“Now,” he declared triumphantly, holding the key with one hand and pushing the button with the other.

Nothing happened.

Chapter 6. Strangers In Town

Back in their apartment, Derec kicked the chair in front of the computer console and sent it skidding across the hard floor into the other one.

“Those filthy, stinking, walking, frosted slag heaps! What about the First Law? Doesn’t that apply to the keys?”

“Apparently not,” Ariel said bitterly. “If Keymo was telling the truth when he said that their keys are all initialized in that processing machine, and that they only work for the type of being that initializes them, then their keys will only work for robots. And if they initialize them by hand, that ruins them for us, too. They listened to my argument because of the First Law, not because they had keys that could send us away.”

“I felt like an utter fool standing there holding that key when nothing happened. And then they scanned the wall to find out how I got in, and gave me my boot back.” He looked down at the matched boots that he wore on his feet again. “You can bet the same trick won’t work a second time. “

“Well, at least they just threw us out. There wasn’t any penalty or anything.” She sighed and sat down in one of the chairs where it was, without bothering to move it back into its place. “I was so proud of myself for talking my way in to see Keymo, too.”

“The First Law did us that much good, at least.” He started pacing the perimeter of the small room. “I thought we were so close to getting away from here. I thought we had it.” He paused when he saw Ariel leaning forward in the chair, staring glumly at the floor.

She glanced up at him and nodded dejectedly.

“Well, look. It isn’t over yet. I mean, we aren’t going to give up.” He sat down in the console chair and gazed at the blank screen thoughtfully. “All right. What’s our next move? Let’s see.” He started working on the keyboard.

She watched him for a moment. “You ‘re looking for the other humans on the planet, I suppose.”

“Of course. They got here, somehow; we can leave the same way, whatever it was.”

“But we haven’t made any progress finding them. What else can we do?”

“We didn’t really apply ourselves before. I figured Keymo was our best bet, and the other humans just a backup. Now it’s time to get serious about them.”

“I hope it makes a difference.” Her tone was still discouraged, but she pulled her chair closer.

“I’ll start with that file we had earlier,” said Derec. “Hey, we’re in luck.”

“Really?” She looked up hopefully.

“The two strangers who are traveling together have been sighted several more times.”

“What about the third?”

“No, there’s no more mention of that one. I hope he’s okay. I wonder if the third one is with the other two, or if they just happened to arrive about the same time.”

“If they came separately, then we might have two ways to get away from Robot City.”

“Good point,” said Derec. “I just hope that the third one is simply hiding better than the other two.”

“What do you mean?”

“If they all came together, the third one could have left again in the only transportation, whatever it is.”

“Oh, Derec. Why did you have to bring that up?”

“We have to consider all the possibilities, don’t we?” He turned to look at her. “Besides, getting in touch with some people for a change is still going to be an advantage. At some point, someone will come back for them. They’ll be part of the spacefaring community, at least, not like these isolationist robots.”

“Suppose we try to think along that line. Do we have any way of guessing who they could be?”

“I’ll enter what we have. The real problem is that we don’t know the location of this planet.”

“We know that Dr. Avery wanted Robot City to be away from the beaten track,” said Ariel. “My mother always emphasized how eccentric he was. I’m certain we aren’t near any major spacelanes.”

“I don’t think we’re in too much of a backwater, either. If Dr. Avery was the megalomaniac you said, then at some point he probably planned to show off his success to other people.”

“Mother would have wanted to see it. And, you know what? He faced a lot of skeptics on Aurora. Eventually, he’d want to prove to them that he could do what he said.”

“Good. We don’t have much to go on, but it’s something.” Derec summarized the information he read on the screen. “ Aurora is probably the nearest habitable planet, and it’s almost certainly the nearest planet of any significance.”

“If we do get a ride out of here, that’ll be convenient,” she observed. “I’m willing to take small favors.”

“Let me go on. The odds of three people just landing here at almost the same time purely by chance in two spacecraft are too low to think about. One spacecraft, maybe, if it had mechanical trouble or something” but not two. Assuming we are close to a spacelane, and remembering that this is all just surmise anyhow, we have to figure that our visitors came here deliberately.”

“I can’t honestly see why anybody would want to come here,” said Ariel. “There’s no business to conduct. And it’s not exactly Fun City. There’s no entertainment or anything.”

“I know. And pioneering commercial interests would show up in force, not one or two people at a time.”

“Individuals wouldn’t have much of anything to do here that I can think of,” she went on. “Even if I weren’t sick, I’d still want to get away from here. The robots run everything on their terms.”

“I think we can rule ourselves out as the reason, don’t you?” Derec asked. “As far as we know, no one has any way of knowing that either of us is here.”

“Don’t I know it.” She shook her head in resignation, with a wistful smile.

“So that leaves Robot City itself as the reason.”

“But I told you that Dr. Avery kept its location a secret. My mother was sure that was very important to him.”

“You also said that he disappeared a long time ago. If he’s dead, could he have left some information behind in the office that someone got? Or spilled the secret someplace else out in space before he died? And now they’ve used the information to come here. Or he’s back himself.”

“With a guy like that, anything’s possible,” she said reluctantly. “But it sounds out of character for him to reveal more than he wanted. Besides, any people who had learned the secret would have shown up here a long time ago.”

“Not if it was well hidden. Maybe they just found it.”

“Maybe. I guess.” She looked at him. “Do you think it’s Avery?”

“No. The sightings just aren’t consistent with his ability to go into that office in the Compass Tower. Our visitors are as lost as we are. And they can get us off this rock, too.”

“So much for them finding Robot City,” said Ariel. “What about us finding them?”

“I wish I’d had the time to streamline the computer by now. It just isn’t that reliable. If it was, we could use it to help.”

“We can try, can’t we? Can you give some kind of standing instruction to the robots to look for the people?”

“Yeah, I can try, but we have the same problems as before. The instructions don’t reach every single robot, and they take a long time to reach a lot of them. And even that assumes Dr. Avery didn’t counterprogram against it for some weird reason of his own.”

She shook her head. “He was too paranoid. If he was careful enough to keep the secret of this place, I’m sure he would have approved of ordering the robots to keep watch for outsiders.”

“We already know that some robots are reporting their sightings. I’ll order all the robots to do that, and…” he trailed off. “Well, I don’t know. Maybe we’re just going around in circles.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Well, I just don’t know if it’ll make a difference, like I said. It’s just more of what’s already in the computer.”