"Asimov, Isaac - Robot City 01 - Odyssey - Michael P Kube-McDowell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Asimov Isaac)

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.
It made sense to him now. Of course Darla would try to protect him from the consequences of his own curiosity?unless he could make her see that he was different.
?Darla, I?m not the kind of person you were told to expect,? he said gently. ?I need something to do, something to think about. I can?t just sit here and wait. I can deal with bad news, if that?s what you?re hiding. What I can?t take is feeling helpless.?
It seemed as though she were prepared for his kind too, after all, but had only needed convincing that he was one. ?I understand, Derec. Of course I?ll be happy to tell you what I know.?
?Good. What ship are we from?? he asked. ?There?s no shipper?s crest or ship logo anywhere in the cabin.?
?This is a Massey Corporation G-85 Lifepod??
?You told me that already. What ship are we from??
Darla was silent for a moment. ?Massey Lifepods are the primary safety system on six of the eight largest general commercial space carriers??
?You don?t know??
?My customization option has not been initialized. Would you care for a game of chess??
?No.? Derec mused for a moment. ?So all you know how to do is shill for the manufacturer. Which means that we probably came from a privately owned ship?all the commercial carriers customize their gear.?
?I have no information in that area.?
Derec clucked. ?In fact, I think you do. Somewhere among your systems there has to be a data recorder, activated the moment the pod was ejected. It should tell you not only what ship we came from and where it was headed, but what?s happened since. It?s time to find out how smart you really are, Darla,? he said. ?We need to find that recorder and get into it.?
?I have no information about such a recorder.?
?Trust me, it?s there. If it wasn?t, there?d be no way to do postmortems after a ship disaster. Are you in control of the pod?s power bus??
?Yes.?
?Look for an uninterruptible line. That?ll be it.?
?Just a moment. Yes, there are two.?
?What are they called??
?My system map labels them 1402 and 1632. I have no further information.?
Derec reached for the water tube again. ?That?s all right. One will be the recorder, and the other is probably the locator beacon. We?re making progress. Now find the data paths that correspond with those power taps. They should tell us which one is which.?
?I?m sorry. I can?t.?
?They have to be there. The recorder will be taking data from your navigation module, from the environmental system, probably even an abstract of this conversation. There ought to be a whole forest of data paths.?
?I?m sorry, Derec. I am unable to do what you ask.?
?Why??
?When I run a diagnostic trace in that portion of the system, I am unable to find any unlabeled paths.?
?Can you show me your service schematic? Maybe I can find something.?
The icescape vanished and was replaced by a finely detailed projection of the lifepod?s logic circuits. Scanning it, Derec quickly found the answer. A smart data gate?a Maxwell junction?was guarding the data line to the recorder. The two systems were effectively isolated. Similar junctions stood between Darla and the inertial navigator, the locator beacon, and the environmental system.
This is all very odd, Derec thought. It wasn?t surprising that there was a lower-level autonomous system regulating routine functions. What was strange was how Darla was locked out of getting any information from it.
Coddling frightened survivors required tact and discretion. But robots were strongly disposed toward an almost painful honesty. Perhaps it had proven too difficult to program a Companion to put on a happy face while keeping grim secrets. Lying did unpredictable things to the potentials inside a positronic brain.