by Isaac Asimov
“Not for a while. Use this time to think instead. And get me a cup of coffee.”
Lucius moved at once to obey. Avery looked over to Adam and Eve, still sitting silently at the table. Their eyes had been upon Avery all along, though, and it was obvious they were waiting for him to lower the boom on them as well.
He held their gaze for what seemed an eternity even to Derec, who felt that he could cut the tension between them with a knife.
At last Avery broke the spell. “Boo,” he said and turned his attention back to his breakfast.
It was a quiet day on board the Wild Goose Chase. The ship had made its first jump on schedule in the night, and was now coasting at high speed through the waypoint star system toward the next jump point, which it would reach early the next morning. There was little to do in the meantime save look out at the stars, read, or play games. The robots were making themselves scarce, save for Lucius, who followed Avery like a shadow wherever he went. Even Mandelbrot was more taciturn than usual, no doubt trying to decide for himself where he fit into the general scheme of things as they now stood.
Derec decided to show Wolruf how to play chess, but gave it up when the alien insisted that the pieces should move in packs. He spent the rest of the day with a book, and went to bed early. Wolruf also went to bed, expressing her faith in the automatic controls to make the jump on schedule without her.
Derec surprised himself by actually being able to sleep with no one at the helm. Evidently boredom was a stronger force than worry. He managed to escape both in dreams, but his dreams ended suddenly in the middle of the night when he awoke with a start to the shrill howl of an alarm. He sat up and called on the light, trying to shake the sleep from his head enough to decide what to do next.
“What’s the matter?” Ariel asked sleepily. She sat up beside him, gathering the sheet around her as if for protection.
“I don’t know. I’ll go see.” Derec made to get out of bed.
“Why don’t you just ask?” Ariel was always quicker to wake up than he was.
“Oh. Yeah.” What’s going on? he sent out over the comlink.
General alert, a featureless voice replied. The autopilot, no doubt. Life support system failure.
Life support! Derec suddenly felt his breath catch. What happened to it?
The oxygen regeneration system has failed.
He let his breath out again in a sigh of relief. Oxygen regeneration was serious, but not as serious as, say, a breach in the hull. They weren’t actually losing air, at least.
“There’s a problem with the oxygen regenerator,” he said to Ariel. “Come on, let’s see how bad it is.”
As they pulled on their robes and stepped out into the hallway, Derec realized that the best thing to do in a case like this was to go back to sleep and reduce their oxygen consumption while the robots fixed the problem, but the time to think of that would have been before the alarm woke everyone up, not after. He couldn’t have slept now unless he were drugged, and he had no intention of drugging himself in the middle of an emergency.
Shut off the alarm, he sent, and relative quiet descended upon the ship. There was still the clatter of feet and voices coming from the other bedrooms. Derec heard Avery demanding loudly that Lucius find his pants, and across the hall Wolruf howled something in her own tongue.
Ariel was already headed for the common room. Derec followed her down the hallway, through the now-unfurnished room, and through the open door beside the automat into the back part of the ship where the engines and other machinery stood.
The smell alerted him even before he saw the flickering glow or heard the crackle of flame. Something furry was burning. He looked over Ariel’s head and saw flame silhouetting three robots, Adam and Eve and Mandelbrot, who were all emptying fire extinguishers into the blaze. A lot more than just something furry was burning.
“Look out!” Ariel shouted, backing up and bumping into Derec as a tongue of flame shot out, engulfing one of the robots.
Derec reacted with almost instinctive speed. Wrapping an arm around Ariel, he pulled her back into the common room, shouted, “Door close!” and even as it began to slide shut added, “Make this door airtight and vent the engine room to space!”
The door shut with a soft thump, seemed to melt until it was just a ripple in the wall, then hardened. From beyond came a loud whoosh, diminishing quickly to silence.
Mandlebrot! Derec sent. Can you hear me?
I am receiving your transmission, Mandelbrot replied, always the stickler for accuracy.
Are you okay?
I am functional; however, I am drifting away from the ship.
“Frost!” Derec said aloud. “I blew Mandelbrot out into space along with the fire! “He turned and ran for the control room, sending, Hang on, old buddy. We’re coming after you. How about Adam and Eve? Are you guys still there?
We are, another voice sent, and the fire is extinguished. We will assess the damage while you retrieve Mandelbrot.
No! Mandelbrot sent. You must not. The engines could have been damaged in the fire.
I’ll just use the attitude controls, then.
Whatever Mandelbrot said to that, Derec never heard it. He collided headfirst with Avery as Avery came out of his bedroom, sending both of them sprawling on the floor.
“Why don’t you look where you’re going for a change?” Avery growled. “What’s going on around here, anyway?”
“Fire in the engine room,” Derec answered, getting to his feet and offering Avery a hand up. Lucius, still under Avery’s orders, beat him to it. Derec shrugged and dropped his hand. “We’ve got it out, but Mandelbrot got blown into space. I’m going after him.”
“What burned?”
Avery’s question reminded Derec that they had other problems than just a robot overboard. Some part of him hadn’t wanted to face that just yet, still didn’t, but Ariel was standing just behind him and she said, “Life support. The whole recycling system was on fire.”
“What?”
Derec felt tempted to say, “You should have your hearing checked,” but he suppressed the urge. Instead he said, “See for yourself, but be careful. The engine room is still in vacuum.” He moved around Avery and on toward the control room, Ariel in tow.
Wolruf was already there, peering into a short-range navigation holo-screen while she wove the attitude control joystick through a gentle loop that brought the ship around to aim toward Mandelbrot. Internal gravity kept them from feeling the acceleration, but through the view screen Derec could see a tiny stick figure grow into a robot as they drew near. Mandelbrot held his arms and legs out as far as they would go, either to help his rescuers see him or to minimize his spin. Wolruf slowed the ship with the forward jets rather than spinning it around and braking with the main engines, so they got to watch him grow larger and larger until he thumped spread-eagled into the viewscreen.
Derec and Ariel both flinched, and Wolruf laughed. The viewscreen was much more than just a simple pane of glass; it was an array of optical sensors on the hull transmitting a composite image to the display inside. The hull in between was just as thick as anywhere else on the ship. Derec knew that, but it worked like a window just the same, and his reflexes treated it as such.
Mandelbrot crawled off the sensor array and disappeared from view. Thank you, he sent, and moments later he added, I am inside the engine room again.
How bad is it? Derec asked.
Very bad, the robot replied.
“It looks like the old question of who quits breathing first,” Avery said. They were sitting at the table in the common area, three humans and a caninoid alien. The four robots stood against the walls around the table, Mandelbrot behind Derec, Lucius behind Avery, and Adam and Eve together behind Ariel. Wolruf sat alone at her end of the table. It was more than coincidence. With a life threatening crisis on board, the robots’ First Law imperative to protect humans from harm didn’t extend to her.
Avery looked genuinely worried f
or the first time in Derec’s memory. His face was pale and drawn, an effect his white hair and sideburns only accentuated. He held his hands together in front of him on the table, neither gesturing with them nor drumming with them as he would have if he was just speaking normally.
“The recycler is toast,” he said in a voice devoid of emotion. “We have enough air left for three days for the four of us, four days if we sleep all the way. It’s five more days to Ceremya. That means one of us has to stop breathing, and I say the obvious choice is Wolruf.”
“I’ll try,” the alien said, puffing out her cheeks and rolling her eyes around in their sockets. When that failed to get a laugh, she let her breath out in a sigh and said, “Thought a little ‘umor might lighten the mood. Sorry.”
“This isn’t a laughing matter.”
“I don’t even think it should be a matter,” Derec put in. ‘ We should be spending our time thinking of a way to keep us all alive, not arguing about who we sacrifice. What about using Keys?”
The Keys to which he referred were Keys to Perihelion, Avery’s name for an experimental teleportation device he had either created or discovered when he built the first Robot City. With a Key, a person or a robot could make a direct point-to-point hyperspace jump without a ship.
Avery shook his head grimly. “That would be a good idea if we had Keys, or facilities to build them. We have neither.”
“Why not? I’d think that’d be an elementary precaution.”
Avery scowled. “Hindsight is wonderful for making accusations, but I didn’t notice you bringing any Keys aboard, either.”
Derec blushed. True enough. He’d trusted completely in the robots who built the ship. “You’re right,” he said. “I didn’t think of it, either. But we’ve got to be able to do something. How about making more oxygen? We have water, don’t we? Can’t we electrolyze oxygen from that?”
Adam spoke up. “Unfortunately, the ship’s water supply went through the recycling unit as well. When you vented it to space to put out the flames, the water boiled away. We have no water. This means that the automat will no longer function, but I believe that is a secondary concern. Humans can survive five days without food or water, can you not?”
“Longer,” Derec said, remembering times when Wolruf had gone without food or water much longer than that in her effort to help her human friends. She had never abandoned them; could they do any less for her now?
“If there was a way to make more air, the robots would have thought of it,” Avery said. “I’m sorry, Wolruf, but there’s really only one solution. One of us has to go, and it’s got to be you. We couldn’t sacrifice ourselves if we wanted to. The robots wouldn’t let us.”
Derec wondered if Mandelbrot would allow them to sacrifice Wolruf, either. He, at least, still considered her human, or had yesterday. But he wasn’t protesting this conversation, which meant he was at least questioning his definition in light of the new situation. He would be in danger of burning out his brain if he couldn’t resolve it, but Derec supposed he was probably safe at least for the moment. Mandelbrot had originally been a personal defense robot; he could handle potential conflicts better than most. With him, a conflict wouldn’t become crippling unless action demanded it be solved immediately.
Mandelbrot knew that too, which could also explain his silence.
“What about going somewhere else?” Ariel asked. “Maybe there’s a habitable planet closer by.”
“There is not,” Eve said. “We are headed away from human-inhabited space; there is no known world closer than our destination. We have only made one jump from Robot City, but we are nearing our second outward jump point, so returning there would still require five days as well, since we must cancel our intrinsic velocity and re-thrust toward the return jump point. I have examined the planets in this solar system, but none has a breathable atmosphere. Our next two waypoint stars may have habitable planets, but we cannot allow you to risk all of your lives on that possibility.”
Avery nodded. “You see how it is.” He turned to Lucius. “There’s no sense in drawing this out. I truly regret having to do this, but, Lucius, I order you to —”
The robot was already in motion, obeying his gesture even before his order.
Mandelbrot took a jerky step to intercept him, but Derec interrupted them both.
“No!” He pounded his fist on the table. “I order all of you to consider Wolruf to be human. Protect her as you would protect us. We all get through this together or we all die together.” Mandelbrot stopped instantly and totally. If he hadn’t remained standing, Derec would have thought the conflict had burned him out. Lucius also stopped, his head turning to Derec and back to Avery while he fought to reconcile his own inner discord. His was not as serious a disturbance as Mandelbrot’s, since he didn’t believe Wolruf to be human. His was only a question of how to obey two opposing orders.
Derec tried to increase the potential and turn it into a First Law conflict at the same time. “It may be that your definition of ‘human’ is wrong. You thought that you were one once, just because you were a thinking being. Now you’ve gone to the opposite extreme. Can you trust your new definition enough to toss another thinking being out the airlock?”
Lucius took a step backward until he stood beside Avery and turned his head to look straight at Wolruf. Derec could almost see the struggle of potentials within the robot’s positronic mind. He wouldn’t have been surprised if he locked up from it, but if it saved Wolruf, it would be worth the loss.
Avery shook his head. “A noble sentiment, but what’s the use in all of us dying when three of us can live? Do you want to see Ariel suffocate one day away from salvation? Carrying your child? I won’t ask how you’d feel about it happening to me, but how about yourself? Do you want to die for the sake of friendship?”
“Avery ‘as a point,” Wolruf said. “Better one of us dies so three of us live. I’d just rather it be ‘im, is all.” She grinned across the table at him, adding, “But I know ‘ow your robots work, too. No matter what you call ‘uman, I’m the least ‘uman of us all; it won’t take long before they ignore Derec’s order and toss me out on their own.”
As soon as the oxygen supply drops to the point where even three of us are in danger, Derec thought. That would probably happen sometime in the next couple of hours. That meant he would have to think of something fast if he wanted to save everyone.
But what could he possibly come up with that the robots wouldn’t have already considered and rejected? They would have been just as frantically trying to improve the odds even for three humans; yet they had come up with nothing.
Nothing that they could act upon, that is. Suddenly Derec smiled, for he saw the weak spot in the army of arguments aimed at Wolruf. They wouldn’t follow any course of action that would be riskier to the humans than spacing Wolruf, but that didn’t mean other courses of action didn’t exist. They just couldn’t act upon them, or even mention them to humans who might consider them the better alternative.
Nor would they allow the humans to discuss them in their presence, lest they become convinced to take an unacceptable risk
“All four of you, out,” Derec ordered suddenly. “Go back to the engine room. I’m not at all convinced that the recycler isn’t repairable. If all four of you work on it at once, then I’m sure you’ll come up with a solution we haven’t considered yet.”
Mandelbrot moved for the door immediately. Adam and Eve hesitated, and Adam said, “I do not see how our collaboration will make the unrepairable repairable.”
“Try it,” Derec said. “I order you to.” With a humanlike shrug, the robots moved after Mandelbrot.
Lucius, however, remained standing beside Avery. “I cannot follow Dr. Avery, s command to obey his every whim if I leave his presence,” he said.
“I release you,” Avery said. “Go with the others.”
“I echo Adam’s reservation. The recycler is damaged beyond repair.”
Avery thundered,
“Damn it, you’ve been questioning every order you can this whole trip, and I want it stopped! When a human tells you to do something, you do it. Understand?”
“I understand your words, but not the reason. If I obey blindly, might I not inadvertently violate your true intent if your order was less than precise? I can better judge how to act if I know the reason the order is given.”
“You’re not supposed to think; you’re supposed to act. It’s my job to see that the order is clear. You can assume, if it makes things any easier for you, that I know what I’m doing when I give it, but your understanding is not required. In some cases —” this with a sidelong glance at Derec “— it’s not even wanted. It’s enough that I am human and I give you an order. Clear now?”
“I must think about this further.”
“Well, think about it in the engine room. Now go.”
Lucius followed the other three robots without another word. Avery waited until the door had closed behind them, then said, “Okay, I know what you’re trying to do. What kind of hare-brained scheme have you come up with?”
Derec spread his hands. “I haven’t, but there has to be one. The robots are thinking no-risk solutions. I reject that if it means sacrificing Wolruf.”
“Thank ‘u.”
“So now we think of low-risk solutions. And if we don’t come up with something, we think of medium-risk solutions. And if that —”
“We get the picture,” Ariel cut in. “So what’s risky and will get us some more air?”
Derec hmmmed in thought. “Electrolyze something else? There’s got to be oxygen bound up in something besides water.”
“As well as poisonous gasses,” Avery said. “Without the recycler to clean out the unwanted products, we’d die even faster than by suffocation. No, that goes in the extremely risky category.”
“How about suspended animation?” Ariel asked. “Freeze one of us, and revive him when we get to Ceremya.”
“Again, extremely risky. The odds of survival are barely twenty percent under the best of conditions. Here, we might achieve ten percent. That’s not what I call a solution. I would, however, allow Wolruf to try it as an alternative to certain death.”