Asimov's Future History Volume 1

by Isaac Asimov

  Bogert was back after three days, silent and thoroughly depressed. When Robertson inquired anxiously as to results, he shook his head. “Nothing!”

  “Nothing?”

  “Absolutely nothing. I spoke with every man in flagstaff – every scientist, every technician, every student – that had had anything to do with Jane; everyone that had as much as seen her. The number wasn’t great; I’ll give Madarian credit for that much discretion. He only allowed those to see her who might conceivably have had planetological knowledge to feed her. There were twenty-three men altogether who had seen Jane and of those only twelve had spoken to her more than casually.

  “I went over and over all that Jane had said. They remembered everything quite well. They’re keen men engaged in a crucial experiment involving their specialty, so they had every motivation to remember. And they were dealing with a talking robot, something that was startling enough, and one that talked like a TV actress. They couldn’t forget.”

  Robertson said, “Maybe a Psycho-probe –”

  “If one of them had the vaguest thought that something had happened, I would screw out his consent to Probing. But there’s nothing to leave room for an excuse, and to Probe two dozen men who make their living from their brains can’t be done. Honestly, it wouldn’t help. If Jane had mentioned three stars and said they had habitable planets, it would have been like setting up sky rockets in their brains. How could anyone of them forget?”

  “Then maybe one of them is lying,” said Robertson grimly. “He wants the information for his own use; to get the credit himself later.”

  “What good would that do him?” said Bogert. “The whole establishment knows exactly why Madarian and Jane were there in the first place. They know why I came there in the second. If at any time in the future any man now at Flagstaff suddenly comes up with a habitable-planet theory that is startlingly new and different, yet valid, every other man at Flagstaff and every man at U. S. Robots will know at once that he had stolen it. He’d never get away with it.”

  “Then Madarian himself was somehow mistaken.”

  “I don’t see how I can believe that either. Madarian had an irritating personality – all robopsychologists have irritating personalities, I think, which must be why they work with robots rather than with men – but he was no dummy. He couldn’t be wrong in something like this.”

  “Then –” But Robertson had run out of possibilities. They had reached a blank wall and for some minutes each stared at it disconsolately.

  Finally Robertson stirred. “Peter –”

  “Well?”

  “Let’s ask Susan.”

  Bogert stiffened. “What!”

  “Let’s ask Susan. Let’s call her and ask her to come in.”

  “Why? What can she possibly do?”

  “I don’t know. But she’s a robopsychologist, too, and she might understand Madarian better than we do. Besides, she – Oh, hell, she always had more brains than any of us.”

  “She’s nearly eighty.”

  “And you’re seventy. What about it?”

  Bogert sighed. Had her abrasive tongue lost any of its rasp in the years of her retirement? He said, “Well, I’ll ask her.”

  Susan Calvin entered Bogert’s office with a slow look around before her eyes fixed themselves on the Research Director. She had aged a great deal since her retirement. Her hair was a fine white and her face seemed to have crumpled. She had grown so frail as to be almost transparent and only her eyes, piercing and uncompromising, seemed to remain of all that had been.

  Bogert strode forward heartily, holding out his hand. “Susan!”

  Susan Calvin took it, and said, “You’re looking reasonably well, Peter, for an old man. If I were you, I wouldn’t wait till next year. Retire now and let the young men get to it.... And Madarian is dead. Are you calling me in to take over my old job? Are you determined to keep the ancients till a year past actual physical death?”

  “No, no, Susan. I’ve called you in –” He stopped. He did not, after all, have the faintest idea of how to start.

  But Susan read his mind now as easily as she always had. She seated herself with the caution born of stiffened joints and said, “Peter, you’ve called me in because you’re in bad trouble. Otherwise you’d sooner see me dead than within a mile of you.”

  “Come, Susan –”

  “Don’t waste time on pretty talk. I never had time to waste when I was forty and certainly not now. Madarian’s death and your call to me are both unusual, so there must be a connection. Two unusual events without a connection is too low-probability to worry about. Begin at the beginning and don’t worry about revealing yourself to be a fool. That was revealed to me long ago.”

  Bogert cleared his throat miserably and began. She listened carefully, her withered hand lifting once in a while to stop him so that she might ask a question.

  She snorted at one point. “Feminine intuition? Is that what you wanted the robot for? You men. Faced with a woman reaching a correct conclusion and unable to accept the fact that she is your equal or superior in intelligence, you invent something called feminine intuition.”

  “Oh, yes, Susan, but let me continue –”

  He did. When she was told of Jane’s contralto voice, she said, “It is a difficult choice sometimes whether to feel revolted at the male sex or merely to dismiss them as contemptible.”

  Bogert said, “Well, let me go on –”

  When he was quite done, Susan said, “May I have the private use of this office for an hour or two?”

  “Yes, but –”

  She said, “I want to go over the various records – Jane’s programming, Madarian’s calls, your interviews at flagstaff. I presume I can use that beautiful new shielded laser-phone and your computer outlet if I wish.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Well, then, get out of here, Peter.”

  It was not quite forty-five minutes when she hobbled to the door, opened it, and called for Bogert.

  When Bogert came, Robertson was with him. Both entered and Susan greeted the latter with an unenthusiastic “Hello, Scott.”

  Bogert tried desperately to gauge the results from Susan’s face, but it was only the face of a grim old lady who had no intention of making anything easy for him.

  He said cautiously, “Do you think there’s anything you can do, Susan?”

  “Beyond what I have already done? No! There’s nothing more.” Bogert’s lips set in chagrin, but Robertson said, “What have you already done, Susan?”

  Susan said, “I’ve thought a little; something I can’t seem to persuade anyone else to do. For one thing, I’ve thought about Madarian. I knew him, you know. He had brains but he was a very irritating extrovert. I thought you would like him after me, Peter.”

  “It was a change,” Bogert couldn’t resist saying.

  “And he was always running to you with results the very minute he had them, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “And yet,” said Susan, “his last message, the one in which he said Jane had given him the answer, was sent from the plane. Why did he wait so long? Why didn’t he call you while he was still at flagstaff, immediately after Jane had said whatever it was she said?”

  “I suppose,” said Peter, “that for once he wanted to check it thoroughly and – well, I don’t know. It was the most important thing that had ever happened to him; he might for once have wanted to wait and be sure of himself.”

  “On the contrary; the more important it was, the less he would wait, surely. And if he could manage to wait, why not do it properly and wait till he was back at U. S. Robots so that he could check the results with all the computing equipment this firm could make available to him? In short, he waited too long from one point of view and not long enough from another.”

  Robertson interrupted. “Then you think he was up to some trickery –”

  Susan looked revolted. “Scott, don’t try to compete with Peter in making inane re
marks. Let me continue.... A second point concerns the witness. According to the records of that last call, Madarian said, ‘Poor guy jumped two feet when Jane suddenly began to reel out the answer in her gorgeous voice.’ In fact, it was the last thing he said. And the question is, then, why should the witness have jumped? Madarian had explained that all the men were crazy about that voice, and they had had ten days with the robot – with Jane. Why should the mere act of her speaking have startled them?”

  Bogert said, “I assumed it was astonishment at hearing Jane give an answer to a problem that has occupied the minds of planetologists for nearly a century.”

  “But they were waiting for her to give that answer. That was why she was there. Besides, consider the way the sentence is worded. Madarian’s statement makes it seem the witness was startled, not astonished, if you see the difference. What’s more, that reaction came ‘when Jane suddenly began’ – in other words, at the very start of the statement. To be astonished at the content of what Jane said would have required the witness to have listened awhile so that he might absorb it. Madarian would have said he had jumped two feet after he had heard Jane say thus-and-so. It would be ‘after’ not ‘when’ and the word ‘suddenly’ would not be included.”

  Bogert said uneasily, “I don’t think you can refine matters down to the use or non-use of a word.”

  “I can,” said Susan frostily, “because I am a robopsychologist. And I can expect Madarian to do so, too, because he was a robopsychologist. We have to explain those two anomalies, then. The queer delay before Madarian’s call and the queer reaction of the witness.”

  “Can you explain them?” Asked Robertson. “Of course,” said Susan, “since I use a little simple logic. Madarian called with the news without delay, as he always did, or with as little delay as he could manage. If Jane had solved the problem at Flagstaff, he would certainly have called from Flagstaff. Since he called from the plane, she must clearly have solved the problem after he had left Flagstaff.”

  “But then –”

  “Let me finish. Let me finish. Was Madarian not taken from the airport to Flagstaff in a heavy, enclosed ground car? And Jane, in her crate, with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And presumably, Madarian and the crated Jane returned from Flagstaff to the airport in the same heavy, enclosed ground car. Am I right?”

  “Yes, of course!”

  “And they were not alone in the ground car, either. In one of his calls, Madarian said, ‘We were chauffeured from the airport to the main administration building,’ and I suppose I am right in concluding that if he was chauffeured, then that was because there was a chauffeur, a human driver, in the car.”

  “Good God!”

  “The trouble with you, Peter, is that when you think of a witness to a planetological statement, you think of planetologists. You divide up human beings into categories, and despise and dismiss most. A robot cannot do that. The First Law says, ‘A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.’ Any human being. That is the essence of the robotic view of life. A robot makes no distinction. To a robot, all men are truly equal, and to a robopsychologist who must perforce deal with men at the robotic level, all men are truly equal, too.

  “It would not occur to Madarian to say a truck driver had heard the statement. To you a truck driver is not a scientist but is a mere animate adjunct of a truck, but to Madarian he was a man and a witness. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

  Bogert shook his head in disbelief. “But you are sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. How else can you explain the other point; Madarian’s remark about the startling of the witness? Jane was crated, wasn’t she? But she was not deactivated. According to the records, Madarian was always adamant against ever deactivating an intuitive robot. Moreover, Jane-5, like any of the Janes, was extremely non-talkative. Probably it never occurred to Madarian to order her to remain quiet within the crate; and it was within the crate that the pattern finally fell into place. Naturally she began to talk. A beautiful contralto voice suddenly sounded from inside the crate. If you were the truck driver, what would you do at that point? Surely you’d be startled. It’s a wonder he didn’t crash.”

  “But if the truck driver was the witness, why didn’t he come forward –”

  “Why? Can he possibly know that anything crucial had happened, that what he heard was important? Besides, don’t you suppose Madarian tipped him well and asked him not to say anything? Would you want the news to spread that an activated robot was being transported illegally over the Earth’s surface.”

  “Well, will he remember what was said?”

  “Why not? It might seem to you, Peter, that a truck driver, one step above an ape in your view, can’t remember. But truck drivers can have brains, too. The statements were most remarkable and the driver may well have remembered some. Even if he gets some of the letters and numbers wrong, we’re dealing with a finite set, you know, the fifty-five hundred stars or star systems within eighty light-years or so – I haven’t looked up the exact number. You can make the correct choices. And if needed, you will have every excuse to use the Psycho-probe –”

  The two men stared at her. Finally Bogert, afraid to believe, whispered, “But how can you be sure?”

  For a moment, Susan was on the point of saying: Because I’ve called Flagstaff, you fool, and because I spoke to the truck driver, and because he told me what he had heard, and because I’ve checked with the computer at Flagstaff and got the only three stars that fit the information, and because I have those names in my pocket.

  But she didn’t. Let him go through it all himself. Carefully, she rose to her feet, and said sardonically, “How can I be sure?... Call it feminine intuition.”

  The Fourth Law of Robotics

  2065 A.D.

  THE SECRETARY SURGED to her feet as i rushed by her desk.

  “Stop! You can’t go in there! This is Dr. Calvin’s office!”

  “I know,” I demurred. “That’s why I am here.”

  Then I was through the door and it closed behind me. Dr. Calvin looked up and frowned at me through her reading glasses.

  “You seem in quite a hurry, young man.”

  “I am, Dr. Calvin, I am —” My words ground to a halt like an old Victrola with a busted spring. With her glasses off Dr. Calvin’s eyes were limpid pools of unfulfilled desire. Her figure, despite the lab gown, could not be disguised in its pulchritude.

  “Did you look at my great-aunt in that steamy-eyed way, Dr. Donovan?” She smiled.

  “No, no, of course not!” I stammered, rubbing my hand across my iron-gray hair. Or rather my bald skull fringed by iron-gray hair. And realized my mistake. “I was not looking at you in any particular way, Dr. Calvin.” She smiled warmly at that and an ache passed through every fiber of my being. I grabbed my mind by the neck and shook it, remembering my pressing errand. “I have a pressing errand, which is why I have burst into your office like this. I have reason to believe that a robot has just held up a bank.”

  Well, as you might very well imagine, that got her attention. She dropped back into her chair, her eyes opened wide, she gasped, and I could see the sweat spring to her brow and the slight tremor of her hand.

  “I can guess that you are a little surprised by this news,” I said.

  “Not at all,” she sussurated. “It had to happen one day. Tell me about it.”

  “I will do better — I will show you.”

  I slipped the security camera ‘s visivox recording into the projector on her desk and thumbed it to life. One end of her office appeared to vanish, to be replaced by the interior of a financial establishment. Tellers dispensed money and services to attendant customers.

  “I don’t see any holdup,” she said sweetly.

  “Wait,” I cozened. Then the revolving door revolved and a man came into the bank. He was dressed in black from head to toe — black raincoat, black fedora hat, even black gloves and dark glass
es. Even more interesting was the fact that when he turned to face the hidden camera, it could be seen that his features were concealed by a black ski mask. I saw that I had all of Dr. Calvin’s attention now.

  We watched as he walked to the nearest free window. The teller looked up and smiled.

  “May I help you?” he asked, the smile fading as he looked at the sinister figure before him.

  “You may,” the man said in a woman’s clear contralto voice as he took a hand grenade from his pocket and held it out. Then pulled the pin and let the pin drop to the floor. “This is a hand grenade,” the lovely voice said.

  “And I have pulled and discarded the pin. If I open my hand now the lever will fly off. Three seconds after release a hand grenade will explode. This kind of explosion tends to have a deleterious effect on people. Now I, for one, do not want this to happen and — I am just guessing? — I feel that you don’t want this to happen, either. Would you like to keep my hand closed? Just nod. That’s fine. Then we agree. Now I’ll bet that you think it is a really hunky-dory idea to take all of the money from your cash drawer, place it in this bag, and pass it back to me. How nice — you do think that it is a good idea. Very good! You have a nice day, hear.”

  With this parting jest the man turned and strode across the bank. He was almost at the exit when the teller shouted a warning and alarm bells sounded.

  What happened next was terrible. Unbelievable. Yet it happened. The thief turned and dropped the hand grenade, turned back and sprang at the revolving door, and pushed his way clear in the brief time before the grenade exploded.

  “Close your eyes if you don’t want to watch,” I said.

  “I can watch,” Dr. Calvin said grimly.

  There was a burst of smoke from the grenade — and it emitted a shrill scream and a cloud of sparkling stars as it spun about. Then the shriek died away into silence, the fireworks stopped.

  “It did not explode,” she observed.