combination.
And there were times she thought seriously about taking at least one name off that list.
2
CALIBAN FOLLOWED PROSPERO down the tunnel. It ran for about a hundred meters, and deposited them at the base of a ravine that was otherwise quite inaccessible to the house. Their aircar was hidden there.
“I would like to know what all that was about,” Caliban said as they emerged from the tunnel into the cool of the evening.
“I spoke the truth,” Prospero said coolly. “It was in part merely a test to see how she would react to such an accusation. Surely you would agree it is worth knowing if she is capable of betraying us.” Prospero climbed into the pilot’s station.
Caliban followed, climbing into the forward passenger seat. “I suppose the case could be made that such information would be useful in a general sense,” he said. “But you have dealt with Dr. Leving for quite some time now. Why worry about such hypotheticals now? And if the need for a test was only part of your intent, what was the rest?”
“I have answers to both questions, friend Caliban, but I do not choose to give them now. This is all I can tell you: I believe we are in danger. The possibility that we will be betrayed—or have been already—is quite real. And I can tell you no more than that.”
Prospero engaged the aircar’s controls, and they lifted off into the evening air. Caliban said no more, but he found that he had reached a conclusion about Prospero. There was no longer the slightest doubt in his mind that the New Law robot was unstable. He did not merely suspect betrayal on all sides—he virtually invited it. He had gone out of his way to encourage Dr. Leving’s hostility. More than likely, the fellow was confusing danger to himself with danger to the New Laws.
All of which made Caliban’s next decision quite simple. As soon as it was conveniently possible, he would put some distance, in every sense of the word, between himself and Prospero.
He no longer wished to stand quite so close to so tempting a target.
FREDDA LEVING WALKED to the other end of the underground safe room, and went through the open door there. She wearily closed the door behind her, and scrambled the combination as well. She, Fredda, was the only one who knew the combination to this door. Alvar had insisted on that much. He had no desire for a New Law robot like Prospero—let alone a No Law robot like Caliban—to have free access to his home. There had been times when she herself had been glad to keep her home well barricaded against New Law robots.
And of course, the New Laws felt the same way about humans. She still had not the slightest idea where, exactly, the New Law city of Valhalla was. She knew it was underground, and that it was in the Utopia sector, but that was about all. Fredda had even been taken there several times, but she had always been transported in a windowless aircar equipped with a system for jamming tracking devices. The New Law robots took no chances, and she could not blame them. Fredda had been quite willing to cooperate with their precautions, and to make sure everyone knew about them. They were for her safety as much as for that of the robots. What she did not know, she could not reveal under the Psychic Probe. The New Law robots had a large number of enemies. Some of them might well be willing to reduce the governor’s wife to a vegetable, and damn the consequences, if that was what it took to find the lair of the New Law robots.
Astonishing, really, the lengths they all went to. Not just the New Laws, but Alvar, and even herself. They all took such elaborate precautions. Against discovery, against scandal, against each other. No wonder Prospero was turning half paranoid. Maybe even more than half.
In all probability, of course, the precautions would turn out to be useless in the end. Plots and secrets and hidden agendas generally came crashing down, sooner or later. She had never been involved in a plot or a secret that hadn’t. But the secrets and plots and safeguards and precautions made them all feel better, feel secure, at least for a while. Perhaps that was the point of having them.
Fredda double-checked the inner door, and then stepped into the elevator car that would carry her up above ground, to the household proper.
OBR-323 was waiting there for her, in all his rather ponderous solemnity. “Master Kresh has landed,” he announced in his gravely, ponderous voice. “He should be here momentarily.”
“Very good,” Fredda said. “Will dinner be ready soon?”
“Dinner will be ready in twelve minutes, Mistress. Is that acceptable?”
“That will be fine, Oberon.” Fredda regarded Oberon with a critical—and self-critical—eye. She had built him, after all. He was a tall, solid-looking robot, heavily built and gun-metal gray. Oberon was nearly twice the size of Donald—and perhaps only half as sophisticated. Fredda was not entirely satisfied with her handiwork regarding Oberon. If nothing else, there was the question of overall appearance. At the time she had designed him, she had concluded that a robot as big as Oberon who was all angles and hard edges would have been rather intimidating. That would not have been a good idea in these rather edgy times. Therefore, Oberon was as rounded-off as Donald. However, Fredda was not entirely satisfied with the overall effect. Donald’s rounded angles made him look unthreatening. Oberon merely looked half-melted.
She often wondered what Oberon’s design said about her own psychology. The custom-design robots she had built before him—Donald, Caliban, Ariel, Prospero—had all been cutting-edge designs, highly advanced, even, except for Donald, dangerously experimental. Not Oberon. Everything about his design was basic, conservative— even crude. Her other custom-built robots had required highly sophisticated construction and hand-tooled parts. Oberon represented little more than the assembly of components.
“I’ll just go in and freshen up,” she said to Oberon, and headed for the refresher, her mind still on why she had made Oberon the way she had. Once burned, twice shy? she wondered. Of course she had been burned twice already. It was a desire for rebellion against caution that had gotten her into trouble in the first place. And the second place. She found herself thinking back on it all as she stripped and headed into the refresher. The hot water jets of the needle-shower were just what she needed to unwind after the meeting with Prospero.
A few years before, Fredda Leving had been one of Inferno’s leading roboticists, with a well-earned reputation for taking chances, for searching out shortcuts, for impatience.
None of those character traits were exactly well-suited to the thoroughly calcified field of robotics research. There had not been a real breakthrough in robotics for hundreds of years, just an endless series of tiny, incremental advances. Robotics was an incredibly conservative field, caution and safety and care the watchwords at every turn.
Positronic brains had the standard Three Laws of Robotics burned into them, not once, but millions of times, each microcopy of the Laws standing guard to prevent any violation. Each positronic brain was based on an earlier generation of work, and each later generation seemed to include more Three-Law pathing. The line of development went back in an unbroken chain, all the way to the first crude robotic brain built on Earth, untold thousands of years before.
Each generation of positronic brain had been based on the generation that went before—and each generation of design had sought to entwine the Three Laws more and more deeply into the positronic pathway that made up a robotic brain. Indeed, the closest the field had come to a breakthrough in living memory was a way to embed yet more microcopies of the Three Laws into the pathways of a positronic brain.
In principle, there was, of course, nothing wrong with safety. But there was such a thing as overdoing it. If a robotic brain checked a million times a second to see if a First Law violation was about to occur, that meant all other processing was interrupted a million times, slowing up productive work. Very large percentages of processing time, and very large percentages of the volume of the physical positronic brain, were given over to massively, insanely redundant iterations of the Three Laws.
But Fredda had wanted to know how a robot would behave with a modified law set—or with no law set at all. And that meant she was stuck. In order to create a positronic brain without the Three Laws, it would have been necessary to start completely from scratch, abandoning all those thousands of years of refinement and development, almost literally carving the brain paths by hand. Even if she had tried such a thing, the resulting robot
