Asimov’s Future History Volume 4

by Isaac Asimov

  “I see. That makes sense. Now isn’t it true, Doctor, that the roboticists of the Outer World manufacture robots that are much more humanoid than our Own?”

  “I believe that is true.”

  “Could they manufacture a robot so humanoid that it would pass for human under ordinary conditions?”

  Dr. Gerrigel lifted his eyebrows and considered that. “I think they could, Mr. Baley. It would be terribly expensive. I doubt that the return could be profitable.”

  “Do you suppose,” went on Baley, relentlessly, “that they could make a robot that would fool you into thinking it was human?”

  The roboticist tittered. “Oh, my dear Mr. Baley. I doubt that. Really. There’s more to a robot than just his appear–”

  Dr. Gerrigel froze in the middle of the word. Slowly, he turned to R. Daneel, and his pink face went very pale.

  “Oh, dear me,” he whispered. “Oh, dear me.”

  He reached out one hand and touched R. Daneel’s check gingerly. R. Daneel did not move away but gazed at the roboticist calmly.

  “Dear me,” said Dr. Gerrigel, with what was almost a sob in his voice, “you are a robot.”

  “It took you a long time to realize that,” said Baley, dryly.

  “I wasn’t expecting it. I never saw one like this. Outer World manufacture?”

  “Yes,” said Baley.

  “It’s obvious now. The way he holds himself. The manner of his speaking. It is not a perfect imitation, Mr. Baley.”

  “It’s pretty good though, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, it’s marvelous. I doubt that anyone could recognize the imposture at sight. I am very grateful to you for having me brought face to face with him. May I examine him?” The roboticist was on his feet, eager.

  Baley put out a hand. “Please, Doctor. In a moment. First, the matter of the murder, you know.”

  “Is that real, then?” Dr. Gerrigel was bitterly disappointed and showed it. “I thought perhaps that was just a device to keep my mind engaged and to see how long I could be fooled by–”

  “It is not a device, Dr. Gerrigel. Tell me, now, in constructing a robot as humanoid as this one, with the deliberate purpose of having it pass as human, is it not necessary to make its brain possess properties as close to that of the human brain as possible?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Very well. Could not such a humanoid brain hack the First Law? Perhaps it is left out accidentally. You say the theory is unknown. The very fact that it is unknown means that the constructors might set up a brain without the First Law. They would not know what to avoid.”

  Dr. Gerrigel was shaking his head vigorously. “No. No. Impossible.”

  “Are you sure? We can test the Second Law, of course.–Daneel, let me have your blaster.”

  Baley’s eyes never left the robot. His own hand, well to one side, gripped his own blaster tightly.

  R. Daneel said calmly, “Here it is, Elijah,” and held it out, butt first.

  Baley said, “A plain-clothes man must never abandon his blaster, but a robot has no choice but to obey a human.”

  “Except, Mr. Baley,” said Dr. Gerrigel, “when obedience involves breaking the First Law.”

  “Do you know, Doctor, that Daneel drew his blaster on an unarmed group of men and women and threatened to shoot?”

  “But I did not shoot,” said R. Daneel.

  “Granted, but the threat was unusual in itself, wasn’t it, Doctor?”

  Dr. Gerrigel bit his lip. “I’d need to know the exact circumstances to judge. It sounds unusual.”

  “Consider this, then. R. Daneel was on the scene at the time of the murder, and if you omit the possibility of an Earthman having moved across open country, carrying a weapon with him, Daneel and Daneel alone of all the persons on the scene could have hidden the weapon.”

  “Hidden the weapon?” asked Dr. Gerrigel.

  “Let me explain. The blaster that did the killing was not found. The scene of the murder was searched minutely and it was not found. Yet it could not have vanished like smoke. There is only one place it could have been, only one place they would not have thought to look.”

  “Where, Elijah?” asked R. Daneel.

  Baley brought his blaster into view, held its barrel firmly in the robot’s direction.

  “In your food sac,” he said. “In your food sac, Daneel!”

  13: Shift to the Machine

  “THAT IS NOT so,” said R. Daneel, quietly.

  “Yes? We’ll let the Doctor decide. Dr. Gerrigel?”

  “Mr. Baley?” The roboticist, whose glance had been alternating wildly between the plain-clothes man and the robot as they spoke, let it come to rest upon the human being.

  “I’ve asked you here for an authoritative analysis of this robot. I can arrange to have you use the laboratories of the City Bureau of Standards. If you need any piece of equipment they don’t have, I’ll get it for you. What I want is a quick and definite answer and hang the expense and trouble.”

  Baley rose. His words had emerged calmly enough, but he felt a rising hysteria behind them. At the moment, he felt that if he could only seize Dr. Gerrigel by the throat and choke the necessary statements out of him, he would forgo all science.

  He said, “Well, Dr. Gerrigel?”

  Dr. Gerrigel tittered nervously and said, “My dear Mr. Baley, I won’t need a laboratory.”

  “Why not?” asked Baley apprehensively. He stood there, muscles tense, feeling himself twitch.

  “It’s not difficult to test the First Law. I’ve never had to, you understand, but it’s simple enough.”

  Baley pulled air in through his mouth and let it out slowly. He said, “Would you explain what you mean? Are you saying that you can test him here?”

  “Yes, of course. Look, Mr. Baley, I’ll give you an analogy. If I were a Doctor of Medicine and had to test a patient’s blood sugar, I’d need a chemical laboratory. If I needed to measure his basal metabolic rate, or test his cortical function, or check his genes to pinpoint a congenital malfunction, I’d need elaborate equipment. On the other hand, I could check whether he were blind by merely passing my hand before his eyes and I could test whether he were dead by merely feeling for his pulse.

  “What I’m getting at is that the more important and fundamental the property being tested, the simpler the needed equipment. It’s the same in a robot. The First Law is fundamental. It affects everything. If it were absent, the robot could not react properly in two dozen obvious ways.”

  As he spoke, he took out a flat, black object which expanded into a small book-viewer. He inserted a well-worn spool into the receptacle. He then took out a stop watch and a series of white, plastic slivers that fitted together to form something that looked like a slide rule with three independent movable scales. The notations upon it struck no chord of familiarity to Baley.

  Dr. Gerrigel tapped his book-viewer and smiled a little, as though the prospect of a bit of field work cheered him.

  He said, “It’s my Handbook of Robotics. I never go anywhere without it. It’s part of my clothes.” He giggled self-consciously.

  He put the eyepiece of the viewer to his eyes and his finger dealt delicately with the controls. The viewer whirred and stopped, whirred and stopped.

  “Built-in index,” the roboticist said, proudly, his voice a little muffled because of the way in which the viewer covered his mouth. “I constructed it myself. It saves a great deal of time. But then, that’s not the point now, is it? Let’s see. Umm, won’t you move your chair near me, Daneel.”

  R. Daneel did so. During the roboticist’s preparations, he had watched closely and unemotionally.

  Baley shifted his blaster.

  What followed confused and disappointed him. Dr. Gerrigel proceeded to ask questions and perform actions that seemed without meaning, punctuated by references to his triple slide rule and occasionally to the viewer.

  At one time, he asked, “If I have two cousins, five years apart in age, and the
younger is a girl, what sex is the older?”

  Daneel answered (inevitably, Baley thought), “It is impossible to say on the information given.”

  To which Dr. Gerrigel’s only response, aside from a glance at his stop watch, was to extend his right hand as far as he could sideways and to say, “Would you touch the tip of my middle finger with the tip of the third finger of your left hand?”

  Daneel did that promptly and easily.

  In fifteen minutes, not more, Dr. Gerrigel was finished. He used his slide rule for a last silent calculation, then disassembled it with a series of snaps. He put away his stop watch, withdrew the Handbook from the viewer, and collapsed the latter.

  “Is that all?” said Baley, frowning.

  “That’s all.”

  “But it’s ridiculous. You’ve asked nothing that pertains to the First Law.”

  “Oh, my dear Mr. Baley, when a doctor hits your knee with a little rubber mallet and it jerks, don’t you accept the fact that it gives information concerning the presence or absence of some degenerative nerve disease? When he looks closely at your eyes and considers the reaction of your iris to light, are you surprised that he can tell you something concerning your possible addiction to the use of certain alkaloids?”

  Baley said, “Well, then? What’s your decision?”

  “Daneel is fully equipped with the First Law!” The roboticist jerked his head in a sharp affirmative.

  “You can’t be right,” said Baley huskily.

  Baley would not have thought that Dr. Gerrigel could stiffen into a rigidity that was greater than his usual position. He did so, however, visibly. The man’s eyes grew narrow and hard.

  “Are you teaching me my job?”

  “I don’t mean you’re incompetent,” said Baley. He put out a large, pleading hand. “But couldn’t you be mistaken? You’ve said yourself nobody knows anything about the theory of non-Asenion robots. A blind man could read by using Braille or a sound-scriber. Suppose you didn’t know that Braille or sound-scribing existed. Couldn’t you, in all honesty, say that a man had eyes because he knew the contents of a certain book-film, and be mistaken?”

  “Yes,” the roboticist grew genial again, “I see your point. But still a blind man could not read by use of his eyes and it is that which I was testing, if I may continue the analogy. Take my word for it, regardless of what a non-Asenion robot could or could not do, it is certain that R. Daneel is equipped with First Law.”

  “Couldn’t he have falsified his answers?” Baley was floundering, and knew it.

  “Of course not. That is the difference between a robot and a man. A human brain, or any mammalian brain, cannot be completely analyzed by any mathematical discipline now known. No response can therefore be counted upon as a certainty. The robot brain is completely analyzable, or it could not be constructed. We know exactly what the responses to given stimuli must be. No robot can truly falsify answers. The thing you call falsification just doesn’t exist in the robot’s mental horizon.”

  “Then let’s get down to cases. R. Daneel did point a blaster at a crowd of human beings. I saw that. I was there. Granted that he didn’t shoot, wouldn’t the First Law still have forced him into a kind of neurosis? It didn’t, you know. He was perfectly normal afterward.”

  The roboticist put a hesitant hand to his chin. “That is anomalous.”

  “Not at all,” said R. Daneel, suddenly. “Partner Elijah, would you look at the blaster that you took from me?”

  Baley looked down upon the blaster he held cradled in his left hand.

  “Break open the charge chamber,” urged R. Daneel. “Inspect it.”

  Baley weighed his chances, then slowly put his own blaster on the table beside him. With a quick movement, he opened the robot’s blaster.

  “It’s empty,” he said, blankly.

  “There is no charge in it,” agreed R. Daneel. “If you will look closer, you will see that there has never been a charge in it. The blaster has no ignition bud and cannot be used.”

  Baley said, “You held an uncharged blaster on the crowd?”

  “I had to have a blaster or fail in my role as plain-clothes man,” said R. Daneel. “Yet to carry a charged and usable blaster might have made it possible for me to hurt a human being by accident, a thing which is, of course, unthinkable. I would have explained this at the time, but you were angry and would not listen.”

  Baley stared bleakly at the useless blaster in his hand and said in a low voice, “I think that’s all, Dr. Gerrigel. Thank you for helping out.”

  Baley sent out for lunch, but when it came (yeast-nut cake and a rather extravagant slice of fried chicken on cracker) he could only stare at it.

  Round and round went the currents of his mind. The lines on his long face were etched in deep gloom.

  He was living in an unreal world, a cruel, topsy-turvy world.

  How had it happened? The immediate past stretched behind him like a misty improbable dream dating back to the moment he had stepped into Julius Enderby’s office and found himself suddenly immersed in a nightmare of murder and robotics.

  Jehoshaphat! It had begun only fifty hours before.

  Persistently, he had sought the solution in Spacetown. Twice he had accused R. Daneel, once as a human being in disguise, and once as an admitted and actual robot, each time as a murderer. Twice the accusation had been bent back and broken.

  He was being driven back. Against his will he was forced to turn his thoughts into the City, and since last night he dared not. Certain questions battered at his conscious mind, but he would not listen; he felt he could not. If he heard them, he couldn’t help but answer them and, oh God, he didn’t want to face the answers.

  “Lije! Lije!” A hand shook Baley’s shoulder roughly.

  Baley stirred and said, “What’s up, Phil?”

  Philip Norris, Plain-clothes man C-5, sat down, put his hands on his knees, and leaned forward, peering at Baley’s face. “What happened to you? Been living on knockout drops lately? You were sitting there with your eyes open and, near as I could make out, you were dead.”

  He rubbed his thinning, pale blond hair, and his close-set eyes appraised Baley’s cooling lunch greedily. “Chicken!” he said. “It’s getting so you can’t get it without a doctor’s prescription.”

  “Take some,” said Baley, listlessly.

  Decorum won out and Norris said, “Oh, well, I’m going out to eat in a minute. You keep it.–Say, what’s doing with the Commish?”

  “What?”

  Norris attempted a casual attitude, but his hands were restless. He said, “Go on. You know what I mean. You’ve been living with him ever since he got back. What’s up? A promotion in the works?”

  Baley frowned and felt reality return somewhat at the touch of office politics. Norris had approximately his own seniority and he was bound to watch most assiduously for any sign of official preference in Baley’s direction.

  Baley said, “No promotion. Believe me. It’s nothing. Nothing. And if it’s the Commissioner you’re wanting, I wish I could give him to you. Jehoshaphat! Take him!”

  Norris said, “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t care if you get promoted. I just mean that if you’ve got any pull with the Commish, how about using it for the kid?”

  “What kid?”

  There was no need of any answer to that. Vincent Barrett, the youngster who had been moved out of his job to make room for R. Sammy, was shuffling up from an unnoticed corner of the room. A skull cap turned restlessly in his hands and the skin over his high cheekbones moved as he tried to smile.

  “Hello, Mr. Baley.”

  “Oh, hello, Vince. How’re you doing?”

  “Not so good, Mr. Baley.”

  He was looking about hungrily. Baley thought: He looks lost, half dead–declassified.

  Then, savagely, his lips almost moving with the force of his emotion, he thought: But what does he want from me?

  He said, “I’m sorry, kid.” What else was ther
e to say?

  “I keep thinking–maybe something has turned up.”

  Norris moved in close and spoke into Baley’s ear. “Someone’s got to stop this sort of thing. They’re going to move out Chen-low now.”

  “What?”

  “Haven’t you heard?”

  “No, I haven’t. Damn it, he’s a C-3. He’s got ten years behind him.”

  “I grant that. But a machine with legs can do his work. Who’s next?”

  Young Vince Barrett was oblivious to the whispers. He said out of the depths of his own thinking, “Mr. Baley?”

  “Yes, Vince?”

  “You know what they say? They say Lynane Millane, the subetherics dancer, is really a robot.”

  “That’s silly.”

  “Is it? They say they can make robots look just like humans; with a special plastic skin, sort of.”

  Baley thought guiltily of R. Daneel and found no words. He shook his head.

  The boy said, “Do you suppose anyone will mind if I just walk around. It makes me feel better to see the old place.”

  “Go ahead, kid.”

  The youngster wandered off. Baley and Norris watched him go. Norris said, “It looks as though the Medievalists are right.”

  “You mean back to the soil? Is that it, Phil?”

  “No. I mean about the robots. Back to the soil. Huh! Old Earth has an unlimited future. We don’t need robots, that’s all.”

  Baley muttered, “Eight billion people and the uranium running out! What’s unlimited about it?”

  “What if the uranium does run out. We’ll import it. Or we’ll discover other nuclear processes. There’s no way you can stop mankind, Lije. You’ve got to be optimistic about it and have faith in the old human brain. Our greatest resource is ingenuity and we’ll never run out of that, Lije.”