Foundation and Chaos Read Online Free PDF Page B

performance of duty. He would in some sense enjoy notifying a human that a beautiful view was available through this port; but his foremost duty would be to inform the human that this view was in fact caused by forces that were very dangerous…
    And in this duty he had no chance of succeeding, for the humans on Spear of Glory were already dead. Captain Tolk haddied last, his mind gone, his body a wreck. In the last few hours of rational thought left to him, Tolk had instructed Lodovik on the actions that might be taken to bring the ship to its final destination: repair of the hyperdrive units, reprogramming of the ship’s navigational system, preserving ship’s power for maximum survival time.
    Tolk’s last coherent words to Lodovik had been a question. “How long can you live…I mean, function?”
    Lodovik had told him, “A century, without refueling.”
    Tolk had then succumbed to the painful, murmurous half sleep that preceded his death.
    Two hundred human deaths weighed on Lodovik’s positronic brain like a drain on his power supplies; it slowed him somewhat. That effect would pass. He was not responsible for the deaths. He simply could not prevent them. But this in itself was sufficient to make him feel weary.
    As for the view—
    Sarossa itself was a dim star, still a hundred billion kilometers distant; but the shock front revealed its extended spoor like a vast, ghostly fireworks display.
    The streams of high-energy particles had met the solar wind from the Sarossan system, creating huge, dim auroras like waving banners. He could make out faint traces red and green in the murky luminosity; switching his eyes to the ultraviolet, he could see even more colors as the diffuse clouds of the explosion’s outer shells advanced through the outlying regions of the system’s cometary dust and ice and gas.
    There was so little time to act, nothing he could do…
    And worse still, Lodovik could feel his brain changing. The neutrinos and other radiation had overwhelmed the ship’s armor of energy fields, and had done more than just kill the humans; they had somehow, he believed, interfered with his own positronic circuitry. He had not yet finished his autodiagnosis sequence—that might take days more—but he feared the worst.
    If his primary functions were affected, he would have to destroy himself. In ages past, he would have merely gone into a dormant mode until a human or another robot repaired him; but he could not afford to have his robotic nature discovered.
    Whatever happened to him, there seemed little chance of discovery. Spear of Glory was hopelessly lost, less than a microbe in an ocean. He had never managed to trace the malfunction or make repairs, despite the captain’s instructions. Being jerked rapidly into and out of hyperspace had burned out all the circuitry for faster-than-light communication. The ship had automatically broadcast a distress signal, but surrounded by the shock front’s extreme radiation, there was little chance the signal would ever be heard.
    Lodovik’s secret was secure enough. But his usefulness to Daneel, and to humanity, was over.
    For a robot, duty was everything, self nothing; yet in his present circumstance, he could look through the port at the effects of the shock front and speculate for no particular reason about physical processes. While not completely stopping his constant processing of problems associated with his long-term mission, he could drift in the middle of the bridge, his immediate needs and work reduced to nothing.
    For humans, this could be called a time of introspection. Introspection without the target of duty was more than novel; it was disturbing. Lodovik would have avoided the opportunity and this sensation if he could have.
    A robot, above all else, was uncomfortable with internal change. Ages past, during the robotic renaissance, on the almost-forgotten worlds of Aurora and Solaria, robots had been built with inhibitions that went beyond the Three