He used a hand to wipe the water from his face, then hugged himself, shivering, against the damp cold, taking stock of his position. The overhang protected the building front only for about a meter, and it extended for perhaps three meters in either direction from where he stood.
Beyond the awning, he could see nothing. The roaring water was impenetrable. The building front was no better. It was totally blank, no doors or windows. Yet, oddly enough, when he touched it, it felt warm, resisting the chill of the air. He was stuck in a world one meter wide by five meters long. The ground water had risen from his ankles to his calves, its current always pulling at him.
He stood there for several minutes, cold, teeth chattering, cursing the fate that would bring him to this hellhole. His numbness and melancholy soon, inevitably, turned to anger.
“Damn you!” he screamed, to whom, to what, he didn’t know. “Why me?”
In frustration, he turned to the wall behind him. Hands balled into fists, he pounded viciously at the wall and-his hands sank right into it!
“Aaaahh!”
He screamed in surprise, instinctively jumping backward.
The water cascading from the awning caught him on the face, and as he tried to duck away from it, the ground current took him down.
He went under, then came up gasping for breath. But his control was gone and he was caught in the current. It pulled him back across the street; even the street itself seemed tilted at an angle toward the aqueduct. At this point, trying to regain his footing was out of the question. Keeping his head above water was the only priority. Staying alive was everything.
He felt himself go over the lip of the aqueduct and plunge into its raging waters. He bobbed down, at no point touching bottom, then rose again, totally numb and choking as the swift current carried him away, pulling at him, sucking him ever down.
He had wanted to see the terminal point of the waters. He would now see it quickly-if he could stay alive long enough.
Katherine stood with Euler by the opening to the balcony, staring out at a completely opaque wall of water that made her think that Robot City didn’t really exist at all, but was simply an image conjured by an overactive brain exposed to too much cosmic radiation. The rain came down in never-ending torrents, rain such as she’d never seen or even thought could exist. It frightened her, a fright that almost overcame her anger at their predicament. Almost.
“Why did he go out?” Euler asked.
“I’ve already told you,” she replied, turning away from the incredible downpour and moving back into the apartment. “He wanted to see the city.”
“But we told him it was dangerous.”
Katherine sat on the couch, folding her arms across her chest. A black hole could swallow Derec and his robots for all she cared. “Her either didn’t believe you or didn’t care,” she said. “Why are you standing here asking me the same thing over and over when you could be out there looking for him?”
Rydberg came in from the bedroom, where he had apparently been searching in case Katherine had been lying. “Everything that can be done is being done,” he said. “We appreciate your concern. Ours is every bit as great as yours.”
“I’m not concerned,” she said. “I couldn’t care less.”
The robots exchanged glances. “You don’t care about the possible loss of a human life?” Euler asked.
Katherine jumped up from the couch. “You mean he could possibly be… be…?”
“Dead?” Rydberg helped. “Of course. We warned you that it was dangerous.”
For the fiftieth time since Derec’s leaving, she hurried back to the balcony doorway and stared into the blank wall of water. He’d had been gone for several hours, far longer than he should have been. If anything had happened to him-
“Why did he go out?” Euler asked from beside her.
“Again!” she said loudly. “That same question. Why do you keep asking me that?”
“Because we don’t understand,” Rydberg said, moving up to join them. “You must know that robots don’t lie.”
“Yes,” she replied.
“Then, when we said it was dangerous, why did he risk his life?” Euler asked.
“To begin with, his definition of danger might be different from yours,” she said. “But beyond that, he wanted to know about this crazy city of yours more than he was afraid of the danger.”
“You mean,” Euler said, “that he could have purposely risked his life just for the sake of curiosity?”
“Something like that.”
“Astounding.”
“Let me ask you a question,” she said, poking Euler in his chest sensors with an index finger. “If you want people to live here so much, why did you pick a place with such dangerous weather?”
Rydberg seemed to hesitate, as if he were weighing the answer he was about to give by some sort of internal scale. “The weather here is not naturally like this,” he said at last.
“Naturally,” she repeated, zeroing in on the key word. “Does this mean that something has affected the weather adversely?”
“Yes,” Euler said.
“What?” she asked.
“We cannot tell you that,” Rydberg said, and walked over to peer beneath the couch.
“Will it stop soon?” Kate asked.”
Probably within the next hour,” Euler said. “At which time we can conduct an extensive search for Friend Derec.”
A thought struck Katherine. She wanted to suppress it, but couldn’t. “Is this how the other man… David, died?”
“He may have caused the rains,” Euler said. “but he didn’t die from them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It is quite late for humans,” Rydberg said, moving toward the door. “You must sleep now or risk damaging your health.”
With that, the two supervisor robots moved silently into the hallway, the door sliding shut behind them.
Katherine was alone, except for the robot standing guard in the hallway outside. She moved to the couch and curled into a tight ball. “Oh, David,” she cried into the sleeve of her jumper. “Why did this have to happen?”
Chapter 3. The Extruder
Derec rode the aqueduct like a log in a sluice, his body numb, his senses and his fate out of control. The waters raged in his ears as his entire existence turned on the simple act of trying to keep his head above water. Nothing else mattered; life had reduced itself to its essence. There was no fear, no time for it, and any yearnings to have his life pass before his eyes went unsatisfied, since he had no life to reflect upon. There was only the water and the numbing cold-and the ubiquitous companionship of Death.
His ride could have lasted a minute or an eternity-he was beyond calculating time-but when he felt himself free-falling in midair, his brain snapped to the new reality and questioned.
He was falling, surrounded by a hot, moist wind. A bare glow of light seemed to envelope him, but before he had a chance to appreciate it, he splashed into hot water.
He had gulped down water with his quickly sucked breath, and when he bobbed to the surface like a cork, he was choking and coughing, his head pounding with a heartbeat throb. He panicked, then forced himself into control when he realized the water he was in wasn’t flowing, but pooling.
As he treaded water, he found himself grateful to his former life for giving him the lifesaving advantage of swimming lessons. He leaned back and floated on his back, small currents pulling him this way and that. His body ached horribly from the battering he had taken in the aqueduct; every bit of strength had drained from him.
There was a ceiling of some sort above him, tiny lights making it dimly visible. The roar of waterfalls filled the hollow cavern completely, and he turned his head to the side to get a glimpse of his surroundings.
He was a hundred meters from the edge of a large square pool that stretched perhaps a thousand meters across. Red lights set at regular intervals bathed the entire area in an eerie glow. In the middle of each side of the pool were aqueduct runoffs, four in all, their cascades shimmering like fading pulsars in the red haze. These four runoffs provided the incredible noise that churned inside his head, all of it echoing within the confined space.