Asimov’s Future History Volume 12

by Isaac Asimov

  “Under heavy guard in a storeroom similar to the one Bissal used as a hiding place,” Donald replied. “But with your permission, I would like to point out several facts that strengthen the case against them.”

  “Very well,” Kresh said.

  “First, they were involved in the staged fight. If that in and of itself is enough to cast suspicion on Tonya Welton, then it is enough to cast suspicion on Caliban and Prospero.”

  “He’s got a point,” Kresh said. “No one seemed to think anything of their actions at the time, but why were they obeying the Three Laws? Maybe just to look good. Maybe not.”

  “You anticipate my next point, sir. The ambiguities of the New Laws might well permit Prospero to be a willing participant in a murder.”

  “Donald!” Fredda said.

  He turned and looked at her with a steady gaze. “I regret saying so, Dr. Leving, particularly to you, the author of those Laws, but it is nonetheless true. The New First Law says a robot must not harm a human–but says nothing about preventing harm. A robot with foreknowledge of a murder is under no compulsion to give anyone warning. A robot who witnesses a murder is not compelled to prevent it.

  “The New Second Law says a robot must ‘cooperate’ with humans, not obey them. Which humans? Suppose there are two groups of humans, one intent on evil, the other on good? How does a New Law robot choose?

  “The New Third Law is the same as the old third–but relative to the weakened First and Second Laws, it is proportionately stronger. A so-called New Law robot will all but inevitably value its own existence far more than any true robot–to the detriment of the humans around it, who should be under its protection.

  “As for the New Fourth Law, which says a robot ‘may’ do whatever it likes, the level of contradiction inherent in that statement is remarkable. What does it mean? I grant that the verbal expression of robotic laws is far less exact than the underlying forms of them as structured in a robot’s brain, but even the mathematical coding of the Fourth Law is uncertain.”

  “I meant it to be vague,” Fredda said. “That is, I mean there to be a high level of uncertainty. I grant there is a basic contradiction in a compulsory instruction to act with free will, but I was forced to deal within the framework of the compulsory, hierarchical nature of the first three of the New Laws.”

  “But even so,” Donald said. “The Fourth New Law sets up something utterly new in robotics–an intralaw conflict. The original Three Laws often conflict with each other, but that is one of their strengths. Robots are forced to balance the conflicting demands; for example, a human gives an order for some vitally important task that involves a very slight risk of minor harm to the human. A robot that is forced to deal with such conflicts and then resolve them will act in a more balanced and controlled fashion. More importantly, perhaps, it can be immobilized by the conflict, thus preventing it from acting in situations where any action at all would be dangerous.

  “But the Fourth New Law conflicts with itself; and I can see no possible benefit in that. It gives semi-compulsory permission for a robot to follow its own desires–although a robot has no desires. We robots have no appetites, no ambitions, no sexual urges. We have virtually no emotion, other than a passion for protecting and obeying humans. We have no meaning in our lives, other than to serve and protect humans–nor do we need more meaning than that.

  “The Fourth Law in effect orders the robot to create desires, though a robot has none of the underlying urges from which desires spring. The Fourth Law then encourages–but does not require–the robot to fulfill these synthetic desires. In effect, by not compelling a New Law robot to fulfill its needs at all times, the Fourth Law tells a robot to fulfill its spurious needs part of the time–and thus, it will not fulfill them at other times. It is compelled, programmed, to frustrate itself from time to time.

  “A true robot, a Three-Law robot, left to its own devices, without orders or work or a human to serve, will do nothing, nothing at all–and be not at all disturbed by its lack of activity. It will simply wait for orders, and be alert for danger to humans. A New Law robot without orders will be a mass of conflicted desires, compelled to want things it does not need, compelled to seek satisfaction only part of the time.”

  “Very eloquent, Donald,” Kresh said. “I don’t like New Law robots any better than you do–but what does it have to do with the case?”

  “A great deal, sir. New Law robots want to stay alive–and they know that it is not by any means certain they will do so. Prospero in particular knew that Grieg was considering extermination as a possibility. They might well have decided to act in a misguided form of self-defense. The New Laws would permit them to cooperate with humans and assist in a murder, so long as they did not actually do the killing themselves. Caliban, of course, has no Laws whatsoever. There are no limits to what he might do. There is nothing in robotics to prevent him actually pulling the trigger.”

  “A rather extreme view, Donald,” Fredda said, quite surprised by the vehemence of Donald’s arguments.

  “It is a rather extreme situation, Dr. Leving.”

  “Do you have any evidence for all of this, aside from elaborate theory-spinning? Do you have any concrete reason for accusing Prospero and Caliban?”

  “I have their confession,” Donald said.

  “Their what?” Fredda almost shouted.

  Donald held up a cautionary hand. “They confessed to blackmail, not murder. However, it is a frequent tactic of criminals to confess to a lesser charger in order to avoid a graver one.”

  “Blackmail?” Kresh asked. “What the devil were they going to blackmail Grieg with?”

  “Everything,” Donald said. “It has been an open secret for some time that Prospero has been in league with the rustbackers, seeking to get as many New Law robots as possible off Purgatory. In that capacity, he has accumulated a great deal of information on all the people–some of them quite well known–involved in the rustbacking business, and has made it his business to collect confidential information–preferably negative information–about virtually every public figure on this planet. Prospero told me that he had threatened Grieg with the release of all of it if the New Law robots were exterminated. The ensuing scandals would paralyze society, at the very least. He was, in effect, blackmailing the office, not the man. Do what I say or I ruin your society. It is a tribute to the Governor’s integrity that Prospero was forced to such a tactic.”

  “In what way?” Kresh asked.

  “Clearly, Prospero would not have needed to offer the threat he did if he had been able to learn a few unpleasant details about Governor Grieg himself. Since he could not locate any such information, he was forced into the far more difficult task of accumulating enough scurrilous information on everyone else that Grieg would not dare have it all get out.”

  “So Prospero was willing to blackmail Grieg. What about Caliban?”

  “My interrogation of the two of them was necessarily rather brief, but it was my impression that it was Prospero making the threats, perhaps without Caliban’s foreknowledge. Caliban, I must confess, seemed most unhappy to be involved in the whole affair.”

  “But you think the whole blackmail story is a hoax,” Fredda said, “a cover story that will divert us from thinking they were there to murder the Governor, or at least assist in the Governor’s murder.”

  “I think we must consider the possibility,” Donald said” And, one last point I must make. Both Caliban and Prospero are capable of lying. Three-Law robots, of course, cannot lie. Caliban and Prospero may be hoping that we associate them with the robotic reputation for honesty–which would be quite undeserved.”

  “But wait a second,” Devray protested. “What could Caliban and Prospero do that wasn’t being done already? We’ve got Bissal in the basement with the rigged SPRs. He’s the triggerman. Why do we need blackmailing robots wandering around?”

  “I admit that there is strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that Bissal pulled the trig
ger,” Donald said. “Why else would he have been in the storeroom? But we have no concrete evidence. All we know for certain is that he was hiding in a storeroom closet during the party.”

  “Donald, you’re on a fishing expedition, looking for things to blame on Caliban and Prospero,” Fredda said. “Do you think Bissal went down there and hid because he was shy? If Caliban and Prospero did it, what did they need Bissal for? You don’t make the sort of effort the plotters made to get Bissal in position if you already have someone else ready to do the killing.”

  “Nonetheless, Fredda, Donald has a point,” Kresh said. “The two robots did have motives, means, and opportunity–and they have confessed to a lesser crime. There’s certainly enough there to justify further investigation. But let’s move on. Devray?”

  “In any event,” Devray went on, “the plotters staged a fight. It seems to me there’s no need to assume Welton and the robots were part of the plot because they were there, but in any event, the fight served its purpose by allowing Bissal to get into the storeroom unobserved. Soon thereafter–also as a result of the fight–the robots were deployed. No one wanted robots around during the party, remember. Bad publicity. The plan was that the SPRs only be brought out if needed.

  “I think it is at least possible that making sure the SPRs were brought out was part of the plan. They were really only there as a reserve security force. If there hadn’t been an apparent threat during the evening, they would have been left in the storeroom and Grieg might well have used his own reserve SPRs for overnight security. Since there were already fifty security robots on duty, nobody bothered to power up the Governor’s half-dozen reserve SPRs sitting in the aircar.

  “Except those reserve SPRs came with Grieg from Hades, and they weren’t tampered with,” Fredda said. “They’re still where they were the whole time, powered down in the cargo aircar that brought them, sitting outside. Without the staged altercation, Grieg might well have deployed those robots rather than the rigged SPRs. And, of course, if Bissal had been up against fully functional SPRs, he never would have gotten anywhere near the Governor.”

  “I just had a thought,” Kresh said. “If the purpose of the staged fight was to draw out the rigged SPRs, that would explain why it was all so elaborate. It was intended to make us paranoid, so we would deploy the closest, largest force of robots on hand.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Devray said. “I’ve been wondering about that. If all they had wanted was a simple diversion, there wasn’t any need to go to the lengths they did.”

  “That’s a good explanation,” Fredda said, “but I think you’ve got to think about the psychology of the whole plan too. There’s something theatrical about it all. It’s complicated, it’s full of grand gestures.”

  “Whoever set this up,” Kresh said. “The ringleader. That’s the person we should be thinking about, not a cipher like Ottley Bissal. He’s no one at all. It’s who he might lead us to that I’m interested in. So far, about the one thing we can say for sure about the ringleader is that it wasn’t Bissal.”

  “That theatrical angle, “Devray said. “A person like that wouldn’t want to miss the show.”

  “What do you mean?” Fredda asked.

  “I mean if the ringleader is the sort of person with a flair for the dramatic you’re talking about, and if he or she has an ego big enough to think about killing the Governor–then that person would be there. “Devray thought for a moment, and nodded to himself. “Our ringleader would want to be there, watching the show he or she had set up, gloating over it. There would be no real danger in watching it unfold. He or she would have so many cutouts and layers of security that the team’s own operatives wouldn’t know who the boss was. But the boss would be there, watching it happen. An audience of one.”

  “Point taken,” Kresh said. “It would be an insane risk for the leader of the plot to be within a hundred kilometers of the place–but people who kill planetary leaders aren’t altogether sane. All right, there we are at the staged fight.”

  “The fight draws the attention of the party-goers,” Devray went on, “and distracts enough of the Ranger security guards inside the house so Bissal can get to the storage room with the robots. Alternately, the fight provides the excuse for the guards being drawn off, as they were already suborned in the first place. They are my people, but they are also human. It is possible that Huthwitz was not the only dirty Ranger in all this. But I will say in defense of the Rangers that they are not used to serving as sentries. They don’t get much training in it. Robots do that sort of thing. It was only because robots were not supposed to be in evidence last night for political reasons that Grieg asked for human guards.”

  “And if he had stuck with robot guards, he’d be alive this morning,” Kresh said. “That’s another reason the plotters must have chosen last night–at a regular Spacer party, there would have been throngs of robots around, serving the food, offering drinks and so on, and they would have stayed on after the party, remained in the house. There would have been a dozen different types of robots, from a dozen different sources. There would be no way to deactivate them all at one go before the event. The reception last night was all human service, Rangers serving as bartenders and waiters, and they went home when they were done. Cinta Melloy thought it was strange that Grieg was alone in the house, but that wasn’t the strange part. The strange part was that he had none of his own household robots along.”

  “In any event, Bissal uses the diversion of the fight to get to the storeroom and wait. You, Sheriff Kresh, investigate the staged fight, and while you are otherwise involved, the three supposed SSS agents come in and take Blare and Deam away, never to be seen again. The party goes on, with no apparent further incident, but everyone more than a little paranoid. Shortly thereafter, the Rangers on duty are sent down to activate the SPRs and deploy them. I questioned the Rangers who did the job, and they said all fifty robots were standing there, powered down, their chest access panels open. All the Rangers had to do was push the power buttons and close the access doors. One of the Sappers failed to activate, but the Rangers did not fuss with it very much, figuring forty-nine security robots were enough. They were also a bit anxious to get back to their own duty posts–understandable, with all the commotion that had already taken place.”

  “Unless they were the Rangers who were suborned,” Kresh said. “That seems farfetched, but there was a conspiracy. Sooner or later, someone or other will suspect every single person at the reception of being in on the plot. And that goes for all of us around this table. We have to be ready for that.”

  “I’m already checking the two Rangers who powered up the Sappers,” Devray said. “In any event, the plotters now had a houseful of rigged security robots, and Bissal was in the basement with Fredda’s Trojan robot. He might have come out and starting unpacking his gear then, but if he had any sense at all, he stayed in that closet, out of sight, waiting. Not the most relaxing way to spend the evening. His nerves may have gotten a bit jangled by waiting so long in the dark, which might explain some of the mistakes he made. Judging by the integrator images, he was already a little jumpy when he arrived.

  “The party ends. The guests leave. The Ranger waiters are eager to get the place cleaned up and get out of there. They don’t like being servants. It’s humiliating to be doing a robot’s job, and it’s not why they joined the force. Maybe they are a little hurried, a little sloppy. Meantime, upstairs, Grieg is having his usual series of end-of-the-evening meetings. The next to last of these is with Tierlaw Verick–and I think we need to take another crack at Verick. I don’t think we got everything out of him. And he’s got to be a prime suspect in all this. Donald can say what he wants about Caliban and Prospero, but if I were an assassin, I’d want a human confederate in the house, not a pair of robots.”

  “We’re still holding him,” Kresh said. “He’s mad enough to bite the head off a Sapper, but he’s not going anywhere.”

  “Good,” Devray said. “Anyway
, according to Verick’s statement, he said good night to the Governor at the door. He encountered two robots matching Caliban’s and Prospero’s descriptions coming in as he went out, and then went to bed. He claims to have slept through the ruckus, and he seems to have been overlooked in the initial room-to-room search.”

  “My people getting sloppy, “Kresh said. “And more damn suspects for the conspiracy mill. Though what purpose pretending to overlook Verick might have, I can’t imagine.”

  “Caliban and Prospero meet with the Governor,” Devray continued. “According to Donald, they say they threatened the Governor with blackmail. They may have participated in some way in the murder. Perhaps they removed the modified range restrictors from the ground-floor robots. Maybe Bissal was doing that while they shot the Governor. But let’s leave them out of it for now. We don’t really need them to explain the sequence of events. We can add them later if we have to. Donald, what did they say happened after they talked to Grieg?”

  “They say they left the Residence without noticing anything untoward and walked back to Limbo.”

  “In the driving rain?” Kresh asked.

  “Neither of them had access to an aircar,” Donald said. “I would expect the going would be a bit treacherous, and visibility poor, but both of them are of water-resistant design. It would be no great hardship for either of them to walk back to town.”

  “What about the SPRs?” Fredda asked. “Were they functional when Caliban and Prospero left?”

  “I elected not to ask that question, for fear of supplying them with information they did not have. If I asked if the SPRs were working when they left, they might well have realized we had not established the timing of events, allowing them to fashion their stories more effectively. However, neither of them volunteered any information regarding the SPRs. If they are telling the truth, that suggests nothing was amiss when they left. If they are lying, they may be trying to make it appear nothing was amiss at that time, thus muddying the waters.”