Adam Link, Robot

by Eando Binder

  Adam Link, the intelligent robot, is definitely a national figure today. As a startling, almost fantastic novelty out of some lurid thriller, he captures the imagination. But the novelty has worn off. Even most of the jokes about him have died down.

  Science has created metal-life. We can accept that. But we must not blind ourselves to its deeper significance. Adam Link will want to be accepted as a human being. He may have legal status, but so has a dog. A dog may inherit money, and be tried for a crime. And despite his laudable actions so far, and his own protestations that he is human in all but body—is he human? I maintain he is inferior to humans in all mental respects. His so-called emotional reactions are all pseudo-human, mechanical, not real. Personally, I doubt if they exist at all. The commentator, signing himself Bart Oliver, left that damning indictment echoing like a challenge.

  “You see?” said the official softly. “A government like ours must never run against public opinion. Washington won’t grant you citizenship.” Then he waved impatiently. “I’m a busy man. Good day, gentlemen.”

  He should have added “—and Mrs. Link.” He had completely ignored the fact that she was a lady.

  Back at his apartment, Jack shook his head again.

  “No, I knew it wouldn’t work. Not that easily. In Washington, they’ll wrangle a while and then reject the application. They won’t want to set a precedent, or buck the public. Right, Tom?”

  Tom nodded wordlessly, and there was silence in the room. Tom broke the silence. “Maybe we should take out the—” he hesitated, glancing at me—“well, the patent.”

  “No.” My microphonic voice was firm. “The secret of the metal-brain is locked in my mind. I would trust no one else with it.”

  Jack was suddenly fuming.

  “That commentator, Bart Oliver. He doesn’t represent public opinion. He just poisons it. Adam Link is inferior to humans, he says like a lordly judge—”

  “Perhaps I am,” I said. “After all, I’m just wires and wheels. Metal junk strung together. Perhaps—”

  But something had struck Jack, forcibly.

  “Perhaps, nothing,” he interrupted. “There’s a way, by heaven. If we can get a tide of public opinion in your favor, Adam, we’d have a wedge in Washington.” He looked at me a moment. “Will you let us put you in the public eye?”

  Jack went on eagerly. “Sports is what I mean. We’ll display your strength and skill in sports. And with it, sportsmanship, determination, and what they call ‘heart’. All those human qualities are best brought out in sport activities. Adam, old boy, you’re going to make the headlines in a new way. What’s today—hah. The Indianapolis Memorial Day Race is next month. I have connections. I’ll get you in as an entry if I have to commit murder.”

  Irrepressibly, Jack made plans. His idea was sound. I would that way win human will and sympathy first, then official recognition.

  The Indianapolis racing classic took place.

  The jam-packed stands blurred by, hour after hour, as I drove my special car around the oval track. Eve was at my side, as my mechanic, pumping oil by hand to the laboring engine.

  We felt supreme confidence in ourselves. In my private car, a powerful one, I had often driven over a hundred miles an hour. I hit 200 here on the straight stretches, and not much less on the curves. I had no worry over a tire blowing out and losing control. Electrons and electricity motivate my brain and body, give me speed and power to a superhuman degree.

  There wasn’t any competition. I led the field. There wasn’t even danger, except when I overtook the racers so far behind, gaining laps. I swung past them one after another, timing the dangerous moments with hairline accuracy. I am a machine myself. Driving another machine is child’s play.

  “We will win, Eve,” I sang above the grinding roar of our motor. “They are so slow and inept, these humans.”

  “Not all of them,” Eve said. “The man in car five—Bronson is his name, I think—has been taking curves faster right along, in the attempt to catch us.”

  A moment of great danger came. One car skidded on a curve, cracking into another sideways, and both rolled over and over across my path. I was just passing the field again. There was only a split-second of time. No human could have avoided crashing into them. Tires squealing, our car swerved for the only opening in the jam.

  “Adam! The man—you’ll run over him…”

  One of the unfortunate drivers had catapulted from his wrecked car in front of me. He might be alive or dead. If I hit him, he would certainly be dead.

  The stalled car was in our way. I knew, in avoiding the man, I’d have to take my chances with a collision. When we struck, it was a glancing blow. Any human would have had the wheel ripped out of his hands. My alloy fingers tightened like a vice. The gears of my arms gave a screech of unyielding protest. I held firm. We went on, safely, except for two blown tires.

  Stopping in the pit for a quick change of wheels, we went on to win the race, still far ahead. Bronson was second, breaking the track record himself in the magnificent attempt to catch us.

  Oil-stained, grimy, so tired he could hardly stand, Bronson grinned at us. “Great race,” he said simply. “Better man than I am, Adam Link. You deserved it.”

  Before the race he had scorned to consider us competition. Some of the other drivers crowding around muttered. Had the race been fair, since I won so easily?

  “Shut up,” Bronson told them. “We had our laughs before we started. Adam and Eve Link thinking they could win? Hah! A couple of tin monkeys, we called them. We got to take our medicine now. Besides, I saw him take a skid, to miss running over Henderson. Adam Link might have cracked himself up. He takes first money and no beefing.”

  The crowd had taken the announcement of my victory in a dead, chilling silence. They were hostile. The announcer asked me to say something over the public-address system. I didn’t.

  I handed Bronson the first-prize check. I didn’t need it; we had plenty of the money I had earned as a business consultant in the past.

  Jack, on the judges’ stand beside me, nodded. “Take it, Bronson. You really won. There isn’t a driver on Earth could beat Adam Link.”

  The crowd burst out in cheers, over this. I knew what it was called—sportsmanship. I had won a point, after all, in my campaign to prove I was worth human status.

  Or had I?

  That evening, the papers used 72-point headlines. ROBOT WINS CLASSIC. METAL MAN DEMON DRIVER. INCREDIBLE RECORD SET BY ADAM LINK. And more significantly—TIN MAN AND MATE STEAL SPEEDWAY CUP.

  Under the latter heading, it said: “Why not run a man against a car? Adam Link was bound to win. It might have been a fairer contest if Adam Link had gamboled around the track himself, machine against machine.”

  More cutting was the column under Bart Oliver’s byline:

  Adam Link won the race, but not public acclaim. He tried to, by ‘magnanimously’ turning over the first-prize money to Bronson. Sportsmanship? I think we all see through it as a spurious act. He was told to do it, undoubtedly, by his manager. Adam Link himself would never have thought of such a human gesture in his cold, metallic mind.

  Bart Oliver had appointed himself my Nemesis. I could see that. He was ruthlessly determined to misinterpret everything I did, as so many others had since my creation. But now I had a truly formidable enemy, one who swayed large masses.

  I wrote a rebuttal. “I, Adam Link, am a robot, but I have a human mind, not a cold, metallic one. Ever since my advent, certain yellow journals and their paid mouthpieces have dinned against me constantly. The latest is Bart Oliver. I wish to point out that he represents his own opinion, not everyone’s, if there is any fairness in human minds.”

  It appeared in Oliver’s syndicated papers, under the heading: “Adam Link’s Manager Pens Rebuttal in Robot’s Name…”

  I will pass over sketchily the many following events. We barnstormed the sports world. In the tennis matches, I won against the highest-ranking player in straight sets.r />
  In golf I achieved a score of 49 on a par-72 course. Three times I drove from one green to another for a hole in one. The rest of the time I landed the ball within a few feet of the cup. An expert golfer takes account of the wind, when he swings his club. But he doesn’t see clearly, in his less mathematical mind, a graph showing the exact course the ball must follow through the air. Nor is he able to make allowance, as I did, for the differences in air density as the ball arcs up and then down again.

  At a track meet, in an open-air stadium, I ran the hundred yard dash in 5.4 seconds. But Eve did it in 5.3. She is a little quicker than I at the start. I recall the papers playing it up, banteringly, as a reversal of masculine superiority.

  We ran the two-minute mile. We set a high-jump “record” of 10½ feet, and a broad-jump of 41 feet. In the latter event, we did not dare exert our full powers. When we land our 500 pounds of weight, it jars through our whole mechanism, threatening to disrupt vital parts. As it was, Eve went head-over-heels, cracked her skull-piece against the ground violently, and was “unconscious” for five minutes. I was frantic till she came to and answered the endearments that come as naturally to me as to any man seeing a loved one hurt.

  “Is Adam Link really human in mind?” commented one paper over that. “He all but wrung his hands while his metal mate lay knocked cold.”

  “Another spurious reaction,” wrote Bart Oliver. “His ‘heart’ is an electrical distributor, giving off sparks of electricity, but certainly not of human emotion.”

  And so it had gone all along, pro and con. Was Adam Link human? Or was he simply a thinking engine? And always the yellow journals, led by Bart Oliver, maligned me. Branded me with such epithets as unhuman, subhuman, pseudo-human, quasi-human, para-human. Never human-human.

  With his flair for the spectacular. Jack managed to stage an exhibition baseball game, the proceeds for charity. The pitcher for one team was listed as Adam Link, the catcher Eve Link. The rest of our team were minor-leaguers. The opposing team were major-league all-stars.

  “Have you ever pitched before?” they asked me.

  I shook my head.

  “We’ll murder you,” they predicted boisterously.

  I was a little startled till I realized it was part of baseball jargon.

  The first man up waited confidently. They knew of my machine-strength, and success in all other sports, but baseball was different. I was against a skilled, powerful team. I sped the first ball down. Too low it was called a ball. The second was too high. The third too wide.

  But then I got the idea, and shot the fourth ball straight over the plate. Crack! It went into center field. Luckily, it was caught. The second man up watched two of my pitches go straight over for called strikes, then swung at the third. Like a bullet, it came at me and struck my frontal plate with a resounding clang. It might have killed a man. It bounced up from me and came down in my hands. Two out. The batter, having rounded first base, turned back, disgruntled. Any human pitcher would have been forced to dodge the ball and let it go into center field for a hit.

  The crowd was roaring. Adam Link could be hit. He was not so invincible in baseball as in all else.

  The third man up crashed the first ball over my head. That is, it would have gone over my head except that I leaped up ten feet and caught it in my left hand. The first half of the inning was over. The major-leaguers, passing me on the way to field, grinned.

  “We’ll bust you wide open next inning,” they cheerfully informed me. And this time I knew they didn’t mean wrecking my metal body and strewing its parts around.

  As our side, at bat, went down in one-two-three order, a voice called me from behind the dugout, where I sat with Eve and Jack.

  “Jim Brody, Jack explained. “Big betting-combine behind him. He’s probably wanting to fix things his way, but we’re having nothing to do with that sort of thing.”

  I shook my head in revulsion as we approached the man. “What do you want?” Jack asked him.

  The gambler’s beetle-brows were drawn together in a frown. He addressed me. “Look here, you going to win this game or not? The way you’re starting, they’ll run up a score next inning. And your men won’t get a run from their pitchers. Bets have been hard to get except at ten-to-one. If you lose, I’m cleaned.”

  “So what?” Jack snorted, stalking away.

  I thought of deliberately losing, to teach Brody a lesson. But I didn’t. The first inning had been experimental. Now I knew the exact range of the plate, the behavior of a ball in flight, the timing of their swings.

  I looped my arm around. The ball spanked into Eve’s hands almost instantly. I don’t think the umpire really saw it, but he sensed it had cut the heart of the plate, and he called a strike. Again the ball whistled down. On the third throw, the batter bewilderedly swung. The ball was in Eve’s hands before he even started the bat around. The two following men swung courageously, but belatedly. It was speed they had never seen before.

  Thereafter, they went down in one-two-three order, each on three pitched balls. With their slow reflexes, they had no chance. It would be a no-hit game. Eve and I came to bat in the third inning. Swinging experimentally at the first two balls, I sent the third one into the center-field bleachers for a home-run. Eve duplicated my feat. We repeated in the sixth inning, pounding the balls out of the park entirely.

  The game was a farce. While I pitched, the men back of me sat and lay on the ground, with nothing to do. They laughed and made biting remarks to the futilely-swinging All-Stars. I could sense tempers flaring. At the end of the sixth inning, thoroughly humiliated, the All-Stars attacked their taunting rivals.

  And they attacked me.

  “Damned tin gorilla!” I heard, and then bats were pounding at me from all sides. I had heard baseball players were rough and ready men. But they actually had murder in their eyes, splintering their wooden clubs against me. One crack against my skull made me reel.

  “Stop,” I bellowed. I wrenched a club out of one man’s hands and snapped it in half, in my hands.

  They all saw. Anger went out of their eyes, and fear came in. They backed away.

  “No, I won’t touch you,” I told them quickly. “But you’re poor sports.”

  “Poor sports,” shrilled back one man. “We don’t have a chance against you. You’ve just been showing off your cheap strength, you tin sport.”

  That epithet was singularly appropriate, from their viewpoint. That was all it had meant to them. Cheap exhibitionism, rather than strength and skill under the control of a humanlike mind. They looked on me more or less as a dancing bear or remarkable puppet, rather than a mental human. I looked at Jack. Our campaign was backfiring.

  “Yes,” agreed another voice. “You’ve been trying to prove you’re a human being, Adam Link. All you’ve proved is that you’re a machine.”

  It was not a baseball player who spoke. Part of the crowd had swarmed onto the field. Among them was a slouching figure in a black fedora hat, with a sharp nose and cynical eyes. He stepped forward.

  “Bart Oliver,” Jack said in recognition.

  This was the man who, more than any other, opposed me. Who had taken it upon himself to deny me human status, like a one-man Vigilante Committee. He had led the yellow journals like a pack of wolves after me. I looked upon him as you would look upon a man who tried to run you down with a truck.

  He was staring at me with deep interest, his first sight of me at close range. “I came here,” he explained, “to look you over. I think it’s about time we met. What’s your game, Adam Link? What are you after?”

  “Game?” I asked.

  “Don’t act innocent,” he drawled cynically. “You’ve been trying to display human qualities. Why?”

  “Why don’t you lay off him, Oliver?” snapped Jack. He was warning me with his eyes not to answer.

  But I did. I decided to chance all on a direct plea. I addressed them all, players, reporters, crowd. And therefore the world.

  “Liste
n to me. I have tried to show, through sports, that beneath my machine-power are the human things. Eve and I are as human mentally as any of you here or elsewhere. Our kind can be useful, in industry, as thinking machines. As pilots, drivers, laborers, mechanics and in the laboratory. Robots will do only good, never harm. I swear it. But future robots must not be slaves. I am the first of the robots.”

  I looked around at the intent crowd.

  “I want to become a citizen,” I finished.

  The human faces before me were stunned. It was my first public utterance to that effect. They looked at me queerly, as though the thought were inconceivable. Just as Dahlgren had looked. I suppose the effect was something like a car or animal asking for citizenship.

  Bart Oliver seemed less startled than the others.

  “I thought so,” he murmured. He swung on the crowd too. “Adam Link wants to become a citizens; and to vote. Robots can easily be manufactured. Think of thousands, or millions as a non-human voting block. See the danger, folks? But right now, and in the first place, Adam Link has not proved he’s entitled to human status. I claim he’s inferior to us in all factors—even physically.”

  He went on to explain his astounding statement.

  “Under suitable handicaps, a human will beat Adam Link. Suppose, for instance, that he ran a really grueling race, like a cross-country run, without stopping for repairs, and with a governor within him to keep his speed at ten miles an hour. Would he win? Would he possess enough determination and courage to stick to his task?”

  My phonic voice came out quickly.

  “I accept the challenge.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Robot Freaks

  Two weeks later, I was at the starting line with five long-distance runners. Eve checked me over carefully. Fresh battery, central distributor sparking evenly, all rivets and bolts tightened, joints oiled. I was ready.

  Jim Brody, the gambler, approached us before the start. “You going to win Adam Link?” he asked me, with all the querulousness of a child.