Isaac Asimov - Robots and Empire

“But if you did not, friend Giskard, scores of human beings on this ship, including Madam Gladia, and several hundreds more on the Auroran vessel would die.”

“They might not die if the captain were correct in his feeling of confidence in success. I could not bring about one certain death to prevent many merely probable ones. There is the difficulty, friend Daneel, in your Zeroth Law. The First Law deals with specific individuals and certainties. Your Zeroth Law deals with vague groups and probabilities.”

“The human beings on board these ships are not vague groups. They are many specific individuals taken together.”

“Yet when I must make a decision it is the specific individual I am about to influence directly whose fate must count with me. I cannot help that.”

“What was it you did do, then, friend Giskard—or were you completely helpless?”

“In my desperation, friend Daneel, I attempted to contact the commander of the Auroran vessel after a small Jump had brought him quite close to us. I could not. The distance was too great. And yet the attempt was not altogether a failure. I did detect something, the equivalent of a faint hum. I puzzled over it a short while before realizing I was receiving the overall sensation of the minds of all the human beings on board the Auroran vessel. I had to filter out that faint hum from the much more prominent sensations arising from our own vessel—a difficult task.”

Daneel said, “Nearly impossible, I should think, friend, Giskard.”

“As you say, nearly impossible, but I managed it with an enormous effort. However, try as I might, I could make out no individual minds.—When Madam Gladia faced the large numbers of human beings in her audience on Baleyworld, I sensed an anarchic confusion of a vast jumble of minds, but I managed to pick out individual minds here and there for a moment or two. That was not so on this occasion.”

Giskard paused, as though lost in his memory of the sensation.

Daneel said, “I imagine this must be analogous to the manner in which we see individual stars even among large groups of them, when the whole is comparatively close to us. In a distant galaxy, however, we cannot make out individual stars but can see only a faintly luminous fog.”

“That strikes me as a good analogy, friend Daneel.—And as I concentrated on the faint but distant hum, it seemed to me that I could detect a very dim wash of fear permeating it. I was not sure of this, but I felt I had to try to take advantage of it. I had never attempted to exert influence over anything so far away, over anything as inchoate as a mere hum—but I tried desperately to increase that fear by however small a trifle. I cannot say whether I succeeded.”

“The Auroran vessel fled. You must have succeeded.”

“Not necessarily. The vessel might have fled if I had done nothing.”

Daneel seemed lost in thought. “It might. If our captain were so confident that it would flee—”

Giskard said, “On the other hand, I cannot be sure that there was a rational basis to that confidence. It seemed to me that what I detected was intermixed with a feeling of awe and reverence for Earth. The confidence I sensed was rather similar to the kind I have detected in young children toward their protectors—parental or otherwise. I had the feeling that the captain believed he could not fail in the neighborhood of Earth because of the influence of Earth. I wouldn’t say the feeling was exactly irrational, but it felt nonrational, in any case.”

“You are undoubtedly right in this, friend Giskard. The captain has, in our hearing, spoken of Earth, on occasion, in a reverential manner. Since Earth cannot truly influence the success of an action through any mystical influence, it is quite possible to suppose that your influence was indeed successfully exerted. And moreover—”

Giskard, his eyes glowing dimly, said, “Of what are you thinking, friend Daneel?”

“I have been thinking of the supposition that the individual human being is concrete while humanity is abstract. When you detected that faint hum from the Auroran ship, you were not detecting an individual, but a portion of humanity. Could you not, if you were at a proper distance from Earth and if the background noise were sufficiently small, detect the hum of the mental activity of Earth’s human population, overall? And, extending that, can one not imagine that in the Galaxy generally there is the hum of the mental activity of all of humanity? How, then, is humanity an abstraction? It is something you can point to. Think of that in connection with the Zeroth Law and you will see that the extension of the Laws of Robotics is a justified one—justified by your own experience.”

There was a long pause and finally Giskard said, slowly as though it were being dragged out of him, “You may be right friend Daneel.—And yet, if we are landing on Earth now, with a Zeroth Law we may be able to use, we still don’t know how we might use it. It seems to us, so far, that the crisis that Earth faces involves the use of a nuclear intensifier, but as far as we know, there is nothing of significance on Earth on which a nuclear intensifier can do its work. What, then, will we do on Earth?”

“I do not as yet know,” said Daneel sadly.

Noise!

Gladia listened in astonishment. It didn’t hurt her ears. It wasn’t the sound of surface slashing on surface. It wasn’t a piercing shriek, or a clamor, or a banging, or—anything that could be expressed by an onomatopoetic word.

It was softer and less overwhelming, rising and falling, bearing within it an occasional irregularity—and always there.

D.G. watched her listening, cocking her head to this side and that, and said, “I call it the ‘Drone of the City,’ Gladia.

“Does it ever stop?”

“Never, really, but what can you expect? Haven’t you ever stood in a field and heard the wind rustling the leaves and insects stridulating and birds calling, and water running. That never stops.”

“That’s different.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s the same. The sound here is the melting together of the rumble of machinery and the various noises people make, but the principle is precisely the same as the natural nonhuman noises of a field. You’re used to fields, so you don’t hear the noise there. You’re not used to this, so you hear it and probably find it annoying. Earthpeople don’t hear it except on the rare occasions when they come fresh in from the countryside—and then they are very glad indeed to greet it. Tomorrow you won’t hear it either.”

Gladia looked about thoughtfully from their position on a small balcony. “So many buildings!”

“That’s true enough. Structures in every direction stretching outward for miles. And up—and down, too. This is not just a city, in the fashion of Aurora or Baleyworld. It is a City—capital ‘C’—of the kind that exists only on Earth.”

“These are the Caves of Steel,” said Gladia. “I know. We’re underground, aren’t we?”

“Yes. Absolutely. I must tell you that it took me time to get used to this sort of thing the first time I visited Earth. Wherever you go in a City, it looks like a crowded city scene. Walkways and roadways and storefronts and mobs of people, with the soft and universal lights of fluorescents making everything seem bathed in soft shadowless sunshine—but it isn’t sunshine and, up above the surface, I don’t know if the sun is really shining at the moment, or is covered by clouds, or is absent altogether, leaving this part of the world plunged in night and darkness.”

“It makes the City enclosed. People breathe each other’s air.”

“We do anyway—on any world—anywhere.”