“For eight years.”
“Is that the information, the data, that makes Snookums so priceless, aside from his nucleonics work?”
She smiled a little then. “Oh no. Of course not, silly. He’s been fed data on everything—physics, subphysics, chemistry, mathematics—all kinds of things. Most of the major research laboratories on Earth have problems of one kind or another that Snookums has been working on. He hasn’t been given the problem I was working on at all; it would bias him.” Then the tears came back. “And now it doesn’t matter. He’s insane. He’s lying.”
“What’s he saying?”
“He insists that he’s never broken the First Law, that he has never hurt a human being. And he insists that he has followed the orders of human beings, according to the Second Law.”
“May I talk to him?” Mike asked.
She shook her head. “Fitz is running him through an analysis. He even made me leave.” Then she looked at his face more closely. “You don’t just want to confront him and call him a liar, do you? No—that’s not like you. You know he’s just a machine—better than I do, I guess.... What is it, Mike?”
No, he thought, looking at her, she still thinks he’s human. Otherwise, she’d know that a computer can’t lie—not in the human sense of the word.
Most people, if told that a man had said one thing, and that a computer had given a different answer, would rely on the computer.
“What is it, Mike?” she repeated.