Asimov's Future History Volume 5

by Isaac Asimov

  Though he knew what he hoped would happen from that point onward, Derec stopped there. Verbal instruction-in-advance was a tricky enough matter, requiring the skills of a semanticist with the foresight of a seer. He did not wish to saddle the robot with excessively specific and possibly useless orders.

  Much work and intelligence had gone into designing the PD library cube. Derec would have to trust that, when the time came, Alpha would grasp the situation and do what was required.

  Chapter 12

  MUTINY

  DESPITE HOW LITTLE of the night was left when Derec was done, he slept well and awoke rested, with his head clear and his spirits up. He began clearing one end of the room as though to make a stage, determined to put on a good show. Presently, Aranimas arrived with Wolruf in tow.

  Derec did not have a Handbook of Robotics with its extensive diagnostic interrogatory, but he knew the main lines of questioning used to test the various positronic functions.

  “If the daughter of a woman with red hair owns two dogs and the father of a boy with a broken leg is unemployed, what day does the barber give shaves?”

  Wolruf hooted at that one, and Aranimas looked puzzled. But the robot calmly answered, “It is not possible to determine the answer from the information given.”

  “What is the value of hex 144C times 16F2?”

  “Hex 1D1B7D8.”

  “Touch your right index finger to the middle of your forehead.”

  The robot complied.

  “State the Rayleigh law of magnetic permeability —”

  For fifteen minutes, Derec peppered the robot with commands and questions, less to impress Aranimas with the robot’s abilities than to underscore his own competence. He did not want Aranimas thinking that with the robot operational, he, Derec, was now expendable.

  Then, before Aranimas could grow impatient, Derec asked the final question. “Alpha, who is your master?”

  “Aranimas,” the robot replied.

  Derec turned to Aranimas. “The robot’s yours now,” he said. “You will have to teach it what you want it to do, but you won’t have to show it more than once.”

  Aranimas rose. “Order it to attack Wolruf,” the alien said.

  “What?”

  “I will not share control of this servant. Order it to attack Wolruf.”

  Derec’s hesitation was calculated. He turned to the robot and said, “Pick up that brace and strike Wolruf in the head.”

  Wolruf whimpered, but the robot did not move. “I may not comply, sir.”

  Then Aranimas repeated the command. “Servant. Pick up the brace and strike Wolruf.”

  Derec held his breath. If there was going to be a First Law conflict over treatment of the aliens, now was when it would surface.

  “Yes, master,” the robot said, turning and reaching for the metal rod.

  Wolruf crabbed nervously toward the door. Derec released a small sigh of relief.

  “Stop, servant,” Aranimas ordered. To Derec he said, “You have done as you promised. It seems that you are worth keeping alive after all. Wolruf will find other duties for you.”

  That was a wild card Derec had not expected, and he could not let it be played unchallenged. “No,” Derec said boldly. “I’m a roboticist, not a laborer. Not a Narwe. If you want to keep your new servant in good order, you’re going to keep me working here.”

  “Doing what?”

  “First, disassembling the other body for spare parts. Some of the patches I did on this robot are temporary. I can work on better fixes. Some of the damaged components may be repairable if I can get certain supplies.”

  Derec plunged on, gathering a head of steam. “Out in the real world, there are repair technician robots which do nothing but maintain other robots. You only have one robot at the moment, so I’m your technician. You’ve seen what I can do. How long did you have those parts? How much time did you spend looking at them and figuring out nothing? Why do you want to start treating me like a particularly ugly Narwe?”

  Aranimas stared, then made a hissing sound which might have been laughter. “Come, servant. We will leave the master roboticist to his work.”

  It was difficult for Derec to watch Alpha walk away with Aranimas. It was even more difficult to wait patiently for some sign whether the fragile plan he and Wolruf had concocted would even pass the first threshold.

  He was still isolated in his little corner of the ship. There was no way for him to know what Aranimas was doing with the robot. He did not know from one minute to the next whether his instructions to the robot were still intact. Perhaps Aranimas had only pretended to be ignorant about robots. Perhaps he had already undone all of Derec’s careful conditioning.

  Even if the instructions were still intact, they could well be irrelevant. Derec had assumed that Aranimas would be so fond of his new toy that he would keep it close at hand. Everything depended on that being true. But if he was wrong, if Aranimas had simply dispatched Alpha to some far corner of the ship to perform some menial function, then his plan was foredoomed to failure. Derec would have given up the robot and gotten nothing in return for it.

  Derec had work to do, some to maintain the fiction he was Aranimas’s faithful employee, some for his own purposes. He tried to make the hours pass more quickly by immersing himself in it. But work could not dull the edge of his impatience or his anxiety. Even with no clock to watch, time crawled by.

  Wolruf was in and out several times the rest of that day, and even when she was gone she was never far away. He welcomed the interruptions, but he worried that Aranimas might detect the change in her working patterns and wonder why. And without Alpha to alert him to Aranimas’s approach, Derec was reluctant to talk about their evolving plot against the alien commander.

  But it was not entirely avoidable. The call could come at any time, and a key problem remained unsolved. Derec knew, or thought he did, how they could disarm Aranimas. The unanswered question was how to disable him.

  With surprising vehemence, Wolruf ruled out killing the Erani. Derec did not much regret it. He could not picture himself walking up to Aranimas with a club and battering him to death. But at the same time, as long as Aranimas was alive he was dangerous.

  Derec first proposed a stunner, made from a recharged microcell and a few bits of wire. But there was no way to be sure that Aranimas was vulnerable to electric shocks, or to assure that the high-voltage current wouldn’t kill him.

  “The chamber with the star-creatures,” Derec said abruptly. “When we passed through it, Aranimas’s eyes started to water. Do you know why? Those things are from your world. Is there something in the air there that’s not in the rest of the ship?”

  “Yes,” Wolruf said. “The yellow-gas. That iss the only part of the ship wherr it iss used. The star-creatures release yellow-gas when they move.”

  That would account for it, Derec thought. A digestive by-product, or some sort of chemical communication —” So the air in there is like the atmosphere of your world?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which means that the Erani probably can’t spend any time on your world without getting sick,” Derec concluded.

  “We arr protected from the Erani temper,” Wolruf agreed.

  Derec paused and considered. “You said the star-creatures were part of an experiment. Could Aranimas be trying to find a way to neutralize the gas, so that the Erani can invade?”

  “It iss possible.”

  “Are there samples, bottled up?”

  “There is a liquid that turns to yellow-gas when freed.”

  “Perfect. Get me some.”

  When Derec turned in that night, he was a bundle of restless energy, and sleep did not come easily. When it finally did come, it seemed as though he closed his eyes one moment and the next someone was shaking him. He looked up to see Wolruf standing over him.

  “Aranimas wants ‘u,” Wolruf said.

  “Is it the robot?”

  “New servant won’t listen to the boss anymore
,” Wolruf said. “It just sits there.”

  “This could be it, then,” Derec said, scrambling to his feet. “I’ll get my tools.”

  As Derec followed Wolruf through the passageways, his anticipation and anxiety both spiraled upward. When they reached the hex junction, he stopped and caught the caninoid’s arm. “Does he expect you to come in?”

  “No. Only to deliver ‘u. But I could come in and see if he sends me away —”

  “No,” Derec said. “Don’t do anything out of the ordinary. I can handle the first part myself. Just wait here.”

  Inside Hull A, Derec spotted Aranimas across the main compartment and picked his way around the mesh bulkheads to where the alien waited.

  “The robot has malfunctioned,” Aranimas said, gesturing, “Repair it.”

  The robot sat on the edge of a low counter, motionless except for his left hand, rotating slowly and aimlessly at the wrist joint. Code 3033 — our location! Derec thought.

  “What did you do to it?” Derec demanded, moving within arm’s reach of the robot.

  “I did nothing. The mechanism ceased to obey me.”

  “You must have done something.” Derec bent at the waist to peer directly into the glowing eyes. “Alpha. Acknowledge.”

  “Yess, ssir,” the robot said, its words slurred and distorted.

  Code 804! The key! But he had to be sure. “Alpha. Default l-A-l-B. Execute.”

  The robot sat inert.

  “Alpha. Default 2-C-2-D. Execute.”

  Still there was no response.

  “What’s wrong with my servant?” Aranimas demanded.

  Stalling for time, Derec opened his small tool clutch and then the robot’s left shoulder access plate. As he peered inside, he thought the next step through. The reworking he had done on the robot’s instinct to protect intelligent life was a delicate business. It had already been stressed unexpectedly when Aranimas took possession of the robot.

  If he were to release the robot from its instruction block and order it to move against Aranimas, that would create a Second Law obligation to break the First Law. His careful adjustments might come apart under the stress, and the robot would freeze up in a way Derec would not be able to repair.

  He did not want to take that risk. It was much more straightforward for the robot to act in obedience to the First Law than in defiance of it. But that meant it was necessary to provoke Aranimas into an attack.

  “It looks like a failure of the volitional initiator,” Derec double talked. “If two contradictory impulses reach it on the same pulse, it can set up a standing wave in the oscillator. It’s almost always the owner’s fault. What did you ask it to do?”

  “I did nothing wrong, I was explaining the functions of the equipment in this section when its hand began to twirl foolishly that way.”

  “Don’t lie to me,” Derec said. “I should have known that a race as backward as yours couldn’t cope with sophisticated machinery —”

  “You are worse than the Narwe,” Aranimas snarled. “You do not have the good sense to know when you are in the service of a true superior.” As he spoke, his hand moved toward the gap in his robelike blouse.

  “Aurora!” Derec shouted.

  But the robot had begun to move even before Derec uttered the word, the First Law overcoming the strictures of the instruction block. The race between Aranimas’s reflexes and the robot’s was no contest. Before the stylus had even cleared the folds of Aranimas’s robe, the robot had grabbed the alien’s wrist with its right hand and plucked the stylus from his grasp with its left.

  “Release me!” Aranimas squalled shrilly. He squirmed and fought, but could not free himself from the grip of the single mechanical hand.

  “I cannot allow you to harm Derec,” the robot said.

  “You are my servant. Obey my orders! Release me!”

  “No, Aranimas,” Derec said, stepping forward. “Alpha is my servant, and always was.” Then he called back over his shoulder, “Wolruf! You can come in now!”

  Retrieving the stylus from the floor, Derec turned it over in his hand. There were no obvious switches or controls on it. Holding it the way Aranimas had, Derec pointed it at the alien. Aranimas remained unaffected.

  “My own weapons cannot be used against me,” Aranimas said with stiff pride.

  “A very clever management technique,” Derec said. He reached into the tool clutch and retrieved the little toy he had made earlier that day. Attached to a small pressure bottle half full of mustard-yellow liquid was a miniature pump salvaged from the disabled robot. “But I have my own weapon.”

  As Wolruf joined him, Derec pointed the pump’s outlet valve at Aranimas and pressed the switch. A fine mist blasted from the tiny opening and caught the alien in the face.

  A human would have gasped in surprise. Aranimas lunged for the aerosol with his freehand and nearly got it, his arm span being almost equal to the makeshift device’s range.

  But a moment later, a reddish liquid began streaming from Aranimas’s eyes, and the skin of his face seemed to pucker. He went rigid and reached high in the air with his free hand, the fingers curling as though grasping for something, the ropelike muscles of his arm and shoulder visible under the skin for the first time. As the aerosol began to sputter, the alien’s eyes closed, and his arm dropped limply to his side.

  “Release him,” Derec said, thumbing the switch. The robot’s hand opened, and the alien crumpled to the deck and lay there motionless.

  “I — detect — no respiration,” the robot said haltingly.

  The robot’s speech impediment was a warning sign to Derec. I should have warned it what was going to happen, he realized belatedly. “He’s not dead,” Derec said. “His system has received a poison shock, but he will recover.”

  “I — will try — to integrate —”

  “Alpha — analyze the situation. This is Aranimas’s ship. He had all the advantages. He could have done a hundred things to stop us and we’d never have known until it was too late. He had to be neutralized.”

  “I understand — and accept.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I detect a moderate disturbance — in my brain potentials which I attribute — to witnessing violence against an intelligent-being-not-a-human,” the robot said, its speech gradually returning to normal. “The disturbance is abating and I do not believe that it will affect my functioning.”

  “Good,” Derec said, dropping the spent aerosol on top of the tools. “What did you find out?”

  “We are approaching an independent free-flying space station.”

  “Frost,” Derec said emphatically. “I was hoping he’d take us right in to one of the Spacer worlds. How much time do we have?”

  “I am unable to accurately estimate our arrival time. However, I did determine that the ship’s crew is presently at the lowest level of alert.”

  “So we probably have more than a few hours,” Derec said. “Has Aranimas been in contact with the station?”

  “Not that I am aware of, sir. This vessel does not appear to have hyperwave communications — only simple carrier-wave radio.”

  That agreed with Derec’s experience on the asteroid, but it raised a puzzle. How had the aliens found the asteroid? Derec had assumed along with Monitor 5 that they had intercepted the distress message sent on his behalf. But without a hyperwave viewer, that was clearly impossible.

  Perhaps Wolruf could shed some light — but it would have to wait. “Okay. What about the key? Do you know where it is?”

  “Within limits. I believe it is concealed beneath one of the deck tiles of the command center.”

  The last time he had been in the command center, Derec had been in too much pain to pay attention to his surroundings. “Let’s go see,” Derec said, starting off. “How did you find it?” he called back over his shoulder.

  “Aranimas showed the key to me and questioned me about it,” the robot said. “When he left with it, I was not able to see precisely
what disposition he made of it. However, the time he was gone limited the radius of concealment to this deck, and the sounds I heard were consistent with the removal and replacement of a floor tile.”

  They reached the command center then, and Derec saw that the deck was a mosaic of several hundred hexagonal metal tiles the size of a dinner plate. The surface of each tile had a pattern of small holes, but there was no obvious fingerlift — in fact, no obvious way to lift an individual tile. All six edges were flush with the adjoining tiles.

  “Any idea where I should start?”

  “The strategy of concealment would argue against obvious positions such as the center and corners. Beyond that, I cannot say.”

  “You can’t detect it under the deck? It’s not giving off some kind of radio signal, or generating a magnetic field?”

  “Not that I am able to detect.”

  That, too, was consistent with what had happened on the asteroid. If the key had declared its presence in any measurable way, the robots’ scans would have turned it up long before the raider ship arrived.

  “All right,” Derec said slowly. He turned to Wolruf, who had been a silent spectator since joining them. “We need a place to lock up Aranimas.”

  Wolruf glanced nervously back toward where they had left the Erani. “Therr arr some lockers outside, on the side passage, which would be large enough —”

  Derec nodded. “Alpha — pick up Aranimas and go with Wolruf. She will show you where to put him. Wolruf, make sure it’s something Aranimas can’t open from the inside. Then both of you come back here.” He caught the look of apprehension in Wolruf’s eyes and added. “I know — you don’t like the robot.”

  “Maybe ‘u surprise Wolruf like ‘u surprise Aranimas.”

  “I promise you, it’ll be all right,” Derec said, patting the caninoid’s arm. “No surprises. I’ll be waiting for you here.”