Asimov's Future History Volume 1

by Isaac Asimov

  He said argumentatively, “The trouble is the matter of recognition. We have Jane-2 correlating magnificently. She can correlate on any subject, but once she’s done so, she can’t recognize a valuable result from a valueless one. It’s not an easy problem, judging how to program a robot to tell a significant correlation when you don’t know what correlations she will be making.”

  “I presume you’ve thought of lowering the potential at the W-21 diode junction and sparking across the –”

  “No, no, no, no –” Madarian faded off into a whispering diminuendo. “You can’t just have it spew out everything. We can do that for ourselves. The point is to have it recognize the crucial correlation and draw the conclusion. Once that is done, you see, a Jane robot would snap out an answer by intuition. It would be something we couldn’t get ourselves except by the oddest kind of luck.”

  “It seems to me,” said Bogert dryly, “that if you had a robot like that, you would have her do routinely what, among human beings, only the occasional genius is capable of doing.”

  Madarian nodded vigorously. “Exactly, Peter. I’d have said so myself if I weren’t afraid of frightening off the execs. Please don’t repeat that in their hearing.”

  “Do you really want a robot genius?”

  “What are words? I’m trying to get a robot with the capacity to make random correlations at enormous speeds, together with a key-significance high-recognition quotient. And I’m trying to put those words into positronic field equations. I thought I had it, too, but I don’t. Not yet.”

  He looked at Jane-2 discontentedly and said, “What’s the best significance you have, Jane?”

  Jane-2’s head turned to look at Madarian but she made no sound, and Madarian whispered with resignation, “She’s running that into the correlation banks.”

  Jane-2 spoke tonelessly at last. “I’m not sure.” It was the first sound she had made.

  Madarian’s eyes rolled upward. “She’s doing the equivalent of setting up equations with indeterminate solutions.”

  “I gathered that,” said Bogert. “Listen, Madarian, can you go anywhere at this point, or do we pull out now and cut our losses at half a billion?”

  “Oh, I’ll get it, “muttered Madarian.

  Jane-3 wasn’t it. She was never as much as activated and Madarian was in a rage.

  It was human error. His own fault, if one wanted to be entirely accurate. Yet though Madarian was utterly humiliated, others remained quiet. Let he who has never made an error in the fearsomely intricate mathematics of the positronic brain fill out the first memo of correction.

  Nearly a year passed before Jane-4 was ready. Madarian was ebullient again. “She does it,” he said. “She’s got a good high-recognition quotient.”

  He was confident enough to place her on display before the Board and have her solve problems. Not mathematical problems; any robot could do that; but problems where the terms were deliberately misleading without being actually inaccurate.

  Bogert said afterward, “That doesn’t take much, really.”

  “Of course not. It’s elementary for Jane-4 but I had to show them something, didn’t I?”

  “Do you know how much we’ve spent so far?”

  “Come on, Peter, don’t give me that. Do you know how much we’ve got back? These things don’t go on in a vacuum, you know. I’ve had over three years of hell over this, if you want to know, but I’ve worked out new techniques of calculation that will save us a minimum of fifty thousand dollars on every new type of positronic brain we design, from now on in forever. Right?”

  “Well –”

  “Well me no wells. It’s so. And it’s my personal feeling that n-dimensional calculus of uncertainty can have any number of other applications if we have the ingenuity to find them, and my Jane robots will find them. Once I’ve got exactly what I want, the new JN series will pay for itself inside of five years, even if we triple what we’ve invested so far.”

  “What do you mean by ‘exactly what you want’? What’s wrong with Jane-4?”

  “Nothing. Or nothing much. She’s on the track, but she can be improved and I intend to do so. I thought I knew where I was going when I designed her. Now I’ve tested her and I know where I’m going. I intend to get there.”

  Jane-5 was it. It took Madarian well over a year to produce her and there he had no reservations; he was utterly confident.

  Jane-5 was shorter than the average robot, slimmer. Without being a female caricature as Jane-1 had been, she managed to possess an air of femininity about herself despite the absence of a single clearly feminine feature.

  “It’s the way she’s standing,” said Bogert. Her arms were held gracefully and somehow the torso managed to give the impression of curving slightly when she turned.

  Madarian said, “Listen to her.... How do you feel, Jane?”

  “In excellent health, thank you,” said Jane-5, and the voice was precisely that of a woman; it was a sweet and almost disturbing contralto.

  “Why did you do that, Clinton?” said Peter, startled and beginning to frown.

  “Psychologically important,” said Madarian. “I want people to think of her as a woman; to treat her as a woman; to explain.”

  “What people?” Madarian put his hands in his pockets and stared thoughtfully at Bogert. “I would like to have arrangements made for Jane and myself to go to flagstaff.”

  Bogert couldn’t help but note that Madarian didn’t say Jane-5. He made use of no number this time. She was the Jane. He said doubtfully, “To flagstaff? Why?”

  “Because that’s the world center for general planetology, isn’t it? It’s where they’re studying the stars and trying to calculate the probability of habitable planets, isn’t it?”

  “I know that, but it’s on Earth.”

  “Well, and I surely know that.”

  “Robotic movements on Earth are strictly controlled. And there’s no need for it. Bring a library of books on general planetology here and let Jane absorb them.”

  “No! Peter, will you get it through your head that Jane isn’t the ordinary logical robot; she’s intuitive.”

  “So?”

  “So how can we tell what she needs, what she can use, what will set her off? We can use any metal model in the factory to read books; that’s frozen data and out of date besides. Jane must have living information; she must have tones of voice, she must have side issues; she must have total irrelevancies even. How the devil do we know what or when something will go click-click inside her and fall into a pattern? If we knew, we wouldn’t need her at all, would we?”

  Bogert began to feel harassed. He said, “Then bring the men here, the general planetologists.”

  “Here won’t be any good. They’ll be out of their element. They won’t react naturally. I want Jane to watch them at work; I want her to see their instruments, their offices, their desks, everything about them that she can. I want you to arrange to have her transported to flagstaff. And I’d really like not to discuss it any further.”

  For a moment he almost sounded like Susan. Bogert winced, and said, “It’s complicated making such an arrangement. Transporting an experimental robot –”

  “Jane isn’t experimental. She’s the fifth of the series.”

  “The other four weren’t really working models.”

  Madarian lifted his hands in helpless frustration. “Who’s forcing you to tell the government that?”

  “I’m not worried about the government. It can be made to understand special cases. It’s public opinion. We’ve come a long way in fifty years and I don’t propose to be set back twenty-five of them by having you lose control of a –”

  “I won’t lose control. You’re making foolish remarks. Look! U. S. Robots can afford a private plane. We can land quietly at the nearest commercial airport and be lost in hundreds of similar landings. We can arrange to have a large ground car with an enclosed body meet us and take us to Flagstaff. Jane will be crated and it will be obvious
that some piece of thoroughly non-robotic equipment is being transported to the labs. We won’t get a second look from anyone. The men at Flagstaff will be alerted and will be told the exact purpose of the visit. They will have every motive to cooperate and to prevent a leak.”

  Bogert pondered. “The risky part will be the plane and the ground car. If anything happens to the crate –”

  “Nothing will.”

  “We might get away with it if Jane is deactivated during transport. Then even if someone finds out she’s inside –”

  “No, Peter. That can’t be done. Uh-uh. Not Jane-5. Look, she’s been free-associating since she was activated. The information she possesses can be put into freeze during deactivation but the free associations never. No, sir, she can’t ever be deactivated.”

  “But, then, if somehow it is discovered that we are transporting an activated robot –”

  “It won’t be found out.” Madarian remained firm and the plane eventually took off. It was a late-model automatic Computo-jet, but it carried a human pilot – one of U. S. Robots’ own employees – as backup. The crate containing Jane arrived at the airport safely, was transferred to the ground car, and reached the Research Laboratories at Flagstaff without incident.

  Peter Bogert received his first call from Madarian not more than an hour after the latter’s arrival at Flagstaff. Madarian was ecstatic and, characteristically, could not wait to report.

  The message arrived by tubed laser beam, shielded, scrambled, and ordinarily impenetrable, but Bogert felt exasperated. He knew it could be penetrated if someone with enough technological ability – the government, for example – was determined to do so. The only real safety lay in the fact that the government had no reason to try. At least Bogert hoped so.

  He said, “For God’s sake, do you have to call?”

  Madarian ignored him entirely. He burbled, “It was an inspiration. Sheer genius, I tell you.”

  For a while, Bogert stared at the receiver. Then he shouted incredulously, “You mean you’ve got the answer? Already?”

  “No, no! Give us time, damn it. I mean the matter of her voice was an inspiration. Listen, after we were chauffeured from the airport to the main administration building at Flagstaff, we uncrated Jane and she stepped out of the box. When that happened, every man in the place stepped back. Scared! Nitwits! If even scientists can’t understand the significance of the Laws of Robotics, what can we expect of the average untrained individual? For a minute there I thought: This will all be useless. They won’t talk. They’ll be keying themselves for a quick break in case she goes berserk and they’ll be able to think of nothing else.”

  “Well, then, what are you getting at?”

  “So then she greeted them routinely. She said, ‘Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am so glad to meet you.’ And it came out in this beautiful contralto.... That was it. One man straightened his tie, and another ran his fingers through his hair. What really got me was that the oldest guy in the place actually checked his fly to make sure it was zipped. They’re all crazy about her now. All they needed was the voice. She isn’t a robot any more; she’s a girl.”

  “You mean they’re talking to her?”

  “Are they talking to her! I should say so. I should have programmed her for sexy intonations. They’d be asking her for dates right now if I had. Talk about conditioned reflex. Listen, men respond to voices. At the most intimate moments, are they looking? It’s the voice in your ear –”

  “Yes, Clinton, I seem to remember. Where’s Jane now?”

  “With them. They won’t let go of her.”

  “Damn! Get in there with her. Don’t let her out of your sight, man.”

  Madarian’s calls thereafter, during his ten-day stay at Flagstaff, were not very frequent and became progressively less exalted.

  Jane was listening carefully, he reported, and occasionally she responded. She remained popular. She was given entry everywhere. But there were no results.

  Bogert said, “Nothing at all?”

  Madarian was at once defensive. “You can’t say nothing at all. It’s impossible to say nothing at all with an intuitive robot. You don’t know what might not be going on inside her. This morning she asked Jensen what he had for breakfast.”

  “Rossiter Jensen the astrophysicist?”

  “Yes, of course. As it turned out, he didn’t have breakfast that morning. Well, a cup of coffee.”

  “So Jane’s learning to make small talk. That scarcely makes up for the expense.”

  “Oh, don’t be a jackass. It wasn’t small talk. Nothing is small talk for Jane. She asked because it had something to do with some sort of cross-correlation she was building in her mind.”

  “What can it possibly –”

  “How do I know? If I knew, I’d be a Jane myself and you wouldn’t need her. But it has to mean something. She’s programmed for high motivation to obtain an answer to the question of a planet with optimum habitability/distance and –”

  “Then let me know when she’s done that and not before. It’s not really necessary for me to get a blow-by-blow description of possible correlations.”

  He didn’t really expect to get notification of success. With each day, Bogert grew less sanguine, so that when the notification finally came, he wasn’t ready. And it came at the very end.

  That last time, when Madarian’s climactic message came, it came in what was almost a whisper. Exaltation had come complete circle and Madarian was awed into quiet.

  “She did it,” he said. “She did it. After I all but gave up, too. After she had received everything in the place and most of it twice and three times over and never said a word that sounded like anything.... I’m on the plane now, returning. We’ve just taken off.”

  Bogert managed to get his breath. “Don’t play games, man. You have the answer? Say so, if you have. Say it plainly.”

  “She has the answer. She’s given me the answer. She’s given me the names of three stars within eighty light-years which, she says, have a sixty to ninety percent chance of possessing one habitable planet each. The probability that at least one has is 0.972. It’s almost certain. And that’s just the least of it. Once we get back, she can give us the exact line of reasoning that led her to the conclusion and I predict that the whole science of astrophysics and cosmology will –”

  “Are you sure –”

  “You think I’m having hallucinations? I even have a witness. Poor guy jumped two feet when Jane suddenly began to reel out the answer in her gorgeous voice”

  And that was when the meteorite struck and in the thorough destruction of the plane that followed, Madarian and the pilot were reduced to gobbets of bloody flesh and no usable remnant of Jane was recovered.

  The gloom at U. S. Robots had never been deeper. Robertson attempted to find consolation in the fact that the very completeness of the destruction had utterly hidden the illegalities of which the firm had been guilty.

  Peter shook his head and mourned. “We’ve lost the best chance U. S. Robots ever had of gaining an unbeatable public image; of overcoming the damned Frankenstein complex. What it would have meant for robots to have one of them work out the solution to the habitable-planet problem, after other robots had helped work out the Space Jump. Robots would have opened the galaxy to us. And if at the same time we could have driven scientific knowledge forward in a dozen different directions as we surely would have... Oh, God, there’s no way of calculating the benefits to the human race, and to us of course.”

  Robertson said, “We could build other Janes, couldn’t we? Even without Madarian?”

  “Sure we could. But can we depend on the proper correlation again? Who knows how low – probability that final result was? What if Madarian had had a fantastic piece of beginner’s luck? And then to have an even more fantastic piece of bad luck? A meteorite zeroing in... It’s simply unbelievable –”

  Robertson said in a hesitating whisper, “It couldn’t have been meant. I mean, if we weren’t meant
to know and if the meteorite was a judgment – from –”

  He faded off under Bogert’s withering glare. Bogert said, “It’s not a dead loss, I suppose. Other Janes are bound to help us in some ways. And we can give other robots feminine voices, if that will help encourage public acceptance – though I wonder what the women would say. If we only knew what Jane-5 had said!”

  “In that last call, Madarian said there was a witness.” Bogert said, “I know; I’ve been thinking about that. Don’t you suppose I’ve been in touch with flagstaff? Nobody in the entire place heard Jane say anything that was out of the ordinary, anything that sounded like an answer to the habitable-planet problem, and certainly anyone there should have recognized the answer if it came – or at least recognized it as a possible answer.”

  “Could Madarian have been lying? Or crazy? Could he have been trying to protect himself –”

  “You mean he may have been trying to save his reputation by pretending he had the answer and then gimmick Jane so she couldn’t talk and say, ‘Oh, sorry, something happened accidentally. Oh, darn!’ I won’t accept that for a minute. You might as well suppose he had arranged the meteorite.”

  “Then what do we do?” Bogert said heavily, “Turn back to flagstaff. The answer must be there. I’ve got to dig deeper, that’s all. I’m going there and I’m taking a couple of the men in Madarian’s department. We’ve got to go through that place top to bottom and end to end.”

  “But, you know, even if there were a witness and he had heard, what good would it do, now that we don’t have Jane to explain the process?”

  “Every little something is useful. Jane gave the names of the stars; the catalogue numbers probably – none of the named stars has a chance. If someone can remember her saying that and actually remember the catalogue number, or have heard it clearly enough to allow it to be recovered by Psycho-probe if he lacked the conscious memory – then we’ll have something. Given the results at the end, and the data fed Jane at the beginning, we might be able to reconstruct the line of reasoning; we might recover the intuition. If that is done, we’ve saved the game –”