Isaac Asimov's I, Robot: To Preserve Read online

  Seconds passed like eternities before Susan found herself peering through the open door of the Psychiatry Laboratory, along with so many others. The four large laboratory tables, pushed together, still filled most of the interior, but now a body sprawled across them. Five brave or foolhardy volunteers worked around it, one swearing viciously as he attempted to insert an endotracheal tube while blood saturated his rubber gloves, pants, and shoes. A mature male nurse hovered around him, clutching an electronic breathing device, an EBD, that had replaced Ambu bags shortly before Susan had started her training.

  The resident attempting the intubation fully blocked Susan’s view of the victim’s face, but the formal clothing and sturdy form suggested Ari Goldman. Cody Peters was taller and painfully lean, and Susan already intuitively knew it had to be one of the brilliant researchers lying, limp and supine, on those research tables.

  Another resident slapped at the victim’s extremities, seeking a hint of vein open enough to accept an intravenous catheter. A stubby surgical resident in scrubs tore open a sterile cut-down tray while an ICU nurse attended a crash cart, blindly handing out requested items, her hands moving from habit, her attention glued to the farthest corner of the room.

  There, several hospital security officers in pale green uniforms pinned a giant of a man, wearing neat but casual clothing, against one of the walls. The security officers kept exchanging glances, as if they had no real idea of what to do next. Their quarry did not appear to resist in any way, standing stone still and making no sound while three sets of beefy hands pressed his face and upper body against the cement blocks. Susan caught sight of a bloody tool lying on the floor near their feet, possibly a wrench or a hammer. Apparently it, not a gun, was the “silver” portion of the code.

  The perpetrator was taller and younger than his captors, physically fit, and probably capable of overpowering them despite their numbers and bulk. Hospital security did not carry guns, either; and they looked too nervous to maintain control without police backup, even with their quarry disarmed and cooperative, at least for the moment. That explained why so many of the health-care workers hung back, afraid to enter the room. The doctors and nurses could have returned to work, but curiosity held them in place, clogging the hallways and making it more difficult for those dedicated to the resuscitation despite the danger.

  Susan took in all of this as she rushed to assist, without hesitation. By the expanding pool at the intubator’s feet and the pallor of Ari’s skin, Susan could tell he had lost a significant amount of blood. Appropriately, the nurse abandoned her efforts at intravenous catheter placement and started prepping a tibia for intraosseous access. The surgeon had the sterile tray open and clearly planned a central line. An emergency pacemaker perched on Ari’s chest like some outlandish space alien, pumping timed electrical pulses to his heart at eighty beats per minute. The circulatory system was reasonably under control, so Susan turned her focus to assisting airway and breathing.

  The resident attempting the intubation stepped back, still clutching the slimy plastic ET tube in one hand and the metal laryngoscope in the other. The male nurse clamped the EBD to Ari’s face, and it pulsed oxygen into his mouth and nose, raising his oximetry reading from a dangerous sixty-eight to a somewhat less dangerous eighty-two. Sweat slicked the intubator’s forehead, and a comma of sandy hair had slid into his eyes. He tossed his head to free it, without success.

  Susan brushed it aside for him, then slipped on a pair of gloves. “Need help?”

  Soft dark eyes met Susan’s steely gray, and she read frustration and a trace of guilty hope. He would have liked nothing better than to hand the onerous job to someone else. “I’m usually great at this,” he said, “but this one’s not going to happen. Can’t position the head right with . . .” He made a broad gesture that forced Susan to look directly at the facial features for the first time. Until that moment, she did not realize she had been avoiding it, knowing but not truly wanting to know. The lined features, broad nose, and weathered and gruff countenance, even so near death, defined Ari Goldman. The coarse brown hair was clotted with blood and no longer fell in neat waves across his scalp.

  Something had struck the back of Ari’s skull with a force so brutal it had smashed through some of the densest bone in human anatomy, tearing a chunk free along with the dura mater, creating a hole that emitted copious amounts of blood and left the brain wholly unprotected—and visible. Susan had seen some horrific sights, particularly in the last couple of years, but nothing compared with this. She wanted to scream and vomit simultaneously but forced herself not to react at all, focusing instead on studying the wound with her usual professionalism. There was direct and deliberate damage to the brain tissue; and, no doubt, the impact had sheared it from the brain stem. Even if they resuscitated Dr. Ari Goldman, he would, at best, be respirator – and pacemaker-dependent, paralyzed, and unlikely to think at more than an animal level. Better, she thought, to let him die with whatever small dignity remained to him.

  Susan’s mind flashed back to the heart-pounding moment when homicide detective Jake Carson had abruptly fired several rounds into an obviously dead enemy. The cop had called it a “nonstandard response” or NSRing, explaining that “anyone worth shooting once was worth shooting seven times.” She knew she was seeing the head-bashing equivalent of an NSR, overkill in its most literal sense. The perpetrator had taken the time and energy to assure that Ari Goldman would not survive the attack.

  Susan also understood her fellow resident’s frustration. In order to visualize the anatomy of the throat and get the tube down the proper hole, he needed to tip Ari’s head backward. However, in this case, he could not risk doing so without causing more damage or further contaminating the open wound. Placing an endotracheal tube under normal circumstances was difficult. Blind, it required the expertise of a long-practiced anesthesiologist with specialized instruments. In this situation, it was impossible.

  “He’s going to need a cricothyrotomy,” Susan pointed out dully. She almost hoped the other resident would refuse. In Ari’s position, Susan would rather die.

  The surgeon sang out, “I’m on it.” He snapped off the gloves he had used for the central line and addressed the crash-cart nurse. “Crike tray.” Like most of his ilk, he relished procedures, especially ones he rarely got to perform.

  The nurse dragged her attention from the security officers to the drawers, seeking the proper equipment.

  Though only four years ago, it seemed like an eternity since Susan had performed her surgical rotation. She could still remember Dr. Stephen Coppinger’s admonition verbatim: “When it comes to brain trauma, never give up. Sometimes, the goriest open injuries are surgically manageable while what appears grossly normal may hide a fatal bleed.” It was not for the medical team to decide what the neurosurgeons could piece together, but Susan knew Dr. Coppinger’s words referred to a specific phenomenon that did not apply here. The fatality of head trauma usually stemmed from an increase in intracranial pressure that crushed or damaged the tissue. An open wound allowed space for swollen tissues to expand, eliminating the need for emergent burr holes. Every instinct told her they could not salvage any significant portion of Ari Goldman’s cerebral cortex, but she knew they had to try.

  Nothing else mattered, Susan realized, if they could not stop the bleeding. It did no good to oxygenate empty vessels or stimulate a heart devoid of blood flow. Yet how to do so eluded her. Neither direct pressure nor styptics seemed feasible in a situation involving exposed and scrambled brain tissue. It would only invite infection, which would adversely affect whatever positive outcome remained. She had no real choice. Antibiotics might forestall infection, but at the moment only direct pressure against the scalp could prevent him from bleeding out. Grabbing handfuls of gauze, she set to the task.

  The other medical physician tossed the gory endotracheal tube into a hole in the crash cart meant for potentially biohazardous garbage. Cl
early relieved to abandon his hopeless task for something more constructive, he began the proper calls for fluids and stimulants, forcing the cart nurse to attend him and the surgeon simultaneously. Both hands clutching gauze against flesh, Susan turned her attention back to hospital security. She had lost track of them in the need to assist with medical procedures, and she knew Jake would denigrate her for what could have been a fatal lapse.

  A well-muscled, uniformed policeman came through the door, accompanied by a stocky female officer who stood a few inches taller. Both sported crew cuts, the man’s straw blond and the woman’s almost black. They bore an air of confidence and authority that drew nearly every eye. The woman barked out, “What do you got?” to the hospital security detail.

  The three kept their hands on the man pinned to the wall, while the others turned to face the police. One of the latter spoke. “He assaulted somebody.” He made a vague gesture toward Ari Goldman and the working medical staff.

  The male officer moved with a speed that belied his bulk, snapping handcuffs onto the unresisting man pressed against the wall. That simple, effective action seemed to bring down the level of urgency a hundredfold, despite the dying man stretched across several laboratory tables. The cop spoke directly to the perpetrator, though Susan could not hear what he said. Only then, Susan realized how tall the subdued man was; the top of the male cop’s head barely reached his shoulder. There had to be a foot of difference between them. No doubt, the policeman was relatively short, perhaps five foot six or five foot seven, but it also meant the would-be killer was colossal.

  Six foot six. Six foot seven. The same height as my father. A thought intruded. The same height as Nate. Susan remembered hearing something about how the size of the positronic brain required a larger head and, proportionately, a taller body in order to appear appropriately human.

  Susan clutched tighter to the gauze, pressing it fiercely against the lacerated edges of scalp. The brain itself felt no pain, had no significant bleeding. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. It was the First Law of Robotics: supreme, inviolate. No matter how right her intuition had been about her father, about Ari Goldman, Susan’s current abstraction was madness. She knew no positronic robot could so much as deliberately scratch a man’s arm, let alone club him with a household tool. No matter if it seethed with rage, no matter the circumstances, no matter who commanded it, no positronic robot or programmer could circumvent the First Law.

  This had become all too clear the previous year. Falsely believing her parents had a code that could inactivate the Three Laws of Robotics, the Society for Humanity had murdered them when Susan was only four years old. Just last year, they had discovered John Calvin still living and slaughtered him a second time, unaware they had actually destroyed a positronic robot USR had created to replace him. Under the same misapprehension, a Department of Defense Intelligence Exploitation Agency, code name Cadmium, had hounded Susan and her companions in an attempt to wrest the same information from her with the intention of weaponizing robots.

  Suddenly, the monitor alarm shrilled. Gasps startled from several onlookers, the police whirled, and Susan stiffened so abruptly, pain lanced through every muscle.

  “Damn it!” The surgeon ripped off his soiled gloves and threw them on the table before stabbing off the alarm. The display recorded the regular zaps of the portable pacemaker, but the heart itself was sending off crazily irregular and tiny blips. The oximeter reading was falling fast, currently in the twenty percent range. The cricothyrotomy was finished, and the male nurse held the EBD against the opening, flushing it with pulses of one hundred percent oxygen, to no avail.

  The medical resident who moved from attempting intubation to leading the code waved the others away from Ari Goldman’s limp body. “Stop ACLS.” The nurse shut off the pacemaker, and the heart rate dropped almost instantly to zero. The oximeter blinked, searching for a nonexistent pulse. The leader glanced at his Vox. “Time of death: two thirty-four p.m.”

  The male policeman’s voice broke the sudden, tense hush as he addressed his partner. “Call homicide.” Seizing the cuffed man by the upper arm, he turned him from the wall to reveal the familiar features of N8-C, the eighth in the NC line, the robotic friend and confidant Susan knew as Nate.

  Chapter 2

  Half an hour later, Susan found herself pleading her case in the office of Aloise Savage, the chairman of the psychiatry residency program. In his sixties, the lanky psychiatrist paced the area between his leather desk chair and a wall covered in large, slowly changing pictures of his family. Susan could not help noticing that the route he trod showed dull wear while the rest of the green expanse of carpet appeared practically new. She sat in one of two folding chairs that resembled tiny trampolines. She had anticipated feeling as if she perched precariously on a bouncy table, but the seat molded to fit her hips and buttocks in a proper, and strangely comfortable, sitting position. She clutched at the metal tubing, seized by a similar need to pace but not wanting to appear to be mocking him or trying to engage in a silent parody of musical chairs.

  “Susan, we all deeply respected Dr. Goldman. I’m planning to attend the funeral, and I’ll bring as much of the staff as possible, in shifts, if necessary. But that’s not going to be for a few days, at least.”

  Susan knew Jews followed a principle called k’vot hamet, honoring the dead, which meant they had to bury a corpse as soon as possible. Dr. Goldman himself had described it to her when his mother-in-law had passed away. Susan also did not mention that most of the residents, and probably a good portion of the staff, had only known the researcher as a name at the top of multiple articles. She had worked with him, had gotten to know and appreciate him personally. “You don’t understand, sir. Dr. Goldman’s death is a terrible tragedy, in all senses of the word, but that’s not why I need the rest of the afternoon off. It’s Nate.”

  “Nate?” Aloise pulled at his beard. “Who’s Nate?”

  “Nate. N8-C. Hasbro’s resident robot.”

  Aloise stopped cold. He turned to face Susan directly. “What are you talking about?”

  The spottiness of the knowledge of Hasbro’s humanoid positronic robot worker never ceased to surprise Susan. According to Lawrence Robertson, CEO and founder of United States Robots and Mechanical Men, Nate had quietly come to work at Hasbro some two decades previously, a prototype intended to accustom staff and patients to the possibility of anthropomorphic robots. Due to what John Calvin had labeled the “Frankenstein Complex,” staff and visitors had, instead, mostly become terrified of the idea, and protesters from the Society for Humanity had joined the teeming mass that always haunted the entryways of progressive hospitals open to cutting-edge, and often politically dangerous, technology. That forced Nate to keep a low profile, the idea being that his origins would seep out slowly, after people had become used to his presence. A handful of the Hasbro staff regularly worked closely with Nate, but for the most part he was as invisible and unknown as any filing clerk.

  Susan realized she had made a strategic miscalculation, but, having come this far, could only plunge onward. “Sir, Nate has become a close friend and confidant of mine. He’s gotten me through the worst of times, and you know how hard I’ve had it the last couple of years.”

  Aloise’s features softened. “Of course, Susan. And you know we’ve made a lot of allowances for that.”

  Susan could not deny she had missed a significant amount of time due to circumstances beyond her control. The schedule of a medical resident did not allow for vacations or sick days. If they took off, even for an hour, someone had to cover for them; and that someone was normally another resident with just as little free time. Susan had done everything she could to make up the time she had lost, to the point where she felt as if she lived at Manhattan Hasbro Hospital, much more so than in her new apartment with its sparse furnishings. She had not been able to return to t
he apartment she had shared with her father, the scene of his murder, where the walls had gotten smashed and everything they owned cut into pieces in the search for the mythical Three Laws’ uncoupling code.

  “Yes,” Susan acknowledged. “And I do appreciate everything. But Nate . . . is in trouble. He’s confused and terrified. He has more book knowledge than anyone, but he doesn’t know much about police procedure, his rights—”

  “His rights?” Aloise repeated, still stroking his beard. A light flickered through his eyes, then blazed. “His rights! You mean . . . he’s the killer? You want me to grant you time off to assuage . . . the murderer of . . . of . . . ?” A mixture of warning and confusion filled his voice. He shook his head. “That can’t be what you’re asking.” He ambled to his chair and dropped into it, his head weaving side to side as if to rattle loose the logic in his own suggestion.

  Susan did not want to waste time discussing the matter. “Sir, Nate didn’t kill anyone. His programming wouldn’t allow it. But they believe he did, and he needs me.”

  Aloise only stared. “Susan,” he started, then stopped. He sighed deeply, and she wondered if he was about to question her sanity. During his time at Hasbro, he must have heard rumors of the possibility of a robot among them, even if he had no idea how human it appeared. “Susan, your request is denied. Your rightful place is on the PIPU. As much as you think this Nate needs you, we need you more. And you can’t afford to miss any more days.”

  Susan bit her lower lip, her mind drifting back to the times she had relied on Nate, first for friendship and companionship, then for support. John Calvin had always been her anchor in the most turbulent times, a role model as well as the best father she could ever imagine anyone having. Now he was gone, and the nearest thing to him, the eighth in the “New Calvin” line, one of only two remaining humanoid positronic robots, needed her. If her absence for half a day meant the possible deaths of one or more patients, she would have faced a difficult choice. “Sir, I’m sorry, but I’m not asking. Nate needs my help immediately, and I’m going to assist him.”