Asimov's Future History Volume 1 (48 page)

And that would mean Rathbone would be after them. There’d be no returning to their home on the moon, and no staying here on Earth. Life was hard for a geologist prospecting out in the asteroids, but what other chance did they have to be a family – father, daughter, and robot?

“Sweetie,” he said to his daughter, “this is your GrandPAPPI.”

Risk

2033 A.D.

H
YPER
B
ASE
HAD
lived for this day. Spaced about the gallery of the viewing room, in order and precedence strictly dictated by protocol, was a group of officials, scientists, technicians and others who could only be lumped under the general classification of “personnel.” In accordance with their separate temperaments they waited hopefully, uneasily, breathlessly, eagerly, or fearfully for this culmination of their efforts.

The hollowed interior of the asteroid known as Hyper Base had become for this day the center of a sphere of iron security that extended out for ten thousand miles. No ship might enter that sphere and live. No message might leave without scrutiny.

A hundred miles away, more or less, a small asteroid moved neatly in the orbit into which it had been urged a year before, an orbit that ringed Hyper Base in as perfect a circle as could be managed. The asteroidlet’s identity number was H937, but no one on Hyper Base called it anything but It. (“Have you been out on it today?”

“The general’s on it, blowing his top,” and eventually the impersonal pronoun achieved the dignity of capitalization.)

On It, unoccupied now as zero second approached, was the
Parsec,
the only ship of its kind ever built in the history of man. It lay, unmanned, ready for its takeoff into the inconceivable.

Gerald Black, who, as one of the bright young men in etherics engineering, rated a front-row view, cracked his large knuckles, then wiped his sweating palms on his stained white smock and said sourly, “Why don’t you bother the general, or Her Ladyship there?”

Nigel Ronson, of Interplanetary Press, looked briefly across the gallery toward the glitter of Major-general Richard Kallner and the unremarkable woman at his side, scarcely visible in the glare of his dress uniform. He said, “I would. except that I’m interested in news.”

Ronson was short and plump. He painstakingly wore his hair in a quarter-inch bristle, his shirt collar open and his trouser leg ankle-short, in faithful imitation of the newsmen who were stock characters on TV shows. He was a capable reporter nevertheless.

Black was stocky, and his dark hairline left little room for forehead, but his mind was as keen as his strong fingers were blunt. He said, “They’ve got all the news.”

“Nuts,” said Ronson. “Kallner’s got no body under that gold braid. Strip him and you’ll find only a conveyer belt dribbling orders downward and shooting responsibility upward.”

Black found himself at the point of a grin but squeezed it down. He said. “What about the Madam Doctor?”

“Dr. Susan Calvin of U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation.” intoned the reporter. “The lady with hyperspace where her heart ought to be and liquid helium in her eyes. She’d pass through the sun and come out the other end encased in frozen flame.”

Black came even closer to a grin. “How about Director Schloss, then?”

Ronson said glibly, “He knows too much. Between spending his time fanning the feeble flicker of intelligence in his listener and dimming his own brains for fear of blinding said listener permanently by sheer force of brilliance, he ends up saying nothing.”

Black showed his teeth this time. “Now suppose you tell me why you pick on me.”

“Easy, doctor. I looked at you and figured you’re too ugly to be stupid and too smart to miss a possible opportunity at some good personal publicity.”

“Remind me to knock you down someday.” said Black. “What do you want to know?”

The man from Interplanetary Press pointed into the pit and said, “Is that thing going to work?”

Black looked downward too, and felt a vague chill riffle over him like the thin night wind of Mars. The pit was one large television screen, divided in two. One half was an over-all view of It. On It’s pitted gray surface was the
Parse,
glowing mutedly in the feeble sunlight. The other half showed the control room of the
Parsec.
There was no life in that control room. In the pilot’s seat was an object the vague humanity of which did not for a moment obscure the fact that it was only a positronic robot.

Black said, “Physically, mister, this will work. That robot will leave and come back. Space! how we succeeded with that part of it. I watched it all. I came here two weeks after I took my degree in etheric physics and I’ve been here, barring leave and furloughs, ever since. I was here when we sent the first piece of iron wire to Jupiter’s orbit and back through hyperspace – and got back iron filings. I was here when we sent white mice there and back and ended up with mincemeat.

“We spent six months establishing an even hyperfield after that. We had to wipe out lags of as little as tenths of thousandths of seconds from point to point in matter being subjected to hypertravel. After that, the white mice started coming back intact. I remember when we celebrated for a week because one white mouse came back alive and lived ten minutes before dying. Now they live as long as we can take proper care of them.”

Ronson said, “Great!”

Black looked at him obliquely. “I said,
physically
it will work. Those white mice that come back –”

“Well?”

“No minds. Not even little white mice-type minds. They won’t eat. They have to be force-fed. They won’t mate. They won’t run. They sit. They sit. They sit. That’s all. We finally worked up to sending a chimpanzee. It was pitiful. It was too close to a man to make watching it bearable. It came back a hunk of meat that could make crawling motions. It could move its eyes and sometimes it would scrabble. It whined and sat in its own wastes without the sense to move. Somebody shot it one day, and we were all grateful for that. I tell you this, fella, nothing that ever went into hyperspace has come back with a mind.”

“Is this for publication?”

“After this experiment, maybe. They expect great things of it.” A comer of Black’s mouth lifted.

“You don’t?”

“With a robot at the controls? No.” Almost automatically Black’s mind went back to that interlude, some years back, in which he had been unwittingly responsible for the near loss of a robot. He thought of the Nestor robots that filled Hyper Base with smooth, ingrained knowledge and perfectionist shortcomings. Mat was the use of talking about robots? He was not, by nature, a missionary.

But then Ronson, filling the continuing silence with a bit of small talk, said, as he replaced the wad of gum in his mouth with a fresh piece, “Don’t tell me
you’re
anti-robot. I’ve always heard that scientists are the one group that aren’t anti-robot.”

Black’s patience snapped. He said, “That’s true, and that’s the trouble. Technology’s gone robot-happy. Any job has to have a robot, or the engineer in charge feels cheated. You want a doorstop; buy a robot with a thick foot. That’s a serious thing.” He was speaking in a low, intense voice, shoving the words directly into Ronson’s ear.

Ronson managed to extricate his arm. He said, “Hey, I’m no robot. Don’t take it out on me. I’m a man.
Homo sapiens.
You just broke an arm bone of mine. Isn’t that proof?”

Having started, however, it took more than frivolity to stop Black. He said, “Do you know how much time was wasted on this setup? We’ve had a perfectly generalized robot built and we’ve given it one order. Period. I heard the order given. I’ve memorized it. Short and sweet. ‘Seize the bar with a firm grip. Pull it toward you firmly.
Firmly!
Maintain your hold until the control board informs you that you have passed through hyperspace twice.’

“So at zero time, the robot will grab the control bar and pull it firmly toward himself. His hands are heated to blood temperature. Once the control bar is in position, heat expansion completes contact and hyperfield is initiated. If anything happens to his brain during the first trip through hyperspace, it doesn’t matter. All he needs to do is maintain position one microinstant and the ship will come back and the hyperfield will flip off. Nothing can go wrong. Then we study all its generalized reactions and see what, if anything, has gone wrong.”

Ronson looked blank. “This all makes sense to me.”

“Does it?” asked Black bitterly. “And what will you learn from a robot brain? It’s positronic, ours is cellular. It’s metal, ours is protein. They’re not the same. There’s no comparison. Yet I’m convinced that on the basis of what they learn, or think they learn, from the robot, they’ll send men into hyperspace. Poor devils! Look, it’s not a question of dying. It’s coming back mindless. If you’d seen the chimpanzee, you’d know what I mean. Death is clean and final. The other thing –”

The reporter said, “Have you talked about this to anyone?”

Black said, “Yes. They say what you said. They say I’m anti-robot and that settles everything. – Look at Susan Calvin there. You can bet
she
isn’t anti-robot. She came all the way from Earth to watch this experiment. If it had been a man at the controls, she wouldn’t have bothered. But what’s the use!”

“Hey,” said Ronson, “don’t stop now. There’s more.”

“More what?”

“More problems. You’ve explained the robot. But why the security provisions all of a sudden?”

“Huh?”

“Come
on.
Suddenly I can’t send dispatches. Suddenly ships can’t come into the area. What’s going on? This is just another experiment. The public knows about hyperspace and what you boys are trying to do, so what’s the big secret?”

The backwash of anger was still seeping over Black, anger against the robots, anger against Susan Calvin, anger at the memory of that little lost robot in his past. There was some to spare, he found, for the irritating little newsman and his irritating little questions.

He said to himself, Let’s see how he takes it. He said, “You really want to know?”

“You bet.”

“All right. We’ve never initiated a hyperfield for any object a millionth as large as that ship, or to send anything a millionth as far. That means that the hyperfield that will soon be initiated is some million million times as energetic as any we’ve ever handled. We’re not sure what it can do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Theory tells us that the ship will be neatly deposited out near Sirius and neatly brought back here. But how large a volume of space about the
Parsec
will be carried with it? It’s hard to tell. We don’t know enough about hyperspace. The asteroid on which the ship sits may go with it and, you know, if our calculations are even a little off, it may never be brought back here. It may return, say, twenty billion miles away. And there’s a chance that more of space than just the asteroid may be shifted.”

“How much more?” demanded Ronson.

“We can’t say. There’s an element of statistical uncertainty. That’s why no ships must approach too closely. That’s why we’re keeping things quiet till the experiment is safely over.”

Ronson swallowed audibly. “Supposing it reaches to Hyper Base?”

“There’s a chance of it,” said Black with composure. “Not much of a chance or Director Schloss wouldn’t be here, I assure you. Still, there’s a mathematical chance.”

The newsman looked at his watch. “When does this all happen?”

“In about five minutes. You’re not nervous, are you?”

“No,” said Ronson, but he sat down blankly and asked no more questions.

Black leaned outward over the railing. The final minutes were ticking off.

The robot moved!

There was a mass sway of humanity forward at that sign of motion and the lights dimmed in order to sharpen and heighten the brightness of the scene below. But so far it was only the first motion. The hands of the robot approached the starting bar.

Black waited for the final second when the robot would pull the bar toward himself. Black could imagine a number of possibilities, and all sprang nearly simultaneously to mind.

There would first be the short flicker that would indicate the departure through hyperspace and return. Even though the time interval was exceedingly short, return would not be to the
precise
starting position and there would be a flicker. There always was.

Then, when the ship returned, it might be found, perhaps, that the devices to even the field over the huge volume of the ship had proved inadequate. The robot might be scrap steel. The ship might be scrap steel.

Or their calculations might be somewhat off and the ship might never return. Or worse still, Hyper Base might go with the ship and never return.

Or, of course, all might be well. The ship might flicker and be there in perfect shape. The robot, with mind untouched, would get out of his seat and signal a successful completion of the first voyage of a man-made object beyond the gravitational control of the sun.

The last minute was ticking off.

The last second came and the robot seized the starting bar and pulled it firmly toward himself –

Nothing!

No flicker. Nothing!

The
Parsec
never left normal space.

Major-general Kallner took off his officer’s cap to mop his glistening forehead and in doing so exposed a bald head that would have aged him ten years in appearance if his drawn expression had not already done so. Nearly an hour had passed since the
Parsec’s
failure and nothing had been done.

“How did it happen? How did it happen? I don’t understand it.” Dr. Mayer Schloss, who at forty was the “grand old man” of the young science of hyperfield matrices, said hopelessly, “There is nothing wrong with the basic theory. I’ll swear my life away on that. There’s a mechanical failure on the ship somewhere. Nothing more.” He had said that a dozen times.

“I thought everything was tested.” That had been said too. “It was, sir, it was. Just the same –” And that.