Isaac Asimov's Utopia Read online

  Kresh chuckled darkly. “That’s putting it mildly.”

  Lentrall looked toward Kresh, and smiled thinly. “I suppose you have a point, sir. But what confuses me is the name. ‘Donald.”

  “It’s a fancy of mine to use character names from an ancient storyteller for all my custom-made robots,” said Fredda. “A man who lived on old Earth, in the pre-robotic era. A man by the name of—”

  “Shakespeare,” said Lentrall. “I know that. William Shakespeare. And just incidentally, I think it might be more accurate to call him a poet and a playwright, rather than a storyteller. I have studied him myself. That’s what made me wonder. The names of your other robots: Caliban, Prospero, Ariel. All Shakespeare. I even saw some sort of feature story about your home, and noticed your current personal robot is named Oberon. Shakespeare again. That is why I wonder. Why the name ‘Donald’?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Sir, if I might be of assistance,” Donald said, addressing Lentrall. “I am named for a minor character in the play Macbeth.”

  “But there is no character by that name in the play,” Lentrall replied. “I know the play well. In fact, I am morally certain there is no character by the name ‘Donald’ anywhere in Shakespeare.” Lentrall thought for a moment. “There is a Donalbain in Macbeth,” he suggested. “ ‘Donald’ must be a corruption of ‘Donalbain.’ “

  “Sir, forgive me for correcting you, but I have just consulted my on-board dataset, and I have confirmed the character is named ‘Donald.’ “

  “Of course he is, in your copy,” Lentrall said. “If Dr. Leving’s copy was corrupted, and your on-board reference is based on it, of course it has the name wrong as well. A lot of errors creep into the ancient texts over time.”

  “Might it be possible, sir, that your copy of the play is in error?” Donald suggested.

  “Anything might be possible, but I very much doubt my copy is in error. I am something of a collector of such things, and I possess four different sets of Shakespeare, three as datasets and one a hard copy. There’s not a ‘Donald’ in any of them.”

  “I see,” said Donald, clearly taken aback by Lentrall’s news. “Clearly I must review my on-board dataset.”

  “Interesting,” said Lentrall as Donald retreated to his wall niche. “I suppose the moral is that we never know quite as much as we think we know. Wouldn’t you agree, Dr. Leving?”

  “Hmmm? What? Oh, yes.” Fredda felt completely thrown off her stride. How could she have made a mistake like that? What other mistakes had she made over the years without even knowing it? It was remarkable how such a trivial error could make her feel so embarrassed.

  And it was also remarkable that Lentrall could be rude and arrogant enough to call her on it the moment they met. Yet the fellow seemed to have no idea that had been rude. Davlo Lentrall was a most peculiar young man—and not one with the sort of skills and personality required to get far in politics. Lucky for him he had chosen another field.

  But none of this was getting the discussion moving. “Perhaps it is time to turn to the matter at hand,” she said.

  “Absolutely,” said Lentrall. “How much do you know so far?”

  Fredda hesitated, and glanced toward her husband. But his impassive expression gave her no clue. “Just to be clear, Dr. Lentrall, my husband has told me nothing at all. He wanted me to hear it all from you. So please, start at the beginning.”

  “Right,” Lentrall said, in a tone close enough to brusque that it made no difference. “The basic point is that I believe I have found a way to enhance the terraforming process and permanently stabilize the climate.”

  “But only by putting the lives of perhaps millions of people at risk,” said Lentrall’s robot from its niche.

  “Be quiet, Kaelor,” Lentrall said impatiently.

  “First Law compelled me to say at least that much,” the robot replied, in an aggrieved tone of voice. “Your plan of action would put many human beings in danger.”

  “I would hardly call it danger,” Lentrall said testily. “Rather, very slight risk. But if my plan succeeds, it will mean greater safety and comfort for generations of humans yet to come.”

  “That argument contains far too many hypotheticals to be of any interest to me,” Kaelor replied.

  “You have made your point now,” Lentrall said. “I order you to be quiet.” He shook his head and looked to Fredda. “I know you are famous for building superb robots,” he said. “But there are times when I wonder if the Settlers don’t have a point.”

  “The same thought has crossed my mind more than once,” said Fredda. “But please go on. How do you propose to stabilize the climate?”

  “By flooding the north pole,” Lentrall said. “I call it the Polar Sea Project.”

  “What, precisely, would that accomplish?” Fredda asked.

  Lentrall stared hard at her for a moment, as if she had just asked what use robotic labor might be. “Let me go back a bit,” he said at last. “In fact, let me go all the way back. As you might know, when the first Spacers arrived at this planet, what they found was a desert world that consisted of two large and distinct geologic regions. The southernmost two-thirds of the planet were lowlands, while the northernmost third was covered by a huge plateau, much higher in elevation than the southern hemisphere. For that precise reason, Inferno was regarded as a marginal candidate for terraforming.”

  “Why?”

  “Because when water was introduced onto the planet, it would obviously all pool in the south—as indeed it has. Today we call the northern uplands the continent of Terra Grande, and the southern lowlands have been flooded to form the Southern Ocean. This gives the planet one water-covered pole and one landlocked one.”

  “And what difference does that make?”

  “A great deal of difference. Water absorbs heat energy far more efficiently than the atmosphere can. Water can circulate, carrying that heat along with it. Temperatures in the southern hemisphere are much more moderate and stable than they are in the north, because warm water can flow over the south pole and the polar regions, warming them up. Cold polar water can move toward the temperate zones and cool them off. I am oversimplifying things tremendously, of course, but that is the basic idea.”

  “And that can’t happen in the north, because there is no water,” Fredda said, glancing toward her husband. But his face was completely expressionless. He was watching this game, not playing it.

  Lentrall nodded eagerly. “Precisely. Terra Grande is a huge, monolithic continent. It completely covers the northern third of the planet’s surface. Because no water can flow over the North Pole region, there is little chance for temperatures to moderate themselves in the northern hemisphere. The tropical regions of the northern hemisphere are too hot, while the polar regions are too cold. If you look at a map, you will see that the southern edge of Terra Grande—where most of the people live—more or less borders the northern edge of the north tropical zone. Right here, in Hades, we should be right in the center of the temperate regions. But the temperate regions are shrinking, and we are very near the northern border of the habitable zone, at least by some standards. Actually, there are a few rather stringent Settler measures by which the city of Hades is, technically, uninhabitable. Because of insufficient rainfall, I believe. Be that as it may, the habitable zone of this planet is already little more than a narrow strip, five or six hundred kilometers wide, along the southern coast of Terra Grande. And that strip is still shrinking, despite our best efforts, and despite local successes.”

  “I thought the terraforming project was gaining ground,” Fredda said, looking toward her husband.

  “It is,” said Alvar. “In places. Mostly in the places where people live. We are losing ground elsewhere—but we are doing much better around Hades and in the Great Bay region generally. Once we have this part of the world under control, we hope to expand outward.”

  “If you get the chance,” Lentrall said. “Current projections show it c
ould go either way. You’re relying on a high-point balance. It’s unstable.”

  “What’s a high-point balance?” Fredda asked.

  Lentrall smiled as he reached into the breast pocket of his tunic and pulled out a large coin—a Settler coin, Fredda could not help but notice. He had it so ready to hand that Fredda assumed he had put it there deliberately, just to be ready to make his point.

  “This is a high-point balance,” he said. He held his left hand with the index finger pointed straight up, and carefully placed the coin on the tip of his index finger. “In theory, I could hold this coin here indefinitely,” he said. “All I have to do is keep my finger completely steady, keep my arm from moving, keep from being jostled—while, at the same time compensating for any minute gusts of air, any very slight tremor in the building. And of course, I have to be sure I don’t overcompensate while trying to correct for some very minor—”

  But at that moment, the coin suddenly fell from his finger and landed ringingly on the stone floor of the office. Somehow the sound of it striking the floor was much louder than Fredda had expected.

  “I’ve just given you a pretty fair metaphor for the present state of Inferno’s planetary climate. It is stable for the moment, but if there is the slightest perturbation, there will be trouble. There is no negative feedback in the system, nothing working against a perturbation to push the system back toward stability. Ever since the first climate engineer started to work here, the balance point for Inferno’s climate has been a high point tottering between two extremes, with the slightest shift capable of sending the whole thing crashing down into overheating or supercooling. We have to get everything exactly right every time, or else . . .” He nodded toward the coin on the floor.

  “But you have a solution,” Fredda said, her voice not entirely friendly. Lentrall was making no effort to convince, or explain, or discuss matters. He was lecturing, dictating, instructing her. He was speaking in tones that were a strange combination of arrogance and condescension. He was talking down to her, as if she were a child, explaining to her why doing things his way, the sensible way, was for her own good.

  “I have a solution,” he said. He reached down, picked up the coin, and placed it in the palm of his hand. “We put the planet in a low-point balance, like this.” He shook his hand back and forth, and jiggled it around vigorously. The coin stayed in his palm. Once or twice, he managed to dislodge it briefly, but then it dropped back into place. “As you can see, it’s much harder to perturb something out of a low-point balance, and it will tend to return to its balance point once a perturbation is removed. Now, a Polar Sea would move the global climate into a stable low-point system that would require massive effort to dislodge into instability.

  “As I have said, the problem is the absence of water circulation in the northern hemisphere. If there were a way to let water accumulate in the northern polar regions, while providing inlets and outlets to the Southern Ocean, then warm water could flow north to warm the poles, and cold water could come south to cool the ocean—and the land areas near the coast. That would give us a low-point balance, where the natural force working on the planet would be self-correcting. If things got too hot, the cold polar waters would cool them off. If the temperatures dropped too much, tropical waters would warm them up. We need water over both poles.”

  “But there are a number of terraformed planets without water on both poles,” Fredda objected. “And I recall, even Earth had one pole with land on it—and the other with highly restricted water flow. I think the pole with water on it was even frozen over most of the time.”

  Lentrall smiled again, and it was not a warm or friendly expression. Rather, it was the debater’s smile of triumph, something close to a condescending sneer. She had fallen into the trap he had laid, and now he could move in for the kill. “I have answers to all that,” he said. “I think you will find that they all strengthen my argument. Regarding the terraformed planets with land-locked poles, I can tell you that all of them have bodies of water that get much closer to the poles than we have on Inferno.”

  “What about the examples she cited from Earth?” Kresh asked.

  “First, the natural oceans of Earth were far deeper than the artificial oceans of any terraformed planet,” Lentrall said. “Because they were deeper, they held much more water and served as a much more effective heat sink.

  “Second, they covered far more of the surface of the planet than on most terraformed worlds. Three-fourths of Earth was water. Slightly less than two-thirds of Inferno’s surface is water, and it has more water coverage than any other wholly terraformed world. The difference between three-fourths and two-thirds may not sound like much, but it is substantial—and, as I have said, measured by volume, and not surface area, Inferno’s oceans are much smaller than Earth’s.

  “Third, even if Earth’s oceans did not have free and open access to either pole, once again, they reached close enough to allow substantial heat exchange.

  “Fourth, the land-locked South Pole of Earth was far colder than the water-covered North Pole, which just goes to show my point that liquid water served to moderate temperatures. While the surface of the Arctic Ocean was frozen over, there were still a lot of water—and a lot of water currents—below the ice.

  “Finally, Earth’s Climate was remarkable for its instability. It suffered severe ice ages, which were triggered by very small fluctuations in this variable or that. There is substantial evidence that the impeded flow of water over the poles was a major contributing factor to this instability. I would submit that all of these facts regarding Old Earth strengthen, rather than weaken, the argument in favor of a water flow over the North Pole.”

  “Hmmph.” Fredda didn’t trust herself to say anything more. The infuriating thing was that the man was right. He did marshal his arguments well. But there was so much in his tone, in his attitude, in his behavior, that made her want to disagree with him, made her want to argue with him, tooth and nail.

  “Go on, Dr. Lentrall,” said Alvar, his voice an absolute study in neutrality. “What is your backing for all this?”

  “An excellent question, Governor,” Lentrall said, in a tone of voice that made it sound as if he were praising a bright schoolboy. “As you are no doubt aware, the original terra-forming plans for Inferno called for the creation of just such a Polar Sea. I have derived most of my information from those old studies.”

  “Why did they cancel the plans for the Polar Sea?” Fredda asked.

  “Partly it was politics and scheduling. Building the Polar Sea would have slowed the whole project up for years, and there was pressure to land colonists on the planet as soon as possible. By that time, a great number of things had already gone wrong with the terraforming project. There was some thought given to abandoning the planet altogether. Costs were getting out of control. But that would have done terrible damage to Spacer pride and prestige. The engineers were ordered to complete the project, but they were not given the time or the resources or the money to do it properly. They really had no choice but to cut corners. And the Polar Sea was one they could cut. Not doing it freed up enough resources to let them complete the rest of the terraforming project.”

  “A generous interpretation,” said Kresh. “I’ve studied the old files and reports as well. I’d say they didn’t come close to completion of the terraforming project. What they did was declare that they had completed it. The terraformers of Inferno knew exactly the mess they were creating. I found at least three reports predicting a planetary climate collapse—and all three predicted that it would happen right about now, give or take a few years.”

  Lentrall looked annoyed at Kresh for interrupting the flow of his speech. “In any case, the original planning documents clearly call for establishing a substantial flow of water in and over the polar regions. All of their projections showed that it would moderate and stabilize the planetary climate, as well as increasing rainfall throughout Terra Grande.”

  “Pretty big job,
digging an ocean,” Fredda said.

  Lentrall smiled again, and the expression didn’t make her like him any more. “Yes it is,” he agreed. “But most of the work has been done for us already. Kaelor, bring me my map case.”

  Lentrall’s robot came forward. It opened a storage compartment in the front of its torso, drew out a long, thin tube, and handed the robe to Lentrall. Lentrall opened the tube and pulled out a map printed on glossy stock. “This shows the north polar regions of Inferno,” he said, spreading the map out on the low table in front of him. “One of the features of the Infernal landscape that we tend not to notice is that it is rather heavily cratered. Part of the reason for this is that the original settlers chose city sites in the regions with the lightest crater cover. Besides which, most of the craters are heavily eroded. But most of Terra Grande—and most of the flooded lowlands that now make up the ocean floor—are quite heavily cratered.”

  Lentrall stabbed a finger down on the exact center of the map. “As you can see, a pair of very large overlapping craters sit astride the North Pole, a formation generally known as the Polar Depression. You will note two things about the Depression. One, that nearly all of the land area inside it is below sea level. Two, there are actually permanent icecaps inside the craters. Those icecaps used to be seasonal in nature. They are now permanent, and they are growing. Every year during northern summer they melt back a bit—but every winter the storms deposit more snow, and the icecaps grow more than they have shrunk. More and more of the planet’s fresh water is being locked up at the north pole. If there were a channel bringing in warm tropical water, it would melt back the icecaps in short order. If a channel could be opened from the Southern Ocean to the Polar Depression, the waters would rush in, forming the Polar Sea.”

  “What you’re saying is that we have a ready-made sea-bed,” said Fredda, “and it is already partly filled with water—frozen water, but water all the same. Which means that all we have to do is dig the channel.”