The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

And one of the priests walked along with him along the narrow way, to summon mourners from the nearest village in the beleaguered hills.

The Girl and the Robot With Flowers (#u6f80ed93-6bd8-527e-8af6-490edd5b693d)

I dropped it to her casually as we were clearing away the lunch things. ‘I’ve started another story.’

Marion put the coffee cups down on the draining board, hugged me, and said, ‘You clever old thing! When did you do that? When I was out shopping this morning?’

I nodded, smiling at her, feeling good, enjoying hearing her chirp with pleasure and excitement. Marion’s marvellous, she can always be relied on. Does she really feel as delighted as that – after all, she doesn’t care so greatly for science fiction? But I don’t mind; she is full of love, and it may lend her enough empathy to make her feel as sincerely delighted as I do when another story is on the way.

‘I suppose you don’t want to tell me what it’s going to be about?’ she asked.

‘It’s about robots, but more than that I won’t tell you.’

‘Okay. You go and write a bit more while I wash these few things. We don’t have to leave for another ten minutes, do we?’

We were planning to go and see our friends the Carrs, who live the other side of Oxford. Despite their name, the Carrs haven’t a car, and we had arranged to take them and their two children out for a ride and a picnic in the country, to celebrate the heatwave.

As I went out of the kitchen, the fridge started charging again.

‘There it goes!’ I told Marion grimly. I kicked it, but it continued to growl at me.

‘I never hear it till you remind me,’ she said. I tell you, nothing rattles her! It’s wonderful; it means that she is a great nerve tonic, exciting though I find her.

‘I must get an electrician in to look at it,’ I said. ‘Unless you actually enjoy the noise, that is. It just sits there gobbling electricity like a –’

‘A robot?’ Marion suggested.

‘Yep.’ I ambled into the living room-cum-study. Nikola was lying on the rug under the window in an absurd position, her tummy up to the sunlight. Absently, I went over and tickled her to make her purr. She knew I enjoyed it as much as she did; she was very like Marion in some ways. And at that moment, discontent struck me.

I lit a Van Dyke cigar and walked back into the kitchen. The back door was open; I leant against the post and said, ‘Perhaps for once I will tell you the plot. I don’t know if it’s good enough to bear completing.’

She looked at me. ‘Will my hearing it improve it?’

‘You might have some suggestions to offer.’

Perhaps she was thinking how ill-advised she would be ever to call me in for help when the cooking goes wrong, even if I am a dab hand with the pappadoms. All she said was, ‘It never hurts to talk an idea over.’

‘There was a chap who wrote a tremendous article on the generation of ideas in conversation. A German last century, but I can’t remember who – Von Kleist, I think. Probably I told you. I’d like to read that again some time. He pointed out how odd it is that we can surprise even ourselves in conversation, as we can when writing.’

‘Don’t your robots surprise you?’

‘They’ve been done too often. Perhaps I ought to leave them alone. Maybe Jim Ballard’s right and they are old hat, worked to death.’

‘What’s your idea?’

So I stopped dodging the issue and told her.

This earth-like planet, Iksnivarts, declares war on Earth. Its people are extremely long-lived, so that the long voyage to Earth means nothing to them – eighty years are nothing, a brief interval. To the Earthmen, it’s a lifetime. So the only way they can carry the war back to Iksnivarts is to use robots – beautiful, deadly creatures without many of humanity’s grandeurs and failings. They work off solar batteries, they last almost forever, and they carry miniature computers in their heads that can out-think any protoplasmic being.

An armada of ships loaded with these robots is sent off to attack Iksnivarts. With the fleet goes a factory which is staffed by robots capable of repairing their fellows. And with this fully automated strike force goes a most terrible weapon, capable of locking all the oxygen in Iksnivarts’ air into the rocks, so that the planetary atmosphere is rendered unbreathable in the course of a few hours.

The inhuman fleet sails. Some twenty years later, an alien fleet arrives in the solar system and gives Earth, Venus, and Mars a good peppering of radioactive dusts, so that just about seventy per cent of humanity is wiped out. But nothing stops the robot fleet, and after eighty years they reach target. The anti-oxygen weapon is appallingly effective. Every alien dies of almost immediate suffocation, and the planet falls to its metallic conquerors. The robots land, radio news of their success back to Earth, and spend the next ten years tidily burying corpses.

By the time their message gets back to the solar system, Earth is pulling itself together again after its pasting. Men are tremendously interested in their conquest of the distant world, and plan to send a small ship to see what is going on currently on Iksnivarts; but they feel a certain anxiety about their warlike robots, which now own the planet, and send a human-manned ship carrying two pilots in deep freeze. Unfortunately, this ship goes off course through a technical error, as does a second. But a third gets through, and the two pilots aboard, Graham and Josca, come out of cold storage in time to guide their ship in a long reconnaissance glide through Iksnivarts’ unbreathable atmosphere.

When their photographs are delivered back to Earth – after they have endured another eighty years in deep freeze – they show a world covered with enormous robot cities, and tremendous technological activity going on apace. This looks alarming.

But Earth is reassured. It seems that the war robots they made have turned to peaceful ways. More than one shot through the telescope lenses shows solitary robots up in the hills and mountains of their planet, picking flowers. One close-up in particular is reproduced in every communication medium and finds its way all round rejoicing Earth. It shows a heavily armed robot, twelve feet high, with its arms laden with flowers. And that was to be the title of my story: ‘Robot with Flowers’.

Marion had finished washing up by this time. We were standing in my little sheltered back garden, idly watching the birds swoop along the roof of the old church that stands behind the garden. Nikola came out and joined us.

‘Is that the end?’ Marion asked.

‘Not quite. There’s an irony to come. This shot of the robot with flowers is misinterpreted – an automated example of the pathetic fallacy, I suppose. The robots have to destroy all flowers, because flowers exhale oxygen, and oxygen is liable to give the robots rust troubles. They’ve not picked up the human trick of appreciating beauty, they’re indulging in the old robot vice of being utilitarian, and in a few years they’ll be coming back to lick the Earthmen on Earth.’

Inside the kitchen, I could hear the fridge charging again. I fought an urge to tell Marion about it; I didn’t want to disturb the sunlight on her face.

She said, ‘That sounds quite a good twist. It sounds as if it ought to make a decent run-of-the-mill story. Not quite you, perhaps.’

‘Somehow, I don’t think I can bring myself to finish it.’

‘It’s a bit like that Poul Anderson robot story you admired – “Epilogue”, wasn’t it?’

‘Maybe. Every SF story is getting like every other one. It’s also a bit like one of Harry’s in his War With the Robots collection.’

‘“Anything that Harry wrote can’t be all bad”’, she said, quoting a private joke.

‘“Wish I’d written that,”’ I said, adding the punchline. ‘But that isn’t really why I don’t want to finish “Robot With Flowers”. Maybe Fred Pohl or Mike Moorcock would like it enough to publish it, but I feel disappointed with it. Not just because it’s a crib.’

‘You said once that you could always spot a crib because it lacked emotional tone.’

The goldfish were flitting about under the water-lily leaves in my little ornamental pond. Both Nikola and Marion had got interested in them; I said that they were alike. I looked down at them in love and a little exasperation. Her last remark told me she was carrying on the conversation just for my sake – it lacked emotional tone.

‘You were meant to ask why I was disappointed with the idea.’

‘Darling, if we are going to go and collect the Carrs, we ought to be moving. It’s two-forty already.’

‘I’m raring to go.’

‘I won’t be a moment.’ She kissed me as she went by.

Of course she was right, I thought. I had to work it out for myself, otherwise I would never be satisfied. I went and sat by the cat and watched the goldfish. The birds were busy round the church, feeding their young; they could enjoy so few summers.

In a way, what I wanted to say was not the sort of thing I wanted to say to Marion, and for a special reason that was very much part of me. I’d seen many loving summers with several loving girls, and now here was Marion, the sweetest of them all, the one with whom I could be most myself and most freely speak my thoughts; for that very reason, I did not wish to abuse the privilege and needed to keep some reserves in me.

So I was chary about telling her more than I had done. I was chary about telling her that in my present mood of happiness I felt only contempt for my robot story, and would do so however skilfully I wrote it. There was no war in my heart; how could I begin to believe in an interplanetary war with all its imponderables and impossibilities? When I was lapped about by such a soft and gentle person as Marion, why this wish to traffic in emotionless metal mockeries of human beings?

Further, was not science fiction a product of man’s divided and warring nature? I thought it was, for my own science fiction novels dealt mainly with dark things, a reflection of the personal unhappiness that had haunted my own life until Marion entered it. But this too was not a declaration lightly to be made.