Asimov's Future History Volume 1 (8 page)

And then AL-76 had squatted down next to him and said, “Say, why did all the rest of them run?”

Payne knew quite well why they all ran, but the gurgle that issued from his diaphragm didn’t show it. He tried to inch away from the robot.

AL-76 continued in an aggrieved tone, “One of them even took a shot at me. An inch lower and he would have scratched my shoulder plate.”

“M-must have b-been a nut,” stammered Payne.

“That’s possible.” The robot’s voice grew more confidential. “Listen, what’s wrong with everything?”

Payne looked hurriedly about. It
had struck him that the robot spoke in a remarkably mild tone for one so heavily and brutally metallic in appearance. It also struck him that he had heard somewhere that robots were mentally incapable of harming human beings. He relaxed a bit.

“There’s nothing wrong with anything.”

“Isn’t there?” AL-76 eyed him accusingly.
“You’re
all wrong. Where’s your space suit?”

“I haven’t got any.”

“Then why aren’t you dead?”

That stopped Payne, “Well – I don’t know.”

“See!” said the robot triumphantly, “there’s something wrong with everything. Where’s Mount Copernicus? Where’s Lunar station 17? And where’s my Disinto? I want to get to work, I do.” He seemed perturbed, and his voice shook as he continued. “I’ve been going about for hours trying to get someone to tell me where my Disinto is, but they all run away. By now I’m probably ‘way behind schedule and the Sectional Executive will be as sore as blazes. This is a fine situation.”

Slowly Payne unscrambled the stew in which his brain found itself and said, “Listen, what do they call you?”

“My serial number is AL-76.”

All right, Al is good enough for me. Now, Al, if you’re looking for Lunar Station 17, that’s on the moon, see?”

AL-76 nodded his head ponderously. “Sure. But I’ve been looking for it –”

“But it’s on the moon. This isn’t the moon.”

It was the robot’s turn to become confused. He watched Payne for a speculative moment and then said slowly, “What do you mean this isn’t the moon? Of course it’s the moon. Because if it isn’t the moon, what is it, huh? Answer me that.”

Payne made a funny sound in his throat and breathed hard. He pointed a finger at the robot and shook it. “Look,” he said – and then the brilliant idea of the century struck him, and he finished with a strangled “Wow!”

AL-76 eyed him censoriously. “That isn’t an answer. I think I have a right to a civil answer if I ask a civil question.”

Payne wasn’t listening. He was still marveling at himself. Why, it was as plain as day. This robot was one built for the moon that had somehow gotten loose on Earth. Naturally it would be all mixed up, because its positronic brain had been geared exclusively for a lunar environment, making its earthly surroundings entirely meaningless.

And now if he could only keep the robot here – until he could get in touch with the men at the factory in Petersboro. Why, robots were worth money. The cheapest cost $50,000, he had once heard, and some of them ran into millions. Think of the reward!

Man, oh, man,
think of the reward!
And every cent for himself. Not as much as a quarter of a snifter of a plugged nickel for Mirandy. Jumpin’ tootin’ blazes,
no!

He rose to his feet at last. “Al,” he said, “you and I are buddies! Pals! I love you like a brother.” He thrust out a hand. “Shake!”

The robot swallowed up the offered hand in a metal paw and squeezed it gently. He didn’t quite understand. “Does that mean you’ll tell me how to get to Lunar Station 17?”

Payne was a trifle disconcerted..’N-no, not exactly. As a matter of fact, I like you so much, I want you to stay here with me awhile.”

“Oh no, I can’t do that. I’ve got to get to work.” He shook his head. “How would you like to be falling behind your quota hour by hour and minute by minute? I want to work. I’ve
got
to work.”

Payne thought sourly that there was no accounting for tastes, and said, “All right, then, I’ll explain something to you – because I can see from the looks of you that you’re an intelligent person. I’ve had orders from your Sectional Executive, and he wants me to keep you here for a while. Till he sends for you, in fact.”

“What for?” asked AL-76 suspiciously.

“I can’t say. It’s secret government stuff.” Payne prayed, inwardly and fervently, that the robot would swallow this. Some robots were clever, he knew, but this looked like one of the early models.

While Payne prayed, AL-76 considered. The robot’s brain, adjusted to the handling of a Disinto on the moon, was not at its best when engaged in abstract thought, but just the same, ever since he had gotten lost, AL-76 had found his thought processes becoming stranger. The alien surroundings did something to him.

His next remark was almost shrewd. He said slyly, “What’s my Sectional Executive’s name?”

Payne gulped and thought rapidly. “Al,” he said in a pained fashion, “you hurt me with this suspicion. I
can’t
tell you his name. The trees have ears.”

AL-76 inspected the tree next to him stolidly and said, “They have not.”

“I know. What I mean is that spies are all around.”

“Spies?”

“Yes. You know,
bad
people who want to destroy Lunar Station 17.”

“What for?”

“Because they’re
bad.
And they want to destroy
you,
and that’s why you’ve got to stay here for a while, so they can’t find you.”

“But – but I’ve got to have a Disinto. I mustn’t fall behind my quota.”

“You will have. You will have,” Payne promised earnestly, and just as earnestly damned the robot’s one-track mind. “They’re going to send one out tomorrow. Yeah, tomorrow.” That would leave plenty of time to get the men from the factory out here and collect beautiful green heaps of hundred-dollar bills.

But AL-76 grew only the more stubborn under the distressing impingement of the strange world all about him upon his thinking mechanism.

“No,” he said. “I’ve got to have a Disinto now.” Stiffly he straightened his joints, jerking erect. “I’d better look for it some more.”

Payne swarmed after and grabbed a cold, hard elbow. “Listen,” he squealed. “You’ve got to stay –”

And something in the robot’s mind clicked. All the strangeness surrounding him collected itself into one globule. Exploded, and left a brain ticking with a curiously increased efficiency. He whirled on Payne. “I tell you what. I can build a Disinto right here – and then I can work it.”

Payne paused doubtfully. “I don’t think I can build one.” He wondered if it would do any good to pretend he could.

“That’s all right.” AL-76 could almost feel the positronic paths of his brain weaving into a new pattern, and experienced a strange exhilaration.
“I
can build one.” He looked into Payne’s deluxe doghouse and said. “You’ve got all the material here that I need.”

Randolph Payne surveyed the junk with which his shack was filled: eviscerated radios, a topless refrigerator, rusty automobile engines, a broken-down gas range, several miles of frayed wire, and, taking it all together, fifty tons or thereabouts of the most heterogeneous mass of old metal as ever caused a junkman to sniff disdainfully.

“Have I?” he said weakly.

Two hours later, two things happened practically simultaneously. The first was that Sam Tobe of the Petersboro branch of the United States Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation received a visiphone call from one Randolph Payne of Hannaford. It concerned the missing robot, and Tobe, with a deep-throated snarl, broke connection halfway through and ordered all subsequent calls to be rerouted to the sixth assistant vice-president in charge of buttonholes.

This was not really unreasonable of Tobe. During the past week, although Robot AL-76 had dropped from sight completely, reports had flooded in from all over the Union as to the robot’s whereabouts. As many as fourteen a day came – usually from fourteen different states.

Tobe was almighty tired of it, to say nothing of being half crazy on general principles. There was even talk of a Congressional investigation, though every reputable roboticist and mathematical physicist on Earth swore the robot was harmless.

In his state of mind, then, it is not surprising that it took three hours for the general manager to pause and consider just exactly how it was that this Randolph Payne had known that the robot was slated for Lunar Station 17, and, for that matter, how he had known that the robot’s serial number was AL-76. Those details had not been given out by the company.

He kept on considering for about a minute and a half and then swung into action.

However, during the three hours between the call and the action, the second event took place. Randolph Payne, having correctly diagnosed the abrupt break in his call as being due to general skepticism on the part of the plant official, returned to his shack with a camera. They couldn’t very well argue with a photograph, and he’d be hornswoggled if he’d show them the real thing before they came across with the cash.

AL-76 was busy with affairs of his own. Half of the contents of Payne’s shack was littered over about two acres of ground, and in the middle of it the robot squatted and fooled around with radio tubes, hunks of iron, copper wire, and general junk. He paid no attention to Payne, who, sprawling flat on his belly, focused his camera for a beautiful shot.

And at this point it was that Lemuel Oliver Cooper turned the bend in the road and froze in his tracks as he took in the tableau. The reason for his coming in the first place was an ailing electric toaster that had developed the annoying habit of throwing out pieces of bread forcefully, but thoroughly untoasted. The reason for his
leaving
was more obvious. He had come with a slow, mildly cheerful, spring-morning saunter. He left with a speed that would have caused any college track coach to raise his eyebrows and purse his lips approvingly.

There was no appreciable slackening of speed until Cooper hurtled into Sheriff Saunders’ office, minus hat and toaster, and brought himself up hard against the wall.

Kindly hands lifted him, and for half a minute he tried speaking before he had actually calmed down to the point of breathing with, of course, no result.

They gave him whisky and fanned him and when he did speak, it came out something like this: “– monster – seven feet tall – shack all busted up – poor Rannie Payne –” and so on.

They got the story out of him gradually: how there was a huge metal monster, seven feet tall, maybe even eight or nine, out at Randolph Payne’s shack; how Randolph Payne himself was on his stomach, a “poor, bleeding, mangled corpse”; how the monster was then busily engaged in wrecking the shack out of sheer destructiveness; how it had turned on Lemuel Oliver Cooper, and how he, Cooper, had made his escape by half a hair.

Sheriff Saunders hitched his belt tighter about his portly middle and said, “It’s that there machine man that got away from the Petersboro factory. We got warning on it last Saturday. Hey, Jake, you get every man in Hannaford County that can shoot and slap a deputy’s badge on him. Get them here at noon. And listen, Jake, before you do that, just drop in at the Widow Payne’s place and lip her the bad news gentle-like.”

It is reported that Miranda Payne, upon being acquainted with events, paused only to make sure that her husband’s insurance policy was safe, and to make a few pithy remarks concerning her foolishness in not having had him take out double the amount, before breaking out into as prolonged and heart-wringing a wail of grief as ever became a respectable widow.

It was some hours later that Randolph Payne – unaware of his horrible mutilation and death – viewed the completed negatives of his snapshots with satisfaction. As a series of portraits of a robot at work, they left nothing to the imagination. They might have been labeled: “Robot Gazing Thoughtfully at Vacuum Tube,” “Robot Splicing Two Wires,” “Robot Wielding Screwdriver,” “Robot Taking Refrigerator Apart with Great Violence,” and so on.

As there now remained only the routine of making the prints themselves, he stepped out from beyond the curtain of the improvised darkroom for a bit of a smoke and a chat with AL-76.

In doing so, he was blissfully unaware that the neighboring woods were verminous with nervous farmers armed with anything from an old colonial relic of a blunderbuss to the portable machine gun carried by the sheriff himself. Nor, for that matter, had he any inkling of the fact that half a dozen roboticists, under the leadership of Sam Tobe, were smoking down the highway from Petersboro at better than a hundred and twenty miles an hour for the sole purpose of having the pleasure and honor of his acquaintance.

So while things were jittering toward a climax, Randolph Payne sighed with self-satisfaction, lighted a match upon the seat of his pants, puffed away at his pipe, and looked at AL-76 with amusement.

It had been apparent for quite some time that the robot was more than slightly lunatic. Randolph Payne was himself an expert at homemade contraptions, having built several that could not have been exposed to daylight without searing the eyeballs of all beholders; but he had never even conceived of anything approaching the monstrosity that AL-76 was concocting.

It would have made the Rube Goldbergs of the day die in convulsions of envy. It would have made Picasso (if he could have lived to witness it) quit art in the sheer knowledge that he had been hopelessly surpassed. It would have soured the milk in the udders of any cow within half a mile.

In fact, it was gruesome!

From a rusty and massive iron base that faintly resembled something Payne had once seen attached to a secondhand tractor, it rose upward in rakish, drunken swerves through a bewildering mess of wires, wheels, tubes, and nameless horrors without number, ending in a megaphone arrangement that looked decidedly sinister.

Payne had the impulse to peek in the megaphone part, but refrained. He had seen far more sensible machines explode suddenly and with violence.

He said, “Hey, Al.”

The robot looked up. He had been lying flat on his stomach, teasing a thin sliver of metal into place. “What do you want, Payne?”