Cutler pointed to a wooden post with a red-painted top and a number etched into its side. ‘You can see we’re trying to impose some organization on this place.’ Roberta said, ‘To a large extent the whole facility is self-organizing. The Thinker itself has, or at least is incrementally developing, a knowledge of its own necessary layout—’ ‘All of which wordy bullshit is no use to your average truck driver from Detroit trying to find his drop point. So we’ve sent up a couple of Navy twains to map and number the emerging zones, according to a system of our own.’ Roberta said dryly, ‘Painting all those little signposts does keep a lot of people in uniform gainfully occupied.’ ‘Yeah,’ Cutler said entirely without irony, ‘that’s another advantage.’ They entered what Roberta called a manufacturing zone. The cart rolled to a halt outside a kind of factory, a long, low building of aluminium walls and big glass ceiling panels. As she walked in, crossing a floor of hastily laid concrete, Maggie saw what looked like assembly lines, and some equipment she recognized: angular construction robots that she’d expect to see in a twain shipyard, automated forklift trucks shifting loads to and fro, and a big overhead frame from which heavy chains dangled.
