The Best of Bova: Volume 1

by Ben Bova

  Her eyes flashed. “Your real Noura may be on Earth, but, dead or alive, she is not with Selwyn.”

  “It would be pleasant to believe so.”

  “It is true!” the image insisted. “Who would know better than I?”

  “You’re not real.”

  “I am the sum of all the ship’s records of Noura Sudarshee; the personnel records are complete from her birth to the day you left Earth.”

  “No better than a photograph,” Aleyn countered. “No better than looking at a star in the sky of night.”

  “I am also made up from your holos of Noura Sudarshee. Your private recordings and communications.” She hesitated a moment, then added, almost shyly, “Even your subconscious memories and dreams.”

  “Dreams?” Aleyn blurted. “Memories?”

  “This ship’s psychological program has been scanning your brainwave activity since you came aboard. During your long sleep you dreamt extensively of me. All that data is included in this imagery.”

  Aleyn thought about that for a moment. An electronic clone of his beloved Noura, complete down to the slightest memory in his subconscious mind. But the deadening hand of futility made him laugh bitterly.

  “That only makes it worse, my dearest. That only means that when I die I will be killing you too.”

  “Don’t think of death, darling. Think of life. Think of me.”

  He shook his head wearily. “I don’t want to think of anything. I want to sleep. Forever.”

  He closed his eyes. His last waking thought was that it would be a relief never to have to open them again.

  Of course he dreamed of Noura, as he always did. But this time the dream was drenched with a dire sense of foreboding, of dread. He and Noura were on Earth, at a wild and incredibly remote place where a glacier-fed waterfall tumbled down a sheer rock scarp into a verdant valley dotted with trees. Not another person for hundreds of kilometers. Only the two of them sitting on the yielding grass under the warming Sun.

  But the Sun grew hotter, so hot that the grass began to smolder and curl and blacken. The waterfall began to steam. Aleyn looked up at the Sun and saw it broiling angrily, lashing out huge tongues of flame. It thundered at them and laughed. In the Sun’s blinding disk he saw the face of Selwyn, laughing at him, reaching out his flaming arms for Noura.

  “NO!” he screamed.

  Aleyn found himself sitting upon his bunk, soaked with sweat. Grimly he got up, washed, and put on his freshly cleansed uniform. He strode past the galley and took the command chair at the bridge.

  “Good morning, darling,” said Noura’s smiling image. He made himself smile back at her. “Good morning.” Her face became more serious. “The cooling systems are nearing overload. In six more hours they will fail.”

  “Backups?”

  “The six-hour figure includes the backups.”

  Aleyn nodded. Six hours.

  “Savant!” he called. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do you refuse to allow us to leave your domain? Are you prohibited from doing so?”

  “I am programmed to survive, to guard, and to protect. I await the creators. There is nothing in my programming that requires me to allow you to leave.”

  “But there’s nothing in your programming that prohibits you from allowing us to leave, is there?”

  “That is so.”

  “Then allow us to leave and we will search for the creators and bring them back to you.”

  The synthesized voice was silent for several heartbeats. Aleyn realized that each second of time was an eternity for such a powerful computer. It must be considering this proposition very carefully, like a computer chess game, calculating every possible move as far into the future as it could see.

  “The creators are so distant now that they could not he found and returned before the star explodes again. The next explosion will destroy this sphere. It will destroy me. I will not survive. I will have failed my primary purpose.”

  It was Aleyn’s turn to fall silent, thinking, his mind churning through all the branching possibilities. Death stood at the end of each avenue, barring the door to escape.

  “Aleyn,” said Noura’s image, softly, “the ship is drifting deeper into the chromosphere. Hull temperature is rising steeply. The cooling systems will fail in a matter of minutes if corrective action is not taken.”

  Corrective action, Aleyn’s mind echoed. Why not simply allow the ship to drift toward the heart of the dying star and let us be vaporized? It will all be finished in a few minutes. Why try to delay the inevitable, prolong the futility? Why struggle, merely to continue suffering?

  He looked squarely at Noura’s image in the screen. “But I can’t kill you,” he whispered. “Even if you are only memories and dreams, I can’t let you die.”

  Turning again to the main screen, he saw the angry heart of the dying star, seething red, writhing and glowering, drumming against the ship’s hull with the dull muted thunder of approaching doom.

  “Savant,” he called again. “Have you scanned all of our data banks?”

  “I have.”

  “Then you know that we of Earth are attempting to prevent our own star from exploding.”

  “Your Sun is younger than my star.”

  “Yes, and the data you have recorded about your star would be of incalculable value in helping us to gain an understanding of how to save our Sun.”

  “That is of no consequence.”

  “But it is!” Aleyn snapped. “It is! Because once we learn how to control our own Sun, how to prevent it from exploding, we can come back here and apply that knowledge to your star.”

  “Return here?”

  “Yes! We can return and save your star! We can help you to survive! We can allow you to achieve your primary objective.”

  “I am programmed to survive, to guard, and to protect.”

  “We will help you to survive. You can continue to guard and protect until we return with the knowledge that will save your star from destruction.”

  Again the alien voice went silent. Aleyn counted to twenty, then fifty, then . . .

  Noura sang out, “The port is opening!”

  Aleyn swung his chair to see the screen. The vast hatch that had sealed the port was slowly swinging open again. He could see a slice of star-studded darkness beyond it. Without thinking consciously he turned the ship toward the port, away from the growling, glaring star.

  “Savant,” he called once again, “we need the data you have accumulated on your star’s behavior.”

  “Your data banks are too small to accommodate all of it. Therefore I have altered the atomic structure of your ship’s hull and structure to store the data.”

  “Altered the hull and structure?”

  “The alteration is at the nuclear level. It will not affect the performance of your ship. I have placed instructions in your puny computer on how to access the data.”

  “Thank you!”

  “You must return within thirty thousand years if you are to save this star.”

  “We’ll be back long before then. I promise you.”

  “I will survive until then without you.”

  “You will survive beyond that, Savant. We will be back and we will bring the knowledge you need to save yourself and your star.”

  “I will wait.”

  The ship headed toward the port, gaping wide now, showing the cold darkness of infinity sprinkled with hard pinpoints of stars.

  “The cooling system is returning to normal,” Noura’s image said. “We will survive.”

  “We will return to Earth,” said Aleyn. “I’ll sleep for a thousand years, and when I wake again, we’ll be back at Earth.”

  “The real Noura will be waiting for you.”

  He smiled, but there was still bitterness in it. “I wish that could be true.”

  “It is true, my beloved Aleyn. Who would know better than I? She is in deep sleep even now, waiting for your return.”

 
“Do you really believe so?”

  “I know it.”

  “And Selwyn, also?”

  “Even if he waits for her,” Noura’s image replied, “she waits for you.”

  He closed his eyes briefly. Then he realized, “But that means . . .”

  “It means you will no longer need me,” said Noura’s image. “You will erase me.”

  “I don’t know if I could do that. It would be like murdering you.”

  She smiled at him, a warming, loving smile without a trace of sadness in it. “I am not programmed to survive, Aleyn. My objective was to help you to survive. Once the real Noura is in your arms you will not need me anymore.”

  He stared at the screen for many long moments. Then wordlessly he reached out his hand and touched the button that turned off the display.

  RISK ASSESSMENT

  This one was written for Jack Williamson.

  Jack was probably the most beloved writer in the science-fiction field, the dean of us all, whose first short story was published in 1928. He was a truly gentle man and a fine writer.

  To celebrate his more than sixty years as a published writer, Jack’s friends put together an anthology of stories, all written on themes that Jack himself has used in his long and productive career.

  I was asked to contribute a story to the anthology, and “Risk Assessment” is the result. If you are unfortunate enough to be unfamiliar with Jack Williamson’s work, all I can say (aside from urging you to read his fiction) is that he was among the very earliest writers to deal with antimatter, which he called “contraterrene” matter, or seetee. This was at a time when the concept of antimatter was a new and startling idea to theoretical physicists such as P.A.M. Dirac, Fermi, Einstein, and that crowd.

  Two stories about Jack:

  For many years, Jack was a professor of English at the University of Eastern New Mexico, in Portales. When he reached retirement age, he retired. Not surprising, you might think. But I received a nearly frantic phone call from a group of his students (I was editing Analog magazine in New York then) who told me that they thought the university’s administration was “forcing” Professor Williamson into retirement, and they wanted me to do something about it!

  The first thing I did was to call Jack. “Forcing me?” Jack laughed. “Goodness, no. I’m very happy to retire from teaching. Now I can write full-time.”

  How many professors have been so revered by their students that the students don’t want them to retire?

  Second story:

  I visited Jack in Portales one year during the time for the spring calf roundup. We drove out to the ranch where the roundup was taking place that weekend, and watched the local cowhands and teenagers at work. It was a hot, bloody, dusty scene. The calves were separated from their mothers, dehorned, the males deballed, all of the calves branded and shot with about a quart of penicillin apiece. There was bleating and mooing and horses and roping and the stench of burnt hides and lots of blood, toil, tears, and sweat.

  As we leaned against the corral railing, watching all this hard work and suffering, Jack nudged me in the ribs. “See why I became a writer?” he asked softly.

  I nodded. I’d much rather sweat over a keyboard than rope a calf, any day.

  * * *

  They are little more than children, thought Alpha One, self-centered, emotional children sent by their elders to take the responsibilities that the elders themselves do not want to bother with.

  Sitting at Alpha One’s right was Cordelia Thomasina Shockley, whom the human male called Delia. Red-haired and impetuous, brilliant and driven, her decisions seemed to be based as much on emotional tides as logical calculation.

  The third entity in the conference chamber was Martin Flagg, deeply solemn, intensely grave. He behaved as if he truly believed his decisions were rational, and not at all influenced by the hormonal cascades surging through his endocrine system.

  “This experiment must be stopped,” Martin Flagg said firmly.

  Delia thought he was handsome, in a rugged sort of way. Not terribly tall, but broad in the shoulder and flat in the middle. Nicely muscular. Big dimple in the middle of his stubborn chin. Heavenly deep blue eyes. When he smiled his whole face lit up, and somehow that lit up Delia’s heart. But it had been a long time since she’d seen him smile.

  “Why must the experiment be stopped?” asked the robot avatar of Alpha One.

  It folded its mechanical arms over its cermet chest, in imitation of the human gesture. Its humanform face was incapable of showing any emotion, however. It merely stared at Martin Flagg out of its optical sensors, waiting for him to go on.

  “What Delia’s doing is not only foolish, it’s wasteful. And dangerous.”

  “How so?” asked Alpha One, with the patience that only a computer possessed.

  The human male was almost trembling with agitation. “You don’t think a few hundred megatons of energy is dangerous?”

  Delia said coolly, “Not when it’s properly contained, Marty. And it is properly contained, of course.”

  Alpha One knew that Delia had two interlinked personality flaws: a difficulty in taking criticism seriously and an absolute refusal to accept anyone else’s point of view. Like her auburn hair and opalescent eyes, she had inherited those flaws from her mother. From her father she had inherited one of the largest fortunes in the inner solar system. He had also bequeathed her his incredibly dogged stubbornness, the total inability to back away from a challenge. And the antimatter project.

  Marty was getting red in the face. “Suppose you lose containment?” he asked Delia. “What then?”

  “I won’t.”

  Turning to the robot, Marty repeated, “What if she loses containment?”

  Alpha One’s prime responsibility was risk assessment. Here on the Moon it was incredibly easy for a mistake to kill humans. So the computer quickly ran through all the assessments it had made to date of C. T. Shockley’s antimatter project, a task that took four microseconds, then had its robot avatar reply to Flagg.

  Calmly, Alpha One replied, “If the apparatus loses containment, then our seismologists will obtain interesting new data on the Moon’s deep structure.” Its voice was a smooth computer synthesis issuing from the horizontal grill where a human’s mouth would be.

  Martin Flagg was far from pleased. “Is that all that your germanium brain cares about? What about the loss of human life?”

  Alpha One was totally unperturbed. Its brain was composed mainly of optical filaments, not germanium. “The nearest human settlement is at Clavius,” it said. “There is no danger to human life.”

  “Her life!”

  Alpha One turned to see Delia’s reaction. A warm flush colored her cheeks, an involuntary physical reaction to her realization that Flagg was worried about her safety.

  The human form of the robot was a concession to human needs. The robot was merely one of thousands of avatars of Alpha One, the master computer that monitored every city, every habitat, every vehicle, factory and mining outpost on the Moon. Almost a century ago the pioneer lunar settlers had learned, through bitter experience, that the computer’s rational and incorruptible decisions were far sounder—and safer—than the emotionally biased decisions made by men and women.

  But the humans were unwilling to allow a computer, no matter how wise and rational, to have complete control over them. The Lunar Council, therefore, was founded as a triumvirate: the Moon was ruled by one man, one woman, and Alpha One. Yet, over the years, the lunar citizens did their best to avoid the duty of serving on the Council. The task was handed to the young, those who had enough idealism to serve, or those who did not have enough experience to evade the responsibility.

  Children, Alpha One repeated to itself. As human life spans extend toward the two-century mark, their childhoods lengthen also. Physically they are mature adults, yet emotionally they are still spoiled children.

  Martin Flagg was the human male member of the triumvirate. C. T. Shockley was the fe
male. Marty was the youngest human ever elected to the triumvirate. Except for Delia.

  The three of them were sitting in the plush high-backed chairs of the Council’s private conference room, in the city of Selene, dug into the ringwall mountains of the giant crater Alphonsus. Flagg glared at Delia from his side of the triangular table. Delia smiled saucily at him. She knew she shouldn’t antagonize him, but she couldn’t help it. Delia did not want to be here; she wanted to be at her remote laboratory in the crater Newton, near the lunar south pole. But Marty had insisted on her physical appearance at this meeting: no holographic presence, no virtual-reality attendance.

  “This experiment must be stopped,” Flagg repeated. He was stubborn, too.

  “Why?” asked the robot, in its maddeningly calm manner.

  Obviously struggling to control his temper, Flagg leaned forward in his chair and ticked off on his fingers: “One, she is using valuable resources—”

  “That I’m paying for out of my own pocket.” But the pocket was becoming threadbare, she knew. The Shockley family fortune, big as it might have been, was running low. Delia knew she’d have to succeed tomorrow or give it all up.

  Flagg scowled at her, then turned back to the robot. “Two, she is endangering human life.”

  “Only my own,” Delia said sweetly.

  The robot checked its risk assessments again and said, “She is entirely within her legal rights.”

  “Three, her crazy experiment hasn’t been sanctioned by the Science Committee.”

  “I don’t need the approval of those nine old farts,” Delia snapped.

  The robot seemed to incline its head briefly, as if nodding. “Under ordinary circumstances it would be necessary to obtain the Science Committee’s permission for such an experiment, that is true.”

  “Ah-hah!” Flagg grinned maliciously.

  “But that is because researchers seek to obtain funding grants from the Committee. Shockley is using her own money. She needs neither funding nor permission, so long as she does not present an undue risk to other humans.”

  Flagg closed his eyes briefly. Delia thought he was about to admit defeat. But then he played his trump.