Asimov's Future History Volume 1

by Isaac Asimov

  “What’s this?” asked Powell.

  “Look, if Napoleon is real, he’s got to be hanging around in this neighborhood. Let’s see if we can find him before he figures out some fresh deviltry. If he’s not real, if Jack is quantum hopping, what’ve we lost?”

  “If he is hidden on one of the moons, I do not know how we can detect him,” Borup objected.

  Donovan shook his head. “Jack doesn’t think he is, and he for sure would not be. In the first place, digging in like that is a lot of work, needs time and equipment and hands. If this is a try to sabotage Project Io, it’s got to be a shoestring kind of thing, a tiny clique, like maybe half a dozen individuals. Anything bigger would take too long to organize, be too hard to manage, and make secrecy impossible for any useful length of time. Investigators would be bound to get clues to the guilty parties.”

  Powell regarded his partner closely. “Once in a while you surprise me,” he confessed. “Marvelous, my dear Holmes!”

  Donovan bowed. “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

  “Holmes and Watson never said that,” Borup remarked aside.

  Donovan continued: “We’ve also got the fact that the gear for using the Trojan relays is special and delicate. On the surface of a moon it would stick up in sight of God and everybody and give the game away. Therefore Napoleon must be in space. And he won’t want to lose touch with Io during the frequent occultations. So he’ll be well above or below the ecliptic, where he always has Io in his instruments. An orbit skewed from Jupiter’s but otherwise with the same elements will keep him in place, fairly stably, over a period of a few weeks, I should think.” He glanced at Borup. “Svend, could we find a ship loitering maybe two, three million klicks from here in the northern or southern sky?”

  Powell scowled. “That’s a monstrous volume of space to cruise through.”

  “I would not obyect to running up the bill I present the company wit’,” Borup said, “but it is not necessary, and it would waste time that is precious. We do carry very sensitive instruments. When you travel at the speeds a courier reaches, you must be able to detect t’ings far ahead of you.” He pondered. “M-m-m, tja, it depends on the size and type of the craft. But somet’ing no bigger than mine, which is close to minimum, we could get on the optics for certain. And radar reaches still farther. The rotation axis of this moon is tilted enough that we need not take off to examine bot’ regions where Napoleon must be in one of if he monitors Io.”

  “The ship’s hull could be camouflaged, couldn’t it?” Powell inquired. “Then how’ll you know your radar hasn’t fingered a meteoroid?”

  “Camouflage, maybe, I am not sure. But the nature of a radar-reflecting surface shows in the return signal if you got an analyzer like mine. Metal is different from rock and so on. And once we have acquired a suspicious obyect, we have more instruments. In these parts, unless the crew is frozen to deat’, there will be infrared emission — and also from that direction, out of the power plant, neutrinos above the background count. Yes, I t’ink we can find the Emperor’s spaceship unless he is so far away that the communications delay is ridiculous. I will go put Knud on it.” Borup thrust foot against bulwark and arrowed out of the saloon, into the passageway leading to the control room.

  He returned with the promised bottle and three small thin glasses, to join Powell and Donovan at the table. There was just sufficient weight to make pouring and drinking feasible, albeit a trifle awkward. “Ole, make dinner,” he called. “A special treat for these poor men. Fishballs and tomato soup. You look too gloomy, my friends.”

  “We were wondering what to do if Jack really is insane — which is the simplest hypothesis, after all.” Powell’s tone was dark. “Get him aboard a robotic ship and back to Earth for Dr. Calvin to interview, sure. Except, how? He believes his duty is to stay and fight any new effort to exploit Io. He might return with us anyway, I suppose, if he knew we’re human. Second Law. You could add your voice for reinforcement, Svend. We’d outvote Napoleon three to one. But he can’t be certain. My guess is that even if he granted a ninety-nine percent probability that we’re human, he wouldn’t risk it. That one percent contains an outcome he finds unendurable.”

  The smile died on Borup’s mouth. “We all do, no?” he replied most softly. “I would not take such a chance, would you? Better we go back to bad, corrupt politics than nearly everybody on Eart’ die and the survivors are starving savages. Could Napoleon be telling the trut’?”

  “Absolutely not,” Donovan stated. “I know that much biology, physics, and geology. Too bad Jack doesn’t.”

  “He’s utterly ignorant about people, too,” Powell added. “A quite ordinary robot, even, would wonder about that story, if he’d had normal human contacts. You needn’t stipulate our politicians and capitalists are farsighted, altruistic, or extraordinarily bright. Simply ask yourself whether they’d take such a risk with the civilization that keeps them alive and well-to-do. Besides, the scientific method doesn’t work the way the story claims. You don’t get a few geniuses makIng a discovery overnight in a garret and then unable to get it published. Something as fundamental as this would come out in bits and pieces, over the years, with the news media following and exaggerating every step.”

  “And the public sure as hell would demand a screeching halt the moment it heard operations here might bring doomsday,” Donovan said.

  Borup nodded a bit impatiently. “Yes, yes. I am not quite so naive as Yack.”

  “I’m sorry,” Donovan apologized, while Powell offered, “I guess we’re overwrought.”

  “It is all right. I only wondered how plausible to anybody are the viroids.”

  “To nobody, except Jack,” Donovan growled. “In fact, it’s so crackpot that if we reported right now what he’d told us, they’d wonder on Earth whether we’d gone off trajectory ourselves. We need all the data we can collect, which is why I wanted that search for another ship. “His eyes brightened … If we do find it, we’ll beam the news back the same minute, and the world police can begin right away tracking down the conspirators.”

  “Who might they be, do you t’ink?”

  Powell shrugged … I can’t name anybody specific. I have my guesses, but they taught me in school that a man is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Imagine a couple of powerful old-guard politicians whose careers are in trouble, probably conjoined with one or two industrialists who were getting rich off the former cozy arrangements, plus a few skilled underlings. The idea obviously is to show Project Io was a monumental, expensive blunder, and cause the Young Turks who pushed it through to be discredited. The reform coalition will fall apart and the wily old-timers can pick off its members piecemeal.”

  Donovan’s mane bristled with excitement … We’ll have one damn good clue,” he said … The cabal has to’ve had a mole in U.S. Robots or high up in the World Space Agency — somebody who knew about Code Oops!-ilon and passed the information on. Probably that was what decided the conspirators to go ahead. It’s the key to their whole stunt. Well, the number of possible suspects must be mighty small. Once we can prove this was a hoax, I’ll bet the mole is under arrest inside a week, and his buddies by the end of the month.”

  “That’s if we can prove it,” Powell demurred, “which we can’t if it’s not true.”

  “Yes, why should a person lying to Yack pretend he is Napoleon?” Borup asked … It is crazy.”

  Donovan’s laugh rattled … Exactly. Hearing what Jack has to tell, most people would take for granted he’s gone blinkety.”

  “Confusions about Napoleon are a cliché,” Powell said … And you’d expect a poor, limited robot to fall into clichés, wouldn’t you? Yes, it was a clever touch. Maybe Jack never heard the name ‘Napoleon’ before he was on Io, but we don’t know, and he isn’t about to inform us.”

  “Or he could lie, could he not?” Borup suggested. “If he believes you are robots too, not humans, you cannot order him to speak the trut’.”

  “Right,” Donov
an snarled. “We can’t give him any damned orders he doesn’t want to carry out.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he desperately wants to,” Powell replied. “Couldn’t you hear it in his voice? This conflict, this uncertainty is racking him apart. It may well destroy him, bum out his brain, all by itself.”

  “In which case the gang will’ve won.”

  “If the gang exists.”

  “Yeah. How do we settle Jack’s dilemma for him? How do we convince him we’re human?”

  Powell leered. “I could chop off your head.” Sobering: “No, seriously, he would see the action performed, but he couldn’t be certain the gore wasn’t fake. A human doubtless would be, knowing we can’t have brought along the studio equipment needed to stage a realistic-looking murder. But Jack doesn’t know humans that well. He’s had so little direct exposure to them, he’s like a small child.”

  “And we can’t land on Io to let him meet us in the flesh,” Donovan said unnecessarily. “We could, that is, if we didn’t mind dying shortly afterward.”

  “Not in my spaceship,” Borup declared.

  “Of course. Besides, Jack would probably run away and hide from us — Wait, though. I’m on the track of something.”

  Donovan stared into a comer. The ventilator whirred. Warm odors drifted in from the galley. After a minute he tossed off his drink, struck his fist against the table, and exclaimed, “How’s this? I don’t imagine you have any weapon aboard, Svend, but inside the station I noticed a supply room that hadn’t been emptied — stuff might be wanted someday — and the manifest on the door mentioned a case of detonol sticks. Jack can recognize one of those, all right! Look, while he watches, somebody waves it and says to him,, Jack, your behavior makes me feel so terrible I want to kill myself. ‘Then the man pulls out the firing pin. If he doesn’t push it back in within five minutes, bang!”

  Borup blinked. “Are you crazy like him? What good will that do, except to ruin my ship?”

  “Why, if I’m a robot I can’t suicide,” Donovan crowed. “Third Law, remember? Therefore I must be human. Therefore Jack will immediately yell ‘Stop!’ and beg our pardon for ever having doubted us.”

  “That firewater went to your head almighty fast, boy,” Powell clipped. “A robot damn well can self-destruct if that’s necessary for executing his orders.”

  “But — well, naturally, I mean first we’ll set it up — uh — it does call for some preliminary detail work.”

  “It calls for an infinite amount, because its value is zero. However — hmm —” Powell refilled his own glass and fell into a similar reverie.

  Under the ghostly gravity, Knud entered without sound. One by one they saw his tall form in the doorway, and tensed.

  “Search completed, sir,” the robot reported.”

  Already?” Donovan wondered.

  “The sweep and data crunching go fast,” Borup said. “They must, on a courier. la, Knud. hvad har du — What have you found?”

  “Negative, sir,” the flat voice announced. “No indications of a vessel within either the northern or the southern cones of space that you specified, for as far as reliability extends.”

  Powell and Donovan exchanged stares. Powell slumped. “Then Jack is insane,” he said heavily. “Conditions on Io were too much for him, and Project Io is kaput.”

  “You may go, Knud,” Borup said. The robot departed. “I am sorry, my friends. Come, have a little more to drink.”

  “No, hold on, hold on!” Donovan bawled. He sprang to his feet. They left the deck. He caught the table edge in time to keep from rising to the overhead. Hanging upside down, he blurted, “Listen, I sort of expected this. Napoleon wouldn’t likely be human. A big risk of life, a big expense. But he can be a robot!”

  The silence was not lengthy, nor stunned. The idea had lain at the back of each mind. Powell began to develop it. While the other two sat, he paced in front of them, long strides bouncing off the ends of the cabin, and counted points on his fingers as they occurred to him.

  “Yes,” he said, “that does make sense. Any man-capable spacecraft is a sizable, powerful machine. Misused, it can kill a lot of people. So the authorities keep track of it. You don’t take it anywhere without a certified crew and a filed flight plan. Hard to go clandestinely. But a one-robot vessel, why, that needn’t be much more than a framework and a motor. You could keep it somewhere unbeknownst to anyone, as it might be the Lunar outback, and lift off from there unnoticed. When the robot wanted to drift along undetectable beyond a few hundred klicks, he’d shut off the power and sit in the cold. He himself — not every robot is a U. S. R. product and property, leased to the user and periodically inspected. The best are, yes, but — hm, every now and then one of ours is irrecoverably destroyed, in some accident or other. Except that not all those reports have been honest. I know of a few cases where the robot was in fact hidden away, to be redirected to illegal jobs. This could well be such a case.”

  Borup’s china-blue eyes widened. “Can you make a robot do unlawful t’ings?”

  “You can if you go about it right,” Donovan said. “With the proper technicians and equipment, you can blank out all he’s ever learned and retrain him from scratch. The Three Laws still hold, of course, but he can have some pretty weird notions about the world. That must be what’s been done here. If Napoleon only remembers dealing with his masters and Jack, then he’s swallowed their story whole. Except for a very few top-flight, experimental models, robots are unsubtle characters anyway. They can’t concoct elaborate plots and don’t imagine that anybody else could. We’ll give him an earful!”

  “Slow down,” Powell cautioned. “Let’s explore this further. What does the Napoleon robot necessarily know and believe, to execute his mission of halting Project Io?” He thought aloud as he soared to and fro:

  “He can operate a spacecraft, a communications system, et cetera. Therefore he has a certain amount of independent decision-making capability, though scarcely equal to Jack’s. Otherwise simpleminded, he has no way of knowing the viroid story is false. I daresay he’s been forbidden to tune in any outside ‘cast, and told to ignore whatever he might overhear accidentally. His mission is to warn Jack about the viroids, and about the wicked men whose robots will try to talk Jack into going back to work. To this end, it’ll be reasonable to him that he claim to being human himself, and that his image be projected as human. He’ll have no inhibitions about such a pious deception, if it’s used on another robot.”

  “Ah-ha!” Borup exulted. “We have him! He will be listening and watching when you next call Yack. He will see you are human, and obey your orders.”

  “He will not,” Powell said bleakly. “I assume the conspirators have planned ahead. Ifl were in charge, I’d not only program his transmitter to make him look human, I’d program his receiver to make any in-calling human look like a robot.”

  “Whoof!” puffed Borup, and sought the akvavit.

  “Yeah,” Donovan agreed. “That pretty well shields him from any nagging doubts, which makes him better able to quiet down any that Jack expresses.”

  “He might entertain the possibility that his communicator is deceiving him,” Powell said, “but he can’t act on it, when his orders are to prevent a catastrophe. For instance, we could invite him to come here and meet us. I’ll bet he’d refuse, because we, if we’re enemy robots as he’s been told, we’d overpower him.”

  Borup nodded. “I see. I see. It is a classic conundrum, no? Plato’s cave.”

  “Huh?” grunted Donovan.

  “You do not know? Well, I have more time to read than you do, on my travels. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato pointed out that our information about the material world comes to us entirely t’rough our senses, and how do we know they tell us true? Rather, we know they are often wrong. We must do the best we can. He said we are like prisoners chained in a cave who cannot see the outside, yust the shadows of t’ings there that are cast on the wall. From this they must try to guess what the reality i
s.”

  “Kind of an airy notion.”

  “Ha, you would refute solipsism like Dr. Samuel Yohnson, by kicking a stone —”

  “Never mind the dialectics,” Powell interrupted. “You have hit on a good analogy, Svend. We are trapped in Plato’s cave, all three parties of us. We can’t physically go to each other. The only information we get is what comes over the communication beams; and it could be lies. We don’t even know that the Napoleon robot exists. We’re assuming so, but maybe he really is only a figment of Jack’s deranged imagination. If Napoleon does exist, then he knows that his own projected image is a man’s; but every image he receives is a robot’s, and he believes — he must believe, if he’s to serve his bosses reliably — that that is true. As for Jack, if he isn’t hallucinating, then every image he receives is human, and he can’t tell which of them are genuine.

  “Deadlock. How do we break it? Remember, meanwhile the clock is running. I don’t think Jack’s brain can take the stress on it much longer. Be that as it may, Project Io can’t remain idle for weeks and months without going broke.”

  Donovan snapped his fingers. “Got it!” he cried. “We call Jack and get Napoleon into the conversation. We record this. Then Earth will know there’s something rotten in — uh — sorry, Svend.”

  Powell frowned. “Well, we can try,” he answered. “But we’d better have something to say he’ll consider worth his notice.”

  “Hello, Jack,” he greeted as calmly as he was able. “How are you?”

  The barren scene jittered. The belated voice rose and fell. “What … do you want?”

  “Why, to continue our conversation. And, to be sure, offer our respects to the Emperor Napoleon. You told us he’ll be listening in. We’d be delighted to have the honor of his participation in our talk. Introductions first. I neglected them earlier. You may recall that my name is Gregory Powell. The gentleman here at my side is Michael Donovan, and behind us you see Captain Svend Borup.” Powell beamed, pointless though he knew it was. “Quite a contrast, we three, eh? Well, humans are a variegated lot.”