Hunt stubbed his cigarette in an ashtray on the console and scratched an ear. “ZORAC?” he said aloud after studying the display for a few moments longer—ZORAC didn’t pick up subvocalized patterns.
‘‘Yes, Vic?’’
“What’s this thing that you’ve got going around the city on channel fifty-six? Something to do with a translation facility.”
“There’s still a general-purpose communications net running that
wasn’t specifically a part of JevEX,” ZORAC replied. “One of the channels is reserved for translating between the Jevlenese dialects and most Terran languages. So you and they can talk to each other just about anywhere.”
“It’s a service that you support?”
“Yes. I suppose you could call it people-interfacing.”
“Hmm.. .“ Hunt rubbed his chin. “I was thinking about that visit that Gina made to Baumer’s office in the city.”
“Yes?’’
“There were a couple of Jevlenese leaving just as she got there. You must have done the translating for them. I, ah, I wonder if there might still be a record of it in your system somewhere that we might be able to get at?” Hunt knew that VISAR, programmed with its Thurien hangups, would never have done it. But ZORAC wasn’t VISAR. It seemed worth a try.
“It’s just a translation service,” ZORAC replied. “I don’t store any of it. I don’t even have a record that they were there.”
Hunt sighed resignedly—but it did open up the thought of further possibilities.
“So, when Terrans and Jevlenese talk to each other, you, from inside the Shapieron, have an ear into all their conversations, as it were, everywhere,” he said.
The implication was plain enough, and ZORAC was too logical not to see it. “Why not spell out what you’re asking?” the machine suggested.
“Hell, you know what I’m asking. Something’s going on. We need to find out what Baumer and these Jevlenese are up to before we have another war on our hands—maybe a real one this time. Gina got nowhere, and right now we don’t have another line.”
There was a short pause.
“I presume that your ultimate objective would be to frustrate any intended action on the part of a suspected political group, that might be directed at increasing their power over other people’s affairs,” ZORAC said finally.
Hunt turned his eyes upward briefly. “Well, if we always insisted on analyzing everything through to its final aims like that, we’d be lucky if we ever got around to actually doing anything—but yes, I suppose you could say it was that.”
“The argument being,” ZORAC persisted, “that you see their
methods as a violation of certain rights and freedoms which you, from certain a priori moral principles that are nondeducible but taken as self-evident, consider it desirable for a society to guarantee?”
“Yes.” Hunt groaned beneath his breath as he saw where they were heading.
“So the goal would be to protect people from the violations of their rights that an intrusive and coercive governing system would subject them to?”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Hunt agreed impatiently.
“One of them being the right to the enjoyment of noninterference and privacy. But if it is to be a genuine guarantee, with nobody having a privilege to decide whom it shall or shall not be granted to, then—”
Hunt’s patience snapped. He knew that when ZORAC went off into one of these excursions, it could create knots that would have taken Aristotle volumes to untangle. “Look, they cremated Ayultha prematurely, and probably took care of Obayin, too. And if what we’re up against is what I’m beginning to think it might be, they’re the same forces that burned the libraries of Alexandria and Constantinople, brought on the Dark Ages, operated the Inquisition, and for all I know engineered the Black Death. We didn’t.”
“Algorithmically, it reduces to an interesting circumvolution of the logical calculus,” ZORAC commented. “Using the same structure, you could argue that early suicide is the best preventative of cancer, or that the most effective way of protecting people against slavery is extermination.”
“Forget it, then, and think of the question this way,” Hunt suggested. “You’re a ship’s computer, right? Not a huge, interstellar regulator of social affairs like VISAR. Moralizing isn’t your business. Your primary, overriding concern is the safety of the Shapieron and its occupants. You’ve told me as much yourself.”