Reaching the door, Nimrod could see nothing through the window except a bright point of orange light and a lot of black space. The room beyond was clearly enormous.
The door opened onto a viewing platform, constructed out of metal grilling. Looking down, Nimrod could see through to the floor beneath, thirty feet below. To his left and right metal staircases headed down, weaving back and forth twice before they reached the bottom.
Nimrod stepped forward, and gripped the platform’s handrail as he looked out into the space. The metal was cold against his palms, and as he looked out he gripped them tight enough to feel the cold against his bones.
The space was truly cavernous, as big as the largest Air Force hangar he’d seen above ground, hidden in the desert. It was lit from above by large white floodlights, but they did little to dispel the orange glow coming from the center of the room, where a huge torus was held in mid-air by a framework of silver struts. Above the torus was another black metal platform, perhaps octagonal, around the edge of which looked to be control panels and instrument banks. Two twisting black staircases led from the platform to the floor.
The torus was the source of the light. The entire object was glowing orange, like iron in a fire: darker around the edge and almost white in the center. A brighter light moved around the ring, anti-clockwise, throwing the orange light around the hangar, and across the robots assembled on the floor – robots surrounding the central structure from one side to the other, filling the room wall-to-wall, end-to-end.
Nimrod gasped. Robots. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Each identical, tall and silver, row upon row upon row. Nimrod counted fifty units from one side of the room to the other, then lost count as he tried to count the rows going back.
The robots were vaguely man-shaped, but huge; from his elevated position, Nimrod estimated each was at least seven feet in height, with rectangular torsos that were wider at the shoulders than at the waist by a considerable girth. The worst thing was the heads – each had a face, each identical, a toy-like parody of human features: triangular eyes, and a mouth that stretched across the square face. The mouth was a black plate, angled and vicious, a separate piece that could clearly open and close like the robots could… eat something.
Each robot had a black circle in the center of its silver chest; as his eyes adjusted to the orangey gloom, Nimrod could see the discs shine, like dark glass portholes.
Nimrod squeezed the handrail and shook his head, trying to understand what he was looking at, remembering the Director’s talk of war.
And here was her response. Atoms for Peace were indeed preparing for war. They were building an army. An army of robots.
The robotics laboratory was one thing; this was entirely another. The Secretary of Defense be damned – this was going straight to President Eisenhower.
There was a sound as Nimrod turned, like a button of his jacket clicking against the platform railing, an innocuous sound he barely registered before a black bag was yanked over his head and his arms were pulled back sharply.
He cried out and got a mouthful of dry cotton. He spat the fabric out and struggled, pulling his shoulders around, trying to break free, but the needle that entered his neck was thin and sharp, and the last thing Nimrod felt was pain and then numbness and the last thing he heard was the roar of the ocean, far away.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The night in Harlem was cold, the world frosted with ice, the air heavy with freezing mist.
The streets were empty, the buildings too: empty shells staring with empty black eyes out onto deserted streets. It seemed the very fabric of the place was rotting away, brick crumbling, concrete fracturing like wet chalk. If the Empire State was an imperfect copy of Manhattan island, then the Pocket universe’s Harlem was where the data degradation was worst. The cold wasn’t helping, nor the tremors. The whole world shook as it fell apart; here in Harlem, the quakes loosened mortar and pushed stones, making cracks, weakening everything.
The people stayed inside, huddled in small communities that gathered around fires to keep the dark away, to keep the creeping cold out. Some areas were better than others; here people could move around, try to continue some semblance of normal life, with shops and bars and businesses