I, Robot

He woke with Donovan bending over him and smiling anxiously. ‘How are you, Greg?’

‘Fine!’ came the response. ‘Where’s Speedy?’

‘Right here. I sent him out to one of the other selenium pools – with orders to get that selenium at all cost this time. He got it back in forty-two minutes and three seconds. I timed him. He still hasn’t finished apologizing for the runaround he gave us. He’s scared to come near you for fear of what you’ll say.’

‘Drag him over,’ ordered Powell. ‘It wasn’t his fault.’ He held out a hand and gripped Speedy’s metal paw. ‘It’s OK, Speedy.’ Then, to Donovan, ‘You know, Mike, I was just thinking—’

‘Yes!’

‘Well’ – he rubbed his face – the air was so delightfully cool, ‘you know that when we get things set up here and Speedy put through his Field Tests, they’re going to send us to the Space Stations next—’

‘No!’

‘Yes! At least that’s what old lady Calvin told me just before we left, and I didn’t say anything about it, because I was going to fight the whole idea.’

‘Fight it?’ cried Donovan. ‘But—’

‘I know. It’s all right with me now. 273 degrees Centigrade below zero. Won’t it be a pleasure?’

‘Space Station,’ said Donovan, ‘here I come.’

3 (#uf5b02f29-07df-5a59-95b7-f38e6b9c7641)

Reason (#uf5b02f29-07df-5a59-95b7-f38e6b9c7641)

Half a year later, the boys had changed their minds. The flame of a giant sun had given way to the soft blackness of space but external variations mean little in the business of checking the workings of experimental robots. Whatever the background, one is face to face with an inscrutable positronic brain, which the slide-rule geniuses say should work thus-and-so.

Except that they don’t. Powell and Donovan found that out after they had been on the Station less than two weeks.

Gregory Powell spaced his words for emphasis, ‘One week ago, Donovan and I put you together.’ His brows furrowed doubtfully and he pulled the end of his brown mustache.

It was quiet in the officer’s room of Solar Station No. 5 – except for the soft purring of the mighty Beam Director somewhere far below.

Robot QT-I sat immovable. The burnished plates of his body gleamed in the Luxites and the glowing red of the photoelectric cells that were his eyes, were fixed steadily upon the Earthman at the other side of the table.

Powell repressed a sudden attack of nerves. These robots possessed peculiar brains. Oh, the three Laws of Robotics held. They had to. All of US Robots, from Robertson himself to the new floor-sweeper would insist on that. So QT-I was safe! And yet – the QT models were the first of their kind, and this was the first of the QTs. Mathematical squiggles on paper were not always the most comforting protection against robotic fact.

Finally, the robot spoke. His voice carried the cold timbre inseparable from a metallic diaphragm, ‘Do you realize the seriousness of such a statement, Powell?’

‘Something made you, Cutie,’ pointed out Powell. ‘You admit yourself that your memory seems to spring full-grown from an absolute blankness of a week ago. I’m giving you the explanation. Donovan and I put you together from the parts shipped us.’

Cutie gazed upon his long, supple fingers in an oddly human attitude of mystification, ‘It strikes me that there should be a more satisfactory explanation than that. For you to make me seems improbable.’

The Earthman laughed quite suddenly, ‘In Earth’s name, why?’

‘Call it intuition. That’s all it is so far. But I intend to reason it out, though. A chain of valid reasoning can end only with the determination of truth, and I’ll stick till I get there.’

Powell stood up and seated himself at the table’s edge next to the robot. He felt a sudden strong sympathy for this strange machine. It was not at all like the ordinary robot, attending to his specialized task at the station with the intensity of a deeply ingrooved positronic path.

He placed a hand upon Cutie’s steel shoulder and the metal was cold and hard to the touch.

‘Cutie,’ he said, ‘I’m going to try to explain something to you. You’re the first robot who’s ever exhibited curiosity as to his own existence – and I think the first that’s really intelligent enough to understand the world outside. Here, come with me.’

The robot rose erect smoothly and his thickly sponge-rubber-soled feet made no noise as he followed Powell. The Earthman touched a button and a square section of the wall flickered aside. The thick, clear glass revealed space – star-speckled.

‘I’ve seen that in the observation ports in the engine room,’ said Cutie.

‘I know,’ said Powell. ‘What do you think it is?’

‘Exactly what it seems – a black material just beyond this glass that is spotted with little gleaming dots. I know that our director sends out beams to some of these dots, always to the same ones – and also that these dots shift and that the beams shift with them. That’s all.’

‘Good! Now I want you to listen carefully. The blackness is emptiness – vast emptiness stretching out infinitely. The little, gleaming dots are huge masses of energy-filled matter. They are globes, some of them millions of miles in diameter – and for comparison, this station is only one mile across. They seem so tiny because they are incredibly far off.

‘The dots to which our energy beams are directed, are nearer and much smaller. They are cold and hard, and human beings like myself live upon their surfaces – many billions of them. It is from one of these worlds that Donovan and I come. Our beams feed these worlds energy drawn from one of those huge incandescent globes that happens to be near us. We call that globe the Sun and it is on the other side of the station where you can’t see it.’

Cutie remained motionless before the port, like a steel statue. His head did not turn as he spoke, ‘Which particular dot of light do you claim to come from?’

Powell searched, ‘There it is. The very bright one in the corner. We call it Earth.’ He grinned, ‘Good old Earth. There are three billions of us there, Cutie – and in about two weeks I’ll be back there with them.’

And then, surprisingly enough, Cutie hummed abstractedly. There was no tune to it, but it possessed a curious twanging quality as of plucked strings. It ceased as suddenly as it had begun, ‘But where do I come in, Powell? You haven’t explained my