Foundation's Friends by Isaac Asimov

Author:Isaac Asimov [Asimov, Isaac]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780586212165
Publisher: Grafton Books
Published: 2010-05-08T18:30:00+00:00

The silence was not lengthy, nor stunned. The idea had lain at the back of each mind. Powell began to develop it. While the other two sat, he paced in front of them, long strides bouncing off the ends of the cabin, and counted points on his fingers as they occurred to him.

“Yes,” he said, “that does make sense. Any man-capable spacecraft is a sizable, powerful machine. Misused, it can kill a lot of people. So the authorities keep track of it. You don’t take it anywhere without a certified crew and a filed flight plan. Hard to go clandestinely. But a one-robot vessel, why, that needn’t be much more than a framework and a motor. You could keep it somewhere unbeknownst to anyone, as it might be the Lunar outback, and lift off from there unnoticed. When the robot wanted to drift along undetectable beyond a few hundred klicks, he’d shut off the power and sit in the cold. He himself--not every robot is a U.S.R. product and property, leased to the user and periodically inspected. The best are, yes, but--hm, every now and then one of ours is irrecoverably destroyed, in some accident or other. Except that not all those reports have been honest. I know of a few cases where the robot was in fact hidden away, to be redirected to illegal jobs. This could well be such a case.”

Borup’s china-blue eyes widened. “Can you make a robot do unlawful t’ings?”

“You can if you go about it right,” Donovan said. “With the proper technicians and equipment, you can blank out all he’s ever learned and retrain him from scratch. The Three Laws still hold, of course, but he can have some pretty weird notions about the world. That must be what’s been done here. If Napoleon only remembers dealing with his masters and Jack, then he’s swallowed their story whole. Except for a very few top-flight, experimental models, robots are unsubtle characters anyway. They can’t concoct elaborate plots and don’t imagine that anybody else could. We’ll give him an earful!”

“Slow down,” Powell cautioned. “Let’s explore this further. What does the Napoleon robot necessarily know and believe, to execute his mission of halting Project Io?” He thought aloud as he soared to and fro:

“He can operate a spacecraft, a communications system, et cetera. Therefore he has a certain amount of independent decision-making capability, though scarcely equal to Jack’s. Otherwise simpleminded, he has no way of knowing the viroid story is false. I daresay he’s been forbidden to tune in any outside ‘cast, and told to ignore whatever he might overhear accidentally. His mission is to warn Jack about the viroids, and about the wicked men whose robots will try to talk Jack into going back to work. To this end, it’ll be reasonable to him that he claim to being human himself, and that his image be projected as human. He’ll have no inhibitions about such a pious deception, if it’s used on another robot.”

“Ah-ha!” Borup exulted. “We have him! He will be listening and watching when you next call Yack.

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