Isaac Asimov - The Naked Sun

“We have to, sometimes, when things go wrong. If a fetus has developmental trouble, for instance. Robots can’t be trusted to judge the situation accurately when human life is involved.”

Baley nodded. “Too much risk of a misjudgment and a life lost, I suppose.”

“Not at all. Too much risk of overvaluing a life and saving one improperly.” The woman looked stem. “As fetal engineers, Baley, we see to it that healthy children are born; healthy ones. Even the best

gene analysis of parents can’t assure that all gene permutations and combinations will be favorable, to say nothing of the possibility of mutations. That’s our big concern, the unexpected mutation. We’ve got the rate of those down to less than one in a thousand, but that means that, on the average, once a decade, we have trouble.”

She motioned him along the balcony and he followed her.

She said, “I’ll show you the infants’ nurseries and the youngsters’ dormitories. They’re much more a problem than the fetuses are. With them, we can rely on robot labor only to a limited extent.”

“Why is that?”

“You would know, Baley, if you ever tried to teach a robot the importance of discipline. First Law makes them almost impervious to that fact. And don’t think youngsters don’t learn that about as soon as they can talk. I’ve seen a three-year-old holding a dozen robots motionless by yelling, ‘You’ll hurt me. I’m hurt.’ It takes an extremely advanced robot to understand that a child might be deliberately lying.”

“Could Delmarre handle the children?”

“Usually.”

“How did he do that? Did he get out among, them and shake sense into them?”

“Dr. Delmarre? Touch them? Skies above! Of course not! But he could talk to them. And he could give a robot specific orders. I’ve seen him viewing a child for fifteen minutes, and keeping a robot in spanking position all that time, getting it to spank-spank-spank. A few like that and the child would risk fooling with the boss no more. And the boss was skillful enough about it so that usually the robot didn’t need more than a routine readjustment afterward.”

“How about you? Do you get out among the children?”

“I’m afraid I have to sometimes. I’m not like the boss. Maybe someday I’ll be able to handle the long-distance stuff, but right now if I tried, I’d just ruin robots. There’s an art to handling robots really well, you know. When I think of it, though. Getting out among the children. Little animals!”

She looked back at him suddenly. “I suppose you wouldn’t mind seeing them.”

“It wouldn’t bother me.”

She shrugged and stared at him with amusement. “Earthman!”

She walked on again. “What’s all this about, anyway? You’ll have to end up with Gladia Delmarre as murderess. You’ll have to.”

“I’m not quite sure of that,” said Baley.

“How could you be anything else but sure? Who else could it possibly be?”

“There are possibilities, ma’am.”

“Who, for instance?”

“Well, you, for instance!”

And Klorissa’s reaction to that quite surprised Baley.

She laughed.

The laughter grew and fed on itself till she was gasping for breath and her plump face had reddened almost to purple. She leaned against the wall and gasped for breath.

“No, don’t come closer,” she begged. “I’m all right.”

Baley said gravely, “Is the possibility that humorous?”

She tried to answer and laughed again. Then, in a whisper, she said, “Oh, you are an Earthman? How could it ever be me?”

“You knew him well,” said Baley. “You knew his habits. You could have planned it.”

“And you think I would see him? That I would get close enough to bash him over the head with something? You just don’t know anything at all about it, Baley.”

Baley felt himself redden. “Why couldn’t you get close enough to him, ma’am. You’ve had practice—uh—mingling.”

“With the children.”

“One thing leads to another. You seem to be able to stand my presence.”

“At twenty feet,” she said contemptuously.

“I’ve just visited a man who nearly collapsed because he had to endure my presence for a while.”

Klorissa sobered and said, “A difference in degree.”

“I suggest that a difference in degree is all that is necessary. The habit of seeing children makes it possible to endure seeing Delmarre just long enough.”

“I would like to point out, Mr. Baley,” said Klorissa, no longer ap

pearing the least amused, “that it doesn’t matter a speck what I can endure. Dr. Delmarre was the finicky one. He was almost as bad as Leebig himself. Almost. Even if I could endure seeing him, he would never endure seeing me. Mrs. Delmarre is the only one he could possibly have allowed within seeing distance.”

Baley said, “Who’s this Leebig you mentioned?”

Klorissa shrugged. “One of these odd genius types, if you know what I mean. He’s done work with the boss on robots.”

Baley checked that off mentally and returned to the matter at hand. He said, “It could also be said you had a motive.”

“What motive?”

“His death put you in charge of this establishment, gave you position.”

“You call that a motive? Skies above, who could want this position? Who on Solaria? This is a motive for keeping him alive. It’s a motive for hovering over him and protecting him. You’ll have to do better than that, Earthman.”

Baley scratched his neck uncertainly with one finger. He saw the justice of that.

Kiorissa said, “Did you notice my ring, Mr. Baley?”

For a moment it seemed she was about to strip the glove from her right hand, but she refrained.

“I noticed it,” said Baley.

“You don’t know its significance, I suppose?”

“I don’t.” (He would never have done with ignorance, he thought bitterly.)

“Do you mind a small lecture, then?”

“If it will help me make sense of this damned world,” blurted out Baley, “by all means.”

“Skies above!” Klorissa smiled. “I suppose we seem to you as Earth would seem to us. Imagine. Say, here’s an empty chamber. Come in here and we’ll sit down—no, the room’s not big enough. Tell you what, though. You take a seat in there and I’ll stand out here.”

She stepped farther down the corridor, giving him space to enter the room, then returned, taking up her stand against the opposite wall at a point from which she could see him.

Baley took his seat with only the slightest quiver of chivalry countering it. He thought rebelliously: Why not? Let the Spacer woman stand.

Klorissa folded her muscular arms across her chest and said, “Gene analysis is the key to our society. We don’t analyze for genes directly, of course. Each gene, however, governs one enzyme, and we can analyze for enzymes. Know the enzymes, know the body chemistry. Know the body chemistry, know the human being. You see all that?”

“I understand the theory,” said Baley. “I don’t know how it’s applied.”

“That part’s done here. Blood samples are taken while the infant is still in the late fetal stage. That gives us our rough first approximation. Ideally, we should catch all mutations at that point and judge whether birth can be risked. In actual fact, we still don’t quite know enough to eliminate all possibility of mistake. Someday, maybe. Anyway, we continue testing after birth; biopsies as well as body fluids. In any case, long before adulthood, we know exactly what our little boys and girls are made of.”

(Sugar and spice… A nonsense phrase went unbidden through Baley’s mind.)

“We wear coded rings to indicate our gene constitution,” said Klorissa. “It’s an old custom, a bit of the primitive left behind from the days when Solarians had not yet been weeded eugenically. Nowadays, we’re all healthy.”