by Ben Bova
“No, sir. I’m sorry.” Chagrin.
“Sorry doesn’t buy it, goddammit! I don’t want you taking any juice from anywhere. No bottles, no gifts, no nothing, not from anybody. Have you got that?”
“Yessir.”
Wearily, Summit persisted. “It’s tough enough to do a job here without having special graft investigations and the D.A.’s squad sniffing all over the precinct. Jesus, Polchik, do you have any idea . . .!” He stopped, looked levelly at the patrolman and said, “One more time and you’re out on your ass. Not set down, not reprimanded, not docked—out. All the way out. Kapish?”
Polchik nodded; his back was broken.
“I’ve got to set it right.”
“What, sir?”
“You, that’s what.”
Polchik waited. A pendulum was swinging.
“I’ll have to think about it. But if it hadn’t been for the five good years you’ve given me here, Polchik . . . well, you’ll be getting punishment, but I don’t know just what yet.”
“Uh, what’s gonna happen with the robot?”
Summit got to his feet slowly; mooring a dirigible. “Come on outside and you’ll see.”
Polchik followed him to the door, where the Captain paused. He looked closely into Polchik’s face and said, “Tonight has been an education, Mike.”
There was no answer to that one.
They went into the front desk room. Reardon still had his head stuck into Brillo’s open torso cavity, and the whiz kid was standing tiptoed behind him, peering over the engineer’s shoulder. As they entered the ready room, Reardon straightened and clicked off the lamp on the power tool. He watched Summit and Polchik as they walked over to Chief Santorini. Summit murmured to the Chief for a moment, then Santorini nodded and said, “We’ll talk tomorrow, then.”
He started toward the front door, stopped and said, “Good night, gentlemen. It’s been a long night. I’ll be in touch with your offices tomorrow.” He didn’t wait for acknowledgment; he simply went.
Reardon turned around to face Summit. He was waiting for words. Even the whiz kid was starting to come alive again. The silent FBI man rose from the bench (as far as Polchik could tell, he hadn’t changed position all the time they’d been gone on patrol) and walked toward the group.
Reardon said, “Well . . .” His voice trailed off.
The pendulum was swinging.
“Gentlemen,” said the Captain, “I’ve advised Chief Santorini I’ll be writing out a full report to be sent downtown. My recommendations will more than likely decide whether or not these robots will be added to our Force.”
“Grass roots level opinion, very good, Captain, very good,” said the whiz kid. Summit ignored him.
“But I suppose I ought to tell you right now my recommendations will be negative. As far as I’m concerned, Mr. Reardon, you still have a long way to go with your machine.”
“But, I thought—”
“It did very well,” Summit said, “don’t get me wrong. But I think it’s going to need a lot more flexibility and more knowledge of the police officer’s duties before it can be of any real aid in our work.”
Reardon was angry, but trying to control it. “I programmed the entire patrolman’s manual, and all the City codes, and the Supreme Court—”
Summit stopped him with a raised hand. “Mr. Reardon, that’s the least of a police officer’s knowledge. Anybody can read a rule book. But how to use those rules, how to make those rules work in the street, that takes more than programming. It takes, well, it takes training. And experience. It doesn’t come easily. A cop isn’t a set of rules and a pile of wires.”
Polchik was startled to hear his words. He knew it would be okay. Not as good as before, but at least okay.
Reardon was furious now. And he refused to be convinced. Or perhaps he refused to allow the Mayor’s whiz kid and the FBI man to be so easily convinced. He had worked too long and at too much personal cost to his career to let it go that easily. He hung onto it. “But merely training shouldn’t put you off the X-44 completely !”
The Captain’s face tensed around the mouth. “Look, Mr. Reardon, I’m not very good at being politic—which is why I’m still a Captain, I suppose—” The whiz kid gave him a be-careful look, but the Captain went on. “But it isn’t merely training. This officer is a good one. He’s bright, he’s on his toes, he maybe isn’t Sherlock Holmes but he knows the feel of a neighborhood, the smell of it, the heat level. He knows every August we’re going to get the leapers and the riots and some woman’s head cut off and dumped in a mailbox mailed C.O.D. to Columbus, Ohio. He knows when there’s racial tension in our streets. He knows when those poor slobs in the tenements have just had it. He knows when some new kind of vice has moved in. But he made more mistakes out there tonight than a rookie. Five years walking and riding that beat, he’s never foulballed the way he did tonight. Why? I’ve got to ask why? The only thing different was that machine of yours. Why? Why did Mike Polchik foulball so bad? He knew those kids in that car should have been run in for b&b or naline tests. So why, Mr. Reardon . . . why?”
Polchik felt lousy. The Captain was more worked up than he’d ever seen him. But Polchik stood silently, listening; standing beside the silent, listening FBI man.
Brillo merely stood silently. Turned off.
Then why did he still hear that robot buzzing?
“It isn’t rules and regs, Mr. Reardon.” The Captain seemed to have a lot more to come. “A moron can learn those. But how do you evaluate the look on a man’s face that tells you he needs a fix? How do you gauge the cultural change in words like ‘custer’ or ‘grass’ or ’high’ or ‘pig’? How do you know when not to bust a bunch of kids who’ve popped a hydrant so they can cool off? How do you program all of that into a robot . . . and know that it’s going to change from hour to hour?”
“We can do it! It’ll take time, but we can do it.”
The Captain nodded slowly. “Maybe you can.”
“I know we can.”
“Okay, I’ll even go for that. Let’s say you can. Let’s say you can get a robot that’ll act like a human being and still be a robot . . . because that’s what we’re talking about here. There’s still something else.”
“Which is?”
“People, Mr. Reardon. People like Polchik here. I asked you why Polchik foulballed, why he made such a bum patrol tonight that I’m going to have to take disciplinary action against him for the first time in five years . . . so I’ll tell you why, Mr. Reardon, about people like Polchik here. They’re still afraid of machines, you know. We’ve pushed them and shoved them and lumbered them with machines till they’re afraid the next clanking item down the pike is going to put them on the bread line. So they don’t want to cooperate. They don’t do it on purpose. They may not even know they’re doing it, hell, I don’t think Polchik knew what was happening, why he was falling over his feet tonight. You can get a robot to act like a human being, Mr. Reardon. Maybe you’re right and you can do it, just like you said. But how the hell are you going to get humans to act like robots and not be afraid of machines?”
Reardon looked as whipped as Polchik felt.
“May I leave Brillo here till morning? I’ll have a crew come over from the labs and pick him up.”
“Sure,” the Captain said, “he’ll be fine right there against the wall. The Desk Sergeant’ll keep an eye on him.” To Loyo he said, “Sergeant, instruct your relief.”
Loyo smiled and said, “Yessir.”
Summit looked back at Reardon and said, “I’m sorry.”
Reardon smiled wanly, and walked out. The whiz kid wanted to say something, but too much had already been said, and the Captain looked through him. “I’m pretty tired, Mr. Kenzie. How about we discuss it tomorrow after I’ve seen the Chief?”
The whiz kid scowled, turned and stalked out.
The Captain sighed heavily. “Mike, go get signed out and go home. Come see me tomorrow. Late.” He nodded to the FBI
man, who still had not spoken; then he went away.
The robot stood where Reardon had left him. Silent.
Polchik went upstairs to the locker room to change.
Something was bothering him. But he couldn’t nail it down.
When he came back down into the muster room, the FBI man was just racking the receiver on the desk blotter phone. “Leaving?” he asked. It was the first thing Polchik had heard him say. It was a warm brown voice.
“Yeah. Gotta go home. I’m whacked out.”
“Can’t say I blame you. I’m a little tired myself. Need a lift?”
“No, thanks,” Polchik said. “I take the subway. Two blocks from the house.” They walked out together. Polchik thought about wet carpets waiting. They stood on the front steps for a minute, breathing in the chill morning air, and Polchik said, “I feel kinda sorry for that chunk of scrap now. He did a pretty good job.”
“But not good enough,” the FBI man added.
Polchik felt suddenly very protective about the inert form against the wall in the precinct house. “Oh, I dunno. He saved me from getting clobbered, you wanna know the truth. Tell me . . . you think they’ll ever build a robot that’ll cut it?”
The FBI man lit a cigarette, blew smoke in a thin stream, and nodded. “Yeah. Probably. But it’ll have to be a lot more sophisticated than old Brillo in there.”
Polchik looked back through the doorway. The robot stood alone, looking somehow helpless. Waiting for rust. Polchik thought of kids, all kinds of kids, and when he was a kid. It must be hell, he thought, being a robot. Getting turned off when they don’t need you no more.
Then he realized he could still hear that faint electrical buzzing. The kind a watch makes. He cast a quick glance at the FBI man but, trailing cigarette smoke, he was already moving toward his car, parked directly in front of the precinct house. Polchik couldn’t tell if he was wearing a watch or not.
He followed the government man.
“The trouble with Brillo,” the FBI man said, “is that Reardon’s facilities were too limited. But I’m sure there are other agencies working on it. They’ll lick it one day.” He snapped the cigarette into the gutter.
“Yeah, sure,” Polchik said. The FBI man unlocked the car door and pulled it. It didn’t open.
“Damn it!” he said. “Government pool issue. Damned door always sticks.” Bunching his muscles, he suddenly wrenched at it with enough force to pop it open. Polchik stared. Metal had ripped.
“You take care of yourself now, y’hear?” the FBI man said, getting into the car. He flipped up the visor with its OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT BUSINESS card tacked to it, and slid behind the steering wheel.
The car settled heavily on its springs, as though a ton of load had just been dumped on the front seat. He slammed the door. It was badly sprung.
“Too bad we couldn’t use him,” the FBI man said, staring out of the car at Brillo, illuminated through the precinct house doorway. “But . . too crude.”
“Yeah, sure, I’ll take care of myself,” Polchik replied, one exchange too late. He felt his mouth hanging open.
The FBI man grinned, started the car, and pulled away.
Polchik stood in the street, for a while.
Sometimes he stared down the early morning street in the direction the FBI man had taken.
Sometimes he stared at the metal cop immobile in the muster room.
And even as the sounds of the city’s new day rose around him, he was not at all certain he did not still hear the sound of an electric watch. Getting louder.
ANSWER, PLEASE ANSWER
The Cold War is over, and good riddance to it. “Answer, Please Answer,’’ however, was written when the Cold War was at its bitterest and most dangerous: in 1961, when the Soviet Union and the U.S. were building hydrogen bombs and missiles as fast as they could, the Berlin Wall was going up, the Bay of Pigs was going down, and the Cuban Missile Crisis was on its way.
You might think that a fifty-some-year-old story would be dated, but I believe that the basic message of “Answer, Please Answer” is more relevant today than ever. The knowledge of how to build terrible weapons of mass destruction has not evaporated with the end of the Cold War. While the former Soviet Union and the U.S. are presently scrapping most of their missiles and H-bombs, other nations are building missiles and developing nuclear, chemical, and biological weaponry. The ability to destroy ourselves utterly is now part of the human store of knowledge: it will never go away. We will have to police our destructive impulses forever.
Science fiction is uniquely qualified to make points like that. Only in science fiction can we use an extraterrestrial civilization from a distant star to show how permanently dangerous is the world we have created for ourselves.
To make that point as strong as possible, it was necessary to strip the story of everything else. Every possible distraction had to be removed. So the characters are the bare minimum: two. The setting is as uncomplicated as possible: the two characters are alone in a remote Antarctic base. There is a good deal of astronomy thrown at the reader, for two reasons: one, to help the reader to understand what the characters are trying to do; two. to mask the approach of the final denouement.
A simple story, with no frills. But some depth, I think.
We had been at the South Pole a week. The outside thermometer read fifty degrees below zero, Fahrenheit. The winter was just beginning.
“What do you think we should transmit to McMurdo?” I asked Rizzo.
He put down his magazine and half-sat up in his bunk. For a moment there was silence, except for the nearly inaudible hum of the machinery that jammed our tiny dome, and the muffled shrieking of the ever-present wind, above us.
Rizzo looked at the semi-circle of control consoles, computers, and meteorological sensors with an expression of disgust that could be produced only by a drafted soldier.
“Tell ’em it’s cold, it’s gonna get colder, and we’ve both got appendicitis and need replacements immediately.”
“Very clever,” I said, and started touching the buttons that would automatically transmit the sensors’ memory tapes.
Rizzo sagged back into his bunk. “Why?” He asked the curved ceiling of our cramped quarters. “Why me? Why here? What did I ever do to deserve spending the whole goddammed winter at the goddammed South Pole?”
“It’s strictly impersonal,” I assured him. “Some bright young meteorologist back in Washington has convinced the Pentagon that the South Pole is the key to the world’s weather patterns. So here we are.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Rizzo continued, unhearing. His dark, broad-boned face was a picture of wronged humanity. “Everybody knows that when the missiles start flying, they’ll be coming over the North Pole. . . . The goddammed Army is a hundred and eighty degrees off base.”
“That’s about normal for the Army, isn’t it?” I was a drafted soldier, too.
Rizzo swung out of the bunk and paced across the dimly-lit room. It only took a half-dozen paces; the dome was small and most of it was devoted to machinery.
“Don’t start acting like a caged lion,” I warned. “It’s going to be a long winter.”
“Yeah, guess so.” He sat down next to me at the radio console and pulled a pack of cigarets from his shirt pocket. He offered one to me, and we both smoked in silence for a minute or two.
“Got anything to read?”
I grinned. “Some microspool catalogues of stars.”
“Stars?”
“I’m an astronomer . . . at least, I was an astronomer, before the National Emergency was proclaimed.”
Rizzo looked puzzled. “But I never heard of you.”
“Why should you?”
“I’m an astronomer too.”
“I thought you were an electronicist.”
He pumped his head up and down. “Yeah . . . at the radio astronomy observatory at Green-belt. Project OZMA. Where do you work?”
“Lick Observatory . . . with the 120-inch
reflector.”
“Oh , . . an optical astronomer.”
“Certainly.”
“You’re the first optical man I’ve met.” He looked at me a trifle queerly.
I shrugged. “Well, we’ve been around a few millenia longer than you static-scanners.”
“Yeah, guess so.”
I didn’t realize that Project OZMA was still going on. Have you had any results yet?” It was Rizzo’s turn to shrug. “Nothing yet. The project has been shelved for the duration of the emergency, of course. If there’s no war, and the dish doesn’t get bombed out, we’ll try again.”
“Still listening to the same two stars?”
“Yeah . . . Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani. They’re the only two Sun-type stars within reasonable range that might have planets like Earth.”
“And you expect to pick up radio signals from an intelligent race.”
‘‘Hope to.”
I flicked the ash off my cigaret. “You know, it always struck me as rather hopeless . . . trying to find radio signals from intelligent creatures.”
“Whattaya mean, hopeless?”
“Why should an intelligent race send radio signals out into interstellar space?” I asked. “Think of the power it requires, and the likelihood that it’s all wasted effort, because there’s no one within range to talk to.”
“Well . . . it’s worth a try, isn’t it . . . if you think there could be intelligent creatures somewhere else . . . on a planet of another star.”
“Hmph. We’re trying to find another intelligent race; are we transmitting radio signals?”
“No,” he admitted. “Congress wouldn’t vote the money for a transmitter that big.”
“Exactly,” I said. “We’re listening, but not transmitting.” Rizzo wasn’t discouraged. “Listen, the chances—just on statistical figuring alone—the chances are that there’re millions of other solar systems with intelligent life. We’ve got to try contacting them! They might have knowledge that we don’t have . . . answers to questions that we can’t solve yet . .
