To Obey

by Mickey Zucker Reichert

  Waiting for Kendall to return, Susan bunched the sweatshirt in her arms and rested her head on the fabric. It made a comfortable pillow, the fabric smooth, sweeping, cushiony against her cheek. The smell of it filled her nostrils, almost choking her with an odd, pungent aroma half burning leaves, half oily musk. She jerked her head up, shoving the offending object away, then drew it back for another tentative sniff. She knew that unique aroma, but her memory refused to process it for several moments. She took another whiff, cautious and necessary, and the answer finally came to her.

  With a chuckle, Susan shoved all the items back into the bag, grabbed the handle, and took off after Kendall. As he reentered the room, she checked her headlong rush, barely avoiding a collision.

  Kendall staggered against the door frame. “What the hell, Susan? Late for the racetrack?”

  Susan regained her balance, grasped the sweatshirt, and hauled it from the bag. She shoved it into Kendall’s face. “Smell this.”

  Kendall took a delicate whiff, then a deeper one. His features screwed into a caricature of disgust. “Phew! What is that? Skunk whiz?”

  “I think it’s marijuana.”

  “What?” Kendall looked at Susan as if she had gone stark raving mad.

  “Marijuana,” Susan repeated. “Smell it again.” She shoved it deeper into Kendall’s face.

  Kendall pushed the offending cloth away. “It doesn’t do any good to wedge it up my nose. I’ve never smoked the shit.”

  The denial made Susan defensive. “Neither have I, but I’ve smelled it. That unique, indescribable odor. That’s marijuana.” She stuffed the sweatshirt back into the bag.

  Kendall’s features remained bunched. “I’d hardly say ‘indescribable.’ It smells like burnt skunk urine. Why the hell would anyone inflict that crap on their innocent, irreplaceable lungs?” Realization suddenly flashed through his eyes. “Are you saying Grandma’s a junkie?”

  Susan laughed. “Probably more like an occasional user.”

  Kendall looked over his shoulder. “Obviously, we have to stop her. So why do I feel like a snitch ratting her out to her…”

  “Parents?” Susan supplied.

  “Well, in this case, her kids.” Kendall waved in the direction Caden and Bambi had taken. “Isn’t it weird how the trends go? Just when you start thinking every generation has to do everything ten times nuttier than its predecessors, you find one making healthier choices, living more fit and sensibly. My grandparents thought nothing of eating double-fried, lard-filled doughnuts on a stick and similar things that make me puke at the mere thought, combining that toxic ball of grease with a gallon of supercharged soda, then lighting up a nicotine-filled tube of death and blowing the smoke into other people’s faces.”

  As if in answer to Kendall’s rhetorical question, Nurse Musica poked her head into the conference room. “Ah, there you are, Susan. Lab wanted you to Vox up the results on Jessica Aberdeen.”

  “Thanks.” For an instant, Susan wondered why the lab had not just sent a signal directly to her Vox, then realized another interesting trend. Now that they could reach nearly anyone with anything at any time, people sometimes hesitated to do so, for fear of interrupting something important with a buzz, ring tone, or vibration. Quickly, she tapped up Jessica’s results.

  Kendall tried to look over her shoulder, an action the tininess of the screen rendered intimate. “Don’t tell me we’re going to solve three hopeless cases in a day. That’s got to be a record.”

  Susan lowered her arm. The results were no surprise. “Jessica has macrocytic anemia, though it’s surprisingly mild given her symptoms and the dirt-bottom low of her cobalamin level.” She extended her wrist toward Kendall.

  Seizing her arm, Kendall studied the Vox, then whistled. “That’s the lowest level I’ve ever heard of.” He let go of Susan. “What do you think, Calvin? Intrinsic factor deficiency?”

  Susan shook her head gloomily. She hated cases like this one. “Rigid vegan diet. She’s probably never had fully adequate stores of B12 in her life.”

  “Well, then, Calvin.” Kendall patted her on the back. “Another opportunity for you to bring around a hopeless case. A couple of stiff injections, and she’s perfectly normal. Chalk up another miracle for Susan Calvin.”

  Susan narrowed her eyes and turned to face him. “Have you ever actually seen a case of B12 deficiency?”

  “No,” Kendall admitted. “It’s a zebra. Rare.”

  “Do you know why it’s rare?”

  Kendall hesitated only a moment. “Because…it’s not 1763?” He took on the voice of a stereotypical crusty pirate, “An’…argh…we’re not all scurvy dogs.”

  Susan yawned. “Scurvy is vitamin C deficiency.”

  Kendall continued his pirate imitation. “Argh! Twelve’s a high ’nuff B, it might’s well be vite-min C.” He added in his own voice, “My point’s valid.”

  Susan rolled her eyes. “Valid, indeed, if your point is the federal government fortifies our food so deficiencies have become a thing of the past, except in cases where disease states impair our ability to absorb or process them.”

  “But?” Kendall tipped his head.

  “But,” Susan inserted, “we have a forty-something woman still living with her extremely controlling parents, who are dietarily militant.”

  Kendall tipped his head still farther, to an exaggerated degree. He looked like he might fall over.

  “She’s probably been B12 deficient all or most of her life. God knows how much of the neurological damage we can reverse at this stage.”

  “You’re saying it’s not just a matter of pumping her full of B12 and sending her on her way.”

  Susan shook her head sadly. “Not that I won’t. We’ll start her on a thousand micrograms per day IM. I’m sure we’ll see some improvement, possibly significant improvement, but it’s not going to be the hundred-percent miracle we’re all hoping for.”

  Kendall chuckled.

  Susan turned him a sour look. “What’s so funny?”

  Kendall’s laughter grew so uproarious, Susan found it difficult to pin him with her gaze.

  “What’s so damn funny, Kendall?”

  Kendall waited until he fully caught his breath to reply, “Only the great Susan Calvin would characterize a patient going from frank dementia to significantly functional as a failure.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Susan punched his arm a bit harder than a friendly tap. “It bugs the crap out of me when people do stupid things to themselves, then expect us to fix it. But it makes me homicidal when people ruin the lives of their children, even if it’s well-meaning.” She added to her own surprise, “Especially when it’s well-meaning.”

  Kendall stared. “Wow, you’re in a mood today.”

  Susan did not care. “And why shouldn’t I be? I haven’t slept in about thirty-two hours. I wiped myself out saving a man’s sanity, only to be treated like dirt for my efforts. And now I get to clean up the mess made by a couple of morons who worship diet as a religion to the point of turning their daughter into a vegetable.”

  Kendall chuckled, and Susan rounded on him. “What’s so damn funny about destroying a child’s brain?”

  “I’m sorry,” Kendall said, not sounding it. “You just essentially said that eating vegan turned her into a vegetable. Gives new meaning to the phrase ‘You are what you eat.’” He laughed again, shaking his head, and put an arm around her shoulder. “Come on, Susan. You’re deliriously tired, and you need to go home right now.”

  Susan knew Kendall was right, but that only annoyed her further. She shrugged off his touch.

  “Everyone is irrational about something. You’ve run into this a million times in medicine, and you’ve always managed to handle it.” Kendall raised his hand again, as if to place it on Susan’s shoulder, then dropped it to his side. “You’ll find a way to educate them.”

  Susan suspected she had about as much chance as talking a Christian Scientist into a blood transfusion or a priest into an a
bortion. Kendall was right about one thing: She needed to go home.

  More cautiously, Kendall put an arm around Susan’s waist and steered her toward the door. “I am sending you home, and I’m not going to hear any protest. Reefes already left; he won’t even know. The nurses and I will cover for you.”

  Susan knew they all would, too. She trusted them at her back. “Fine. I’ll leave as soon as I get the orders written for Jessica Aberdeen.”

  “Do you need me to get you on the right glide-bus?”

  “What?” It took Susan an inordinate amount of time to understand the obvious question. “No, I can handle it. I’ve been doing it since I was three.”

  “Well, see that you do.” Kendall headed toward the charting room. “Because if you’re still here in ten minutes, I’m carrying you out, kicking and screaming and ranting about dietary extremism as religion.”

  Susan turned Kendall a withering look. Though taller and heavier than she was, he clearly had little more than a nodding acquaintance with gym equipment. “I’d like to see you try.”

  Chapter 7

  Susan awoke with no memory of where she was or how she had gotten there. She opened her eyes, trying to orient herself to the ceiling, a broad expanse of mottled off-white with a generic overhead fixture, currently turned off. Gaining too few clues from that, she rolled her gaze across her near surroundings. She lay on a patterned couch, her head resting on one arm. In front of her, she found a low table with an untidy array of palm-prosses. The scene finally coalesced into the familiar tableau of the first-floor Manhattan Hasbro charting room, where she usually met with Nate.

  “Good morning, sleepyhead.” The robot’s voice cut through Susan’s confusion, and the events of the previous evening came rushing back. Instead of going straight home, she had headed to the hospital to talk to him. She had found a couple of residents in the room, discussing a difficult patient, but no sign of Nate. She remembered lying down on the couch to wait for him, her last conscious decision.

  Susan sat up suddenly. “Oh, my God! Am I late for work?”

  Nate sat in a chair parallel to and at the head of her couch. The residents had left hours ago. “Only if you have to be at work by four twenty-six a.m.”

  The pressure off, Susan sank back into the cushions, yawning. “My father’s probably frantic.”

  “I already contacted John Calvin. He knows where you are and that you’re safe.”

  Susan blushed. She should have done that. “Thank you. That was very kind.”

  Nate shrugged. “It was little effort, and only what needed to be done.”

  The events of the previous day returned to Susan’s memory, and she groaned.

  “Bad day?” Nate guessed.

  “How did you know?”

  “The noise you just made was a giveaway, even if I ignore the fact that you chose to come here after a job you characterize as gardening, fell asleep, and didn’t wake up until the wee morning hours.”

  “Bad day,” Susan admitted. “Bad two days merged into one really long, rotten day.”

  “Would you like to talk about it?”

  Nate’s tone was sincere, but Susan could not help laughing.

  Nate looked positively wounded by her mirth. “What’s funny? What did I say?”

  Susan lay back down on the sofa, using the armrest as a pillow. “I just got a flashback to when I first met Lawrence Robertson. He asked me when I’d be joining the staff of U.S. Robots.” She chuckled at the memory. “He was just being polite to the daughter of one of his workers, and I made a joke about robotics corporations not needing psychiatrists. There followed a bit of banter and a joke about a robot lying on the couch, spilling his lack of guts.” She deliberately did not think too long about the joke itself; Remington had made it.

  Nate continued to study her curiously, clearly wondering where she intended to take the conversation.

  Susan twisted so she could see his face. “So, instead of me becoming a psychiatrist for robots, I’m lying here getting analyzed by a robotic psychiatrist. It just struck me as hilarious turnabout.”

  Nate smiled but did not seem to find the same amusement. “Except I’m not a psychiatrist, robotic or otherwise.”

  “Well, you’re serving a therapeutic purpose for me.” Susan turned her head back to stare at the ceiling. “And that’s good enough for a joke at four thirty a.m.”

  “Hmmm,” Nate said, sounding very much like a classical Freudian. “So, what brings you to Dr. Nate?”

  Susan sighed again, all of the humor draining from her in the instant she pulled her thoughts back to reality. “I think lack of sleep is amplifying everything. I went to work with renewed enthusiasm after our last talk, found a patient who appeared to have been misdiagnosed, and presented him to our attending in order to get permission to perform a few tests.”

  “Naturally,” Nate said, “he refused.”

  Startled, Susan glanced at him. “How did you know?”

  Nate chuckled. “Because if he had said, ‘Sure, Susan. Go right ahead,’ you wouldn’t be making noises like a wounded rabbit and require the services of a robotic psychiatrist.”

  Susan folded her arms over her chest, stared back at the ceiling, and laughed. “Well, yes, then. He refused, all right.” She muttered under her breath. “Arrogant, demeaning jerk.”

  Nate made a thoughtful noise. “This sounds familiar.”

  That caught Susan off guard. “How so?”

  “Well, I seem to remember a first-year resident bringing me a similar dilemma almost exactly one year ago. She had a patient who needed reevaluation by Neurosurgery, but no one was brave enough to accuse the greatest neurosurgeon in the world of having made a mistake.”

  Susan remembered quite well. “Well, this time, my attending expressly forbade me from doing the tests, even though I was pretty sure we would find something significant, something we could treat that might improve or rescue the man’s sanity and, ultimately, his life.”

  “You did the tests anyway,” Nate guessed.

  Susan sat up. “My mood told you that?”

  “Your being Susan Calvin told me that,” Nate responded simply, as if no other explanation were needed. “And these tests were, indeed, abnormal.”

  “Yes.” Susan did not press Nate’s knowledge again. It would result only in compliments to her diagnostic acumen, and she did not need anyone, least of all Nate, to remind her of her talents. They often seemed as much a curse as a blessing. “And when I presented my findings to my attending, he acted as if he had made the discovery against my protests and chided me like an errant child right in front of my peers.” She amended, “Well, my peer. Singular.”

  “Wow.” Nate went silent a moment before asking, “What did you do?”

  Susan said soberly, “I punched his eyeballs through the back of his skull.”

  “What!” Nate stared in horror, then sat back. His tone turned doubtful. “You did not.”

  “Well, I wanted to,” Susan confessed. “I probably would have if Kendall hadn’t stopped me. Then kneed his privates through the roof of his mouth and surgi-stripped them to his ears.” Susan suddenly realized she might be making Nate distinctly uncomfortable, not because the image of traumatized testicles would upset any man, but because she doubted his wiring even allowed him to imagine the scenario she had created. “You know, at that moment, I actually wished I was a robot. Then the First Law would have constrained me, and I could not have even considered injuring a human being.”

  Before Nate could analyze the thought, Susan added carefully, “Of course, if I were a robot, I couldn’t have helped my patient, either. I’d be constrained by the Second Law.”

  “Susan,” Nate said softly. “I would have done nothing different than you did.”

  Now, Nate had Susan’s complete attention. “What?”

  “The First Law states, ‘A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.’ The Second Law officially states, �
�A robot must obey orders given it by human beings—’”

  Susan interrupted. “And my attending ordered me not to do those tests. And he’s a human being…” She added under her breath, “Barely.”

  Nate finished his thought as if Susan had not interrupted. “‘—except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.’ In this case, the order given would conflict with the First Law.”

  Susan considered, puzzled. “How so?”

  “Because,” Nate explained, “in this case, doing nothing, as ordered by your attending, would cause harm to the patient, who is also a human being. That conflicts directly with the second part of the First Law, which takes precedence over the first part of the Second Law.”

  Susan ran the wording through her mind again. “‘Or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.’” She could not help adding, “Wow.” She studied Nate. “I knew the Laws of Robotics allowed more insight than most people imagined they could. They fit together like a flawless and beautiful tapestry.” There was an inherent perfection in the whole of the Three Laws, the way they meshed, that went even beyond their creator’s realization. Lawrence Robertson had wanted safe, loyal robots. What he got was a cleaner, better breed than mankind could ever be, stronger creatures, more faithful and useful than himself and wholly devoted to him. How could anyone not see the value of this incredible creation, this thing of steel and gears and positrons that lived in secrecy because the mankind he served so lovingly was so foolish as to fear him?

  A thought came to Susan that seemed so obvious, she wondered why she had never asked before. “N8-C,” she whispered.

  Nate turned her an all-too-human glare. “You know I prefer Nate the same way you do Susan. Dr. Calvin.”

  Susan ignored the jibe. “The eighth in the NC model line, you once told me.”

  “Yes,” Nate admitted. “What of it?”

  “Is there an N7-C? An N1-C?”