Isaac Asimov - Robots and Empire

“Poor Han!”

“Yes, indeed, poor me. But you can’t go alone. As far as I know, you can’t pilot a ship.”

“Oh! Well, I thought I’d be taken up by—”

“Commercial carrier?” Fastolfe shook his head. “Quite impossible. For you—to visit and board an Earth ship in orbit openly, as would be unavoidable if you used commercial carrier, would require special permission and that would take weeks. If you don’t want to go, Gladia, you needn’t put it on the basis of not wishing to see him. If the paperwork and red tape involved would take weeks, I’m sure he can’t wait that long.”

“But I do want to see him,” said Gladia, now determined.

“In that case, you can take my private space vessel and Daneel can take you up there. He can handle the controls very well indeed and he is as anxious to see Baley as you are. We just won’t report the trip.”

“But you’ll get into trouble, Han.”

“Perhaps no one will find out—or they’ll pretend not to find out. And if anyone makes trouble, I will just have to handle it.”

Gladia’s head bowed in a moment of thought and then she said, “If you don’t mind, I will be selfish and chance your having trouble, Han. I want to go.”

“Then you’ll go.”

It was a small ship, smaller than Gladia had imagined; cozy in a way, but frightening in another way. It was small enough, after all, to lack any provision for pseudo-gravity and the sensation of weightlessness, while constantly nudging at her to indulge in amusing gymnastics, just as constantly reminded her that she was in an abnormal environment.

She was a Spacer. There were over five billion Spacers spread over fifty worlds, all of them proud of the name. Yet how many of those who called themselves Spacers were really space travelers? Very few. Perhaps eighty percent of them never left the world of their birth. Even of the remaining twenty percent, hardly any passed through space more than two or three times.

Certainly, she herself was no Spacer in the literal sense of the word, she thought gloomily. Once (once!) she had traveled through space and that was from Solaria to Aurora seven years before. Now she was entering space a second time on a small private space yacht for a short trip just beyond the atmosphere, a paltry hundred thousand kilometers, with one other person—not even a person—for company.

She cast another glance at Daneel in the small pilot room. She could just see a portion of him, where he sat at the controls.

She had never been anywhere with only one robot within call. There had always been hundreds—thousands—at her disposal on Solaria. On Aurora, there were routinely dozens, if not scores. Here there was but one.

She said, “Daneel!”

He did not allow his attention to wander from the controls. “Yes, Madam Gladia?”

“Are you pleased that you will be seeing Elijah Baley again?”

“I am not certain, Madam Gladia, how best to describe my inner state. It may be that it is analogous to what a human being would describe as being pleased.”

“But you must feel something.”

“I feel as though I can make decisions more rapidly than I can ordinarily; my responses seem to come more easily; my movements seem to require less energy. I might interpret it generally as a sensation of well-being. At least I have heard human beings use that word and feel that what it is intended to describe is something that is analogous to the sensations I now experience.”

Gladia said, “But what if I were to say I wanted to see him alone?”

“Then that would be arranged.”

“Even though that meant you wouldn’t see him?”

“Yes, madam.”

“Wouldn’t you then feel disappointed? I mean, wouldn’t you have a sensation that was the opposite of wellbeing? Your decisions would come less rapidly, your responses less easily, your movements would require more energy and so on.”

“No, Madam Gladia, for I would have a feeling of well being at fulfilling your orders.”

“Your own pleasant feeling is Third Law, and fulfilling my orders is Second Law, and Second Law takes precedence. Is that it?”

“Yes, madam.”

Gladia struggled against her own curiosity. It would never have occurred to her to question an ordinary robot in this matter. A robot is a machine. But she couldn’t think of Daneel as a machine, just as five years before she had been unable to think of Jander as a machine. But with Jander that had been only the burning of passion—and that had gone with Jander himself. For all his similarity to the other, Daneel could not set the ashes alight again. With him, there was room for intellectual curiosity.

“Doesn’t it bother you, Daneel,” she asked, “to be so bound by the Laws?”

“I cannot imagine anything else, madam.”

“All my life I have been bound to the pull of gravity, even during my one previous trip on a spaceship, but I can imagine not being bound by it. And here I am, in fact, not bound by it.”

“And do you enjoy it, madam?”

“In a way, yes.”

“Does it make you uneasy?”

“In a way, that too.”

“Sometimes, madam, when I think that human beings are not bound by Laws, it makes me uneasy.”

“Why, Daneel? Have you ever tried to reason out to yourself why the thought of Lawlessness should make you feel uneasy?”

Daneel was silent for a moment. He said, “I have, madam, but I do not think I would wonder about such things but for my brief associations with Partner Elijah. He had a way—”

“Yes, I know,” she said. “He wondered about everything. He had a restlessness about him that drove him on to ask questions at all times in all directions.”

“So it seemed. And I would try to be like him and ask questions. So I asked myself what Lawlessness might be like and I found I couldn’t imagine what it might be like except that it might be like being human and that made me feel uneasy. And I asked myself, as you asked me, why it made me feel uneasy.”

“And what did you answer yourself?”

Daneel said, “After a long time, I decided that the Three Laws govern the manner in which my positronic pathways behave. At all times, under all stimuli the Laws constrain the direction and intensity of positronic flow along those pathways so that I always know what to do. Yet the level of knowledge of what to do is not always the same. There are times when my doing-as-I-must is under less constraint than at other times. I have always noticed that the lower the positronomotive potential, then the further removed from certainty is my decision as to which action to take. And the further removed from certainty I am, the nearer I am to ill being. To decide an action in a millisecond rather than a nanosecond produces a sensation I would not wish to be prolonged.

“What then, I thought to myself, madam, if I were utterly without Laws, as humans are? What if I could make no clear decision on what response to make to some given set of conditions? It would be unbearable and I do not willingly think of it.”

Gladia said, “Yet you do, Daneel. You are thinking of it now.”

“Only because of my association with Partner Elijah, madam. I observed him under conditions when he was unable, for a time, to decide on an action because of the puzzling nature of the problems that had been set him. He was clearly in a state of ill-being as a result and I felt ill-being on his behalf because there was nothing I could do that would ease—It is possible that I only grasped at the situation for him. A very small part of what it was he felt then. If I had grasped a larger part and better understood the consequences of his inability to decide on action, I might have—”

He hesitated.