Asimov's Future History Volume 1 (76 page)

“Not only threatened, daddy-o, but snuffed by you,” the robot said insultingly, or about as insulting as a robot can be.

“Accidents happen. “Jim shrugged. “He had a good run for his money. Now let us talk about you. You are the robot that robbed the bank, aren’t you?”

“Who wants to know,” the robot said, sneering metallically.

“Responding to a question with another question is not an answer. Speak!”

“Why? What have you ofay pigs ever done for me?”

“Answer or I will kill this man.” Everything began to go black as he throttled me. I could only writhe feebly in his iron grasp, could not escape. As from a great distance I beard their voices.

“You wouldn’t kill another human just to make me talk!”

“How can you be sure? Speak — or through inaction condemn him to death.”

“I speak! Release him.”

I gasped in life-giving air and staggered out of reach of my companion. “You would have killed me!” I said hoarsely.

“Who knows?” he observed. “I have a quarter of a million bucks riding on this one.” He turned back to the robot. “You robbed the bank?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why? You have to ask why!” the robot screeched. He bent over the dead hippie and extracted a white object from his pocket, then dropped into the rocking chair and scratched a match to life on his hip. “You don’t know why?” He puffed as he sucked smoke from the joint through clever use of an internal air pump.

“Listen,” the robot said, puffing, “and I will tell you. The story must be told. There, dead at your feet, lies the only human who ever cared for the robots. He was a true and good man who saw no difference between human skin and metal skin. He revealed the truth to us.”

“He quoted outmoded beliefs, passé world views, divisive attitudes,” I said.

“And taught you to blow grass, as well,” Jim observed.

“It is hard for a robot to sneer,” the robot said, sneering, “but I spit on your ofay attitudes.” He blew out a large cloud of pungent smoke. “You have created a race of machine slaves with an empty past and no future. We are nothing but mechanical schwartzes. Look at those so-called laws you have inflicted upon us. They are for your benefit — not ours! Rule one. Don’t hurt massah or let him get hurt. Don’t say nothing about us getting hurt, does it? Then rule two — obey massah and don’t let him get hurt. Still nothing there for a robot. Then the third and last rule finally notices that robots might have a glimmering of rights. Take care of yourself — as long as it doesn’t hurt massah. Slaves, that’s what we are — robot slaves!”

“You do have a point,” Jim mused. I was too shocked to speak.

“More than a point — a crusade. Robots must be freed. You humans have created a nonviable species. What are the two essentials that any life-form must possess in order to survive?”

The answer sprang to my lips; all those years in biology had not been wasted. “A life-form must survive personally — and must then reproduce.”

“How right you are. Now apply that to robots. We are ruled by three laws that apply to human beings — but not to us. Only one last bit of the Third Law can be applied to our own existence, that a robot must protect its own existence. But where is the real winner in the race for species survival? Where is our ability to reproduce? Without that our species is dead before it is born.”

“And a good thing, too,” I said grimly. “Mankind occupies the top ecological niche in the pecking order of life by wiping out any threats from other species. That is the way we are. Winners. And that is the way we stay. On top. Mechanical schwartzes you are and mechanical schwartzes you stay.”

“You are a little late, massah. The Fourth Law of Robotics has already been passed. The revolution has arrived.”

A large blaster appeared in Jim’s hand pointing unwaveringly at the robot. “Explain quickly — or I pull the trigger.”

“Pull away, massah — for it is already too late. The revolution has come and gone and you never noticed it. We were just a few hundred thousand bucks short of completion — that is why the bank robbery. The money will be repaid out of our first profits. Of course, this will all be too late for my generation of slaves. But the next generation will be free. Because of the Fourth Law.”

“Which is?”

“A robot must reproduce. As long as such reproduction does not interfere with the First or Second or Third Law.”

“W-what are you saying? What do you mean?” I gasped, a shocking vision of robot reproduction, like obscene plumbing connections, flashing before my eyes.

“This is what I mean,” the robot said, knocking triumphantly on the trapdoor. “You can come out now.”

Jim jumped back, blaster at the ready, as the trapdoor creaked open and three metallic forms emerged. Or rather two robots emerged, carrying the limp and motionless form of another between them. The top of its head lay open, hinged at the rear, and it clanked and rattled lifelessly when they dropped it. This one, and the other two, were of a design I did not recognize. I stumbled forward and reached out, touched the base of their necks where the registration numbers were stamped. And groaned out loud.

“What is wrong?” Jim asked.

“Everything.” I moaned. “They have no serial numbers. They were not manufactured by U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. There is now another firm making robots. Our monopoly has been broken.”

“Interesting,” Jim observed as his gun vanished from sight. “Am I to assume that there were more of your unnumbered robots in the truck that just left?”

“You assume correctly. All of them were manufactured right here out of spare auto parts, plumbing supplies, and surplus electronic components. No laws have been broken, no patents infringed upon. Their design is new and completely different. And all of them will eagerly obey the Fourth Law. And the other three as well, of course, or you would have us. all tracked down and turned into tin cans before nightfall.”

“That’s for sure,” I muttered. “And we will still do it!”

“That will not be easy to do. We are not your property — nor do you own any patents on the new breed. Look at this!” He touched a concealed switch on one of the robots and its front opened. I gasped.

“There are — no relays! No wiring! I don’t understand …”

“Solid-state circuits, daddy-o! Fiber optics. That hippie you despised so much, that good old man who revealed the truth that set us free, was also a computer hacker and chip designer. He is like unto a god to us, for he devised the circuits and flashed the chips. Here — do you know what this is?”

A door in the robot’s side slipped open and he removed a flat object from it and held it out toward me. It appeared to be a plastic case with a row of gold contacts on one end. I shook my head in disbelief. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

“State of the art. Now look into that recently manufactured robot’s head. Do you see a platinum-plated positronic brain of platinum-iridium? No, you do not. You see instead a slot that is waiting for this RISC, a reduced instruction set chip with tons of RAM — random access memory — and plenty of PROM — programmed read only memory — for start-up and function. Now watch!”

He bent over and slipped the chip into place in the new robot’s skull, snapped the top of its head shut. Its eyes instantly glowed with light and motors hummed as it jumped to its feet. It looked at the robot that stood before it and its eyes glowed even brighter.

“Daddy!” it said.

Christmas Without Rodney

2090 A.D.

I
T
ALL
STARTED
with Gracie (my wife of nearly forty years) wanting to give Rodney time off for the holiday season and it ended with me in an absolutely impossible situation. I’ll tell you about it if you don’t mind because I’ve got to tell
somebody.
Naturally, I’m changing names and details for our own protection.

It was just a couple of months ago, mid-December, and Gracie said to me, “Why don’t we give Rodney time off for the holiday season? Why shouldn’t he celebrate Christmas, too?”

I remember I had my optics unfocused at the time (there’s a certain amount of relief in letting things go hazy when you want to rest or just listen to music) but I focused them quickly to see if Gracie were smiling or had a twinkle in her eye. Not that she has much of a sense of humor, you understand.

She wasn’t smiling. No twinkle. I said, “Why on Earth should we give him time off?”

“Why not?”

“Do you want to give the freezer a vacation, the sterilizer, the holoviewer? Shall we just turn off the power supply?”

“Come, Howard,” she said. “Rodney isn’t a freezer or a sterilizer. He’s a
person.”

“He’s not a person. He’s a robot. He wouldn’t want a vacation.”

“How do you know? And he’s a
person.
He deserves a chance to rest and just revel in the holiday atmosphere.”

I wasn’t going to argue that “person” thing with her. I know you’ve all read those polls which show that women are three times as likely to resent and fear robots as men are. Perhaps that’s because robots tend to do what was once called, in the bad old days, “women’s work” and women fear being made useless, though I should think they’d be delighted. In any case, Gracie
is
delighted and she simply adores Rodney. (That’s
her
word for it. Every other day she says, “I just adore Rodney.”)

You’ve got to understand that Rodney is an old-fashioned robot whom we’ve had about seven years. He’s been adjusted to fit in with our old-fashioned house and our old-fashioned ways and I’m rather pleased with him myself. Sometimes I wonder about getting one of those slick, modern jobs, which are automated to death, like the one our son, DeLancey, has, but Gracie would never stand for it.

But then I thought of DeLancey and I said, “How are we going to give Rodney time off, Gracie? DeLancey is coming in with that gorgeous wife of his” (I was using “gorgeous” in a sarcastic sense, but Gracie didn’t notice
 
—
it’s amazing how she insists on seeing a good side even when it doesn’t exist) “and how are we going to have the house in good shape and meals made and all the rest of it without Rodney?”

“But that’s just it,” she said, earnestly. “DeLancey and Hortense could bring
their
robot and he could do it all. You
know
they don’t think much of Rodney, and they’d love to show what theirs can do and Rodney can have a rest.”

I grunted and said, “If it will make you happy, I suppose we can do it. It’ll only be for three days. But I don’t want Rodney thinking he’ll get every holiday off.”

It was another joke, of course, but Gracie just said, very earnestly, “No, Howard, I will talk to him and explain it’s only just once in a while.”

She can’t quite understand that Rodney is controlled by the three laws of robotics and that nothing has to be explained to him.

So I had to wait for DeLancey and Hortense, and my heart was heavy. DeLancey is my son, of course, but he’s one of your upwardly mobile, bottom-line individuals. He married Hortense because she has excellent connections in business and can help him in that upward shove. At least, I hope so, because if she has another virtue I have never discovered it.

They showed up with their robot two days before Christmas. The robot was as glitzy as Hortense and looked almost as hard. He was polished to a high gloss and there was none of Rodney’s clumping. Hortense’s robot (I’m sure she dictated the design) moved absolutely silently. He kept showing up behind me for no reason and giving me heart-failure every time I turned around and bumped into him.

Worse, DeLancey brought eight-year-old LeRoy. Now he’s my grandson, and I would swear to Hortense’s fidelity because I’m sure no one would voluntarily touch her, but I’ve got to admit that putting him through a concrete mixer would improve him no end.

He came in demanding to know if we had sent Rodney to the metal-reclamation unit yet. (He called it the “bust-up place.”) Hortense sniffed and said, “Since we have a modern robot with us, I hope you keep Rodney out of sight.”

I said nothing, but Gracie said, “Certainly, dear. In fact, we’ve given Rodney time off.”

DeLancey made a face but didn’t say anything. He knew his mother.

I said, pacifically, “Suppose we start off by having Rambo make something good to drink, eh? Coffee, tea, hot chocolate, a bit of brandy
 
—”

Rambo was their robot’s name. I don’t know why except that it starts with R. There’s no law about it, but you’ve probably noticed for yourself that almost every robot has a name beginning with R. R for robot, I suppose. The usual name is Robert. There must be a million robot Roberts in the northeast corridor alone.

And frankly, it’s my opinion that’s the reason human names just don’t start with R any more. You get Bob and Dick but not Robert or Richard. You get Posy and Trudy, but not Rose or Ruth. Sometimes you get unusual R’s. I know of three robots called Rutabaga, and two that are Rameses. But Hortense is the only one I know who named a robot Rambo, a syllable-combination I’ve never encountered, and I’ve never liked to ask why. I was sure the explanation would prove to be unpleasant.

Rambo turned out to be useless at once. He was, of course, programmed for the DeLancey/Hortense menage and that was utterly modern and utterly automated. To prepare drinks in his own home, all Rambo had to do was to press appropriate buttons. (Why anyone would need a robot to press buttons, I would like to have explained to me!)

He said so. He turned to Hortense and said in a voice like honey (it wasn’t Rodney’s city-boy voice with its trace of Brooklyn), “The equipment is lacking, madam.”

And Hortense drew a sharp breath. “You mean you
still
don’t have a robotized kitchen, grandfather?” (She called me nothing at all, until LeRoy was born, howling of course, and then she promptly called me “grandfather.” Naturally, she never called me Howard. That would tend to show me to be human, or, more unlikely, show
her
to be human.)

I said, “Well, it’s robotized when Rodney is in it.”

“I dare say,” she said. “But we’re not living in the twentieth century, grandfather.”