by Isaac Asimov
“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.
Now Davlo looked on Kaelor, and could not take his eyes off him. “Yesterday, he grabbed me and stuffed me under a bench and used his body to shield mine. He risked his life for mine. He’d remind me himself that the Three Laws compelled him to do it, but that doesn’t matter. He risked his life for mine. And now we’re simply going to risk his life.” He paused a moment, and then said it in plainer words. “We’re probably about to kill him,” he said in a flat, angry voice. “Kill him because he wants to protect us—all of us—from me.”
Fredda glanced at Davlo, and then looked back at Kaelor. “I think you’d better let me do the talking,” she said.
For a moment she thought he was about to protest, insist that a man ought to be willing to do this sort of job for himself. But instead his shrugged, and let out a small sigh. “You’re the roboticist,” he said, still staring straight at Kaelor’s dead eyes. “You know robopsychology.”
And there are times I wished I knew more human psychology, Fredda thought, giving Davlo Lentrall a sidelong glance. “Before we begin,” she said, “there’s something you need to understand. I know that you ordered Kaelor built to your own specifications. You wanted a Constricted First Law robot, right?”
“Right,” said Lentrall, clearly not paying a great deal of attention.
“Well, you didn’t get one,” Fredda said. “At least not in the sense you might think. And that’s what set up the trap you’re in now. Kaelor was designed to be able to distinguish hypothetical danger or theoretical danger from the real thing. Though most high-function robots built on Inferno are capable of distinguishing between real and hypothetical danger to humans, they in effect choose not to do so. In a sense, they let their imaginations run away with them, worry that the hypothetical might become real, and fret over what would happen in such a case, and treat it as if were real, just to be on the safe side of the First Law. Kaelor was, in effect, built without much imagination—or what passes for imagination in a robot. He is not capable of making that leap, of asking, ‘What if the hypothetical became real?’ ”
“I understand all that,” Davlo said irritably.
“But I don’t think you understand the next part,” Fredda said with more coolness than she felt. “With a robot like Kaelor, when the hypothetical, the imaginary, suddenly does become real, when it dawns on such a robot that it has been working on a project that is real, that poses real risks to real people—well, the impact is enormous. I would compare it to the feeling you might have if you suddenly discovered, long after the fact, that, unbeknownst to yourself, some minor, even trifling thing you had done turned out to cause the death of a close relative. Imagine how hard that would hit you, and you’ll have some understanding of how things felt to Kaelor.”
Davlo frowned and nodded. “I see your point,” he said. “And I suppose that would induce a heightened First Law imperative?”
“Exactly,” Fredda said. “My guess is that, by the time you switched him off, Kaelor’s mental state was approaching a state of First Law hypersensitivity, rendering him excessively alert to any possible danger to humans. Suddenly realizing that he had unwittingly violated First Law already would only make it worse. Once we switch Kaelor back on, he’s going to revert to that state instantly.”
“You’re saying he’s going to be paranoid,” Davlo said.
“It won’t be that extreme,” said Fredda. “He’ll be very careful. And so should we be. Just because his body is immobilized, it doesn’t mean that he won’t be capable of committing—of doing something rash.”
Davlo nodded grimly. “I figured that much,” he said.
“Are you ready, then?”
He did not answer at first. He managed to tear his eyes away from Kaelor. He paced back and forth a time or two, rubbed the back of his neck in an agitated manner, and then stopped, quite abruptly. “Yes,” he said at last, his eyes locked on the most distant corner of the room.
“Very well,” she said. Fredda pulled an audio recorder out of her tool pouch, switched it on, and set on the floor in front of Kaelor. If they got what they needed, she wanted to be sure they had a record of it.
She stepped around to the rear of the maintenance frame, opened the access panel, and switched Kaelor back on. She moved back around to the front of the maintenance frame, and positioned herself about a meter and a half in front of it.
Kaelor’s eyes glowed dimly for a moment before they flared to full life. His head swiveled back and forth, as he looked around himself. He looked down at his arms and legs, as if confirming what he no doubt knew already—that his body had been immobilized. Then he looked around the room, and spotted Lentrall. “It would appear that you figured it out,” Kaelor said. “I was hoping for all our sakes that you would not.”
“I’m sorry, Kaelor, but I—”
“Dr. Lentrall, please. Let me handle this,” said Fredda, deliberately speaking in a cold, sharp-edged, professional tone. This had to be impersonal, detached, dispassionate if it was going to work. She turned to Kaelor, up there on the frame. No, call the thing by its proper name, even if she had just now realized what that name was. The rack. The torturer’s rack. He hung there, paralyzed, strapped down, pinned down, an insect in a collector’s sample box, his voice and his expressionless face seeming solemn, even a little sad. There was no sign of fear. It would seem Kaelor had either too little imagination, or too much courage, for that.
Suddenly she felt a little sick, but she forced herself to keep all hint of that out of her voice and expression. She told herself she was imposing human attributes on Kaelor, investing him with characteristics and emotions he simply did not have. There was no practical difference between having him up on that rack and having a malfunctioning aircar up on a hydraulic lift in a repair shop. She told herself all of that, and more, but she did not believe a word of it. She forced herself to look steadily, coolly, at Kaelor, and she addressed him. “Kaelor, do you know who I am?”
“Yes, of course. You are Dr. Fredda Leving, the roboticist.”
“Quite right. Now then, I am going to give you an order. You are to answer all my questions, and answer them as briefly as possible. Do not provide any information I do not ask for, or volunteer any information. Regard each question by itself. The questions will not be related to each other. Do you understand?” she asked.
“Certainly,” said Kaelor.
“Good.” Fredda was hoping, without much confidence, that she would be able to ask her questions in small enough pieces that no one question would present a First Law violation. And of course the questions would be related—that part was a baldfaced lie. But it might be a convincing enough lie to help Kaelor live through this. She knew for certain that asking, straight-out, the one big question to which they needed an answer would be absolutely catastrophic. She dared not ask for the big picture. She could only hope Kaelor would be willing and able to provide enough tiny pieces of the puzzle.
The trouble was, Kaelor had to know what she was doing as well as she did. How far would he be able to go before First Law imperative overrode the Second Law compulsion to obey orders?
There was one last thing she could do to help Kaelor. Fredda did not have any realistic hope that the Third Law’s requirement for self-preservation would help sustain Kaelor, but she could do her best to reinforce it all the same. “It is a
lso vital for you to remember that you are important as well. Dr. Lentrall needs you, and he very much wants you to continue in his employ. Isn’t that so, Doctor?”
Lentrall looked up from the hole he was staring at in the floor, and glanced at Fredda before settling his gaze on Kaelor. “Absolutely,” he said. “I need you very much, Kaelor.”
“Thank you for saying so,” Kaelor said. He turned his gaze back on Fredda. “I am ready for your questions,” he said.
“Good,” said Fredda. It might well help Kaelor if she kept the questions as disordered as possible, and tossed in a few unrelated ones now and then. “You work for Dr. Lentrall, don’t you?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Kaelor.
“How long have you been in his employ?”
“One standard year and forty-two days.”
“What are the specifications for your on-board memory system?
“A capacity of one hundred standard years non-erasable total recall for all I have seen and heard and learned.”
“Do you enjoy your work?”
“No,” said Kaelor. “Not for the most part.”
An unusual answer for a robot. Generally a robot, when given the chance, would wax lyrical over the joys of whatever task it was performing.
“Why do you not enjoy your work?” Fredda asked.
“Dr. Lentrall is often abrupt and rude. He will often ask for my opinion and then reject it. Furthermore, much of my work in recent days has involved simulations of events that would endanger humans.”