“Yes, but the Auroran ship is now gone, apparently, so that the captain seems to have negotiated to good effect.”
“He has done so in a manner of which you were apparently not aware. I was—to an extent. Though the captain was not here with us, I had little trouble sensing his mind. It exuded overwhelming tension and suspense and underneath that a gathering and strengthening sense of loss.”
“Loss, friend Giskard? Were you able to determine of what that loss might consist?”
“I cannot describe my method of analysis of such things, but the loss did not seem to be the type of loss I have, in the past associated with generalities or with inanimate objects. It had the touch—that is not the word, but there is no other that fits even vaguely—of the loss of a specific person.
“Lady Gladia.”
“Yes.”
“That would be natural, friend Giskard. He was faced with the possibility of having to give her up to the Auroran vessel.”
“It was too intense for that. Too wailing.”
“Too wailing?”
“It is the only word I can think of in this connection. There was a stressful mourning associated with the sense of loss. It was not as though Lady Gladia would move elsewhere and be unavailable for that reason. That might, after all, be corrected at some future time. It was as though Lady Gladia would cease existing—would die—and be forever unavailable.”
“He felt, then, that the Aurorans would kill her? Surely that is not possible.”
“Indeed, not possible. And that is not it. I felt a thread of a sense of personal responsibility associated with the deep, deep fear of loss. I searched other minds on board ship and, putting it all together, I came to the suspicion that the captain was deliberately charging his ship into the Auroran vessel.”
“That, too, is not possible, friend Giskard,” said Daneel in a low voice.
“I had to accept it. My first impulse was to alter the captain’s emotional makeup in such a way as to force him to change course, but I could not. His mind was so firmly set, so saturated with determination and—despite the suspense, tension, and dread of loss—so filled with confidence of success—”
“How could there be at once a dread of loss through death and a feeling of confidence of success?”
“Friend Daneel, I have given up marveling at the capacity of the human mind to maintain two opposing emotions simultaneously. I merely accept it. In this case, to have attempted to alter the captain’s mind to the point of turning the ship from its course would have killed him. I could not do that.”
“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?”