The robot and the man, p.10
The Robot and the Man, page 10
Besides Ferguson, there were three men in the room. Two were technicians, whose duty it was to open the door to the power plant and remove and decapitate the robot in the revolving chamber, and the U.N. representative, whose duty was to make certain the robot brain—Smither’s famous substance with a selective memory—went into the acid bath and was dissolved there. Robots capable of working in a hellish bath of radioactive radiations made the effective generation of electric power from atomic energy both cheap and practical, but for good and sufficient reasons, the U.N. was scared of them. When robots went into a power plant, to remain there until natural wear and tear had rendered them useless for further service, a U.N. representative was on hand to check them in. And when they came out, worn and battered hulks of metal with only Smither’s secret brain substance alive in them, another U.N. man made certain that the brain died. Otherwise men might find they had a dangerous and deadly rival fighting them for control of the planet.
There were no robots outside atomic power plants. The secret of Smither’s famous brain substance was a U.N. secret. The manufacture of robots was a U.N. monopoly. The counting of robot noses was a U.N. job. It would remain this way until both experience and carefully controlled experiments had proved beyond the shadow of a doubt exactly what a robot was. It seemed best to take no chances with a mechanism that possessed not only sufficient intelligence to repair itself but could also perform highly complicated operations, or not until the human race had forgotten how to train armies and fight wars.
The U.N. wanted no robot armies in existence. Hence no robot knowledge of worlds outside of power plants, no robot knowledge of anything except the twin gods of duty and obey implanted so deeply in a brain substance that they could not be eliminated, men hoped!
“Ready!” the technician called. The U.N. man nodded. Ferguson nodded. The technician closed a switch and the heavy door began to turn.
The robot was an old model. Both legs were missing. The metal body sheathing was pitted and flaked. He lay quietly on the revolving turntable. As the door turned and the robot came completely into the room, the wall counters began to rattle like the tails of little snakes shouting a warning that something more deadly than any snake had come into this room. The robot body, bathed for years in the deadly radiations beyond the wall, was in itself a source of secondary radiations.
The technicians worked swiftly. A crane magnet lifted the robot from the turntable to a long bench. The robot made no attempt to escape although the photoelectric cells that were its eyes must have looked up at the knife above it and guessed the purpose of that knife. But, it crossed its arms and lay there looking up. The U.N. man nodded. The technicians closed another switch and the knife screamed down. The robot head dropped from the robot body and fell into a bath of acid. The crane lifted the body and dropped it into a lead-lined vault. The wall counters left off their savage chattering. Ferguson tried to repress a shudder and failed. He always hated this scene. The whole thing even to the knife, which was modeled on the guillotine, reminded him too strongly of an execution.
The robot had crossed its arms and died. Down in the acid bath the material with a selective memory, the brain, was dissolving into elemental parts. It had been alive, in a way, and now it was dying, now it was dead. It had accepted death calmly, but Ferguson, remembering the way the arms had been crossed, stepped forward to ask a question.
“First time I ever saw one of them do that,” the technician answered.
The U.N. man made a mark in his notebook. One robot, dead. “What difference does it make!” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Ferguson answered. He was irritated and a little afraid. What difference did it make if a robot crossed its arms before it died? He tried to think of that difference. He couldn’t see the answer clearly. “They’re not supposed to do that,” he said.
The U.N. man shrugged. He was here to count dead robots, not to worry about them. He was in a hurry to get the job done and get out of this heavy armor and get away from this unhealthy place. “Next,” he said.
The revolving door swung round again, hesitated while robots beyond the wall placed another worn-out body on the chamber that led to death, then came around again carrying its second load of twisted metal and resigned brain. The wall counters rattled their warning. The robot crossed its arms across its chest, clasping in them a little star-shaped object, the knife roared down. Ferguson beat the crane to the body. In the fingers was a little plastic star.
“Look at that!”
The technicians looked, the U.N. man looked. “Plastic molded into the shape of a star,” one of the technicians said. “Funny, isn’t it? It’s hot, though. We’ll have to dump it.”
“They’ve invented death rites and death objects,” Ferguson said. He turned to the U.N. man. “Look, I think this is important.”
“What’s important about it?”
“They’ve gained some conception of the meaning of death. They’re beginning to attempt to control death. That’s what death rites and death objects are, attempts to control the fate of the soul in some after-life—” His voice went into confused silence. These were unscientific terms that conveyed feeling but no real meaning. These were outlaw words that got their user a lifted eyebrow and a compassionate look.
They got Ferguson exactly that, plus a grin. The U.N. man glanced at the acid bath. “The death objects didn’t do much good, did they? Next,” The grin did it. “Listen, you thick-headed—” Ferguson caught himself. There was nothing to be gained by calling names. Besides, he knew enough psychiatry to know that his name-calling outburst was rising out of fears in his own deep soul, out of his own subconscious. “Sorry. But—”
“If you think it is important, I’ll report it,” the U.N. man said, compassionately. “Next.”
Ferguson was silent. In his mind was turmoil. A robot going to death with a star in his hands! Ferguson had a touch of mysticism in him. The sight of a star-carrying robot touched deep wells of feeling in him, arousing age-old questions. “Tiger, tiger, burning bright—” he found himself saying. “In the forest of the night.
“What the hand and what the eye,
“Shaped thy fearful symmetry?”
Was the tiger seeking the hand and the eye that had shaped his being?
The crane dropped the robot body in the lead-lined vault and the revolving door began to turn again. Ferguson had his eyes glued to the turntable when Blake, his assistant, burst into the room, “The hospital wants you!” Blake gasped, then, because he was not wearing armor, turned and ducked back out of the place.
“The hospital—” Tigers burning bright and robots going to death with plastic stars carried in crossed hands were erased from the mind of the safety engineer. He went out of the room without seeing what the turntable carried. Tigers burning bright and star-carrying robots belonged to the realm of teleo-logical philosophy, to the doctrine of purposive and conscious causes, to the dim and dark nether region of first causes where science had not yet penetrated. For fifty centuries and more men had speculated on such subjects, without reaching any firm conclusions.
In the corridor Blake helped him tear off his armor. “Come on,” Ferguson said. They started at a run. In the distance ahead of them voices roared. “Hup, two, three, four—” And then roared again, “Hup, two, three, four,” and were silent. In a changing world, one thing remained the same forever, the rhythm of the drillmaster’s voice. Caesar’s legions had marched to some variant of this sound, as had the men of world wars I, II, and III. It was the oldest sound on earth.
They met the source of the sound and stopped running, standing against the wall to let the file of robots pass. Ferguson counted them mechanically. Eight robots. They were in charge of a technician and they were on their way to the revolving door. A U.N. man marched behind them. For a moment Ferguson hesitated, watching the file march away. They walked, they swung their arms, like marching men. Each of them, he knew, had a set of perfectly conditioned responses to the problems that would be met inside the plant. Only, of course, that part of their minds was not functioning yet and would not start to function until they went through the revolving door. To a robot, that door was the boming place and the dying place. Ferguson wondered if they ever wondered about the world outside an atomic power plant. What were the limits of the selective memory substance that Smither had invented? Was it able to put two and two together and think of the time when it had not been and of the time when it would again cease to be?
Then the pressure of the urgency calling him to the hospital again erased all such thoughts from his mind. He turned, a tall gaunt man with a hungry look somewhere about him, and broke into a dogtrot down the tunnel. Behind him came his silent shadow, Blake, younger but also tall and gaunt and also with the look about him of some secret soul hunger.
An elevator took them to the surface. They skirted the edge of the landing field with its parked helicopters. Before them, set among trees, was a cool white building—the hospital. As they went up the steps, rockets from a Moonbound freighter throbbed in the far sky above them.
Inside the hospital a woman was screaming.
The screams came from a room down the corridor. The door was open. Ferguson looked in. The woman doing the screaming was floating up against the ceiling. She was wearing a white uniform and he decided she was a nurse. He could not decide why she was floating in the air and he preferred not to try. A man in the white garb of an intern floated beside her. The intern was swearing and making swimming motions with his hands and feet.
Dr. Clanahan, the chief resident physician, was standing on top of a stepladder and was reaching for the screaming nurse. An extremely fussed looking man in a white coat, whom Ferguson recognized as Dr. Morton, the staff psycho, was holding the stepladder. There was a hospital bed in the room, with a patient in it, propped up against pillows. The patient was a wizened little man, about fifty, with a skin so white and so clear it looked transparent, and a great shock of hair so silver white and shining that it made the spotless pillow covers seem dull and drab in comparison. The patient, looking up at the nurse and intern floating near the ceiling, was smiling happily, like a child with a new toy or like an old man with a new faith, Ferguson couldn’t decide which.
The air seemed charged with static electricity. Ferguson thought he saw inch-long sparks leaping between Dr. Clanahan’s outstretched hand and the hand of the screaming nurse. The ever-present wall counter was sputtering, brrp, brrp, brrp-brrrp, as if catching radioactive indigestion.
“Great day in the morning!” Ferguson said.
“What … what’s holding them up?” Blake whispered, behind him.
“I’m guessing we’re seeing an example of levitation.”
“Lev … lev—” Blake couldn’t say the word. “What— what are we going to do?”
Ferguson would have preferred to run but he didn’t say so. He would have liked to turn around and walk out, in the calm manner of a man walking away from a ghost and pretending he doesn’t see it, but he knew he couldn’t. Every atom in him sensed the strangeness of this situation and radiated warning vibrations. He could hear those atoms ringing, like little silver bells tense with subtle warning. Stay away, stay away, the bells said. Ferguson felt a wave of cold run over him, like a spider with a thousand icy feet. Stay away, stay away. This is not for men to see!
Clanahan was suddenly aware of the presence of the safety engineer. “Help me,” he wailed, grabbing for the nurse.
There was no mistaking the spark this time. It was six inches long, leaping between the nurse and the doctor. Ferguson moved forward as Clanahan at last got his hands on the nurse. There was a soft cracking sound as of something tearing. The nurse began to fall. Clanahan fell with her.
Ferguson caught them as they fell, nurse and doctor. He didn’t know how much the nurse weighed when she was floating up against the ceiling but he knew how much she weighed when she hit him. He felt his knees sag under the unexpected weight. As he braced himself, Clanahan nose-dived across both of them and all three hit the floor. The nurse wailed, a thin sound deep in her throat that was like the whimper of a frightened child.
The room was silent. The patient chuckled, an out of place sound. Ferguson smelled ozone. The wall counter went brrp, brrp in slowing cadence. The nurse moaned. Dr. Morton straightened up the stepladder. Clanahan got slowly to his feet.
“Get me down from here!” the intern protested, from the ceiling. There was pain in the intern’s voice and shocked surprise. His voice was the voice of a man whose universe has been turned upside down and who has lost all faith in the orderly nature of the world around him.
Hearing that voice, Ferguson knew that up near the ceiling a man was holding on to his sanity with a death grip. He sympathized with that intern.
Dr. Clanahan, moving with the purposive determination of a man who is going to do his duty no matter what happens, climbed up the stepladder again. The nurse crawled off Ferguson’s lap and the engineer rose to his feet to catch the intern. Sparks leaped from Clanahan’s fingers to the intern, an invisible fabric ripped and was tom, and Ferguson, ready this time, caught the intern and eased him to the floor. The intern sat down, then laid down, his fingernails scraping across the smooth plastic linoleum as he tried to dig himself a hand-hold on the floor. Clanahan came down the ladder cautious step after cautious step and looked at the intern, then looked at the patient on the bed.
“Would somebody mind telling me what happened?” Ferguson said. There was a plaintive note in his voice. He did not wonder at it being there. Deep inside of him he was aware of a strong urge to get down and help that intern dig a hand-hold in the plastic floor, to use to hold on to the spinning world.
Dr. Clanahan took a cigarette out of the pocket of his white jacket. He was a young man but a worried man, now. A good doctor. He tapped the cigarette on his thumbnail, his motions slow and deliberate, and looked at the patient out of the comer of his eye. Then, the cigarette unlit, he went out into the hall. They heard him shouting out there. “Hicks. Judson. Miss Jones. Lock the doors. Don’t let anybody in, or out, then come here. On the double.” He came back into the room. There was a scurry of feet outside. Two men and a woman entered. Clanahan pointed the cigarette at the intern and the nurse. “Take care of them,” he said. “Give them a sedative and put them to bed. Then come back in here and stay here. You, Hicks, you stay here now.”
Clanahan’s eyes sought Ferguson. “Come to my office,” he said. “You too, Dr. Morton, if you please.”
They followed him, Blake coming, too. He went ahead of them. They found him opening a filing cabinet and taking out a bottle of whisky. He drank straight from the bottle, then handed it to Dr. Morton. The psycho took it without a word. The whisky made little gurgling sounds as it went down his throat.
Ferguson had the feeling of unreality that goes with great events, the sensation that this is a puppet show with the actors on strings responding to the will of some unseen, far-off master. “Would somebody mind telling me what happened?” he repeated, and wondered if this question was in the script. “How did those people get up on the ceiling?”
“Why … why didn’t they fall?” Blake asked.
“Uh,” Dr. Clanahan said. He looked at Ferguson. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to get you for an hour. No, don’t bother answering. It isn’t important. How did those people get up on the ceiling? The patient put them there.”
“Huh?”
“He said, ‘Rise thou up’,” Dr. Morton spoke. He took another drink. “And they rose up.” He looked at the bottle, measuring its remaining contents.
“Sky hooks!” Ferguson heard himself say. “Tell me just a little more,” he begged. He didn’t care how he sounded. The need to know was a million volt tension inside of him.
“The patient was brought in this morning,” Dr. Clanahan said. He looked at the bottle Dr. Morton had and decided there was no hope of getting it away from the psycho. Turning, he opened the filing cabinet and took out a second bottle, which he kept in his possession. “He was brought in this morning with a load of radios.”
“Oh,” Ferguson said. He knew now why he had been called. It was his job to keep radioactive materials and radiations where they belonged. They didn’t belong near any human being. “What department?” he asked quickly. “Where was he working and what is his name? How did he get the dose?
Weren’t the counters working? Hadn’t he been warned—”
Clanahan shook his head. “He’s not an employee, so far as I know. Anyhow he didn’t have a badge on him.”
“Oh. Outside the plant?” This was worse. When an employee got a load of radios, it was bad, but when somebody outside the plant caught a dose of death, there was likely to be a stir that would disturb half of Southern California People were scared of these plants. That was one reason they were located underground, in out of the way places, to give the public at least the illusion of protection, “Where did he get it?”
“We don’t know,” Glanahan answered.
“And we’re not likely to find out,” Dr. Morton spoke. “He won’t tell us his name or anything else.”
“He’s got to tell us! We have to know!”
Morton shrugged.
“You’ve got drugs that will force a man to talk.”
“Uh-huh,” the psycho nodded. “We were preparing to use one of them when … when—” He shrugged and took another drink.
“When he said, ‘Rise thou up’ to the intern and nurse,” Clanahan said.
“Oh. He resisted?”
Morton laughed, a sound that was more giggle than laugh. “That he did.”
“How did those people get up on the ceiling?” asked Blake.
“I wish you would shut up!” Ferguson spoke fiercely. “You keep bringing up the one fact that I’ve been trying to ignore.” He glared at his assistant, then at Morton. “Well, how did they?”
