Isaac Asimov - Utopia

But even as he grabbed at the arms of his seat and braced himself against the bouncing, bone-rattling ride, there was part of him that knew no fear at all, because a robot was at the controls, and robots and danger to humans simply could not exist in the same place. There were few things in the universe in which Alvar Kresh could place absolute faith, but robots were one of them.

But tell that to the weather. The storm boomed and roared outside the long-range aircar as it fought for altitude, the banging and rattling getting worse with every moment. Just at the moment when Kresh was ready to decide his faith in robots was not all that absolute, the aircar broke free, punched a hole in the clouds and climbed out into the clear and placid skies above.

Smooth sailing after the storm, Kresh told himself as he looked down on the storm clouds below. A nice symbol, that. Maybe even a good omen.

But Kresh knew better, of course. When it came to signs and omens, he had no faith at all.

The aircar turned toward the southeast and settled in for its flight to the island of Purgatory.

DAVLO LENTRALL STUMBLED blindly from the aircar and out into the rain-swept darkness of his own front yard. Kaelor stepped out after him, gently threaded his left arm through his master’s right, and led him toward the front door of the house.

Davlo followed half-consciously, barely aware of where he was or what he was doing. He was in shock, that was all there was to it. It had taken some time for the full impact of what had happened to hit him, but now, at last, it had.

The one part of him that was still more or less aware had refused to let the police aircar hover forward into the garage attached to the house, even though there was plenty of room and it would have saved him getting drenched in the rain. No. No. He would not let the police in his house, not even that far. Not if he could help it.

It was irrational, and he knew it, and he didn’t care. Even though he knew perfectly well that the police had been all through the place in his absence, running their security checks and installing their monitoring devices. Even though he knew they would remain just outside his property line, scanning and probing and watching the storming darkness. Even if he knew all that was right, and sensible, given the fact that people with very few qualms about going too far had chosen him for a target. It might well be that the survival of the planet depended on his staying alive—but just at the moment, Davlo Lentrall did not even care about that.

He moved on leaden feet toward his front door, waited while Kaelor opened it for him, bundled him inside, and closed it behind him. He obeyed unresistingly as Kaelor led him to the center of the main parlor and stripped off his sopping-wet outer garments then and there. Kaelor vanished and returned instantly with a stack of towels and a warm blanket. One of the household robots materialized with a mug of something steaming hot. And then the robots left him alone.

Davlo found himself sitting in the main parlor, his hair and skin still damp, bundled up in a blanket, drinking the hot soup without tasting it, staring at the far wall without seeing it.

It had all fallen in. All of it. Davlo Lentrall had never, not once in his life, doubted himself. Never, not once in his life, had he doubted that he was capable of handling whatever life put before him. He was smarter than, sharper than, quicker than, better than other people, and he knew it. He had always known it.

Until today. Until a bunch of faceless kidnappers took him in completely with their tricks to keep him away from his security detail. Until a robot tossed him around like a rag doll, and shoved him under a park bench for safekeeping. Until a police officer whom Davlo would have dismissed as being of only average intelligence had made all the right guesses, all the right moves, taken all the right chances, and put his own life in grave peril, so as to save Davlo.

But even all that, galling as it was, would not have been so bad. But it all served as nothing more than background for the real story, the real humiliation.

Davlo Lentrall had been scared. No. It was time to be honest, at least with himself. He had been terrified. He was still terrified. When the moment had come, when the emergency had popped up from out of nowhere, the Davlo Lentrall of his imagination—the cool, confident, commanding fellow who could handle whatever life threw at him without the least amount of trouble—that Davlo Lentrall had vanished in a puff of smoke.

It didn’t matter that a courageous, in-control Davlo Lentrall would have ended up shoved under that park bench just the same, that there was nothing he could have done from start to finish to change things, no matter how brave or cowardly he was.

It was that the Davlo Lentrall who was smarter and better than all the rest, the Davlo Lentrall with the nerve to tell the planet’s foremost robot designer that she had made a mistake naming her robot, suddenly wasn’t there anymore.

Lentrall had never really known how would react in an emergency, because he had never been in an emergency. But now he knew. From now on, Davlo Lentrall could not help but know that fear could leave him absolutely incapable of action.

Lentrall took another sip of the hot soup, and, for the first time since had arrived home, really noticed where he was, what he was doing. The soup was good, warming, filling.

So he had dropped the ball today. So be it. What did it matter? There was nothing even the bravest man alive could have done that would have made any difference. And did it really matter so much if Commander Justen Devray was the hero of the afternoon? Would anyone even remember this afternoon’s incident, when they wrote the history books? No. They would remember that Dr. Davlo Lentrall had discovered Comet Grieg, and spearheaded the effort that had led to Grieg’s impact, and to the salvation of the planet.

Yes. Yes. Lentrall finished off the last of the soup in a single swallow, and got to his feet. The blanket still wrapped around his body, he made his way to his home office, in the far corner of the ground floor. Yes. Comet Grieg. That was what they would remember, not this afternoon’s foolish humiliation.

And the best way to wipe the memory of today’s disaster from his mind would be to get back to work, immediately, on the Comet Grieg project. Kaelor had been quite right to point out there were a large number of unresolved problems to deal with. No time like the present to deal with them. He could call up the appropriate computer files from here and set to work on them.

It, of course, never so much as crossed Davlo’s mind to consider where, precisely, the computer files actually were. It had never so much as dawned on him that they had an actually physical location, a position in space that held them. They were simply there, in the massively interlinked comm and computer system that interlinked all the comm terminals in the city and all the planet’s outposts of civilization. He could call them up from any place, any time, and set to work on them, whenever he liked.

He had never given the matter much consideration, any more than he would have stopped to remember that the air was there for him to breathe whenever he wanted, or that his household robots knew when to serve him soup.

Lentrall sat down at his home office comm station and activated his files on Comet Grieg. At least he tried to do so.

Because, quite suddenly, it was as if the air wasn’t there for him to breathe anymore.

THE FLIGHT OVER the Great Bay had been smooth as silk, the aircar leaving the storm behind with the coastline. That was not too surprising. The climate people had told Kresh that it was a typical pattern: warm, moist air dumping its moisture the moment it came in contact with the cool, dry air over land. Part of it had to do with the air being forced up by the mountain ranges just inland from the city of Hades. The wind blew the air up the side of the hill, and the higher the air went, the more its barometric pressure dropped and the less moisture it could hold. So the water came out of the air, and it rained. A rain shadow effect, they called it.