Asimov's Future History Volume 1

by Isaac Asimov

  “You’ll stay here till after election,” Byerley told him. “It would be better to have you out of the way if things take a bad turn.”

  The hoarse voice that twisted painfully out of John’s crooked mouth might have had accents of concern in it. “There’s danger of violence?”

  “The Fundamentalists threaten it, so I suppose there is, in a theoretical sense. But I really don’t expect it. The Fundies have no real power. They’re just the continuous irritant factor that might stir up a riot after a while. You don’t mind staying here? Please, I won’t be myself if I have to worry about you.”

  “Oh, I’ll stay. You still think it will go well?”

  “I’m sure of it. No one bothered you at the place?”

  “No one. I’m certain.”

  “And your part went well?”

  “Well enough. There’ll be no trouble there.”

  “Then take care of yourself, and watch the televisor tomorrow, John.” Byerley pressed the gnarled hand that rested on his.

  Lenton’s forehead was a furrowed study in suspense. He had the completely unenviable job of being Byerley’s campaign manager in a campaign that wasn’t a campaign, for a person that refused to reveal his strategy, and refused to accept his manager’s.

  “You can’t!” It was his favorite phrase. It had become his only phrase. “I tell you, Steve, you can’t!”

  He threw himself in front of the prosecutor, who was spending his time leafing through the typed pages of his speech.

  “Put that down, Steve. Look, that mob has been organized by the Fundies. You won’t get a hearing. You’ll be stoned more likely. Why do you have to make a speech before an audience? What’s wrong with a recording, a visual recording?”

  “You want me to win the election, don’t you?” asked Byerley, mildly.

  “Win the election! You’re not going to win, Steve. I’m trying to save your life.”

  “Oh, I’m not in danger.”

  “He’s not in danger. He’s not in danger.” Lenton made a queer, rasping sound in his throat. “You mean you’re getting out on that balcony in front of fifty thousand crazy crackpots and try to talk sense to them – on a balcony like a medieval dictator?”

  Byerley consulted his watch. “In about five minutes – as soon as the televisor lines are free.”

  Lenton’s answering remark was not quite transliterable.

  The crowd filled a roped off area of the city. Trees and houses seemed to grow out of a mass-human foundation. And by ultra-wave, the rest of the world watched. It was a purely local election, but it had a world audience just the same. Byerley thought of that and smiled.

  But there was nothing to smile at in the crowd itself. There were banners and streamers, ringing every possible change on his supposed roboticity. The hostile attitude rose thickly and tangibly into the atmosphere.

  From the start the speech was not successful. It competed against the inchoate mob howl and the rhythmic cries of the Fundie claques that formed mob-islands within the mob. Byerley spoke on, slowly, unemotionally-

  Inside, Lenton clutched his hair and groaned – and waited for the blood.

  There was a writhing in the front ranks. An angular citizen with popping eyes, and clothes too short for the lank length of his limbs, was pulling to the fore. A policeman dived after him, making slow, struggling passage. Byerley waved the latter off, angrily.

  The thin man was directly under the balcony. His words tore unheard against the roar.

  Byerley leaned forward. “What do you say? If you have a legitimate question, I’ll answer it.” He turned to a flanking guard. “Bring that man up here.”

  There was a tensing in the crowd. Cries of “Quiet” started in various parts of the mob, and rose to a bedlam, then toned down raggedly. The thin man, red-faced and panting, faced Byerley.

  Byerley said, “Have you a question?”

  The thin man stared, and said in a cracked voice, “Hit me!”

  With sudden energy, he thrust out his chin at an angle. “Hit me! You say you’re not a robot. Prove it. You can’t hit a human, you monster.”

  There was a queer, flat, dead silence. Byerley’s voice punctured it. “I have no reason to hit you.”

  The thin man was laughing wildly. “You can’t hit me. You won’t hit me. You’re not a human. You’re a monster, a make-believe man.”

  And Stephen Byerley, tight-lipped, in the face of thousands who watched in person and the millions, who watched by screen, drew back his fist and caught the man crackingly upon the chin. The challenger went over backwards in sudden collapse, with nothing on his face but blank, blank surprise.

  Byerley said, “I’m sorry. Take him in and see that he’s comfortable. I want to speak to him when I’m through.”

  And when Dr. Calvin, from her reserved space, turned her automobile and drove off, only one reporter had recovered sufficiently from the shock to race after her, and shout an unheard question.

  Susan Calvin called over her shoulder, “He’s human.”

  That was enough. The reporter raced away in his own direction.

  The rest of the speech might be described as “Spoken but not heard.”

  Dr. Calvin and Stephen Byerley met once again – a week before he took the oath of office as mayor. It was late – past midnight.

  Dr. Calvin said, “You don’t look tired.”

  The mayor-elect smiled. “I may stay up for a while. Don’t tell Quinn.”

  “I shan’t. But that was an interesting story of Quinn’s, since you mention him. It’s a shame to have spoiled it. I suppose you knew his theory?”

  “Parts of it.”

  “It was highly dramatic. Stephen Byerley was a young lawyer, a powerful speaker, a great idealist – and with a certain flare for biophysics. Are you interested in robotics, Mr. Byerley?”

  “Only in the legal aspects.”

  “This Stephen Byerley was. But there was an accident. Byerley’s wife died, he himself, worse. His legs were gone; his face was gone; his voice was gone. Part of his mind was bent. He would not submit to plastic surgery. He retired from the world, legal career gone – only his intelligence, and his hands left. Somehow he could obtain positronic brains, even a complex one, one which had the greatest capacity of forming judgments in ethical problems – which is the highest robotic function so far developed.

  “He grew a body about it. Trained it to be everything he would have been and was no longer. He sent it out into the world as Stephen Byerley, remaining behind himself as the old, crippled teacher that no one ever saw-”

  “Unfortunately,” said the mayor-elect, “I ruined all that by hitting a man. The papers say it was your official verdict on the occasion that I was human.”

  “How did that happen? Do you mind telling me? It couldn’t have been accidental.”

  “It wasn’t entirely. Quinn did most of the work. My men started quietly spreading the fact that I had never hit a man; that I was unable to hit a man; that to fail to do so under provocation would be sure proof that I was a robot. So I arranged for a silly speech in public, with all sorts of publicity overtones, and almost inevitably, some fool fell for it. In its essence, it was what I call a shyster trick. One in which the artificial atmosphere which has been created does all the work. Of course, the emotional effects made my election certain, as intended.”

  The robopsychologist nodded. “I see you intrude on my field – as every politician must, I suppose. But I’m very sorry it turned out this way. I like robots. I like them considerably better than I do human beings. If a robot can be created capable of being a civil executive, I think he’d make the best one possible. By the Laws of Robotics, he’d be incapable of harming humans, incapable of tyranny, of corruption, of stupidity, of prejudice. And after he had served a decent term, he would leave, even though he were immortal, because it would be impossible for him to hurt humans by letting them know that a robot had ruled them. It would be most ideal.”

  “Except that a r
obot might fail due to the inherent inadequacies of his brain. The positronic brain has never equaled the complexities of the human brain.”

  “He would have advisers. Not even a human brain is capable of governing without assistance.”

  Byerley considered Susan Calvin with grave interest. “Why do you smile, Dr. Calvin?”

  “I smile because Mr. Quinn didn’t think of everything.”

  “You mean there could be more to that story of his.”

  “Only a little. For the three months before election, this Stephen Byerley that Mr. Quinn spoke about, this broken man, was in the country for some mysterious reason. He returned in time for that famous speech of yours. And after all, what the old cripple did once, he could do a second time, particularly where the second job is very simple in comparison to the first.”

  “I don’t quite understand.”

  Dr. Calvin rose and smoothed her dress. She was obviously ready to leave. “I mean there is one time when a robot may strike a human being without breaking the First Law. Just one time.”

  “And when is that?”

  Dr. Calvin was at the door. She said quietly, “When the human to be struck is merely another robot.”

  She smiled broadly, her thin face glowing. “Good-by Mr. Byerley. I hope to vote for you five years from now – for Co-ordinator.”

  Stephen Byerley chuckled. “I must reply that that is a somewhat farfetched idea.”

  The door closed behind her.

  PAPPI

  2032 A.D.

  THE FIRST THING Tim noticed when he entered his old home was the visorphone in the hall flashing to warn him of an incoming call. It had to be for Karin, of course. But who wouldn’t already know she was dead? Karin didn’t have a very wide circle of friends.

  The visorphone’s shrill call noise was irritating. He was tired from the shuttle flight, obscurely annoyed by the obsequious robot attendants, and feeling the pull of Earth’s excessive gravity already. He punched the receive button. The operator’s voice instructed Mr. Tim Garroway to stand by for a call from Mr. Howard Rathbone III.

  Too late to worry about how Rathbone had figured where he’d be going to in such a hurry. He wasn’t cut out to play James Bond games, but he’d felt confident that Earth was the one place Rathbone would never think of looking for him if he made a run for it, since it was where Rathbone had wanted him to go. Obviously he’d under-estimated the man.

  While he waited for the connection to be completed between Earth and the space station up at the Lagrange point that was Rathbone’s corporate headquarters, he glanced through the doorway into the living room to see what Beth was doing. She was sitting cross-legged on the rug, building a tower of books, her small plump face raised to the warm spring sunshine that flooded in through the undraped window. Sunlight sparked her curls to gold, and Tim’s heart lurched as he saw for the thousandth time how like her mother his little daughter was.

  If only Sylvia could’ve seen her now.

  If only the damned emergency-team robots had functioned as they were supposed to.

  He’d gone over and over the options on the shuttle trip from the moon. There weren’t very many in his favor. Running had been an impulse that he’d begun to see might cause him a lot of nasty problems. He waited sullenly for the phone link to be completed.

  The visorphone crackled, pulling his attention back, and the screen cleared. Howard Rathbone III gazed at him from the elegantly paneled office where he kept the helm of his billion-dollar enterprises. Tim had speculated once, on first seeing this magnificent room, how much it had cost to lob all that rare and expensive teak and mahogany and rosewood into space to reconstruct the look of a luxury ocean liner from the 1920s. Sylvia had giggled at his estimate. “Way, way under!” she’d said.

  “Tim. You and Beth had a pleasant shuttle trip, I hope? Of course, you should have consulted me before you took the child along.”

  So the old man wasn’t going to call it kidnapping just yet. Mr. Rathbone was a big man with a big man ‘s hearty voice and manner. And a heart made out of pure moon rock. Obviously he figured on gaining some advantage from playing along with Tim.

  “Fine, thanks, Mr. Rathbone. I would’ve called you to –”

  Rathbone overrode his words. “You and Beth will need some time to recover. Tomorrow will be plenty of time to do what we talked about. You will do it, of course. You have so much to gain!”

  Uneasily, Tim considered how often the man seemed to read his mind. Or was it just that he himself was totally predictable, at least where Mercury Mining and Manufacturing was concerned? Maybe Rathbone was right; there was too much money involved to be squeamish, enough to buy Beth everything her heart desired now and for a long time to come. And was the price really so unreasonable?

  “I’m relying on you, Tim,” Rathbone said. “Triple M’s future is in your hands. But I’m confident you’ll come through for us.”

  Even when he was handing out praise and flattery, Rathbone’s words came out as orders. That was why he’d been so phenomenally successful, building his huge empire in less than two decades since the Second Mercury Expedition.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m a reasonable man, Tim. I’d like to have your willing cooperation. So I’m prepared to explain it all one more time. We must stop this now, before it goes any further. No telling what’ll happen if he gets away with it. Do you understand my position, Tim?”

  Tim nodded, his throat dry.

  “We can’t have all those machines out there thinking they’re entitled to rights and privileges same as humans. And they will, you know, if he gets away with this.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re a bright man. But you’ve been squandering your talents.”

  Not half as vicious as the things he’d said about Tim when he’d first learned of Sylvia’s marriage to a penniless student, and her pregnancy, Tim thought. But if he played his cards right...

  Rathbone leaned back in his leather swivel chair, steepled his fingers, and gazed at the father of his daughter’s child. On the wall behind him a map of the inner solar system showed the Rathbone empire in scattered twinkling lights. “I have no heirs except for little Beth.”

  Tim swallowed. His hunger to own and control what the map represented fought another battle with the cautious part of him. The outcome was indecisive again. Yet each time, the hungry side of him crept a little closer to victory. Especially here, in this house.

  “I still wonder if it wouldn’t be better to try public exposure,” Tim said. “You know – subject him to public scrutiny – put him through tests he can’t pass –”

  In the delay that followed, he knew what Rathbone’s answer would be.

  “That’s been tried already!” Rathbone scowled at him across space. “And failed. There’s no time left for pussyfooting here. He has to be removed.”

  Tim shrugged uneasily.

  “It’s not like killing a man, Tim. Stephen Byerley’s a robot!”

  Rathbone spat the word out, loaded with all the contempt, the hatred, and the fear Tim knew that he felt for robots.

  “Sleep on it, son,” his father-in-law said. In spite of the term he’d used, the threatening tone came through clearly. “I should think the consequences if you fail easily outweigh the demise of one robot.”

  That was the other factor in the equation. If he refused to do what Rathbone wanted, then Rathbone would take Beth away from him. He couldn’t go back to the moon or the space station, and he sure couldn’t stay on Earth any more. There was no place he could hide that his father-in-law’s thugs couldn’t find him. And he certainly couldn’t take up the freelance life of an asteroid prospector, not with a three-year-old to raise.

  The visorphone screen clouded over, and Tim turned heavily toward the living room to retrieve his daughter.

  He had to agree his father-in-law had a point. Stephen Byerley had managed to get elected to public office a month ago. It was the beginning of the end of uncont
ested human superiority, despite the much-vaunted three laws. For one thing, Mayor Byerley might start thinking his “brothers” in space, those who toiled under horrifying conditions on blistering planets for industrialists like Howard Rathbone III, deserved better conditions. Byerley might even decide they were being treated like slaves and use the weight of his office to start a campaign for their emancipation. It was ludicrous, of course, but Tim understood that once you set the precedent of one robot being “human “enough to hold human office, then you were going to have a hard time denying the same rights and protections to all the others.

  It wasn’t that he had much sympathy with the metal men. They were, after all, only machines. Nobody was more convinced of that than he! He’d had a long, intimate association with one of them going all the way back to 2009, right here in this house.

  “You wanted a father, Tirilmy,” Karin Garroway said brightly. “Well, I’ve brought you PAPPI.”

  Timmy stared at the gray metal box on wheels squatting in the precise middle of the living room rug. At first glance, he’d thought it was an old-fashioned canister vacuum cleaner minus the hose. Four skinny appendages protruded from its sides, ending in a collection of hooks and pincers like some grim skeletal joke. An upside-down bowl-shaped turret housed a camera lens and other things he didn’t recognize right away.

  Timmy touched a wheel housing with one toe.

  “Treat it with care.” Motherly chores satisfied now, Karin gathered up papers and laptop computer and stuffed them all in her briefcase.

  “What is it?”

  “PAPPI – Paternal Alternative Program: Prototype I.”

  “Looks pretty stupid,” Timmy said.

  “Never mind how it looks!” His mother glanced at him. “It’ll do everything a real father can do. PAPPI can pitch baseballs, and sort your stamp collection – all sorts of things.”

  “Can it do my homework?”

  “It has programs to coach you in math and reading, Timmy. PAPPI has tapes of bedtime stories selected for eight-year-old boys, too. And we’ll update them as you grow.”