Asimov's Future History Volume 1 (15 page)

“It is best that you think so,” Cutie sighed again. “I see the wisdom of the illusion now. I would not attempt to shake your faith, even if I could.” He departed – the picture of commiseration.

Powell snarled and motioned to Donovan. Sealed suitcases in hand, they headed for the air lock.

The relief ship was on the outer landing and Franz Muller, his relief man, greeted them with stiff courtesy. Donovan made scant acknowledgment and passed into the pilot room to take over the controls from Sam Evans.

Powell lingered. “How’s Earth?”

It was a conventional enough question and Muller gave the conventional answer, “Still spinning.”

Powell said, “Good.”

Muller looked at him, “The boys back at the U. S. Robots have dreamed up a new one, by the way. A multiple robot.”

“A what?”

“What I said. There’s a big contract for it. It must be just the thing for asteroid mining. You have a master robot with six sub-robots under it. – Like your fingers.”

“Has it been field-tested?” asked Powell anxiously.

Muller smiled, “Waiting for you, I hear.”

Powell’s fist balled, “Damn it, we need a vacation.”

“Oh, you’ll get it. Two weeks, I think.”

He was donning the heavy space gloves in preparation for his term of duty here, and his thick eyebrows drew close together. “How is this new robot getting along? It better be good, or I’ll be damned if I let it touch the controls.”

Powell paused before answering. His eyes swept the proud Prussian before him from the close-cropped hair on the sternly stubborn head, to the feet standing stiffly at attention – and there was a sudden glow of pure gladness surging through him.

“The robot is pretty good,” he said slowly. “I don’t think you’ll have to bother much with the controls.”

He grinned – and went into the ship. Muller would be here for several weeks.

Catch That Rabbit

2016 A.D.

T
HE
VACATION
WAS
longer than two weeks, that, Mike Donovan had to admit. It had been six months, with pay. He admitted that, too. But that, as he explained furiously, was fortuitous. U. S. Robots had to get the bugs out of the multiple robots, and there were plenty of bugs, and there are always at least half a dozen bugs left for the field-testing. So they waited and relaxed until the drawing-board men and the slide-rule boys had said “OK!” And now he and Powell were out on the asteroid and it was not OK. He repeated that a dozen times, with a face that had gone beety, “For the love of Pete, Greg, get realistic. What’s the use of adhering to the letter of the specifications and watching the test go to pot? It’s about time you got the red tape out of your pants and went to work.”

“I’m only saying,” said Gregory Powell, patiently, as one explaining electronics to an idiot child, “that according to spec, those robots are equipped for asteroid mining without supervision. We’re not supposed to watch them.”

“All right. Look – logic!” He lifted his hairy fingers and pointed. “One: That new robot passed every test in the home laboratories. Two: United States Robots guaranteed their passing the test of actual performance on an asteroid. Three: The robots are not passing said tests. Four: If they don’t pass, United States Robots loses ten million credits in cash and about one hundred million in reputation. Five: If they don’t pass and we can’t explain why they don’t pass, it is just possible two good jobs may have to be bidden a fond farewell.”

Powell groaned heavy behind a noticeably insincere smile. The unwritten motto of United States Robot and Mechanical Men Corp. was well known: “No employee makes the same mistake twice. He is fired the first time.”

Aloud he said, “You’re as lucid as Euclid with everything except the facts. You’ve watched that robot group for three shifts, you redhead, and they did their work perfectly. You said so yourself. What else can we do?”

“Find out what’s wrong, that’s what we can do. So they did work perfectly when I watched them. But on three different occasions when I didn’t watch them, they didn’t bring in any ore. They didn’t even come back on schedule. I had to go after them.”

“And was anything wrong?”

“Not a thing. Not a thing. Everything was perfect. Smooth and perfect as the luminiferous ether. Only one little insignificant detail disturbed me – there was no ore.”

Powell scowled at the ceiling and pulled at his brown mustache. “I’ll tell you what, Mike. We’ve been stuck with pretty lousy jobs in our time, but this takes the iridium asteroid. The whole business is complicated past endurance. Look, that robot, DV-5, has six robots under it. And not just under it – they’re part of it.”

“I know that-”

“Shut up!” said Powell, savagely, “I know you know it, but I’m just describing the hell of it. Those six subsidiaries are part of DV-5 like your fingers are part of you and it gives them their orders neither by voice nor radio, but directly through positronic fields. Now – there isn’t a roboticist back at United States Robots that knows what a positronic field is or how it works. And neither do I. Neither do you.”

“The last,” agreed Donovan, philosophically, “I know.”

“Then look at our position. If everything works – fine! If anything goes wrong – we’re out of our depth and there probably isn’t a thing we can do, or anybody else. But the job belongs to us and not to anyone else so we’re on the spot, Mike.” He blazed away for a moment in silence. Then, “All right, have you got him outside?”

“Yes.”

“Is everything normal now?”

“Well he hasn’t got religious mania, and he isn’t running around in a circle spouting Gilbert and Sullivan, so I suppose he’s normal.”

Donovan passed out the door, shaking his head viciously.

Powell reached for the “Handbook of Robotics” that weighed down one side of his desk to a near-founder and opened it reverently. He had once jumped out of the window of a burning house dressed only in shorts and the “Handbook.” In a pinch, he would have skipped the shorts.

The “Handbook” was propped up before him, when Robot DV-5 entered, with Donovan kicking the door shut behind him.

Powell said somberly, “Hi, Dave. How do you feel?”

“Fine,” said the robot. “Mind if I sit down?” He dragged up the specially reinforced chair that was his, and folded gently into it.

Powell regarded Dave – laymen might think of robots by their serial numbers; roboticists never – with approval. It was not over-massive by any means, in spite of its construction as thinking-unit of an integrated seven-unit robot team. It was seven feet tall, and a half-ton of metal and electricity. A lot? Not when that half-ton has to be a mass of condensers, circuits, relays, and vacuum cells that can handle practically any psychological reaction known to humans. And a positronic brain, which with ten pounds of matter and a few quintillions of positrons runs the whole show.

Powell groped in his shirt pocket for a loose cigarette. “Dave,” he said, “you’re a good fellow. There’s nothing flighty or prima donnaish about you. You’re a stable, rockbottom mining robot, except that you’re equipped to handle six subsidiaries in direct coordination. As far as I know, that has not introduced any unstable paths in your brain-path map.”

The robot nodded, “That makes me feel swell, but what are you getting at, boss?” He was equipped with an excellent diaphragm, and the presence of overtones in the sound unit robbed him of much of that metallic flatness that marks the usual robot voice.

“I’m going to tell you. With all that in your favor, what’s going wrong with your job? For instance, today’s B-shift?”

Dave hesitated, “As far as I know, nothing.”

“You didn’t produce any ore.”

“I know.”

“Well, then-”

Dave was having trouble, “I can’t explain that, boss. It’s been giving me a case of nerves, or it would if I let it – my subsidiaries worked smoothly. I know I did.” He considered, his photoelectric eyes glowing intensely. Then, “I don’t remember. The day ended and there was Mike and there were the ore cars, mostly empty.”

Donovan broke in, “You didn’t report at shift-end those days, Dave. You know that?”

“I know. But as to why-” He shook his head slowly and ponderously.

Powell had the queasy feeling that if the robot’s face were capable of expression, it would be one of pain and mortification. A robot, by its very nature, cannot bear to fail its function.

Donovan dragged his chair up to Powell’s desk and leaned over, “Amnesia, do you think?”

“Can’t say. But there’s no use in trying to pin disease names on this. Human disorders apply to robots only as romantic analogies. They’re no help to robotic engineering.” He scratched his neck; “I hate to put him through the elementary brain-reaction tests. It won’t help his self-respect any.”

He looked at Dave thoughtfully and then at the Field-Test outline given in the “Handbook.” He said, “See here, Dave, what about sitting through a test? It would be the wise thing to do.”

The robot rose, “If you say so, boss.” There was pain in his voice.

It started simply enough. Robot DV-5 multiplied five-place figures to the heartless ticking of a stopwatch. He recited the prime numbers between a thousand and ten thousand. He extracted cube roots and integrated functions of varying complexity. He went through mechanical reactions in order of increasing difficulty. And, finally, worked his precise mechanical mind over the highest function of the robot world – the solutions of problems in judgment and ethics.

At the end of two hours, Powell was copiously besweated. Donovan had enjoyed a none-too-nutritious diet of fingernail and the robot said, “How does it look, boss?”

Powell said, “I’ve got to think it over, Dave. Snap judgments won’t help much. Suppose you go back to the C-shift. Take it easy. Don’t press too hard for quota just for a while – and we’ll fix things up.”

The robot left. Donovan looked at Powell.

“Well-”

Powell seemed determined to push up his mustache by the roots. He said, “There is nothing wrong with the currents of his positronic brain.”

“I’d hate to be that certain.”

“Oh, Jupiter, Mike! The brain is the surest part of a robot. It’s quintuple-checked back on Earth. If they pass the field test perfectly, the way Dave did, there just isn’t a chance of brain misfunction. That test covered every key path in the brain.”

“So where are we?”

“Don’t rush me. Let me work this out. There’s still the possibility of a mechanical breakdown in the body. That leaves about fifteen hundred condensers, twenty thousand individual electric circuits, five hundred vacuum cells, a thousand relays, and upty-ump thousand other individual pieces of complexity that can be wrong. And these mysterious positron is fields no one knows anything about.”

“Listen, Greg,” Donovan grew desperately urgent. “I’ve got an idea. That robot may be lying. He never-”

“Robots can’t knowingly lie, you fool. Now if we had the McCormack-Wesley tester, we could check each individual item in his body within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, but the only two M-W testers existing are on Earth, and they weigh ten tons, are on concrete foundations and can’t be moved. Isn’t that peachy?”

Donovan pounded the desk, “But, Greg, he only goes wrong when we’re not around. There’s something – sinister – about – that.” He punctuated the sentence with slams of fist against desk.

“You,” said Powell, slowly, “make me sick. You’ve been reading adventure novels.”

“What I want to know,” shouted Donovan, “is what we’re going to do about it.”

“I’ll tell you. I’m going to install a visiplate right over my desk. Right on the wall over there, see!” He jabbed a vicious finger at the spot. “Then I’m going to focus it at whatever part of the mine is being worked, and I’m going to watch. That’s all.”

“That’s all? Greg-”

Powell rose from his chair and leaned his balled fists on the desk, “Mike, I’m having a hard time.” His voice was weary. “For a week, you’ve been plaguing me about Dave. You say he’s gone wrong. Do you know how he’s gone wrong? No! Do you know what shape this wrongness takes? No! Do you know what brings it on? No! Do you know what snaps him out? No! Do you know anything about it? No! Do I know anything about it? No! So what do you want me to do?”

Donovan’s arm swept outward in a vague, grandiose gesture, “You got me!”

“So I tell you again. Before we do anything toward a cure, we’ve got to find out what the disease is in the first place. The first step in cooking rabbit stew is catching the rabbit. Well, we’ve got to catch that rabbit! Now get out of here.”

Donovan stared at the preliminary outline of his field report with weary eyes. For one thing, he was tired and for another, what was there to report while things were unsettled? He felt resentful.

He said, “Greg, we’re almost a thousand tons behind schedule.”

“You,” replied Powell, never looking up, “are telling me something I don’t know.”

“What I want to know,” said Donovan, in sudden savagery, “is why we’re always tangled up with new-type robots. I’ve finally decided that the robots that were good enough for my great-uncle on my mother’s side are good enough for me. I’m for what’s tried and true. The test of time is what counts – good, solid, old-fashioned robots that never go wrong.”

Powell threw a book with perfect aim, and Donovan went tumbling off his seat.

“Your job,” said Powell, evenly, “for the last five years has been to test new robots under actual working conditions for United States Robots. Because you and I have been so injudicious as to display proficiency at the task, we’ve been rewarded with the dirtiest jobs. That,” he jabbed holes in the air with his finger in Donovan’s direction, “is your work. You’ve been griping about it, from personal memory, since about five minutes after United States Robots signed you up. Why don’t you resign?”

“Well, I’ll tell you.” Donovan rolled onto his stomach, and took a firm grip on his wild, red hair to hold his head up. “There’s a certain principle involved. After all, as a troubleshooter, I’ve played a part in the development of new robots. There’s the principle of aiding scientific advance. But don’t get me wrong. It’s not the principle that keeps me going; it’s the money they pay us. Greg!’