Foundation’s Friends

“Or he could lie, could he not?” Borup suggested. “If he believes you are robots too, not humans, you ca

“Right,” Donovan snarled. “We can’t give him any damned orders he doesn’t want to carry out.”

“Oh, I’m sure he desperately wants to,” Powell replied. “Couldn’t you hear it in his voice? This conflict, this uncertainty is racking him apart. It may well destroy him, bum out his brain, all by itself. “

“In which case the gang will’ve won.”

“If the gang exists.”

“Yeah. How do we settle Jack’s dilemma for him? How do we convince him we’re human?”

Powell leered. “I could chop off your head.” Sobering: “No, seriously, he would see the action performed, but he couldn’t be certain the gore wasn’t fake. A human doubtless would be, knowing we can’t have brought along the studio equipment needed to stage a realistic-looking murder. But Jack doesn’t know humans that well. He’s had so little direct exposure to them, he’s like a small child.”

“And we can’t land on Io to let him meet us in the flesh,” Donovan said u

“Not in my spaceship,” Borup declared.

“Of course. Besides, Jack would probably run away and hide from us-Wait, though. I’m on the track of something. “

Donovan stared into a comer. The ventilator whirred. Warm odors drifted in from the galley. After a minute he tossed off his drink, struck his fist against the table, and exclaimed, “How’s this? I don’t imagine you have any weapon aboard, Svend, but inside the station I noticed a supply room that hadn’t been emptied-stuff might be wanted someday-and the manifest on the door mentioned a case of detonol sticks. Jack can recognize one of those, all right! Look, while he watches, somebody waves it and says to him,, Jack, your behavior makes me feel so terrible I want to kill myself. ‘ Then the man pulls out the firing pin. If he doesn’t push it back in within five minutes, bang!”

Borup blinked. “ Are you crazy like him? What good will that do, except to ruin my ship?”

“Why, if I’m a robot I can’t suicide,” Donovan crowed. “Third Law, remember? Therefore I must be human. Therefore Jack will immediately yell ‘Stop!’ and beg our pardon for ever having doubted us. “

“That firewater went to your head almighty fast, boy,” Powell clipped. “ A robot damn well can self-destruct if that’s necessary for executing his orders.”

“But-well, naturally, I mean first we’ll set it up-uh-it does call for some preliminary detail work.”

“It calls for an infinite amount, because its value is zero. However-hmm-” Powell refilled his own glass and fell into a similar reverie.

Under the ghostly gravity, Knud entered without sound. One by one they saw his tall form in the doorway, and tensed.

“Search completed, sir,” the robot reported. “

Already?” Donovan wondered.

“The sweep and data crunching go fast,” Borup said. “They must, on a courier. la, Knud. hvad har du- What have you found?”

“Negative, sir,” the flat voice a

Powell and Donovan exchanged stares. Powell slumped. “Then Jack is insane,” he said heavily. “Conditions on Io were too much for him, and Project Io is kaput.”

“You may go, Knud,” Borup said. The robot departed. “I am sorry, my friends. Come, have a little more to drink.”

“No, hold on, hold on!” Donovan bawled. He sprang to his feet. They left the deck. He caught the table edge in time to keep from rising to the overhead. Hanging upside down, he blurted, “Listen, I sort of expected this. Napoleon wouldn’t likely be human. A big risk of life, a big expense. But he can be a robot!”

The silence was not lengthy, nor stu

“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 u

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. He will see you are human, and obey your orders.”

“He will not,” Powell said bleakly. “I assume the conspirators have pla

“Whoof!” puffed Borup, and sought the akvavit.

“Yeah,” Donovan agreed. “That pretty well shields him from any nagging doubts, which makes him better able to quiet down any that Jack expresses. “

“He might entertain the possibility that his communicator is deceiving him,” Powell said, “but he can’t act on it, when his orders are to prevent a catastrophe. For instance, we could invite him to come here and meet us. I’ll bet he’d refuse, because we, if we’re enemy robots as he’s been told, we’d overpower him.”

Borup nodded. “I see. I see. It is a classic conundrum, no? Plato’s cave.”

“Huh?” grunted Donovan.

“You do not know? Well, I have more time to read than you do, on my travels. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato pointed out that our information about the material world comes to us entirely t’rough our senses, and how do we know they tell us true? Rather, we know they are often wrong. We must do the best we can. He said we are like prisoners chained in a cave who ca

“Kind of an airy notion.”

“Ha, you would refute solipsism like Dr. Samuel Yohnson, by kicking a stone-”

“Never mind the dialectics,” Powell interrupted. “You have hit on a good analogy, Svend. We are trapped in Plato’s cave, all three parties of us. We can’t physically go to each other. The only information we get is what comes over the communication beams; and it could be lies. We don’t even know that the Napoleon robot exists. We’re assuming so, but maybe he really is only a figment of Jack’s deranged imagination. If Napoleon does exist, then he knows that his own projected image is a man’s; but every image he receives is a robot’s, and he believes-he must believe, if he’s to serve his bosses reliably-that that is true. As for Jack, if he isn’t hallucinating, then every image he receives is human, and he can’t tell which of them are genuine.

“Deadlock. How do we break it? Remember, meanwhile the clock is ru

Donovan snapped his fingers. “Got it!” he cried. “We call Jack and get Napoleon into the conversation. We record this. Then Earth will know there’s something rotten in-uh-sorry, Svend.”

Powell frowned. “Well, we can try,” he answered. “But we’d better have something to say he’ll consider worth his notice. “

“Hello, Jack,” he greeted as calmly as he was able. “How are you?”

The barren scene jittered. The belated voice rose and fell. “What…do you want?”

“Why, to continue our conversation. And, to be sure, offer our respects to the Emperor Napoleon. You told us he’ll be listening in. We’d be delighted to have the honor of his participation in our talk. Introductions first. I neglected them earlier. You may recall that my name is Gregory Powell. The gentleman here at my side is Michael Donovan, and behind us you see Captain Svend Borup.” Powell beamed, pointless though he knew it was. “Quite a contrast, we three, eh? Well, humans are a variegated lot. “

After the delay: “That may be. To me you…look similar. I had to exert myself to describe the Emperor Napoleon as closely as I did. Begging your pardon, sir,” Jack said to an unseen observer? His attention returned to Powell. “What do you want? He…he has instructed me…not to waste time on your… importunities. I must prepare…to resist…any invasion.”