Asimov’s Future History Volume 11

by Isaac Asimov

  A stranger’s elbow jammed into his ribs, an anonymous hand clawed at his face, and a disembodied boot crushed down on his toes. All three assaults were completely unintentional. He could not even tell which people, in the press of bodies, were responsible. There were no people in the melee, just a random collection of fists and feet, bodies and shouts. One moment, Alvar found himself buried beneath a tangle of Settlers and deputies, and the next he was suspended in midair over a tangle of Ironheads.

  Alvar was overwhelmed. The shouts, the cries, the noise, the shock of feeling pain, were tremendous. Robot-protected Spacers rarely had the chance to feel pain of any sort, and Alvar was amazed at the intensity of the sensation.

  He winced and writhed, every instinct telling him to get free, get away. But both duty and desire fought against those impulses: He had a job to do here, and a few debts to pay as well. Alvar Kresh did not get many chances to bust heads.

  The bodies crushed together, punches flew. At first, the two sides seemed evenly matched, but then the Ironheads began to give way. The Ironheads specialized in hit-and-run attacks on property. Never before had they faced a pitched battle against whatever rowdies the Settlers could field.

  And the Settlers here at the lecture were a pretty rough lot. There were no front-office types here, no executives who stayed clean during a workday. Whoever had picked out the Settler delegation to this lecture had sent the roughnecks.

  The differences in experience and attitude began to show. When an Ironhead punched a Settler, the Settler would stand there and take it. But when a Settler landed one good punch on an Ironhead, the Head would drop to the ground, moaning in pain.

  Obvious when you thought about it. After all, robots had been shielding the Ironheads from even the most trivial pain or trauma all their lives. They weren’t used to it. The Settlers – at least these rowdies – were quite willing to take a fair amount of punishment in exchange for beating and humiliating the goons who had raised so much hell so many times in Settlertown.

  But the Heads weren’t in full retreat yet. A few of them were showing guts enough to stay and fight – and that suited Alvar just as much as it did the Settlers. The Heads had caused his department no end of grief over the years. Someone stomped on his foot again, and he cried out.

  Someone yelled back, into his ear, and he turned toward whoever it was. And then, suddenly, there he was, face to angry face with Simcor Beddle, the corpulent leader of the Ironheads.

  Alvar’s blood was up. The last few days had been among the toughest of his life. Even if the Ironheads had been the least of his troubles recently, there were still a few older debts to pay. If he could not get his hands on Anshaw or the Governor or Welton or Caliban, then Simcor Beddle would do nicely.

  He grabbed Beddle by the collar and got the pleasure of seeing the blubbering fool cry out in alarm. Alvar drew back his arm, formed his hand into a fist

  – And suddenly there was a huge metallic-green hand wrapped around his fist, holding him back. Alvar looked up, looked around the auditorium. Someone had had the sense to call in the robots waiting in the lobby. One robot was no good in a riot. A thousand, working together, were unstoppable. The robots were swarming allover the room, pulling the combatants apart, putting themselves between attacker and attacked, a whole army of them determinedly enforcing the First Law.

  Oh, well, Alvar thought as he relaxed his fist and let go of Beddle. At least it was fun while it lasted.

  But it would have been nice if he had gotten to throw at least one punch.

  The flight from the lecture hall to her home was not a happy one for Fredda. Jomain, her sole human escort on the trip, was less than scintillating company, to put it mildly.

  Still, it could have been worse. The others had all taken their own aircars. Jomaine was bad enough, but compared to the alternative of, say, watching Gubber Anshaw fall to pieces, traveling with Jomaine was an absolute joy.

  Which was not to say she was enjoying the ride. Sitting in stony silence with an angry colleague while a robot did the flying was not her idea of a good time.

  On the other hand, that did not mean she was glad when Jomaine started talking. After all, she knew what he was going to say.

  “He knows,” Jomaine said.

  Fredda shut her eyes and leaned back against the headrest of her chair. For a moment or two, she toyed with the idea of playing dumb, pretending she did not know what he was talking about, but he would not fall for that, and he would not enjoy the charade of being forced to tell her what she already knew. “Not now, Jomaine. It’s been a hard enough day as it is.”

  “I don’t think we have the luxury of deciding when would be a pleasant time to discuss this, Fredda. We are in danger. Both of us. I think it is time we tried to find ways to get back in control of the situation. And I don’t think we can do that if we just pretend the problem isn’t there.”

  “All right, then, Jomaine, let’s talk about it. What do you want to say? What, exactly, do you think Kresh knows, and what makes you think he knows it?”

  “I think he knows Caliban is a No Law robot. I saw him getting a report. It had to be about Horatio. I could see it in Kresh’s face.”

  Fredda opened her eyes and looked toward Jomaine. “What about Horatio? I just heard a scrap or two, nothing solid.”

  “No, I suppose you wouldn’t have. We tried to let you keep to yourself today and work on your talk. There were police all over Limbo Depot today. Witnesses saw a big red robot go into the supervisor’s office with Horatio. Five minutes later the red robot goes through the plate glass, down into the tunnels, with the cops in hot pursuit. Then a police roboshrink shows up and takes Horatio away. Then Kresh gets that report during your talk. I think we have to assume that Caliban talked to Horatio, somehow or another revealed his true nature to Horatio, and Horatio brainlocked until the psychologists calmed him down.”

  Fredda screwed up her face and cursed silently in the darkness before she replied in a voice she kept determinedly even and reasonable. “Yes, that sounds like a sensible guess,” she said woodenly. Hells on fire! She did not need this now.

  “Why the devil didn’t you tell him?” Jomaine demanded. “Kresh has not only found out the truth, he has found out we were trying to hide the truth. His knowing about Caliban hurt us badly, but you have done us as much damage by hiding the information.”

  Fredda struggled to keep her temper. “I know that,” she said, her voice short and under tight control. “I should have called and told the police about Caliban the moment I came to in the hospital. Instead I just crossed my fingers and hoped there wouldn’t be any trouble. Remember, I did not even know he was missing at first. And it seemed to me that announcing the New Law robots would cause enough trouble all by itself – and it did, in case you didn’t notice. So I took a chance on keeping quiet – and lost. I must thank you for leaving the decision to me. You could have spoken up, too.”

  “That was a purely selfish decision. I didn’t want to be thrown in prison. Not when there were still hopes that there would be no further trouble. But then, the more trouble there was, the more dangerous it would be to confess.”

  “And now, I can hardly see how it could get worse,” Fredda said. She let down her guard a bit and sighed. “We should have told Kresh about Caliban. But that’s the past. We have to look at the present and the future. What do we do now?”

  “Let’s think on that for a moment,” Jomaine said. “The police may have theories and reports from specialists, but you and I still are the only ones who know for certain that Caliban is a No-Law.”

  “Gubber has his suspicions,” Fredda said. “I’m sure he does. But Gubber is in no state or position to go talking to the Sheriff just now.”

  “I agree,” Jomaine said. “I’m not worried about him. My point is that no matter what happened between Caliban and Horatio, Kresh can’t be certain that Caliban isn’t just a New Law robot, or even some specialized form of standard Three Law robot. There have bee
n cases where robots have been built unaware that they obeyed the Three Laws, but they obeyed them, anyway. All Kresh could have would be Horatio’s report – and I doubt that Horatio would be an altogether reliable informant. As I recall you built him with extremely high First Law and Third Law potential, with Second Law reduced somewhat. The idea was to give him the ability to make independent decisions.”

  “So what’s your point?” Fredda asked.

  “An enhanced First Law robot like him wouldn’t be able to deal with Caliban very well or very long without malfunctioning,” Jomaine said. “If Caliban talked to him, and described doing much of anything well outside normal robotic behavior, Horatio would probably suffer severe cognitive dissonance and malfunction.”

  “So?”

  “You’ve just finished making a long speech where you said we rely too much on robots. We believe in them so much we can’t quite believe they could be built any other way. I think if Kresh is given the choice between believing there could be such a thing as a No Law robot, or believing that a malfunctioning robot was confused, he’ll go with the confused robot.”

  Fredda shifted in her seat and sighed. It was tempting, sorely tempting, to agree with Jomaine. She had spent her whole life in a culture that believed what it wanted and resolutely ignored the facts. She looked at Jomaine and saw his eager, hopeful expression as he continued to speak, desperately trying to convince himself and Fredda both.

  “Caliban was meant to live in the laboratory,” Jomaine said. “He only has a low-capacity power source, and we never taught him how to recharge it. At best, it will last a day or two longer. Maybe it’s died already. If not, then it will fail soon, and he’ll run out of power. He’ll stop dead. If he’s in hiding when that happens, he’ll just vanish. Maybe he was already on reserves when he went to see Horatio. Maybe he’s already keeled over in some tunnel where no one will look for the next twenty years.”

  “And maybe Horatio told him how to plug into a recharge receptacle, or maybe Caliban saw a robot charge up somewhere, or maybe he worked it out for himself. We can hope that he will lose power, but we can’t count on it.”

  Fredda hesitated a moment, then spoke again. “Besides, there’s something you don’t know. The information from Gubber that you “handed to me in the hospital? It was the full police report. I didn’t tell you about it before now because I didn’t think you’d want to know. They have very strong evidence that a robot committed the attack against me. They weren’t ready to believe that evidence before, but now it will be different. And they know a robot named Caliban was involved in a situation with a bunch of robot-bashing Settlers that ended up burning down a building. And there must be more, besides, things that have happened since then. Kresh is not the sort of man to sit still and wait for things to happen. Even if he can’t quite accept the idea of a No Law robot, by now he has a lot more than Horatio’s statement to convince him that Caliban is strange and dangerous. I doubt he’ d give up looking even if Caliban loses power and vanishes without a trace.”

  “Do you really think Kresh believes Caliban to be dangerous?” Jomaine Terach asked.

  Fredda Leving felt an ache in the pit of her stomach and a throbbing pain in her head. It was time to speak truths she had not been able to face. “My point, Jomaine, is that Caliban is dangerous. At least we must work on the assumption that he is. Perhaps he did attack me. You and I know better than anyone else, there was nothing, literally nothing at all, to stop him. Maybe he intends to track me down and finish me off. Who knows?

  “Yes, maybe Caliban will simply go into hiding, or vanish into the desert, or malfunction somehow. At first, I was hoping Caliban would allow his power pack to run down, or that he would allow himself to be caught and destroyed before he could get into serious trouble – or reveal his true nature. Those seemed reasonable hopes. After all, he was designed to be a laboratory test robot. We deliberately never programmed him to deal with the outside world. And yet he has survived, somehow, and taught himself enough that he can evade the police.”

  “I suppose we can blame Gubber Anshaw for that,” Jomaine said. “The whole idea of the gravitonic brain was that it was to be more flexible and adaptive than overly rigid positronic brains.” Jomaine smiled bleakly, his face dimly visible in the semidarkness of the aircar’s cabin. “Gubber, it seemed, did his job entirely too well.”

  “He’s not the only one, Jomaine.” Fredda rubbed her forehead wearily. “You and I did the basal programming on him. We took Gubber’s flexible gravitonic brain and wrote the program that would allow that brain to adapt and grow and learn in our lab tests. It’s just that he stumbled into a slightly larger laboratory than the one we planned.” She shook her head again. “But I had no idea his gravitonic brain would be adaptive enough to survive out there,” she said, speaking not so much to Jomaine as to the dark and open air.

  “I don’t understand,” Jomaine said. “You say he’s dangerous, but you sound more like you’re worried about him than frightened of him.”

  “I am worried about him,” Fredda said. “I created him, and I’m responsible for him, and I cannot believe he is evil or violent. We didn’t give him Laws that would prevent him from harming people, but we didn’t give him any reason to hurt people either. Half of what we did on the personality coding was compensation for the absence of the Three Laws, making his mind as stable, as well grounded, as we could. And we did our job right. I’m certain of that. He’s not a killer.”

  Jomaine cleared his throat gently. “That’s all as may be,” he said. “But there is another factor. Now that we are at last discussing the situation openly, we need to consider the nature of the experiment we planned to perform with Caliban. No matter what else you say about the stability of his personality, or the flexibility of his mind, he was after all built to run one test, designed to answer one question. And when he walked out of your lab, he was primed and ready for that task. He could not help seeking out the answer. He is in all likelihood unaware of what he is looking for, or even that he is looking. But he will be looking, seeking, burning to discover it, even so.”

  The aircar eased itself to a halt in midair, then began to sink lower. They had arrived at Jomaine’s house, hard by Leving Labs, close to where it had all begun. The car landed on his roof and the hatch sighed open. The cabin light came gently up. Jomaine stood and reached out to Fredda across the narrow cabin, took her hand and squeezed it. “There is a great deal you have to think about, Fredda Leving. But no one can protect you anymore. Not now. The stakes are far too high. I think you had best start asking yourself what sort of answer Caliban is likely to come up with.”

  Fredda nodded. “I understand,” she said. “But remember that you are as deeply involved as I am. I can’t expect you to protect me – but remember, we will sink or swim together.”

  “That’s not strictly true, Fredda,” Jomaine said. His voice was quiet, gentle, with no hint of threat or malice. His tone made it clear that he was setting out facts, not trying to scare her. “Remember that you, not I, designed the final programming of Caliban ‘s brain. I have the documentation to prove it, by the way. Yes, we worked together, and no doubt a court could find me guilty of some lesser charge. But it was your plan, your idea, your experiment. If that brain should prove capable of assault, or murder, the blood will be on your hands, not mine.”

  With that, he looked into her eyes for the space of a dozen heartbeats, and then turned away. There was nothing left to say.

  Fredda watched Jomaine leave the car, watched the door seal itself, watched the cabin light fade back down to darkness. The aircar lifted itself back up into the sky and she turned her head toward the window. She stared sightlessly out onto the night-shrouded, slow-crumbling glory that was the city of Hades. But then the car swung around, and the Leving Labs building swept across her field of view. Suddenly she saw not nothing, but too much. She saw her own past, her own folly and vaulting ambition, her own foolish confidence. There, in that lab, she had bred
this nightmare, raised it on a steady diet of her own disastrous questions.

  It had seemed so simple back then. The first New Law robots had passed their in-house laboratory trials. After rather awkward and fractious negotiations, it had been agreed they would be put to use at Limbo. It was a mere question of manufacturing more robots and getting them ready for shipment. That would require effort and planning, yes, but for all intents and purposes, the New Law project was complete insofar as Fredda was concerned. She had time on her hands, and her mind was suddenly free once again to focus on the big questions. Basic, straightforward questions, obvious follow-ons to the theory and practice of the New Law robots.

  If the New Laws are truly better, more logical, better suited to the present day, then won’t they fit a robot’s needs more fully? That had been the first question. But more questions, questions that now seemed foolish, dangerous, threatening, had followed. Back then they had seemed simple, intriguing, exciting. But now there was a rogue robot on the loose, and a city enough on edge that riots could happen.

  If the New Laws are not best suited to the needs of a robot living in our world, then what Laws would be? What Laws would a robot pick for itself!

  Take a robot with a wholly blank brain, a gravitonic brain, without the Three Laws or the New Laws ingrained into it. Imbue it instead with the capacity for Laws, the need for Laws. Give it a blank spot, as it were, in the middle of its programming, a hollow in the middle of where its soul would be if it had a soul. In that place, that blank hollow, give it the need to find rules for existence. Set it out in the lab. Create a series of situations where it will encounter people and other robots, and be forced to deal with them. Treat the robot like a rat in a maze, force it to learn by trial and error.

  It will have the burning need to learn, to see, to experience, to form itself and its view of the universe, to set down its own laws for existence. It will have the need to act properly, but no clear knowledge of what the proper way was.