I, Robot

Now she was retiring – as much as she ever could. At least, she was allowing someone else’s name to be inset upon the door of her old office.

That, essentially, was what I had. I had a long list of her published papers, of the patents in her name; I had the chronological details of her promotions— In short I had her professional ‘vita’ in full detail.

But that wasn’t what I wanted.

I needed more than that for my feature articles for Interplanetary Press. Much more.

I told her so.

‘Dr Calvin,’ I said, as lushly as possible, ‘in the mind of the public you and US Robots are identical. Your retirement will end an era and—’

‘You want the human-interest angle?’ She didn’t smile at me. I don’t think she ever smiles. But her eyes were sharp, though not angry. I felt her glance slide through me and out my occiput and I knew that I was uncommonly transparent to her; that everybody was.

But I said, ‘That’s right.’

‘Human interest out of Robots? A contradiction.’

‘No, doctor. Out of you.’

‘Well, I’ve been called a robot myself. Surely, they’ve told you I’m not human.’

They had, but there was no point in saying so.

She got up from her chair. She wasn’t tall and she looked frail. I followed her to the window and we looked out.

The offices and factories of US Robots were a small city; spaced and planned. It was flattened out like an aerial photograph.

‘When I first came here,’ she said, ‘I had a little room in a building right about there where the fire-house is now.’ She pointed. ‘It was torn down before you were born. I shared the room with three others. I had half a desk. We built our robots all in one building. Output – three a week. Now look at us.’

‘Fifty years,’ I hackneyed, ‘is a long time.’

‘Not when you’re looking back at them,’ she said. ‘You wonder how they vanished so quickly.’

She went back to her desk and sat down. She didn’t need expression on her face to look sad, somehow.

‘How old are you?’ she wanted to know.

‘Thirty-two,’ I said.

‘Then you don’t remember a world without robots. There was a time when humanity faced the universe alone and without a friend. Now he has creatures to help him; stronger creatures than himself, more faithful, more useful, and absolutely devoted to him. Mankind is no longer alone. Have you ever thought of it that way?’

‘I’m afraid I haven’t. May I quote you?’

‘You may. To you, a robot is a robot. Gears and metal, electricity and positrons. —Mind and iron! Human-made! If necessary, human-destroyed! But you haven’t worked with them, so you don’t know them. They’re a cleaner, better breed than we are.’

I tried to nudge her gently with words, ‘We’d like to hear some of the things you could tell us; get your views on robots. The Interplanetary Press reaches the entire Solar System. Potential audience is three billion, Dr Calvin. They ought to know what you could tell them on robots.’

It wasn’t necessary to nudge. She didn’t hear me, but she was moving in the right direction.

‘They might have known from the start. We sold robots for Earth-use then – before my time it was, even. Of course, that was when robots could not talk. Afterward, they became more human and opposition began. The labor unions, of course, naturally opposed robot competition for human jobs, and various segments of religious opinion had their superstitious objections. It was all quite ridiculous and quite useless. And yet there it was.’

I was taking it down verbatim on my pocket-recorder, trying not to show the knuckle-motions of my hand. If you practice a bit, you can get to the point where you can record accurately without taking the little gadget out of your pocket.

‘Take the case of Robbie,’ she said. ‘I never knew him. He was dismantled the year before I joined the company – hopelessly out-of-date. But I saw the little girl in the museum—’

She stopped, but I didn’t say anything. I let her eyes mist up and her mind travel back. She had lots of time to cover.

‘I heard about it later, and when they called us blasphemers and demon-creators, I always thought of him. Robbie was a non-vocal robot. He couldn’t speak. He was made and sold in 1996. Those were the days before extreme specialization, so he was sold as a nursemaid—’

‘As a what?’

‘As a nursemaid—’

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

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

‘Ninety-eight – ninety-nine – one hundred.’ Gloria withdrew her chubby little forearm from before her eyes and stood for a moment, wrinkling her nose and blinking in the sunlight. Then, trying to watch in all directions at once, she withdrew a few cautious steps from the tree against which she had been leaning.

She craned her neck to investigate the possibilities of a clump of bushes to the right and then withdrew farther to obtain a better angle for viewing its dark recesses. The quiet was profound except for the incessant buzzing of insects and the occasional chirrup of some hardy bird, braving the midday sun.

Gloria pouted, ‘I bet he went inside the house, and I’ve told him a million times that that’s not fair.’

With tiny lips pressed together tightly and a severe frown crinkling her forehead, she moved determinedly toward the two-story building up past the driveway.

Too late she heard the rustling sound behind her, followed by the distinctive and rhythmic clump-clump of Robbie’s metal feet. She whirled about to see her triumphing companion emerge from hiding and make for the home-tree at full speed.

Gloria shrieked in dismay. ‘Wait, Robbie! That wasn’t fair, Robbie! You promised you wouldn’t run until I found you.’ Her little feet could make no headway at all against Robbie’s giant strides. Then, within ten feet of the goal, Robbie’s pace slowed suddenly to the merest of crawls, and Gloria, with one final burst of wild speed, dashed pantingly past him to touch the welcome bark of home-tree first.

Gleefully, she turned on the faithful Robbie, and with the basest of ingratitude, rewarded him for his sacrifice by taunting him cruelly for a lack of running ability.

‘Robbie can’t run!’ she shouted at the top of her eight-year-old voice. ‘I can beat him any day. I can beat him any day.’ She chanted the words in a shrill rhythm.

Robbie didn’t answer, of course – not in words. He pantomimed running, instead, inching away until Gloria found herself running after him as he dodged her narrowly, forcing her to veer in helpless circles, little arms outstretched and fanning at the air.

‘Robbie,’ she squealed, ‘stand still!’ —And the laughter was forced out of her in breathless jerks.

—Until he turned suddenly and caught her up, whirling her round, so that for her the world fell away for a moment with a blue emptiness beneath, and green trees stretching hungrily downward towards the void. Then she was down in the grass again, leaning against Robbie’s leg and still holding a hard, metal finger.

After a while, her breath returned. She pushed uselessly at her disheveled hair in vague imitation of one of her mother’s gestures and twisted to see if her dress were torn.

She slapped her hand against Robbie’s torso, ‘Bad boy! I’ll spank you!’

And Robbie cowered, holding his hands over his face so that she had to add, ‘No, I won’t, Robbie. I won’t spank you. But anyway, it’s my turn to hide now because you’ve got longer legs and you promised not to run till I found you.’

Robbie nodded his head – a small parallelepiped with rounded edges and corners attached to a similar but much larger parallelepiped that served as torso by means of a short, flexible stalk – and obediently faced the tree. A thin, metal film descended over his glowing eyes and from within his body came a steady, resonant ticking.

‘Don’t peek now – and don’t skip any numbers,’ warned Gloria, and scurried for cover.