by Eando Binder
After dinner, we would go to a show, or play, or some other entertainment. I enjoy them as much as anyone else. If they are good. If they aren’t I enjoy them as the ridiculous nonsense with which you humans so often attempt to entertain each other. I am afraid that in such cases, I laugh at rather than with them. I am not taking a superior stand, though. I would warrant that a world of robots, like myself, would also plumb the depths of shallow absurdity to while away dull hours.
Yes, I know hours of dullness, too. I am not all steady industry, activity, the tirelessness of a machine. There are times when my brain sags, when a “blue” feeling steals over me, when things seem hollow, empty. And remember that I have 24 hours a day to fill. Sometimes I long to have the gift of sleep!
Perhaps you think I am merely trying to make myself out as near-human in my mental processes. I could know all those things simply by reading. I have no answer for that, except what happened later.
TO get back to my companions and “night life,” I recall with mixed pleasure and pain one certain evening, in a cabaret. The master-of-ceremonies, picking out celebrities, finally turned the limelight on me.
“Adam Link, ladies and gentlemen!” he said. “The talking, walking, thinking robot! Be he man or be he beast, he’s got what it takes. His weekly income would make most of us turn bright green with envy. We all know of his heroism in the fire, and saving a child. Take a bow, Adam. You can see, folks, that he doesn’t do it with mirrors. Nor is he run by strings. He’s the real thing!”
I arose and bowed slightly, at Jack’s urging. I did not mind the master-of-ceremonies’ bantering, for beneath it there had been respect. And the answering burst of applause was wholehearted. I felt a deep glow. Now, more than before, I realized I had been accepted in the world of man. Even the inevitable autograph-hunter boldly walked up, held out his book. I signed with my usual scrawl, since I do not have the fine control over my hands that you humans have.
“Wait!” said the master-of-ceremonies, as I was about to sit down. “Take a chair, there, Adam, and show us how you can crumple it up like matchwood with your hands. Go ahead—we’ll gladly stand the cost. He doesn’t know his own strength, folks. And yet, he’s gentle as a lamb. Okay, Adam—”
But this I did not want to do. I do not care to display my brute powers, so meaningless, when it is my mind that counts. Jack, quick to see this, hastily signalled negatively to the man.
“Sorry, Adam!” the master-of-ceremonies said smoothly. “No offense. So instead we’ll play a brand new ditty one of my boys composed. It’ll be a hit, or I’m a robot! Title—‘Who Do I Mean?’ Warble it, Honey!”
It is a hit. You’ve all heard it. “Honey,” the club’s singer, rendered it nicely. I listened, a bit bewildered.
“He has a heart of gold,
And nerves of steel,
He rattles like a dishpan,
And never eats a meal.
Who do l mean?
Why, Adam Link the r-o-o-bot!
He has a silvery voice,
And an iron grip,
One thing he cannot do,
Is take an ocean dip.
Who do I mean?
Why, Adam Link the r-o-o-bot!”
A silly little song, of course, and it runs on for verse after verse. Its catchy tune, I believe, is the secret of its popularity. It amuses me immensely.
Again there was applause, almost wild, and I was forced to take another bow. It had “brought down the house.”
And then it was that a voice rose from the next table.
“Aw, all this fuss over a junk-man,” growled a beefy man, with two empty bottles of champagne beside his elbow. “Haw, haw, that’s good—junk-man! Get it?” He was speaking to his lady companion, ostensibly, but really to the whole house. “Hey, Frankenstein!” He turned to me, looking me up and down appraisingly. “Let’s see—I’ll offer 95c and not a penny more!” He guffawed coarsely.
A queer silence came over the room. Everybody looked around. It was an open insult. And everybody wondered, no doubt, if I had feelings that could be hurt. I did. But I said nothing. Jack started up, face livid, but I pulled him back.
The man’s companion had whispered to him. “Aw, I’m not afraid of him!” his drunken tongue boasted. “Neither of them.” He staggered erect to his feet and leered at me, and in his hand he held—a can-opener. For a split instant I half rose to my feet and felt the restraining hand of Kay on my metal arms. And then my tormentor spoke again. What he said made me subside immediately. “Want to make anything of it, Frankenstein?” he said.
Frankenstein, again! Would it always hound me, all my life? I could see vague fears steal into people’s faces. No matter how calmly I was accepted, there was always that lurking distrust of me. That fear that at any moment I would show the beast in me. There must be a beast in me, of course! Maybe you humans think that way because you know of the beast within yourselves. But I do not mean to be bitter.
We left. There was nothing else to do. In a taxi on the way home, I felt sunk in moodiness. Jack and Kay looked at me. Kay suddenly put her hand on my arm.
“I just want to say, Adam Link,” she said earnestly, “that you’re more of man than many so-called men. You have—yes, character!” She said it in a sort of awed tone, as though it had suddenly struck her. “Please don’t think about what happened!”
And that is one of the memories I’ll carry with me to my grave, wherever and whenever it will be. Kay Temple that day made such things easier to bear.
CHAPTER III
New Developments
I RECORD the following incident purely to show I was not a hero in any sense of the word. I had gone to the bank, to deposit several checks in my account. As I stood at the wall counter, filling out the blank, I heard a rough voice say threateningly:
“This is a stick-up! Don’t move, anybody!”
I turned, stood still. Three masked bandits were advancing, with submachine guns. The few depositors threw up their hands, white-faced. One bandit barked to the clerks behind the grill to hand out money, in a hurry. The other two stood on guard, eyes shifting around, ready to shoot. Outside, at the curb, I could see a big black car with motor running, waiting for the getaway.
I hadn’t made a move, since turning around. I saw the nervous, watchful eyes of the guarding men flick over me impersonally. In their tense state, they didn’t see who I was. They probably took me, without thinking, as some metallic fixture of the place. I was in shadow.
I thought rapidly. Then I leaped for the bandit nearest the door, at the same time yelling “down!” at the other people. My leap was so instantaneous, so surprising, that I reached the man and wrenched his gun away before he even thought of shooting.
But the other guard sprang into action. His submachine gun coughed harshly. Bullets rattled against my middle—they always shoot for the abdomen, I understand. And that was what made it simple for me. My middle body is sheathed with thick metal plates. Bullets cannot penetrate. But bullets higher, into my eyes or face-piece, would have stopped me—even killed me.
I ran directly into the hail of bullets. Suddenly the bandit was aware at what he was shooting. His eyes opened wide, shocked. His gun dropped from nerveless fingers. He backed away, with a shriek of utter terror, and then fainted.
Now I went for the third man. He had whirled, brought up his gun. Evidently a little harder to scare, and shrewder, he raked bullets at me. And he suddenly raised the muzzle, to shoot higher, at my head.
That was the only moment of danger. Instantly, I dove under his fire, clanked against the floor on my chest plates and slid across the tile toward him, like a metal baseball player stealing home. Before he could swing the gun down, I had grasped his ankle and jerked him off his feet. My grip also snapped his delicate ankle bones. He was through, too.
This had all happened in seconds.
Now the two men outside, in the car, hearing the shots, came to a window to take a look, faces aghast, and then jumped back.
I saw I had no time to run to the door, to stop them. Instead I ran straight for the big plate-glass window, crashed through in a shower of glass. The car was just starting to move.
I thought of grasping the rear bumper, trying to hold the car back, or even overturning it, but I estimated, in lightning thought, that it would be beyond even my powers, with the engine already in gear. The weight alone would not have stopped me.
Secondly, I thought of jumping on the running-board, poking a hand through the window, and grasping the steering wheel away. But the runaway car might then smash up somewhere. I myself might end up crushed.
There was only one possibility left. I had not slowed one bit after crashing through the window. I overtook the car, just starting to zoom into second gear, and ran ahead of it. Then I turned, running backward—still faster than the car—and just stared at the two bandits in the front seat.
I figured the psychological effect correctly. Instinctively, the driver jammed on his brakes, perhaps visioning 300 pounds of metal ramming through his windshield if he ran me down.
Then it was that I jumped on the running-board, wrenched the steering wheel off its post. Completely unnerved, the two bandits shrank back, babbling for mercy, thinking I was about to tear them apart too. And so, a few minutes later, the police had all five of them.
It was nothing “heroic” on my part—you humans have a strange “hero” complex—but simply use of my machine-given powers. I vision some day a police force of robots like myself . . .
BUT that will not be for a while. Not till I am sure others of my kind really belong in the world of man. Perhaps never. I say this, now, thinking back to what has happened.
My business went along smoothly, with Kay in charge of all details. But more and more I began to notice her watching me, surreptitiously, in a strange way. I seldom caught her at it. When I looked—I have to turn my whole head to look—she would be staring impersonally at her typewriter. But I could feel her eyes on me. Again I failed to reason out why she did that. She was, as I imagine women have always been to men—mystery.
Not that she was annoyingly secretive. On the contrary, she was quite open and frank in her general curiosity about me. Oftentimes, with Jack, our conversation would turn to myself. I explained as best I could what made me “tick.” I told them my outlook on things. We would at times discuss humanity and social life, relative to the robot question. My very presence—the long-predicated metal man of intelligence—made that problem a looming one.
Dr. Link had cautiously destroyed his ultimate secret of energizing and bringing to life an iridium-sponge brain. He had given me the key formula. It was locked in my mind. Therefore I, and I alone, would have the final decision to make, whether any more robots were to be made.
“Eventually,” Jack said, in one of his more serious moments, “it will have to come to the government’s attention. Your record will soon prove, to them, that intelligent robots will be an economic asset to civilization. And no threat to man’s rule, all fantasy to the side. You, Adam, are already proof of those fundamental things.”
“Not quite,” I returned. “The problem goes deeper. I was fortunate in being ‘brought up’ by a high-minded man, Dr. Link. My open, impressionable mind was given the best possible start in civilized life. But think of a robot brought into being and trained by an unscrupulous man, or an out-and-out criminal. What would the robot be? The same!”
Kay nodded. “A basic rule. Environment molding the mind. If we had no slums, there would be no slum children.” Her voice was a little tragic. “Some rise out of it; most don’t—” She stopped.
“Kay did!” Jack went on, despite the girl’s startled hand on his arm. “We know you well enough, Adam, for you to hear this. Kay had two strikes on her from the start—the slums and her beauty. She survived them both. But her sister didn’t. Her sister—”
It was a tragic story, and I knew the reason now for Kay’s somber moments. I was shocked at the revelation of slum life, poverty, maladjustment, side by side with a thriving mechanical civilization.
“I’ve been wondering what to do with my money,” I said, when Jack was done. “Now I know. We’re going to buy up slum property, tear down the buildings, and erect new modern ones!” Already my rapid thoughts were outlining the project.
Kay’s eyes were shining, through tears. Her hand touched my arm.
“I don’t see you as a robot any more, Adam!” she exclaimed. “I see you as a man! You have character, personality, just like anyone else. You are like a man who is big and strong—and gentle. You have kindly eyes, sympathetic lips, a strong chin.” She was looking at me with half-closed eyes. “You have a grave, boyish face, a shock of unruly hair, seldom combed. Your hands are big, thick-fingered, but so very gentle! And when you smile—you often do, I know—it is like a warm sun breaking through clouds!”
Jack and I were both a little startled.
But Jack’s face lighted up with a wondering fascination. “You know, Kay,” he whispered, “you’ve described him to a T!”
And after that, I felt more than ever a human being. I knew that in their eyes I was no longer Adam Link, robot, but Adam Link—man!
THE slum-clearance project knit us three still more closely together. Jack quit his paper, where he had often editorialized against the city’s laxness, and became manager of activities. We could not clean up everything, but we would do as much as we could. My money—it had reached over a half million—poured into the venture. Fire-trap, vermin-infested tenements began to go down, foundations up.
Tom Link, my “cousin,” came from his eastern law office to help with legal matters. I have forgotten to mention Tom. He hadn’t suddenly lost all interest in me, after his losing court battle, or I in him. It was just that he had gone to his new position, before the date of my near-execution, unable to bear being around for that bitter event. We had exchanged letters steadily, after my pardon. Now he came to help us.
“Adam Link!” he greeted me, stepping off the train. It was all he could say for the moment. I couldn’t say anything.
Later, the four of us talked.
“How did you ever get that testimony out of the housekeeper?” Tom asked Jack, without jealousy. “I tried to get her to remember separate sounds, in the witness chair, but she stubbornly claimed she couldn’t.”
“It was simple enough,” grinned Jack. “Talking to her at her home, I kept my voice loud. She was annoyed. I explained that I knew she was half deaf. That got her! Sometimes little personal things like that sharpen people’s minds. To prove her perfect hearing, she had to remember that she had heard Adam’s footsteps first—whether she really did or not! You see?”
“You missed your calling!” Tom meant it. He turned to me. “I knew neither my uncle nor I was wrong about you, Adam. You’re proving your worth. I’m—well, I’m proud to be your cousin!”
Tom had to leave a week later, but promised to be back oftener. He had cleared away a legal tangle, and snipped much red tape for us.
BUT in all our activity, Jack, Kay and I still found time to relax and have fun.
Sports appealed to all of us. I quickly found tennis to my liking. But it was some time before I could learn to release my strength in normal quantities. At the very first try, I struck the tennis ball with the wood of the racket so violently that both ball and racket crumpled. Toning my blows down, I still had to learn control. Many a ball I knocked out of sight. My game steadied at last, soon to the point where Jack could not win a game. In fact, not even one volley.
He gave up, but one day grinningly contrived to have me play with a certain young friend with an inflated ego. Jack told me to give it all I had. I did. I won every service game on straight aces. I won opponent’s service games by bullet-like returns that he never touched. His ego, to Jack’s delight, was properly deflated.
Golf was next. It was a while before I could learn to strike the little ball at all. And longer to keep from driving it, when I did hit it, three greens b
eyond. But putting I never mastered. It takes a little more quiet, subtle control than I am capable of. I am good only for fast movement and blows of strength.
Horseback riding and swimming, of course, I could do nothing with, though Kay and Jack loved both. I don’t think horseback riding would be any sort of thrill to me at all, since I can outrun any horse. Swimming—yes, I am laughing, too, at the mere thought of a robot trying that.
One of my chief delights was driving. I had bought a speedy, powerful car and would sometimes drive it over a hundred miles an hour down wide highways. The feel of a powerful motor thrills me. I feel a vague kinship with it. It is perhaps the only psychological twist I have, away from the human. I think of every engine, motor, and power plant as a “brother,” less fortunately equipped than myself with an integrated center of control. But you can hardly understand. I will say no more.
I had a bad accident once, in my driving. My own driving, frankly, is faultless. I have instantaneous reflexes, perfect control, absolute timing. But other drivers are human. One car passed another just ahead of me, both coming my way. I jammed on my foot-brakes so forcefully that the connecting rods snapped. The emergency brake alone was inadequate. Our two cars would smash violently together head-on!
To save the other man, I twisted my wheel, careened off the road, turned turtle twice, and ended up against a tree. The impact was thunderous, shoving the engine off its block, and there was an explosion and fire all around. I had crashed through the windshield, and against the tree, in the middle of the burning wreck.
“Good God!” moaned the man who had caused this, running up after stopping at the roadside. “Good God—whoever was in that car is—”