Asimov’s Future History Volume 12

by Isaac Asimov

  “There is no identity Davlo Lentrall on access node 43l3,” Dee said at once.

  “What?” said Kresh.

  “No one named Davlo Lentrall is linked into that access node,” said Dee.

  “The number must be wrong, or something,” said Kresh.

  “Quite likely,” said Dee. “I’m going to hand off to Dum. He is directly linked to the network in question and can perform the search more effectively.”

  “There is no Davlo Lentrall on node 4313,” Dum announced, almost at once, speaking in an even flatter monotone than usual. “Searching all net nodes. No Davlo Lentrall found. Searching maintenance archives. Information on identity Davlo Lentrall discovered.”

  “Report on that information,” Kresh said. How could Lentrall’s files have vanished off the net? Something was wrong. Something was seriously and dangerously wrong.

  “Network action logs show that all files, including all backups, linked to the identity Davlo Lentrall, were invasively and irrevocably erased from the network eighteen hours, ten minutes, and three seconds ago,” Unit Dum announced.

  Kresh was stunned. He looked to Soggdon, not quite knowing why he hoped for an answer from that quarter. He switched off his mike and spoke to her. “I don’t understand,” he said. “How could it all be erased? Why would anyone do that?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He used a term I’m not familiar with in this context. Let me check.” She keyed on her own mike again. “Dum, this is Soggdon, monitoring. Define meaning of the term ‘invasive’ in present situation.”

  “Invasive-contextual definition: performed by an invader, an attack from the outside, the act of an invader.”

  “In other words,” said Kresh, his voice as cold and hard as he could make it, “someone has broken in and deliberately destroyed the files. “He suddenly remembered what Fredda had said, about the things you thought you knew. She had said something about never really being sure about what you knew. Here it was, happening again. He had thought he knew where the comet was. Now he knew he did not. “It would seem,” he said, “that someone out there agrees with you, Dr. Soggdon. They don’t want anyone playing with comets.”

  11

  “It’s gone, Governor,” said Davlo Lentrall. “Everything I’ve ever worked on is gone.” He was glad to be speaking over an audio-only link to the governor. Kresh had called on an audio link because it was easier to maintain a secure line that way, but Davlo didn’t care about that. He was simply glad he did not have to show his face. It was bad enough that Kresh could hear the panic in his voice. He wouldn’t want anyone to see him this way. Davlo Lentrall paced frantically up and down in front of his comm center. “All my core files, all the backups, everything.”

  “Take it easy, son. Easy now. There must be some way to retrieve it all. I thought the system was designed to make it impossible to lose things irretrievably.”

  Davlo tried to calm himself. Kresh had called from – from wherever he was – just as Davlo had finally, absolutely confirmed that all was lost. It was no easy thing to talk to the planetary leader when he was at his lowest ebb.

  “Normally, yes, sir. But this wasn’t an accident. This was sabotage. Five minutes after I discovered that my files were gone, I got a call from University Security. Someone broke into my office there and threw in a firebomb. They think there were at least two separate break-ins. By the end of the second intrusion, everything that wasn’t stolen was bummed. They say there’s nothing left. Nothing at all. All my notes and work – including the comet data. The comet coordinates, the tracking information, the orbital projections – everything.”

  “Burning stars,” Kresh’s voice half whispered. “Maybe that whole escapade at Government Tower was just a diversion.”

  Davlo laughed bitterly. “Trying to kidnap me, perhaps kill me, a mere diversion for stealing my life’s work?”

  “I don’t mean to sound harsh, son, but yes. Exactly that. I grant that you would have a different point of view – but for the rest of the world, right now, your life’s work is of far greater importance than your life. And you’re sure everything is gone? Irretrievably gone?”

  “Everything.”

  “I see.”

  “Governor Kresh? Who did this? Was it the Settlers?”

  “Probably,” said Kresh. “But it could have been anyone who wanted to keep the comet from coming down. Right now that doesn’t matter. Right now we have to deal with the situation, not worry about how the situation came to be.”

  “That’s not going to be easy, sir. I’ll try.”

  There was silence on the line for a moment. “All right, then. Your computer files containing your plans are gone. We have to set to work at once to get them back – or at least get the main part of them back. I’ve seen enough of what the twin control units can do to be sure they could start from the basics of your plan and reconstruct it – probably in greater detail than you had to start with.”

  “How very kind of you to say so,” Davlo muttered.

  “I meant no offense to your work,” Kresh said. “The control units are designed for this kind of job, and they have the capacity to oversee the climate of an entire planet. Of course they can do more detailed projections than one man working alone, no matter how gifted – especially when that man is working outside his field of expertise. And I might add that no robot or computer or control unit found that comet and saw what it might mean to this planet.”

  Davlo sat down in the chair facing the comm unit, folded his arms over his chest, and stared down at the floor. “You’re flattering me,” he said. “Trying to soothe me, make me feel better.”

  “Yes, I am,” Kresh agreed, his voice smooth and calm. “Because I need you, and I need you right now. As I was about to say, the control units can reconstruct and refine your plan for targeting the comet – but we need you in your field of expertise.”

  “Sir? I don’t understand.”

  “Son, we need you to look through your telescope again and relocate that comet. And fast.”

  Davlo took a deep breath, shook his head, and kept his gaze fixed on the floor. “Sir, I never found the comet in the first place.”

  “What! Are you saying this has all been some kind of hoax? Some kind of fraud?”

  “No! No, sir. Nothing like that. I didn’t mean it that way. I meant that the computers found the comet. Automated telescopes found it while doing preprogrammed scans. I’ve never looked through a telescope myself in my life.”

  Again, silence on the line, but this time Davlo spoke first. “All the data is gone, sir. Without my computer files, without my written notes, without the log files – there is simply no way at all I can find that comet again in time.”

  “But the thing is kilometers across! It’s practically headed straight for the planet right now! How hard could it be to spot?”

  Davlo Lentrall let out a tired sigh. The man was right. It shouldn’t be hard at all. How could he explain that it would be all but impossible? “It is extremely hard to spot, sir. It is coming straight for us, and that is part of the problem. Normally we track a comet by spotting its motion against the night sky. Comet Grieg appears to be all but stationary. Not quite motionless, but close. And while it’s a relatively large cometary body, even a big comet is rather small from tens of millions of kilometers away. It also happens to be a rather dark body – and at its present distance, it has a very low apparent magnitude.”

  “You’re saying it’s too dim to see? But you saw it before – or at least the computers and the telescopes did.”

  “It’s not impossible to see. But it’s very dim and small and far away and with a very small lateral motion. And it’s not just a question of seeing it once. We have to get repeated, accurate measures of its position and trajectory before we can reconstruct the orbit.”

  “But what about when it gets closer? Won’t it develop a tail and all the rest of it? Surely that will make it easier to spot.”

  “By which time it wil
l be too late. Grieg is a dark-body comet. The comet will be too close, and if it has developed much of a tail, that will mean it is starting to melt. If it gets too warm and melts too much, it will be too fragile to hold together during the course correction. Part of the plan I hadn’t worked out yet was shielding from the sun. I was going to come up with some kind of parasol, a shield to keep the sunlight off.”

  “But there’s a chance,” said Kresh. “At least there is some sort of chance we could reacquire the comet if we tried.” There was a brief moment of quiet again before the governor’s voice spoke again. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said. “We’re going to keep everything moving forward, based on the assumption that we do reacquire the comet, and that we will decide to go forward with the diversion and the impact. We need to move forward on as many fronts as possible, as fast as possible, and I need some work out of you, right now.

  “First I want you to set down the closest approximations you can of the mass, size, position, and trajectory of Comet Grieg. Even rough figures will give us someplace to start in planning for the impact itself. Send that information at once to my data mailbox. Then you are going to get to work at once organizing a search to reacquire Comet Grieg. I will instruct your superiors to give you whatever resources and personnel you need for the job. Tell them as much as you can about the comet. But get that started – and let someone else run it. Because I want you to get to work trying to recover your computer files. Maybe they’re not as lost as we think. There must be something, somewhere – at least enough to give some leads to the team doing the telescope search. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir. Sir – if I might ask a question?”

  “Yes, of course, Dr. Lentrall.”

  “I get the impression that you’ve become more convinced that the plan might work.”

  “That I have, Dr. Lentrall. I’ve seen and heard quite a bit here about your plan. Enough to make me think we just can’t live without it. Was there anything else?”

  “Not at the moment, sir. I’ll be in touch.”

  “You certainly will,” the governor replied, with just the slightest hint of humor in his voice. “Kresh out.”

  The line went dead.

  That should have been his cue to swing into action, but instead, Davlo simply stared at the speaker, expressionless. After what seemed a very long time indeed, he finally stirred himself into action. He set down all he could recall of his comet data, as accurately as possible, knowing full well that the margin of error in most of his figures would render them close to useless. He sent a copy of it off to Kresh’s data mailbox, and another off to the head of the astronomy department, asking for whatever help he could get. Of course, Davlo knew perfectly well that the department head absolutely refused to accept any after-hours calls. She would not get the message until morning. But still, best to have it done.

  Simple enough jobs, both of them, but they seemed to take an inordinately long time – and to take a great deal out of Davlo. After the day he had had, there was not really a great deal left to take. When he was at last done with the messages, he did not get up. Instead he sat there, unable to rouse himself. There was a lot more he ought to do, but Davlo Lentrall could not quite bring himself to move. Not quite yet.

  It was that hour of the night when rational thought seems most unreasonable, when unreasoning fear seems utterly logical, and disasters seem most probable. Davlo thought of his nameless, faceless, enormously powerful enemies. They were mad enough at him already. He was not entirely sure he wanted to do anything else – like getting out of his chair – that might incur their wrath.

  There was some part of Davlo Lentrall that was able to recognize the fragility of his own personality at that moment. A part of him that could see that the game was over. A part of him that knew he had been pretending to be someone and something he was not for a long time. He had seen himself as smarter, braver, better than anyone else. And why not, in a universe where robots protected everyone from the consequences of their actions, where robots did all the hard work and left the posturing for humans? He had always imagined himself as being immune to fear and as impossible to harm. It was easy enough to indulge such fancies when robots warded off all danger.

  And that part of Davlo Lentrall could feel it all slipping away. A few more shocks, a few more disasters, and he knew he would not be able to hold together. What was he to do if the mask fell from his face altogether, and the face underneath was blank? He knew now that he was not the person he had pretended to be. But then who was he?

  Davlo Lentrall sat in his office chair, still as a switched-off robot, trying to work up the nerve to move.

  It might have been a minute later, or an hour later, when Kaelor came into the room. “Come along, sir,” the robot said. “You must rest. There is nothing more you can accomplish tonight.”

  Lentrall allowed himself to be led away, allowed Kaelor to peel off his clothes, move him through the refresher, and put him to bed. He was asleep almost before he was fully between the covers. The last thing he saw as his head hit the pillow was Kaelor leaning over him, tucking the sheets up around him.

  And the first thing he would think of the next morning was where he might find quite a bit of his lost data.

  Donald 111 was every bit as motionless as Lentrall had been, but he was far from inactive. Donald stood in his niche in the wall of Alvar Kresh’s home office, and worked the hyperwave links with all the speed and efficiency that he could muster. To an outside observer, Donald would have appeared completely inert, as if he had been shut down altogether. In point of fact, he was linked into a half-dozen databases, patched through to simultaneous conference calls with robots in the City of Hades maintenance offices, the Department of Public Safety, the Emergency Preparedness Service, the Combined Inferno Police, and a half-dozen other agencies. No one knew for sure what would happen if and when the comet hit, but there were certain basic precautions that could be taken – and Donald could at least get them started.

  It had to be anticipated that there would be quakes and aftershocks as a result of the impact, even in Hades, halfway around the planet. That assumption right there meant a great deal of work would have to be done. There were buildings that would have to be braced. Perhaps it would be wise if some old and unneeded buildings were disassembled altogether. Valuable and fragile objects would have to be stored in places of safety.

  And then, of course, there were the people. The robots would have to prepare massive places of shelter, where the quakes could be ridden out in safety.

  All the computer projections and models made it clear they had to anticipate that the comet impact would inject a large amount of dust, gas, and water vapor into the atmosphere. Theory said the dust injection would be of benefit to the climate in the long run, an aid to the efforts to adjust the planetary greenhouse factor, but it also meant there would be a prolonged period of bad weather. The robots of Inferno had to prepare for this as well.

  There were dozens, hundreds, thousands of details to work out, contingencies to prepare for, scarce resources to be allocated between conflicting demands.

  Donald had made a status report to the governor three hours after commencing the job, as instructed, although there was not a great deal of new information at that time. Things were really just getting started.

  The job his master had given him was enormous in scope, enormous enough that Donald already convinced himself that the job was far beyond his capacity. It was obviously quite impossible for him to organize the entire planet for the comet impact all by himself. But his master, Governor Alvar Kresh, had to know that as well. Clearly, therefore, his orders required some interpretation. Donald would do the best he could for as long as required, but there would come a point where it would be counterproductive for Donald to run things, instead of handing the job to whatever combination of humans and robots were best suited to the job. But until the governor issued orders to that effect, Donald would tackle the job as best he could.
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  Indeed, the initial stages of the job were well within Donald’s capacities. Later there would be decisions to make that were beyond his scope, but for now he even had a little bit of extra capacity – enough to monitor the news channels, for example. That was a routine part of running a large-scale mobilization job like this one. One had to monitor all the uncontrollable variables that affected the situation. From the operations planning side of things, unfavorable news reports were as much an uncontrollable and unpredictable variable as bad weather or plagues or economic crashes. Nor was it just the news itself that mattered – the way in which was reported was equally important. The mood of the report, the things that were left in and left out, the match-up between the facts as reported and the facts as known to the project team – all of those mattered.

  And Donald was enough of a. student of human behavior to know that what he heard starting to be reported on the overnight news broadcast was far beyond his ability to judge. All he could know for sure was that it would have some effect, and a complicating one at that.

  So he did was any robot would do under the circumstances.

  He went looking for a human who could deal with the problem.

  Fredda Leving opened her eyes to see Donald’s calm and expressionless gaze looking down on her. She of all people should not have been unnerved by the sight. After all, she had built Donald, and she knew him as well as anyone else in her life. She knew how solid a protection the Three Laws were, and how utterly reliable Donald was in any event. But even so, it had been a long, hard day, and there was something distinctly unnerving about waking up to see a sky-blue robotic face staring down at one’s self. “Donald,” she said, her voice still heavy with sleep. “What is it?”

  “Dr. Leving, I have just monitored an audio channel news report from Inferno Networks concerning the incident today at Government Tower Plaza.”