by Isaac Asimov
They remained at opposite ends of the room, facing one another.
Baley said, “You don’t like this, do you, ma’am?”
Kiorissa shrugged. “Why should I like it? I’m not an animal. But I can stand it. You get pretty hardened, when you deal with–with”–she paused, and then her chin went up as though she had made up her mind to say what she had to say without mincing–” with children.” She pronounced the word with careful precision.
“You sound as though you don’t like the job you have.”
“It’s an important job. It must be done. Still, I don’t like it.”
“Did Pdkaine Delmarre like it?”
“I suppose he didn’t, but he never showed it. He was a good Solarian.”
“And he was finicky.”
Klorissa looked surprised.
Baley said, “You yourself said so. When we were viewing and I said you might dress in private, you said I was finicky like the boss.”
“Oh. Well, he was finicky. Even viewing he never took any liberties. Always proper.”
“Was that unusual?”
“It shouldn’t be. Ideally, you’re supposed to be proper, but no one ever is. Not when viewing. There’s no personal presence involved so why take any pains? You know? I don’t take pains when viewing, except with the boss. You had to be formal with him.”
“Did you admire Dr. Delmarre?”
“He was a good Solarian.”
Baley said, “You’ve called this place a farm and you’ve mentioned children. Do you bring up children here?”
“From the age of a month. Every fetus on Solaria comes here.”
“Fetus?”
“Yes.” She frowned. “We get them a month after conception. Does this embarrass you?”
“No,” Baley said shortly. “Can you show me around?”
“I can. But keep your distance.”
Baley’s long face took on a stony grimness as he looked down the length of the long room from above. There was glass between the room and themselves. On the other side, he was sure, was perfectly controlled heat, perfectly controlled humidity, perfectly controlled asepsis. Those tanks, row on row, each contained its little creature floating in a watery fluid of precise composition, infused with a nutrient mixture of ideal proportions. Life and growth went on.
Little things, some smaller than half his fist, curled on themselves, with bulging skulls and tiny budding limbs and vanishing tails.
Klorissa, from her position twenty feet away, said, “How do you like it, Plainclothesman?”
Baley said, “How many do you have?”
“As of this morning, one hundred and fifty-two. We receive fifteen to twenty each month and we graduate as many to independence.”
“Is this the only such institution on the planet?”
“That’s right. It’s enough to keep the population steady, counting on a life expectancy of three hundred years and a population of twenty thousand. This building is quite new. Dr. Delmarre supervised its construction and made many changes in our procedures. Our fetal death rate now is virtually zero.”
Robots threaded their way among the tanks. At each tank they stopped and checked controls in a tireless, meticulous way, looking in at the tiny embryos within.
“Who operates on the mother?” asked Baley. “I mean, to get the little things.”
“Doctors,” answered Klorissa.
“Dr. Delmarre?”
“Of course not. Medical doctors. You don’t think Dr. Delmarre would ever stoop to–Well, never mind.”
“Why can’t robots be used?”
“Robots in surgery? First Law makes that very difficult, Plainclothesman. A robot might perform an appendectomy to save a human life, if he knew how, but I doubt that he’d be usable after that without major repairs. Cutting human flesh would be quite a traumatic experience for a positronic brain. Human doctors can manage to get hardened to it. Even to the personal presence required.”
Baley said, “I notice that robots tend the fetuses, though. Do you and Dr. Delmarre ever interfere?”
“We have to, sometimes, when things go wrong. If a fetus has developmental trouble, for instance. Robots can’t be trusted to judge the situation accurately when human life is involved.”
Baley nodded. “Too much risk of a misjudgment and a life lost, I suppose.”
“Not at all. Too much risk of overvaluing a life and saving one improperly.” The woman looked stem. “As fetal engineers, Baley, we see to it that healthy children are born; healthy ones. Even the best gene analysis of parents can’t assure that all gene permutations and combinations will be favorable, to say nothing of the possibility of mutations. That’s our big concern, the unexpected mutation. We’ve got the rate of those down to less than one in a thousand, but that means that, on the average, once a decade, we have trouble.”
She motioned him along the balcony and he followed her.
She said, “I’ll show you the infants’ nurseries and the youngsters’ dormitories. They’re much more a problem than the fetuses are. With them, we can rely on robot labor only to a limited extent.”
“Why is that?”
“You would know, Baley, if you ever tried to teach a robot the importance of discipline. First Law makes them almost impervious to that fact. And don’t think youngsters don’t learn that about as soon as they can talk. I’ve seen a three-year-old holding a dozen robots motionless by yelling, ‘You’ll hurt me. I’m hurt.’ It takes an extremely advanced robot to understand that a child might be deliberately lying.”
“Could Delmarre handle the children?”
“Usually.”
“How did he do that? Did he get out among, them and shake sense into them?”
“Dr. Delmarre? Touch them? Skies above! Of course not! But he could talk to them. And he could give a robot specific orders. I’ve seen him viewing a child for fifteen minutes, and keeping a robot in spanking position all that time, getting it to spank-spank-spank. A few like that and the child would risk fooling with the boss no more. And the boss was skillful enough about it so that usually the robot didn’t need more than a routine readjustment afterward.”
“How about you? Do you get out among the children?”
“I’m afraid I have to sometimes. I’m not like the boss. Maybe someday I’ll be able to handle the long-distance stuff, but right now if I tried, I’d just ruin robots. There’s an art to handling robots really well, you know. When I think of it, though. Getting out among the children. Little animals!”
She looked back at him suddenly. “I suppose you wouldn’t mind seeing them.”
“It wouldn’t bother me.”
She shrugged and stared at him with amusement. “Earthman!”
She walked on again. “What’s all this about, anyway? You’ll have to end up with Gladia Delmarre as murderess. You’ll have to.”
“I’m not quite sure of that,” said Baley.
“How could you be anything else but sure? Who else could it possibly be?”
“There are possibilities, ma’am.”
“Who, for instance?”
“Well, you, for instance!”
And Klorissa’s reaction to that quite surprised Baley.
12: A Target Is Missed
SHE LAUGHED.
The laughter grew and fed on itself till she was gasping for breath and her plump face had reddened almost to purple. She leaned against the wall and gasped for breath.
“No, don’t come closer,” she begged. “I’m all right.”
Baley said gravely, “Is the possibility that humorous?”
She tried to answer and laughed again. Then, in a whisper, she said, “Oh, you are an Earthman? How could it ever be me?”
“You knew him well,” said Baley. “You knew his habits. You could have planned it.”
“And you think I would see him? That I would get close enough to bash him over the head with something? You just don’t know anything at all about it, Baley.”
Baley felt himself redden. “Why couldn’t you get close enough to him, ma’am. You’ve had practice–uh–mingling.”
“With the children.”
“One thing leads to another. You seem to be able to stand my presence.”
“At twenty feet,” she said contemptuously.
“I’ve just visited a man who nearly collapsed because he had to endure my presence for a while.”
Klorissa sobered and said, “A difference in degree.”
“I suggest that a difference in degree is all that is necessary. The habit of seeing children makes it possible to endure seeing Delmarre just long enough.”
“I would like to point out, Mr. Baley,” said Klorissa, no longer appearing the least amused, “that it doesn’t matter a speck what I can endure. Dr. Delmarre was the finicky one. He was almost as bad as Leebig himself. Almost. Even if I could endure seeing him, he would never endure seeing me. Mrs. Delmarre is the only one he could possibly have allowed within seeing distance.”
Baley said, “Who’s this Leebig you mentioned?”
Klorissa shrugged. “One of these odd genius types, if you know what I mean. He’s done work with the boss on robots.”
Baley checked that off mentally and returned to the matter at hand. He said, “It could also be said you had a motive.”
“What motive?”
“His death put you in charge of this establishment, gave you position.”
“You call that a motive? Skies above, who could want this position? Who on Solaria? This is a motive for keeping him alive. It’s a motive for hovering over him and protecting him. You’ll have to do better than that, Earthman.”
Baley scratched his neck uncertainly with one finger. He saw the justice of that.
Kiorissa said, “Did you notice my ring, Mr. Baley?”
For a moment it seemed she was about to strip the glove from her right hand, but she refrained.
“I noticed it,” said Baley.
“You don’t know its significance, I suppose?”
“I don’t.” (He would never have done with ignorance, he thought bitterly.)
“Do you mind a small lecture, then?”
“If it will help me make sense of this damned world,” blurted out Baley, “by all means.”
“Skies above!” Klorissa smiled. “I suppose we seem to you as Earth would seem to us. Imagine. Say, here’s an empty chamber. Come in here and we’ll sit down–no, the room’s not big enough. Tell you what, though. You take a seat in there and I’ll stand out here.”
She stepped farther down the corridor, giving him space to enter the room, then returned, taking up her stand against the opposite wall at a point from which she could see him.
Baley took his seat with only the slightest quiver of chivalry countering it. He thought rebelliously: Why not? Let the Spacer woman stand.
Klorissa folded her muscular arms across her chest and said, “Gene analysis is the key to our society. We don’t analyze for genes directly, of course. Each gene, however, governs one enzyme, and we can analyze for enzymes. Know the enzymes, know the body chemistry. Know the body chemistry, know the human being. You see all that?”
“I understand the theory,” said Baley. “I don’t know how it’s applied.”
“That part’s done here. Blood samples are taken while the infant is still in the late fetal stage. That gives us our rough first approximation. Ideally, we should catch all mutations at that point and judge whether birth can be risked. In actual fact, we still don’t quite know enough to eliminate all possibility of mistake. Someday, maybe. Anyway, we continue testing after birth; biopsies as well as body fluids. In any case, long before adulthood, we know exactly what our little boys and girls are made of.”
(Sugar and spice... A nonsense phrase went unbidden through Baley’s mind.)
“We wear coded rings to indicate our gene constitution,” said Klorissa. “It’s an old custom, a bit of the primitive left behind from the days when Solarians had not yet been weeded eugenically. Nowadays, we’re all healthy.”
Baley said, “But you still wear yours. Why?”
“Because I’m exceptional,” she said with an unembarrassed, unblunted pride. “Dr. Delmarre spent a long time searching for an assistant. He needed someone exceptional. Brains, ingenuity, industry, stability. Most of all, stability. Someone who could learn to mingle with children and not break down.”
“He couldn’t, could he? Was that a measure of his instability?”
Kiorissa said, “In a way, it was, but at least it was a desirable type of instability under most circumstances. You wash your hands, don’t you?”
Baley’s eyes dropped to his hands. They were as clean as need be. “Yes,” he said.
“All right. I suppose it’s a measure of instability to feel such revulsion at dirty hands as to be unable to clean an oily mechanism by hand even in an emergency. Still, in the ordinary course of living, the revulsion keeps you clean, which is good.”
“I see. Go ahead.”
“There’s nothing more. My genic health is the third-highest ever recorded on Solaria, so I wear my ring. It’s a record I enjoy carrying with me.”
“I congratulate you.”
“You needn’t sneer. It may not be my doing. It may be the blind permutation of parental genes, but it’s a proud thing to own, anyway. And no one would believe me capable of so seriously psychotic an act as murder. Not with my gene make-up. So don’t waste accusations on me.”
Baley shrugged and said nothing. The woman seemed to confuse gene make-up and evidence and presumably the rest of Solaria would do the same.
Kiorissa said, “Do you want to see the youngsters now?”
“Thank you. Yes.”
The corridors seemed to go on forever. The building was obviously a tremendous one. Nothing like the huge banks of apartments in the Cities of Earth, of course, but for a single building clinging to the outside skin of a planet it must be a mountainous structure.
There were hundreds of cribs, with pink babies squalling, or sleeping, or feeding. Then there were play rooms for the crawlers.
“They’re not too bad even at this age,” said Klorissa grudgingly, “though they take up a tremendous sum of robots. It’s practically a robot per baby till walking age.”
“Why is that?”
“They sicken if they don’t get individual attention.”
Baley nodded. “Yes, I suppose the requirement for affection is something that can’t be done away with.”
Klorissa frowned and said brusquely, “Babies require attention.”
Baley said, “I am a little surprised that robots can fulfill the need for affection.”
She whirled toward him, the distance between them not sufficing to hide her displeasure. “See here, Baley, if you’re trying to shock me by using unpleasant terms, you won’t succeed. Skies above, don’t be childish.”
“Shock you?”
“I can use the word too. Affection! Do you want a short word, a good four-letter word. I can say that, too. Love! Love! Now if it’s out of your system, behave yourself.”
Baley did not trouble to dispute the matter of obscenity. He said, “Can robots really give the necessary attention, then?”
“Obviously, or this farm would not be the success it is. They fool with the child. They nuzzle it and snuggle it. The child doesn’t care that it’s only a robot. But then, things grow more difficult between three and ten.”
“Oh?”
“During that interval, the children insist on playing with one another. Quite indiscriminately.”
“I take it you let them.”
“We have to, but we never forget our obligation to teach them the requirements of adulthood. Each has a separate room that can be closed off. Even from the first, they must sleep alone. We insist on that. And then we have an isolation time every day and that increases with the years. By the time a child reaches ten, he is able to restrict himself to viewing for a week at a time. Of course, the viewi
ng arrangements are elaborate. They can view outdoors, under mobile conditions, and can keep it up all day.”
Baley said, “I’m surprised you can counter an instinct so thoroughly. You do counter it; I see that. Still, it surprises me.”
“What instinct?” demanded Klorissa.
“The instinct of gregariousness. There is one. You say yourself that as children they insist on playing with each other.”
Klorissa shrugged. “Do you call that instinct? But then, what if it is? Skies above, a child has an instinctive fear of falling, but adults can be trained to work in high places even where there is constant danger of falling. Haven’t you ever seen gymnastic exhibitions on high wires? There are some worlds where people live in tall buildings. And children have instinctive fear of loud noises, too, but are you afraid of them?”
“Not within reason,” said Baley.
“I’m willing to bet that Earth people couldn’t sleep if things were really quiet. Skies above, there isn’t an instinct around that can’t give way to a good, persistent education. Not in human beings, where instincts are weak anyway. In fact, if you go about it right, education gets easier with each generation. It’s a matter of evolution.”
Baley said, “How is that?”
“Don’t you see? Each individual repeats his own evolutionary history as he develops. Those fetuses back there have gills and a tail for a time. Can’t skip those steps. The youngster has to go through the social-animal stage in the same way. But just as a fetus can get through in one month a stage that evolution took a hundred million years to get through, so our children can hurry through the social animal stage. Dr. Delmarre was of the opinion that with the generations, we’d get through that stage faster and faster.”
“Is that so?”
“In three thousand years, he estimated, at the present rate of progress, we’d have children who’d take to viewing at once. The boss had other notions, too. He was interested in improving robots to the point of making them capable of disciplining children without becoming mentally unstable. Why not? Discipline today for a better life tomorrow is a true expression of First Law if robots could only be made to see it.”
