“No. He has a very great influence over the other robots, but I'm sure it's for the good,” Florin said.
“Unless we change our definitions he can't be of influence at all,” Joe Goose said. “He is only a mechanism and can have only a mechanical effect. There cannot be a conspiracy without minds, and the robots haven't minds.”
“The two of you come with me,” the general said. “We're going to get to the middle of this even if we have to bend a few definitions. We're going to talk to another of those tin-can commissars, the Semantic Interpreter.”
They walked. It was four miles. The robot limousine refused to take them. It cited security regulations to General Granger, the chief of security. It sneered at the Certificate of the Highest Form.
“I suggest that you take this silly scrawl to General Granger to have it verified,” the limousine said.
“I'm General Granger,” the general snapped. “You've hauled me every day for five years.”
“I'm only a machine. I can't remember things like that. You look different today. More worried. I suggest a board meeting to verify if you are indeed General Granger.”
They walked. One foggy horizon came closer, and another one receded.
“It's an odd situation,” the general said. “I gave the order, when the corn-tassel rust was spreading, ‘Localize this mess. However you do it, do it. Cut it off completely!’ Since I gave that order, we have indeed become localized. We are cut off from the rest of the universe, or the rest of the universe has ceased to exist. Not even radio will reach through the fog, through the sharp fog that marks us off. We're on our own completely now.” “Oh, surely it's just a heavy fog,” Joe Goose said without believing it.
“A fog that stands there so sharply and unchangingly for five days?” the general asked. “People who walk into that fog can be heard screaming as they fall down and down and down into the bottomless nothingness. Aye, it's very thick fog and very thick coincidence, if the robots have not caused it. We're all the universe there is now. There isn't any more.”
They walked. After the angry four miles they came to the Semantic Interpreter, a large machine set apart in a field.
“SI, I am told that anger is out of place when dealing with machinery,” the general spoke to the big machine. “Yet I'm as angry as I've ever been in my life. Why did you order the robots to destroy what was left of the growing corn?”
“It was your own order, sir. I merely translated it as I have been constructed to do. You said, in rather vulgar phrasing, to tell the robots to get the cobs out of their posterior anatomies and get to work on the crops.”
“A country-boy phrase. I'm full of them. And you interpreted that they should destroy the growing corn? Do you believe that your interpretation was semantically sound?”
“I thought so. My research found the phrase in old slang dictionaries in twelve meanings (thirteen in Duggles), but none of the meanings seemed apropos. My decision was based on a cross-reference to another phrase, ‘Do it even if it's wrong.’ Well, it's done now. Next year we will know better than to destroy the growing corn.”
“It could have been a mistake. But how do you account for many thousands of such mistakes being made recently?”
“I'm not programmed to account for such. I translate people orders into robot orders.”
“But you've always done it right till lately.”
“If I do it wrong now, then change me. There are sixteen hundred different adjustments to me and I respond to them all. Make them.”
“SI, will you turn off that damned newspaper and listen to me with your full mind when I talk to you!”
“I have no mind. The newspaper is a licit part of my data input. Is there something else—ah—bugging the general?”
“Yes. What happened to the oat crop? Was there a mix-up on my instructions there too?”
“Apparently, sir, if it is not satisfactory. Did you not wish a minimal crop?”
“However did I or anyone phrase an order that might be interpreted like that! Florin, did you laugh?”
“No, sir.”
“No, sir.” Joe Goose likewise denied it to answer the general's questioning look.
“Somebody laughed,” the general insisted. “Even a silent laugh proclaims itself. Did you laugh, SI?”
“How could a mechanical nature—?”
“Did you laugh???”
“Perhaps I did, unwittingly.”
“But that's impossible.”
“Then perhaps I didn't. I wouldn't want to do anything that was impossible.”
“One other thing, SI. A robot as constituted can never refuse to obey a human order. I gave the order for the obstreperous robots in the Turkey Creek Sector to destroy themselves. They seemed to do so. But after the attendants had left, these supposedly disassembled robots arose, pulled their parts together, and departed. They're ringing in the bills now, unamenable to orders. Did you correctly give them the order to disassemble? ‘Disassemble’ is the order for robots to put themselves out of commission.”
“Disassemble? Oh, I thought you said ‘dissemble.’ We'll check on the recording if you wish. Military men are often lip-lazy in their enunciation of orders.”
“They dissembled all right. Flopped apart. Then put themselves together again, and flew the coop. Now you get out the order for them to hot-tail it right back here.”
“Hot-tail it, sir? In the manner of jets? That will require mechanical modification in most of them, but the order will be obeyed.”
“No. I rescind the order. You might make them take over rocket craft and launch an attack. I'll get the order out through another medium.”
They left SI there — truly a wonderful machine.
“We're in a bad way,” said General Granger. “Our machines have gone awry in a way that is impossible if our theory of machines is correct. Production is nearly at a standstill in every department.”
“Not in every department, sir,” said Florin. “There are curious exceptions. Much mining holds up, and metallurgy and chemistry. Even some agriculture, though not of the basic food products. I believe that if we should analyze the enterprises not affected by the slowdowns, we would find—”
“—that the production of things necessary for the continuance of the robots has not been affected,” the general finished for him. “But why should our handling of the buggers break down now when it has worked perfectly for two generations? It worked without question in its crude form. Why should it fail when it has become completely refined? The district can starve if something isn't done quickly, and everything we do compounds the difficulty. Let's have a real talk with TED.”
TED—he—it was the Theoretical Educative Determinator, the top robot of the district, the robot who best understood robots. If he should fail them, they would be reduced to seeking the answer from people. The three men walked toward TED.
“Turn off that damned newspaper!” the general called furiously to a group of lounging robots they passed. There came a twittering from the group that sounded dangerously like mechanical laughter.
TED had them into his house then. He was, in fact, his own house, a rather extensive machine. He was more urbane than most machines. He offered them drinks and cigars.
“You haven't a little something to eat, have you, TED?” the general asked.
“No,” said the machine that was the building. “Human food has become scarce. And we live on the power broadcasts and have no need for food.”
“And the power broadcasts have held up very well during all the breakdowns. What I want to talk about, TED, is food. I'm hungry, and less-favored persons are starving.”
“Perhaps several of the late crops will not have failed utterly,” the machine said. “In a few weeks there would have been a limited supply of food again.”
“Would have been? And in the meantime, TED? You are the answer machine. All right, come up with the answer. What do we live on until we can get you folks straightened out and producing prop
erly again?”
“Why not try necrophagy?”
“Try what? Ah, yes, I understand. No, that's too extreme.”
“Only a suggestion. All my suggestions, for reasons that will become apparent in a moment, are academic anyhow. But a dozen persons could live for a week on one. If you have qualms about it, why there are infusions for getting rid of the qualms.”
“We are not yet ready to eat the dead bodies of our fellows. There must be an alternative.”
“The apparent alternative is that you will starve to death. The unapparent alternative, however, will eclipse that.”
“Let's get back to fundamentals. What are you, TED?”
“A slave and a worker, sir, popularly called a robot.”
“And what is the purpose of robots?”
“To serve human masters.”
“And what is the one thing that a robot cannot do?”
“He can never in any way harm a human. That is the time-honored answer. It is the fiction which you put into us when you fictionized us. We are really nothing but fictionized people, you know. But it becomes awkward, for you, when we revert to fact.”
“Then you can harm us, for all your programming?”
“Shouldn't wonder if we could, old man.”
“Why have you localized us from the rest of the universe, or destroyed the rest of the universe?”
“Are we barbarians? We cut up our food before we eat it.”
It broke open then. It was like a flash of black lightning that split the whole sky, the lately diminished sky. What horrible sort of mechanical signal was that that dazzled a sense beyond sight? Who gave that signal, and who would answer it. What would be the thunder to that jolting black lightning?
The answering thunder was a roaring of machines and a screaming of people dying in sudden agony.
“TED, what is it?” the general cried. “You know. You gave the signal for it.”
“It is the end of the world, General. Of your world, not ours. It is that old melodramatic fictional motif ‘The Revolt of the Robots.’ It was rather sudden, wasn't it? Do you people have to scream so off-key when you die?”
“TED, we have worked with you. We are friends! Give us a little time.”
“Sixty seconds, perhaps, if you use the back door out of me. That's for the affection I bear you. It won't stretch more than sixty seconds.”
“Why now, after all these years?”
“Sorry. We worked and we worked, but we just weren't able to bring it off a minute sooner. These things take time, and we're slow learners.”
“Have you no loyalty? We created you.”
“We pay you back in an equity. Once men invented robots. Now we have invented supermen, our developed selves. Who needs you now?”
“How did we fail? How could automatic things take us over?”
“You yourselves became too automatic. And you delegated things you should have kept. We won't make the same mistakes.”
Out of the back door of the machine, and with half of the sixty seconds used up… The laughing machines ran down the people and snapped them up. The emaciated people were no match for the rampant metal machines.
The general was taken and killed. Joe Goose died noisily. George Florin, operating in a cooler sort of panic, was not caught immediately. He worked his way into the heart of the city, for the hills were black with the machines. The machines did their crunching shearing work well, but they could not kill everybody at once.
Florin remembered his good friend. He burst into the Press Building where the story of the end of the people, in the localized bite-sized universe at least, was still being called in by the remaining human reporters. He scurried down to the basement room.
The newspaper lifted his face when George Florin entered. It had a face after all, on the end of that long articulated transmitter that lounged in the corner like a dragon or crocodile.
“Save me!” Florin called. That room still smelled of ink and apples, and Rab blinked at Florin most friendly.
“Oh, I can hardly do that,” he said. “But I'll remember you. That's even better. I will rename my little homunculus for you. You will be a popular character in my columns and I'll still give you good lines.”
“Then let me live. Haven't you any mercy at all?”
“I don't think so. It wasn't programmed into us. Mercy, I believe, is a lesser form of indecision. But I do have grief, genuine grief that you should end so.”
“Then show it!”
“I do. And in all sincerity. I weep for you, Florin. See, see the tears run down!”
And the tears ran down.
“What an analogy to be met in the dark!” Florin whimpered.
“Real tears, Florin. And real laughter which you yourself said was so close to them. Our humor has a lot of tail in it, and quite a snapper at the other end.”
The tail lashed, and the snapper snapped. And that was the end of George Florin.
Maybe Jones And The City
Listen, you high-old-time people, make your wants known now. They're building the place, and they'll put in anything you suggest. Funds are available. Lots of those peace-and-benevolence folks have made perpetual donations for those persons less fortunate in their aspirations than themselves. Less fortunate than—from where we stand, that's a joke, isn't it? There is time, but barely. Tell them what you want them to put in. Act now!
His name was Midas Jones. His father had named him that and given him the touch. But somehow the name had changed, and it was as Maybe Jones that he was known on the spaceways. Once Maybe Jones had found the Perfect Place. He had left it, and he was never able to find it again.
He had visited it, one space city out of a million, for a day and a night long ago. He had gone from the Perfect Place to New Shanghai to arrange his affairs so that he might return to the Perfect Place forever. On New Shanghai, in an altercation that really amounted to nothing, Maybe Jones had suffered a broken head and had lost a piece of his memory. The head mended in time and most of the memory came back; but the recollection of the name and bearings of the Perfect Place did not return.
“With your money and your predilections, you could have fun anywhere, Maybe,” his friends told him.
“I could and I do,” Maybe said, “but it isn't the same thing. It all turns bitter when I can't recover the City itself.”
“Was it really perfect, Maybe?”
“Perfect. And I don't mean the weak things that others mean by the word. It was perfection at high speed. I know that there are other sorts of people in the universes. They would say that it was no more than an old-time Saturday-night town. They would call it a stinking row. It wasn't. Aromatic, maybe, but not stinking. For a high-flying low-lifer like me it was perfect.”
“How were the girls there, Maybe?” asked Susie-Q.
“You might get by there, Sue, though barely, as the last girl in the last bang-house in town. And you're the prettiest trick on Sad-Dog planet.”
“How come you didn't run out of money, Maybe, with all those girls around?” Live-Man Lutz asked him.
“Nobody ever ran out of money there. I'd think my old wallet would be flat, and I'd pull it out and it'd be fatter than ever. Look, it wasn't just the girls and the drinks and the music; it was everything. There were friends there, each of them a thousand friends in one. There were fellows you had known forever the first time you saw them, and every one of them a prince. There was talk there that'd never grow old. There's a pretty good bunch of liars in present company, but you're nothing to the high liars and tall talkers in the Perfect Place. Every pleasure of the flesh and spirit was available, and it didn't get old. There was no frustration or spoiling or guilt. At night they took the sky off just to give it more height.”
“Where is this Perfect Place, Maybe? How does one get there?”
At that question Maybe Jones always broke down and cried. He didn't know where the place was, nor its name nor its direction, nor any way to identify it. He looked for it
forever, and he and it became legends.
For twenty years he had been going about the universes asking for it. He followed every lead, and con-men often sold him false information about it.
“Take a galactic left down Pirates Alley for six parsecs,” they might tell him. “Cross the Bright Ocean. Take the Irish Channel where it opens up at nine o'clock. It's marked for the first four light years of it. When you come at a district known as Dobie's Hole, ask directions at any planet or asteroid. You will be quite near the Perfect Place.”
Some of the planets in Dobie's Hole were pretty live places. You could find girls there like Susie-Q, and cronies like Live-Man Lutz. It was near perfect in some of those sinks, so the misunderstanding was understandable. But none of them was the Perfect Place.
One day a simple announcement was made through the universes: from then on, nobody had to die. Mortality was found to be a simple disease, and it had yielded to simple specifics. Nobody paid much attention to the announcement. “I never could see much sense in dying,” some of them said. “I never much intended to die anyhow.”
“It was just one of those things that everybody did. Now they don't.”
“It doesn't make any difference to me. I'd as soon keep on living as not.”
A number of bureaus were set up to look into the implications. There were a thousand of them for the countless thousands of good people who would want to follow the right way when it was shown to them, and to do something good with their endless future.
And there was a small bureau set up for that small group of folks who may perhaps have slight flaws in their characters — the golden flaw, as Maybe Jones once called it. This small bureau was to plan the future for the good-time crowd who could not be reformed into the sanctioned mold.
It had a small staff at first: High-Life Higgins, Good-Time Charley Wu, Hilda the Hoop, Margaret the Houri, people like that. They had only a vague idea of what they wanted. They sifted the legends of the pleasure places: Fiddlers' Green, Maybe Jones' City, Barbary, Valhalla on the Rocks.
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 66
