Asimov’s Future History Volume 12

by Isaac Asimov

  Very well. Now the world knew about the comet, and he had not been the one to tell them. All to the good. But now there was another problem. The obvious thing to do now was to allow the public discussion move forward to the point where he could confirm the existence of the comet plan to a populace ready to accept the idea. But how the devil could he do that when he would be forced to make the ridiculous-sounding admission that they had misplaced the comet?

  Plainly, the best answer to that problem was to relocate the comet as soon as possible. But Kresh had done as much as he could in that direction for the moment. Sometimes the job of leadership was simply to get things started, and trust in others to get them done. He would have to keep on here, focusing on other aspects of the project, working on the assumption that they would be able to find the comet in time. Back to work, he told himself.

  “Still with me, Dee?” Kresh asked.

  “Yes, sir, I am,” Unit Dee replied. “Was there anything of interest in your mailbox?”

  “Quite a bit,” he said. “But nothing that you need worry about. I have a new task for you.”

  “I would be delighted to be of further assistance.”

  “Right,” said Kresh, his tone of voice deliberately brusque. There was something about courtly manners from a robot that got on his nerves. “My personal robot, Donald 111, is at work on the preliminary preparations for the cometary impact. Safety plans, evacuations plans, that sort of thing. I want to contact him and have him hand off that job to you. Clearly, you’re better suited to it than he is. I should have assigned the job to you in the first place. Relay my orders to that effect, then order Donald to join me here as soon as possible without revealing my whereabouts.”

  “I will contact him at once,” Dee said.

  “Good,” said Kresh. “I’m going to step out for a breath of fresh air. When I return, we will return to refining your impact targeting plan.”

  “With the extremely rough data we got from Dr. Lentrall, I am not sure there is more we can do.”

  “But there might be,” Kresh said. “At the very least we can work out a range of scenarios and contingencies, so that we are more ready to act when the time comes. We’ll work out a few hundred possible rough trajectories, and give Unit Dum something to do.”

  Dee did not respond to the very small joke, but instead spoke with her usual urbane civility. “Very well, sir. I will continue with my other duties while I await your return.”

  “Back in a minute,” Kresh said, and stood up. He stretched, yawned, and ignored the stares of the Center’s workers as he rubbed his tired face. Let them wonder what their governor was doing here. Alvar headed out the huge armored door of Room 103, down the corridor of the Terraforming Center, out the double doors that led to the outside, and into the morning.

  It had been a long time since he had worked a job all night, worked all the clock around. He was close to exhausted, but not quite. There was something invigorating about seeing the morning after a hard night’s work. Somehow Kresh always felt as if he had earned the loveliness of morning after working through the darkness.

  The rains were gone now, and the world was fresh and bright, scrubbed clean. The sky was a brilliant blue, dotted with perfect white clouds that set off the deep azure of the heavens. The air smelled sweet, and good. Alvar Kresh looked toward the west, in the direction of the governor’s Winter Residence. He remembered another morning like this, with everything fresh and bright, and all good things possible. A morning he had spent with Fredda, just after he had assumed the governorship. That had been a morning of good omen. Perhaps this would be as well.

  And maybe it was time to move over to the Winter Residence. That would let him stay on the island. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed a good idea to keep a low profile just now. But that could wait until later. Right now there was something else he could do to keep himself isolated. He walked over to his aircar, sitting in the middle of a parking lot that was now half full of aircars. Oberon saw him through the cockpit viewport, and the door of the craft swung open as he approached. Kresh went aboard, and found Oberon just coming aft to meet him.

  “Are we heading home, sir?” Oberon asked in his slow, ponderous voice.

  “You are, but I’m not. Fly the aircar back and give my regards to my wife. Tell her I heard the recordings, and that she handled them exactly right. Tell her where I am, and that if she wishes, she can join me here – if she can do so undetected. I would value her advice. You must make it clear I wish to keep my whereabouts as private as possible for the time being. I need time to think, and work, without the world jiggling my elbow.”

  “What of the workers here, sir?” asked Oberon. “They know where you are.”

  “True enough, and sooner or later something is going to leak. With luck it will be later. Just see to it you aren’t the one that does the leaking. Fly an evasive pattern so it looks like you’re coming in to Hades from someplace besides here.”

  “Very good, sir. Unless there is something further, I will leave at once.”

  “Nothing else,” said Kresh. “Go.” He turned and stepped out of the hatch, and moved back toward the building to get clear for Oberon’s takeoff. After a moment or two the aircar launched, moving smoothly and slowly up into the sky. Kresh was on his own – or at least he could pretend he was. He was, after all, the governor. He could call on any sort of transport or communication he liked, whenever he liked. But without the aircar there, he was just that little bit more cut off, that little bit more isolated.

  He had a little time.

  Now if only he had the trajectory and coordinates for the comet, maybe things would turn out all right after all.

  Maybe.

  12

  Davlo Lentrall’s eyes snapped open. He sat bolt upright in bed. He had gone from stone cold asleep to quiveringly awake and alert in the flicker of a heartbeat. He knew. He knew. But he would have to proceed carefully. Very carefully indeed, or it would all be lost, all be over. He forced himself to think it through, work out all the logical consequences in his head. There was only going to be one chance to do this thing, and it was clear the odds were against him. He was going to have to move carefully, and act as normally as possible. Davlo knew he could not give his quarry any reason at all to suspect him.

  Well, if he were going to have to act normally, there was no time like the present to start. He pushed the button by his bedside, and, after the briefest of delays, Kaelor came in. “Good morning,” the robot said. “I hope you slept well.”

  “Very well indeed,” said Davlo in what he hoped was a light and casual tone of voice. “I certainly needed it after yesterday.”

  “One or two things did go on,” Kaelor said, the familiar sardonic tone in his voice.

  “It wasn’t an easy day for you, either,” said Davlo. “And I never did get to thank you for all you did.”

  “I couldn’t help but do it, sir, as you know perfectly well.”

  “Yes,” said Davlo. “But even so, I want you to know it is appreciated. “He got out of bed, and Kaelor produced his robe and slippers from the closet. Davlo shrugged the robe on over his shoulders and knotted the tie loosely in front of him, then stepped into the slippers. He yawned strenuously and walked out of the bedroom, Kaelor following and shutting the door behind him.

  Davlo had long ago decided that breakfast was a meal best consumed in the most soothing surroundings and circumstances possible. Therefore, contrary to the custom in most Infernal households, he did not bathe or dress before going down to breakfast, but instead ate in his pajamas and robe. On the same principle of informal comfort, his breakfast room was large, cool and shady, with the table facing large bay windows that looked out over a meticulously well-kept garden. There were two robots at work pruning the shrubbery, and a third on its knees by one of the flower beds, apparently doing some sort of work by the roots. Most mornings Davlo enjoyed watching the garden robots at their tasks, and used the time to decide what else ne
eded doing about the place, but this morning he hardly paid the yardwork any notice at all.

  But then he reminded himself it was important, above all things, to act normal, to do all the things he would normally do. He sat down at the table in his usual chair facing the window, and watched carefully as the robots trimmed back the hedges. “Make sure the garden staff checks carefully for storm damage, and clears out any storm debris,” Davlo said. “That was a devil of a rain last night.”

  “So it was,” Kaelor responded as he put down the tray and served breakfast to his master. “I have already seen to it that the outdoor staff will attend to the matter.”

  “Very good,” said Davlo, and yawned. “Mmmph. Still a little sleepy. I might need an extra cup of tea to wake up this morning,” he said. Could he really bring himself to act against the robot who had saved his life the day before? He thought back to the day before, and the way he had fallen apart in the face of danger and disaster. He shook his head. No. Not today. He would show the world he could take action, and act decisively. He was on the verge of congratulating himself on his newfound courage when he reminded himself that there was not much risk involved when one attacked a Three-Law robot.

  “I’ll bring the tea at once, sir,” Kaelor said, “assuming you really want it.”

  “Hold off on it just a bit,” Davlo said. Was it his imagination, or was Kaelor a bit overalert, oversolicitous? For the average robot, his behavior this morning would have been borderline rude, but for Kaelor it was sweetness and light.

  “Very well,” said Kaelor, in a tone of voice that made it clear what he thought of Davlo’s indecisiveness. In a strange way, that made Davlo feel better. After all, Kaelor was normally rather curt. Or was Kaelor just “acting” normal, in the same way Davlo himself was? Davlo did not dare ask. Better just to eat his breakfast and wait for his moment. He turned to his food and did his best to notice what it was he was eating. After all, Davlo Lentrall was a man who normally enjoyed his food.

  His chance came as Kaelor was clearing away the last of the breakfast dishes, and Davlo had pushed back his chair from the table. Struggling between the need to be on the alert and the need to seem at ease, Davlo nearly missed the opportunity. But when Kaelor reached across the table to collect the last glass, just as Davlo was standing up, the robot had to turn his back completely on his master.

  The golden moment lay open to Davlo, and he moved with a smooth and focused speed. He flipped open the door over the compartment on Kaelor’s back, and revealed the robot’s main power switch underneath. Kaelor was already turning to react, to get away, when Davlo threw the switch down.

  His power cut, overbalanced as he leaned over the table, Kaelor fell like a stone, dropping the dishes he held and crashing into the wooden tabletop with enough force to break it in two. Davlo moved back a step or two, hating himself for what he had just done to the robot, the sentient being who had saved his life the day before. But it was necessary. Absolutely necessary. He felt anything but heroic.

  He turned his back on the collapsed robot and the debris of the ruined table, and went to the comm center. There was a chance, at least a chance, that he could extract the knowledge he needed. The knowledge that might well save Inferno. It was just barely possible that he had saved the world by turning off a robot. There was a lot to think about in that idea, but there was no time for it now. He had to call Fredda Leving.

  If anyone could get the information out of Kaelor, she could.

  Fredda Leving watched as her four service robots unpacked and set up the portable robot maintenance frame in the middle of Davlo Lentrall’s living room. Once it was assembled, they lifted Kaelor’s still-inert form up onto it and attached it firmly to the frame with the use of hold-down straps.

  The maintenance frame itself was attached to its base by a complex arrangement of three sets of rotating bearings, built at right angles to each other, so that the frame could be spun around into any conceivable orientation. Thus, a robot clamped into the frame could be spun and swiveled and rotated into whatever position was most convenient to the roboticist doing the work. Once the service robots had Kaelor up on the frame, Fredda stepped in and went to work. Not that she had much hope of success, but with the stakes this high, one had to at least try.

  She swiveled Kaelor’s body around until he was lying facedown, his unpowered eyes staring blankly at the floor. She found Kaelor’s standard diagnostic port at the base of his neck and plugged in her test meter. She switched from one setting to another, watching the display on the meter. “No surprises there,” she said. “The standard diagnostics show that his basic circuits are all functioning normally, but we knew that.”

  “Can you tap into his memory system through that port?” Davlo asked, leaning in a bit closer than Fredda would have preferred. He was nervous, agitated, his face gaunt and pale. He kept rubbing his hands together, over and over.

  “I’m afraid not,” said Fredda, trying to assume a cool, professional tone. “It’s not that easy. This just shows me the basic systems status. Even though he’s powered down, there are still lots of circuits with trickle-charges running through them, things that need power to maintain system integrity. This just shows me he hasn’t blown a fuse, that his basic pathing is stable. Now I know we’re not going to harm him accidentally as we proceed.” Whether or not we decide to harm him deliberately is quite another story. she thought. No sense saying any such thing out loud. Lentrall was in a bad enough state as it was.

  Fredda left the test meter plugged in and hung it off a utility hook on the side of the maintenance frame. She got in a little closer, adjusted the position of the table slightly, and undid the four clampdown fasteners that held on the back of Kaelor’s head, and carefully lifted the backplate off. She took one look at the circuitry and cabling thus revealed and shook her head. “No,” she said. “I was afraid of that. I’ve seen this setup before.” She pointed to a featureless black ball, about twelve centimeters across. “His positronic brain is in that fully sealed unit. The only link between it and the outside world is that armored cable coming out of its base, where the spinal column would be on a human. That cable will have about five thousand microcables inside, every one of them about the diameter of a human hair. I’d have to guess right on which two of those to link into, and get it right on the first try, or else I would quite literally fry his brain. Short him out. Space alone knows how long it would take to trace the linkages. A week probably. The whole brain assembly is designed to be totally inaccessible.”

  “But why?” asked Davlo Lentrall.

  Fredda smiled sadly. “To protect the confidential information inside his head. To keep people from doing exactly what we’re trying to do – get information out of him that he would not want to reveal.”

  “Damnation! I’d thought we’d just be able to tap into his memory system and extract what we needed.”

  “With some robots that might be possible – though incredibly time-consuming,” Fredda said as she reattached the back of Kaelor’s head. “Not with this model.”

  “So there’s nothing we can do,” Lentrall said. “I mean, on the level of electronics and memory dumps. “As he spoke, his face was drawn and expressionless, and he seemed unwilling to meet Fredda’s gaze, or to look at Kaelor. He was the portrait of a man who had already decided he had to do something he was not going to be proud of. And the portrait of a man who was going to crack before very much longer.

  “Nothing much,” said Fredda.

  “So we’re going to have to talk to him – and we know he doesn’t want to talk.”

  Fredda wanted to have some reason to disagree, but she knew better. Kaelor would already have spoken up if he had been willing to speak. “No, he doesn’t,” she said. She thought for a moment and picked up her test meter. “The two things I can do is deactivate his main motor control, so he can only move his head and eyes and talk. And I can set his pseudoclock-speed lower.”

  “Why cut his main motor function?�
� Davlo asked.

  So he won’t tear his own head off or smash his own brain in to keep us from learning what he wants kept secret, Fredda thought, but she knew better than to tell that to Davlo. Fortunately, it didn’t take her long to think of something else. “To keep him from breaking out and escaping,” she said. “He might try to run away rather than speak to us.”

  Davlo nodded, a bit too eagerly, as if he knew better but wanted to believe. “What about the clock speed?” he asked.

  “In effect, it will make him think more slowly, cut his reaction time down. But even at its minimum speed settings, his brain works faster than ours. He’ll still have the advantage over us – it’ll just be cut down a bit.”

  Davlo nodded. “Do it,” he said. “And then let’s talk to him.”

  “Right,” said Fredda, trying to sound brisk and efficient. She used the test meter to send the proper commands through Kaelor’s diagnostic system, then hooked the meter back on to the maintenance frame. She spun the frame around until Kaelor was suspended in an upright position, eyes straight ahead, feet dangling a half meter off the floor. He stared straight ahead, his body motionless, his eyes sightless. The test meter cable still hung from his neck, and the meter’s display showed a series of diagnostic numbers, one after the other, in blinking red.

  Seeing Kaelor strapped in that way, Fredda was irresistibly reminded of an ancient drawing she had seen somewhere, of a torture victim strapped down on a frame or rack not unlike the one that held Kaelor now. That’s the way it works, she thought. Strap them down, mistreat them, try and force the information out of them before they die. It was a succinct description of the torturer’s trade. She had never thought before that it might apply to a roboticist as well. “I bet you don’t like this any better than I do,” she said, staring at the robot. She was not sure if she was talking to Kaelor or Davlo.