I, Robot - Isaac Asimov [63]
Robertson frowned and his lean figure stiffened, “Despite the fact that they have a thinking machine of their own. Right?”
“Exactly what makes the whole proposition a foul ball, chief. Levver, take it from there.”
Abe Levver looked up from the far end of the conference table and smoothed his stubbled chin with a faint rasping sound. He smiled:
“It’s this way, sir. Consolidated had a thinking machine. It’s broken.”
“What?” Robertson half rose.
“That’s right. Broken! It’s kaput. Nobody knows why, but I got hold of some pretty interesting guesses—like, for instance, that they asked it to give them an interstellar engine with the same set of information they came to us with, and that it cracked their machine wide open. It’s scrap—just scrap now.”
“You get it, chief?” The general manager was wildly jubilant. “You get it? There isn’t any industrial research group of any size that isn’t trying to develop a space-warp engine, and Consolidated and U.S. Robots have the lead on the field with our super robot-brains. Now that they’ve managed to foul theirs up, we have a clear field. That’s the nub, the . . . uh . . . motivation. It will take them six years at least to build another and they’re sunk, unless they can break ours, too, with the same problem.”
The president of U.S. Robots bulged his eyes, “Why, the dirty rats—”
“Hold on, chief. There’s more to this.” He pointed a finger with a wide sweep, “Lanning, take it!”
Dr. Alfred Lanning viewed the proceedings with faint scorn—his usual reaction to the doings of the vastly better-paid business and sales divisions. His unbelievable gray eyebrows hunched low and his voice was dry:
“From a scientific standpoint the situation, while not entirely clear, is subject to intelligent analysis. The question of interstellar travel under present conditions of physical theory is . . . uh . . . vague. The matter is wide open—and the information given by Consolidated to its thinking machine, assuming these we have to be the same, was similarly wide open. Our mathematical department has given it a thorough analysis, and it seems Consolidated has included everything. Its material for submission contains all known developments of Franciacci’s space-warp theory, and, apparently, all pertinent astrophysical and electronic data. It’s quite a mouthful.”
Robertson followed anxiously. He interrupted, “Too much for The Brain to handle?”
Lanning shook his head decisively, “No. There are no known limits to The Brain’s capacity. It’s a different matter. It’s a question of the Robotic Laws. The Brain, for instance, could never supply a solution to a problem set to it if that solution would involve the death or injury of humans. As far as it would be concerned, a problem with only such a solution would be insoluble. If such a problem is combined with an extremely urgent demand that it be answered, it is just possible that The Brain, only a robot after all, would be presented with a dilemma, where it could neither answer nor refuse to answer. Something of the sort must have happened to Consolidated’s machine.”
He paused, but the general manager urged on, “Go ahead, Dr. Lanning. Explain it the way you explained it to me.”
Lanning set his lips and raised his eyebrows in the direction of Dr. Susan Calvin who lifted her eyes from her precisely folded hands for the first time. Her voice was low and colorless.
“The nature of a robot reaction to a dilemma is startling,” she began. “Robot psychology is far from perfect—as a specialist, I can assure you of that—but it can be discussed in qualitative terms, because with all the complications introduced into a robot’s positronic brain, it is built by humans and is therefore built according to human values.
“Now a human caught in an impossibility often responds by a retreat from reality: by entry into a world