Asimov's Future History Volume 1

by Isaac Asimov

  “You mean all this isn’t legal?”

  Larry cleared his throat. “Not just yet, but it’s all right. He won’t leave the house, and you mustn’t let anyone see him. That’s all.... And, Claire, I’d stay with you, but I know too much about the robots. We must have a completely inexperienced tester so that we can have severe conditions. It’s necessary.”

  “Oh, well,” muttered Claire. Then, as a thought struck her, “But what does he do?”

  “Housework,” said Dr. Calvin shortly.

  She got up to leave, and it was Larry who saw her to the front door. Claire stayed behind drearily. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror above the mantelpiece, and looked away hastily. She was very tired of her small, mousy face and her dim, unimaginative hair. Then she caught Tony’s eyes upon her and almost smiled before she remembered....

  He was only a machine.

  Larry Belmont was on his way to the airport when he caught a glimpse of Gladys Claffern. She was the type of woman who seemed made to be seen in glimpses.... Perfectly and precisely manufactured; dressed with thoughtful hand and eye; too gleaming to be stared at.

  The little smile that preceded her and the faint scent that trailed her were a pair of beckoning fingers. Larry felt his stride break; he touched his hat, then hurried on.

  As always he felt that vague anger. If Claire could only push her way into the Claffern clique, it would help so much. But what was the use.

  Claire! The few times she had come face to face with Gladys, the little fool had been tongue-tied. He had no illusions. The testing of Tony was his big chance, and it was in Claire’s hands. How much safer it would be in the hands of someone like Gladys Claffern.

  Claire woke the second morning to the sound of a subdued knock on the bedroom door. Her mind clamored, then went icy. She had avoided Tony the first day, smiling thinly when she met him and brushing past with a wordless sound of apology.

  “Is that you – Tony?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Belmont. May I enter?”

  She must have said yes, because he was in the room, quite suddenly and noiselessly. Her eyes and nose were simultaneously aware of the tray he was carrying.

  “Breakfast?” she said.

  “If you please.”

  She wouldn’t have dared to refuse, so she pushed herself slowly into a sitting position and received it: poached eggs, buttered toast, coffee.

  “I have brought the sugar and cream separately,” said Tony. “I expect to learn your preference with time, in this and in other things.”

  She waited.

  Tony, standing there straight and pliant as a metal rule, asked, after a moment, “Would you prefer to eat in privacy?”

  “Yes.... I mean, if you don’t mind.”

  “Will you need help later in dressing?”

  “Oh, my, no!” She clutched frantically at the sheet, so that the coffee hovered at the edge of catastrophe. She remained so, in rigor, then sank helplessly back against the pillow when the door closed him out of her sight again.

  She got through breakfast somehow.... He was only a machine, and if it were only more visible that he were it wouldn’t be so frightening. Or if his expression would change. It just stayed there, nailed on. You couldn’t tell what went on behind those dark eyes and that smooth, olive skin-stuff. The coffee cup beat a faint castanet for a moment as she set it back, empty, on the tray.

  Then she realized that she had forgotten to add the sugar and cream after all, and she did so hate black coffee.

  She burned a straight path from bedroom to kitchen after dressing. It was her house, after all, and there wasn’t anything frippy about her, but she liked her kitchen clean. He should have waited for supervision....

  But when she entered, she found a kitchen that might have been minted fire-new from the factory the moment before.

  She stopped, stared, turned on her heel and nearly ran into Tony. She yelped.

  “May I help?” he asked.

  “Tony,” and she scraped the anger off the edges of her mind’s panic, “you must make some noise when you walk. I can’t have you stalking me, you know.... Didn’t you use this kitchen?”

  “I did, Mrs. Belmont.”

  “It doesn’t look it.”

  “I cleaned up afterward. Isn’t that customary?”

  Claire opened her eyes wide. After all, what could one say to that. She opened the oven compartment that held the pots, took a quick, unseeing look at the metallic glitter inside, then said with a tremor, “Very good. Quite satisfactory.”

  If at the moment, he had beamed; if he had smiled; if he had quirked the corner of his mouth the slightest bit, she felt that she could have warmed to him. But he remained an English lord in repose, as he said, “Thank you, Mrs. Belmont. Would you come into the living room?”

  She did, and it struck her at once. “Have you been polishing the furniture?”

  “Is it satisfactory, Mrs. Belmont?”

  “But when? You didn’t do it yesterday.”

  “Last night, of course.”

  “You burned the lights all night?”

  “Oh, no. That wouldn’t have been necessary. I’ve a built-in ultra-violet source. I can see in ultraviolet. And, of course, I don’t require sleep.”

  He did require admiration, though. She realized that, then. He had to know that he was pleasing her. But she couldn’t bring herself to supply that pleasure for him.

  She could only say sourly, “Your kind will put ordinary houseworkers out of business.”

  “There is work of much greater importance they can be put to in the world, once they are freed of drudgery. After all, Mrs. Belmont, things like myself can be manufactured. But nothing yet can imitate the creativity and versatility of a human brain, like yours.”

  And though his face gave no hint, his voice was warmly surcharged with awe and admiration, so that Claire flushed and muttered, “My brain! You can have it.”

  Tony approached a little and said, “You must be unhappy to say such a thing. Is there anything I can do?”

  For a moment, Claire felt like laughing. It was a ridiculous situation. Here was an animated carpet-sweeper, dishwasher, furniture-polisher, general factotum, rising from the factory table – and offering his services as consoler and confidant.

  Yet she said suddenly, in a burst of woe and voice, “Mr. Belmont doesn’t think I have a brain, if you must know.... And I suppose I haven’t.” She couldn’t cry in front of him. She felt, for some reason, that she had the honor of the human race to support against this mere creation.

  “It’s lately,” she added. “It was all right when he was a student; when he was just starting. But I can’t be a big man’s wife; and he’s getting to be a big man. He wants me to be a hostess and an entry into social life for him – like G – guh – guh – Gladys Claffern.”

  Her nose was red, and she looked away.

  But Tony wasn’t watching her. His eyes wandered about the room. “I can help you run the house.”

  “But it’s no good,” she said fiercely. “It needs a touch I can’t give it. I canonly make it comfortable; I can’t ever make it the kind they take pictures of for the Home Beautiful magazines.”

  “Do you want that kind?”

  “Does it do any good – wanting?”

  Tony’s eyes were on her, full. “I could help.”

  “Do you know anything about interior decoration?”

  “Is it something a good housekeeper should know?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Then I have the potentialities of learning it. Can you get me books on the subject?”

  Something started then.

  Claire, clutching her hat against the brawling liberties of the wind, had manipulated two fat volumes on the home arts back from the public library. She watched Tony as he opened one of them and flipped the pages. It was the first time she had watched his fingers flicker at anything like fine work.

  I don’t see how they do it, she thought, and on a sudden
impulse reached for his hand and pulled it toward herself. Tony did not resist, but let it lie limp for inspection.

  She said, “It’s remarkable. Even your fingernails look natural.”

  “That’s deliberate, of course,” said Tony. Then, chattily, “The skin is a flexible plastic, and the skeletal framework is a light metal alloy. Does that amuse you?”

  “Oh, no.” She lifted her reddened face. “I just feel a little embarrassed at sort of poking into your insides. It’s none of my business. You don’t ask me about mine.”

  “My brain paths don’t include that type of curiosity. I can only act within my limitations, you know.”

  And Claire felt something tighten inside her in the silence that followed. Why did she keep forgetting he was a machine. Now the thing itself had to remind her. Was she so starved for sympathy that she would even accept a robot as equal – because he sympathized?

  She noticed Tony was still flipping the pages – almost helplessly – and there was a quick, shooting sense of relieved superiority within her. “You can’t read, can you?”

  Tony looked up at her; his voice calm, unreproachful. “I am reading, Mrs. Belmont.”

  “But –” She pointed at the book in a meaningless gesture.

  “I am scanning the pages, if that’s what you mean. My sense of reading is photographic.”

  It was evening then, and when Claire eventually went to bed Tony was well into the second volume, sitting there in the dark, or what seemed dark to Claire’s limited eyes.

  Her last thought, the one that clamored at her just as her mind let go and tumbled, was a queer one. She remembered his hand again; the touch of it. It had been warm and soft, like a human being’s.

  How clever of the factory, she thought, and softly ebbed to sleep.

  It was the library continuously, thereafter, for several days. Tony suggested the fields of study, which branched out quickly. There were books on color matching and on cosmetics; on carpentry and on fashions; on art and on the history of costumes.

  He turned the pages of each book before his solemn eyes, and, as quickly as he turned, he read; nor did he seem capable of forgetting.

  Before the end of the week, he had insisted on cutting her hair, introducing her to a new method of arranging it, adjusting her eyebrow line a bit and changing the shade of her powder and lipstick.

  She had palpitated in nervous dread for half an hour under the delicate touch of his inhuman fingers and then looked in the mirror.

  “There is more that can be done,” said Tony, “especially in clothes. How do you find it for a beginning?”

  And she hadn’t answered; not for quite a while. Not until she had absorbed the identity of the stranger in the glass and cooled the wonder at the beauty of it all. Then she had said chokingly, never once taking her eyes from the warming image, “Yes, Tony, quite good – for a beginning.”

  She said nothing of this in her letters to Larry. Let him see it all at once. And something in her realized that it wasn’t only the surprise she would enjoy. It was going to be a kind of revenge.

  Tony said one morning, “It’s time to start buying, and I’m not allowed to leave the house. If I write out exactly what we must have, can I trust you to get it? We need drapery, and furniture fabric, wallpaper, carpeting, paint, clothing – and any number of small things.”

  “You can’t get these things to your own specifications at a stroke’s notice,” said Claire doubtfully.

  “You can get fairly close, if you go through the city and if money is no object.”

  “But, Tony, money is certainly an object.”

  “Not at all. Stop off at U.S. Robots in the first place. I’ll write a note for you. You see Dr. Calvin, and tell her that I said it was part of the experiment.”

  Dr. Calvin, somehow, didn’t frighten her as on that first evening. With her new face and a new hat, she couldn’t be quite the old Claire. The psychologist listened carefully, asked a few questions, nodded – and then Claire found herself walking out, armed with an unlimited charge account against the assets of U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation.

  It is wonderful what money will do. With a store’s contents at her feet, a saleslady’s dictum was not necessarily a voice from above; the uplifted eyebrow of a decorator was not anything like Jove’s thunder.

  And once, when an Exalted Plumpness at one of the most lordly of the garment salons had insistently poohed her description of the wardrobe she must have with counterpronouncements in accents of the purest Fifty-seventh Street French, she called up Tony, then held the phone out to Monsieur.

  “If you don’t mind” – voice firm, but fingers twisting a bit –” I’d like you to talk to my – uh – secretary.”

  Pudgy proceeded to the phone with a solemn arm crooked behind his back. He lifted the phone in two fingers and said delicately, “Yes.” A short pause, another “Yes,” then a much longer pause, a squeaky beginning of an objection that perished quickly, another pause, a very meek “Yes,” and the phone was restored to its cradle.

  “If Madam will come with me,” he said, hurt and distant, “I will try to supply her needs.”

  “Just a second.” Claire rushed back to the phone, and dialed again. “Hello, Tony. I don’t know what you said, but it worked. Thanks. You’re a –” She struggled for the appropriate word, gave up and ended in a final little squeak, “– a – a dear!”

  It was Gladys Claffern looking at her when she turned from the phone again. A slightly amused and slightly amazed Gladys Claffern, looking at her out of a face tilted a bit to one side.

  “Mrs. Belmont?”

  It all drained out of Claire – just like that. She could only nod – stupidly, like a marionette.

  Gladys smiled with an insolence you couldn’t put your finger on. “I didn’t know you shopped here?” As if the place had, in her eyes, definitely lost caste through the fact.

  “I don’t, usually,” said Claire humbly.

  “And haven’t you done something to your hair? It’s quite – quaint.... Oh, I hope you’ll excuse me, but isn’t your husband’s name Lawrence? It seems to me that it’s Lawrence.”

  Claire’s teeth clenched, but she had to explain. She had to. “Tony is a friend of my husband’s. He’s helping me select some things.”

  “I understand. And quite a dear about it, I imagine.” She passed on smiling, carrying the light and the warmth of the world with her.

  Claire did not question the fact that it was to Tony that she turned for consolation. Ten days had cured her of reluctance. And she could weep before him; weep and rage.

  “I was a complete f-fool,” she stormed, wrenching at her water-togged handkerchief. “She does that to me. I don’t know why. She just does. I should have – kicked her. I should have knocked her down and stamped on her.”

  “Can you hate a human being so much?” asked Tony, in puzzled softness. “That part of a human mind is closed to me.”

  “Oh, it isn’t she,” she moaned. “It’s myself, I suppose. She’s everything I want to be – on the outside, anyway.... And I can’t be.”

  Tony’s voice was forceful and low in her ear. “You can be, Mrs. Belmont. You can be. We have ten days yet, and in ten days the house will no longer be itself. Haven’t we been planning that?”

  “And how will that help me – with her?”

  “Invite her here. Invite her friends. Have it the evening before I – before I leave. It will be a housewarming, in a way.”

  “She won’t come.”

  “Yes, she will. She’ll come to laugh.... And she won’t be able to.”

  “Do you really think so? Oh, Tony, do you think we can do it?” She had both his hands in hers.... And then, with her face flung aside, “But what good would it be? It won’t be I; it will be you that’s doing it. I can’t ride your back.”

  “Nobody lives in splendid singleness,” whispered Tony. “They’ve put that knowledge in me. What you, or anyone, see in Gladys Claffern is not
just Gladys Claffern. She rides the back of all that money and social position can bring. She doesn’t question that. Why should you?... And look at it this way, Mrs. Belmont. I am manufactured to obey, but the extent of my obedience is for myself to determine. I can follow orders niggardly or liberally. For you, it is liberal, because you are what I have been manufactured to see human beings as. You are kind, friendly, unassuming. Mrs. Claffern, as you describe her, is not, and I wouldn’t obey her as I would you. So it is you, and not I, Mrs. Belmont, that is doing all this.”

  He withdrew his hands from hers then, and Claire looked at that expressionless face no one could read – wondering. She was suddenly frightened ‘again in a completely new way.

  She swallowed nervously and stared at her hands, which were still tingling ‘with the pressure of his fingers. She hadn’t imagined it; his fingers had pressed hers, gently, tenderly, just before they moved away.

  No!

  Its fingers... Its fingers....

  She ran to the bathroom and scrubbed her hands – blindly, uselessly.

  She was a bit shy of him the next day; watching him narrowly; waiting to see what might follow – and for a while nothing did.

  Tony was working. If there was any difficulty in technique in putting up wallpaper, or utilizing the quick-drying paint, Tony’s activity did not show it. His hands moved precisely; his fingers were deft and sure.

  He worked all night. She never heard him, but each morning was a new adventure. She couldn’t count the number of things that had been done, and by evening she was still finding new touches – and another night had come.

  She tried to help only once and her human clumsiness marred that. He was in the next room, and she was hanging a picture in the spot marked by Tony’s mathematical eyes. The little mark was there; the picture was there; and a revulsion against idleness was there.

  But she was nervous, or the ladder was rickety. It didn’t matter. She felt it going, and she cried out. It tumbled without her, for Tony, with far more than flesh-and-blood quickness, had been under her.