Untitled, p.1
Untitled, page 1
His Master's Voice
Analog – March 1962
(1962)*
Randall Garrett
Spaceship McGuire had lots of knowledge—but no wisdom. He was smart—but incredibly foolish. And, as a natural consequence, tended to ask questions too profound for any philosopher—questions like "Who are you?"
-
I'd been in Ravenhurst's office on the mountain-sized planetoid called Raven's Rest only twice before. The third time was no better; Shalimar Ravenhurst was one of the smartest operators in the Belt, but when it came to personal relationships, he was utterly incompetent. He could make anyone dislike him without trying.
When I entered the office, he was sitting behind his mahogany desk, his eyes focused on the operation he was going through with a wineglass and a decanter. He didn't look up at me as he said: "Sit down, Mr, Oak. Will you have some Madeira?"
I decided I might as well observe the pleasantries. There was no point in my getting nasty until he did. "Thank you, Mr. Ravenhurst, I will."
He kept his eyes focused on his work: It isn't easy to pour wine on a planetoid where the gee-pull is measured in fractions of a centimeter per second squared. It moves stewly, like ropy molasses, but you have to be careful not to be fooled by that. The viscosity is just as low as ever, and if you pour it from any great height, it will go scooting right out of the glass again. The momentum it builds up is enough to make it splash right out again in a slow-motion gush which gets it all over the place.
Besides which, even if it didn't splash, it would take it so long to fall a few inches that you'd die of thirst waiting for it.
Ravenhurst had evolved a technique from long years of practice. He tilted the glass and the bottle toward each other, their edges touching, like you do when you're trying to pour beer without putting a head on it. As soon as the wine wet the glass, the adhesive forces at work would pull more wine into the wine glass. To get capillary action on a low-gee asteroid, you don't need a capillary, by any means. The negative meniscus on the wine was something to see; the first time you see it, you get the eerie feeling that the glass is spinning and throwing the wine up against the walls by centrifugal force.
I took the glass he offered me (Careful! Don't slosh!) and sipped at it. Using squirt tubes would have been a hell of a lot easier and neater, but Ravenhurst liked to do things his way.
He put the stopper back in the decanter, picked up his own glass and sipped appreciatively. Not until he put it back down on the desk again did he raise his eyes and look at me for the first time since I'd come in.
"Mr. Oak, you have caused me considerable trouble."
"I thought we'd hashed all that out, Mr. Ravenhurst," I said, keeping my voice level.
"So had I. But it appears that there were more ramifications to your action than we had at first supposed." His voice had the texture of heavy linseed oil.
He waited, as if he expected me to make some reply to that. When I didn't, he sighed slightly and went on. "I fear that you have inadvertently sabotaged McGuire. You were commissioned to prevent sabotage, Mr. Oak, and I'm afraid that you abrogated your contract."
I just continued to keep my voice calm. "If you are trying to get back the fee you gave me, we can always take it to court. I don't think you'd win."
"Mr. Oak," he said heavily, "I am not a fool, regardless of what your own impression may be. If I were trying to get back that fee, I would hardly offer to pay you another one."
I didn't think he was a fool. You don't get into the managerial business and climb to the top and stay there unless you have brains. Ravenhurst was smart, all right; it was just that, when it came to personal relationships, he wasn't very wise.
"Then stop all this yak about an abrogated contract and get to the point," I told him.
"I shall. I was merely trying to point out to you that it is through your own actions that I find myself in a very trying position, and that your sense of honor and ethics should induce you to rectify the damage."
"My honor and ethics are in fine shape," I said, "but my interpretation of the concepts might not be quite the same as yours. Get to the point."
He took another sip of Madeira. "The robotocists at Viking tell me that, in order to prevent any further ... ah ... sabotage by unauthorized persons, the MGYR-7 was constructed so that, after activation, the first man who addressed orders to it would thenceforth be considered its ... ah ... master.
"As I understand it, the problem of defining the term 'human being' unambiguously to a robot is still unsolved. The robotocists felt that it would be much easier to define a single individual. That would prevent the issuing of conflicting orders to a robot, provided the single individual were careful in giving orders himself.
"Now, it appears that you, Mr. Oak, were the first man to speak to McGuire after he had been activated. Is that correct?"
"Is that question purely rhetorical," I asked him, putting on my best expression of innocent interest. "Or are you losing your memory?" I had explained all that to him two weeks before, when I'd brought McGuire and the girl here, so that Ravenhurst would have a chance to cover up what had really happened.
-
My sarcasm didn't faze him in the least. "Rhetorical. It follows that you are the only man whose orders McGuire will obey."
"Your robotocists can change that," I said. This time, I was giving him my version of "genuine" innocence. A man has to be a good actor to be a competent double agent, and I didn't want Ravenhurst to know that I knew a great deal more about the problem than he did.
He shook his head, making his jowls wobble. "No, they cannot. They realize now that there should be some way of making that change, but they failed to see that it would be necessary. Only by completely draining McGuire's memory banks and refilling them with new data can this bias be eliminated."
"Then why don't they do that?"
"There are two very good reasons," he said. And there was a shade of anger in his tone. "In the first place, that sort of operation takes time, and it costs money. If we do that, we might as well go ahead and make the slight changes in structure necessary to incorporate some of the improvements that the robotocists now feel are necessary. In other words, they might as well go ahead and build the MGYR-8, which is precisely the thing I hired you to prevent."
"It seems you have a point there, Mr. Ravenhurst." He'd hired me because things were shaky at Viking. If he lost too much more money on the McGuire experiment, he stood a good chance of losing his position as manager. If that happened some of his other managerial contracts might be canceled, too. Things like that can begin to snowball, and Ravenhurst might find himself out of the managerial business entirely.
"But," I went on, "hasn't the additional wasted time already cost you money?"
"It has. I was reluctant to call you in again—understandably enough, I think."
"Perfectly. It's mutual."
He ignored me. "I even considered going through with the rebuilding work, now that we have traced down the source of failure of the first six models. Unfortunately, that isn't feasible, either." He scowled at me.
"It seems," he went on, "that McGuire refuses to allow his brain to be tampered with. The self-preservation 'instinct' has come to the fore. He has refused to let the technicians and robotocists enter his hull, and be has threatened to take off and leave Ceres if any further attempts are made to ... ah ... disrupt his thinking processes."
"I can't say that I blame him," I said. "What do you want me to do? Go to Ceres and tell him to submit like a good boy?"
"It is too late for that, Mr. Oaks. Viking cannot stand any more of that kind of drain on its financial resources. I have been banking on the McGuire-type ships to put Viking Spacecraft ahead of every other spacecraft company in the System." He looked suddenly very grim and very determined. "Mr. Oak, I am certain that the robot ship is the answer to the transportation problems in the Solar System. For the sake of every human being in the Solar System, we must get the bugs out of McGuire!"
What's good for General Bullmoose is good for everybody, I quoted to myself. I'd have said it out loud, but I was fairly certain that Shalimar Ravenhurst was not a student of the classics.
"Mr. Oak, I would like you to go to Ceres and co-operate with the robotocists at Viking. When the MGYR-8 is finally built, I want it to be the prototype for a fast, safe, functional robot spaceship that can be turned out commercially. You can be of great service, Mr. Oak."
"In other words, I've got you over a barrel."
"I don't deny it."
"You know what my fees are, Mr. Ravenhurst. That's what you'll be charged. I'll expect to be paid weekly; if Viking goes broke, I don't want to lose more than a week's pay. On the other hand, if the MGYR-8 is successful, I will expect a substantial bonus."
"How much?"
"Exactly half of the cost of rebuilding. Half what it would take to build a Model 8 right now, and taking a chance on there being no bugs in it."
He considered that, looking grimmer than ever. Then he said: "I will do it on the condition that the bonus be paid off in installments, one each six months for three years after the first successful commercial ship is built by Viking."
"My lawyer will nail you down on that wording," I said, "but it's a deal. Is there anything else?"
"No."
"Then I think I'll leave for Ceres before you break a blood vessel."
"You continue to amaze me, Mr. Oak," he said. And the soft oiliness of his voice was the oil of vitriol. "Your compassion for your fellow man is a facet
I could almost see Shalimar Ravenhurst suddenly exploding and adding his own touch of color to the room.
And, on that gruesome thought, I left. I let him have his small verbal triumph; if he'd known that I'd have taken on the job for almost nothing, he'd really have blown up.
-
Ten minutes later, I was in my vacuum suit, walking across the glaring, rough-polished rectangle of metal that was the landing field of Raven's Rest. The sun was near the zenith in the black, diamond-dusted sky, and the shadow of my flitterboat stood out like an inkblot on a bridal gown. I climbed in, started the engine, and released the magnetic anchor that held the little boat to the surface of the nickel-iron planetoid. I lifted her gently, worked her around until I was stationary in relation to the spinning planetoid, oriented myself against the stellar background, and headed toward the first blinker beacon on refway to Ceres.
For obvious economical reasons, it is impractical to use full-sized spaceships in the Belt. A flitterboat, with a single gravitoinertial engine and the few necessities of life—air, some water, and a very little food—still costs more than a Rolls-Royce automobile does on Earth, but there has to be some sort of individual transportation the Belt.
They can't be used for any great distance because a man can't stay in a vac suit very long without getting uncomfortable. You have to hop from beacon to beacon, which means that your average velocity doesn't amount to much, since you spend too much time accelerating and decelerating. But a flitterboat is enough to get around the neighborhood in, and that's all that's needed.
I got the GM-187 blinker in my sights, eased the acceleration up to one gee, relaxed to watch the radar screen while I thought over my coming ordeal with McGuire.
Testing spaceships, robotic or any other kind, is strictly not my business. The sign on the door of my office in New York says: DANIEL OAK, Confidential Expediter; I'm hired to help other people Get Things Done. Usually, if someone came to me with the problem of getting a spaceship test-piloted, I'd simply dig up the best test pilot in the business, hire him for my client, and forget about everything but collecting my fee. But I couldn't have refused this case if I'd wanted to. I'd already been assigned to it by someone a lot more important than Shalimar Ravenhurst.
Every schoolchild who has taken a course in Government Organization and Function can tell you that the Political Survey Division is a Branch of the System Census Bureau of the UN Government, and that its job is to evaluate the political activities of various sub-governments all over the System. And every one of those poor tykes would be dead wrong.
The Political Survey Division does evaluate political activity, all right, but it is the Secret Service of the UN Government. The vast majority of the System's citizens don't even know the Government has a Secret Service. I happen to know only because I'm an agent of the Political Survey Division.
The PSD was vitally interested in the whole McGuire project. Robots of McGuire's complexity had been built before; the robot that runs the traffic patterns of the American Eastern Seaboard is just as capable as McGuire when it comes to handling a tremendous number of variables and making decisions on them. But that robot didn't have to be given orders except in extreme emergencies. Keeping a few million cars moving and safe at the same time is actually pretty routine stuff for a robot. And a traffic robot isn't given orders verbally; it is given any orders that may be necessary via teletype by a trained programming technician. Those orders are usually in reference to a change of routing due to repair work on the highways or the like. The robot itself can take care of such emergencies as bad weather or even an accident caused by the malfunctioning of an individual automobile.
McGuire was different. In the first place, he was mobile. He was in command of a spacecraft. In a sense, he was the spacecraft, since it served him in a way that was analogous to the way a human body serves the human mind. And he wasn't in charge of millions of objects with a top velocity of a hundred and fifty miles an hour; he was in charge of a single object that moved at velocities of thousands of miles per second. Nor did he have a set, unmoving highway as his pith; his paths were variable and led through the emptiness of space.
Unforeseen emergencies can happen at any time in space, most of them haying to do with the lives of passengers. A cargo ship would be somewhat less susceptible to such emergencies if there were no humans aboard; it doesn't matter much to a robot if he has no air in his hull.
But with passengers aboard, there may be times when it would be necessary to give orders—fast! And that means verbal orders, orders that can be given anywhere in the ship and relayed immediately by microphone to the robot's brain. A man doesn't have time to run to a teletyper and type out orders when there's an emergency in space.
That meant that McGuire had to understand English, and, since there has to be feedback in communication, he had to be able to speak it as well.
And that made McGuire more than somewhat difficult to deal with.
-
For more than a Century, robotocists have been trying to build Asimov's famous Three Laws of Robotics into a robot brain.
First Law: A robot shall not, either through action or inaction, allow harm to come to a human being.
Second Law: A robot shall obey the orders of a human being, except when such orders conflict with the First Law.
Third Law: A robot shall strive to protect its own existence, except when this conflicts with the First or Second Law.
Nobody has succeeded yet, because nobody has yet succeeded in defining the term "human being" in such a way that the logical mind of a robot can encompass the concept.
A traffic robot is useful only because the definition has been rigidly narrowed down. As far as a traffic robot is concerned, "human beings" are the automobiles on its highways. Woe betide any poor sap who tries, illegally, to cross a robot-controlled highway on foot. The robot's only concern would be with the safety of the automobiles, and if the only way to avoid destruction of an automobile were to be by nudging the pedestrian aside with a fender, that's what would happen.
And, since its orders only come from one place, I suppose that a traffic robot thinks that the guy who uses that typer is an automobile.
With the first six models of the McGuire ships, the robotocists attempted to build in the Three Laws exactly as stated. And the first six went insane.
If one human being says "jump left," and another says "jump right," the robot is unable to evaluate which human being has given the more valid order. Feed enough conflicting data into a robot brain, and it can begin behaving in ways that, in a human being, would be called paranoia or schizophrenia or catatonia or what-have-you, depending on the symptoms. And an insane robot is fully as dangerous as an insane human being controlling the same mechanical equipment, if not more so.
So the seventh model had been modified. The present McGuire's brain was impressed with slight modifications of the First and Second Laws.
If it is difficult to define a human being, it is much more difficult to define a responsible human being. One, in other words, who can be relied upon to give wise and proper orders to a robot, who can be relied upon not to drive the robot insane.
