Caliban (c-1) by Isaac Asimov & Roger MacBride Allen

Author:Isaac Asimov & Roger MacBride Allen [Asimov, Isaac]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf
ISBN: ISBN: 044-100482-2
Publisher: Ace Books
Published: 1997-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

13

HRT-234, better known as Horatio, was an extremely busy robot at the moment. But then, there was nothing unusual about that. Such had been the case for some time now. There was, after all, Limbo to deal with.

Horatio noted the time and checked his internal datastore, but the information there only increased his sense of mounting frustration. He linked into a hyperwave link to check the submaster schedule for the next three hours. No doubt about it. They had fallen behind again out on the auxiliary shipping floor. There was a bottleneck somewhere. Smoothing out bottlenecks was one of his duties. Being sure to stay linked into the comm net via hyperwave, he left his normal duty station in Depot Central and hurried out to aux shipping to see what was up.

The Limbo Project was enormously complicated. Horatio’s duties were complex, and his responsibilities tremendous, but he knew that he was concerned with only the slightest, smallest piece of the picture. At least, he had surmised as much for himself. Doing so was not hard: The evidence was there to be seen on all sides, in the density of message traffic, in the complexity of the routing problems, in the patterns of communications security…

But, truth be told, there was no need to examine such esoteric areas as signal analysis to know there was something big going on. The conclusion was there to be drawn by a mere glance at the whirling, overorganized chaos that surrounded him on the aux shipping floor.

The shipping floor, the whole depot, was a place of noise and confusion, of heavy unpainted stresscrete floors and towering support girders, roller/carriers and liftwagons, of hurrying robots darting everywhere and hectoring men and women shouting and arguing, talking into mobile phones, checking the time, pointing at lists of things that had to be done.

Even the air was filled with rush and hurry. Even here, four deep levels below ground level, there was no room for the cargo vehicles to land while waiting for a load. The heavy-duty cargo flyers were forced to hover instead, and they hung in midair everywhere, waiting for their chance to land. Carrier robots of all descriptions humped freight into the cargo bays of the flyers that found a place to come down. As Horatio watched, another flyer sealed up and launched through the great accessways, up toward ground level and the sky beyond, its place taken by another ship almost before the first had cleared the loading zone. Instantly the newly arrived ship was surrounded by a swarm of loader robots. The cargo doors swung open and they started rushing the cargo inside. Similar scenes were being repeated on all sides. Horatio had heard one of the human supervisors say it reminded her of the panicky rushing about in an overturned ant heap, and Horatio was reluctantly forced to concede he could see the comparison.

Limbo Depot had often been a busy place, and something close to a madhouse in the days just gone by. But today was the worst of all.

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