Asimov's Future History Volume 1

by Isaac Asimov

  By the time they met, Chile was still helplessly drifting from the push he had received, Ling was starting to disappear below the edge, and Sheila was ready to jump away from it and him. He had released the slack in the chain connecting them.

  “Hit us, Sheil’!” called Mike. She needed no instruction. A little toe work in the surface cracks headed her toward the two-man system slowly spinning and drifting edgeward as it settled toward the ground. She had bent her knees a little as she went down, and now straightened them firmly.

  By the time she reached her target and complicated the system, it was on the ground. Ling was nearly out of sight, and Chile, who had had no control over his original spin, had only partly stopped his flight with his hands and was on the first bounce.

  “We’ve got you, and the girls have us. There’s plenty of traction. Start hauling in!” Mike snapped. “Not too hard!”

  She pulled quickly anyway. The sooner the slack was taken up and she could start doing something useful, the better. By the time she felt resistance, the falling man was out of sight, one could only estimate how far. She abandoned responsibility for her own safety to the others, and drew steadily, hand over hand, gripping the fine chain as effectively as she could with her insulated gloves. She barely noticed that the big cube had settled back where it had been. From her position, the other robot was hidden beyond it; for the moment, its possible activities didn’t concern her.

  “Rob, are you all right?” she called.

  “Sure. Swinging in toward the cliff now. I take it you’re anchored all right – if you come over too, it could be awkward.”

  “I’m solid. Don’t look down.”

  “Oh, it’s not that bad. There’s no haze to suggest distance; my head knows it’s twenty kilos, but my stomach isn’t sure it’s down. I’m about to hit the cliff; stop pulling up for a moment so I can catch it. It’s pretty rough, and I may be able to hang on myself.” There was a pause, and Sheila braced herself for a possible jolt along the chain, but felt nothing. “Missed the hold. I bounced, but only a little. I ought to get it next time. It’s not quite vertical, I think; maybe I can walk up it, with the rope helping. Here I come.” There was a pause. “Yep, it’s not straight up and down; I’m hanging against the rock. You can pull again. So much for the strength of this cliff.”

  “What? Is it cracking?” Chispa was first with the question, by a split second.

  “Oh, no, but if that data unit can fly, our logic was a bit shaky. Just don’t stamp, please, until I get back up. More to the point, what’s that other robot doing now?”

  Chispa, who could see farthest around the right side of the cube, replied, “Nothing. It’s just standing there. Why?”

  “Well, if you didn’t happen to see, I think it pushed me over; and I was wondering if it had shown the same feeling about anyone else.”

  “Chile! Keep close to that thing and make sure it doesn’t do a repeat!” snapped Bronwen.

  “Shouldn’t I be helping bring Robert up? His danger seems more immediate.”

  “We can get him. If he’s right – I couldn’t see him on that side of the block – the other danger is greater.”

  “I understand.”

  “Talk to it, if you’ve reached that level, and ask why it did it,” suggested Ling.

  “We have not reached that level of abstraction.”

  “At least we’ve learned one thing; this stuff is alien,” Rob resumed, very calmly all things considered. “No robot made on Earth could have done that to what it recognized as a human being. We don’t have First Law protection from it. Maybe we don’t have any kind; maybe whoever made it doesn’t use the Three Laws in their design.”

  Chile had stopped at last, and was “walking” back toward the scene of action. “Such a positronic brain is not possible,” he said flatly. “I will try to find human identifying signals, if any exist, in its communication with the data processor, but I expect they will be too abstract for my present intuition base. Is Robert nearly up?”

  “Nearly.” Ling and Sheila spoke almost together. No one suggested aloud that the ghost’s brain might not be positronic. “There can’t be much of this chain still out,” the woman added.

  “The robot is getting between me and the cube again,” Chile reported quietly. “I will go to the left side, so I can help with Robert’s chain. I am still monitoring signals. I can’t get very close, of course, without using force on the robot. I assume that is not yet the policy.”

  “Right. Just communicate,” replied Bronwen.

  Ling’s gloves, slightly preceding his helmet, appeared about eight meters to the left of the cube, as seen by his companions. Chile was standing within a meter of the same spot, slowly bending over to reach for him. The main anchoring trio lay a dozen meters straight in from the point, at the junction of a “Y” outlined in chain with the other women at its arm tips and Chile at its foot.

  This lasted only a split second. Then the alien robot moved again, this time pushing off from the big cube. As before, it plunged for the edge. Chile, almost upright, was in no position to oppose it. He took most of its momentum and flew over Ling’s head; the rest of the push was expended against the man’s helmet, and he followed Chile more slowly.

  “Rob!” Sheila screamed, and jerked up her legs in readiness to jump. She recovered control in time to forestall the motion, but not soon enough to let Luis and Mike keep hold of her ankles. All might still have been well if she had released the loops of chain she had been coiling up, but letting go of Ling was the farthest thing from her instincts. The chain transferred part of the robot’s final thrust to her, and after two agonizingly slow bounces accompanied by futile scrabbling at surface irregularities and a shrieked “NO!” she too went over the edge. The startled watchers saw the alien robot, now falling to the safe side of the rim, lean and extend an arm as though to intercept her, but she drifted past out of its reach.

  “I think we may bounce out before we hit bottom, but I’m not sure how far down that’ll happen,” Ling remarked. “At least, there should be time to make our wills, if any of us hasn’t done it already.”

  “Nine minutes thirty-three seconds,” affirmed Chile. He had hooked a foot under the chain as the other had pushed him, and was now engaged in pulling the three together. “If we approach the bottom, you two hold tightly to each other, and at the last possible moment I will kick upward against you as hard as I can, to take as much as possible of our downward momentum to myself. There seems little chance that this would suffice to preserve your lives, but it is the best I can think of. We have not enough collective spin to help the operation by –”

  “Thanks, Chile, but we’ll take your word for it. Rob, was it that robot again’? Things happened too fast for me to be sure.”

  “‘Fraid so. It seems to have a prejudice against me, or maybe against anyone who tried to touch the cube. I wonder why it didn’t come around and get you too before; you were about to do the same thing.”

  “That is why I want all three of us together as quickly as possible,” Chile cut in. “It will not harm Sheila, and will have the cube here to catch her very shortly. She is human. If we are actually in contact, as she and I are now, it will probably not try to force us apart, but if you, Rob, are still at the end of the chain, I am not sure it won’t try to break you free.”

  “Why? I’m –”

  “Please don’t talk, Robert. Just pull in chain from your end, too. It will put an uncomfortable amount of spin on us, I fear, but should make you much safer. Here comes the cube.”

  Actually, there was no hurry. The alien block, with the ghost on top, overhauled them rather slowly, seemed to look things over for more than a minute, and finally slid under the trio over two hundred meters down. Bronwen had plenty of time to unlimber the rest of the chain, but not enough to figure out how to use it.

  “Then you solved the alien symbols.” Ling was talking before his feet were back on the ground. “But why does that thing regard Sheila a
s human, and not me?”

  “I did not solve them. It was the sort of intuition which apparently any brain experiences; yours, when you organized the shadow pattern Chispa called a ship –”

  “And the ridge we all named the Stegosaur!” Mike added.

  “And the face Rob saw in the Rorschach blot,” continued ZH50. “It happens to positronic brains like mine, too; it may be an inevitable part of any intelligence, natural or otherwise, as I have heard suggested. Dumbo lacks it, of course; it needs Sheila to work intelligently. This other robot has the same quality, positronic or not, and apparently decided that I and the black-helmeted figures were robots, deserving of no special consideration beside the safety of its central system, but that the white-helmeted ones were human.”

  “Why should it get that idea?”

  “Behavior patterns are also data, and can also be connected intuitively. I did it with the robot’s actions, it did the same with yours. During the time we were investigating this cube, for example, the men made a point – possibly unconscious – of staying between their companions and the edge of the cliff. I think the key behavior, though, occurred at Barco, when –”

  “When this idiotic Galahad kicked me back up the cliff, at his own risk!” snapped Sheila.

  “That seems likely.”

  “But I wasn’t in any real risk! I could have jumped up from that slab of ice five seconds before hitting bottom, and landed like jumping off a table!”

  “The robot didn’t know your limits. It saw the basic action; you were protecting another being, and, I suggest, interpreted that as First Law behavior. The most obvious difference between the two of you was helmet color. The conclusion may have been tentative, if the thing is intelligent enough be that scientific, but it was supported later.”

  “You trusted human lives to your own guess, then. How does that fit with First Law?” asked Luis.

  “I did not. The lives were already at risk through no fault of mine. I told you the best action I could suggest at the time,” answered Chile. “I also implied that it would be unnecessary; I used the conditional. “Luis blinked, thinking back.

  “It’s one of those old-fashioned happy endings!” Chispa laughed. “We really have found proof of alien life, and when Chile, or maybe Chile and Dumbo between them, have worked out this machine’s code, we’ll know everything it’s learned about Miranda in however long it’s been here. Nobel prizes all around. And all the romance anyone could want.” She moved closer to Luis; then, just visibly to the others through her face plate, glanced at Sheila. “Well...” Her voice trailed off.

  A snort, recognizably Ling’s, sounded in their helmets.

  “If I’ve been that obvious, forget it. There’s such a thing as self-respect.” He made another, less describable sound.

  “I can stand self-respect, even when it slops over into conceit,” Sheila said quietly. “It’s much better than hinting. How about ‘Rorschach’ for a team name?”

  “Why be subtle? ‘Blot’ is more euphonious. But I’ll go with anything you like. What, except for wasted time, is in a –”

  “And maybe the folks who set up this station will be back soon!” interrupted Chispa merrily.

  Little Lost Robot

  2029 A.D.

  MEASURES ON HYPER Base had been taken in a sort of rattling fury – the muscular equivalent of a hysterical shriek.

  To itemize them in order of both chronology and desperation, they were:

  1. All work on the Hyperatomic Drive through all the space volume occupied by the Stations of the Twenty-Seventh Asteroidal Grouping came to a halt.

  2. That entire volume of space was nipped out of the System, practically speaking. No one entered without permission. No one left under any conditions.

  3. By special government patrol ship, Drs. Susan Calvin and Peter Bogert, respectively Head Psychologist and Mathematical Director of United States Robot & Mechanical Men Corporation, were brought to Hyper Base.

  Susan Calvin had never left the surface of Earth before, and had no perceptible desire to leave it this time. In an age of Atomic Power and a clearly coming Hyperatomic Drive, she remained quietly provincial. So she was dissatisfied with her trip and unconvinced of the emergency, and every line of her plain, middle-aged face showed it clearly enough during her first dinner at Hyper Base.

  Nor did Dr. Bogert’s sleek paleness abandon a certain hangdog attitude. Nor did Major-general Kallner, who headed the project, even once forget to maintain a hunted expression. In short, it was a grisly episode, that meal, and the little session of three that followed began in a gray, unhappy manner.

  Kallner, with his baldness glistening, and his dress uniform oddly unsuited to the general mood, began with uneasy directness.

  “This is a queer story to tell, sir, and madam. I want to thank you for coming on short notice and without a reason being given. We’ll try to correct that now. We’ve lost a robot. Work has stopped and must stop until such time as we locate it. So far we have failed, and we feel we need expert help.”

  Perhaps the general felt his predicament anticlimactic. He continued with a note of desperation, “I needn’t tell you the importance of our work here. More than eighty percent of last year’s appropriations for scientific research have gone to us-”

  “Why, we know that,” said Bogert, agreeably. “U. S. Robots is receiving a generous rental fee for use of our robots.”

  Susan Calvin injected a blunt, vinegary note, “What makes a single robot so important to the project, and why hasn’t it been located?”

  The general turned his red face toward her and wet his lips quickly, “Why, in a manner of speaking we have located it.” Then, with near anguish, “Here, suppose I explain. As soon as the robot failed to report a state of emergency was declared, and all movement off Hyper Base stopped. A cargo vessel had landed the previous day and had delivered us two robots for our laboratories. It had sixty-two robots of the... uh... game type for shipment elsewhere. We are certain as to that figure. There is no question about it whatever.”

  “Yes? And the connection?”

  “When our missing robot failed of location anywhere – I assure you we would have found a missing blade of grass if it had been there to find – we brainstormed ourselves into counting the robots left of the cargo ship. They have sixty-three now.”

  “So that the sixty-third, I take it, is the missing prodigal?” Dr. Calvin’s eyes darkened.

  “Yes, but we have no way of telling which is the sixty-third.”

  There was a dead silence while the electric clock chimed eleven times, and then the robopsychologist said, “Very peculiar,” and the corners of her lips moved downward.

  “Peter,” she turned to her colleague with a trace of savagery, “what’s wrong here? What kind of robots are they, using at Hyper Base?”

  Dr. Bogert hesitated and smiled feebly, “It’s been rather a matter of delicacy till now, Susan.”

  She spoke rapidly, “Yes, till now. If there are sixty-three same-type robots, one of which is wanted and the identity of which cannot be determined, why won’t any of them do? What’s the idea of all this? Why have we been sent for?”

  Bogert said in resigned fashion, “If you’ll give me a chance, Susan – Hyper Base happens to be using several robots whose brains are not impressioned with the entire First Law of Robotics.”

  “Aren’t impressioned?” Calvin slumped back in her chair, “I see. How many were made?”

  “A few. It was on government order and there was no way of violating the secrecy. No one was to know except the top men directly concerned. You weren’t included, Susan. It was nothing I had anything to do with.”

  The general interrupted with a measure of authority. “I would like to explain that bit. I hadn’t been aware that Dr. Calvin was unacquainted with the situation. I needn’t tell you, Dr. Calvin, that there always has been strong opposition to robots on the Planet. The only defense the government has had against the Fundamentalist radicals i
n this matter was the fact that robots are always built with an unbreakable First Law – which makes it impossible for them to harm human beings under any circumstance.

  “But we had to have robots of a different nature. So just a few of the NS-2 model, the Nestors, that is, were prepared with a modified First Law. To keep it quiet, all NS-2’s are manufactured without serial numbers; modified members are delivered here along with a group of normal robots; and, of course, all our kind are under the strictest impressionment never to tell of their modification to unauthorized personnel.” He wore an embarrassed smile; “This has all worked out against us now.”

  Calvin said grimly, “Have you asked each one who it is, anyhow? Certainly, you are authorized?”

  The general nodded, “All sixty-three deny having worked here – and one is lying.”

  “Does the one you want show traces of wear? The others, I take it, are factory-fresh.”

  “The one in question only arrived last month. It, and the two that have just arrived, were to be the last we needed. There’s no perceptible wear.” He shook his head slowly and his eyes were haunted again, “Dr. Calvin, we don’t dare let that ship leave. If the existence of non-First Law robots becomes general knowledge-” There seemed no way of avoiding understatement in the conclusion.

  “Destroy all sixty-three,” said the robopsychologist coldly and flatly, “and make an end of it.”

  Bogert drew back a corner of his mouth. “You mean destroy thirty thousand dollars per robot. I’m afraid U. S. Robots wouldn’t like that. We’d better make an effort first, Susan, before we destroy anything.”

  “In that case,” she said, sharply, “I need facts. Exactly what advantage does Hyper Base derive from these modified robots? What factor made them desirable, general?”

  Kallner ruffled his forehead and stroked it with an upward gesture of his hand. “We had trouble with our previous robots. Our men work with hard radiations a good deal, you see. It’s dangerous, of course, but reasonable precautions are taken. There have been only two accidents since we began and neither was fatal. However, it was impossible to explain that to an ordinary robot. The First Law states – I’ll quote it – ‘No robot may harm a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.’