“Well, if you didn’t happen to see, I think it pushed me over; and I was wondering if it had shown the same feeling about anyone else. “
“Chile! Keep close to that thing and make sure it doesn’t do a repeat!” snapped Bronwen.
“Shouldn’t I be helping bring Robert up? His danger seems more immediate.”
“We can get him. If he’s right-I couldn’t see him on that side of the block-the other danger is greater. “
“I understand.”
“Talk to it, if you’ve reached that level, and ask why it did it,” suggested Ling.
“We have not reached that level of abstraction.”
“At least we’ve learned one thing; this stuff is alien,” Rob resumed, very calmly all things considered. “No robot made on Earth could have done that to what it recognized as a human being. We don’t have First Law protection from it. Maybe we don’t have any kind; maybe whoever made it doesn’t use the Three Laws in their design. “
Chile had stopped at last, and was “walking” back toward the scene of action. “Such a positronic brain is not possible,” he said flatly. “I will try to find human identifying signals, if any exist, in its communication with the data processor, but I expect they will be too abstract for my present intuition base. Is Robert nearly up?”
“Nearly.” Ling and Sheila spoke almost together. No one suggested aloud that the ghost’s brain might not be positronic. “There can’t be much of this chain still out,” the woman added.
“The robot is getting between me and the cube again,” Chile reported quietly. “I will go to the left side, so I can help with Robert’s chain. I am still monitoring signals. I can’t get very close, of course, without using force on the robot. I assume that is not yet the policy.”
“Right. Just communicate,” replied Bronwen.
Ling’s gloves, slightly preceding his helmet, appeared about eight meters to the left of the cube, as seen by his companions. Chile was standing within a meter of the same spot, slowly bending over to reach for him. The main anchoring trio lay a dozen meters straight in from the point, at the junction of a “Y” outlined in chain with the other women at its arm tips and Chile at its foot.
This lasted only a split second. Then the alien robot moved again, this time pushing off from the big cube. As before, it plunged for the edge. Chile, almost upright, was in no position to oppose it. He took most of its momentum and flew over Ling’s head; the rest of the push was expended against the man’s helmet, and he followed Chile more slowly.
“Rob!” Sheila screamed, and jerked up her legs in readiness to jump. She recovered control in time to forestall the motion, but not soon enough to let Luis and Mike keep hold of her ankles. All might still have been well if she had released the loops of chain she had been coiling up, but letting go of Ling was the farthest thing from her instincts. The chain transferred part of the robot’s final thrust to her, and after two agonizingly slow bounces accompanied by futile scrabbling at surface irregularities and a shrieked “NO!” she too went over the edge. The startled watchers saw the alien robot, now falling to the safe side of the rim, lean and extend an arm as though to intercept her, but she drifted past out of its reach.
“I think we may bounce out before we hit bottom, but I’m not sure how far down that’ll happen,” Ling remarked. “ At least, there should be time to make our wills, if any of us hasn’t done it already.”
“Nine minutes thirty-three seconds,” affirmed Chile. He had hooked a foot under the chain as the other had pushed him, and was now engaged in pulling the three together. “If we approach the bottom, you two hold tightly to each other, and at the last possible moment I will kick upward against you as hard as I can, to take as much as possible of our downward momentum to myself. There seems little chance that this would suffice to preserve your lives, but it is the best I can think of. We have not enough collective spin to help the operation by-”
“Thanks, Chile, but we’ll take your word for it. Rob, was it that robot again’? Things happened too fast for me to be sure.”
“‘Fraid so. It seems to have a prejudice against me, or maybe against anyone who tried to touch the cube. I wonder why it didn’t come around and get you too before; you were about to do the same thing.”
“That is why I want all three of us together as quickly as possible,” Chile cut in. “It will not harm Sheila, and will have the cube here to catch her very shortly. She is human. If we are actually in contact, as she and I are now, it will probably not try to force us apart, but if you, Rob, are still at the end of the chain, I am not sure it won’t try to break you free. “
“Why? I’m-”
“Please don’t talk, Robert. Just pull in chain from your end, too. It will put an uncomfortable amount of spin on us, I fear, but should make you much safer. Here comes the cube.”
Actually, there was no hurry. The alien block, with the ghost on top, overhauled them rather slowly, seemed to look things over for more than a minute, and finally slid under the trio over two hundred meters down. Bronwen had plenty of time to unlimber the rest of the chain, but not enough to figure out how to use it.
“Then you solved the alien symbols.” Ling was talking before his feet were back on the ground. “But why does that thing regard Sheila as human, and not me?”
“I did not solve them. It was the sort of intuition which apparently any brain experiences; yours, when you organized the shadow pattern Chispa called a ship-”
“And the ridge we all named the Stegosaur!” Mike added.
“And the face Rob saw in the Rorschach blot,” continued ZH50. “It happens to positronic brains like mine, too; it may be an inevitable part of any intelligence, natural or otherwise, as I have heard suggested. Dumbo lacks it, of course; it needs Sheila to work intelligently. This other robot has the same quality, positronic or not, and apparently decided that I and the black-helmeted figures were robots, deserving of no special consideration beside the safety of its central system, but that the white-helmeted ones were human.”
“Why should it get that idea?”
“Behavior patterns are also data, and can also be connected intuitively. I did it with the robot’s actions, it did the same with yours. During the time we were investigating this cube, for example, the men made a point-possibly unconscious-of staying between their companions and the edge of the cliff. I think the key behavior, though, occurred at Barco, when-”
“When this idiotic Galahad kicked me back up the cliff, at his own risk!” snapped Sheila.
“That seems likely.”
“But I wasn’t in any real risk! I could have jumped up from that slab of ice five seconds before hitting bottom, and landed like jumping off a table!”
“The robot didn’t know your limits. It saw the basic action; you were protecting another being, and, I suggest, interpreted that as First Law behavior. The most obvious difference between the two of you was helmet color. The conclusion may have been tentative, if the thing is intelligent enough be that scientific, but it was supported later.”
“You trusted human lives to your own guess, then. How does that fit with First Law?” asked Luis.
“I did not. The lives were already at risk through no fault of mine. I told you the best action I could suggest at the time,” answered Chile. “I also implied that it would be unnecessary; I used the conditional. “ Luis blinked, thinking back.
“It’s one of those old-fashioned happy endings!” Chispa laughed. “We really have found proof of alien life, and when Chile, or maybe Chile and Dumbo between them, have worked out this machine’s code, we’ll know everything it’s learned about Miranda in however long it’s been here. Nobel prizes all around. And all the romance anyone could want.” She moved closer to Luis; then, just visibly to the others through her face plate, glanced at Sheila. “Well…” Her voice trailed off.
A snort, recognizably Ling’s, sounded in their helmets.
“If I’ve been that obvious, forget it. There’s such a thing as self-respect.” He made another, less describable sound.
“I can stand self-respect, even when it slops over into conceit,” Sheila said quietly. “It’s much better than hinting. How about ‘Rorschach’ for a team name?”
“Why be subtle? ‘Blot’ is more euphonious. But I’ll go with anything you like. What, except for wasted time, is in a-”
“And maybe the folks who set up this station will be back soon!” interrupted Chispa merrily.
The Fourth Law of Robotics
by Harry Harrison
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.