Foundation’s Friends

“Yes,” Hellman said. “That’s the access code to my ship’s computer. How did you get it?”

“Your computer told it to me,” the voice said.

“Why?”

“So you’d trust me. He trusts me, you see, and he asked me to come here to help you. “

Good old computer! Hellman thought. Then his sensation of pleasure that his computer was looking out for him was replaced by an emotion of caution. How had his computer managed to get so self-programming as to decide that Hellman needed help? How had he managed to override his conditioning in order to give this robot or whoever it was the access number? Or hadn’t that happened at all? Perhaps the robots of Robotsville had cracked the computer’s code and hit upon this subterfuge to get Hellman away from Poictesme and into their hands.

“How’s my computer doing?” Hellman asked, temporizing.

“He’s fine. But there’s no time for small talk. He told me you have difficulty making up your mind in an emergency, though you’re quick enough when nothing’s at stake. But you’ll have to decide right now if you want to come with me or not.”

“Where are we going?” Hellman asked. “ And what about Wayne the carhunter and the librarian Jorge?”

“Am I my robot’s keeper? I do what I can. Anyhow, they’re safe enough. You’re the one who’s got problems.”

“And what about Lana?”

“You want to stay where you are and continue having her bring you coffee every morning?”

“I guess I got a few more things to do than that,” Hellman said. “ All right, let’s get out of here.”

It was too dark for Hellman to make out the appearance of his rescuer. But from the direction of the voice, waist level, he was pretty sure that he was small. It seemed reasonable to expect him to be a robot. Everyone he had met on Newstart so far had been a robot, except for Lana, and he still wasn’t completely sure about her.

His rescuer scuttled in front of him toward the furnace door, and opened it. Within, bright flames danced. The robot was revealed in its flames. He was about three feet tall, wore either a wig or had a full head of flowing dark hair and a clever, somewhat supercilious face with a bandit mustache. He was dressed in a tweed jacket and blue jeans. He was upright and bipedal. He wore sneakers. He also wore glasses.

“I’m Harry, by the way,” the robot said. He swung one leg over the lip of the open furnace door.

“Hey, I’m not going in there,” Hellman said.

“The flames are fake,” Harry said.

He swung his other leg over. Hellman put out a hand cautiously toward the fire. He drew it back.

“It’s hot!”

“That’s just simulated warmth. Come on, Tom, now’s not the time to crap around. Your computer warned me you’d be like this.”

“I’m going to have a little talk with that computer,” Hellman said, putting one foot into the furnace, and then, when it wasn’t singed off, the other.

“What’s going on in here?” a loud and familiar voice said. It was the house. Suddenly all the lights in the basement went on. An alarm bell went off. Hellman took a deep breath and jumped into the flames.

The flames were bright around him. They raged and stormed, and there was a little warmth in them, but no real heat. Hellman was fascinated to find himself in the midst of fake flames and simulated warmth. He knew he was on his way. He was going to miss some of those meals that the house had prepared for him. The house was a good provider. There was probably a good future for houses like that on Earth. If there was no real reason against it, he might yet enter into partnership with Poictesme, sell their services on Earth, get rich quick.

First he’d have to find out, however, if these were indeed the robots of Desdemona Station, and if so, had they indeed circumvented or canceled their conditioning to the Three Laws of Robotics. The FDA would never let him import them if they were able to kill people. But if they were the robots of Desdemona, with murder in their hearts, or rather, in their tapes, burned into their chips, as it were, then there would be rewards to claim, prize money to spend. Maybe in that case he’d bring Lana back. She was plenty cute and he was sure she liked him, even though she had some odd ways of expressing it.

And he’d have a word with his computer too, when he got back to the ship. That was very peculiar behavior, giving out the access-code number. Sure, it was for his own protection, but was it, really? Might not his own computer have been reprogrammed by the antisocial elements of this planet of Newstart? And for that matter, what about the humans of Newstart? Had the robots spared some of them? What part did they play in all this?

Hellman considered these things while the flames roared around him. He had quite forgotten where he was. Thus the mind protects itself when faced with an intolerable situation. Now he noticed that the flames were dying down. As the glare faded, he saw Harry, the robot who was rescuing him, standing nearby.

“Why do you wear glasses?” Hellman asked.

“My God! Is that the only thing you can think to ask at a time like this?”

“Why do you robots talk about God so much?” Hellman asked. “Do you know something I don’t know?”

“Your computer was right,” Harry said. “You are fun to be around. One never knows what you’ll say next. Come on, let’s get out of this furnace. I’ll bet you’re hungry too, and thirsty, and perhaps sleepy, as well?”

“Yes, all of the above,” Hellman said.

“How nice it must be to have such urgent conditioning. We robots have been trying to simulate appetite for a long time. It’s easy enough to model human drives, but difficult to put any real urgency into it.”

“But why would you want to have that stuff anyhow?” Hellman asked. “Drives and emotions get you into plenty of trouble. Sometimes they kill you. “

“Yes,” said Harry, “but what a way to go.”

Hellman thought about Lana. “Don’t you ever get the urge to, like for example, mate with someone you know will be bad for you but to hell with that, you want to do it anyway?”

“Not really,” Harry said. “We’ve learned to simulate perversity, of course, that’s not difficult. But the real article…Well, that’s tough. But we have begun a program by means of which we can experiment with it all.”

“All what?”

“All the human moods, nuances, feelings. We’re experimenting also with simulating every aspect of nature’s creative side. But more of that later. We’d better get out of here. “

They were both out of the furnace now. Standing outside it, Hellman saw that it was not a furnace at all. Not now. Maybe it had been earlier. Somehow he had gotten somewhere else. He had stepped out of a small cellar door. He seemed to be in a very pretty pastoral place with bushy trees and green hedges and wild flowers.

“Like it?” Harry asked.

“Very nice. Yours?”

“Yes. I like to come here when I can. The whole thing, is simulated, by the way, down to the last blade of grass.”

“Why didn’t you just plant a garden?”

“We need to express ourselves,” Harry said. “Come on, I’ve got a little place down here. I’m sure we can get you a drink and some lunch. Then you’ll need a nap and after that we can get on with it.”

“Get on with what?”

“The next step. Afraid it’s not going to be quite so easy as what’s happened so far.”

Harry told Hellman he lived in the Gollag Gardens section of Robotsville, quite near the south bridge that crossed the River Visp. He was a dress designer by occupation. Hellman expressed surprise at this, because he had been used to robots only in industrial roles.

“That was in the old days,” Harry said, “when robots were disadvantaged by the racist laws of Earth. All this talk about a robot not being truly creative! As if they had a clue! I can assure you, I do my job better than most designers on Earth. “

“But who do you design dresses for?” Hellman asked.

“For the other robots, of course.”

“I don’t understand. I never heard of a robot wearing clothes before. “

“Yes, I’ve seen the literature on the subject. Humans were really naive in the old days. They expected great things from their robots, but kept them naked. What creature with an ounce of self-respect and the slightest claim to civilization is going to do his best naked?

“The news of your spaceship was received in the city like a bombshell. All of us have been theorizing for a very long time about what humans are really like.”

“You have some here on this planet, don’t you?”

“They don’t count. They’ve been away too long. They’re quite out of touch. They look to us for guidance.”

“Oh. I see what you mean.”

“We want to know what human is like from the horse’s mouth, a genuine human from the planet Earth.”

It was only later that Hellman appreciated the strength of the robot’s drive to be seen as creative and nice.

Harry had taken him through a bypass to a place outside Robotsville. He had a route pla

Hellman’s first sight of Robotsville was not reassuring. The outskirts looked like a junkyard several stories high and stretching for a mile or so in either direction. Although it looked haphazard, the open-work structures were firmly welded into place. There were buildings and verandas and structures of all sorts, most of them lying at odd angles to each other, since robots have no bias in favor of right angles. Although there were ground-level roadways, most of the robots used elevated pathways to get from place to place.

“I hadn’t expected it to be like this,” Hellman said.

“It’s more convenient for a robot to travel monkey-fashion, using a number of lines, than to walk on the ground like men,” Harry explained.

“But I notice that all of them have feet.”

“Of course. Having feet is a mark of being civilized.”

Civilized or not, Hellman saw that most of the robots in this part of Robotsville had small round bodies like squids, with six or eight tentacular limbs with differently shaped grasping members at their ends. As well as the legs, of course, which just dangled appendage-wise as the robots swung through the maze like chimpanzees. Soon they passed this suburban clutter and were in the middle of another district. This one was composed of five- or six-story buildings, some made of masonry, others constructed from what looked like wrought iron. As they walked they passed many robots, who were careful not to stare, even though most of them had never seen a human before. Politeness, Harry explained, seems to be ingrained in the robot psyche.