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Isaac Asimov's Robot City Book 5: Refuge, by Rob Chilson
ISAAC ASIMOV’S
ROBOT
CITY
BOOK 5: REFUGE
ROB CHILSON
Copyright © 1988
CITIES
ISAAC ASIMOV
Through eighty percent of the history of Homo sapiens, all human beings were
hunters and gatherers. Of necessity, they were wanderers, for to stay in one
place would mean gathering all there was of vegetable food and driving away
all there was of animal food—and starvation would follow.
The only habitations such wanderers (or “nomads”) could have would have to be
either parts of the environment, such as caves, or light and movable
artifacts, such as tents.
Agriculture, however, came into being some ten thousand years ago and that
introduced a great change.
Farms, unlike human beings and animals, are not mobile. The need to take care
of farms and agricultural produce nailed the farmers to the ground. The more
they grew dependent upon the harvest to maintain their swollen numbers (too
great for most to survive if they had to return to hunting and gathering), the
more hopelessly immobile they became. They could not run away, except for
brief intervals, from wild animals, and they could not run away at all from
nomadic raiders who wished to help themselves to the copious foodstores that
they had not worked for.
It followed that farmers had to fight off their enemies; they had no choice.
They had to band together and build their houses in a huddle, for in unity
there was strength. Forethought or, failing that, bitter experience, caused
them to build the huddle of houses on an elevation where there was a natural
water supply, and to lay in foodstores and then build a wall about the whole.
Thus were built the first cities.
Once farmers learned to protect themselves and their farms, and became
reasonably secure, they found they could produce more food than they required
for their own needs. Some of the city-dwellers, therefore, could do work of
other types and exchange their products for some of the excess food produced
by the farmers. The cities became the homes of artisans, merchants,
administrators, priests, and so on. Human existence came to transcend the bare
search for food, clothing, and shelter. In short, civilization became possible
and the very word “civilization” is from the Latin for “citydweller.”
Each city was developed into a political unit, with some sort of ruler, or
decision-maker, for this was required if defense of homes and farms was to be
made efficient and successful. The necessity of being prepared for battle
against nomads led to the development of soldiers and weapons which, during
peaceful periods, could be used to police and control the city population
itself. Thus, there developed the “city-state.”
As population continued to grow, each city-state tried to extend the food-
growing area under its control. Inevitably, neighboring city-states would
collide and there would be disputes, which became armed wars.
The tendency would be for one city-state to grow at the expense of others,
with the result that an “empire” would be established. Such large units
tended to be more effective than smaller ones, for reasons that are easy to
explain.
Consider that agriculture requires fresh water, and that the surest supply of
that is to be found in a sizable river. For that reason, early farming
communities were built along the shores of rivers such as the Nile, the
Euphrates, the Indus, and the Hwang-Ho. (The rivers also served as easy
avenues for commerce, transportation, and communication.)
Rivers, however, took work. Dikes had to be built along the shores to confine
the river and prevent ruin through floods. Irrigation ditches had to be built
to bring a controlled supply of water directly to the farms. To dike a river
and to maintain a system of irrigation requires cooperation not only of
individuals within a given city-state, but among the city-states themselves.
If one city-state allowed its own system to deteriorate, the flood that might
follow would disastrously affect all other city-states downstream. An empire
that controls many city-states can, more effectively, enforce the necessary
cooperation and maintain a general prosperity.
An empire, however, usually means the domination of many people by one
conquering group, and resentment builds up, and struggles for “liberty” break
out. Eventually, under weak rulers, an empire is therefore likely to break up.
World history seems to demonstrate an oscillation between empires (often
prosperous, but despotic), and decentralized political units (often producing
a high culture, but quarrelsome and militarily weak).
On the whole, though, the tendency has been in the direction not only of large
units, but of larger and larger ones, as advancing technology made
transportation and communication easier and more efficient, and as overall
population increase heightened the perceived value of security and prosperity
over liberty and squabbling.
As population grew, cities grew larger and more populous, too. Memphis-Thebes-
Nineveh-Babylon—and then, eventually, Rome, which at its peak in the second
century A.D. may have been the first city to have a population of one million.
The multi-million city became a feature of the modem world after the
Industrial Revolution introduced enormous advances in transportation and
communication. The nineteenth century saw cities of four million people and
the early twentieth century saw cities of six and seven million people.
All through the last ten thousand years, in other words, the world has become
more and more urbanized, and after World War II, the process became a runaway
cancer. In the last forty years, the world population has doubled and the
population of the developing countries, where the birth rate remained high,
has considerably more than doubled. We now have cities, like Mexico City, São
Paulo, Calcutta, with populations climbing toward the twenty million mark and
threatening to go higher still. Such cities are becoming squalid expanses of
shantytowns, endlessly polluted, without adequate sanitation, and with the
very technological factors that encourage the growth beginning to break down.
Where do we go from here? Anywhere other than decay, breakdown and
dissolution?
I tackled the problem of the future city in my novel The Caves of Steel, which
first appeared as a three-part serial in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1953. I was
influenced in my thinking by the fact that I happen to be a claustrophile. I
feel comfortable in crowded and enclosed environments.
Thus, I enjoy living in the center of Manhattan. I move about its crowded
canyons with ease and with no sensation of discomfort. I like to work in a
room with the blinds pulled down, and at a desk that faces a blank wall, so
that I increase my feeling of enclosure.
Naturally, then, I pictured my future New York as a kind of much more extreme
version than the present New York. Some people marveled at my imagination.
“How could you think up such a nightmare existence as that in The Caves of
Steel?”
To which I would reply in puzzled surprise, “What nightmare existence?”
I had added one novelty, to be sure. I had the entire huge city of the future
built underground.
Perhaps that was what made it seem a nightmare existence, but there are
advantages to underground life, if you stop to think of it.
First, weather would no longer be important, since it is primarily a
phenomenon of the atmosphere. Rain, snow, and fog would not trouble the
underground world. Even temperature variations are limited to the open surface
and would not exist underground. Whether day or night, summer or winter,
temperatures in the underground city would remain equable and nearly constant.
In place of spending energy on heating and cooling, you would have to spend
energy on ventilation, to be sure, but I think that this would involve a large
net saving. Electrified transportation would be required to avoid the
pollution of the internal-combustion engine, but then walking (considering the
certainty of good weather) would become much more attractive and that, too,
would not only save energy, but would promote better health.
The only adverse environmental conditions that would affect the underground
world would be volcanoes, earthquakes, and meteoric impacts. However, we know
where volcanoes exist and where earthquakes are common and might avoid those
areas. And perhaps we will have a space patrol to destroy any meteoric objects
likely to bring them uncomfortably close.
Second, local time would no longer be important. On the surface, the tyranny
of day and night cannot be avoided, and when it is morning in one place, it is
noon in another, evening in still another and midnight in yet another. The
rhythm of human life is therefore out of phase. Underground, where artificial
light will determine the day, we can if we wish make a uniform time the planet
over. This would certainly simplify global cooperation and would eliminate jet
lag. (If a global day and global night turn out to have serious deficiencies,
any other system can be set up. The point is it will be our system and not one
forced on us by the accident of Earth’s rotation.)
Third, the ecological structure could be stabilized. Right now, with humanity
on the planetary surface, we encumber the Earth. Our enormous numbers take up
room, as do all the structures we build to house ourselves and our machines,
to make possible our transportation and communication, to offer ourselves rest
and recreation. All these things distort the wild, depriving many species of
plants and animals of their natural habitat—and sometimes, involuntarily,
favoring a few, such as rats and roaches.
If humanity and its structures are removed below ground —well below the level
of the natural world of the burrowing animals—Man would still occupy the
surface with his farms, his forestry, his observation towers, his air
terminals and so on, but the extent of that occupation would be enormously
decreased. Indeed, as one imagines the underground world becoming increasingly
elaborate, one can visualize much of the food supply eventually deriving from
soilless crops grown in artificially illuminated areas underground. The
Earth’s surface might be increasingly turned over to park and to wilderness,
maintained at ecological stability.
Nor would we be depriving ourselves of nature. Indeed, it would be closer. It
might seem that to withdraw underground is to withdraw from the natural world,
but would that be so? Would the withdrawal be more complete than it is now,
when so many people work in city buildings that are often windowless and
artificially conditioned? Even where there are windows, what is the prospect
one views (if one bothers to), but sun, sky, and buildings to the horizon—
plus some limited greenery?
And to get away from the city now? To reach the real countryside? One must
travel horizontally for miles and miles, first across city pavements and then
across suburban sprawls. And the countryside we would be viewing would be
steadily retreating and steadily undergoing damage.
In the underground world, we might have areas of greenery, too, even parks—and
tropical growth in greenhouses. But we don’t have to depend on these makeshift
attempts, comforting though they may be to many. We need only go straight up,
a mere couple of hundred yards above the level of “Main Street, Underground”
and—there you are.
The surface you would visit would be nature—perhaps tamer than it might be,
but relatively unspoiled. The surface would have to be protected from too
frequent, or too intense, or too careless visiting, but however carefully
restricted the upward trips might be the chances are that the dwellers in the
underground world would see more of the natural world, under ecologically
sounder conditions, than dwellers of surface cities do today.
I am interested to see, by the way, that the notion of underground living has
begun to seem more realistic in the decades since I wrote The Caves of Steel.
For instance, many cities in the more northerly latitudes (where cold weather,
ice, and snow inhibit shopping by making it unpleasant) are building
underground shopping malls—more and more elaborate, more and more self-
contained, more and more like my own imagined world.
However, my imagination is not the only one the world possesses. Here we have
Refuge, by Rob Chilson, in which my underground city of the future is
explored by another science-fiction writer skilled in his craft, who has taken
my underground cities as the starting point for his own.
CHAPTER 1
KAPPA WHALE
The stars gave no light. Derec crawled slowly along the ship’s hull, peering
intently through his helmet at the silvery metal. The ship was below him, or
beside him, depending entirely on how one looked at it. He preferred to think
of it as “beside”—he felt less as if he might fall that way.
To his left, to his right, “above” and “below” him, was nothing. But space
was nothing new to Derec, whose memories began only a few months ago in a
space capsule—a lifepod, in fact. At the moment he had no time for memories of
the pod, of the ice asteroid, or of capture by the nonhuman pirate Aranimas.
He was concentrating on swimming.
“I’m at the strut,” he announced.
“Good,” said Ariel, her voice booming in his helmet.
Derec hadn’t time to turn his radio down, nor did he wish to let go just yet.
His crawl along the hull, helped by the electromagnets in knees and palms,
had been slow, but inexorable. When he seized the strut, his hand stopped but
his body continued on past, like a swimmer carried by a wave. A wave.()f
inertia.
Gripping the strut, he found himself slowly swinging around it like a flag,
facing back the way he’d come. He had realized immediately that he shouldn’t
have grabbed the strut, but didn’t compound his error by trying to undo it. He
let the swing take him, absorbed his momentum with his arm—it creaked
painfully—and came to a stop.
A robot, advancing in its tracks, arrested itself on the other side of the
strut in the proper way: a hand braced against it, the arm soaking up the
momentum like a spring. Being a robot, he had no fear of sprained wrists, the
most common injuries in free-fall.
The robot, Mandelbrot, paused courteously while Derec resolved his
entanglement with the strut. Derec gripped it with both hands and bent one
elbow while keeping the other straight. His body revolved slowly around the
bent arm until he had reversed himself. Placing his foot against the strut, he
tippy-toed away from it, letting go, uncoiling, and reaching out for the
hull.
For a moment Derec was in free, dreamy flight, not touching the ship; then
his palms touched down, the magnets clicking against it as he turned on
crawlpower. He slid forward on hands and forearms while his inertia wave was
absorbed by the “beach” of the ship’s hull. His chest and belly and finally
his knees touched down painfully, to slide scraping along.
“Frost!” said Ariel. “What are you doing, sawing the hull in half?”
Derec didn’t reply. Not letting all his momentum be absorbed, he came quickly
to hands and knees, reaching and pulling at the hull. The magnets were
computer controlled and clicked on and off alternately in the crawl pattern.
In a few seconds he braked and all the magnets went on. He skittered slowly to
a stop. Mandelbrot joined him in a similar fashion and looked at the hull,
then moved aside.
“Right, we’re at the hatch,” said Derec. “It doesn’t look like we’ll need any
tools to get in; just a matter of turning inset screws.”
There were two slits in the hull, each in a small circle. The circles were at
one edge of a square outline—the hatch. Derec stuck two fingers in one of the
slits, Mandelbrot copying his motion at the other side, and they twisted the
circles clockwise. There was a pop, and the hatch rode free.
“Got it open,” Derec said.
That was a little premature. He would have to stand up on the hull to raise
the hatch, or else move around. But before he could make up his mind,
Mandelbrot reinserted his fingers into one of the slits and pulled. The hatch
came free easily. Mandelbrot bent his arm like a rope, heaving the hatch up
over his head, put up his other arm, and the hatch stood out from the hull.
“Can’t see a frosted thing,” muttered Derec. His helmet light bounced off the
shiny underside of the hatch and again off the huddled machinery exposed, but
without air to scatter the light, what he saw was a collection of parallel and
crossing lines of light against velvet blackness. After a moment, however, he
made out a handle. These things weren’t meant only for doctorates in
mechanical engineering to understand, after all. There was a release in the
handle.
Squeezing the release, Derec pulled up on the handle. Nothing happened. There
wasn’t room on the handle for Mandelbrot to help him. Gripping it tightly,
Derec stood on the hull and put his back into it. It came free with a creaky
vibration he felt all the way up through the soles of his feet, an odd sort of
hearing.
“Trouble?” Ariel asked, concern in her voice. Perhaps she had heard his
breathing and the gasp when it broke free.
“Stuck, but I got it loose. I think a little ice had frozen around it.”
With the help of the robot, who had released the hatch and now stood upright
on the hull, Derec pulled out a mass of cunningly nested pipes all connected
together, rather like unfolding a sofa-bed. Mandelbrot reached down and pulled
a heavy cord, and a mass of thick, silvery plastic unfolded. As soon as the
plastic balloon was sufficiently unfolded not to suffer damage, Derec peered
down at its root.
He had to move around to the side, but there was the valve, looking uncommonly
like a garden faucet on far-off Aurora. For a moment Derec was shaken by a
perfect memory of a faucet in some dewy garden on the Planet of the Dawn. He’d
had indications before this that he was from that greatest of Spacer planets,
but very few specific memories leaked through his amnesia, fewer still were as
sharp as this one.
After a few moments, though, he realized he was not going to remember what or
where that garden was. All he knew about it was that it was a pleasant memory.
He had liked that garden. Now all he had of it was the memory of its faucet.
It isn’t wise to shrug in freefall, so Derec reached carefully inside the
hatch and, bracing himself, twisted the faucet. There was a hiss he heard
through his fingers and the air in the arm of his suit, as steam under low

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