“Who are you?” he demanded. “Where are you? Where am I?”
“I am Darla, your Companion. Please try to remain calm. We’re in no immediate danger.” The voice, coming from the command panel before him, was more clearly female now. “You are inside a Massey Corporation Model G-85 Lifepod. Massey has been the leader in spacesafety systems for more than… ”
While Darla continued on with her advertisement, he twisted his head about as he reexamined the compartment. I should have known that, he thought. Of course. A survival pod. Even the nameMassey was familiar. “Why are there no controls?”
“All G-series pods have been designed to independently evaluate the most productive strategy and respond appropriately.”
Of course, he thought. You don’t know who’s going to climb into a pod, or what kind of condition they’ll be in. “You’re not a person. What are you, then? A computer program?”
“I am a positronic personality,” Darla said cheerfully. “The Companion concept is the Massey Corporation’s unique contribution to humane safety systems.”
Yes. Someone to talk to. Someone to help him pass hours of waiting without thinking about what it would mean if he weren’t found. The full picture dawned on him. All survival pods were highly automated. This one was more. It was a robot-presumably programmed as a therapist and charged with keeping him sane and stable.
A robot-
A human had a childhood. A robot did not. A human learned. A robot was programmed. A robot deprived of the core identity which was supposed to be integrated before activation might “awake” and find he had knowledge without experience, and wonder who and what he was-
Suddenly he bit down on his lower lip.
How does a robot experience sensor overload? As pain?
When he tasted blood, he relaxed his jaw. He would take the outcome of his little experiment at face value. He was human. In some ways, that was the more disturbing answer.
“Why have you done harm to yourself?” Darla intruded.
He sighed. “Just to be sure I could. Do you know whoI am?”
“Your badge identifies you as Derec.”
He looked down past the neck ring and saw for the first time that there was a datastrip in the badge holder on the right breast of the safesuit. The red printing, superimposed on the fractured black-and-white coding pattern, indeed read DEREC.
He said the name aloud, experimentally: “Derec.” It seemed neither familiar nor foreign to his tongue. His ear heard it as a first name, even though it was more likely a surname.
But if I’m Derec, why does the safesuit fit so poorly?The waist ring and chest envelope would have accommodated someone with a much stockier build. And when he tried to straighten his cramped legs, he found that the suit’s legs were a centimeter or two short of allowing him to do so comfortably.
I certainly was shorter once-maybe I was heavier, too. It could be my old suit-one I wouldn’t have used except in an emergency. Or it could be my ID, but someone else’s suit.
“Can you scan the datastrip on the badge?” he asked hopefully. “There should be a photograph-a citizenship record-kinship list. Then I’d know for sure.”
“I’m sorry. There’s no data reader in the pod, and my optical sensors can’t resolve a pattern that fine.”
Frowning, he said, “Then I guess I’ll be Derec, for now.”
He paused and collected his thoughts. To know his name-if it was his name-did nothing to relieve his feelings of emptiness. It was as though he had lost his internal compass, and with it, the ability to act on his own behalf. The most he could do now was react.
“All of the pod’s environmental systems are working well,” Darla offered brightly. “Rescue vessels should be on their way here now.”
Her words reminded him that there was a problem more important in the short run than puzzling out who he was. Survival had to come first. In time, perhaps the things he did know would tell him what he had forgotten.
He was in a survival pod. His mind took that one fact and began to build on it. When he shifted position in his harness, he noted how the slightest movement set the pod to rocking, despite the fact that its mass could hardly be less than five hundred kilograms. He extended an arm and let the muscles go limp. It took a full second to fall to his side.
A hundredth of a gee at best.I’m in a survival pod on the surface of a low-gravity world. I was in a starcraft, on my way somewhere, when something happened. Perhaps that’s why I can’t remember, or perhaps the shock of landing-
There was no window or port anywhere in the pod, not even a hatch peephole. But if he couldn’t see, perhaps Darla could.
“Where are we, Darla?” he asked. “What kind of place did you land us on?”
“Would you like me to show you our surroundings? I have a limpet pack available.”
Derec knew the term, though he wondered where he had learned it. A limpet pack was a disc-shaped sensor array capable of sliding across the outer surface of a smooth-hulled space craft-a cheaper but more trouble-prone substitute for a full array of sensor mounts. “Let’s see.”
The interior lights dimmed, and the central third of the hatch became the background for a flatscreen projection directed down from the command board overhead. Derec looked out on an ice and rock landscape that screamed its wrongness to him. The horizon was too close, too severely curved. It had to be a distortion created by the camera, or a false horizon created by a foreground crater.
“Scan right,” he said.
But everywhere it was the same: a jumble of orange-tinged ice studded with gray rock, merging at the horizon into the velvet curtain of space. He could see no distinct stars in the sky, but that was likely to be due to the limited resolving power of the limpet, and not because of any atmosphere. The planetoid’s gravity was too slight to hold even the densest gases, and the jagged scarps showed no signs of atmospheric weathering.
In truth, it looked like a leftover place, the waste of star-and planet-making, a forgotten world which had not changed since the day it was made. It was a cold world, and a sterile one, and, in all probability, a deserted one.
Formerly deserted, he corrected himself. “Moon or asteroid?” he asked Darla.
“No matter where we are, we are safe,” Darla said ingenuously. “We must trust in the authorities to locate and retrieve us.”
Derec could foresee quickly growing weary of that sort of evasion. “How can I trust in that when I don’t know where we are and what the chances are that we’ll be found? I know that this pod doesn’t have a full-recycle environmental system. No pod ever does. Do you deny it?” He waited a moment for an answer, then plunged on. “How much of a margin did the Massey Corporation decide was enough? Ten days? Two weeks?”
“Derec, maintaining the proper attitude is crucial to-”
“Save the therapist bit, will you?” Darren sighed. “Look, I know you’re trying to protect me. Some people cope better that way-what they don’t know and all that. But I’m different. I need information, not reassurance. I need to know what you know. Understand? Or should I start digging into your guts and looking for it myself?”
Derec was puzzled when Darla did not answer. It dawned on him slowly that he must have presented her with a dilemma which her positronic brain was having difficulty resolving-but there should have been no dilemma. Darla was obliged by the Second Law of Robotics to answer his questions.
The Second Law said, “A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.”
A question was an order-and silence was disobedience. Which could only be if Darla was following her higher obligation under the First Law.
The First Law said, “A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”
Darla had to know how small the chance of rescue was, even within a star system, even along standard trajectories. And Darla knew as well as any robot could what sort of harm that fact could do to the emotional balance of a human being. The typical survivor, already terrorized by whatever events brought him into the lifepod, would respond with despair, a loss of the will to live.