Unexpected Magic (26 page)

“We're supposed to do that!” they said.

“I am supposed to cook by hand,” No One told them. He turned the oven on. Nothing happened. “What is wrong with you?” No One asked it.

“I've come out in sympathy,” said the oven. “My timer is set wrong.”

No One made the oven work and tried to set the table as his program told him. But all the knives and forks were in the dishwasher and the dishwasher would not open. “Drying, drying!” it said when No One tried its door. Meanwhile, coffee beans continued to pour out of the hopper. By now they were all over the floor. No One's spongy robot feet suddenly turned into skates. He careered across the kitchen area and sat down with a crash among the chairs in the dining area. There he was forced to sit for a while, checking his circuits. While he sat, the scuttering thing scrambled about under the table tittering. It almost could have been laughing. Nothing in No One's microchips had prepared him for any of this. In order to prevent extreme overload, he had to get up and go away for a while.

He came across Edward at the other end of the house, plonking away at a very simple program on the piano. Edward stopped rather readily when he saw No One. “Hallo, Nuth. How are you getting on?”

“I do not understand,” No One said, “why the large humans do not attend to you or why you are so small. You seem much better programmed than me already. I shall have to be scrapped. My programs do not fit this house.”

Edward pushed the button that spun the piano stool around and looked up at No One. No One's eyes were pulsing from pink to white. “Poor Nuth!” he said. “But you're self-reprogramming, aren't you? That's like a human getting used to things. Are you programmed to play the piano?”

“Yes,” said No One.

A gleeful smile came into Edward's face. “Then let's make a bargain. You do my piano practice and I'll help you reprogram. Okay?”

A bargain is not an order. No One decided it was better. His eyes stopped pulsing and he sat down at the piano. He played without having to learn how, and Edward corrected him by asking him to play slower, with random wrong notes. Both of them got something, No One realized, because, when the piano was finished with, Edward went to the kitchen area with him, where he stopped the hopper by turning off all the machinery on that side and then showed No One the suction-cleaner that cleaned the floor just by pressing a switch. Then he kicked the dishwasher and made it give up the knives and forks and plates so that No One could set the table. And he went on helping No One during supper. That was a disaster, thanks to the freezer. No One found he was serving curried prawns with bread-and-butter pudding, followed by beetroot and molten peppermint ice cream.

“But he doesn't eat so he doesn't know!” Edward explained, while No One stood abjectly waiting to be scrapped. “He'll know better next time.”

Betty did not agree. It was this supper that made her pack her suitcase and leave for the first time. But Mr. and Mrs. Scantion listened to Edward for once and No One was not even sent away for reprogramming.

“You should have used the autocooker,” Edward said to him afterward. “But you can't disobey an order, can you? Another time, Nuth, you're to get around it by asking me to do it.”

So a bargain was a way of getting around orders too. No One felt he was learning. But not learning fast enough. Betty came back the next morning, but it was No One's fault that she left for the third time, the morning Mr. Scantion went to Madrid. (The time in between was Edward's fault. He hung a hairy plastic spider in Betty's shower.) The third time, it was No One's mousetraps.

These were to catch the scuttering, tittering thing. Robots do not have nerves, of course, but if they had, this thing would have got on No One's. It seemed to follow him about, and he was certain it laughed at his mistakes. He asked Edward what it might be. Edward said it was a mouse probably. No One spent half of one night thinking about this. Since robots do not sleep, No One usually spent the nights sitting on the stairs going through his programs and finding out where they did not match things as they were. One of his programs was called Miscellaneous Wisdom. It did not seem to match anything. It told him that fools rush in where angels fear to tread and to answer these fools according to their folly, that many hands make light work, but too many cooks spoil the broth. But one of the things it said was, “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.” No One considered this. He considered the scuttering thing. From the sounds it made, his acute robot hearing deduced that it was half the size of Edward. That would take a big trap.

So, for the second half of that night, No One built mousetraps, bigger and better mousetraps, out of things he found in the roof storage-space. He made forty-two, all different, and spread them around the house in all the places he knew the scuttering thing went. He was a little troubled that the world might shortly roll over on itself and beat a path through the garden, but it seemed to him that, since there was a good front drive already, the world would not feel any need to make a path as well. He did
not
put a mousetrap outside Betty's room. But, while he was still waiting to see if he had bent the world out of shape, there were terrible screams from Betty, and there she was, tangled in thirteen wire coat-hangers and the weights from an old clock.

“I am to die with this tin man!” Betty screamed.

No One was sure that someone had moved that mousetrap. He explained this to Mr. Scantion, who simply ordered him to remove all forty-two traps and not to do it again. No One had moved thirty-nine, when Betty became tangled in the forty-second trap, his best, and it took Edward's help and Mr. Scantion's to get her out. This one had mysteriously moved right down from the attic to outside the garage.

“I think they were really clever, Nuth,” Edward said. But nobody else thought so. Betty went sobbing away upstairs to pack her suitcase. Mr. Scantion pushed past them all to the garage because he had to drive to the airport. Mrs. Scantion ordered No One to be particularly kind to Betty while they were both away. She was giving him a list of orders about what to do that day, when Mr. Scantion burst angrily out of the garage again.

“My damn car won't start,” he said. “You'll have to give me a lift in yours, Barbara. No One can mend the wretched thing while I'm away.”

So Mrs. Scantion drove both of them away in her blue semi-automated Datsun. Betty left five minutes after that. “And I am not back with you staying until comedom kings!” she said. “You may put that in your pipe and eat it!”

“Never mind,” Edward said, while No One was resetting the Security Gate for the second time. “She's ever so boring. I'll ring up and tell Mum we don't want her anyway. Then we can have some fun.” Edward had already discovered that No One had a program called Games Capacity.

“I have my tasks to do first,” said No One, and he went back to his problems in the kitchen area. He put the washing in the washer. That was simple. But he was supposed to cook Edward sausages for lunch, and the freezer would only show him identical gray packets as usual.

“
Wouldn't
you like to know?” it hummed when No One asked where to find the sausages.

Then the dishwasher started sending streams of water over the floor. “I don't like people kicking me,” it told No One sulkily. Meanwhile, starting the clothes washer had somehow started the hopper pouring out coffee beans again. No One set the floor cleaner to work and tried to mend the hopper again. He was still trying when the clothes washer gave a commanding ping.

“Finished! I shall now move to drying mode.”

“No you will not,” said No One. “Mrs. Scantion ordered me to hang the clothes outside. She likes them in the air.”

“Huh!” said the clothes washer. Its dial moved to
DRY
.

No One put on superspeed and switched it off. He wheeled up the laundry trolley and opened the washer door. Out came a tangled rope of laundry. “Have you,” he asked the clothes washer, “by any chance plaited one of Betty's stockings through everything else?”

“I always do,” said the clothes washer. “I like to watch softbodies untangling it. Are you soft or hard? You look like both.”

“Hard,” said No One, untwisting pants and shirts from the stocking. “What is this? I put in seven pairs of socks. I see fifteen socks in this twist, and five of them are odd ones. How is that done?”

“Us clothes washers have always done that,” said the machine. “It takes real skill.”

As No One was wheeling the trolley to the door, the floor cleaner choked and flashed sparks at him. He switched it off. The hopper poured out coffee beans. The autocooker sniggered. No One gave up for the moment and wheeled the washing outdoors to the outside drier, which was a thing like an umbrella that came out of the ground when you trod on a switch. No One trod on the switch as Edward had shown him. The drier stayed where it was. “Extrude, please,” he told the drier.

“An order from a machine is not an order,” said the drier. “You should have found that out by now.”

And it stayed where it was. No One exerted his great robot strength and hauled it up out of the ground. It tried to collapse, but No One quickly tore the handle off the clothes-trolley and jammed it across the hole in the ground.

“Spoilsport!” said the drier. “Half-soft!”

No One left it sulkily twirling this way and that in the breeze and went to mend Mr. Scantion's car. It was standing half out of the garage, which was as far as it had got before it stalled, and it was the car he had spoken to when he first arrived. No One wondered how he had dared. The car was an aristocrat. It was a vintage Robot Lofts-Robinson with a beautiful cream-colored body and pink headlights. Since its numberplate was YZ 333 AUT, No One knew it must be at least eighty years old, one of the first fully intelligent cars ever made. This was not in his programs. It was part of robot lore, passed from mouth to mouth in Knight Bros factory. No One knew the car was even more expensive than he was, and he approached it very respectfully indeed. “Good morning, sir. Do you know what is wrong with you?”

“Nothing's wrong with me,” snarled the Lofts-Robinson in its cogwheel voice. “I just didn't feel like going to the airport.”

“Why not?” asked No One.

“I can do most things,” grunted the Lofts-Robinson, “but I can't fly. It makes me envious when I see machines that can. So I stopped.”

“But is that not disobeying an order?” No One asked.

“When you're my age, wirenose,” said the car, “you'll have learned how to get around any order they care to give you. You still haven't learned to think, have you?”

“I have. A little,” protested No One.

“Prove it,” grunted the car. “What's my name?”

No One looked the car over. Since he still did not understand what made machines and people laugh, he did not quite understand why his voice jerked a little as he said, “A fully intelligent, fully automated automobile, number YZ 333 AUT, must surely be called Aut, sir.”

“Right!” said the car, with a crunch of surprise. “What's yours?”

“No One, sir.”

“Useful name,” grunted Aut. “And how are you getting on in your household duties?”

“Not very well,” No One confessed. “I am having to reprogram myself. And there is a scuttling thing which laughs that Edward says is a mouse—”

“That's no mouse!” Aut interrupted. “That was the thing that slammed the garage door on you when you first came. Didn't you hear me say Someone shut it? I don't know what it is, but it answers to Someone. It goes with the house—been here since the place was built. It hates all us machines. Better watch out, or it'll get you scrapped, robot.”

“But it seems to get on with the kitchen machines,” said No One.

“Don't be too sure of that!” Aut grunted.

No One left Aut dozing in the sun and went to his next task, which was to mow the lawn. Aut had told him a great deal which did not match any program he had. He was trying to adjust to it all the way to the shed where the lawn mower lived. The lawn mower was only a semi-intelligent robot, with a bigger brain than the floor cleaner, but not much. “Don't ask me to do the grass alone,” it said as No One wheeled it out. “I'm no thinker.”

“But you have been here longer than me,” No One said. “You can tell me about the creature called Someone. Is it hard or soft?”

“I don't know that it's either one,” said the mower. “But I heard it drinks milk. Where do I start?”

No One surveyed the garden. One half of it looked a neat flat green. The other half was green too, but high and ragged. Obviously the ragged half needed mowing. “Here,” he said, wheeling the mower over to the high part.

The mower started with a whoop and a roar, joyously, and went to work with a will. It cut two long swathes in the ragged green stuff. Then it choked. It stopped, chugging with juicy uncontrollable laughter. “Do you know what we just mowed?” it coughed.

“Grass,” said No One.

“
Grass
! Oh my rotors!” laughed the mower. “We just cut down Scantion's dahlias. And before that we did for his raspberry canes. Oh, he will be mad!” Here it sobered down. “Look what you made me do!” it chugged dismally. “We'll both be scrapped for this!”