by Isaac Asimov
And now all he could do was pray that Units Dum and Dee were less fallible than the humans who had built them.
SIMCOR BEDDLE STARED in terror at the cargo roller. “I—I can’t get in that thing again,” he said. “I woke up inside it. I thought I had died. I thought I was in my own coffin.”
“You were mistaken,” said Caliban. “Get in. Now.”
“But I can’t.”
“Then you will die. And die alone. I wish to survive this day. To do so I must leave now, with or without you.”
Simcor Beddle looked wide-eyed at Caliban, swallowed hard, and climbed into the roller. Caliban slammed the lid down with a trifle more force than was strictly necessary, checked to make sure the seal clamps had engaged, and pulled the roller into the airlock.
GUBBER ANSHAW PAUSED before he headed into the shelters set up in the tunnels below the city of Hades.
“GET TO SHELTER. GET TO SHELTER. GET TO SHELTER.” The mechanical voice blared its message over and over, the words echoing down the fast-emptying streets of Hades. Everywhere, robots were urging people down into specially reinforced sections of the city’s underground tunnel system. The initial impacts would scarce be felt here, halfway round the world, but there would be several hours of significant danger from secondary debris, rock and rubble thrown up by the comet crash that would land halfway round the world. After that would come comet-spawned storms, clouds of choking dust, chaotic weather of all sorts. If all went well, that was.
If things did not go well… but that was a line of thought Gubber chose not to consider. He looked to Tonya, standing at his side. She had done little but think about it. Gubber did not envy her the nightmares she had endured as a consequence. Now it was time to wait it out. They could have gone to the underground expanses of Settlertown, of course. But this was a time to be with the people of the city, not to be cut off and hidden away in one’s own private warren. Many Settlers had chosen to take shelter in the tunnels of Hades.
Gubber looked up into the sky. Comet Grieg was not visible from here, but there was more to see than that. This was the last they would see of Hades as it had been. By the time they all emerged, Hades would stand on a new world, on a new Inferno, a world that would be changed beyond all recognition, a world in the act of evolving toward new hope—or collapsing altogether.
“Come along, Tonya,” Gubber said to her. “It’s time to go.”
Tonya followed him down into the shelter. Gubber led the way, wondering what the new world of Inferno would be like.
WITH ONE FINAL effort, Caliban hauled the cargo roller up out of the water. It had taken far longer than he had expected to pull the clumsy thing across the lake bed. Then he popped the seal clamps and threw back the lid. Simcor Beddle scrambled out of the roller far more eagerly than he had climbed in, his breath coming in racking gasps that seemed to convulse his whole body. Perhaps the breathing mask had been low on air. Perhaps Beddle was claustrophobic. Perhaps he was in such appallingly poor shape that merely climbing out of the roller exhausted him. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now, except getting away. The only question was how.
Caliban was by no means certain that the aircar he had stolen from the Ironhead motor pool had enough speed to get them clear of the impact area in time. They would have to be several hundred, if not thousand, kilometers clear of the impact zone before they were safe. Even then, they would have to land and find some sort of shelter. Caliban had no desire to pilot an aircar while a massive supersonic shockwave was tearing through the sky. Anything in the air that was not torn apart would undoubtedly lose control and crash. So how to—
“Sweet burning stars!” Beddle cried out. Caliban looked at him, and saw that he was looking straight up, into the early night sky.
Caliban looked up as well—and found himself torn between absolute wonder and utter terror. There it was, directly overhead: the first, the largest fragment, a fat dot of light growing visibly larger even as he watched. And there, behind it, like beads on a string, haloed in a faint nimbus of dust, the other fragments, trailing off like beads on a string toward the north. There was a flash of light, and Caliban could see the farthest-off fragment break into two as another set of splitting charges went off.
Time was not short. Time was gone. And there was no way to escape before those wondrous terrors in the sky came down.
But wait a moment. Prospero. Prospero had to have been planning to cut it nearly this close. He would have stayed until the last possible moment, in order to gloat over his victim, and to make certain that Beddle had no chance at all to escape.
Prospero’s aircar. He would have flown in on something that would give him a chance to escape. “Come on,” he said to Beddle, and grabbed him, none too gently, by the collar.
He hurried Beddle along and practically threw him into Prospero’s aircar. It was a small, trim, two-seater job. Caliban sat down at the pilot’s controls—and suddenly understood how Prospero had planned to get away. This aircar was capable of reaching orbit.
“Strap yourself in,” Caliban said as he powered up the craft.
Beddle fumbled with the straps, and had to try two or three times before he managed to get the buckles to hook up. Perhaps it was the first time Beddle had ever put on his own seatbelt. “Ready,” the human said nervously.
Caliban made no reply. He brought the aircar up to hover power, taxied it out from under the camouflaged roof of the hangar, and kept moving forward until they were over the lake itself, the hover effect throwing up a shimmering mist of water that enveloped the car. Caliban lifted the car just enough higher so as to get above the hover mist, and look about at the landscape that was about to die. In a few minutes, all of this would be erased for all time. He and Simcor Beddle would be the last beings ever to look upon it.
Caliban lingered a moment longer, and moved the throttle forward, pointing the nose of the aircar up and to the east.
The east, thought Caliban as he guided the aircar toward the hope of safety. East. Home of the dawn, and new beginnings. He wondered if he would live long enough to see another sunrise.
“ALL FRAGMENTS ON course,” Unit Dum announced. “All fragments are descending well within their intended parameters. The operation is proceeding according to plan. Impact of the first fragment in five minutes, twenty-two seconds.”
Fredda Leving felt her heart pounding, her mouth going dry. They were going to do it. They were actually going to do it. This mad idea had moved from improbable theory to undeniable fact. They were about to drop a comet on their own world. She found herself amazed by the boldness, the courage, the desperate willingness to try something—anything—in order to save the planet. It was not the sort of action the universe expected out of the Spacers. It was not the sort of thing Spacers would ever do.
And it suddenly occurred to Fredda that perhaps they were not Spacers anymore. The world of Inferno was about to change beyond recognition. Perhaps the people of that world were going to change as well.
And that thought inspired a most un-Spacerlike reaction in Fredda. Spacers were supposed to be cautious, conservative, and frightened of change. But the thought of change did not scare Fredda. It excited her. She was impatient for it. She glanced at the countdown clock and decided she wanted the next five minutes and ten seconds to pass as quickly as possible.
She couldn’t wait for the future to get there.
DOWN THEY CAME, streaking in toward the planet at impossible speed. Twelve of them, moving in unison, in concert, like beads on a string, spread out on a north-south line, moving through the dark and the silence and their destiny.
The first fragment reached the upper limit of the atmosphere, and suddenly the time for dark and silence was over. The comet fragment struck the upper air at close to double orbital velocity, and all at once the forward surface of the fragment was aglow with the fires of immolation. Down thundered the massive piece of sky, a blazing torch that tore a hole in the atmosphere, smashing a column of superheated air out of
its way as it hurtled toward the ground.
At the speeds the fragment was traveling, it took all of ten seconds for it to traverse the atmosphere. But before it could strike the ground, the second fragment slammed into the atmosphere, ramming through the massive shock wave produced by the first. The second fragment screamed groundward at a slightly more oblique angle, and thus had further to move through thicker air. The first fragment struck the ground just as the second was midway through its atmospheric transit, and just as the third was striking upper air.
Atmospheric contact had induced a massive energy release of light and heat, but the violence of hard-surface impact made what had come before seem utterly trivial by comparison. The first fragment slammed into the ground with incredible force, smashing the surface out of existence as it blasted apart into a million, a billion pieces, shards of rock and ice and steam dust roaring outward at supersonic velocity.
The second fragment struck with equal destructiveness, and the third, and the fourth, one after another, twelve massive hammers wielded by some forgotten god of war. It was a rain of stone and ice and fire that marched steadily north across Terra Grande from the shores of the Southern Ocean to the borderlands of the Polar Depression.
The last fragment smashed into the southernmost edge of Inferno’s inconsequential northern icecap, and suddenly the polar sky was a thunderclap of steam and smoke and fire, ice that did not have time to melt before it flashed away into superheated steam. Sea water thrown up by the first impact on the shores of the Southern Ocean splashed down onto the steaming maelstrom of the Polar Depression, even as shards of icecap that had survived the initial impact dropped into the depths of the Southern Ocean. Water from the south reached the north, and vice versa. As a dozen massive new craters glowed in angry red, belching fire into the sky, touching off fires and wreaking havoc on the land, the new water circulation pattern had already begun.
The fires blazed as brightly as any in the Hell that had given this world its name. But some fires light the way to hope, and for the planet of Inferno, the future had finally begun.
22
“WHY?” ASKED SIMCOR Beddle, and Caliban did not have to ask him to explain the question. He knew what the man wanted to know.
The aircar moved through space, traveling in a synchronous orbit of the planet. Down below, twelve angry red wounds on the planet were beginning to cool, their color fading away. Neither man nor robot could tear his eyes away from the incredible and terrifying sight.
“I did not save you for your own sake,” said Caliban. “Nor simply because you are a human. I came after you for the reasons I explained in front of Prospero. Sooner or later, others would have deduced what I deduced: that a mad New Law robot had found a loophole in the New Laws, and invented a way to kill humans. There would not have been a New Law robot left alive thirty hours later, and I expect there would have been attempts on my life as well. The news of what Prospero attempted will still get out, of course—but you are not dead, while the mad robot in question is.”
“But there was that moment,” Beddle protested. “I admit that I was not thinking clearly at the time, but there was that moment when Prospero suddenly presented the situation as a choice between the two of us, between Prospero and myself. You chose me. Why? Why did you choose a human enemy over a robot friend? You could have killed me without any risk of legal detection. Why didn’t you?”
“It was clear that I could not bring both of you out alive. I did not wish to kill you both. I am no butcher. I had to choose. But there was not much to choose between the two of you,” Caliban said. “I don’t believe that Prospero actually could have survived if you had died through his actions, in any event. Even the New First Law would have imposed fatal stress. It was a severe strain for him to believe that he was not violating the New First Law. If he had actually accomplished his goal, I believe the strain would have been too much. He would have gone utterly mad and died. But that was almost incidental. You are quite right. When Prospero framed it as a choice between the two of you, I had to have some basis for choosing, some criterion. And then I thought of the robots, Three-Law and New Law, that Prospero had killed for no greater crime than simply getting in his way. That is what decided me.”
“I see,” said Beddle. He hesitated for a moment. “I am about to speak with more frankness than wisdom, I suppose, but be that as it may. I have to understand this. It has to make sense to me now, today. Otherwise some part of me will spend the rest of time wondering why Caliban, the No Law robot, didn’t kill me when he had the chance. Surely you must know that I have destroyed robots many times, whenever it suited my convenience. So what difference is there?”
“A slender one,” said Caliban, “a difference so slight it is barely there. You were willing to kill robots, and he was willing to kill humans. That was a rough balance of evil. But Prospero was willing to kill robots, even New Law robots, his own kind, for gain. It was humans like you who showed him that society did not really care if robots were killed capriciously. He learned his lesson well, and committed many awful crimes against robots. There is no doubt about that. You bear some responsibility for that. But what it finally came down to was this: I had no evidence that you were willing to slaughter humans for gain.”
Simcor Beddle turned and looked at Caliban, his face silhouetted by the fires burning on Inferno. Caliban had judged him to be marginally less loathsome, and as having slightly more right to live, than a mass murderer who would probably have died anyway. And yet Caliban had gone to great lengths, and taken great risks, in order to save him.
A thought came to Simcor Beddle, a very humbling one in some ways, and yet, strangely enough, one that filled him with pride.
Caliban was not willing to admit it to the likes of Simcor Beddle, but surely his actions said, quite loudly and clearly, that Caliban had learned, somewhere along the line, that the life of a human being—even an enemy human being—had value. Tremendous value.
Perhaps, he thought, that was the message everyone was supposed to read into the original Three Laws of Robotics.
Epilogue
FREDDA LEVING LOOKED out the window of the Winter Residence, and smiled at the miserable drenching rain outside. The weather had been downright awful for months now, allover the planet, ever since Comet Grieg had struck. But the chaotic weather would pass. Everyone from Units Dee and Dum on down was pleased with the climatic behavior of the planet. It might mean sloppy weather in many inhabited areas for now, but every projection showed that the climate would emerge from the post-impact phase in better shape than it had been before. Even Unit Dee, who had come through her First Law crisis in good shape, was very positive. Now that she knew the world was real, Dee took a slightly different attitude toward things. But the main thing was, she confirmed the long-term climate was going to get better. Much better.
It would be some time yet before the final, relatively minor reworking of the twelve craters was complete. Once the crater walls were properly breached, the craters would flood, and Twelve Crater Channel would let the waters of the Southern, Ocean in to flood the Polar Depression, and form, at long last, the Polar Sea. Or perhaps they would name it Kresh Channel, and Grieg’s Sea.
Fredda smiled. Well, if they did, no one would ever be able to prove she had been the one behind the letter-writing campaign.
At least there wouldn’t be a Beddle Bay, or any such, now or in the future. Beddle the man might still be alive, but Beddle the politician was dead as yesterday. The unveiling of Gildern’s plot against the New Law robots had wrecked the Ironhead movement.
In another time, the plot as revealed would not have mattered so much. But the revelation had come at the very time when the New Laws, led by Caliban, had set themselves to work with a will to assist the human evacuees, to repair and refurbish and rebuild their world, all free of charge.
The New Laws had bought themselves tremendous goodwill by their generous aid to their neighbors. The monsters portrayed by the Ironheads tu
rned out to be helpful and useful, if frequently irritating, members of society. With its straw man knocked down, the Ironhead organization was rapidly decaying back into what it had been when it had started out: a politically irrelevant gang of thugs and plug-uglies.
But the New Law robots. Fredda had finally come to the unmistakable conclusion that their creation had been a mistake. She had put together all sods of fine, noble-sounding reasons for what she had built, but the plain fact was that they did not fit into the real-life world very well. The universe had no need, and no place, for being trapped forever between slavehood and freedom.
Of course, it was far too late to undo what she had done. She had no more right to wipe them all out than Simcor Beddle. But she could at least limit the damage. She could see to it that no more New Laws were made, that the ones now in existence were not replaced as they wore out or malfunctioned.
Which brought her to the subject of the Three-Law robots. For Fredda Leving had concluded that they, too, were a mistake. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they were a mistake now. They had served humanity well, but their time had passed, or would pass soon. The good they could do human beings could no longer make up for the damage they did to the human spirit.
Ultimately, robots wanted humans to be safe. The best way to make humans safe almost always came down to keeping things the same, to making tomorrow as much like yesterday as possible. But that which did not change could not grow, and that which could not grow would inevitably weaken, decay, and die. Fredda remembered reading somewhere, in some ancient pre-spaceflight text, that slavery destroyed the lives of the slaves and the souls of the masters. With every day that passed, she found new reasons to believe the saying to be true.
