Isaac Asimov - Utopia

Again, silence on the line, but this time Davlo spoke first. “All the data is gone, sir. Without my computer files, without my written notes, without the log files—there is simply no way at all I can find that comet again in time.”

“But the thing is kilometers across! It’s practically headed straight for the planet right now! How hard could it be to spot?”

Davlo Lentrall let out a tired sigh. The man was right. It shouldn’t be hard at all. How could he explain that it would be all but impossible? “It is extremely hard to spot, sir. It is coming straight for us, and that is part of the problem. Normally we track a comet by spotting its motion against the night sky. Comet Grieg appears to be all but stationary. Not quite motionless, but close. And while it’s a relatively large cometary body, even a big comet is rather small from tens of millions of kilometers away. It also happens to be a rather dark body—and at its present distance, it has a very low apparent magnitude.”

“You’re saying it’s too dim to see? But you saw it before—or at least the computers and the telescopes did.”

“It’s not impossible to see. But it’s very dim and small and far away and with a very small lateral motion. And it’s not just a question of seeing it once. We have to get repeated, accurate measures of its position and trajectory before we can reconstruct the orbit.”

“But what about when it gets closer? Won’t it develop a tail and all the rest of it? Surely that will make it easier to spot.”

“By which time it will be too late. Grieg is a dark-body comet. The comet will be too close, and if it has developed much of a tail, that will mean it is starting to melt. If it gets too warm and melts too much, it will be too fragile to hold together during the course correction. Part of the plan I hadn’t worked out yet was shielding from the sun. I was going to come up with some kind of parasol, a shield to keep the sunlight off.”

“But there’s a chance,” said Kresh. “At least there is some sort of chance we could reacquire the comet if we tried.” There was a brief moment of quiet again before the governor’s voice spoke again. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said. “We’re going to keep everything moving forward, based on the assumption that we do reacquire the comet, and that we will decide to go forward with the diversion and the impact. We need to move forward on as many fronts as possible, as fast as possible, and I need some work out of you, right now.

“First I want you to set down the closest approximations you can of the mass, size, position, and trajectory of Comet Grieg. Even rough figures will give us someplace to start in planning for the impact itself. Send that information at once to my data mailbox. Then you are going to get to work at once organizing a search to reacquire Comet Grieg. I will instruct your superiors to give you whatever resources and personnel you need for the job. Tell them as much as you can about the comet. But get that started—and let someone else run it. Because I want you to get to work trying to recover your computer files. Maybe they’re not as lost as we think. There must be something, somewhere—at least enough to give some leads to the team doing the telescope search. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir. Sir—if I might ask a question?”

“Yes, of course, Dr. Lentrall.”

“I get the impression that you’ve become more convinced that the plan might work.”

“That I have, Dr. Lentrall. I’ve seen and heard quite a bit here about your plan. Enough to make me think we just can’t live without it. Was there anything else?”

“Not at the moment, sir. I’ll be in touch.”

“You certainly will,” the governor replied, with just the slightest hint of humor in his voice. “Kresh out.”

The line went dead.

That should have been his cue to swing into action, but instead, Davlo simply stared at the speaker, expressionless. After what seemed a very long time indeed, he finally stirred himself into action. He set down all he could recall of his comet data, as accurately as possible, knowing full well that the margin of error in most of his figures would render them close to useless. He sent a copy of it off to Kresh’s data mailbox, and another off to the head of the astronomy department, asking for whatever help he could get. Of course, Davlo knew perfectly well that the department head absolutely refused to accept any after-hours calls. She would not get the message until morning. But still, best to have it done.

Simple enough jobs, both of them, but they seemed to take an inordinately long time—and to take a great deal out of Davlo. After the day he had had, there was not really a great deal left to take. When he was at last done with the messages, he did not get up. Instead he sat there, unable to rouse himself. There was a lot more he ought to do, but Davlo Lentrall could not quite bring himself to move. Not quite yet.

It was that hour of the night when rational thought seems most unreasonable, when unreasoning fear seems utterly logical, and disasters seem most probable. Davlo thought of his nameless, faceless, enormously powerful enemies. They were mad enough at him already. He was not entirely sure he wanted to do anything else—like getting out of his chair—that might incur their wrath.

There was some part of Davlo Lentrall that was able to recognize the fragility of his own personality at that moment. A part of him that could see that the game was over. A part of him that knew he had been pretending to be someone and something he was not for a long time. He had seen himself as smarter, braver, better than anyone else. And why not, in a universe where robots protected everyone from the consequences of their actions, where robots did all the hard work and left the posturing for humans? He had always imagined himself as being immune to fear and as impossible to harm. It was easy enough to indulge such fancies when robots warded off all danger.

And that part of Davlo Lentrall could feel it all slipping away. A few more shocks, a few more disasters, and he knew he would not be able to hold together. What was he to do if the mask fell from his face altogether, and the face underneath was blank? He knew now that he was not the person he had pretended to be. But then who was he?

Davlo Lentrall sat in his office chair, still as a switched-off robot, trying to work up the nerve to move.

It might have been a minute later, or an hour later, when Kaelor came into the room. “Come along, sir,” the robot said. “You must rest. There is nothing more you can accomplish tonight.”

Lentrall allowed himself to be led away, allowed Kaelor to peel off his clothes, move him through the refresher, and put him to bed. He was asleep almost before he was fully between the covers. The last thing he saw as his head hit the pillow was Kaelor leaning over him, tucking the sheets up around him.

And the first thing he would think of the next morning was where he might find quite a bit of his lost data.

DONALD 111 WAS every bit as motionless as Lentrall had been, but he was far from inactive. Donald stood in his niche in the wall of Alvar Kresh’s home office, and worked the hyperwave links with all the speed and efficiency that he could muster. To an outside observer, Donald would have appeared completely inert, as if he had been shut down altogether. In point of fact, he was linked into a half-dozen databases, patched through to simultaneous conference calls with robots in the City of Hades maintenance offices, the Department of Public Safety, the Emergency Preparedness Service, the Combined Inferno Police, and a half-dozen other agencies. No one knew for sure what would happen if and when the comet hit, but there were certain basic precautions that could be taken—and Donald could at least get them started.