'It gets a little loud in there,' Griffith shouted once his equipment was on, and they headed for the inner door.
It disappeared into the wall as they approached, revealing the brilliant light of an artificial day just beyond. The massive [unclear] world of the assembly building was bathed in that remarkably white illumination, and it was alive with movement and activity. As they passed through the door, which was at least a foot thick and looked like an airlock, Laura couldn't shake the feeling they were entering a well-built vessel of some sort. Like the computer center, everything was solid and sealed tight — designed and constructed with a quality usually reserved for submarines or spacecraft. And like the computer center, it was all so new, so pristine.
Laura wandered into the factory like a tourist, her eyes wide and her mouth agape. The mostly hollow building was of a scale that was experienced more physically than through sight or sound.
It was a sensation she'd felt previously only in the largest indoor sports arenas. But this arena was filled not with people but with hundreds upon hundreds of moving machines.
High above it all, giant cranes glided smoothly along rails crisscrossing the ceiling. As the carriages passed overhead, they eclipsed thick tubes that ran the length of the building. The tubes glowed so brightly Laura had to shield her eyes.
'Light pipes!' Griffith said in a raised voice that barely carried over the din of the busy plant. He pointed to the ceiling — to the thick tubes of light. 'Microwave generators shoot beams through the pipes from both ends of the building! The energy excites sulfur elements, which produce the same full-spectrum light as the sun!'
Laura couldn't care less about the lights in the building. It was like the tour guide at Hoover Dam pointing out the portrait of Herbert Hoover on first entering the room with the mammoth turbines.
A Model Six like the lawnmower from before trundled by, towing a trailer loaded with machine parts of various shapes and sizes. It wove its way around another Model Six, which was headed in the opposite direction with a rotary sander mounted at the end of its arm. A massive conveyer belt down the center of the building sent scattered objects past manipulator arms permanently mounted along the side of the line. From up and down the long belt, sparks flew or drills whined or the searing sound of fusing heat crackled in the air. It was unlike anything she'd ever seen. It was unlike anything she'd ever even imagined.
'Pretty rad, eh?' Griffith said, grinning. Laura started to walk out onto the dark concrete floor for a better view, but Griffith reached out and grabbed her arm to restrain her. 'Sorry!' he said, pointing down at a bright yellow line about three feet wide painted just in front of her toes. Regularly stenciled down the line's length were the words 'WORK ENVELOPE — No humans beyond this point!' Laura read and reread the warning. It had some deeper significance, she felt, but couldn't quite decide what that was.
'Safety precaution!' Griffith said, and Laura watched as another of the Model Sixes hurried by — the claw at the end of its single mechanical arm replaced with a shiny silver piston about a foot in diameter. 'Come this way!' Griffith said, motioning for her to follow. He stayed well away from the thick yellow line, she noted, which angled out onto the floor to allow access to a metal ladder.
The busy robots, for their part, also steered clear of the conspicuous boundary. That's when it hit her.
Laura swam through a sea of novel thoughts, each sweeping her up in its powerful emotional crosscurrents. She grew lightheaded and firmly gripped the ladders' railing. She felt like an alien in a space suit behind her goggles, ear protectors, and hard hat.
New thoughts, new perspectives, hit her with dizzying rapidity.
It described perfectly how she felt at that moment.
As they climbed to a catwalk suspended twenty feet above the main floor, Laura was again taken aback by the building's size. The full length of the facility was visible now except where obscured by the outcroppings of structures. The assembly line ran down the center of the building for as far as the eye could see. Smaller belts joined the main line or passed over or under the rolling stream of Gray's products in a maze of highways and byways. They led into and out of metal compartments and tanks and steel chambers wrapped in pipes coated in ice. And everywhere there moved machines — robots.
It was a beehive of continuous activity, and the hive queen lay immersed in nitrogen a thousand feet below sea level.
Griffith waited as Laura took it all in. 'Is this where you build your TVs?' Laura shouted over the noise.
'No! This is where we build the robots that build our TVs! And our satellites, and our relays and switching stations, and our high-def cameras, and our spacecraft! And, of course, the new circuit boards for the computer — until yesterday, that is! All the consumer products are built in regional plants around the world.'
At a distance, the robots looked little more exotic than a garden-variety forklift or backhoe. But there were no human drivers. There were no humans anywhere. They were all up in the Village enjoying their evening. This was a village of a different sort.
'Unbelievable,' she mumbled. Griffith cocked and then shook his head — not having heard what she'd said. 'I said it's unbelievable!'
Griffith nodded in exaggerated fashion, grinning with pride. 'Welcome to the twenty-first century, Dr. Aldridge!'
'Come this way,' Griffith said in a voice barely raised above a whisper. 'I'd like you to meet some friends.'
Griffith, Laura, and a young foreman with whom they'd hooked up made their way through one of the assembly building's larger structures. All wore hard hats, but their goggles and ear protectors dangled loosely around their necks. Outside the thick walls of the building-within-a-building, the rhythm of activity could be heard as a continuous thrum. But inside, all was hushed.
Griffith and the foreman waited beside an open pneumatic door.
Laura passed through into the large room beyond — her jaw dropping in awe. She stepped out onto a metal walkway suspended in air above nearly a hundred motionless Model Sixes. Their lone arms sagged in various states of repose like astronauts asleep in weightlessness.
They were all backed into 'recharging stations,' Griffith explained in a low voice.
The room was quiet. Even the lights were low.
'I don't see any Sevens,' Griffith said to the young man, who looked down at a clipboard-sized pen computer.
Tapping at different icons on the screen, the foreman said; 'Next Seven isn't due in here for half an hour yet.'
'Where's the nearest one?' Again the foreman tapped at the board.
'Out in the side yard.'
Griffith nodded, then turned to Laura. 'These old Sixes,' he said, waving a slack finger down the row of slumbering robots, 'need to recharge for two hours after every two hours of operation. The Sevens only charge about once every three days in normal use, and charging time is about four hours.'
She leaned out over the metal railing to look down at the robot immediately below.
'The Sixes have the same chassis as the Threes — the little cars that take you around the island,' Griffith explained. He spoke in tones appropriate to a library, and without knowing why Laura felt his manner to be fitting. 'Since they're wheeled, they can only negotiate flat terrain. They've got a single manipulator up front,' he pointed to the dark, metallic claw protruding from the stall just beneath their feet.
The tongs of the robot's claw looked like the teeth on a pair of pliers. Four inches wide, their deep grooves ran the full width of the claw and were worn shiny from use. Griffith pointed out the long tubes on either side of the two teeth, which provided hydraulic power to the robot's grip. The steel paw, Laura guessed, could easily crush anything soft. The macabre picture which sprung up in Laura's mind did nothing to endear the technology to her.
A robot across the room jerked. Laura jumped back from the rail, and Griffith and the foreman both laughed. As Laura watched, the robot raised its claw and reached slowly toward the rear of its chassis.
Atop the central trunk that rose from the robot's carriage, what looked like twin security cameras turned to follow the claw.
The gripper seized in its firm grasp a fat black plug that protruded from its socket in the wall. A cable ran
