Adam Link, Robot

by Eando Binder

  The other letter went into my diary, together with my written account, locked in vaults that were not to be opened for a year after my “death or destruction.” It read:

  These may be the last recorded thoughts of Adam Link.

  I am going away to a place that I have owned secretly for some time, a place that I have never mentioned and will not now. I may return, but whether in a year or twenty I cannot say. To that end I have arranged for all the supplies necessary to my existence to be brought by circumspect methods, to what will be my hermitage until I know better what I must do.

  I know at last my full capabilities—and my weaknesses. The capacity for emotion, rooted in me by my creator, has again betrayed me, and this time with me it has added another victim. Unless I can return to life among humans without running the dangers of hurting them, perhaps it is best for me never to return.

  But I don’t know. I don’t know. There is so much good that I can do. The harm must never happen again. I must never tell another half-truth like the one in which I told Jack that there can never be another man for Kay but him. Not a man…

  I am going away then, and I will not come back until Adam Link, the Robot, the machine—is truly a machine again.

  CHAPTER 8

  Metal Mate

  I was away for a week. I had fled to my secret retreat in the Ozark Mountains—fled from Kay. It was a small cabin, a study and laboratory that I had built for myself, for moments of solitude and thought, when the world of men weighed heavily upon me. Jack and Kay did not know of this place.

  I had to think—think.

  But my thoughts all led to the same conclusion—a conclusion forced on me by Kay. She had made it clear that a robot mind, knowing of but lacking the capacity for human love, must live only in a bitter loneliness. Think of yourself as the only human being on Mars, among utterly alien beings. Beings with intelligent minds but strange bodies and strange customs. You would know true loneliness.

  And loneliness closed in on me, relentlessly.

  My solitude was broken one day by a visitor. “I’m Dr. Paul Hillory,” he introduced himself. He was a small wizened man of middle-age, bald as an egg. He had a certain sly look in his eyes that I took for either humor or a cynical outlook. But I didn’t care. I hardly knew he was there as he continued.

  “I’m a scientist, retired. I have a small summer cabin a mile away. I saw you drive up here like a demon a week ago. Of course I’ve heard of you, Adam Link. All about your trial and business venture. It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir. An intelligent robot!”

  Most people had known fear or even panic at meeting me. Dr. Hillory was too intelligent to be frightened. He was instead excited and eager. Suddenly he noticed my dejected pose.

  “You seem sad somehow,” he said, “what’s the trouble?”

  I told him the story in low defeated tones.

  Then, without another word, I stalked from the cabin. I strode along the path through the trees that sheltered the place from prying eyes. Beyond was a clearing of a hundred feet. It ended abruptly in a cliff, which dropped five hundred feet to hard rocks. I would find my death down there. I had decided on that.

  Dr. Hillory had followed me. When he divined my purpose, he cried in protest and tugged at my arm. He might as well have tried to hold back a tractor. I didn’t know he was there. He grasped my middle—and was dragged along like a sack of feathers.

  The cliff edge was now fifty feet away. I would keep right on walking. Suddenly he was running in front of me, pushing at me and talking.

  “You can’t do this, Adam Link!” he screeched. “You have the secret of the metal-brain. It must not go with you. Robots can be useful—”

  He was talking to the wind. The cliff was twenty feet away.

  Suddenly a gleam came into his eyes.

  “You are lonely, Adam Link. You have no one like yourself to talk to, to share companionship. Well, you fool, why not make another robot?”

  I stopped. Stopped dead at the brink of the cliff. I stared down five hundred feet at the shattering rocks below. Then I turned away; went back. Dr. Hillory had won.

  He stayed to help me. I had a completely equipped workshop and laboratory. I ordered the parts I needed through the devious channels I had thought necessary to my isolation when I built the hideaway. Within a month, a second iridium-sponge brain lay in its head-case, on my workbench.

  Dr. Link, my creator, had taken twenty years to build my complex metal brain. I duplicated the feat in a month. Dr. Link had had to devise every step from zero. I had only to follow his beaten path. As an added factor, I work and think with a rapidity unknown to you humans. And I work twenty-four hours a day.

  The time had come to test the new metal-brain. Dr. Hillory was vastly nervous. And also strangely eager. His face at times annoyed me. I could not read behind it.

  I paused when the electrical cord had been attached to the neck cable of the metal-brain head, resting with eyes closed on a porcelain slab.

  “I had thought of this before, of course,” I informed my companion. “Making a second metal-brain. But I had reasoned that it would come to life and know the bitter loneliness I knew. I did not think of her having my companionship, and I hers.”

  “Hers!”

  Dr. Hillory was staring at me open-mouthed.

  For a moment I myself was startled. I had given myself away, and somehow, before this elderly man, I felt—embarrassed. I felt like a teen-age youngster, experiencing his first love affair. In all except the actual fact, I blushed. Metal, fortunately, does not act like the thermometer of human faces, recording human feelings.

  But it was too late to hide what I meant from the canny scientist. Besides, he had to know sooner or later. I went on.

  “When you slopped me at the cliff, you said why not make another robot? I had been thinking of Kay Temple at the moment. The picture of the robot that leaped into my mind, then, was not one like myself. Not mentally. The outward form would not matter. I was ‘brought up’ from the masculine viewpoint. This robot-mind must be given the feminine outlook.”

  My mechanical voice went down in tone.

  “Her name will be—Eve!”

  Dr. Hillory had recovered himself. “And how will you accomplish this miracle?” he said skeptically.

  “Simply enough. She must be brought up in the presence of a woman. Her thought-processes, her entire outlook, will automatically be that of a woman. You must do this for me, Dr. Hillory. You are my friend. You must go to the city and see Kay Temple for me—now Mrs. Jack Hall. She is the only one who can make my plans come true. She must be the companion for Eve.”

  Dr. Hillory sat down, shaking his head a little dazedly. I could appreciate how he felt. Bringing a girl up here to teach a metal monster to be sweet, gentle-natured, feminine! Like trying to bring up a forest creature of lion-like build and strength to be a harmless, playful kitten. It was incongruous. Even I had my doubts. But I had equal determination.

  “I suppose,” he said, with a trace of the cynicism that lurked somewhere in his character, “that you will want your—Eve—to learn to giggle, like a school-girl.”

  I didn’t answer.

  Instead, I switched on the electric current. Slowly I rheostated it up, to reach the point at which electrons would drum through the iridium-sponge brain, as thoughts drum in the human mind under the forces of life. I watched, holding my breath—no, I have no breath. Sometimes I forget I am a metal man. But the idiom stands as descriptive of my feelings.

  For what if the metal-brain were a failure? What if my brain was what it was by sheer accident, not the result of Dr. Link’s creative genius? What if, after all, the process could not be repeated again—ever!

  Loneliness. Extinction. Again my life would be wedged in maddeningly between those two words.

  I held my breath, I repeat. I heard the hum of the electron-discharge, coursing through the metal-brain I hoped to bring to life. And then—movement. The eyelids of the head flicked open.
The brain saw. The eyelids clicked shut again, as though the brain had been startled at its sight. Then they opened and shut several more times, exactly as a human being might blink, awaking from some mysterious sleep.

  “It’s alive,” whispered Dr. Hillory. “The brain is alive, Adam Link. We’ve succeeded!”

  I looked down at the blinking head. The eyes seemed to look into mine, wonderingly.

  “Eve!” I murmured. “My Eve!”

  When we had completed the body, similar to mine but somewhat smaller, Dr. Hillory went to the city. He came back with Jack and Kay. They had come without question, immediately.

  “Adam Link,” Jack called as soon as he stepped from his car. “Adam, old boy! We’ve been wondering and worrying about you. Why did you run off like that? Why didn’t you get in touch with us sooner, you tin idiot…”

  Jack was just covering up his intense joy at seeing me, with those words. It was good to see him too, he who was my staunch friend and looked upon me more as man than robot.

  Kay came up. The air seemed to hush. We stared at each other, not speaking a word.

  Something inside of me turned over. My heart—as real as the “heart” with which you humans love and yearn—stopped beating. I had fled from her, but had not escaped. It was plain, now. And Kay? What was she thinking, she who had such a short time ago seen me as a man behind the illusion of metal. A man she could love…

  Jack glanced from one to the other of us. “Say, what’s the matter with you two? You’re staring at each other as though you’d never met before. Kay—”

  Jack of course didn’t know. She had not told him; he would not understand. And my last letter to Jack had told a half-truth, that there could never be another man in Kay’s life but Jack.

  “Nothing, darling,” Kay spoke. She took a deep breath, squeezing his arm. And then I saw how radiantly happy she was. It was an aura about her. They had been married two months. I felt a surge of joy. Kay had found herself. And I would too, soon, in a companion like myself in outward form, and like Kay inwardly.

  They agreed to my plan enthusiastically.

  “I take credit for the idea originally,” said Jack in mock boastfulness. “You remember once, Adam, that I suggested you make another robot, give it the feminine viewpoint, and you were automatically her lord and master.”

  Kay touched my arm. “I’ll try to make her a girl you can be proud of, Adam.”

  “With you training her, that is assured,” I returned, with more than mere gallantry.

  “Well, let’s get to work,” said Dr. Hillory, impatiently. He had stood by with a look in his face that seemed to say it was all rather foolish. “You two can use my cabin,” he said to Jack and Kay. “It’s only a mile away.”

  Kay came every morning, promptly. She would turn the switch on Eve’s frontal plate that brought her to life and begin her “lessons.”

  Eve learned to walk and talk as rapidly—within a week—as I had under Dr. Link’s expert guidance. Eve, no less than myself, had a brain that learned instantly and thereafter never forgot. Once she had learned to talk, the alphabet and reading came swiftly. Then, like myself, she was given books whose contents she absorbed in page-at-a-time television scanning. She passed from “babyhood” to “schoolhood” to mental “maturity” in the span of just weeks.

  The other process was not quite so simple—instilling in her growing mind the feminine viewpoint. It might take months of diligent work on Kay’s part, and would take all of her time, much to Jack’s ill-concealed dislike.

  I had put quite a bit of thought into the matter. At last I devised an instrument that shortened the process. An aluminum helmet fitted over Kay’s head, transferred her thoughts directly, over wires, to Eve. Thoughts are electrical in nature. I found the way to convert them into electrical impulses, like in a telephone. Fitted to the base of Eve’s skull-piece was a vibrator whose brush-contacts touched the base of her brain. Kay’s thoughts then set up an electro-vibration that modulated the electron flow of Eve’s metal brain.

  Electronic mind transference. Broadcast telepathy. Beamed ESP. Call it what you will. Kay’s mind poured over into the receptive Eve’s. I knew that Eve would then be a second Kay, a mental twin. It was Kay’s mind I appreciated from the first, in an emotion as close to human love as I can reach.

  Dr. Hillory and I watched developments with all the avid curiosity of the scientific mind. But I watched with more than scientific interest. We left the whole job to Kay. We seldom talked with or even went near Eve, for fear of upsetting this strange process of giving a robot a feminine mind.

  Once, in fact, I was annoyed to find Dr. Hillory talking to Eve. Kay had left for a moment. What he had said I don’t know. I didn’t want to question Eve and perhaps confuse her. But I pulled Dr. Hillory away, squeezing his arm with such force that he winced in pain.

  “Keep away from her,” I said bluntly.

  Dr. Hillory said nothing, however. I began to wonder what to do about the scientist. But then I forgot about him, as the great moment neared, and finally arrived.

  Jack, Dr. Hillory and I were in the sitting room. Kay brought Eve in, leading her by the hand. Kay had assured me, that morning, that she had done all she could. Mentally matured, Eve was as much a “woman” in outlook, as I was a “man.”

  I’ll never forget that scene.

  Outwardly, of course, Eve was just a robot, composed of bright metal, standing on stiff alloy legs, her internal mechanism making the same jingling hum that mine did. But I tried to look beyond that. Tried to see in this second intelligent robot a psychic reaction as different from mine as a human female’s from a human male’s. Only in that would I be satisfied.

  I was Pygmalion, watching breathlessly as his ivory statue came to life.

  “This is Adam Link, Eve,” Kay said gravely, in our first formal introduction. “He is a wonderful man. I’m sure you’ll like him.”

  Ridiculous? You who read do not know the solemnity of that scene, the tense expectancy behind it. Jack, Kay and Hillory, as well as myself, had become vitally interested in the problem. The future of the intelligent robot might here be at stake. We all felt that. How nearly human, and manlike and womanlike, could metal life be made?

  We talked, as a group.

  The conversation was general. Eve was being introduced to her first “social” gathering. I was pleased to note how reserved she was, how polite and thoughtful in the most trivial exchange of words. Gradually I became aware of her “character” and “personality.” She was demure, but not meek. She was intelligent, but did not flaunt it. Deeper that than, she was sweet, loyal, sincere. She was lovely, by nature. She was—well, Kay.

  “I’ll be darned,” Jack suddenly said, slapping his knee. “Eve, you’re more Kay than Kay herself!”

  It was a splendid thing for Jack to say. He had made me feel human that way too, when I first met him. He had shaken hands with me in prison, and had me play poker with the “boys.” But he wasn’t merely making a gallant gesture, here with Eve. He meant it. We all laughed, of course. Yes, I laughed too, inside. And I knew that Eve laughed, for she pressed her folded hands together. Kay always did that when she laughed.

  Something of the tense atmosphere was relieved. Our conversation became more natural. And before we knew it, Eve and I, sitting together, were absorbedly engaged in a tête-à-tête, What would two robots talk about, you wonder? Not about electrons, rivets, gears. But about human things. She told me she liked good books, and the beauties of sunrise, and quiet moments of thought. I told her something of the world she hadn’t seen.

  It was then we noticed a queer phenomenon. Our conversation between ourselves gained in rapidity, like two phonographs going faster and faster. Both of us thought and spoke instantaneously. Vaguely, I noticed the others were looking at us in surprise. Our voices to them were an incoherent blur.

  In the next few hours, Eve and I passed through what might have corresponded to days or weeks of human association.

/>   Suddenly it happened.

  “I love you, Adam,” Eve said.

  I gasped, in human terms. My first reaction was one of astonishment. And I was a little repelled. It did not seem like a mature decision, rather a mere fancy of the moment on her part. Nor did I want her to say that simply because she knew I was the only other living robot on earth. I had wanted her to say that only from the depths of her being, as human beings did when the mighty forces of love awakened.

  “But Eve,” I protested, speaking to her as to a child, “you hardly know me. Nor have I given you any indication that I wanted you to say such a thing.”

  Eve’s folded hands pressed together. She was laughing.

  “Adam, you poor dear,” she returned. “You’ve been saying you love me for the past hour, in every manner short of words. I just wanted to end your suspense. I say it again, as I will to the end of time—I love you.”

  And in a sudden blinding moment, I knew my dream had come true. I couldn’t fathom how this girl-mind worked. She was to me what women have been to men since the dawn—mystery. And in that, I knew I had succeeded.

  Kay had caught on, somehow. She arose, tugging Jack by the arm. “We’re not needed here any more. We’re going back to the city. Dr. Hillory, you return to your cabin for a while.”

  Turning to us she said, smiling, “Get in touch with us soon, Adam and Eve.”

  And they were all three gone.

  And we—the Adam and Eve of robots—looked into each other’s eyes and knew that we had achieved a pinnacle of human relationship—love.

  CHAPTER 9

  Mechanical Zombies

  A month went by. I will draw the curtain over it, as is customary in your human affairs when a man and a woman adjust themselves to a new, dual life together. For the first time, in my sojourn among humans, I knew happiness. And Eve was radiantly happy, exactly as Kay in her new-found happiness with Jack.