Foundation’s Friends

by Ben Bova

  The two carhunters who brought the food and water would answer no questions. They waited silently while Hellman ate. He thought they watched him with curiosity. He couldn’t figure that out, but he was hungry enough so that he ate anyway. They took away the hammered tin plates on which they had brought the food, but they left him two water cans.

  Time passed. Hellman had no watch, and was unable to reach the ship’s computer to get a time check. But he figured that hours must have passed. He grew irritated with the robot who was locked in with him, who sat in a corner of the room and seemed to be in a cataleptic fit.

  At last Hellman had had enough. Boredom can drive a man to outrageous deeds. He walked over to the robot and said, “Say something.”

  The robot opened its red and green eyes and looked at him. It slowly shook its head, left to right, meaning no.

  “Because they can hear us, right?”

  The robot nodded, affirmative.

  “What does it matter if they can hear us or not?”

  The robot made a complex and intricate gesture with its hands, which Hellman took to mean, ‘You just don’t understand.’

  “I just don’t understand, is that it?” Hellman asked.

  The robot nodded, affirmative.

  “But I can’t understand unless you tell me.”

  The robot shrugged. Universal gesture meaning, what can I do about it?

  “I’ll tell you what you can do,” Hellman said, his voice low but resonant with suppressed anger. “You listening?”

  The robot nodded.

  “If you don’t start talking at once, I’m going to put out one of your eyes. The green one. Then ask you again. If you refuse again, I’ll put out the red one. Got it?”

  The robot stared at him. Only now did Hellman see what a mobile face it had. It was not made up of a single piece of metal. Instead there were many little planes sculptured into the face, and each plane was about an inch square and seemed capable of movement. This was a face designed to reveal its thoughts, feelings, and moods through its face. And sure enough, the robot’s face registered horror, disbelief, outrage,, as Hellman screwed up his own face into a ferocious frown and advanced.

  “There’s no need for violence,” the robot said.

  “Fine. There’s no reason for silence either, is there?”

  “I suppose not,” the robot said. “I just thought it best that we didn’t talk together so that the carhunters wouldn’t get the idea we were plotting against them.”

  “Why would they think that?”

  “You must know as well as I do that it’s every sentient being for itself here on this planet of Newstart. And the carhunters are a very suspicious group of people.”

  “They’re not people,” Hellman said. “They’re robots.”

  “Since intelligent robots have the same faculties as humans, we no longer differentiate between them in terms of ’robot’ and ‘human.’ It’s superfluous and racist to talk that way. “

  “All right,” Hellman said. “I stand corrected. You say they are suspicious people?”

  “Stands to reason, doesn’t it? They have separated themselves from the mainstream of Newstart life and development. Isolated groups tend toward xenophobia.”

  “You know a lot of big words,” Hellman said. “I ought to. I’m a librarian.”

  “These carhunters don’t look like they have much use for reading.”

  “I’m not a librarian here,” the robot said with a low laugh. “I don’t belong to this tribe! I work at the Central Lending Library in downtown Robotsville. “

  “Robotsville? Is that a city?”

  “The largest city on Newstart. Surely you’ve heard of it?”

  “I’m not from here,” Hellman said. “I’m from the planet Earth. “

  “You ‘re from another planet?” The robot sat up and looked at Hellman more attentively. “How did you get here?”

  “In the usual way. By spaceship.”

  “Uhuu,” the robot said.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “‘Uhuu’ is an expression peculiar to Robotsville. It means ‘that really opens up a lot of possibilities.’ “

  “Can you explain that?” Hellman asked.

  “It’s just that quite a lot is happening on Newstart right now. Your arrival could have incalculable consequences.”

  “What are you talking about? What’s going on?”

  Just then there was the sound of a key in the lock.

  “I’m afraid I’m not going to have time to tell you,” the robot said. “God knows what these barbarians have in store for us. My name is Jorge.” He gave it the Spanish pronunciation, Hor-hay.

  “Jorge? As in Jorge Luis Borges?” asked Hellman, a literate man when it came to very short stories.

  “Yes. He is the saint of librarians.”

  The door opened. Two carhunters lumbered in. Around buildings they seemed clumsy and ill at ease. The fluid grace that a carhunter possessed in the countryside seemed to have deserted them in these restricting surroundings.

  “Come with us,” one of them said. “The council has discussed you and now will speak with you.”

  “What about my buddy Jorge here?”

  “He will be dealt with in due time.”

  “Be careful what you say to them,” the librarian said. “The carhunters do not like…prevarication.”

  The librarian’s pause was long enough to convince Hellman that there was something he was being advised not to say to the carhunters. He wished he knew what it was. But now the carhunters were moving, and Hellman had to move quickly to prevent being run over.

  They led him to the meeting area. It was a flat circular rock face that had been roughly smoothed. It stood about three feet above the ground, and there were ramps of packed earth leading up to it. The carhunters had already assembled. They were moving around the rock, which greatly resembled a large parking lot. In the center was a raised cube. On it there were five or so carhunters. These looked more like a bunch of politicians than anything else.

  Hellman was led to a large pedestal with a spiral roadway leading up to it. It put him on eye level with the five top carhunters.

  Even if they had not been apart from the others, Hellman would have had no difficulty telling that these were the important ones. They were somewhat larger than the others, and their bodies had more ornamentation, mostly of the chromium variety. Several of them wore necklaces of shiny objects which Hellman recognized as hood designs from automobiles of Earth ‘s past.

  The leading carhunter was easy to spot, too. He sat in the center of the others on the raised rectangle. He was almost a third larger than his fellow judges, and he was painted a midnight blue with silver accents.

  The blue and silver judge said, “I am Car Eater, Chief Elder of the Carhunters tribe. These are my fellow judges. Why have you come here, Tom Hellman? We already know that you came in a spaceship. Why did you come to Newstart?”

  “It was a mistake,” Hellman said. “I had a malfunction.”

  “That is not an acceptable answer. Where humans are concerned, there are no mistakes.”

  “Maybe you don’t know people very well,” Hellman said. “This was definitely a mistake. If you don’t believe me, ask my ship’s computer.”

  “One of our scouts tried to talk to him “ Car Eater said. “He told us we did not have the proper access code. He would not explain what he meant by that.”

  “The access code is a nine-number combination. It is used to prevent unauthorized spying on the computer’s memory banks.”

  “But couldn’t the computer make up his own mind about that?” Car Eater asked.

  “Perhaps he could,” Hellman said. “But it is not the way we do things on Earth.”

  The robots held a whispered conference. Then Car Eater said, “It has been many years since a human visited these parts. This part of the planet belongs to us, the carhunters. We stay out of other people’s territory and expect people to stay out of ours. T
his is how it has been for a very long time, ever since the Great Fabricator divided the species of intelligence and told each to be fruitful and multiply according to his basic plan. Some of the carhunters wanted to kill you, and that other stray too, the librarian who calls himself Jorge. Sounds like a sissy name to me. That’s the sort of name they give themselves in Robotsville, where they think they’re better than anyone else. But we Elders decided against taking violent action. The Compact which rules this planet abhors destruction except in lawful ways. Hellman, you may go. You and Jorge, too. I advise you to be out of our territory by sundown. Otherwise a hyenoid might get you. “

  “Where am I supposed to go? I can’t get back to my spaceship on my own. “

  “Since Wayne 1332A brought you here,” Car Eater said, “he can also take you back. Right, Wayne?”

  A loud sound of backfires came from the assembled carhunters. It took Hellman a moment to realize it was laughter.

  “Sorry about this, Wayne,” Hellman said. He and Jorge had mounted and were clinging to the carhunter’s back plates.

  “Hell, it don’t make no never mind,” Wayne said. “I don’t sit around a whole lot fretting about how I pass my time. Sometimes it’s more convenient for us carhunters to turn onto emergency mode, which of course is timebound. But most of the time life just goes along here on the concrete prairie much as it has ever done.”

  Hellman learned from Wayne that the carhunters had lived in this region, the badlands of Northwest Mountain and Concrete Prairie, for as long as anyone could remember. Jorge broke in and said that this was a lie, or at least an untruth: the carhunters had been around only a hundred years or so, just like everyone else. Wayne said he didn’t want to argue, but he did point out that there was one hell of a lot city robots didn’t know. Hellman himself was interested in what it was like to be a city robot.

  “Aren’t there any people in your city?” Hellman asked Jorge.

  “I told you, all of us are people.”

  “Well, I mean people like me. Humans. Flesh-and-blood sort of people. You know what I mean?”

  “If you mean natural human beings, no. There are none in Robotsville. We separated from them. It was for the good of everyone. Just didn’t get along. We tried producing flesh-and-blood androids for a while-robots with protoplasmic bodies. But it was aesthetically unpleasing.”

  “I didn’t know aesthetics was a concern,” Hellman said.

  “It’s the only real issue,” Jorge told him, “once you’ve solved the problems of maintenance and upkeep and part replacement.”

  “Yeah, I guess it would be,” Hellman said. “Do you know how your people got to this planet?”

  “Of course. The Great Fabricator put us here, back when he divided the intelligent species and gave each a portion of the land and of the good things thereof.”

  “How long ago was that?” Hellman asked.

  “A long time ago. Before the beginning of time.”

  Jorge told Hellman the Creation Story, which, in slightly altered versions, was known to every being on the planet Newstart. How the Great Fabricator, a being made up equally of flesh, metal, and spirit, had produced all the races and watched them go to war with each other. How he decided that this was wrong. The Great Fabricator tried various plans. He tried putting the humans in charge of everyone. That didn’t work. He tried letting the robots rule, and that didn’t work, either. Finally he divided the planet of Newstart into equal portions. “Each of you has a place now,” the Great Fabricator said. “Go down there now and access information. “

  And so they went down, all the species, and each picked his lot and his fortune. The humans found green places where they could grow things. The robots split into various groups. One of those groups was the carhunters. They didn’t want to live in cities. They denied that the purpose of a robot was to further technology. They insisted that just living was enough purpose for anyone. This was at the time of the choosing of modalities. The carhunters selected bodies for themselves that were swift and long-enduring. They programmed themselves with a love of desolate places. And the Great Fabricator put at their disposal a race of automobiles, direct descendants of the autos of Earth. The cars were belligerent herd animals, and it was all right to kill them because they weren’t intelligent enough to mind. The carhunters had been programmed so that they found car innards delicious. It was a deliberately studied-out ethic, because at the beginning each of the groups had its own choice of an ethic. They worked from ancient models, of course, old-time human models, since intelligence is the ability to choose your programming. It was a good life, but in the view of the other robots, those who had chosen to live in cities, it was a blind alley in the life game of machine evolution. The nomadic model was satisfying, but limiting.

  “You see,” Jorge said, as they bounced along on Wayne’s back, “some of us believe that life is an art that must be learned. We believe that we must learn what we are to do. We devote our lives to taking the next step.”

  Wayne was bored by this sort of talk. The librarian was obviously crazy. What could be better than careening around the landscape, killing things? He pointed out that there was no moral problem, since the things they killed weren’t intelligent enough to know what was being done to them. Also, they weren’t given pain circuits.

  They were coming through a long narrow pass, with towering peaks on either side. Suddenly Wayne came to a stop and extruded his antennae. He swiveled them back and forth in a purposeful manner, and a little instrument deep inside his armoring began a quiet, urgent tick-tick.

  “What is it?” Hellman asked.

  “Believe we got trouble ahead,” Wayne said. He swung around and started back the way he had come. In fifty yards, he stopped again.

  “What is it this time?” Hellman asked.

  “They’re on both sides of us. “

  “Who is on either side of us? Is it those hyenoids again?”

  “They’re no real trouble,” Wayne said. “No, this is a little more serious than that. “

  “What is it?” Jorge asked.

  “I think it’s a group of Deltoids.”

  “How could that be?” Jorge asked. “The Deltoids live far to the south, in Mechanicsville and Gasketoon.”

  “I don’t know what they’re doing here,” Wayne said. “Maybe you can ask them yourself. They seem to be on all sides of us.”

  Jorge’s mobile face took on a look of alarm. “May the Great Fabricator preserve us!”

  “What is it?” Hellman asked. “What’s he so upset about?”

  “The Deltoids are not like the rest of us,” Wayne told him.

  “Not robots?”

  “Oh, they’re robots all right. But something went wrong with their conditioning back when the race was first laid down by the Great Fabricator. Unless he did it on purpose, which is what the Deltoid Church of the Black Star maintains. “

  “What, exactly, did the Great Fabricator do to them?” Hellman demanded.

  “He taught them to like killing,” Jorge said.

  “Hang on,” Wayne said. “Up them cliffs is the only way out of here.”

  “Can you climb a gradient like that?” Hellman asked. “Going to find out,” said Wayne.

  “But you kill things, too,” Hellman said.

  “Sure. But only lawful animals. The Deltoids like to kill other intelligent beings.”

  He started picking his way up the rock face. Behind, a group of big machines in camouflage colors had collected and was watching them.

  Three times Wayne tried to bull his way up the cliffside, and each time lost traction a third of the way from the top. Only the most skillful weight shifting and double clutching prevented the carhunter from turning over as it slid down to its starting point. The Deltoids seemed in no hurry to attack them, something which was incomprehensible to Wayne at the time, but which had a simple explanation that was supplied later, when they were safe for the moment in Poictesme.

  But that was later; for
now, it looked a desperate situation, and Wayne turned, ready to charge head-on into the machines and take his chances. Hellman and Jorge had no say in the matter. This was Wayne’s decision and his alone to make. But it was taken out of his hands when the ground suddenly began to collapse beneath his feet. The Deltoids noticed this and noisily started motors, eager to get away from the treacherous ground. But now they were caught in it too, and the entire plain seemed to be collapsing under them. Hellman and Jorge could do nothing but hang on as Wayne slipped and slithered and fought for traction. But there was nothing to be done, and Hellman felt himself battered by flying dirt and sand as the bottom dropped out from under them.

  It was the alarm clock that woke him.

  Alarm clock?

  Hellman opened his eyes. He was in a large bed under a pink and blue quilt. He was propped up nicely on down cushions. There was an alarm clock on the nightstand next to him. It was ringing.

  Hellman turned it off.

  “Feeling all right?” a voice asked him.

  Hellman looked around. To his right, sitting in an overstuffed chair, there was a woman. A young woman. A good-looking young woman. She wore a yellow and tangerine hostess gown. She had crisp blond hair and gray eyes. She looked at Hellman with an air of boldness and self-possession.

  “Yeah, I’m all right,” Hellman said. “But who are you?”

  “I’m Lana,” the young woman said.

  “Are you a prisoner?”

  She laughed. “My goodness, no! I work for these people. You’re in Poictesme.”

  “The last thing I remember is the ground giving way. “

  “Yes. You fell into Poictesme.”

  “What about the Deltoids?”

  “There is no love lost between Deltoids and the robots of Poictesme. The robots rebuked them for trespassing and sent them away chagrined. The Deltoids had to take it because they were in the wrong. It amused the Poictesmeans very much to see the usually arrogant and self-assured Deltoids slink off with their tails dragging. “

  “Tails?”