Asimov’s Future History Volume 11

by Isaac Asimov

  After all, there was no shortage of sources for rumor and news. Robot-bashing Settlers who could tell tales of a robot that threw a man across a warehouse and set the place on fire; Centor Pallichan, the passerby who called the cops after Caliban refused his order; the now widespread reports of the attack on Fredda Leving; the much-witnessed incident at Limbo Depot, where a bright red robot had smashed its way through a plate-glass window with deputies in hot pursuit, shooting as they went; the undeniable fact that the Settlers were involved in New Law robots; and to top it all off, the riot at Leving’s lecture.

  Sometime during the night and the morning after Fredda Leving’s speech on the New Law robots, the city’s rumor mill struck that critical mass. The stories that had been drifting around the city suddenly seemed to coalesce, to form around each other and give each other new strength. Almost, it seemed, by instinct, reporters sensed that it was the moment to start digging. News reports, accurate and otherwise, were allover the media.

  Alvar Kresh sighed and tossed the notepack to one side. The server robot took away his fruit cup, which was the first that Alvar knew he had even eaten it. The robot placed an omelette in front of him, and he resolved to eat it with more attention.

  It was a resolution that did not last long. His mind was too busy, working over all the events of the last few days and what was likely to happen next.

  He could not keep his mind from what was right there in the middle of all the stories – the assumed conspiracies, the scenarios that were whispered or shouted from half the news reports. Governor Grieg had predicted such things would spring to life: The Settlers were behind it all. They had created some sort of false robot to discredit all robots. New Law robots, the rogue Caliban, they were all part of the same plot to sow fear in the hearts of the good people of Inferno, make them distrust their own robots and so destroy society. It was all part of the Settler plan to move in and take over.

  What was doubly galling for Alvar was that, a week before, he would have been prepared to believe in all such plots. For that matter, there was still no hard-edged evidence that directly contradicted the idea. There was certainly collusion between Leving Labs and the Settlers, and clearly both groups were involved in the New Law robots. And he knew far better than the general public could that the stories of a rogue robot were terribly real. A rogue built by the same Fredda Leving who seemed to be in Tonya Welton’s hip pocket.

  Hell’s clanging bells, but it could be a Leving-Welton conspiracy. Maybe they had struck a deal, conspiring to wreck Inferno’s society and then come in and divvy up the spoils afterwards. Both of them were ambitious, even ruthless. He could not rule that idea out by any means.

  But he dared not act on that or any related theory. Governor Grieg had convinced Alvar just how much Inferno needed the Settlers. Maybe this whole crisis was a plot to wreck Spacer faith in robots. Or maybe some splinter Settler group was trying to get the Settlers thrown off the planet for some reason of their own. Maybe the Settler leadership, Tonya Welton herself, truly did want Inferno to collapse.

  Suppose the Settlers had planned it that way from the start: come in, promise to take over the reterraforming project, and then manufacture a pretext for walking out on the job after the Spacers had given up any thought of doing the job. If it was a deliberate plot, they would of course invent a reason – like a robotics crisis – that would tend to weaken Spacer culture. Then pullout and wait for the collapse to happen.

  Result: a situation identical to the one Alvar Kresh faced right now.

  Unless, of course, he had it all wrong. Suppose the Ironheads were behind it all, wanting to be rid of the Spacers for their own reasons, staging fake robot attacks and sabotaging Caliban with the intention of blaming the Settlers, counting on the resulting backlash to bring in new converts to their cause...

  Alvar Kresh groaned and held his head and his hands. Conspiracies whirled through his mind. It seemed as if everyone, every group had a motive, or the means, or the opportunity, or even all three, to do practically anything. He was tempted, sorely tempted, to walk away from it all.

  But the damage was done, and Alvar Kresh was not a man capable of abandoning his duty.

  If the Ironheads managed to create a violent confrontation, the results could be disastrous. Even without a secret plot, the Settlers would leave if their lives were threatened. Enough protests, enough rioting and harassment, enough aggravation, and the Settlers would all give up and go home, and Alvar could not really blame them. Why put up with such things if they did not have to do so?

  But, damn it, Inferno needed the Settlers. He had to keep that knowledge, galling as it was, at the center of his attention. If they left, the planet died. And they would likely leave if he could not solve this case quickly, and solve it in such a way that the truth, the facts, would cut through all the fog of fear and anger, cut the level of tension down. This case needed a solution that would back things away from the flashpoint and allow people of goodwill to work together again.

  If only the truth would be that cooperative. For only a true solution would do. Papering things over would not work, not for long.

  He looked down at his plate and realized that he gotten halfway through a superb omelette without consciously tasting a bite. He dropped his fork and gave it up. He had no appetite, and eating that mechanically was a strictly joyless experience. Hellfire and damnation, more than likely all of these conspiracies were as imaginary as most other complicated, secret, silly plans dreamed up by people with too much time on their hands.

  He had to act on the assumption that there was no conspiracy. If there was some grand plot afoot to drive the Settlers off the planet, the perpetrators would not be foiled by one lone police officer. Even if he uncovered the dastardly plan, the plotters would simply plot anew, or just activate some already worked-out fiendish Plan B that was ready to go. If They – whoever They were – had managed to create this mess, then they were far more than a match for a single lawman. In short, against any group determined and capable enough to create this much chaos on purpose, he was helpless.

  He smiled to himself. His only real hope was that things had gotten this bad all on their own. He shoved his plate back and stood up. Time to go to work.

  “Donald!” he called. “Get the car ready. We’re headed out.”

  Donald 111 found it increasingly difficult to sit still and allow Alvar Kresh to do the flying. Clearly, however, the man was intent on doing the work himself, however wildly he might be operating the craft. Not for the first or the second or even the hundredth time, Donald reminded himself that Alvar Kresh, despite all appearances to the contrary, was a skilled pilot with a perfect safety record. He gave up thinking about the best way to take control of the craft in various circumstances.

  Still, no robot would fly this way.

  “What’s the situation regarding Jomaine Terach and Gubber Anshaw?” Sheriff Kresh asked him without turning his head.

  “As per your instructions, both were taken into custody last night, sir. As the chaos after the lecture prevented an arrest there, deputies were dispatched to their homes. Both were arrested before they could enter their houses and claim sanctuary. They are in the holding cells at Government Tower, incommunicado from each other and the outside world.”

  “Excellent. Well, they can look forward to being in communication very, very soon. I plan to have a long talk with each of them. I hope that a night in jail has put them both in talkative moods.”

  Donald hesitated a moment and then decided it would be better to ask. “Sir, a question. I take it you still believe that the political solution precludes any attempt to arrest Fredda Leving? Her crimes, after all, are well established and certainly severe.”

  “They are severe, Donald. But we just can’t pull her in now. That would do terrible damage to the Limbo Project, and I don’t want to do that. We’ll have to hope that we get a break somewhere a bit further along in the game. We’ll work Terach and Anshaw as hard as we can, an
d learn what we can that way. They are going to lead us to Caliban.”

  “Yes, sir.” Apparently, then, Sheriff Kresh had made up his mind that Caliban had committed the attack on Madame Leving, or else that the danger Caliban represented took precedence over solving the case. Donald found himself in strong disagreement with both ideas, but he knew Alvar Kresh well. There was no point in discussing alternatives when the Sheriff was in this state of mind. If Donald objected now, it would do little but harden Alvar Kresh’s determination. If events proved Kresh to be in error, that would be the time to present other plans.

  But there were other matters to discuss, one of which Donald found most puzzling. “Sir, there is a rather odd datum to report in connection with Gubber Anshaw’s arrest.”

  “And what might that be?” Kresh asked, his mind clearly more on his flying than on the question.

  “Tonya Welton’s robot, Ariel, was present when the deputies arrived.”

  The aircar jinked suddenly to one side, and Donald was halfway across the cabin to the controls before he could force himself to resist his First Law impulse to protect his master.

  “Sorry about that, Donald. Return to your seat. That one took me by surprise. Ariel there, by the devil. What the hell was she doing there?”

  “We do not know. When the deputies ordered her to explain her presence, she refused, stating that Madame Welton had given prior orders that prevented her from speaking on the subject.”

  “Indeed. It requires highly sophisticated order-giving to keep a robot from speaking to a deputy. They get a lot of training in how to break just that sort of injunction. So how the hell did Tonya Welton learn how to do it – and what made her think to take such a precaution?”

  “Yes, sir. Both of those questions occurred to me as well.”

  “Interesting,” Sheriff Kresh said. “Very, very interesting.” Kresh spoke no more during the flight, and he flew on with a thoughtful expression on his face.

  More to the point, so far as Donald was concerned, the Sheriff tended to fly more slowly when he had a problem to think on. Sure enough, the aircar slowed significantly.

  Donald allowed himself to relax just a trifle as the airspeed indicator eased back. Remarkable, the effect one well-timed question could have. Still, it worked, and that was the main thing. Even so, it sometimes seemed to Donald that taking care of Alvar Kresh was more of an art than a science.

  The interrogation room was bare and plain, the walls a faded, dusty pale blue. In it there were two straight-backed chairs, one table, one robot, and one policeman. The prisoner was on the way. Kresh had considered long and hard before he decided what order in which to question them. At last he went with the gut instinct that told him to go for Terach first and Gubber Anshaw afterwards.,

  Yes, Gubber second. Save the best for last. Ariel at his house the night before. There could be only one explanation for that, and that explanation could blast open a lot of the locked doors in this case... still, he would have to handle Anshaw carefully. But first there was Jomaine. There was some important groundwork to cover here. The door opened. There stood Jomaine Terach, looking small and wan and pale behind the two big guard robots that had escorted him from his cell.

  Kresh made a small hand gesture and Terach came in, sat at the table.

  The players are in position, Kresh told himself. Let the games begin.

  Jomaine Terach felt lost in a jumble of emotions. He was confused, tired, frightened, angered, fearful, angry. He knew perfectly well he was in no fit state to be questioned. But that was exactly why they had chosen this moment to grill him.

  Alvar Kresh grinned unpleasantly at him, and spoke in a voice that made it clear that he was enjoying himself. “Why don’t I just save time and tell you what we already know?” he asked. “And maybe this time you can be just a little bit more forthcoming with your answers. That way I won’t be tempted to use the charges we have against you already – the ones related to obstructing an investigation and failing to provide full and complete answers to a police officer. How does that sound to you?” Alvar Kresh smiled again, even more unpleasantly, as he looked his prisoner in the eye.

  Jomaine Terach stared back and tried to keep calm, tried to calculate, tried to figure the situation. The night behind bars had been a long one, and it had not done his state of mind any good. No doubt it was not meant to. It was a fairly safe bet that they had picked up Gubber and maybe Fredda at the same time they got him. However, no one in the Sheriff’s Department was admitting to that or much of anything else.

  But if Gubber was in here, well, Gubber was not much given to calm in the face of adversity. A night in a cell was likely to make Gubber’s tongue quite loose. And lurking in the background of Alvar Kresh’s angry, threatening courtesy was the unspoken threat of the Psychic Probe. No sane man wished to face that, and Jomaine regarded himself as eminently sane. Sane enough to know just how serious the charges against him could get if Kresh wanted to throw the book at him.

  If he wanted to stay free and with a whole mind, he was going to have to tell Kresh what he wanted to know, and tell it to him before Gubber or Fredda did. The time had come to protect himself from everyone else’s mad schemes. Unless that time was already past.

  “Say what you have to say and ask your questions,” he said. “I don’t know it all. I didn’t want to know it all. But what I know, I’ll tell you. I have run out of reasons for silence.”

  Alvar Kresh leaned back in his chair. “All right,” he said. “Let me start by telling you part of what we know already, and just see how well you do filling in the blanks.”

  The operative word there was part, of course, Jomaine told himself. Was Kresh going to tell ninety-five percent of what the police knew, or five percent? There were any number of traps and pitfalls here.

  “We know for starters that Caliban is not a Three Law robot, not even one of these damned New Law robots, but a No Law robot.”

  Kresh looked hard at Jomaine, stared him down. The testing was starting early. Here was his chance, Jomaine realized. Kresh wanted to see what he would do if given the chance to play games. Kresh had not even asked a question. It was Jomaine’s chance to ask what a No Law was, or who Caliban was.

  But Jomaine had a pretty fair idea what would happen if he did that, and he had no desire to find out if he was right.

  The silence went on for another few seconds before Jomaine Terach could bring himself to speak the words.

  “Yes,” he said. “Caliban is a No Law.”

  “I see,” Kresh said. “How is that possible?”

  Jomaine was thrown off balance by the question, and no doubt that was the intention. “I – I don’t understand,” he said. “What do you mean?”

  “I believe that what the Sheriff wishes to know are the technical details of the process,” Donald 111 said.

  Jomaine looked over to the small blue robot, and was not fooled for a minute by Donald’s unprepossessing appearance and gentle voice. Donald had come out of Leving Labs, after all, and Jomaine had had a hand in his design. Behind that harmless blue exterior was a formidable mind, a positronic brain that came close to the theoretical limits for flexibility and learning ability.

  “You mentioned in our first interview after the attack that gravitonic brains were a new departure,” Kresh said, his voice deceptively mild.

  “Yes, they are. Gubber designed them that way and was justifiably proud of what he had done. But no one would listen to him – until he came to Fredda.”

  “All right, that’s fine. But then we get into a problem area. I am not very happy to hear about this New Law experiment, to say the least, but it appears to have legal sanction from the Governor, and I don’t see that there is much I can do about it. But, as I understand it, these gravitonic brains have the New Laws as part of their integral makeup, just as the positronic brain’s basic structure must of necessity include the Three Laws. So how did you manage to erase those laws from Caliban’s brain?”

  �
�They were never there in the first place,” Terach said. “There are no Laws inherent in the structure of the gravitonic brain. That’s the whole idea. The positronic brain became a dead end precisely because the Three Laws were so tightly woven into it. Because of the inherent nature of the Laws inside the positronic brain, it was almost impossible to consider one element of the brain by itself.

  “The Laws interconnected all the aspects of the brain so thoroughly that any attempt to modify one part of a positronic brain would affect every other part of it in complex and chaotic ways. Imagine that rearranging the furniture in your living room could cause the roof to catch fire, or the paint on the basement walls to change color, and that putting out the fire or repainting could cause the doors to falloff and the furniture to reset to its original configuration. The interior architecture of the positronic brain is just about that interconnected. In any sort of deep-core programming or redesign, anything beyond the most trivial sort of potential adjustment was hopelessly complex. By leaving the gravitonic brain with a clean structure, by deliberately not making the Three Laws integral to every pathway and neural net, it became far easier to program a new pattern onto a blank brain.”

  Jomaine looked up and saw the anger and disgust on Alvar Kresh’s face. Clearly the very idea of tampering with the Three Laws was the depths of perversion so far as he was concerned. “All right,” the Sheriff said, trying to keep his voice even. “But if there are no Laws built into the gravitonic brains, how do these damned New Laws get in there? Do you write them down on a piece of paper and hope that the robot thinks to read them over before going out to attack a few people?”

  “No.” Jomaine swallowed hard. “No, no, sir. There is nothing casual or superficial about the way a Law set – either Law set.: – is embedded into a gravitonic brain. The difference is that the lawset is embedded centrally, at key choke points of the brain’s topology, if you will. It is embedded not just once, but many times, with elaborate redundancy, at each of these several hundred sites. The topology is rather complex, but suffice it to say that no cognitive or action-inductive processing can go on in a gravitonic brain without passing through a half dozen of these Law-support localities. The difference is that in a modern positronic brain, the Laws are written millions, even billions, of times, across the pseudocortex, just as there are billions of copies of your DNA written, one copy in each cell of your brain. The difference is that your brain can function fairly well if even a large number of cells are damaged, and your body will not break down if a few DNA cells fail to copy properly.