Robot and the Man - [Adventures in Science Fiction 04]

by Edited by Martin Greenburg

  It took a little argument, but with the memory of that one perfect shot in his mind it didn’t take much. As Quinby said afterward, “Robinc built pride into its robots to give them self-confidence. But that pride also gave them vanity and dissatisfaction with anything less than perfection. That’s what we could use. It was all perfectly simple—”

  “—when you looked at it straight,” I chorused with him.

  “And besides,” he said, “now we know how to lick Robinc forever.”

  ~ * ~

  That was some comfort, I suppose, though he wouldn’t say another word to explain it. And I needed comfort, because just then things took a nasty turn again. We stuck close to our factory and didn’t dare go out. We were taking no chances on more kidnapings before Quinby finished his new inspiration.

  Quinby worked on that alone, secret even from us. I figured out some extra touches of perfection on the usuform soldier, who was now our bodyguard—Grew would never dare complain of the theft because he’d had no legal right to possess such an android, anyway. Mike and his assistants, both living and usuform, turned out barkeeps and dowsers and cooks— our three most successful usuform designs so far.

  We didn’t go out, but we heard enough. It was the newest and nastiest step in Grew’s campaign. He had men following up our cooks and bartenders and managing to slip concentrated doses of ptomaine alkaloids into their products. No serious poisoning, you understand; just an abnormally high proportion of people taken sick after taking usuform-prepared food or drink. And a rumor going around that the usuforms secreted a poisonous fluid3 which was objective nonsense, but enough to scare a lot of people.

  “It’s no use,” Mike said to me one day. “We’re licked. Two new orders in a week. We’re done for. No use keeping up production.”

  “The hell we’re licked,” I said.

  “If you want to encourage me, you’d ought to sound like you believed it yourself. No, we’re sunk. While he sits in there and—I’m going down to the Sunspot and drink Three Planets till this one spins. And if Grew wants to kidnap me, he’s welcome to me.”

  It was just then the message came from the Head. I read it, and knew how the camel feels about that last straw. It said:

  I can’t resist popular pressure forever. I know and you know what Grew is up to; but the public is demanding re-enactment of the law giving Robinc exclusive rights. Unless Quinby can see straight through the hat to the rabbit, that re-enactment is going to pass.

  “We’ll see what he has to say to this,” I said to Mike. I started for the door, and even as I did so Quinby came out.

  “I’ve got it!” he said. “It’s done.” He read the Head’s message with one glance, and it didn’t bother him. He grabbed me by the shoulders and beamed. I’ve never heard my name spoken so warmly. “Mike, too. Come on in and see the greatest usuform we’ve hit on yet. Our troubles are over.”

  We went in. We looked. And we gawked. For Quinby’s greatest usuform, so far as our eyes could tell, was just another android robot.

  ~ * ~

  Mike went resolutely off to the Sunspot to carry out his threat of making this planet spin. I began to think myself that the tension had affected Quinby’s clear-seeing mind. I didn’t listen especially when he told me I’d given him the idea myself. I watched the usuform-android go off on his mysterious mission and I even let him take my soldier along. And I didn’t care. We were done for now, if even Dugg Quinby was slipping.

  But I didn’t have time to do much worrying that morning. I was kept too busy with androids that came in wanting repairs. Very thoroughgoing repairs, too, that turned them, like my soldier, practically into usuforms. We always had a few such requests—I think I mentioned how they all want to be perfect—but this began to develop into a cloudburst. I stopped the factory lines and put every man and robot on repair.

  Along about mid-afternoon I began to feel puzzled. It took me a little while to get it, and then it hit me. The last three that I’d repaired had been brand-new. Fresh from the Robinc factory, and rushing over here to be remade into . . . into usuforms!

  As soon as I finished adjusting drill arms on the robot miner, I hurried over to where Quinby was installing an infrared color sense on a soldier intended for camouflage-spotting. He looked up and smiled when he saw me. “You get it now?”

  “I get what’s happening. But how . . . who-”

  “I just followed your advice. Didn’t you say what we needed was a guaranteed working usuform converter?”

  ~ * ~

  “I don’t need to explain, do I? It’s simple enough once you look at it straight.”

  We were sitting in the Sunspot. Guzub was very happy; it was the first time the Head had ever honored his establishment.

  “You’d better,” I said, “remember I’m a crooked-viewing dope.”

  “But it’s all from things you’ve said. You’re always saying I’m good at things and robots, but lousy at people because people don’t see or act straight. Well, we were stymied with people. They couldn’t see the real importance of usuforms through all the smoke screens that Grew threw up. But you admit yourself that robots see straight, so I went direct to them. And you said we needed a usuform converter, so I made one.”

  The Head smiled. “And what is the utile form of a converter?”

  “He had to look like an android, because otherwise they wouldn’t accept him. But he was the sturdiest, strongest android ever made, with several ingenious, new muscles. If it came to fighting, he was sure to make converts that way. And besides, he had something that’s never been put in a robot brain before—the ability to argue and convince. With that, he had the usuform soldier as a combination bodyguard and example. So he went out among the androids, even to the guards at Robinc and from then on inside; and since he was a usuform converter, well—he converted.”

  The Head let the famous grin play across his black face. “Fine work, Quinby. And if Grew hadn’t had the sense to see at last that he was licked, you could have gone on with your usuform converters until there wasn’t an android left on Earth. Robinc would have toppled like a wooden building with termites.”

  “And Grew?” I asked. “What’s become of him?”

  “I think, in a way, he’s resigned to his loss. He told me that since his greatest passion was gone, he was going to make the most of his second greatest. He’s gone off to his place in the mountains with that usuform cook you gave him, and he swears he’s going to eat himself to death.”

  “Me,” said Mike, with appropriate business, “I’d like a damper death.”

  “And from now on, my statisticians assure me, we’re in no danger of ever using up our metal stockpile. The savings on usuforms will save us. Do you realize, Quinby, that you’re just about the most important man in the Empire today?”

  That was when I first heard the band approaching. It got louder while Quinby got red and gulped. It was going good when he finally said, “You know, if I’d ever thought of that, I . . . I don’t think I could have done it.”

  He meant it, too. You’ve never seen an unhappier face than his when the crowd burst into the Sunspot yelling “Quinby!” and “Q.U.R.!”

  But you’ve never seen a prouder face than mine as I saw it then in the bar mirror. Proud of myself, sure, but only because it was me that discovered Dugg Quinby.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  While the robot became man’s right hand, there was ever present the fear that he might get out of control. Watchful guidance continued, but he was gradually becoming more accepted as a part of man’s civilization.

  BURNING BRIGHT

  by John S. Browning

  T

  HE voice whispered through the miles of underground tunnels and chambers of the big atomic power plant. “Calling Mr. Ferguson. Call the safety engineer.

  Come to the surface hospital at once. Urgent. Calling-”

  The whispering sound from the loudspeakers raised up little never-sleeping ghosts of doubt and
fear in the men who heard it. They looked up from their desks, then checked the wall counters to see if hidden radiation was leaking through the plant, they looked at each other in furtive sidelong glances, then went quickly back to their tasks as if they were ashamed of the hidden fears the whispering voice brought to the surface. They were afraid but they didn’t like to admit it. All men who had worked in an atomic energy plant had learned the meaning of fear, including Ferguson. All men. And maybe all robots.

  Ferguson didn’t hear the voice calling him to come to the hospital. He didn’t know he was being paged. The loudspeaker in the room where he was had been removed, for repairs, and had not been replaced. The voice, if he had heard it, would have raised a cold sweat on him and would have taken him to the hospital on the run. When the hospital called the safety engineer, it meant only one thing, the grim and bitter and final fact of death, for someone.

  But Ferguson didn’t know he was being paged. And so, for the time at hand, he retained his peace of mind, or as much of his peace of mind as he, or anyone, with the possible exception of the robots, ever retained in an atomic power plant. There was something about a power plant that hated peace of mind in men. Watching the armor-covered, extremely careful technicians prepare to open the revolving door that led into the hell that was beyond, and remove from it the body of the robot that other robots had placed there in obedience to orders they almost certainly did not understand, he knew at least two of the reasons why there was no peace of mind in this place. One reason was the robots themselves. The other reason was the hell that existed beyond the wall, the hell that he was constantly aware of as a feeling of pressure and of tension, somewhere. No sound went with the feeling of pressure; the tremendous load of power being generated behind the wall was produced silently. Nor did the feeling of pressure reach his mind through sight or the sense of touch. But it reached his mind somehow, moving through some channel of communication not yet discovered by the neurologists, and he was eternally aware of it, like a dam just at the bursting point but never quite bursting.

  Besides Ferguson, there were three men in the room. Two were technicians, whose duty it was to open the door to the power plant and remove and decapitate the robot in the revolving chamber, and the U.N. representative, whose duty was to make certain the robot brain—Smither’s famous substance with a selective memory—went into the acid bath and was dissolved there. Robots capable of working in a hellish bath of radioactive radiations made the effective generation of electric power from atomic energy both cheap and practical, but for good and sufficient reasons, the U.N. was scared of them. When robots went into a power plant, to remain there until natural wear and tear had rendered them useless for further service, a U.N. representative was on hand to check them in. And when they came out, worn and battered hulks of metal with only Smither’s secret brain substance alive in them, another U.N. man made certain that the brain died. Otherwise men might find they had a dangerous and deadly rival fighting them for control of the planet.

  There were no robots outside atomic power plants. The secret of Smither’s famous brain substance was a U.N. secret. The manufacture of robots was a U.N. monopoly. The counting of robot noses was a U.N. job. It would remain this way until both experience and carefully controlled experiments had proved beyond the shadow of a doubt exactly what a robot was. It seemed best to take no chances with a mechanism that possessed not only sufficient intelligence to repair itself but could also perform highly complicated operations, or not until the human race had forgotten how to train armies and fight wars.

  The U.N. wanted no robot armies in existence. Hence no robot knowledge of worlds outside of power plants, no robot knowledge of anything except the twin gods of duty and obey implanted so deeply in a brain substance that they could not be eliminated, men hoped!

  ~ * ~

  “Ready!” the technician called. The U.N. man nodded. Ferguson nodded. The technician closed a switch and the heavy door began to turn.

  The robot was an old model. Both legs were missing. The metal body sheathing was pitted and flaked. He lay quietly on the revolving turntable. As the door turned and the robot came completely into the room, the wall counters began to rattle like the tails of little snakes shouting a warning that something more deadly than any snake had come into this room. The robot body, bathed for years in the deadly radiations beyond the wall, was in itself a source of secondary radiations.

  The technicians worked swiftly. A crane magnet lifted the robot from the turntable to a long bench. The robot made no attempt to escape although the photoelectric cells that were its eyes must have looked up at the knife above it and guessed the purpose of that knife. But, it crossed its arms and lay there looking up. The U.N. man nodded. The technicians closed another switch and the knife screamed down. The robot head dropped from the robot body and fell into a bath of acid. The crane lifted the body and dropped it into a lead-lined vault. The wall counters left off their savage chattering. Ferguson tried to repress a shudder and failed. He always hated this scene. The whole thing even to the knife, which was modeled on the guillotine, reminded him too strongly of an execution.

  The robot had crossed its arms and died. Down in the acid bath the material with a selective memory, the brain, was dissolving into elemental parts. It had been alive, in a way, and now it was dying, now it was dead. It had accepted death calmly, but Ferguson, remembering the way the arms had been crossed, stepped forward to ask a question.

  “First time I ever saw one of them do that,” the technician answered.

  The U.N. man made a mark in his notebook. One robot, dead. “What difference does it make!” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ferguson answered. He was irritated and a little afraid. What difference did it make if a robot crossed its arms before it died? He tried to think of that difference. He couldn’t see the answer clearly. “They’re not supposed to do that,” he said.

  The U.N. man shrugged. He was here to count dead robots, not to worry about them. He was in a hurry to get the job done and get out of this heavy armor and get away from this unhealthy place. “Next,” he said.

  The revolving door swung round again, hesitated while robots beyond the wall placed another worn-out body on the chamber that led to death, then came around again carrying its second load of twisted metal and resigned brain. The wall counters rattled their warning. The robot crossed its arms across its chest, clasping in them a little star-shaped object, the knife roared down. Ferguson beat the crane to the body. In the fingers was a little plastic star.

  “Look at that!”

  The technicians looked, the U.N. man looked. “Plastic molded into the shape of a star,” one of the technicians said. “Funny, isn’t it? It’s hot, though. We’ll have to dump it.”

  “They’ve invented death rites and death objects,” Ferguson said. He turned to the U.N. man. “Look, I think this is important.”

  “What’s important about it?”

  “They’ve gained some conception of the meaning of death. They’re beginning to attempt to control death. That’s what death rites and death objects are, attempts to control the fate of the soul in some after-life-” His voice went into confused silence. These were unscientific terms that conveyed feeling but no real meaning. These were outlaw words that got their user a lifted eyebrow and a compassionate look.

  They got Ferguson exactly that, plus a grin. The U.N. man glanced at the acid bath. “The death objects didn’t do much good, did they? Next.”

  The grin did it. “Listen, you thick-headed-” Ferguson caught himself. There was nothing to be gained by calling names. Besides, he knew enough psychiatry to know that his name-calling outburst was rising out of fears in his own deep soul, out of his own subconscious. “Sorry. But-”

  “If you think it is important, I’ll report it,” the U.N. man said, compassionately. “Next.”

  Ferguson was silent. In his mind was turmoil. A robot going to death with a star in his hands! Ferguson had a touch of mystic
ism in him. The sight of a star-carrying robot touched deep wells of feeling in him, arousing age-old questions. “Tiger, tiger, burning bright-” he found himself saying. “In the forest of the night.

  “What the hand and what the eye,

  “Shaped thy fearful symmetry?”

  Was the tiger seeking the hand and the eye that had shaped his being?

  The crane dropped the robot body in the lead-lined vault and the revolving door began to turn again. Ferguson had his eyes glued to the turntable when Blake, his assistant, burst into the room. “The hospital wants you!” Blake gasped, then, because he was not wearing armor, turned and ducked back out of the place.

  “The hospital-” Tigers burning bright and robots going to death with plastic stars carried in crossed hands were erased from the mind of the safety engineer. He went out of the room without seeing what the turntable carried. Tigers burning bright and star-carrying robots belonged to the realm of teleo-logical philosophy, to the doctrine of purposive and conscious causes, to the dim and dark nether region of first causes where science had not yet penetrated. For fifty centuries and more men had speculated on such subjects, without reaching any firm conclusions.