Asimov’s Future History Volume 7

by Isaac Asimov

  “Very generous of ‘u,” Wolruf growled, “but there’s a better solution.”

  “What is it?” Derec asked eagerly.

  “Shorten the trip.”

  “Shorten how? We still — oh! Do it all in one jump.”

  “We’ve got three jumps left,” protested Avery. “You’re suggesting we triple our distance? I’d call that an extreme risk as well.”

  Wolruf shook her furry head. “Not triple. Cut it to two jumps, each one and a ‘alf times normal. Seven and a ‘alf light-years instead of five. Save a day and a ‘alf coasting time between jump points. Not that dangerous; trader ships do it all the time.”

  “There may not be a jump point exactly in between.”

  “So we go eight and seven, or nine and six. Still not risky.”

  “How risky is not risky? Let’s put some numbers on it. How many trader ships get into trouble with long jumps?”

  “Almost nobody gets ‘urt from it. Maybe one in twenty goes astray, has to spend extra time getting’ ome.”

  “Which would kill all of us.”

  Derec said to Avery,” A minute ago you said a ten percent chance of success wasn’t good enough for you. Fine, I’ll grant that. But one in twenty odds is ninety-five percent in our favor! That’s an acceptable risk.”

  “I agree,” said Ariel.

  Avery pursed his lips in concentration, considering it. Now he drummed his fingers 01.1 the tabletop.

  “Now’s the time to decide whether you’re cured or not,” Ariel added. “Can you make a personal sacrifice for someone else or do you still think only of yourself?”

  “Your psychology is charmingly simplistic,” Avery said. He drummed a moment longer. “But unfortunately, it’s still correct. The risk seems slight. common decency seems to dictate that we take it.”

  Wolruf let out a long-held breath.

  “You’d better get to it,” Derec told her. “The robots are bound to realize what we’re doing behind their backs before long, and as soon as they do, they’re going to try to stop you.”

  “I’m going,” Wolruf said, rising from her chair and rushing for the control room.

  They were lucky the ship had been coasting all day toward a jump point, lucky they hadn’t already gone through it. If they had had to wait another day to carry out their plan, they would never have gotten away with it. As it was, Wolruf had only been gone a few minutes before the robots burst back into the room, all four cycling together through the mutable airlock that had once been a simple door.

  Seeing the empty chair where Wolruf had been, Lucius became a blur of motion streaking toward the control room. “No!” he shouted. “You must not risk —”

  There was a faint twisting sensation as every atom in the ship was tom asunder and rebuilt light-years away.

  “Too late,” Derec said.

  The robot skidded to a confused stop. “You... tricked us,” Lucius accused.

  Avery let out the most sincere laugh Derec had ever heard him laugh. It went on and on in great peals of mirth, and when he finally calmed down enough to speak, he said, “Get used to it. To quote a famous dead scientist, ‘Old age and treachery will always overcome youth and innocence.”

  Chapter 6

  SHATTERED DREAMS

  WOLRUF, REALIZING THAT the robots would not give her a second chance, had made the first jump a long one. The second one would thus be only a light-year or so longer than originally planned, well within the safety margin of a normal flight. When presented with such a fait accompli, the robots could only agree that it had, after all, worked out to everyone’s benefit to take the risk.

  “But what if you had strayed off course?” Lucius asked once things had settled down somewhat. He was standing in the doorway to the control room, Derec by his side. Wolruf still sat in the pilot’s chair, watching as the autopilot made the routine post-jump scans for planets or other objects in the ship’s path.

  “Then we’d have tried to correct for it on our next jump,” Wolruf replied.

  “But what if you weren’t able to?”

  When Wolruf didn’t respond immediately, Derec, sensing her embarrassment, answered for her. “Then we would all have died.”

  Lucius had great difficulty with that statement, even presented as it was so calmly after the danger was over. His features lost their clarity, and he had to hold onto the doorjamb for support.

  “You would have died. This does not distress you?”

  “No more than losing a friend and knowing I could have done something to save her.”

  “But... she is not human. Is she?”

  “That depends on your definition. But it doesn’t matter. She’s a friend.”

  Wolruf looked up, grinned, and looked back to her monitors. Lucius pondered Derec’s statement for a moment, then asked, “Is Mandelbrot your friend as well?”

  That had come out of nowhere, but it was easy enough to answer. “Yes, he is,” Derec said. “Why?”

  “You risked the lives of everyone on board the ship when you rescued him. You did not know that the engines were safe to use, yet you used them anyway. Did you do that because Mandelbrot was your friend?”

  Derec nodded. “Wolruf did the piloting, and she was using the attitude jets, but I would have done the same thing and used the main engines if I had to. And yes, I’d have done it because Mandelbrot is my friend.”

  “Even though he is not human.”

  “Again, it doesn’t matter.”

  Lucius’s features blurred still more, then suddenly returned to normal, or at least to clarity. Under the influence of both Derec’s and Wolruf’s presences, he took on the appearance of a werewolf caught in the act of changing from one form to the other.

  He spoke with sudden animation. “Then I believe I have made a fundamental breakthrough in understanding the Laws of Humanics” ‘

  “What breakthrough is that?”

  “If I provisionally regard Wolruf as human, at least in her motivations, then I believe I can state the First Law of Humanics as follows: A human may not harm a friend, or through inaction allow a friend to come to harm.”

  Derec was tempted to be flip about it, to say, “That leaves Avery out then, doesn’t it?” but the robot’s sincerity stopped him. And in truth, Avery hadn’t been happy about spacing Wolruf, nor, come to think of it, did Avery even consider Wolruf a friend anyway. Derec doubted if he considered anyone a friend.

  He shook his head. “I can’t refute it. It’s as good a guiding principle as any I’ve heard yet.”

  Lucius nodded. “If, as you say, friendship can occur between human and robot, then I believe the law applies to robots as well.”

  “It probably should,” Derec admitted. In fact, it already must to a certain extent, or the Robot City central computer would never have allowed him to cancel Avery’s order concerning the hunters when Lucius and the others were trying to make their escape. Now that was an interesting development in Avery, s robot society experiment: The robots had independently developed a sense of social responsibility. Lucius had not invented it with his law; he had only discovered its existence.

  But that was evidently exciting enough in itself. “I must go tell the others,” Lucius said, then turned and hurried away toward the common area.

  Wolruf leaned back in her chair, crossed her arms over her barrel chest, and asked, “Does this mean I ‘ave to make friends with all of them now?”

  Derec, watching the retreating werewolf, said, “It probably wouldn’t hurt.”

  The landing on Ceremya was smooth, so smooth that Derec didn’t even wake up until well after they were on the ground. He had been spending most of his time asleep, at first to conserve oxygen, but by the second day without a recycler, his motive was more to escape the foul odors building up in the air. And hunger. While asleep he was aware of neither. What woke him now was the sudden fresh smell of plant-scrubbed atmosphere filtering in through the open door.

  He gently shook Ariel awake. “We’re t
here.”

  “Mmm?”

  “Clean air! Breathe deep.” He rolled out of bed, dressed quickly, and headed for the hatch.

  He found Wolruf already outside and Mandelbrot as well. The ship had landed at a spaceport almost identical to the one from which they had taken off nearly a week ago. Derec wouldn’t have been able to tell it from the original save that this one was at the end of a long arm of building-material pavement reaching out from the edge of the city instead of surrounded by it, and the sky here was a subtly different shade than that over the original Robot City.

  That wasn’t the way it should have been. The last time he had been here — the only time, before this — the city had been under a dome, a force dome dark as night with a single wedge-shaped slit in it. The Ceremyons had been about to enclose it completely, but Ariel had made an agreement with them to leave the city as it was if Derec stopped its growth and turned the robots into farmers for them. He had done that, but now it looked as if all his changes had been undone. The dome was gone and the city before him was bustling with robots again, and none of them looked like farmers.

  “What happened?” he asked softly.

  “They left before you awoke,” Mandelbrot said. “I was unable to stop them.”

  “Who? What are you talking about?”

  “The experimental robots. They are gone.”

  “Oh. I wasn’t talking about — gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they say where they were going?”

  “No, they did not.”

  Wolruf said, “I came outside just in time to see them all grow wings and fly off that way.” She pointed toward a line of hills in the distance, above which Derec could see a horde of tiny dark specks: the Ceremyons. The dominant lifeforms on the planet were night-black, balloon-shaped things with bat wings, electrically powered organic beings that converted solar energy or thermal gradients into electricity, with which they powered their bodies as well as electrolyzed water for the hydrogen that gave them lift. They spent their days in the air and their nights tethered to trees, and as far as Derec knew they spent all the time — day or night — thinking. Philosophers all, and the robots had come here to philosophize with them.

  Small wonder they had gone off to do so at their first opportunity. Their duty to the humans over once they had delivered them safely to the city, they had taken off before they could be ordered to do something else that interfered with their wishes.

  On a hunch, Derec sent via comlink, Adam, Eve, Lucius. Answer me.

  He got no reply, which was just what he expected. Still under Avery’s orders not to use their comlinks among themselves, they had shut them off entirely.

  He shrugged. “Let them go. They’ll come back when they’re ready.” Until then Derec had other things to do, like figure out what had happened to his careful modifications to the city.

  Ariel came down the ramp, shaking her head and tugging at her hair with a brush. “I vote we go find us a shower,” she said vehemently.

  “Food first, then shower,” Avery said from behind her. He stepped carefully down the ramp, holding onto the railing for support. Three and a half days without food was probably longer than he had ever fasted before, and his unsteadiness showed it.

  Mandelbrot went to his side at once and helped him the rest of the way down to the paved ground. A row of transport booths waited patiently beside the terminal building, only a few paces away, and Mandelbrot led the way toward them without waiting to be ordered.

  Another booth came out of the city, moving down the center of the road toward them. It arrived just as they reached the other booths, and a golden-hued robot stepped out of it. Derec recognized the robot immediately by its color and the distinctive markings on its chest and shoulders. He had dealt with this particular robot before, and one of his predecessors before that. This was a supervisor, one of the seven charged with keeping the city functioning smoothly.

  “Wohler-9!” he said.

  “Master Derec,” Wohler-9 replied. “Welcome back. We were not aware that you were returning.”

  “We almost didn’t. We had a fire on the ship and lost our recycler. We just barely made it.”

  “I am glad that you are safe. The entire city is glad and eager to serve you. What do you require?”

  “Is our apartment still here?”

  “It is being re-created at this moment.”

  “Modify it for three bedrooms. Personals in all three. We’re all staying together.” Derec indicated with a nod Ariel and Wolruf and Dr. Avery.

  Wohler-9 was obviously surprised to see Avery in their midst, but he said only, “It is being done.”

  Ariel broke in. “What happened to the changes we made when we were here before?”

  “That programming was eliminated.”

  “I gathered that. Why?”

  “We do not know.”

  “Who did it?”

  “The beings you call Ceremyons.”

  Derec shook his head. “Evidently they didn’t like robot farmers any better than they did robot cities.”

  “Not surprising,” Wolruf put in. “They’re finicky creatures for all their high-powered thinking.”

  Derec could certainly agree with that. But why they would return the city to its original state rather than modify it further to suit their needs was beyond him. He said so.

  “Let’s worry about it after dinner,” Avery said, climbing into a transport booth.

  “If you do not require my services at your apartment, I will stay and direct the repairs to your ship,” said Wohler-9.

  “Good enough,” Derec said. He got into a booth of his own, directed it and the others to the apartment, and relaxed for the ride.

  A hot shower and a hot meal restored all four of them to near normal, though the meal was not what any of them had hoped for. Wohler-9 had alerted the city’s medical robots that the humans were nearly starved, and the medical robots were waiting for them at the apartment. They allowed them only tiny portions, claiming that overeating after a prolonged fast was dangerous. Worse, they insisted on complete checkups immediately after dinner, and no amount of protests would counter their First Law demand. So, within an hour of arriving on the planet, all four travelers found themselves flat on their backs on examining tables while diagnostic equipment clicked and whirred and scanned them for potential problems.

  The robots finished with Avery first. “You may sit up,” his robot said to him. Derec looked over and saw it hand him a glass with nearly a liter of clear liquid in it. “Drink this.”

  “What is it?”

  “An electrolyte mixture. You are unbalanced.”

  “We knew that,” Derec said with a chuckle.

  “Funny.” Avery set the glass to his lips, sipped from it, and made a sour face. “Thought so,” he muttered, then tipped the glass back and bolted the rest of its contents without tasting.

  “Hold still, please,” the robot working on Derec said to him. “I am trying to make a high-resolution, high-density scan.” It moved his head back upright until he was staring at the ceiling again. One of its instruments hummed for a few seconds, and a few seconds after that the robot said, “You seem to have tiny metallic granules all through your body.”

  “They’re chemfets,” Derec said. “Self-replicating Robot City cellular material. They’re normal.”

  “Surely not in a human.”

  “They are in me.”

  “How can that be so?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I would like to hear it, please,” the robot said. It folded its arms over its chest in a gesture so like a human doctor that Derec couldn’t help laughing. That little detail had so obviously been included in its programming that Derec wondered if it was taught intentionally to human medical students as well.

  He shook his head and sat up. “Later. Is anything else wrong?”

  “Your electrolytes are unbalanced as well.” The robot pushed a sequence of buttons on what had
to be an automat for medicines, and took from the hopper a liquid-filled glass like the one Avery had just downed. Derec took it and followed Avery’s example, bolting it down without tasting.

  He looked over to see how the robots were doing with Ariel and Wolruf. At first they had not intended to examine Wolruf, since the original programming to which they had been returned did not include her in their definition of human, but Derec had sent an order to the central computer that all city robots were to consider her human as well, with the result that she, too, had a medical robot puzzling over her monitors, wondering what constituted normal in an alien of her particular biology.

  Another robot hovered nervously about Ariel.

  Derec felt a sharp stab of worry, but it vanished almost immediately. He laughed. “What’s the matter, didn’t she tell you she was pregnant?”

  “I ascertained that,” the robot said. “However...” It hesitated, looking to Ariel and back to Derec as if wondering which of them to address. At last it decided upon Ariel. “However, there seems to be a problem with the embryo.”

  “What!” Derec rushed to Ariel’s side, grasped her hand, and looked up at the monitor over her head. It showed a curved, wrinkled object with a dark streak along one side and tiny projections emerging from the other. It had to be the embryo, but to Derec it just looked like a blob on a screen.

  “What problem?” Ariel asked the robot.

  “It is developing abnormally. From its appearance it seems to have been developing abnormally for some time, so I do not believe it to be an effect of your recent experience, but rather an inherent genetic problem.”

  “How can that be?” Derec demanded. Genetic defects were practically unheard of in Aurorans. He and Ariel both came from pure Auroran stock, as had every person born on the planet since the original colonization from Earth centuries before — colonization by the genetically cleanest the planet had to offer. There hadn’t been many colonists; it was a small gene pool, but it had been selected carefully. And it had been guarded carefully ever since. There were no genetic defects on Aurora.