Then, too, what if the robot is faced by a child of ten-indisputably human as far as the First Law is concerned. Must the robot obey without question the orders of such a child, or the orders of a moron, or the orders of a man lost in the quagmire of emotion and beside himself?
The problem of when to obey and when not to obey is so complicated and devilishly uncertain that I have rarely subjected my robots to these equivocal situations.
And that brings me to the matter of aliens.
The physiological difference between aliens and ourselves matters to us-but then tiny physiological or even cultural differences between one human being and another also matter. To Smith and Campbell, ancestry obviously mattered; to others skin color matters, or gender or eye shape or religion or language or, for goodness sake, even hairstyle.
It seems to me that to decent human beings, none of these superficialities ought to matter. The Declaration of Independence states that “All men are created equal.” Campbell, of course, argued with me many times that all men are manifestly not equal, and I steadily argued that they were all equal before the taw. If a law was passed that stealing was illegal, then no man could steal. One couldn’t say, “Well, if you went to Harvard and were a seventh-generation American you can steal up to one hundred thousand dollars; if you’re an immigrant from the British Isles, you can steal up to one hundred dollars; but if you’re of Polish birth, you can’t steal at all.” Even Campbell would admit that much (except that his technique was to change the subject).
And, of course, when we say that “All men are created equal” we are using “men” in the generic sense including both sexes and all ages, subjected to the qualification that a person must be mentally equipped to understand the difference between right and wrong.
In any case, it seems to me that if we broaden our perspective to consider non-human intelligent beings, then we must dismiss, as irrelevant, physiological and biochemical differences and ask only what the status of intelligence might be.
In short, a robot must apply the Laws of Robotics to any intelligent biological being, whether human or not.
Naturally, this is bound to create difficulties. It is one thing to design robots to deal with a specific non-human intelligence, and specialize in it, so to speak. It is quite another to have a robot encounter an intelligent species whom it has never met before.
After all, different species of living things may be intelligent to different extents, or in different directions, or subject to different modifications. We can easily imagine two intelligences with two utterly different systems of morals or two utterly different systems of senses.
Must a robot who is faced with a strange intelligence evaluate it only in terms of the intelligence for which he is programmed? (To put it in simpler terms, what if a robot, carefully trained to understand and speak French, encounters someone who can only understand and speak Farsi?)
Or suppose a robot must deal with individuals of two widely different species, each manifestly intelligent. Even if he understands both sets of languages, must he be forced to decide which of the two is the more intelligent before he can decide what to do in the face of conflicting orders-or which set of moral imperatives is the worthier?
Someday, this may be something I will have to take up in a story but, if so, it will give me a lot of trouble. Meanwhile, the whole point of the Robot City volumes is that young writers have the opportunity to take up the problems I have so far ducked. I’m delighted when they do. It gives them excellent practice and may teach me a few things, too.
Prologue
He woke up…somewhere.
He didn’t know where he was or how he had managed to get there. He didn’t remember anything of his past.
Not even his name.
He was in some small capsule without windows. He could not even see where he was going.
His awakening had stirred a computer into life, and through its positronic personality he found that he was in a Massey lifepod. A badge on his clothing identified him as Derec-the name seemed to fit as well as anything. The positronic intelligence built into the lifepod could help him with very little; it had no information to aid him at all, not even the name of the ship from which it had been ejected.
The lifepod had landed on an asteroid that Derec quickly found was inhabited by a colony of robots. He seemed to be the only human there. The robots were as little help to him as the lifepod. Strangely silent about their task, they ignored him for the most part. They were obviously looking for something buried in the rock of the asteroid-it seemed to be the only explanation. While he tried to decipher just what it was they were looking for and why, a raider ship appeared.
While the robot colony prepared to self-destruct, Derec made a desperate attempt to escape from the asteroid and contact the raider.
As he was doing so, the raider’s bombardment uncovered a shiny silver object, perhaps five centimeters by fifteen centimeters. He would later learn that it was called a “Key to Perihelion.” A pursuing robot revealed that this was the object for which the robots were so obsessively searching.
Derec grabbed the Key and jumped. With the power of his augmented worksuit and the almost nonexistent gravity of the asteroid, he reached escape velocity, angling for the raider. But suddenly his faceplate was filled with a glaring blue light, and he was knocked unconscious.
He awoke on the raider ship and was confronted by a strange creature: wolf-like but with fingers instead of paws and a flattened, fur-covered face. The alien’s name, as best he could pronounce it, was Wolruf. The creature escorted Derec to Aranimas, the captain of the raider ship, which seemed to be a jumble of half a dozen or more ships welded together in a patchwork maze.
Aranimas was also an alien, a humanoid of the Erani race, and very dangerous. Using a form of electrical prod, he tortured Derec to gain information as to what the robots were doing on the asteroid. Derec, of course, could tell him nothing. Aranimas then ordered Derec to put together a working robot from the salvaged parts from the asteroid and other raids.
Through Wolruf, Derec learned that Aranimas intended to replace the subservient Narwe race (who functioned as Aranimas’s crew) with even more docile robots. Derec found that he did indeed seem to know a great deal about robotics; the knowledge came naturally to him. He managed to salvage one positronic brain and enough working parts to create a patchwork robot he called Alpha. The most curious thing about the robot was one of its arms: made of tiny cellular surfaces that seemed infinitely malleable, it could literally shape itself into any form needed. Derec remembered that many of the structures on the asteroid bore that same unique design, and he was filled with a desire to meet the inventor of this new substance.
Aranimas’s constant mistreatment of Derec, Wolruf, and the Narwe made Derec determined to escape. With the use of Alpha, he and Wolruf successfully mutinied against Aranimas. They also met another prisoner on the ship, a human female named Katherine Ariel Burgess. Derec recovered the Key to Perihelion, and they escaped Aranimas’s ship, landing on a refueling station.
There Derec learned that Kate claimed to know something of his past but stubbornly refused to talk to him about it. He learned too, that she was suffering from some type of debilitating disease herself, and she also refused to talk about that.
The robots on the refueling station had taken the Key to Perihelion, and now it seemed that the bureaucrats who ran the Spacer society were also after the Key. Derec, with Ariel and Wolruf’s help, recovered it. Through a mistake, Kate activated the Key while Derec was holding it. In an instant, the two were transported to Perihelion, a cold, formless place of gray fog. Pressing the switch on the Key again, they found themselves on top of a huge pyramidal tower in the middle of a city.