“That’s absurd,” Prospero objected. “There is no way they could accomplish such a thing.”
Caliban thought for a moment. “It is a sensible goal, at least. A polar sea with proper communication to the Southern Ocean would do a great deal to moderate the climate. But friend Prospero is correct. There is no way to do such a thing.”
Fiyle nodded his agreement. “In the normal course of events, digging an ocean would be an impossibly huge project. Way beyond the capacity of Inferno’s engineers. Of anyone’s engineers. But all of a sudden someone dealt us a wild card.”
“Go on,” Caliban said.
Fiyle leaned forward in his chair, and went on in an earnest tone of voice. “There’s a guy by the name of Davlo Lentrall. He was working on something called Operation Snowball. A small-scale, low-budget project that’s been running for a few years now. You find comets in suitable orbits, set mining machines and robots on them, and, quite literally, set the robots to work making snowballs, mining hunks of ice. You load the snowballs into a linear accelerator that fires them toward the planet, one after another, over and over, working nonstop, around the clock. You fire the snowballs toward Inferno, one after another, over and over and over again, millions of them, until the whole mass of the comet is delivered to the planet in five- or ten-kilo chunks.
“Each snowball vaporizes as it enters Inferno’s atmosphere—and there’s another five or ten kilos worth of water vapor in the atmosphere. Repeat five or ten or twenty million times, and you’ll got a substantial increase in the amount of water on the planet. Some of the water escapes to space, and some of what’s in the comet isn’t water—but the other elements serve as nutrients, and we can use those too. Every little bit helps—that’s the Operation Snowball motto. They’ve chewed up nine or ten small comets that way in the last few years.”
“I have heard of the project, and seen the constant streams of meteors that sometimes appear in one part of the sky or another. What of it?”
“Lentrall found Comet Grieg while he was doing a scan for comets suitable for Snowball. Except Grieg wasn’t suitable for Operation Snowball. It had too little water ice, and too much stony material. And that should have been the end of it—except for two things.
“The first thing was that Lentrall saw how close the comet was going to come to Inferno. The second thing was that Lentrall was—and is—an arrogant, ambitious little man who wanted to be a big man. He was sick and tired of pushing numbers around for Operation Snowball. He was looking for a way out, a way up. Something big. And he found it.”
“And what, exactly, was that something big?”
“Deliberately dropping a comet on the planet in order to dig that polar sea and its outlets,” said Fiyle. “And who cares if the New Law robots get in the way?”
A human would have professed shock and refused to believe such a thing could be. But Caliban was not a human, and he had never suffered from the human need to try and reshape reality by denying the unpleasant parts of it could exist. Instead he moved on to the next logical question. But, even as he asked it, somehow he already knew what the answer had to be. “You refer to the New Law robots being in the way. Assuming they do drop a comet on the planet—where, precisely, do they intend to drop it?” he asked.
“On the Utopia region,” Fiyle said. “And if it’s anywhere near where I think it is, your hidden city of Valhalla is right in the middle of ground zero.”
SOPHON-06 WATCHED PLACIDLY as Gubber Anshaw unplugged the test meter from his diagnostic socket.
“That will do for this trip,” Gubber said cheerfully.
“Do I still register as sane on all of your meters, Dr. Anshaw?” asked Sophon-06.
“So far as I can tell,” Gubber replied. “I have yet to work out what, exactly, should be defined as sanity among New Law robots.”
“I thought the majority was always sane,” Lancon-03 suggested from across the room.
The human shook his head as he put away his equipment. “I don’t believe that is true for my species,” he said. “At least I hope it isn’t. As for your species, I am still at the beginning of my studies. I’ve done tests on dozens of the New Law robots in Valhalla. The vast majority of the New Law robots seem to fall within a narrow band of personality types. You are a careful, earnest, thoughtful group. The world, the universe, is a very new place to you, and you seek to explore yourselves and it at the same time. You want to know where you belong.”
“And you see that as the primary motivation for New Law behavior?” asked Sophon-06.
Gubber thought for a moment. “There is a very ancient procedure used by humans to examine their own drives and impulses. It has gone under many names, indeed many disguises, as the millennia have passed. But the basics are always the same. The subject is required to speak to a listener, but it is not what the listener hears that matters. What is important is that the subject is forced to order his or her thoughts and express them coherently. In the act of speaking to the listener, the subject speaks to himself or herself, and thus is able to perform a self-examination.”
“In other words, it does not matter what you think our basic drives are,” said Sophon-06. “What is important is that we take the opportunity to ask that question of ourselves, in the most objective way possible.”
“It is useful to ask the question,” said Gubber. “But it is also important to express the answer.”
“Or at least an answer,” said Lancon-03. “So come, friend Sophon. Tell us. What is it that you think drives the New Law robots?”
Sophon sat motionless, deep in thought. “It is certainly a question that goes to the center of things,” he said at last. “Why do we hide away here in Valhalla, obsessed with secrecy? Why do we seek to develop our own aesthetic, our own way of looking at the world? Why are we driven to improve and demonstrate our skills as terraformers? I think all of these can be explained by our desire to survive. We hide to avoid destruction, we seek acts of creation to develop a system of reference for the greater universe, and we sharpen our skills to insure that we are of more use alive than dead.”
Gubber considered Sophon-06 thoughtfully. A coldblooded, even brutal, analysis, but cogent for all of that. It came closer to the truth than most theories did. “It has been interesting, as always,” he said, preparing to take his leave. “I look forward to my next visit.”
Lancon-03 nodded thoughtfully, mimicking the human gesture. “I am glad to hear it,” she said. “I hope we are still here when the time for that visit comes.”
GUBBER HAD MADE the trip from Valhalla often enough to take all of the journey’s odd features for granted. One never came in or went out by the same route, and one rode in a different sort of sealed and windowless vehicle each time one arrived or departed. Nor did one journey to or from Depot ever take anything like the same amount of time as the one before it or the one after. As Sophon-06 had observed, the New Law robots invested a great deal of effort in order to stay hidden. Gubber therefore paid no attention to the journey back and forth to Depot. He had something else on his mind: the question of New Law robot sanity.