“Good,” Derec said. Of course Tower rescue was standard. The overseer had worried that, should the trap door to the office below become jammed, he would be caught on the Tower, unable to get down. The almighty overseer didn’t mind letting everyone else twist slowly in the wind, but he wasn’t going to let himself be uncomfortable on the Tower.
Dante spoke up from the terminal in his tram car. “The central core is in Quadrant 2, Tunnel D-24, moving to the north.”
Avernus nodded and looked at Derec. “We must hurry,” he said, “lest all our work be in vain.”
“Work is already in vain,” Waldeyer said to Avernus. “Because of your unauthorized impoundment of the gateway excavator, the on-hand raw iron consignments have dropped dangerously low. Within an hour, replication efforts will begin falling behind schedule.”
The big robot simply hung his head, looking at the floor.
“I pose a question to you all,” Derec said. “If Avernus and I are able to get to the core and reprogram to halt the replication, will our work already done here enable us to dig the rest of the way through to the cavern before tonight’s rain?”
“Barring work stoppage and machinery malfunction,” Euler said, “we should just be able to make it. This, of course, is all hypothetical.”
Derec just looked at them. There was no satisfaction to be gained from arguing at this point. It was time to deliver the goods. “Where’s the data from my blood sample?” he asked.
Arion stepped forward and handed him a mini-disc. “Everything you asked for is in here,” he said.
“Thanks,” Derec said, taking the disc and putting it in his breast pocket. “Now, listen. We’re going to the central core. As soon as we reprogram, we’ll need you to begin work here again immediately so that no time is lost.”
Arion took a step toward the gateway. “It is now too late to move the excavator back to the iron mine and pick up our failed operation there, so I see no reason why the digging here shouldn’t continue in your absence. There is no longer anything to lose. I will continue to work here, even as you approach the central core.”
“No,” Euler said. “Will you now violate your programming, and perhaps the Laws?”
“The program is already shattered,” Arion said, moving into the innards of the gateway. “There is no putting it back together now.”
Derec smiled broadly as he heard the standby board being brought to full ready by Arion. He walked over to Dante. “We’ll need your tram,” he said. “Now.”
The fever had come on strong, and along with it, hallucinations. Katherine’s world was a nightmare of water, a world of water always threatening to pull her downward, and through it all Derec/David, David/Derec, Derec/David, his face smiling evilly and becoming mechanical even as she watched, metamorphosing from human to robot and back again, over and over. He’d skim the cresting waves to take her in his arms, only to use those arms to pull her underwater-drowning her! Drowning!
“Katherine… Katherine. Wake up. Wake up.”
Voices intruding in her world of water. She wanted them to go away, to leave her alone. The water was treacherous, but at least it was warm.
“Katherine… ”
Something was shaking her, pulling her violently from her dream world. She opened her eyes to pain blazing like fire through her head.
It was daytime, early morning. A utility robot was staring at her around the protective branch of Wohler’s arm.
“C-cold,” she rasped, teeth chattering. “So… cold.”
A light flared above her and to the left, a light raining sparks. She squinted. Welders were using laser torches to cut Wohler’s pincers off the facade where they were locked tight. Above the welder, she could see mechanical pulleys magnetically clamped to the side of the structure, city-material ropes dangling.
“We are cutting you free,” the robot said. “A net and stretcher have been strung just below you. You are safe now.”
“C-cold,” she rasped again.
“We will warm you. We will get you medical attention.”
And through the haze that was her mind, she felt the reassuring firmness of Wohler’s body protecting her, always protecting her.
“Wohler!” she said loudly. “We’re s-safe. Wohler!”
“Supervisor Wohler is… nonoperational,” the utility said.
Even through the hurt and the delirium, she was wracked by waves of shame. That this robot would give his life for hers, after the way she’d acted, was more than she could bear.
She felt his weight behind her give; then hands were lifting both of them onto the stretchers pulled up tight below. She felt the morning sun on her face, a sun that Wohler would never experience again, and rather than dwell on the unpleasant results of its own selfishness, her mind once more retreated into the blissful haze of unconsciousness.
“Would you have?” Avernus asked him as they pushed the tram down tunnel D-24, heading north.
“Would I have what?” Derec replied. The tunnel walls rushed past, red lights zipping overhead at two-second intervals.
“Would you have let the robots die if I hadn’t agreed to help you dig the tunnel?”
“No,” Derec said. “I wouldn’t have done anything like that. I just wanted to talk some sense into you.”
“You lied to me.”
“I lied to save you,” Derec said. “Remember our discussion about lying in the Compass Tower? I created a different reality, a hypothetical reality, to force you into a different line of thought.”
“You lied to me.”
“Yes.”
“I do not know if I’ll ever really understand that,” Avernus said, subtly telling Derec that their relationship would forever be strained.