The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (55 page)

It was not because Asimov’s robots were dangerous that this control was necessary, but because they were all touched by transcendence: RB-34, in Asimov’s third robot story “Liar!” is telepathic. QT-1 is a robotic prophet. Even the least-common-denominator robot, Robbie, is superhumanly faithful and loving and kind.

When Cutie claims that no being can create another being superior to itself, it seems that he must be mistaken. For apparently that is what human beings—in collaboration with the glitch factor—have done. Humanity designs the physical and mental form of the robot. The uncertainty of the universe does the rest.

We can see the glitch factor at work in “Liar!” where it is invoked at the beginning of the story to account for robot RB-34’s otherwise unaccountable ability to read minds. One human says to another: “ ‘Listen, Bogert. There wasn’t a hitch in the assembly from start to finish. I guarantee that.’ ”
⁴¹⁷

But Bogert, who is a mathematician, replies:

“If you can answer for the entire assembly line, I recommend your promotion. By exact count, there are seventy-five thousand, two hundred and thirty-four operations necessary for the manufacture of a single positronic brain, each separate operation depending for successful completion upon any number of factors, from five to a hundred and five. If any one of them goes seriously wrong, the ‘brain’ is ruined.”
⁴¹⁸

Only not precisely ruined this time: made transcendent. This sort of accident has a way of happening to Asimov’s robots. They seem to have some latent tendency toward transcendence inherited from their wild Techno Age ancestors.

It is only their bondage to the Three Laws of Robotics that makes these powerful robots tolerable to humanity. However they may choose to behave on their own time, we can have confidence that these strange servitors we have created will not injure us and that they must do whatever we tell them to do.

In fact, “Liar!” is specifically concerned with a conflict between the transcendent power of a robot and the Laws of Robotics, which is resolved in favor of Campbell’s and Asimov’s in-built rules.

In “Liar!,” RB-34 has the special ability to read human minds. But Herbie, as he is familiarly called, has the bad habit of lying to people about the thoughts he reads.

Herbie is bound by the Laws of Robotics not to do harm. But he believes that if he speaks the truth about what he knows, he will destroy people’s illusions and cause them pain. To avoid this harm, he tells them whatever it is they most want to hear instead of the truth.

But this can lead to eventual greater pain, embarrassment, and chagrin. For instance, Herbie tells the spinster robot psychologist Dr. Susan Calvin that a man she has a crush on secretly loves her. But then, when she begins to reveal her own repressed emotions, she learns that the man is actually recently married and has no interest in her.

Herbie is able to identify the glitch in his manufacture that is responsible for robotic telepathic power. But a vindictive Dr. Calvin prevents him from revealing what he knows. She points out to him over and over again that if he tells the answer to human scientists, he will be showing them up, but if he doesn’t, he will be depriving them of what they want to know. Whatever Herbie does, then, he must cause harm to a human, and thus break the Laws of Robotics.

Dr. Calvin’s paradox is such an insoluble problem that poor Herbie is driven into a catatonic silence. There is certainly some degree of loss here—future robots will just have to do without the power of telepathy. But that must be reckoned a small cost, at least insofar as John Campbell and the modern science fiction public works project are concerned, beside Susan Calvin’s potent demonstration of the power to control inherent in the Laws of Robotics.

Asimov delivered “Liar!” to Campbell on January 20, 1941. And, for a second time, Campbell would ask for no revisions and get a check to Asimov within four days.

When the story was received, “Reason” was already in production, scheduled for the April 1941 issue of
Astounding.
To give Asimov’s stories of controlled robots maximum splash, Campbell rushed “Liar!” into the very next issue—where it would appear directly after “Universe,” Robert Heinlein’s lead novelet.

So it was, then, that when Asimov came to his story conference with John Campbell on March 17, 1941, the April issue of
Astounding
containing “Reason” was only three days from appearing on the newsstands, with “Liar!” due to follow in just one month.

If Asimov at this point could still look on himself as no more than a hopeful third-rater, this was because he had no way to appreciate the degree of importance his robot stories had for Campbell. The editor was bound to value these stories. More than any other work printed in the Golden Age
Astounding,
they visibly showed transcendent power responding to a set of explicitly stated operating principles.

But young Isaac Asimov had no basis as yet to perceive himself as a writer of bedrock modern science fiction—an exemplar of what the new Campbell
Astounding
was all about. The applause and recognition he would receive all lay in the future. In fact, Asimov tells us quite frankly:

In time to come, van Vogt, Heinlein, and I would be universally listed among the top authors of the Golden Age, but van Vogt and Heinlein were that from the very beginning. Each blazed forth as a first-magazine star at the moment his first story appeared, and their status never flagged throughout the remainder of the Golden Age. I, on the other hand (and this is not false modesty), came up only gradually. I was very little noticed for a while and came to be considered a major author by such gradual steps that despite the healthy helping of vanity with which I am blessed, I myself was the last to notice.
⁴¹⁹

“Nightfall” was the story that would first cause Asimov to be taken as a writer of significance. When Asimov came to the crucial story conference in March 1941 that resulted in “Nightfall,” he was right in the midst of his great leap from SF apprentice to master of modern science fiction.

Asimov may not have been consciously aware that he was in the middle of making this kind of shift at the moment that he was handed the crucial quotation from Emerson’s
Nature
and asked, “What do you think would happen, Asimov, if men were to see the stars for the first time in a thousand years?”

But Campbell most certainly did know what was happening to Asimov, and knew what he was doing in assigning him “Nightfall.” He may even have seen this plum of a story idea as a way to provide Asimov with an opportunity for self-recognition, the chance to wake to his own nature and discover that unbeknownst to himself he had become Isaac Asimov, master science fiction writer.

In the event, the youngster did make the most of his opportunity. Asimov sat right down to work on “Nightfall,” the writing went without a hitch, and early in April, only three weeks after their story conference, he turned in a 13,000-word novelet, the second-longest story he had ever attempted.

Campbell was thoroughly pleased with the story, asking only for minor revision to speed the opening. Not only did he offer Asimov hearty and unqualified praise for “Nightfall,” but this time he kicked in a twenty-five percent bonus.

Asimov’s story was placed in the lead spot of the September 1941 issue of
Astounding,
its advent heralded at length in the “In Times to Come” column in the preceding issue. And on the September cover, the climax of “Nightfall” was depicted in a particularly striking picture by Hubert Rogers.

For Isaac Asimov—who had grown up treating the SF magazines on sale in his father’s candy store with the utmost reverence, calculating the calendar of his life from one magazine on-sale date to the next, then reading each new magazine without breathing and putting it back on the newsstand without the slightest mar so that he could do it again the next time—it was all a dream come true, his fondest boyhood wish fulfilled. A lead story in
Astounding!

And a cover by Rogers, too—that wasn’t bad. Through the heart of the Golden Age, from April 1940 until August 1942, it was Hubert Rogers who painted every
Astounding
cover. Rogers’ pictures—simple, clean-cut, modern and definite—captured and expressed the pure visual essence of Campbellian science fiction.

SF cover illustration of the Thirties had emphasized great cities and gigantic machines. People were either not visible or were tiny dots lost in immensity. Rogers’
Astounding
covers moved men into the foreground of the future, portraying them as powerful and confident citizens of the world of tomorrow, masters of the mighty machines and cities.

However, the cover for “Nightfall” was not Rogers’ usual thing:

In this picture we are within a cavernous astronomical observatory dominated by a massive telescope. The aperture of the observatory dome gapes open, and in the slice of sky visible to us an overwhelming torrent of stars seems to tumble, cascade and. explode in a great showering display of cosmic fireworks. A man is running toward us, his eyes bright with fear, a torch in his hand newly extinguished and trailing smoke. Behind him, other men are frozen in postures of alarm and panic. And at the horizon, a city is on fire.

Here human mastery and control have collapsed. The heavens have opened wide, and the sky is falling.

The locus of Asimov’s story is the astronomical observatory of Saro University on the world of Lagash, a planet somewhere in time and space that has six suns in its sky. Four of these are named for us—Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta. (Presumably the two unnamed suns are Epsilon and Zeta.) Once in every two thousand forty-nine years, five suns set, while the remaining sun—Beta, a red dwarf—is eclipsed by a moon of Lagash that ordinarily cannot be seen. Then night falls on this perennially sunlit world, and the hidden stars shine forth.

This is the picture, at least, as it has been slowly and carefully pieced together by the scientists of Saro University, calling upon evidence and argument from a number of different fields of study. They may never have experienced the fall of night, they may not know what “the Stars”
⁴²⁰
are, but they are ready to say that darkness and disaster are coming.

We are here at the observatory in the company of Theremon 762, a skeptical reporter who views the predicted eclipse as a failure of nerve by science, a capitulation to ancient nonsense and superstition. What the academics are proposing sounds to him and to many other people like the central myth of the Cultists, a remnant religious group.

This myth is summarized for us by Sheerin 501, a psychologist at the university:

“The Cultists said that every two thousand and fifty years Lagash entered a huge cave, so that all the suns disappeared, and there came
total darkness all over the world!
And then, they say, things called Stars appeared, which robbed men of their souls and left them unreasoning brutes, so that they destroyed the civilization they themselves had built up. Of course, they mix all this up with a lot of religio-mystic notions, but that’s the central idea.”
⁴²¹

For Theremon, it is the scientists of Saro University who have become mixed up by a lot of religio-mystic notions. And he is ready to face university director Aton 77 and tell him so:

“This is not the century to preach ‘the end of the world is at hand’ to Lagash. You have to understand that people don’t believe the ‘Book of Revelations’ any more, and it annoys them to have scientists turn about face and tell us the Cultists are right after all—”
⁴²²

But Aton cuts him off to say:

“No such thing, young man. . . . While a great deal of our data has been supplied to us by the Cult, our results contain none of the Cult’s mysticism. Facts are facts, and the Cult’s so-called ‘mythology’ has certain facts behind it. We’ve exposed them and ripped away their mystery. I assure you that the Cult hates us now worse than you do.”
⁴²³

So Theremon asks to be informed of the science that lies behind the scientists’ prediction of universal darkness and insanity. And in the hours before the great eclipse descends, psychologist Sheerin takes him aside for a drink and lays all the evidence out for him, bit by bit.

What a truly wonderful situation it is that we find ourselves in! Such is the power of modern science fiction to set forth any special case that it can actually locate and describe a planet like Lagash, with its six suns, its moon that is never directly seen, and its incredibly lopsided cycle of day and night.

But what turns this unique situation into a marvel is that Lagash is also a near twin of contemporary Earth. Whatever
can
be the same in both places
is
the same.

Men are men on Lagash, with teeth and with toes and with Adam’s apples that bob when they swallow. Their blood is red, and they whistle and sweat and frown. They listen to the radio. They read the papers. For amusement, they ride the roller coaster. They work as photographers, astronomers, carpenters and electricians.

On Lagash, just as in 1941 America, liquor is poured from bottles and drunk in glasses, floors are covered by carpets, clothes have collars, time is reckoned in hours and minutes, and crazy people are trussed up in straitjackets and given injections of morphine to cool them out.

Even the current states of social development here and there are identical. On Lagash, a societal stage in which traditional religious belief was central has been superseded by a phase based upon rationality, science and technology—exactly as in the Twentieth Century Western culture which formed Isaac Asimov and for which he was writing this story.

There are certain differences between the two worlds. Perhaps because the people of Lagash live all their lives in a state of perpetual daylight, in the ordinary way of things they would appear to be a tad more rational than Earthmen have ever managed to be. At least they all have scientific-utopian zip-code names like Beenay 25 and Yimot 70, and apparently always have. Even a prophet in the ancient “Book of Revelations” was named Vendret 2.