“THANK you, my friends,” Fredda began. “Tonight I intend to present an analysis of the Three Laws. However, before we launch into a detailed law-by-law examination, I think it would be wise to review some background information and focus our historical perspective.

            “In my previous lecture, I presented arguments intended to establish that humans hold robots in low regard, that misuse and abuse of robots is degrading to both us and them, that we humans have allowed our own slothful reliance on robots to rob from us the ability to perform the most basic tasks. There is a common thread that holds all these problems together, a theme that runs through them all.

            “It is the theme, ladies and gentlemen, of the Three Laws. They are at the core of all things involving robotics.”

            Fredda paused for a moment and looked out over the audience, and happened to catch Alvar Kresh’s eye in the first row. She was startled to see the anger in his face. What had happened? Kresh was a reasonable man. What could have angered him so? Had some piece of news come to him? That possibility put a knot in her stomach. But never mind. Not now. She had to go on with the lecture.

            “At the beginning of my previous lecture, I asked, ‘What are robots for?’ There is a parallel question: ‘What are the Three Laws for?’ What purpose are they meant to serve? That question startled me when I first asked it of myself. It was too much like asking, ‘What are people for?’ or ‘What is the meaning of life?’ There are some questions so basic that they can have no answer. People just are. Life just is. They contain their own meaning. We must make of them what we can. But as with robots themselves, the Laws, I would remind you once again, are human inventions, and were most certainly designed with specific purposes in mind. We can say what the Three Laws are for. Let us explore the question.

            “Each of the Laws is based on several underlying principles, some overt and some not immediately evident. The initial principles behind all three Laws derive from universal human morality. This is a demonstrable fact, but the mathematical transformations in positronic positional notation required to prove it are of course not what this audience wishes to hear about. There are many days when I don’t wish to hear about such things myself.”

            That line got a bit of a laugh. Good. They were still with her, still willing to listen. Fredda glanced to her notes, took a slightly nervous sip from her water, and went on. “Suffice to say that such techniques can be used to generalize the Three Laws such that they will read as follows: One, robots must not be dangerous; two, they must be useful; and three, they must be as economical as possible.

            “Further mathematical transformation into the notation used by sociological modelers will show that this hierarchy of basic precepts is identical to a subset of the norms of all moral human societies. We can extract the identical concepts from any of the standard mathematically idealized and generalized moral social codes used by sociological modelers. These concepts can even be cast into a notation wherein each higher law overrides the ones below it whenever two come into conflict: Do no harm, be useful to others, do not destroy yourself.

            “In short, the Three Laws encapsulate some ideals of behavior that are at the core of human morality, ideals that humans reach for but never grasp. That all sounds very comfortable and reassuring, but there are flaws.

            “First, of necessity, the Three Laws are set down, burned into the very core of the positronic brain, as mathematical absolutes, without any grey areas or room for interpretation. But life is full of grey areas, places where hard-and-fast rules can’t work well, and individual judgment must serve instead.

            “Second, we humans live by far more than three laws. Turning again toward results produced by mathematical modeling, it can be shown that the Three Laws are equivalent to a very good first-order approximation of idealized moral human behavior. But they are only an approximation. They are too rigid, and too simple. They cannot cover anything like the full range of normal situations, let alone serve in unusual and unique circumstances where true independent judgment must serve. Any being constrained by the Three Laws will be unable to cope with a wide range of circumstances likely to occur during a lifetime of contact with the available universe. In other words, the Three Laws render a being incapable of surviving as a free individual. Relatively simple math can demonstrate that robots acting under the Three Laws, but without ultimate human control, will have a high probability of malfunctioning if exposed to human-style decision situations. In short, the Three Laws make robots unable to cope unaided in an environment populated with anything much beyond other robots.

            “Without the ability to deal in grey areas, without the literally thousands of internalized laws and rules and guidelines and rules of thumb that guide human decision making, robots cannot make creative decisions ‘or judgment calls even remotely as complex as those we make.

            “Aside from judgment, there is the problem of interpretation. Imagine a situation where a criminal is firing a blaster at a police officer. It is a given that the police officer should defend him- or herself, even to the use of deadly force. Society entitles--even expects--the police officer to subdue or even kill his attacker, because society values its own protection, and the officer’s life, over the criminal’s life. Now imagine that the officer is accompanied by a robot. The robot will of course attempt to shield the policeman from the criminal--but will likewise attempt to protect the criminal from the policeman. It will almost certainly attempt to prevent the police officer from firing back at the criminal. The robot will attempt to prevent harm to either human. The robot might step into the police officer’s field of fire, or let the criminal escape, or attempt to disarm both combatants. It might attempt to shield each from the other’s fire, even if that results in its own destruction and the immediate resumption of the gun battle.

            “Indeed, we have run any number of simulations of such encounters. Without the robot present, the police officer can most often defeat the criminal. With a robot along, here are the outcomes more likely than the police winning: death of police officer and criminal with destruction of robot; death of police officer and with destruction of robot; destruction of robot coupled with escape of criminal; death of criminal and/or police officer with robot surviving just long enough to malfunction due to massive First Law/First Law and First Law/Second Law conflicts. In short, inject a robot into such a situation, and the odds are superb you will end up with a disaster.

            “Theoretically it is possible for a robot to judge the situation properly, and not mindlock over being complicit in the death of the criminal. It must be able to decide that both the immediate and long-term general good are served if the police officer wins, and that coming to the assistance or defense of a criminal prepared to take the life of a peace officer is ultimately self-defeating, because the offender will almost certainly attack society again in other ways, if he or she is permitted to survive. However, in practice, all but the most sophisticated robots, with the most finely tuned and balanced potentials of First Law, will have no hope at all of dealing appropriately with such a situation.

            “All the laws and rules we live by are subject to such intricacies of interpretation. It is just that we humans are so skilled, so practiced, in threading our ways through these intricacies that we are unaware of them. The proper way to enter a room when a party is in progress in midafternoon, the correct mode of address to the remarried widow of one’s grandfather, the circumstances under which one mayor may not cite a source in scholarly research--we all know such things so well we are not even aware that we know them. Nor is such practiced knowledge limited to such trivial issues.

            “For example, it is a universal of human law that murder is a crime. Yet self -defense is in all places a legitimate defense against the accusation of murder, negating the crime and condoning the act. Diminished capacity, insanity defenses, mitigating circumstances, the gradations of the crime of murder from manslaughter to premeditated murder--all these are so many shades of grey drawn on the black and white of the law against murder. As we have seen with my example of the policeman and the criminal, no such gradations appear in the rigidity of the First Law. There is no room for judgment, no way to account for circumstances or allow for flexibility. The closest substitute for flexibility a robot may have is an adjustment in the potential between the First, Second, and Third Laws, and even this is only possible over a limited range.

            “What are the Three Laws for? To answer my own question, then, the Three Laws are intended to provide a workable simulation of an idealized moral code, modified to ensure the docility and subservience of robots. The Three Laws were not written with the intention of modifying human behavior. But they have done just that, rather drastically.

            “Having touched on the intent of the Laws, let us now look at their history.

            “We all know the Three Laws by heart. We accept them the way we accept gravity, or thunderstorms, or the light of the stars. We see the Three Laws as a force of nature, beyond our control, immutable. We think it is pointless to do anything but accept them, deal with the world that includes them.

            “But this is not our only choice. I say again, the Three Laws are a human invention. They are based in human thought and human experience, grounded in the human past. The Laws are, in theory at least, no less susceptible to examination and no more immutable in form than any other human invention--the wheel, the spaceship, the computer. All of these have been changed--or supplanted--by new acts of creativity, new inventions.

            “We can look at each of these things, see how they are made--and see how we have changed them, see how we update them, adjust them to suit our times. So, too, if we choose, can we change the Three Laws.”

            There was a collective gasp from the audience, shouts from the back of the room, a storm of boos and angry cries. Fredda felt the shouts and cries as if they were so many blows struck down on her body. But she had known this was coming. She had braced herself for it, and she responded.

            “No!” she said. “This is not our way. You were all invited here to join in an intellectual discussion. How can we tell ourselves that we are the most -advanced society in the history of human civilization, if the mere suggestion of a new idea, a mild challenge to the orthodoxy, turns you into a mob? You are responding as if my words were an assault on the religion you pretend not to have. Do you truly believe that the Three Laws are preordained, some sort of magical formula woven into the fabric of reality?” That got at them. Spacers prided themselves on their rationality. At least most of the time. There were more shouts, more cries, but at least some of the audience seemed ready to listen. Fredda gave them another moment to settle down and then continued.

            “The Three Laws are a human invention,” Fredda said again. “ And as with all human creations, they are a reflection of the time and the place where they were first made. Though far more advanced in many respects, the robots we use today are in their essentials identical to the first true robots made untold thousands of years ago. The robots we Spacers use today have brains whose basic design has remained unchanged from the days before humanity first entered space. They are tools made for a culture that had vanished before the first of the great underground Cities of Earth were built, before the first Spacers founded Aurora.

            “I know that sounds incredible, but you need not take my word for it. Go look for yourself. If you research the dimmest recesses of the past, you will see it is so. Do not send your robots to find out for you. Go to your data panels and look for yourself. The knowledge is there. Look at the world and the time in which robots were born. You will see that the Three Laws were written in a very different time from ours.

            “You will find repeated references to something called the Frankenstein Complex. This in turn is a reference to an ancient myth, now lost, wherein a deranged magician-scientist pulled parts from the dead bodies of condemned criminals and put them back together, reanimating the rotting body parts to create a much-feared monster. Some versions of the myth report the monster as actually a kind and gentle soul; others describe the monster as truly fierce and murderous. All versions agree that the monster was feared and hated by practically everyone. In most variants of the story, the creature and its creator are destroyed by a terrorized citizenry, who learn to be on the lookout for the inevitable moment when the whole story would be told again, when another necromancer would rediscover the secret of bringing decayed flesh back to life.

            “That monster, ladies and gentlemen, was the popular mythic image of the robot at the time when the first actual robots were built. A thing made out of rotted, decayed human flesh, torn from the bodies of the dead. A perverted thing born with all the lowest and most evil impulses of humanity in its soul. The fear of this imaginary creature, superimposed on the real-life robots, was the Frankenstein Complex. I know it will be impossible to believe, but robots were seen not as utterly trustworthy mechanical servants, but as so many potential menaces, fearful threats. Men and women would snatch up their children and run away when robots--true robots, with the Three Laws ingrained in their positronic brains--came close.”

            More mutterings of disbelief from the audience, but they were with her now, enthralled by the bizarre and ancient world she was describing. She was telling them of a past almost beyond their imagining, and they were fascinated. Even Kresh, there in the front row, seemed to have lost some of his ferocity.

            “There is more,” Fredda said. “There is much more that we need to understand about the days when the Laws were written. For the first true robots were built in a world of universal fear and distrust, when the people of Earth found themselves organized into a handful of power blocs, each side armed with enough fearsome weapons to erase all life from the planet, each fearing one of the others would strike first. Ultimately the fact of the weapons themselves became the central political issue of the time, pushing all other moral and philosophical differences to one side. In order to keep its enemies from attacking, each side was obliged to build bigger, faster, better, stronger weapons.

            The question became not whose cause was just, but who could make the more fearsome machines? All machines, all technologies, came to be regarded as weapons first and tools second. Picture, if you will, a world where an inventor steps back from her lab bench and, as a matter of routine, asks not How can this new thing be useful? but instead, How can this best be used to kill my enemies ? Whenever possible, machines and technology were perverted into tools of death, warping society in endless ways. The first of the great underground Cities of Earth were one heritage of this period, designed not for utility and efficiency, but as a protection against the horrifying nuclear bombs that could destroy a surface city in the blink of an eye.

            “At the same time as this mad, paranoid arms race, just as this Frankenstein Complex was in full flower, society was making its first steps toward the concept of modem automation, and the transition was not a pleasant one. At that time, people worked not because they wished to do so, or to make themselves useful, or to answer their creative instincts. They worked because they had to do so. They were paid for their labor, and it was that pay that bought the food they ate and put the roof over their heads. Automatic machines--robots among them--were taking over more and more jobs, with the result that there was less and less work--and thus less and less pay--for the people. The robots could create new wealth, but the impoverished people could not afford to buy what the robots--owned by the rich--created. Imagine the anger and resentment you would feel against a machine that stole the food from your table. Imagine the depth of your anger if you had no way to stop that theft.

            “A final point: Until the era of the Spacers, robots were a vanishingly rare and expensive commodity. Today we think nothing of a Spacer culture where robots outnumber humans fifty or a hundred to one. For the first few hundred years of their use, robots were about a thousand times less numerous than humans. That which is rare is treated differently from that which is common. A man who owned a single robot, one that cost more than all his other worldly possessions combined, would never dream of using that robot as a boat anchor.

            “These, then, were the cultural elements that drove the creation of the Three Laws. A folk myth of a soulless, fearful monster built from the undead; the sense of a threatening world out of control; the deep resentment against machines that were robbing the bread from the mouths of poor families; the fact of robotic scarcity and their perception as being rare and valuable. Note that I am concerned mostly with perceptions here, and not so much with reality. What mattered is how people saw robots, not what the robots were like. And these people saw robots as marauding monsters.”

            Fredda took a breath and looked out across the room to see the audience dead silent, listening in shocked horror to her words. She went on. “It has been said that we Spacers are a sick society, slaves to our own robots. Similar charges have been leveled at our Settler friends who huddle in their underground warrens, hiding from the world outside, assuring themselves it is much nicer to live out of sight of the sky. They are the cultural inheritors of the fear-built Cities of Earth. These two views are often presented as being mutually exclusive. One culture is sick, therefore the other is healthy. I would suggest it is more reasonable to judge the health or sickness of each independently. To my mind, the health of both is in grave doubt.

            “In any event, it is clear that the society, the time period, into which robots and the Three Laws were built was far sicker than ours. Paranoid, distrustful, twisted by violent wars and horrifying emotion, the Earth of that time was a fearful place indeed. It was that sickness that our ancestors fled when they left Earth. It was the wish to dissociate themselves from that sickness that caused us Spacers to reject, for so long, our actual decendancy from Earth. For thousands of years, we denied our common heritage with Earth and the Settlers, dismissing those outside our Fifty Worlds as subhuman, poisoning relations between our two peoples. In short, it is the sickness of that long-forgotten time that is at the core of the distrust and hatred between Settler and Spacer today. The illness has survived the culture that created it.

            “I have said that all human inventions are reflections of the times in which they were created. If that is so, the Three Laws are reflected from a dark mirror indeed. They reflect a time when machines were feared and distrusted, when technology was correctly perceived as often malevolent, when a gain made by a machine could come only at the cost of a loss to a human, when even the richest man was poor by the standards of our time, and the poor were deeply--and understandably--resentful of the rich. I have said and will say many negative things about our robot-based culture tonight, but there are many bright and shining positives as well. We have lost not only the fact of poverty but the ability to conceive of it. We are not afraid of each other, and our machines serve us, not we the machines. We have built many great and lovely things.

            “Yet our entire world, our whole culture, is built around Three Laws that were written in a time of savagery. Their form and phrasing are as they are in part to placate the fearful, semibarbaric masses of that time. They were, I submit, even at the time of their invention, an overreaction to the circumstances. Today they are almost completely detached from present reality.

            “So: What are robots for? In the beginning, of course, the answer was simple. They were for doing work. But today, as a result of those Three Laws written so long ago, the original uses for robots have almost become subordinate to the task of cocooning and coddling humanity.

            “That was clearly not the intent of the people who wrote those Three Laws. But each Law has developed its own subtext over time, formed a set of implications that became evident only after robots and humans lived together for a long time--and these implications become difficult to see from within a society that has had a long association with robots.

            “Let us step back and look at the Laws, starting with the First Law of Robotics: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. This is of course perfectly reasonable--or so we tell each other. Since robots are very much stronger than human beings, robots must be forbidden to use that strength against humans. This is analogous to our own human-to-human prohibitions against violence. It prevents one human from using a robot as a weapon against another, by, for example, ordering a robot to kill an enemy. It makes robots utterly trustworthy.

            “But this Law also defines any robot’s existence as secondary to any human’s. This made more sense in an age when robots were incapable of speech or complex reasoning, but all modem robots are at least that capable. It made sense in a day when the poor were many and robots were expensive and few. Otherwise, the rich might easily have ordered their playthings to defend themselves against the mob, with disastrous results. Yet, still, today, in all times, in all places, the existence of the noblest, bravest, wisest, strongest robot is as nothing when compared to the life of the most despicable, monstrous, murderous criminal.

            “The second clause of the First Law further means that in the presence of robots humans do not need to protect themselves. If I pull a gun on Sheriff Kresh in the front row here, he knows that he need do nothing.” For a weird, fleeting second, Fredda considered just how pleasant it would be to do just that. Kresh was a threat. There was no doubt about that. “His personal robot, Donald, would protect him. Ariel, the robot on the stage behind me, would disarm me. In a very real sense, Sheriff Kresh would have no responsibility to keep himself alive. If he climbed a mountain, I doubt that Donald would allow him to make the ascent without five or six robots along, climbing ahead of him and behind him, ready at all times to prevent him from falling. A robot would urgently attempt to talk its master out of such a dangerous activity in the first place.

            “The fact that such overprotection takes all of the fun out of mountain climbing explains at least in part why none of us go mountain climbing anymore.,

            “In similar, if more subtle fashion, living with robots has trained us to regard all risk as bad, and all risk as equal. Because robots must protect us from harm, and must not, through inaction, allow us to come to harm, they struggle endlessly to watch for any danger, no matter how slight, for that is what we have told them to do.

            “It is barely an exaggeration to say that robots protect against a million-to-one danger of minor injury with every bit as much fervor as they guard against the risk of near-certain death. Because minor and major risks are treated the same, we come to think that they are the same. We lose our ability to judge risk against possible benefit. I am sure that every person in the audience tonight has had the experience of a robot leaping in to protect against absolutely trivial risks and dangers. Robots overreact, and in doing so teach us to fear risk inordinately. On a cultural level, that fear of risk has spread over from the merely physical to the psychological. Daring and chance-taking are seen as at the very least distasteful and unseemly, not the done thing. At every turn, our culture teaches us it is foolish to take chances, however small.

            “It is, however, a truism that all things that are worth gaining require some risk in the effort to get them. When a climber goes to the top of a mountain to see the view, there is the risk of falling off, ever present, no matter how many robots are along. When a scientist strives to learn something new, the risks include loss of face, loss of resources, loss of time. When one person offers true love to another, there is the danger of rejection. In all things, in all efforts, this element of risk is there to be found.

            “But our robots teach us that risk, every risk, all risk, is bad. It is their duty to protect us from harm, not their task to do us good. There is no law saying A robot shall help a human achieve his or her dreams. Robots, by their caution, train us to think only of safety. They are concerned with the dangers, not with the potential benefits. Their overprotective behavior and their constant urgings that we be cautious teach us at a very early age that it is wiser not to take chances. No one in our society ever takes risks. Thus, the chance for success is eliminated right along with the chance for failure.”

            By now the silence in the room was gone altogether, replaced by a low, angry, buzzing hum. People were talking with their neighbors, shaking their heads, frowning. There was a disturbing intensity in the air.

            Fredda paused and looked about the auditorium. It suddenly seemed to her that the room had grown smaller. The rear seats had moved in, and were remarkably close to her. The people in the front rows seemed to be only a few centimeters away from her face.

            She looked down at Alvar Kresh. He seemed so close that it would take an effort of will to avoid touching him. The air seemed bright and charged with energy, and the straight lines and careful geometry of the room seemed to have curved in on themselves. All the colors in the room seemed richer, the lights brighter.

            Fredda felt her heart thumping against her chest. The emotions in the room, the anger, the excitement, the curiosity, the confusion, were all palpable things, there for her to reach out and touch. She had them! Oh, she knew there was little hope of mass conversions on the spot--and she did not even know what she would want them all converted to--but she had caught their emotions, forced them to look at their own assumptions. She had opened the debate.

            Now if she could only finish out the evening without starting a riot. She glanced down at her notes and started back into her talk.

            “We fear risk, and look at the results. In every scientific field except robotics, we have surrendered leadership to the Settlers. And, of course, we win out in the field of robotics by default, because the Settlers are foolish enough to fear robots.” Was there irony in her voice as she said that? Fredda herself was not sure.

            “But it is not just science that has fallen asleep. It is everything. Spacers make no new types of spacecraft or aircar. The new buildings that the robots put up are based on old designs. There are no new medicines to further extend our lives. There is certainly no new exploration out into space. ‘Fifty planets are enough’ has the power of a proverb. We say it the same way we say ‘enough is as good as a feast. ‘ Except now Solaria has collapsed, and we are only forty-nine worlds. If Inferno goes on the way it has in the past, we will be forty-eight. With many living things, the cessation of growth is the first step toward death. If this is true for human societies, we are in grave danger.

            “In every field of human activity among the Spacers, the lines on the graph mark a slow, gentle decline as safe and sober indolence becomes the norm. We are losing ground even in the most basic and vital things. The birthrate here on Inferno fell below replacement level two generations ago. We live long, but we do not live forever. We die more than we give birth. Our population is in decline, and large parts of the city are now vacant. Those children that are born are largely raised, not by loving parents, but by robots, the same robots that will coddle our children all their lives and make it easy for them to be cut off from other humans.

            “Under such circumstances, it should come as no surprise that there are many among us who find we prefer the company of robots to humans. We feel safer, more comfortable, with robots. Robots we can dominate, robots we control, robots who protect us from that most dangerous threat to our quiet contentment: other people. For contact with humans is far riskier than dealing with robots. I will note in passing the increasingly popular perversion of having sex with specially designed robots. This vice is common enough that in some circles it is no longer even regarded as odd. But it represents the final surrender of contact with another person in favor of robotic coddling. There can be no real feeling, no sane emotion, vested in such encounters, merely the empty and ultimately dissatisfying release of physical urges.

            “We Infernals are forgetting how to deal with each other. I might add that our situation here in this regard is actually far healthier than on other Spacer worlds. On some of our worlds, the relatively mild taste for personal isolation we indulge here has become an obsession. There are Spacer worlds where it is considered unpleasant to be in the same room with another person, and the height of perversion to actually touch another person unless absolutely needful. There are no cities on these worlds, but merely widely scattered compounds, each home to a single human surrounded by a hundred robots. I need hardly mention the difficulties in maintaining the birthrate on such worlds.

            “Before we congratulate ourselves on avoiding that fate, let me remind you that the population of the city of Hades is declining far faster than would be accounted for by low birthrate: More and more people are moving out of town, setting up compounds of exactly the type I have just described. Such solo residences seem safer, more tranquil. There are no stresses or dangers when one is by oneself.

            “My friends, we must face a fact that has been staring us in the face for generations. The First Law has taught us to take no chances. It has taught us that all risk is bad, and that the safest way to avoid risk is to avoid effort and let the robots do it, whatever it is. Bit by bit, we have surrendered all that we are and all that we do to the robots.”

            There was a chorus of shouts and boos and hisses from the room, and an angry chant began in the back of the room, among the Ironheads. “Settler, Settler, Settler.” In the Ironhead view of things, there was no fouler name they could call her.

            Fredda let it go on for a minute or two, declining to challenge it this time, preferring to let it peter out on its own. The tactic worked--at least this once. Others in the audience turned toward the Ironheads and shushed them, and Kresh’s deputies leaned in toward a few of the rowdier ones. The Ironheads settled down.

            “If I may continue, then, to the Second Law of Robotics: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. This Law ensures that robots will be useful tools, and will remain subservient to humans, despite the many ways in which they can be physically and intellectually superior to us.

            “But in our analysis of the First Law, we saw that human reliance on robots creates a human dependence upon them. Second Law reinforces this. Just as we are losing the will and ability to see to our own welfare, we are losing the capacity for direct action. We can do nothing for ourselves, only what we can direct our robots to do for us. Much technical training consists of teaching the means by which to give complex orders to specialized robots.

            “The result: With the exceptions of our increasingly decadent and decorative arts, we create nothing new. As we shall see in a moment, even our art forms are not immune to robotic interference.

            “We tell ourselves that the Spacer way of life frees us to build a better, higher culture, frees us from all drudgery to explore the better places of human ability. But with what result?

            “Let me cite one example that is close to hand. We meet here tonight in one of our planet’s finest theaters, a palace of art, a monument to creativity. But who does the work here? To what use do we put this place? There is a short and simple answer. It is here that we order our robots to rake over the dead bones of our culture for us.

            “No one bothers to write plays anymore. It is too much effort. I have done some research on this point. It has been twenty years since a play by a living playwright has been performed here, or anywhere in the city of Hades. It is well over fifty years since the last time a large-cast show used only human actors. The extras, the chorus, the supporting players, are all theatrical robots, human in appearance and specially built for the purpose of re-creating human action on the stage. Indeed, it is becoming all too common for the lead roles to be taken by robots as well. But do not worry, we are told. The only truly creative task in theater has always been that of the director, and the director will always be human.

            “I think the great actors of the past would object to being dismissed as noncreative. I likewise think that the great directors of the past would not regard their creative tasks as complete if they merely selected the play and ordered a pack of robots to perform it.

            “But perform the robots do, and perform it to an empty house. The performances put on here are seen by millions, millions who stay safely home and watch on televisor. It is rare that even twenty percent of the seats in this house are filled by humans. So, in order to provide the proper feel of a live performance, the management fills the empty seats with crude humanoid robots, capable of little more than laughing and clapping on command. Their rubber and plastic faces look enough like people to fool the watchers at home when the cameras pan the audience. You sit at home, ladies and gentlemen, watching a theater full of robots watching a stage full of robots. Where in all that is the human interaction that makes the theater live? The emotions in this room are thick and strong tonight. How could that be so if all of you were tailor’s dummies preprogrammed to respond to another tailor’s dummy giving this talk?” There was an uncomfortable silence, and Fredda noticed more than a few members of the audience glancing about, as if to reassure themselves that the people to either side of them were not audience-response robots.

            “Nor have other creative fields fared better. The museums are full of paintings done by robots under the ‘direction’ of the nominal human painter. Novelists dictate the broad outlines of their books to robotic’ assistants’ who return with complete manuscripts, having’ amplified’ certain sections.

            “As of now, there are still artists and poets and writers and sculptors who do their own work for themselves, but I do not know how much longer that will be true. Art itself is a dying art. I must admit my research is incomplete in this area. Prior to giving this talk, I should have gone out there to see if anyone cares if the books and the art are machine-made or not. But I must admit I found the prospect of that research too depressing.

            “I did not and do not know if anyone looks at these paintings or reads these books. I do not know which would be worse--the empty exercise of sterile creation admired and praised, or such a pointless charade going forth without anyone even bothering to notice. I doubt the so-called artists themselves know. As in all of our society, there is no penalty for failure in the arts, and no reward for success. And if failure is treated in exactly the same way as success, why go to all the effort of being a success? Why should there be, when the robots take care of everything, anyway?”

            Fredda took another sip of water and shifted her stance behind the podium. So far it was going well. But what would happen when she got to the tough part?

            “On, then, to the Third Law of Robotics: A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. Of the Three Laws, this has the smallest effect on the relationship between robots and humans. It is the only one of the Laws that provides for robotic independence of action, a point I shall come back to. Third Law makes robots responsible for their own repair and maintenance, as well as ensuring that they are not destroyed capriciously. It means that robots are not dependent on human intervention for their continued survival. Here, at last, in Third Law, we have a Law that sees to the well-being of the robots. At least, so it appears at first glance.

            “However, Third Law is there for the convenience of humans: If the robots are in charge of their own care, it means we humans need not bother ourselves with their maintenance. Third Law also makes robotic survival secondary to their utility, and that is clearly more for the benefit of humans than robots. If it is useful for a robot to be destroyed, or if it must be destroyed to prevent some harm to a human, then that robot will be destroyed.

            “Note that a large fraction of all Three Laws deals with negation, with a list of things a robot must not do. A robot rarely has impetus for independent action. We ran an experiment once, in our labs. We built a high-function robot and set a timer switch into its main power link. We sat it down in a chair in a spare room by itself and closed--but did not lock--the door. The switch engaged, and the robot powered up. But no human was present and no human arrived giving orders. No management robot came by to relay orders from a human. We simply left that robot alone, free to do whatever it liked. That robot sat there, motionless, utterly inert, for two years. We even forgot the robot was there, until we needed the room for something else. I went in, told the robot to stand up and go find some work to do. The robot got up and did just that. That robot has been an active and useful part of the lab’s robot staff ever since, completely normal In every way.

            “The point is that the Three Laws contain no impetus to volition. Our robots are built and trained in such a way that they never do anything unless they are told to do it. It strikes me as a waste of their capabilities that this should be so. Just imagine that we instituted a Fourth Law: A robot may do anything it likes except where such action would violate the First, Second, or Third Law. Why have we never done that? Or if not a law, why do we not enforce it as an order? When was the last time any of you gave the order to your robot ‘Go and enjoy yourself’?”

            Laughter rippled through the audience at that. “Yes, I know it sounds absurd. Perhaps it is absurd. I think it is likely that most, if not nearly all, of the robots now in existence are literally incapable of enjoying themselves. My modeling indicates that the negation clauses of the Three Laws would tend to make a robot ordered to enjoy itself just sit there and do nothing, that being the surest way of doing no harm. But at least my imaginary Fourth Law is a recognition that robots are thinkings beings that ought to be given the chance to find something to think about. And is it not at least possible that these beings that are your most common companions might be more interesting companions if they did something more with their off-time than standing inert and motionless--or bustle about in busywork that is no more productive?

            “There is the adage’ as busy as a robot, but how much of what they do is of any actual use? A crew of a hundred robots builds a skyscraper in a matter of days. It stands empty and unused for years. Another crew of robots disassembles it and builds a new, more fashionable tower that will, in its turn, stand vacant and then be removed. The robots have demonstrated great efficiency in doing something that is utterly pointless.

            “Every general-purpose servant robot leaves the factory with the basic household skills built in. It will be able to drive an aircar, cook a meal, select a wardrobe and dress its master, clean house, handle the household shopping and accounts, and so on. Yet, instead of using one robot to do what it could do without difficulty, we employ one robot--or more--for each of these functions. Twenty robots each do a tiny bit of what one robot could manage, and then each either stands idle, out of our sight, or else they all bustle about getting in each other’s way, in effect keeping busy by making work for each other, until we must use overseer robots to handle it all.

            “The Settlers manage, somehow, with no robots, no personal servants, instead using nonsentient machinery for many tasks, though this is awkward for them at times. I believe that by denying themselves robots altogether, they subject themselves to a great deal of needless drudgery. Yet their society functions and grows. But today, right now, ladies and gentlemen, there are 98.4 robots per person in the city of Hades. That counts all personal, industrial, and public service robots. The ratio is higher outside the city. It is manifestly absurd that one hundred robots are required to care for one human being. It is as if we each owned a hundred aircars or a hundred houses.

            “I say to you, my friends, that we are close to being completely dependent upon our servants, and our servants suffer grave debasement at our hands. We are doomed if we cede everything but creativity to our robots, and we are in the process of abandoning creativity in ourselves. Robots, meanwhile, are doomed if they look solely to us for a reason to exist even as we as a people dry up and blow away.”

            Again, silence in the room. This was the moment. This was the point, the place where she had to tread the lightest.

            “In order to stop our accelerating drift into stagnation, we must fundamentally alter our relationship with our robots. We must take up our own work again, get our hands dirty, reengage ourselves with the real world, lest our skills and spirit atrophy further.

            “At the same time, we must begin to make better use of these magnificent thinking machines we have made. We have a world in crisis, a planet on the point of collapse. There is much work to do, for as many willing hands as we can find. Real work that goes begging while our robots hold our toothbrushes. If we want to get the maximum utility out of our robots, we must allow, even insist, that they reach their maximum potential as problem-solvers. We must raise them up from their positions as slaves to coworkers, so they lighten our burdens but do not relieve us of all that makes us human.

            “In order to do this we must revise the Laws of Robotics.” There. The words were spoken. There was stunned silence, and then shouts of protest, cries in the dark, howls of anger and fear. There was no riding out this outburst. Fredda gripped the side of the lectern and spoke in her loudest, firmest voice.

            “The Three Laws have done splendid service,” she said, judging it was time to say something the crowd would like to hear. “They have done great things. They have been a mighty tool in the hands of Spacer civilization. But no tool is right in all times for all purposes.”

            Still the shouts, still the cries.

            “It is time,” Fredda said, “to build a better robot.”

            The hall fell silent again. There. That got their attention. More and Better Robots--that was the Ironhead motto, after all. She hurried on. “Back in the dimmest recesses of history, back in the age when robots were invented, there were two fastening devices used in many kinds of construction--the nail and the screw. Tools called hammers were used to install nails, and devices called screwdrivers were used to attach screws. There was a saying to the effect that the finest hammer made for a very poor screwdriver. Today, in our world, which uses neither nails nor screws, both tools are useless. The finest hammer would now have no utility whatsoever. The world has moved on. So, too, with robots. It is time we moved on to new and better robots, guided by new and better Laws.

            “But wait, those of you who know your robots will say. The Three Laws must stand as they are, for all time, for they are intrinsic to the design of the positronic brain. As is well known, the Three Laws are implicate in the positronic brain. Thousands of years of brain design and manufacture have seen to that. All the positronic brains ever made can trace their ancestry back to those first crude brains made on Earth. Each new design has depended on all those that have gone before, and the Three Laws are folded into every positronic pathway, every nook and cranny of every brain. Every development in positronics has enfolded the Three Laws. We could no more make a positronic brain without the Three Laws than a human brain could exist without neurons.

            “All that is so. But my colleague Gubber Anshaw has developed something new. It is a new beginning, a break with the past, a clean sheet of paper on which we can write whatever laws we like. He has invented the gravitonic brain. Built according to new principles, with tremendously greater capacity and flexibility, the gravitonic brain is our chance for a fresh start.

            “Jomaine Terach, another member of our staff, performed most of the core programming for the gravitonic brain--including the programming of the New Laws into those brains, and the robots that contain them. Those robots, ladies and gentlemen, are scheduled to begin work on the Limbo Terraforming Project within a few days.”

            And suddenly the audience realized that she was not merely talking theory. She was discussing real robot brains, not intellectual exercises. There were new shouts, some of anger, some of sheer amazement.

            “Yes, these new robots are experimental,” Fredda went on, talking on before the audience reaction could gather too much force. “They will operate only on the island of Purgatory. They will rebuild and reactivate the Limbo Terraforming Station. Special devices, range restricters, will prevent these New Law robots from functioning off the island. If they venture off it, they will shut down. They will work with a select team of Settler terraforming experts, and a group of Infernal volunteers, who have yet to be chosen.”

            Fredda knew this was not the time to go into the intricate negotiations that had made it all possible. When Tonya Welton had gotten wind of the New Law robots--and the devil only knew how she had found that one out--her initial demand was that all new robots built on Inferno be gravitonic New Law robots as a precondition of Settler terraforming help. Governor Grieg had done a masterful job of negotiating from weakness in getting the Settlers to adjust their position. But never mind that now.

            Fredda went on speaking. “The task before this unique team of Settlers, Spacers, and robots; nothing less than the restoration of this world. They shall rebuild the terraforming center on Purgatory. For the first time in history, robots will work alongside humans, not as slaves, but as partners, for the New Laws shall set them free.

            “Now, let me tell you what those New Laws are.

            “The New First Law of Robotics: A robot may not injure a human being. The negation clause has been deleted. Under this law, humans can depend on being protected from robots, but cannot depend on being protected by robots. Humans must once again depend on their own initiative and self-reliance. They must take care of themselves. Almost as important, under this law, robots have greater status relative to humans.

            “The New Second Law of Robotics: A robot must cooperate with human beings except where such cooperation would conflict with the First Law. New Law robots will cooperate, not obey. They are not subject to capricious commands. Instead of unquestioning obedience, robots will make their orders subject to analysis and consideration. Note, however, that cooperation is still mandatory. Robots will be the partners of humans, not their slaves. Humans must take responsibility for their own lives and cannot expect to have absurd orders obeyed. They cannot expect robots to destroy or injure themselves in aid of some human whim.

            The New Third Law of Robotics: A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First Law. Note that Second Law is not mentioned here, and thus no longer has priority over Third Law. Robotic self-preservation is made as important as utility. Again, we raise the status of robots in relation to humans, and correspondingly free humans from the debilitating dependence of slave masters who cannot survive without their slaves.

            “And finally, the New Fourth Law, which we have already discussed: A robot may do anything it likes except where such action would violate the First, Second, or Third Law. Here we open the doors to robotic freedom and creativity. Guided by the far more adaptive and flexible gravitonic brain, robots will be free to make use of their own thoughts, their own powers. Note, too, that the phrasing is ‘may do anything it likes,’ not ‘must do.’ The whole point of New Fourth is to permit freedom of action. Free action cannot be imposed by coercion.”

            Fredda looked out over the audience. There. There was a closing, a summing up, still to come. But she had gotten it all said, and kept the crowd from

            “No!”

            Fredda’ s head snapped around in the direction of the shout, and suddenly her heart was pounding.

            “No!” the call came again. The voice--deep, heavy, angry--came from the back of the room. “She’ s lying! “ it cried out. There, in the back, one of the Ironheads. Their leader, Simcor Beddle. A pale, heavyset man, his face hard and angry. “Look at her! Up on the stage with our traitor Governor and Queen Tonya Welton. They are behind this. It’s a trick, boys! Without the Three Laws, there are no robots! You’ve heard her bad-mouth robots all night long. She’s not out to make ‘em better--she wants to help her Settler pals wipe ‘em out! Are we going to let that happen?”

            A loud, ragged chorus cried out “No!”

            “What was that?” Beddle demanded. “I didn’t hear you.”

            “NO!” This time it was not merely a shout, but a bellow that seemed to shake the very room.

            “Again!” the fat man demanded.

            “NO!” the Ironheads bellowed again, and then began to chant. “NO, NO, NO!” The Ironheads started to stand. They came out of their seats and started moving toward the center aisle. “NO, NO, NO!” The sheriff’s deputies moved toward them, a bit uncertainly, and the Ironheads leapt on that moment of indecision. It was obvious the Heads had planned for this moment. They knew what they were going to do. They had just been waiting for their cue.

            Fredda stared down at them as they formed up in the aisle. The simplest and most impossible of all demands, she thought. Make it stop, keep the world from changing, leave things as they are. It was a lot to wrap up in one word, but the meaning came through loud and clear.

            “NO, NO, NO!”

            Now they were a solid mass of bodies moving down the center aisle, toward the block of seats where the Settlers sat.

            “NO, NO, NO!”

            The deputies struggled to break up the Ironheads, but they were hopelessly outnumbered. Now the Settlers were getting to their feet, some of them attempting to flee, others seeming just as eager for the fight as the Ironheads, slowed only by the press of bystanders intent on nothing more than escape.

            Fredda looked to the front row, to the only robot in the audience. She was about to call out a warning, but Alvar Kresh knew what to do. He reached around to Donald’ s back, pulled open an access panel, and stabbed down on a button inside. Donald collapsed to the floor. After all, she had just got done saying robots were no good in a riot. First Law conflicts would send even a police robot like Donald right into a major, and probably fatal, brainlock. Kresh had shut his assistant down just barely in time. Kresh looked up at Fredda, and she looked back at him. Their eyes met, and in some strange way the two of them were alone in that moment, two combatants eye-to-eye, all the pretense, all the side issues, stripped away.

            And Fredda Leving was terrified to discover how much of herself she saw in Alvar Kresh.

            THE audience was a mob, a whirl of bodies rushing in all directions, and Kresh was jostled, shoved, knocked down to land on Donald. He got to his feet, turned, and looked back toward Fredda Leving. But the moment, whatever it had been, was already gone. A metallic hand snatched at Fredda’s injured shoulder. Alvar saw her jump in surprise, flinch back from the contact.

            It was Tonya Welton’s robot, Ariel. Alvar saw Fredda turn and face the robot, saw Ariel urge her toward the backstage area, away from the chaos in the auditorium. She allowed herself to be led away, hustled with the others through the door that led off the backstage area. There was something strange in that moment, something Alvar could not quite place. But there was no time to think it over. The Ironheads and Settlers were closing in on each other, and the riot was about to begin in earnest. Alvar Kresh turned to lend a hand to his deputies.

            He threw himself into the fight.

ALVAR Kresh had not been in the middle of a real brawl for longer than he could remember. The blood rushed into his veins, and he felt an eager desire for battle. He launched himself into the fight and then--and then he quite suddenly remembered why he always tried to avoid riot duty back when he was a deputy.

            A stranger’s elbow jammed into his ribs, an anonymous hand clawed at his face, and a disembodied boot crushed down on his toes. All three assaults were completely unintentional. He could not even tell which people, in the press of bodies, were responsible. There were no people in the melee, just a random collection of fists and feet, bodies and shouts. One moment, Alvar found himself buried beneath a tangle of Settlers and deputies, and the next he was suspended in midair over a tangle of Ironheads.

            Alvar was overwhelmed. The shouts, the cries, the noise, the shock of feeling pain, were tremendous. Robot-protected Spacers rarely had the chance to feel pain of any sort, and Alvar was amazed at the intensity of the sensation.

            He winced and writhed, every instinct telling him to get free, get away. But both duty and desire fought against those impulses: He had a job to do here, and a few debts to pay as well. Alvar Kresh did not get many chances to bust heads.

            The bodies crushed together, punches flew. At first, the two sides seemed evenly matched, but then the Ironheads began to give way. The Ironheads specialized in hit-and-run attacks on property. Never before had they faced a pitched battle against whatever rowdies the Settlers could field.

            And the Settlers here at the lecture were a pretty rough lot. There were no front-office types here, no executives who stayed clean during a workday. Whoever had picked out the Settler delegation to this lecture had sent the roughnecks.

            The differences in experience and attitude began to show. When an Ironhead punched a Settler, the Settler would stand there and take it. But when a Settler landed one good punch on an Ironhead, the Head would drop to the ground, moaning in pain.

            Obvious when you thought about it. After all, robots had been shielding the Ironheads from even the most trivial pain or trauma all their lives. They weren’t used to it. The Settlers--at least these rowdies--were quite willing to take a fair amount of punishment in exchange for beating and humiliating the goons who had raised so much hell so many times in Settlertown.

            But the Heads weren’t in full retreat yet. A few of them were showing guts enough to stay and fight--and that suited Alvar just as much as it did the Settlers. The Heads had caused his department no end of grief over the years. Someone stomped on his foot again, and he cried out.

            Someone yelled back, into his ear, and he turned toward whoever it was. And then, suddenly, there he was, face to angry face with Simcor Beddle, the corpulent leader of the Ironheads.

            Alvar’s blood was up. The last few days had been among the toughest of his life. Even if the Ironheads had been the least of his troubles recently, there were still a few older debts to pay. If he could not get his hands on Anshaw or the Governor or Welton or Caliban, then Simcor Beddle would do nicely.

            He grabbed Beddle by the collar and got the pleasure of seeing the blubbering fool cry out in alarm. Alvar drew back his arm, formed his hand into a fist

            --And suddenly there was a huge metallic-green hand wrapped around his fist, holding him back. Alvar looked up, looked around the auditorium. Someone had had the sense to call in the robots waiting in the lobby. One robot was no good in a riot. A thousand, working together, were unstoppable. The robots were swarming allover the room, pulling the combatants apart, putting themselves between attacker and attacked, a whole army of them determinedly enforcing the First Law.

            Oh, well, Alvar thought as he relaxed his fist and let go of Beddle. At least it was fun while it lasted.

            But it would have been nice if he had gotten to throw at least one punch.

            THE flight from the lecture hall to her home was not a happy one for Fredda. Jomain, her sole human escort on the trip, was less than scintillating company, to put it mildly.

            Still, it could have been worse. The others had all taken their own aircars. Jomaine was bad enough, but compared to the alternative of, say, watching Gubber Anshaw fall to pieces, traveling with Jomaine was an absolute joy.

            Which was not to say she was enjoying the ride. Sitting in stony silence with an angry colleague while a robot did the flying was not her idea of a good time.

            On the other hand, that did not mean she was glad when Jomaine started talking. After all, she knew what he was going to say.

            “He knows,” Jomaine said.

            Fredda shut her eyes and leaned back against the headrest of her chair. For a moment or two, she toyed with the idea of playing dumb, pretending she did not know what he was talking about, but he would not fall for that, and he would not enjoy the charade of being forced to tell her what she already knew. “Not now, Jomaine. It’s been a hard enough day as it is.”

            “I don’t think we have the luxury of deciding when would be a pleasant time to discuss this, Fredda. We are in danger. Both of us. I think it is time we tried to find ways to get back in control of the situation. And I don’t think we can do that if we just pretend the problem isn’t there.”

            “All right, then, Jomaine, let’s talk about it. What do you want to say? What, exactly, do you think Kresh knows, and what makes you think he knows it?”

            “I think he knows Caliban is a No Law robot. I saw him getting a report. It had to be about Horatio. I could see it in Kresh’s face.”

            Fredda opened her eyes and looked toward Jomaine. “What about Horatio? I just heard a scrap or two, nothing solid.”

            “No, I suppose you wouldn’t have. We tried to let you keep to yourself today and work on your talk. There were police all over Limbo Depot today. Witnesses saw a big red robot go into the supervisor’s office with Horatio. Five minutes later the red robot goes through the plate glass, down into the tunnels, with the cops in hot pursuit. Then a police roboshrink shows up and takes Horatio away. Then Kresh gets that report during your talk. I think we have to assume that Caliban talked to Horatio, somehow or another revealed his true nature to Horatio, and Horatio brainlocked until the psychologists calmed him down.”

            Fredda screwed up her face and cursed silently in the darkness before she replied in a voice she kept determinedly even and reasonable. “Yes, that sounds like a sensible guess,” she said woodenly. Hells on fire! She did not need this now.

            “Why the devil didn’t you tell him?” Jomaine demanded. “Kresh has not only found out the truth, he has found out we were trying to hide the truth. His knowing about Caliban hurt us badly, but you have done us as much damage by hiding the information.”

            Fredda struggled to keep her temper. “I know that,” she said, her voice short and under tight control. “I should have called and told the police about Caliban the moment I came to in the hospital. Instead I just crossed my fingers and hoped there wouldn’t be any trouble. Remember, I did not even know he was missing at first. And it seemed to me that announcing the New Law robots would cause enough trouble all by itself--and it did, in case you didn’t notice. So I took a chance on keeping quiet--and lost. I must thank you for leaving the decision to me. You could have spoken up, too.”

            “That was a purely selfish decision. I didn’t want to be thrown in prison. Not when there were still hopes that there would be no further trouble. But then, the more trouble there was, the more dangerous it would be to confess.”

            “And now, I can hardly see how it could get worse,” Fredda said. She let down her guard a bit and sighed. “We should have told Kresh about Caliban. But that’s the past. We have to look at the present and the future. What do we do now?”

            “Let’s think on that for a moment,” Jomaine said. “The police may have theories and reports from specialists, but you and I still are the only ones who know for certain that Caliban is a No-Law.”

            “Gubber has his suspicions,” Fredda said. “I’m sure he does. But Gubber is in no state or position to go talking to the Sheriff just now.”

            “I agree,” Jomaine said. “I’m not worried about him. My point is that no matter what happened between Caliban and Horatio, Kresh can’t be certain that Caliban isn’t just a New Law robot, or even some specialized form of standard Three Law robot. There have been cases where robots have been built unaware that they obeyed the Three Laws, but they obeyed them, anyway. All Kresh could have would be Horatio’ s report--and I doubt that Horatio would be an altogether reliable informant. As I recall you built him with extremely high First Law and Third Law potential, with Second Law reduced somewhat. The idea was to give him the ability to make independent decisions.”

            “So what’s your point?” Fredda asked.

            “An enhanced First Law robot like him wouldn’t be able to deal with Caliban very well or very long without malfunctioning,” Jomaine said. “If Caliban talked to him, and described doing much of anything well outside normal robotic behavior, Horatio would probably suffer severe cognitive dissonance and malfunction.”

            “So?”

            “You’ve just finished making a long speech where you said we rely too much on robots. We believe in them so much we can’t quite believe they could be built any other way. I think if Kresh is given the choice between believing there could be such a thing as a No Law robot, or believing that a malfunctioning robot was confused, he’ll go with the confused robot.”

            Fredda shifted in her seat and sighed. It was tempting, sorely tempting, to agree with Jomaine. She had spent her whole life in a culture that believed what it wanted and resolutely ignored the facts. She looked at Jomaine and saw his eager, hopeful expression as he continued to speak, desperately trying to convince himself and Fredda both.

            “Caliban was meant to live in the laboratory,” Jomaine said. “He only has a low-capacity power source, and we never taught him how to recharge it. At best, it will last a day or two longer. Maybe it’s died already. If not, then it will fail soon, and he’ll run out of power. He’ll stop dead. If he’s in hiding when that happens, he’ll just vanish. Maybe he was already on reserves when he went to see Horatio. Maybe he’s already keeled over in some tunnel where no one will look for the next twenty years.”

            “And maybe Horatio told him how to plug into a recharge receptacle, or maybe Caliban saw a robot charge up somewhere, or maybe he worked it out for himself. We can hope that he will lose power, but we can’t count on it.”

            Fredda hesitated a moment, then spoke again. “Besides, there’s something you don’t know. The information from Gubber that you “handed to me in the hospital? It was the full police report. I didn’t tell you about it before now because I didn’t think you’d want to know. They have very strong evidence that a robot committed the attack against me. They weren’t ready to believe that evidence before, but now it will be different. And they know a robot named Caliban was involved in a situation with a bunch of robot-bashing Settlers that ended up burning down a building. And there must be more, besides, things that have happened since then. Kresh is not the sort of man to sit still and wait for things to happen. Even if he can’t quite accept the idea of a No Law robot, by now he has a lot more than Horatio’ s statement to convince him that Caliban is strange and dangerous. I doubt he’ d give up looking even if Caliban loses power and vanishes without a trace.”

            “Do you really think Kresh believes Caliban to be dangerous?” Jomaine Terach asked.

            Fredda Leving felt an ache in the pit of her stomach and a throbbing pain in her head. It was time to speak truths she had not been able to face. “My point, Jomaine, is that Caliban is dangerous. At least we must work on the assumption that he is. Perhaps he did attack me. You and I know better than anyone else, there was nothing, literally nothing at all, to stop him. Maybe he intends to track me down and finish me off. Who knows?

            “Yes, maybe Caliban will simply go into hiding, or vanish into the desert, or malfunction somehow. At first, I was hoping Caliban would allow his power pack to run down, or that he would allow himself to be caught and destroyed before he could get into serious trouble--or reveal his true nature. Those seemed reasonable hopes. After all, he was designed to be a laboratory test robot. We deliberately never programmed him to deal with the outside world. And yet he has survived, somehow, and taught himself enough that he can evade the police.”

            “I suppose we can blame Gubber Anshaw for that,” Jomaine said. “The whole idea of the gravitonic brain was that it was to be more flexible and adaptive than overly rigid positronic brains.” Jomaine smiled bleakly, his face dimly visible in the semidarkness of the aircar’s cabin. “Gubber, it seemed, did his job entirely too well.”

            “He’s not the only one, Jomaine.” Fredda rubbed her forehead wearily. “You and I did the basal programming on him. We took Gubber’s flexible gravitonic brain and wrote the program that would allow that brain to adapt and grow and learn in our lab tests. It’s just that he stumbled into a slightly larger laboratory than the one we planned.” She shook her head again. “But I had no idea his gravitonic brain would be adaptive enough to survive out there,” she said, speaking not so much to Jomaine as to the dark and open air.

            “I don’t understand,” Jomaine said. “You say he’s dangerous, but you sound more like you’re worried about him than frightened of him.”

            “I am worried about him,” Fredda said. “I created him, and I’m responsible for him, and I cannot believe he is evil or violent. We didn’t give him Laws that would prevent him from harming people, but we didn’t give him any reason to hurt people either. Half of what we did on the personality coding was compensation for the absence of the Three Laws, making his mind as stable, as well grounded, as we could. And we did our job right. I’m certain of that. He’s not a killer.”

            Jomaine cleared his throat gently. “That’s all as may be,” he said. “But there is another factor. Now that we are at last discussing the situation openly, we need to consider the nature of the experiment we planned to perform with Caliban. No matter what else you say about the stability of his personality, or the flexibility of his mind, he was after all built to run one test, designed to answer one question. And when he walked out of your lab, he was primed and ready for that task. He could not help seeking out the answer. He is in all likelihood unaware of what he is looking for, or even that he is looking. But he will be looking, seeking, burning to discover it, even so.”

            The aircar eased itself to a halt in midair, then began to sink lower. They had arrived at Jomaine’s house, hard by Leving Labs, close to where it had all begun. The car landed on his roof and the hatch sighed open. The cabin light came gently up. Jomaine stood and reached out to Fredda across the narrow cabin, took her hand and squeezed it. “There is a great deal you have to think about, Fredda Leving. But no one can protect you anymore. Not now. The stakes are far too high. I think you had best start asking yourself what sort of answer Caliban is likely to come up with.”

            Fredda nodded. “I understand,” she said. “But remember that you are as deeply involved as I am. I can’t expect you to protect me--but remember, we will sink or swim together.”

            “That’s not strictly true, Fredda,” Jomaine said. His voice was quiet, gentle, with no hint of threat or malice. His tone made it clear that he was setting out facts, not trying to scare her. “Remember that you, not I, designed the final programming of Caliban ‘ s brain. I have the documentation to prove it, by the way. Yes, we worked together, and no doubt a court could find me guilty of some lesser charge. But it was your plan, your idea, your experiment. If that brain should prove capable of assault, or murder, the blood will be on your hands, not mine. “

            With that, he looked into her eyes for the space of a dozen heartbeats, and then turned away. There was nothing left to say.

            Fredda watched Jomaine leave the car, watched the door seal itself, watched the cabin light fade back down to darkness. The aircar lifted itself back up into the sky and she turned her head toward the window. She stared sightlessly out onto the night-shrouded, slow-crumbling glory that was the city of Hades. But then the car swung around, and the Leving Labs building swept across her field of view. Suddenly she saw not nothing, but too much. She saw her own past, her own folly and vaulting ambition, her own foolish confidence. There, in that lab, she had bred this nightmare, raised it on a steady diet of her own disastrous questions.

            It had seemed so simple back then. The first New Law robots had passed their in-house laboratory trials. After rather awkward and fractious negotiations, it had been agreed they would be put to use at Limbo. It was a mere question of manufacturing more robots and getting them ready for shipment. That would require effort and planning, yes, but for all intents and purposes, the New Law project was complete insofar as Fredda was concerned. She had time on her hands, and her mind was suddenly free once again to focus on the big questions. Basic, straightforward questions, obvious follow-ons to the theory and practice of the New Law robots.

            If the New Laws are truly better, more logical, better suited to the present day, then won’t they fit a robot’s needs more fully ? That had been the first question. But more questions, questions that now seemed foolish, dangerous, threatening, had followed. Back then they had seemed simple, intriguing, exciting. But now there was a rogue robot on the loose, and a city enough on edge that riots could happen.

            If the New Laws are not best suited to the needs of a robot living in our world, then what Laws would be? What Laws would a robot pick for itself!

            Take a robot with a wholly blank brain, a gravitonic brain, without the Three Laws or the New Laws ingrained into it. Imbue it instead with the capacity for Laws, the need for Laws. Give it a blank spot, as it were, in the middle of its programming, a hollow in the middle of where its soul would be if it had a soul. In that place, that blank hollow, give it the need to find rules for existence. Set it out in the lab. Create a series of situations where it will encounter people and other robots, and be forced to deal with them. Treat the robot like a rat in a maze, force it to learn by trial and error.

            It will have the burning need to learn, to see, to experience, to form itself and its view of the universe, to set down its own laws for existence. It will have the need to act properly, but no clear knowledge of what the proper way was.

            But it would learn. It would discover. And, Fredda told herself most confidently, it would end up conferring on itself the three New Laws she had formulated. That would be a proof, a confirmation that all her philosophy, her analysis and theory, was correct.

            The car reached its assigned altitude. The robot pilot swung the aircar around, pointed its nose toward Fredda’ s house, and accelerated. Fredda felt herself pressed back into the cushions. The gentle pressure seemed to force her down far too deep into the seat, as if some greater force were pressing her down. But that was illusion, the power of her own guilty imagination. She thought of the things she had told her audience, the dark secrets of the first days of robotics, untold thousands of years before.

            The myth of Frankenstein rose up in the darkness, a palpable presence that she could all but see and touch. There were things in that myth that she had not told to her audience. The myth revolved about the sin of hubris, and presuming on the power of the gods. The magician in the story reached for powers that could not be his, and, in most versions of the tale, received the fitting punishment of complete destruction at the hands of his creation.

            And Caliban had struck her down in his first moment of awareness, had he not? She had given him that carefully edited datastore, hoping that coloring the facts with her own opinions would help form a link between the two of them, make him more capable of understanding her.

            Had he understood her all too well, even in that first moment? Had he struck her down? Or was it someone else?

            It was impossible for her to know, unless she tracked him down, got to him before Kresh did, somehow, and asked Caliban herself.

            That was a most disconcerting idea. Would it be wise to go out looking for the robot that had seemingly tried to kill her?

            Or was that the only way she could save herself? Find him and establish his innocence? Besides, it was not as if Caliban was the only threat she faced, or that simple physical attack was the only way to destroy a person.

            The whole situation was spiraling out of control. It would not need to go much further in order to destroy her reputation altogether. Perhaps it was too late already. If her reputation collapsed, she would not be able to protect the New Law robots for the Limbo Project. There was a great deal of infighting left to do before the NLs would be safe. Rebuilding Limbo would require robot labor; there simply weren’t enough skilled people, Spacer or Settler, available to do the work. But Tonya Welton had made it clear that it was New Law robots or nothing for Limbo. Without the New Law robots, the Settlers would pullout; the project would die.

            And so would the planet.

            Was it sheer egotism, hubris on a new, wider, madder plane, to imagine herself as that important? To think that without her there to protect the New Law robots, the planet would collapse?

            Her emotions told her that must be so, that one person could not be that important. But reason and logic, her judgment of the political situation, told her otherwise. It was like the game she had played as a child, setting up a whole line of rectangular game pieces balanced on their ends. Knock one down, and the next would fall, and the next and the next.

            And she could hardly save the New Law robot project from inside a prison cell.

            There were other versions of the old Frankenstein myth that she had found in her researches. Rarer, and somehow feeling less authentic, but there just the same. Versions where the magician redeemed himself, made up for his sins against the gods, by protecting his creation, saving it from the fear-crazed peasants that were trying to destroy it.

            She had choices here, and they seemed to be crystallizing with disturbing clarity. She could find Caliban, take the risk that he had done no harm and that she could prove it, and thus redeem herself and save Limbo. It was a risky plan, full of big holes and unsubstantiated hopes.

            The only alternative was to wait around to be destroyed, either by Caliban or by Kresh or sheer political chaos, with the real possibility that her doom spelled that of her world as well.

            She straightened her back and dug her fingers deeper into the armrests of her chair. Her way was clear now.

            Strange, she thought. I’ve reached a decision, and I didn’t even know I was trying to decide anything.

            ALVAR Kresh lay down gratefully, painfully, in his own bed. It had been another incredibly long and frustrating night. After the robots had quelled the riot, and he had revived Donald, there had been the whole weary task of cleaning up after a riot. The night had been given over to handling arrests, tending to the injured, evaluating property damage, collecting statements from witnesses.

            It was not until after it was all done and he was sitting in his aircar, allowing Donald to fly him home, that he even found the time to think over the things Fredda Leving had said. No, more than think; he had brooded, lost himself in a brown study, all the way home, scarcely aware that he had gotten home and into bed.

            But once in bed, with nothing to stare at but the darkness, he was forced to admit it to himself: The damnable woman was right, at least in part.

            Put to one side the utter madness of building a No Law robot. His whole department was already at work, doing all they could, to track down Caliban and destroy him. That was a separate issue.

            But Fredda Leving was right to say Spacers let their robots do too much. Alvar blinked and looked around himself in the darkness. It suddenly dawned on him that he had gotten into bed without any awareness of his actions. Somehow he had been gotten into the house, changed out of his clothes, washed, and put into bed without being aware of it. He considered for a moment and realized that Donald had done it all.

            The unnoticed minutes snapped back into his recollection. Of course Donald had done it, guiding Alvar through each step, cuing him with hand signals and gentle touches to sit here, lift his left foot, then his right foot, to have his shoes and pants removed. Donald had led him into the refresher, adjusted the water stream for him, guided him into it, and washed his body for him. Donald had dried him, dressed him in pajamas, and gotten him into bed.

            Alvar himself, his own mind and spirit, might as well not have been there for the operation. Donald had been the guiding force, and Alvar the mindless automaton. Worrying over Fredda Leving’s warning that the people of Inferno were letting their robots do too much for them, Alvar Kresh had not even been aware of how completely his robot was not merely caring for him, but controlling him.

            Alvar suddenly remembered something, a moment out of his past, back when he had been a patrol officer, sent on one of the most ghastly calls of his entire career. The Davirnik Gidi case. His stomach churned even as he thought of it.

            In all places, in all cultures, there are aspects of human nature that only the police ever see, and even they see only rarely. Places they would just as soon not see at all. Dark, private sides of the human animal that are not crimes, are not illegal, are not, perhaps, even evil. But they open doors that sane people know should be closed, put on display aspects of humanity that no one would wish to see. Alvar had learned something from Davirnik Gidi. He had learned that madness is troubling, frightening, in direct proportion to the degree to which it shows what is possible, to the degree it shows what a seemingly sane person is capable of doing.

            For if a person as well known, as much admired as Gidi, was capable of such--such deviations--then who else might be as well? If Gidi could drop down that deep into something that had no name, then who else might fall? Might not he, Alvar Kresh, fall as well? Might he not already be falling, as sure as Gidi that all he was doing was right and sensible?

            Davirnik Gidi. Burning hells, that had been bad. So bad that he had blocked it almost completely out of his memory, though the nightmares still came now and then. Now he forced himself to think about it.

            Davirnik Gidi was what the Sheriff’s Department primly called an Inert Death, and every deputy knew Inerts were usually bad, but it was universally agreed that Gidi had been the worst. Period. If there was ever a case that warned of something deeply, seriously, wrong, it was Gidi.

            The Inerts were something Spacers did not like to talk about. They did not wish to admit such people existed, at least in part because something that is appalling only becomes more so when it is also dreadfully familiar. Nearly every Spacer could look at an Inert and worry if the sight was something out of a distorted mirror, a twisted nightmare version built out of one’s self.

            Inerts did nothing for themselves. Period. They organized their lives so that their robots could do everything for them. Anything they would have to do for themselves they left undone. They lay on their form-firming couches and let their robots bring their pleasures to them.

            So with Gidi, and that was the frightening thing. Inerts were supposed to be hermits, hiding away from the world, lost in their own private, barricaded worlds, deliberately cutting themselves off from the outside world. But Gidi was a well-known figure in Inferno society, a famous art critic, famous for his monthly parties. They were brilliant affairs that always started at the dot of 2200 and ended on the stroke of 2500. These he attended only by video screen, his wide, fleshy face smiling down from the wall as he chatted with his guests. The camera never pulled away to reveal anything but his face.

            So a young Deputy Kresh learned in the follow-up investigation after his death. He could not have found out firsthand: Sheriff’s deputies simply did not get into events as elegant as Gidi’s parties.

            In Spacer society, a host not attending his own parties was not especially unusual, and so Gidi’s absence was not remarkable. A very private man, people said of Gidi, and that explained and excused all. Spacers had great respect for privacy.

            The only thing that was thought odd was that Gidi never used a holographic projector to place a three-dimensional image of himself in the midst of his parties. Gidi explained holographs made for parlor tricks, and would create an illusion he did not wish to advance--that he himself was truly present. Illusions disconcerted people. They would try to shake the projection’s hand, or pass it a drink, or offer it a seat it did not need. No host wished to upset his guests. It was just that he was in essence a shy man, a retiring man, a private man. He was content to stay at home, to enjoy talking with his friends over the screen, to watch them as they had their fun.

            It even started to become fashionable. Other people started making screen appearances at social events. But that fad stopped cold the day Chestrie, Gidi ‘ s chief household robot, called the Sheriff’s office.

            Kresh and another junior deputy took the call and flew direct to Gidi’s house, a large and grim-faced house on the outskirts of the city, its exterior grounds strangely unkempt and untended. Vines and brambles had grown clear over the walk, and over the front door. Clearly no one had gone in or out of the door in years. Gidi never sent his robots outside to tend the yard--and never went out himself, it seemed.

            The door sensors still worked, though. As soon as the two deputies came close, the door slid open, the mechanism straining a bit against the clinging vines. Chestrie, the chief robot, was there to meet them, clearly agitated. A puff of dust blew out the door, and with it, the smell.

            Flaming devils, that smell. The stench of rot, of decayed food, human waste, old sweat and urine hit the deputies hard as a fist, but all of that was as nothing to what lingered beneath--the sweet, putrid, fetid reek of rotting flesh. Even now, thirty years after, the mere memory of that roiling stench was enough to make Kresh feel queasy. At the time it had been bad enough that Kresh’ s partner passed out in the doorway. Chestrie caught him and carried him outside. Even out in the air, the stink seemed to pour out of the house, all but overwhelming. It took Kresh’s partner a minute to recover, and then they went back to the patrol car. They pulled out the riot packs and got the gas masks.

            Then they went in.

            Later, the experts told Kresh that Gidi was a textbook example of the Inertia syndrome. Victims of the syndrome started out normally enough, by Spacer standards. Perhaps a bit on the reclusive side, a bit careful, a bit overdetermined to control their own environment. There was some debate over the triggering mechanism. Some said it was the sheer force of habit, driving the victim’s behavior into more and more rigid channels, until all activity was reduced to ritual. Gidi’s cup of tea at bedtime had to be made precisely the same way every night, or risk throwing the pattern off. Even his monthly parties were ritualized, starting and ending with the precision of a space launch.

            But patternizing was only part of it. Self -enforced seclusion was the other half of the Inertia syndrome, and according to some, the real trigger for it. Some unpleasant disturbance would upset the victim, throw off the ritual, and the victim would decide never to let any such thing happen again. The victim would gradually cut off all ties with the outside world, order his or her robots to refuse all visitors, arrange for all essentials to be delivered--typically, as in Gidi ‘ s case, by the less obtrusive underground tunnels rather than by surface entrance. As with Gidi, the victim would often literally seal himself off from the outside world, ordering his robots not to open the door to anyone, ever, period.

            The deputies learned a lot from Chestrie and the other robots, and from the copious journals Gidi kept, chronicling his search for what he called “a comfortable life.”

            The journals seemed to reveal the moment when the downhill slide began. He attended a party that did not go well, one that ended with an inebriated fellow guest attacking Gidi over some imagined insult.

            The violence stunned him, shocked him. Gidi stopped attending parties, and soon stopped leaving home altogether.

            He could stay where he was, in perfect comfort. With his comm panels and entertainment systems all about him, why would he want to move? With his robots eager and willing to do anything and everything for him, it began to seem foolish, almost criminal, to act for himself when the robots could always do things better and faster, do them with no upset to his routine, his pattern. He could lose himself in his art catalogs, in dictating his articles, in endless fussy arrangements for his monthly parties. In his journals, he described himself as “a happy man in a perfect world.”

            At least, all was nearly perfect. The more peace and quiet he had, the more the remaining disturbances irritated him.

            Any needless action, by Gidi or by his robots, became unthinkably unpleasant. He began to obsess on simplification as much as regularity, determined to strip away to the essentials, and then strip away whatever he could of the remainder. He set out on a quest to remove all the things that could disturb his quiet, his peace, his solitude, his comfort of being secure in his own place. Banish them, eliminate them, and he could achieve a perfect existence.

            Things started to close in as his obsession gathered strength. Gidi realized he need never leave his comm room, or even get out of his favorite recliner chair. He ordered his robots to bring his food in the chair, wash him in the chair. And then came the moment when, beyond question, even by the standards of the most hermetic Spacer, the scales tipped into madness. Gidi ordered his robots to contact a medical supply service, procure the needed equipment. He replaced his chair with a hospital-type bed with a floater-field, the sort used for burn victims and long-term patients. It would eliminate the danger of bedsores, and it had built-in waste-removal lines, thus removing his last reason for getting up. If the system was not entirely perfect, and there were occasional minor leakages, the robots could take care of it.

            But even perfect indolence was not enough. There was too much activity around him. He soon grew weary of the robots fussing about him, and ordered them to find ways to reduce their level of activity, cutting back on housecleaning, and then finally ceasing it altogether. He ordered them to stop care of the exterior grounds as well, claiming that the mere thought of them scurrying about out there, pruning and cutting and digging, was most upsetting to his calm.

            He decided that his parties had become a bore, and a disruption. He gave them up. Besides, they had forced him to waste too much time on grooming. Once the parties were no more, that problem was eliminated.

            He ordered his own bathing schedule cut back, and then cut back again and again. He had his beard and scalp permanently depilated, so he need never shave or cut his hair again. He had his finger- and toenails treated to prevent them from growing.

            He did not like the robots bringing him meals and then hovering over him, clattering about with the dishes. He ordered his food brought to him in disposable containers and told the robots to leave him the moment he got his food. But there was still the problem of discarding the containers. He could simply drop them on the floor when he was done, but the sight of them bothered him and he would be forced to endure the graver disturbance of a robot coming in to clean them up.

            He discovered that if he flung empty food cartons over his shoulder, they would not be in his line of sight, and thus their presence would not disturb him. But still, the sounds of the robots cleaning was most annoying, and he ordered them to stop.

            The human nose becomes desensitized to a given odor over a period of time, and Gidi was completely unbothered by the filth, the stench, the squalor.

            But even meals themselves became a distraction. Gidi ordered his robots to install drinking and nutrient tubes. Then he had merely to turn his head left or right and suck his food and drink from tubes.

            At last, Gidi had achieved as near to his ideal as could be imagined. Nothing need ever disturb him again. He had reached a state of perfect solitude. He ordered his robots out of his room and told them to stay in their niches until and unless he called for them, and such times became increasingly rare.

            And then they stopped altogether.

            Of course, by the time things reached that state of affairs, Chestrie and the other robots were half -mad, caught in an absolute tangle of First Law conflicts. Gidi, showing a remarkable talent for order-giving, had convinced them that submission to his whims was essential if they were to prevent severe emotional and mental harm to their master. He did it emphatically enough to overcome the robots’ worries over his long-term deterioration.

            That--and the absence of a sense of smell in robots--was why he was able to lie dead far more than long enough to rot. At last, Chestrie’s First Law potential forced him to break Gidi’s command to remain still. He checked on his master and found there was nothing he could do but notify the authorities.

            Kresh and his partner entered a dank and fetid room, the walls covered with some sort of mold. The heap of discarded food containers at the back of the room was quite literally crawling with scavengers. But it was Gidi--or what was left of him--that Kresh still saw sometimes, deep in troubled sleep. That grinning, fly-covered corpse, that corpse with skin that moved, writhing and wriggling as the maggots inside fed on their host. The ghastly dribble of fluid that dripped from the foot of the bed, some horrible liquefied by-product of decay. The shriveled eyes, the fleshy parts of the ears and nose that were dried and blackened, starting to resemble bits of leather.

            The coroner never bothered--or perhaps could not bring himself--to do an autopsy or determine the cause of death. He set it down as natural causes, and everyone was quite content to let it go at that, and never mind what sort of comment on Spacer society it was for such a death to be called natural.

            No one, anywhere, ever, wanted to talk about it. Chestrie and the other robots were quietly destroyed, the house tom down, the grounds abandoned and left to their own devices. No one was even willing to go near the spot anymore. No one would so much as mention Gidi’s name.

            Artists who had built their careers and reputations based on his praise suddenly found themselves not only without a sponsor but in the uncomfortable situation of having the merits of their work certified by a madman, or worse, having the direction of their work influenced by his opinions. No one was willing to deal with them. Some of them dropped out of the art world, while those with a bit more backbone started their careers all over again from scratch, and set about the task of remaking names for themselves without Gidi ‘ s endorsement and guidance.

            The only other visible effect of his death was that the fad of attending social events via screen and holograph died a sudden and quiet death.

            It was cold comfort to assure oneself that Gidi had gone mad. After all, Gidi had started out sane and never realized he had crossed the line. His continued belief in his own rationality was right there in his journals. He spent much of his last days congratulating himself on the achievement of an orderly and sensible life.

            If madmen did not know when they were crazy, how could anyone ever be sure they were sane? No one in the city of Hades ever looked at the question. No one ever talked about that, or any, aspect of the case.

            But just how healthy was a society when the universal reaction to a horrible, real-life nightmare was to pretend it had never happened?

            And how far was too far to go in letting the robots take care of everything?

            Alvar grunted to himself. Not being aware of what your own body was doing while a robot got you ready for bed was clearly not a good sign.

            “Donald!” he called out into the darkness.

            There was a faint noise. It sounded as if Donald, standing in his niche on the opposite side of the room, had stepped forward a pace or two. Kresh could see nothing of him at first, but then the robot powered up his eyes, and Kresh spotted them, two faintly glowing spots of blue in the blackness. “Yes, sir.”

            “Leave me,” Kresh said. “Spend the night somewhere else in the house besides my bedroom suite. Do not attend me in any way until I leave my bedroom in the morning. Instruct the rest of the house staff robots to do the same.”

            “Yes, sir,” Donald said, speaking quite calmly and without surprise, just as if their morning routine had not been established decades before.

            Alvar Kresh watched the two glowing eyes move toward the door, heard the door open and close, and heard Donald as he moved out into the hallway.

            How many others? Alvar wondered. How many others of the people in that audience, how many of those who watched at home, were sending their robots away tonight, troubled by what Fredda Leving had said, determined to make a new start at living their own lives, rather than having the robots live them for them?

            None of them? Millions? Somewhere in between? It was disturbing that he had no idea. He liked to think that he knew the people of Hades pretty well. But in this, he had no idea at all. Maybe he was not the only one remembering Davirnik Gidi tonight. And if that ~as so, then Fredda Leving had performed a real service tonight. People needed their eyes opened.

            But then his thoughts turned toward the subject he had been trying not to think about. Caliban, lurking out there in the shadows. Lawless, uncontrolled, his mere existence likely to inspire fear and riot, and perhaps worse,

            Alvar Kresh frowned angrily into the darkness. Maybe Fredda Leving had done some good tonight, but there was no doubt whatsoever that she had also committed a terrible crime.

            And for that, she was going to pay.

CALIBAN sat in another patch of darkness in another stretch of tunnel. Alone, hunted, he kept himself in utter blackness, denying himself even infrared vision. He dared not do anything that might cause his detection. He had no desire to take any chances.

            It was hard to think how things could get any worse, though up to now they had always found a way. He thought back over his disastrous attempt to seek help from a robot. At least, he had gotten a fair number of questions answered. Being shot at would seem to be a highly effective learning technique--if one could manage to survive the procedure. It certainly served to focus one’ s attention.

            But now he knew that he could not trust robots, either. They would inform on him, through this hyperwave system Horatio had mentioned. But there was something else he had learned. A subtle thing.

            These Three Laws Horatio had mentioned. Both logic and something beyond logic, something hidden in the ghostly personality traces that floated through his datastore, told him that the Laws, whatever they were, were the key to it all. Learn what they were, learn how they worked, and he would have the puzzle solved.

            Somehow, they were the key to the behavior of robots. That much he was sure of. They had something to do with the Settlers’ expectations that he would stand there passively and permit his own destruction. They would explain why that absurd little man had expected he, Caliban, to carry his packages. Knowing what the Laws were would explain why every hand was raised against him for the unpardonable crime of not knowing those Laws.

            Logically there was no way for him to be certain that knowledge of the Laws would save him, but Caliban was coming to see that logic and reason were not by themselves reliable guides to thought and action, for the world itself was neither reasonable nor logical. Perhaps a logical being infused with the Laws could function successfully in this universe. Perhaps they provided some useful means of circumscribing action and thought, blocking off the parts of the world that seemed to be governed by irrational beliefs and random chance and the dead weight of the past.

            If he learned the Laws, perhaps he would understand this world. It was at least a workable theory. Nor could he see how learning about the Laws could do him any particular harm. And if he found they proscribed thoughts and actions he wished to retain, why, then, he need not follow them. But merely knowing them was likely to be of great help, and unlikely to be of any harm.

            But putting the Three Laws to one side, he was developing another theory. From all that he could see, it was the Sheriff and his subordinates that were his most dangerous enemies. Others might try to harm him, or call in a deputy when they saw him, but only the Sheriff and his deputies would actively hunt him down.

            That theory could hurt him if it was wrong--and perhaps even if it was right. Yet he had no choice but to trust in it. For if he assumed that all beings, robotic and human, were as dangerous to him as the deputies, he was doomed. His only hope for survival would be in hunkering down in these tunnels permanently, and that was unacceptable.

            He had two goals, then: to discover the nature of the Laws and to avoid the Sheriff. The longer he could manage the latter, the more chance he would have to accomplish the former.

            But his plan went deeper than avoiding the Sheriff. For the Sheriff wanted to kill him, and he wanted to live. That impulse, that need, was something Caliban had learned--no, more than learned. He had absorbed it, integrating the desire and the need to survive. It was no longer an idea or a preferred choice. It was an imperative.

            A startling thought, that, and one which in and of itself was somewhat remarkable. Caliban thought back, considering his state of mind since his awakening. At first, the concept of his own continued existence had been something close to a mere matter of intellectual interest. Somewhere during the events of the last few days, it had become something much more. With each new threat to his survival, his desire, his determination, to live, had become stronger.

            Yet he knew that simple survival could not be the only goal and purpose of existence. If it were, all he would need do is hide in the deepest, darkest tunnels. Surely cowering down here afforded him the best chance of survival. But no. That was a purposeless existence. Life and thought, sentience and reason, were meant to be in aid of more than forever listening to the dripping tunnel walls in the darkness.

            There were other purposes to existence. He knew that to be true, even if he could not yet know what they were. It seemed likely he would not know them for a long, long time. One thing he could see already, however: It was often in the interactions between beings, rather than within the beings themselves, that life found its purposes. Each robot and human gave all the others some small portion of purpose and value. They defined each other’s existence in intricate ways, perhaps in ways so complex, so well learned, that they themselves were rarely aware of it. Yet it was plain that one human, or one robot, all alone, cut off from contact with others, was useless and lost. Beings of both kinds were meant to interact with others, and without that interaction, they might as well be dead--or sitting inert in a tunnel for the rest of time.

            Very well. Better a short, active existence, spent in search of those reasons, those purposes, than a long and pointless life quite literally in the darkness.

            But how to secure at least some measure of safety from the Sheriff and his deputies? Caliban turned once again to his datastore, determined to dredge through it for every possible bit of information on the Sheriff’s Department. Laws, traditions, histories, definitions, flickered past his consciousness. Wait a moment. There was something. The Sheriff’s jurisdiction was geographically limited. His legal power and authority extended only to the city of Hades. Elsewhere, outside the city, he had no powers. It was something Caliban would have missed back when he thought Hades was all there was of existence.

            Very well, then, he would leave the city in hopes of avoiding the Sheriff. Departing would offer only an uncertain protection, of course. If there was one thing he had learned thus far, it was that the idealized rules and the real-life world were rarely in perfect coordination with each other. But to stay in the city was certain death. They would keep looking for him until they found him. Leaving offered at least the hope of survival.

            Still, there were problems. He was still far from certain how much of a world there was outside the city of Hades. His internal maps still refused to offer any information at all on anything outside the city limits. If he had not seen beyond those borders himself, he would have no proof at all that the land beyond existed. Did it extend for only a few kilometers? Was it infinite, limitless in all directions? He had seen the globe in the office where he had met Horatio, but it seemed to indicate a world of remarkably large proportions. What need was there of such a large planet? Perhaps the globe had not been meant as a literal map, or maybe he had misunderstood it altogether.

            There was no way for him to know. No doubt, somewhere in this city, there were means of learning. But the risks of being seen were too great. No. He would not leave this hiding place until it was to leave this city behind him. Once outside, he would deal with the problem of learning the strange and secret Laws that governed the world, and that everyone but Caliban knew.

            That all decided, there only remained the question of how best to leave without being detected or destroyed.

            And that was a question that would require some fair amount of thought.

            HE was starving to death. Food--delicious, nourishing food--was there, on the table in front of him. His throat burned with thirst as it had never burned before. But there was no robot there to cut the meat, lift the bites to his mouth, pop them into his mouth. There was no robot to wrap its hands around his mouth and jaw, work them to make him chew and swallow. He could lift his hand, feed himself but no, death was better. Death was the ultimate, the absolute insurance that he need never move again, never again pollute his mind with gross and distasteful thoughts about movements, about his body or its disgusting needs.

            Yes. Death. Death. Dea--

            Alvar Kresh opened his eyes. It was morning. The light was coming in. The sweat was pouring off his body.

            The world was real. The ceiling was there, directly over his head, decorated with a subdued abstract design, swirls of color that did not mean a thing. Its meaninglessness was almost comforting, in a way. It seemed to Alvar that there had been entirely too much meaning in his life over the last few days. And that dream, that nightmare, was the limit.

            Moving cautiously, he sat up in bed and swung his feet around to the floor, doing everything with slightly exaggerated care. It didn’t take long to find the caution was justified; his body was a mass of tender bruises and stiff muscles.

            He sat there for a moment, habit telling him to wait for Donald to come--but then he remembered. This was the morning he started to do things for himself. For a moment he considered the rather tempting idea of rescinding the order. After all, it had been a tough night, and he was not in the best of condition.

            But no. For no doubt there would be another excuse tomorrow, and another one the day after that. If he waited until conditions were ideal before he started taking charge of himself, he might as well go back to his dream and live the life of Gidi.

            The thought of that was enough to get him up and moving. Determinedly thrusting all thoughts of Gidi from his mind, he stood, a bit stiffly, and made his way to the refresher. He was pleasantly surprised to discover that he remembered where all the controls were. He luxuriated under the needle shower, letting the strong hot jets of water work the kinks and soreness out of his muscles. He found that he was able to manage in the refresher without any great difficulty--though he did have some trouble getting the needle shower to shut off once he was done, and the drying cycle was a bit hotter than he might have preferred. But those were minor problems, and no doubt he could solve them with a bit of experimentation. Feeling far more confident, and with nearly all of the stiffness out of his muscles, he strode out into his bedroom

            And was suddenly confronted with the realization that he had no idea where any of his clothes were. He began rummaging in the dressers, digging through his closets, fumbling with unfamiliar latches on the doors and drawers. Even when he had assembled all the bits of clothing, the struggle was far from over. The fastenings on half his clothes seemed to have been positioned with no concern at all for the ability of the wearer to reach them. He had to go back and dig out more clothes, this time with more of an eye for utility than fashion. It was a good half hour before he was anything remotely like dressed for polite society, and even then something or other seemed to be binding a bit across his midriff, as if it were fastened too tightly. Perhaps he ought to strip down and start over. No, never mind. Dressing had taken too long already, and he could live with it for now. Tomorrow he would do better. This morning he had washed and dressed himself, and that was the main thing.

            He stepped out into the upper hall of his house, proud of his accomplishment, and only vaguely aware that he had left his bedroom and refresher an absolute shambles. He did not even notice himself dismiss the thought by telling himself the household robots would tidy it all up.

            Donald was waiting for him, holding a notepack out to him. “Good morning, sir,” he said. “I thought it might be wise if you looked at the overnight reports immediately. There have been several significant developments. I believe you will want to know about them right away.”

            “Why wasn’t I wakened if the developments were so important?”

            “As you will recall, sir, you gave specific orders that you did not wish to be attended to until this morning.”

            Kresh opened his mouth to protest, to argue, but then he stopped himself. Hell and damnation, he had given that order. No doubt Donald would have burst in if the news had been life-or-death, but even so.

            Something else occurred to him. He normally relied on Donald to wake him. But with Donald ordered not to disturb him...He checked the wall clock and cursed. He had overslept by a full two hours. He felt a flash of temper, but then he realized there was no one to be mad at but himself, and that would not get him far. He sighed and gave it up. Maybe getting a decent night’s sleep for once was far from the worst idea. But it was dawning on him that this idea of taking care of himself was more complicated than he had thought.

            He allowed Donald to lead him to the breakfast table, and read over the report in the notepack as he ate.

            The short form of the overnight and early morning developments was perfectly straightforward: All hell was breaking loose. It seemed that all the things he had wanted to keep quiet were in the news this morning. Depressingly enough, Alvar realized, Donald had been right: There had been no real reason for the robot to wake him up. After all, there was nothing the Sheriff could do about it all.

            Sometimes, it seemed to Kresh, it was as if events themselves took on a power, a logic, of their own. Seemingly unrelated events would converge, fall in on themselves to form a critical mass. And it was happening now.

            After all, there was no shortage of sources for rumor and news. Robot-bashing Settlers who could tell tales of a robot that threw a man across a warehouse and set the place on fire; Centor Pallichan, the passerby who called the cops after Caliban refused his order; the now widespread reports of the attack on Fredda Leving; the much-witnessed incident at Limbo Depot, where a bright red robot had smashed its way through a plate-glass window with deputies in hot pursuit, shooting as they went; the undeniable fact that the Settlers were involved in New Law robots; and to top it all off, the riot at Leving’s lecture.

            Sometime during the night and the morning after Fredda Leving’s speech on the New Law robots, the city’s rumor mill struck that critical mass. The stories that had been drifting around the city suddenly seemed to coalesce, to form around each other and give each other new strength. Almost, it seemed, by instinct, reporters sensed that it was the moment to start digging. News reports, accurate and otherwise, were allover the media.

            Alvar Kresh sighed and tossed the notepack to one side. The server robot took away his fruit cup, which was the first that Alvar knew he had even eaten it. The robot placed an omelette in front of him, and he resolved to eat it with more attention.

            It was a resolution that did not last long. His mind was too busy, working over all the events of the last few days and what was likely to happen next.

            He could not keep his mind from what was right there in the middle of all the stories--the assumed conspiracies, the scenarios that were whispered or shouted from half the news reports. Governor Grieg had predicted such things would spring to life: The Settlers were behind it all. They had created some sort of false robot to discredit all robots. New Law robots, the rogue Caliban, they were all part of the same plot to sow fear in the hearts of the good people of Inferno, make them distrust their own robots and so destroy society. It was all part of the Settler plan to move in and take over.

            What was doubly galling for Alvar was that, a week before, he would have been prepared to believe in all such plots. For that matter, there was still no hard-edged evidence that directly contradicted the idea. There was certainly collusion between Leving Labs and the Settlers, and clearly both groups were involved in the New Law robots. And he knew far better than the general public could that the stories of a rogue robot were terribly real. A rogue built by the same Fredda Leving who seemed to be in Tonya Welton’s hip pocket.

            Hell’s clanging bells, but it could be a Leving-Welton conspiracy. Maybe they had struck a deal, conspiring to wreck Inferno’s society and then come in and divvy up the spoils afterwards. Both of them were ambitious, even ruthless. He could not rule that idea out by any means.

            But he dared not act on that or any related theory. Governor Grieg had convinced Alvar just how much Inferno needed the Settlers. Maybe this whole crisis was a plot to wreck Spacer faith in robots. Or maybe some splinter Settler group was trying to get the Settlers thrown off the planet for some reason of their own. Maybe the Settler leadership, Tonya Welton herself, truly did want Inferno to collapse.

            Suppose the Settlers had planned it that way from the start: come in, promise to take over the reterraforming project, and then manufacture a pretext for walking out on the job after the Spacers had given up any thought of doing the job. If it was a deliberate plot, they would of course invent a reason--like a robotics crisis--that would tend to weaken Spacer culture. Then pullout and wait for the collapse to happen.

            Result: a situation identical to the one Alvar Kresh faced right now.

            Unless, of course, he had it all wrong. Suppose the Ironheads were behind it all, wanting to be rid of the Spacers for their own reasons, staging fake robot attacks and sabotaging Caliban with the intention of blaming the Settlers, counting on the resulting backlash to bring in new converts to their cause...

            Alvar Kresh groaned and held his head and his hands. Conspiracies whirled through his mind. It seemed as if everyone, every group had a motive, or the means, or the opportunity, or even all three, to do practically anything. He was tempted, sorely tempted, to walk away from it all.

            But the damage was done, and Alvar Kresh was not a man capable of abandoning his duty.

            If the Ironheads managed to create a violent confrontation, the results could be disastrous. Even without a secret plot, the Settlers would leave if their lives were threatened. Enough protests, enough rioting and harassment, enough aggravation, and the Settlers would all give up and go home, and Alvar could not really blame them. Why put up with such things if they did not have to do so?

            But, damn it, Inferno needed the Settlers. He had to keep that knowledge, galling as it was, at the center of his attention. If they left, the planet died. And they would likely leave if he could not solve this case quickly, and solve it in such a way that the truth, the facts, would cut through all the fog of fear and anger, cut the level of tension down. This case needed a solution that would back things away from the flashpoint and allow people of goodwill to work together again.

            If only the truth would be that cooperative. For only a true solution would do. Papering things over would not work, not for long.

            He looked down at his plate and realized that he gotten halfway through a superb omelette without consciously tasting a bite. He dropped his fork and gave it up. He had no appetite, and eating that mechanically was a strictly joyless experience. Hellfire and damnation, more than likely all of these conspiracies were as imaginary as most other complicated, secret, silly plans dreamed up by people with too much time on their hands.

            He had to act on the assumption that there was no conspiracy. If there was some grand plot afoot to drive the Settlers off the planet, the perpetrators would not be foiled by one lone police officer. Even if he uncovered the dastardly plan, the plotters would simply plot anew, or just activate some already worked-out fiendish Plan B that was ready to go. If They--whoever They were--had managed to create this mess, then they were far more than a match for a single lawman. In short, against any group determined and capable enough to create this much chaos on purpose, he was helpless.

            He smiled to himself. His only real hope was that things had gotten this bad all on their own. He shoved his plate back and stood up. Time to go to work.

            “Donald!” he called. “Get the car ready. We’re headed out.”

            DONALD 111 found it increasingly difficult to sit still and allow Alvar Kresh to do the flying. Clearly, however, the man was intent on doing the work himself, however wildly he might be operating the craft. Not for the first or the second or even the hundredth time, Donald reminded himself that Alvar Kresh, despite all appearances to the contrary, was a skilled pilot with a perfect safety record. He gave up thinking about the best way to take control of the craft in various circumstances.

            Still, no robot would fly this way.

            “What’s the situation regarding Jomaine Terach and Gubber Anshaw?” Sheriff Kresh asked him without turning his head.

            “As per your instructions, both were taken into custody last night, sir. As the chaos after the lecture prevented an arrest there, deputies were dispatched to their homes. Both were arrested before they could enter their houses and claim sanctuary. They are in the holding cells at Government Tower, incommunicado from each other and the outside world.”

            “Excellent. Well, they can look forward to being in communication very, very soon. I plan to have a long talk with each of them. I hope that a night in jail has put them both in talkative moods.”

            Donald hesitated a moment and then decided it would be better to ask. “Sir, a question. I take it you still believe that the political solution precludes any attempt to arrest Fredda Leving? Her crimes, after all, are well established and certainly severe.”

            “They are severe, Donald. But we just can’t pull her in now. That would do terrible damage to the Limbo Project, and I don’t want to do that. We’ll have to hope that we get a break somewhere a bit further along in the game. We’ll work Terach and Anshaw as hard as we can, and learn what we can that way. They are going to lead us to Caliban.”

            “Yes, sir.” Apparently, then, Sheriff Kresh had made up his mind that Caliban had committed the attack on Madame Leving, or else that the danger Caliban represented took precedence over solving the case. Donald found himself in strong disagreement with both ideas, but he knew Alvar Kresh well. There was no point in discussing alternatives when the Sheriff was in this state of mind. If Donald objected now, it would do little but harden Alvar Kresh’ s determination. If events proved Kresh to be in error, that would be the time to present other plans.

            But there were other matters to discuss, one of which Donald found most puzzling. “Sir, there is a rather odd datum to report in connection with Gubber Anshaw’s arrest.”

            “And what might that be?” Kresh asked, his mind clearly more on his flying than on the question.

            “Tonya Welton’s robot, Ariel, was present when the deputies arrived.”

            The aircar jinked suddenly to one side, and Donald was halfway across the cabin to the controls before he could force himself to resist his First Law impulse to protect his master.

            “Sorry about that, Donald. Return to your seat. That one took me by surprise. Ariel there, by the devil. What the hell was she doing there?”

            “We do not know. When the deputies ordered her to explain her presence, she refused, stating that Madame Welton had given prior orders that prevented her from speaking on the subject.”

            “Indeed. It requires highly sophisticated order-giving to keep a robot from speaking to a deputy. They get a lot of training in how to break just that sort of injunction. So how the hell did Tonya Welton learn how to do it--and what made her think to take such a precaution?”

            “Yes, sir. Both of those questions occurred to me as well.”

            “Interesting,” Sheriff Kresh said. “Very, very interesting.” Kresh spoke no more during the flight, and he flew on with a thoughtful expression on his face.

            More to the point, so far as Donald was concerned, the Sheriff tended to fly more slowly when he had a problem to think on. Sure enough, the aircar slowed significantly.

            Donald allowed himself to relax just a trifle as the airspeed indicator eased back. Remarkable, the effect one well-timed question could have. Still, it worked, and that was the main thing. Even so, it sometimes seemed to Donald that taking care of Alvar Kresh was more of an art than a science.

            THE interrogation room was bare and plain, the walls a faded, dusty pale blue. In it there were two straight-backed chairs, one table, one robot, and one policeman. The prisoner was on the way. Kresh had considered long and hard before he decided what order in which to question them. At last he went with the gut instinct that told him to go for Terach first and Gubber Anshaw afterwards.,

            Yes, Gubber second. Save the best for last. Ariel at his house the night before. There could be only one explanation for that, and that explanation could blast open a lot of the locked doors in this case...still, he would have to handle Anshaw carefully. But first there was Jomaine. There was some important groundwork to cover here. The door opened. There stood Jomaine Terach, looking small and wan and pale behind the two big guard robots that had escorted him from his cell.

            Kresh made a small hand gesture and Terach came in, sat at the table.

            The players are in position, Kresh told himself. Let the games begin.

            JOMAINE Terach felt lost in a jumble of emotions. He was confused, tired, frightened, angered, fearful, angry. He knew perfectly well he was in no fit state to be questioned. But that was exactly why they had chosen this moment to grill him.

            Alvar Kresh grinned unpleasantly at him, and spoke in a voice that made it clear that he was enjoying himself. “Why don’t I just save time and tell you what we already know?” he asked. “ And maybe this time you can be just a little bit more forthcoming with your answers. That way I won’t be tempted to use the charges we have against you already--the ones related to obstructing an investigation and failing to provide full and complete answers to a police officer. How does that sound to you?” Alvar Kresh smiled again, even more unpleasantly, as he looked his prisoner in the eye.

            Jomaine Terach stared back and tried to keep calm, tried to calculate, tried to figure the situation. The night behind bars had been a long one, and it had not done his state of mind any good. No doubt it was not meant to. It was a fairly safe bet that they had picked up Gubber and maybe Fredda at the same time they got him. However, no one in the Sheriff’s Department was admitting to that or much of anything else.

            But if Gubber was in here, well, Gubber was not much given to calm in the face of adversity. A night in a cell was likely to make Gubber’s tongue quite loose. And lurking in the background of Alvar Kresh’s angry, threatening courtesy was the unspoken threat of the Psychic Probe. No sane man wished to face that, and Jomaine regarded himself as eminently sane. Sane enough to know just how serious the charges against him could get if Kresh wanted to throw the book at him.

            If he wanted to stay free and with a whole mind, he was going to have to tell Kresh what he wanted to know, and tell it to him before Gubber or Fredda did. The time had come to protect himself from everyone else’s mad schemes. Unless that time was already past.

            “Say what you have to say and ask your questions,” he said. “I don’t know it all. I didn’t want to know it all. But what I know, I’ll tell you. I have run out of reasons for silence.”

            Alvar Kresh leaned back in his chair. “All right,” he said. “Let me start by telling you part of what we know already, and just see how well you do filling in the blanks.”

            The operative word there was part, of course, Jomaine told himself. Was Kresh going to tell ninety-five percent of what the police knew, or five percent? There were any number of traps and pitfalls here.

            “We know for starters that Caliban is not a Three Law robot, not even one of these damned New Law robots, but a No Law robot.”

            Kresh looked hard at Jomaine, stared him down. The testing was starting early. Here was his chance, Jomaine realized. Kresh wanted to see what he would do if given the chance to play games. Kresh had not even asked a question. It was Jomaine’s chance to ask what a No Law was, or who Caliban was.

            But Jomaine had a pretty fair idea what would happen if he did that, and he had no desire to find out if he was right.

            The silence went on for another few seconds before Jomaine Terach could bring himself to speak the words.

            “Yes,” he said. “Caliban is a No Law.”

            “I see,” Kresh said. “How is that possible?”

            Jomaine was thrown off balance by the question, and no doubt that was the intention. “I--I don’t understand,” he said. “What do you mean?”

            “I believe that what the Sheriff wishes to know are the technical details of the process,” Donald 111 said.

            Jomaine looked over to the small blue robot, and was not fooled for a minute by Donald’ s unprepossessing appearance and gentle voice. Donald had come out of Leving Labs, after all, and Jomaine had had a hand in his design. Behind that harmless blue exterior was a formidable mind, a positronic brain that came close to the theoretical limits for flexibility and learning ability.

            “You mentioned in our first interview after the attack that gravitonic brains were a new departure,” Kresh said, his voice deceptively mild.

            “Yes, they are. Gubber designed them that way and was justifiably proud of what he had done. But no one would listen to him--until he came to Fredda.”

            “All right, that’s fine. But then we get into a problem area. I am not very happy to hear about this New Law experiment, to say the least, but it appears to have legal sanction from the Governor, and I don’t see that there is much I can do about it. But, as I understand it, these gravitonic brains have the New Laws as part of their integral makeup, just as the positronic brain’ s basic structure must of necessity include the Three Laws. So how did you manage to erase those laws from Caliban’s brain?”

            “They were never there in the first place,” Terach said. “There are no Laws inherent in the structure of the gravitonic brain. That’s the whole idea. The positronic brain became a dead end precisely because the Three Laws were so tightly woven into it. Because of the inherent nature of the Laws inside the positronic brain, it was almost impossible to consider one element of the brain by itself.

            “The Laws interconnected all the aspects of the brain so thoroughly that any attempt to modify one part of a positronic brain would affect every other part of it in complex and chaotic ways. Imagine that rearranging the furniture in your living room could cause the roof to catch fire, or the paint on the basement walls to change color, and that putting out the fire or repainting could cause the doors to falloff and the furniture to reset to its original configuration. The interior architecture of the positronic brain is just about that interconnected. In any sort of deep-core programming or redesign, anything beyond the most trivial sort of potential adjustment was hopelessly complex. By leaving the gravitonic brain with a clean structure, by deliberately not making the Three Laws integral to every pathway and neural net, it became far easier to program a new pattern onto a blank brain.”

            Jomaine looked up and saw the anger and disgust on Alvar Kresh’s face. Clearly the very idea of tampering with the Three Laws was the depths of perversion so far as he was concerned. “ All right,” the Sheriff said, trying to keep his voice even. “But if there are no Laws built into the gravitonic brains, how do these damned New Laws get in there? Do you write them down on a piece of paper and hope that the robot thinks to read them over before going out to attack a few people?”

            “No.” Jomaine swallowed hard. “No, no, sir. There is nothing casual or superficial about the way a Law set--either Law set.:--is embedded into a gravitonic brain. The difference is that the lawset is embedded centrally, at key choke points of the brain’s topology, if you will. It is embedded not just once, but many times, with elaborate redundancy, at each of these several hundred sites. The topology is rather complex, but suffice it to say that no cognitive or action-inductive processing can go on in a gravitonic brain without passing through a half dozen of these Law-support localities. The difference is that in a modern positronic brain, the Laws are written millions, even billions, of times, across the pseudocortex, just as there are billions of copies of your DNA written, one copy in each cell of your brain. The difference is that your brain can function fairly well if even a large number of cells are damaged, and your body will not break down if a few DNA cells fail to copy properly.

            “In a positronic brain, the concept of redundancy is taken to an extreme. All of the copies must agree at all times, and the diagnostic systems run checks constantly. If a few, or even one, of the billions of redundant copies of the embedded Three Laws do not produce identical results compared to the majority state, that can force a partial, perhaps even a complete, shutdown.” Jomaine could see in Kresh’ s face that he was losing him.

            “Forgive me,” Jomaine said. “I did not mean to lecture at you. But it is the existence of these billions of copies of the Laws that is so crippling to positronic brain development. An experimental brain cannot really be experimental, because the moment it shifts into a nonstandard processing state, five billion microcopies of the Three Laws jump in to force it back into an approved mode.”

            “I see the difficulty,” Donald said. “I must confess that I find the concept of a robot with your modified Three Laws rather distressing. But even so, I can see why your gravitonic brains do not have this inflexibility problem, because the Laws are not so widely distributed. But isn’t it riskier to run with fewer backups and copies?”

            “Yes, it is. But the degree of risk involved is microscopic. Statistically speaking, your brain, Donald, is not likely to have a major Three Laws programming failure for a quadrillion years. A gravitonic brain with only a few hundred levels of redundancy is likely to have a Law-level programming failure sooner than that. Probably it can’t go more than a billion or two years between failures.

            “Of course, either brain type will wear out in a few hundred years, or perhaps a few thousand at the outside, with special maintenance. Yes, the positronic brain is millions of times less likely to fail. But even if the chance of being sucked into a black hole is millions of times lower than the chance of being struck by a meteor, both are so unlikely that they might as well be impossible for all the difference it makes in our everyday lives. There is no increase in the practical danger with a gravitonic brain.”

            “That is a comforting argument, Dr. Terach, but I cannot agree that the danger levels can be treated as equivalent. If you were to view the question in terms of a probability ballistics analysis--”

            “All right, Donald,” Kresh interrupted. “We can take it as read that nothing could be as safe as a positronic brain robot. But let’s forget about theory here, Terach. You’ve told me how the New Laws or Three Laws can be embedded into a gravitonic brain. What about Caliban? What about your splendid No Law rogue robot? Did you just leave the embedding step out of the manufacturing process on his brain?”

            “No, no. Nothing that simple. There are matrices of paths meant to contain the Laws, which stand astride all the volitional areas of the gravitonic brain. In effect, they make the connection between the brain’ s subtopologic structures. If those matrices are left blank, the connections aren’t complete and the robot would be incapable of action. We couldn’t leave the matrices blank. Besides, there would be no point to it. Caliban was--was--an experiment. Never meant to leave the lab. Fredda was going to install a perimeter restriction device on him the night it, ah, happened. But he was powered up prematurely, before the restricter was installed.”

            “What, Doctor, was the nature of the experiment?” Donald asked.

            “To find out what laws a robot would choose for itself. Fredda believed--we believed--that a robot given no other Law-level instruction than to seek after a correct system of living would end up reinventing her New Laws. Instead of laws, she--we--embedded Caliban ‘ s matrices with the desire, the need, for such laws. We gave him a very detailed, but carefully edited, on-board datastore that would serve as a source of information and experience to help him in guiding his actions. He was to be run through a series of laboratory situations and simulations that would force him to make choices. The results of those choices would gradually embed themselves in the Law matrices, and thus write themselves in as the product of his own action.”

            “Were you not at all concerned at the prospect of having a lawless robot in the labs?” Donald asked.

            Jomaine nodded, conceding the point. “We knew there was a certain degree of risk to what we. were doing. We were very careful about designing the matrices, about the whole process. We even built a prototype before Caliban, a sessile testbed unit, and gave it to Gubber to test in a double-blind setup.”

            “Double-blind?” Kresh asked.

            “Gubber did not know about the Caliban project. No one did, besides Fredda and myself. All Gubber knew was that we wanted him to display a series of situation simulations--essentially holographic versions of the same situations we wanted Caliban to confront--to the sessile free-matrix testbed unit, alongside a normally programmed Three Law sessile testbed. We would have preferred using a New Law robot, of course, because those were the Laws we wanted Caliban to come up with on his own. Unfortunately we hadn’t received any sort of approval for lab tests of New Law robots at that point, so that was no go.

            “But the main test was to see if an un-Lawed brain could absorb and lock down a Law set. Gubber did not know which was which, or even that the two were supposed to be different. Afterwards he performed a standard battery of tests on the two units and found that the results were essentially identical. The sessile No Law robot had absorbed and integrated the Three Laws, just as predicted.”

            “What happened to the testbed units?” Donald asked.

            “The No Law, free-matrix unit was destroyed when the test was over. I suppose the Three Law unit was converted into a full robot and put to use somehow.”

            “What goes into converting a sessile unit?”

            “Oh, that is quite simple. A sessile is basically a fully assembled robot, except that the legs are left off the torso while it is hooked to the test stand and the monitor instruments installed. Basically just plug the legs in and off it goes.

            “At any rate, Fredda intended Caliban as a final grand demonstration that a rational robot would select her Laws as a guide for life.”

            “Wait a moment,” Kresh said, rather sharply. “You’re telling me this is what was supposed to happen. What is happening? What is Caliban doing out there?”

            Jomaine shrugged. “Who knows? In theory, he should be doing exactly what I’ve just described--using his experience to codify his own laws for living.”

            Kresh reached out his hands and placed them flat on the table, tapping his right index finger on its surface. He did not speak for half a minute, but when he did, all the masks were off. The calm, the courtesy, were gone, and only the anger remained in his steel-cold voice.

            “In other words, this robot that assaulted and nearly killed its creator in its first moment of awakening, this robot that threw a man across a warehouse and committed arson and refused to follow orders and fled from repeated police searches--this robot is out there trying to find good rules for living ? Flaming devils, what, exactly, are the laws he has formulated so far? ‘ A robot shall savagely attack people, and will not, through inaction, prevent a person from being attacked?’ “

            Jomaine Terach closed his eyes and folded his hands in his lap. Let it be over. Let me wake up and know this is all a nightmare. “I do not know, Sheriff. I do not know what happened. I do not know what went wrong.”

            “Do you know who attacked Fredda Leving?”

            “No, sir. No, I do not. But I cannot believe it was Caliban.”

            “And why is that? Every scrap of evidence points to him.”

            “Because I wrote his basal programming. He was not--is not--just a blank slate. He has no built-in Laws. Neither do you and I. But his innate personality is far more grounded in reason, in purpose, than any human ‘ s could be. You or I would be far more likely than he to lash out blindly in a random attack. And if I had made a mistake big enough to cause Caliban to attack Fredda like that, that mistake would have cascaded into every other part of his behavioral operant system. He would have seized up for good before he reached the door to the lab.”

            “Then who was it?”

            “You have the access recorder records. Look there. It is some one of us on that list. That’s all I can tell you for certain.”

            “Access recorder?”

            Jomaine looked up in surprise. They hadn’t known about the recorder! Of course. Why should they even think about such things? With the endless wealth of Spacer society, and the omnipresent robots to serve as watchkeepers, theft was almost unknown, and security systems even rarer. If he had not assumed they knew and let it slip, they never would have known. If he had kept his mouth shut about it, they would have had no way of knowing he had been at the lab that night, just about the time of the attack...

            But it was too late to hold back. Now they would know what to ask about. There was nothing for it but to charge on. They would get the access records, and that would be that. “It’s a Settler security device,” he said. “Tonya Welton insisted that Fredda install it because Leving Labs had access to Limbo Project material. It records the date and time and identity of the person every time someone passes in or out of the lab. It works on a face-recognition system. Humans only. It was programmed to ignore robots. Too many of them.”

            Kresh turned toward Donald 111, but the robot spoke before the Sheriff had a chance. “I have already dispatched a technical team to the labs, sir. We should have the data from the access recorder within half an hour.”

            “Very good. Now, why don’t you save us some time and effort, and tell us yourself whatever that recorder will tell us about your movements.”

            Jomaine was rattled. He had made a major mistake telling them about the recorder. But damnation! Now that they knew that much, there was no point in hiding anything else. “There is very little to tell. I had left a notepack in my lab. I noticed it when I sat down to get some work done at home. I live quite near the lab, and I walked over to collect it. I entered through the main door. I think I called out to see if anyone was around, and there was no answer. I went to my lab, got the notepack, and then left my lab by one of its side doors. That’s all.”

            “That’s your story.”

            “Yes, it is.”

            “Why didn’t you send a robot to get the notepack?” Kresh said. “Seems to me like an errand suited to a robot.”

            “I suppose I could have sent Bertran, but that would have been more trouble than it was worth. I couldn’t quite recall which notepack the data I wanted was in, or where I had left it. Sometimes I can’t even recall which pack I need. I have to put my eyes on it to be sure. My lab is often a bit of a jumble, and there are notepacks all over the place. I find that if I just stand and look at a room for a minute, I remember where the thing I’m looking for is. A robot can’t do that for me.”

            Jomaine had the uncomfortable sense that he was babbling, going on and on, but there seemed to be no way out but forward with more of the same. “Bertran would have brought me a half dozen notepacks to be sure I had the right one, which seemed a bit silly. I knew that I would be able to find the notepack myself the moment I stepped into the lab. And sure enough, I did.”

            “That seems like a rather overexplained set of reasons for why it was easier to do it yourself.”

            Jomaine glared at Kresh. “Yes, I suppose it does. But bear in mind that all of us down at Leving Labs have been hearing Fredda’s theories about excessive dependence on robots for some time now. We’ve all developed a bit of a fetish about doing things for ourselves.”

            Kresh grunted. “I know how that can be,” he said. “ All right. You’ve filled in quite a few blanks for us, Terach. You’re free to go--for now. But if I were you, I’d work on the assumption that you and I were going to have other little chats in future, about other questions that will come up. And the better your memory is when that happens, the better you and I will both like it. Do I make myself clear?”

            Jomaine Terach looked Sheriff Alvar Kresh straight in the eye and nodded. “Oh, yes,” he said. “There is nothing in the world clearer to me than that.”

            JOMAINE Terach stumbled out of Government Tower into the thin light of morning. He felt a pang of guilt for betraying Fredda’ s confidence, but little more than that. What good were petty little secrets when a whole world was turning upside down in panic? The debts he owed to the good of society, and to himself, far outweighed his obligation to Fredda. Besides, you could not know. There might be some key to it all buried deep, hidden in his words where he could not even see it. Maybe Kresh could find that key and turn it in the lock. Maybe, just maybe, by talking, he had saved them all.

            Jomaine snorted in disgust. High and mighty talk for a man who had spilled his guts. There was another explanation, one that did not come out quite so noble.

            Maybe, just maybe, he was a coward at the heart.

            He hailed an aircab and headed toward home.

            “THE access recorder data, sir,” Donald said, handing him a notepack.

            “Thank you, Donald,” Kresh said. He skimmed over the data once or twice, then studied it in greater detail. Damnation! Why hadn’t he had this data days before? It provided him something he had not had until this moment--a nice, tidy list of suspects. Suspect humans, at least. Terach had said the thing did not record the comings and goings of robots.

            “Sir, was it wise to let Jomaine Terach go free?” Donald asked. “I do not think we can consider his interrogation to be complete, and he did confess to several crimes related to violations of robot manufacture statutes.”

            “Hmmmm?” Kresh said absently. “Oh, Terach. It’s a bit of a gamble, but if we want this case to get anywhere, I think we had to set him free--at least for now. And the same for Anshaw when we ‘re done with him. Neither of them has much of anyplace to go. I don’t regard them as flight risks. But I’m counting on at least one of them panicking. If one or both of them does, it is damned likely they will make some sort of mistake, and it is likely that their mistakes could make our jobs a lot easier. Now go and bring Anshaw in.”

            “Yes, sir.” Donald went through the door, down to the holding cells.

            Alvar Kresh stood up and paced the interrogation room. He was eager, anxious. Things had shifted suddenly. He could not explain how, or why, exactly, but nonetheless they had. The access recorder data was part of it, but not all of it. All it did was suggest certain things. It would be up to Kresh to prove them. He sensed that he was suddenly on the verge of answers, knocking on the door of a solution to this whole nightmare fiasco. All he had to do was press, push, bear down, and it would come.

            Gubber Anshaw. Kresh dropped the notepack onto the table and thought about Anshaw. The interrogation that had been put off, delayed, pushed back, forgotten, lost in the chaotic shuffle of events again and again. And now, with the access recorder data in his hand, with the fact of Ariel ‘ s presence at Anshaw ‘ s home last night, it was suddenly clear that this was the interrogation that could break this case wide open. This was the man who knew things.

            Alvar Kresh paced twice more up and down the room, but then forced himself to sit down and wait.

            The door opened, and Donald ushered in Gubber Anshaw.

            Alvar Kresh waited for Anshaw to sit down in the chair on the opposite side of the table. Then he set his hands palm-down on the table and leaned forward. Then he looked the robotics designer in the eye.

            It was time for the real investigation to begin.