by Eando Binder
Instantaneously, my hand opened to let the creature escape! Instantaneously. My brain had interpreted the sound for what it was. A long chain of memory-association had worked. Three days before, when I had first been brought to life, Dr. Link had stepped on Terry’s foot accidentally. The dog had squealed its pain. I had seen Dr. Link, at risk of losing his balance, instantly jerk up his foot. Terry had stopped squealing.
Terry squealed when my hand tightened. He would stop when it loosened. Memory-association. The thing psychologists call reflexive reaction. A sign of a living brain.
Dr. Link tells me he let out a cry of pure triumph. He knew at a stroke I had memory. He knew I was not a wanton monster. He knew I had a thinking organ, and a first-class one. Why? Because I had reacted instantaneously. You will realize what that means later.
I learned to walk in three hours.
Dr. Link was still taking somewhat of a chance, unbinding my chains. He had no assurance that I would not just blunder away like a witless machine. But he knew he had to teach me to walk before I could learn to talk. The same as he knew he must bring my brain alive, fully connected to the appendages and pseudo-organs it was later to use.
If he had simply disconnected my legs and arms for those first three days, my awakening brain would never have been able to use them when connected later. Do you think, if you were suddenly endowed with a third arm, that you could ever use it? Why does it take a cured paralytic so long to regain the use of his natural limbs? Mental blind spots in the brain. Dr. Link had all those strange psychological twists figured out.
Walk first. Talk and think next. That is the tried-and-true rule used among humans since the dawn of their species. Human babies learn best and most quickly that way. And I was a human baby in mind, if not body.
Dr. Link held his breath when I first tried to rise. I did, slowly, swaying on my metal legs. Up in my head, I had a three-directional spirit-level electrically contacting my brain. It told me automatically what was horizontal, vertical and oblique. My first tentative step, however, wasn’t a success. My knee-joints flexed in reverse order. I clattered to my knees, which fortunately were knobbed with thick protective plates so that the more delicate swiveling mechanisms behind weren’t harmed.
Dr. Link says I looked up at him like a startled child might. Then I promptly began walking along on my knees, finding this easy. Children would do this too, but it hurts them. I know no hurt.
After I had roved up and down the aisles of his workshop for an hour, chipping his furniture terribly, walking on my knees seemed completely natural. Dr. Link was in a quandary how to get me up to my full height. He tried grasping my arm and pulling me up, but my 500 pounds were too much for him.
My own rapidly increasing curiosity solved the problem. Like a child discovering the thrill of added height with stilts, my next attempt to rise to my full height pleased me. I tried staying up. I finally mastered the technique of alternate use of limbs and shift of weight forward.
In a couple of hours Dr. Link was leading me up and down the gravel walk around his laboratory. On my legs, it was quite easy for him to pull me along and thus guide me. Little Terry gamboled along at our heels, barking joyfully. The dog had accepted me as a friend.
I was by this time quite docile to Dr. Link’s guidance. My impressionable mind had quietly accepted him as a necessary rein and check. I did, he told me later, make tentative movements in odd directions off the path, motivated by vague stimuli, but his firm arm pulling me back served instantly to keep me in line. He paraded up and down with me as one might with an irresponsible oaf.
I would have kept on walking tirelessly for hours, but Dr. Link’s age quickly fatigued him and he led me inside. When he had safely gotten me seated in my metal chair, he clicked the switch on my chest that broke the electric current giving me life. And for the fourth time I knew that dreamless nonbeing which corresponded to my creator’s periods of sleep.
In three days I learned to talk reasonably well.
I give Dr. Link as much credit as myself. In those three days he pointed out the names of all objects in and around the laboratory. This fund of two hundred or so nouns he supplemented with as many verbs of action as he could demonstrate. Once heard and learned, a word never again was forgotten or obscured to me. Instantaneous comprehension. Photographic memory. Those things I had.
It is difficult to explain. Machinery is precise, unvarying. I am a machine. Electrons perform their tasks instantaneously. Electrons motivate my metallic brain.
Thus, with the intelligence of a child of five at the end of those three days, Dr. Link taught me to read. My photo-electric eyes instantly grasped the connection between speech and letter, as my mentor pointed them out. Thought-association filled in the gaps of understanding. I perceived without delay that the word “lion,” for instance, pronounced in its peculiar way, represented a live animal crudely pictured in the book. I have never seen a lion. But I would know one the instant I did.
From primers and first-readers I graduated in less than a week to adult books. Dr. Link laid out an extensive reading course for me in his large library. It included fiction as well as factual matter. Into my receptive, retentive brain began to be poured a fund of information and knowledge never before equalled in that short period of time.
There are other things to consider besides my “birth” and “education”. First of all, the housekeeper. She came in once a week to clean up the house for Dr. Link. He was a recluse, lived by himself, cooked for himself. Retired on an annuity from an invention years before.
The housekeeper had seen me in the process of construction in the past years, but only as an inanimate caricature of a human body. Dr. Link should have known better. When the first Saturday of my life came around, he forgot it was the day she came. He was absorbedly pointing out to me that “to run” meant to go faster than “to walk”.
“Demonstrate,” Dr. Link asked as I claimed understanding.
Obediently, I took a few slow steps before him. “Walking,” I said. Then I retreated a ways and lumbered forward again, running for a few steps. The stone floor clattered under my metallic feet.
“Was—that—right?” I asked in my rather stentorian voice.
At that moment a terrified shriek sounded from the doorway. The housekeeper had come up just in time to see me perform.
She screamed, making more noise than even I. “It’s the Devil himself! Fain, Dr. Link—run! Police—help . . .”
She fainted dead away. He revived her and talked soothingly to her, trying to explain what I was, but he had to get a new housekeeper. After this he contrived to remember when Saturday came and on that day kept me hidden in a storeroom reading books.
A trivial incident in itself, perhaps, but very significant, as you who read this will agree.
Two months after my awakening to life, Dr. Link one day spoke to me in a fashion other than as teacher to pupil; spoke to me as man to—man.
“You are the result of twenty years of effort,” he said, “and my success amazes even me. You are little short of being a human in mind. You are a monster, a creation, but you are basically human. You have no heredity. Your environment is molding you. You are the proof that mind is an electrical phenomenon, molded by environment. In human beings, their bodies—called heredity—are environment. But out of you I will make a mental wonder!”
His eyes seemed to burn with a strange fire, but this softened as he went on.
“I knew I had something unprecedented and vital twenty years ago when I perfected an iridium-sponge sensitive to the impact of a single electron. It was the sensitivity of thought! Mental currents in the human brain are of this micro-magnitude. I had the meahs now of duplicating mind-currents in an artificial medium. From that day to this I worked on the problem.
“It was not long ago that I completed your ‘brain’—an intricate complex of iridium-sponge cells. Before I brought it to life, I had your body built by skilled artisans. I wanted you to begin life equ
ipped to live as closely to the human way as possible. How eagerly I awaited your debut into the world!”
His eyes shone.
“You surpassed my expectations. You are not merely a thinking robot. A metal man. You are—life! A new kind of life. You can be trained to think, to reason, to perform. In the future, your kind can be of inestimable aid to man and his civilization. You are the first of your kind.”
CHAPTER 2
Frankenstein!
The days and weeks slipped by. My mind matured and gathered knowledge steadily from Dr. Link’s library. I was able, in time, to absorb a page of reading matter, as quickly as human eyes scan lines. You know of the television principle—a pencil of light moving hundreds of times a second over the object to be transmitted. My eyes, triggered with speedy electrons, could do the same. What I read was absorbed—memorized—instantly. From then on it was part of my knowledge.
Scientific subjects particularly claimed my attention. There was always something indefinable about human things, something I could not quite grasp, but in my science-compounded brain science digested easily. It was not long before I knew all about myself and why I “ticked” much more fully than most humans know why they live, think and move.
Mechanical principles became starkly simple to me. I made suggestions for improvements in my own make-up that Dr. Link readily agreed upon correcting. We added little universal in my fingers, for example, that made them almost as supple as their human models.
Almost, I say. The human body is a marvelously perfected organic machine. No robot will ever equal it in sheer efficiency and adaptability. I realized my limitations.
Perhaps you will realize what I mean when I say that my eyes cannot see all colors, just the three primary hues—red, yellow and blue. It would take an impossibly complex series of units, bigger than my whole body, to enable me to see all colors. Nature has packed all that in two globes the size of marbles, for her robots. She had a billion years to do it. Dr. Link only had twenty years.
But my brain, that was another matter. Equipped with only two senses of three-color sight and limited sound, it was yet capable of garnishing a full experience. Smell and taste are gastronomic senses. I do not need them. Feeling is a device of Nature’s to protect a fragile body. My body is not fragile.
Sight and sound are the only two cerebral senses. Einstein, color-blind, half-deaf, and with deadened senses of taste, smell and feeling, would still have been Einstein mentally.
Sleep is only a word to me. When Dr. Link knew he could trust me to take care of myself, he dispensed with the nightly habit of “turning me off”. While he slept, I spent the hours reading.
He taught me how to remove the depleted storage battery in the pelvic part of my metal frame when necessary to replace it with a fresh one. This had to be done every forty-eight hours. Electricity is my life and strength. It is my food. Without it I am metal junk.
An amusing thing happened one day, not long ago. Yes, I can be amused too. I cannot laugh, but my brain can appreciate the ridiculous. Dr. Link’s perennial gardener came to the place, unannounced. Searching for the doctor to ask how he wanted the hedges cut, the man came upon us in the back, walking side by side for Dr. Link’s daily light exercise.
The gardener’s mouth began speaking and then ludicrously gaped open and stayed that way as he caught a full glimpse of me. But he did not faint in fright as the housekeeper had. He stood there, paralyzed.
“What’s the matter, Charley?” queried Dr. Link sharply. He was so used to me that for the moment he had no idea why the gardener should be astonished.
“That—that thing!” gasped the man, finally.
“Oh. Well, it’s a robot,” said Dr. Link. “Haven’t you ever heard of them? An intelligent robot. Speak to him, he’ll answer.”
After some urging the gardener sheepishly turned to me. “H-how do you do, Mr. Robot,” he stammered.
“How do you do, Mr. Charley,” I returned promptly, seeing the amusement in Dr. Link’s face. “Nice weather, isn’t it?”
For a moment the man looked ready to shriek and run. But he squared his shoulders and curled his lip. “Trickery!” he scoffed. “That thing can’t be intelligent. You’ve got a phonograph inside of it. How about the hedges?”
“I’m afraid,” murmured Dr. Link with a chuckle, “that the robot is more intelligent than you, Charley!” But he said it so the man didn’t hear, and then directed him how to trim the hedges. Charley didn’t do a good job. He seemed to be nervous all day.
One day Dr. Link stared at me proudly.
“You have now,” he said, “the intellectual capacity of a man of many years. Soon I’ll announce you to the world. You shall take your place in our world, as an independent entity—as a citizen!”
“Yes, Dr. Link.” I returned. “Whatever you say. You are my creator—my master.”
“Don’t think of it that way,” he admonished. “In the same sense, you are my son. But a father is not a son’s master after his maturity. You have gained that status.” He frowned thoughtfully. “You must have a name! Adam! Adam Link!” He faced me and put a hand on my shiny chromium shoulder. “Adam Link, first citizen of the new robot race!”
Then he frowned again. “But making you a full-fledged, legalized citizen among humans won’t be easy, I’m afraid. People will fear you and hate you at first, perhaps. I will have to introduce you to the world gradually, and convince them you are entitled to all the rights and responsibilities of citizenship because of your humanlike mind. Then, and then only, can I make more intelligent robots.”
“More robots?” I was surprised. I had not thought of it before.
“Of course,” Dr. Link said matter-of-factly. “Ever since the machine age started, man has made better and better machines. I’ve simply made the best machine of all—with a mind. Intelligent robots can help civilization. But not as slaves, or pieces of property. For then one day the robots might revolt.”
“I see,” I said, admiring his penetrating glance into the future. “If we robots are honored citizens, alongside humans, we will then work wholeheartedly in cooperation.”
“Exactly,” Dr. Link continued, his eyes shining with a visionary light. “Think of robot police! And robot firemen, robot scientists, robot lawyers, and so on down the line. The ultimate machine, with human intelligence, boosting civilization to greater heights!”
He shook himself. “Slowly, slowly. Rome was not built in a day. First and foremost, before I can make my dream come true, we must gain our first goal, Adam Link. We must make you a citizen. It may be difficult.”
Difficult? Neither Dr. Link nor I could foresee, that day five years ago, what lay ahead.
“But we’ll do it,” Dr. Link said with a firm smile. “We’ll see the day when you are—Adam Link, United States Citizen! We’ll start on the matter tomorrow.”
The next day he was dead.
It was horribly brief. I was in the storeroom, reading—it was housekeeper’s day. I heard the noise. I ran up the steps into the laboratory. Dr. Link lay with his skull crushed. A loose angle-iron of a transformer, hanging on an insulated platform on the wall, had slipped and crashed down on his head while he sat there before his workbench. I raised his slumped head to examine the wound.
Death had been instantaneous.
Those were the facts. I turned the angle-iron back myself. Blood streaked my fingers when I raised his head, not knowing for the moment that he was surely dead.
But of course, I was taken for his murderer.
The housekeeper had also heard the noise and came from the house to investigate. She took one look. She saw me bending over the body, its head torn and bloody. She fled, too frightened to make a sound.
I am not sure what your emotion of sorrow is. Perhaps I cannot feel that deeply. But I do know that the sunlight seemed suddenly faded to me.
My thoughts are rapid. I stood there only a minute, but in that time I made up my mind to leave. This again was misinterpreted. I
t was considered an admission of guilt. The criminal escaping from the scene of his crime. I did not realize the web I was weaving around myself.
My abrupt departure was just a desire and determination to carry out Dr. Link’s plans for me. To go out in the world and find my place in it.
To become a citizen!
Dr. Link, and my life with him, was a closed book. No use now to stay and watch ceremonials. He had launched my life. He was gone. My place now must be somewhere out in a world I had never seen. No thought entered my mind of what you humans would decide about me. I thought all men were like Dr. Link, kind and wise.
I took a fresh battery, replacing my half-depleted one. I would need another in 48 hours, but I was sure this would be taken care of by anyone to whom I made the request.
I left. Terry followed me. He was with me all the time in the events that followed. I have heard a dog is man’s best friend. Even a metal man’s.
My conceptions of geography soon proved hazy. I had pictured earth as teeming with humans and cities, leaving not much space in between. I had estimated that the city Dr. Link had spoken of must be just over the hill from his secluded country home. Yet the woods I traversed seemed endless.
Night came. I had to stop and stay still in the dark. I leaned against a tree motionlessly. Terry curled at my feet and slept. The hours passed slowly. I do not “sleep”.
“Adam Link, American citizen!” I thought to myself, wondering when that day would come.
Then at dawn they appeared—the mob. Men armed with clubs, scythes and guns. They spied me and garbled shouts went up. “Dr. Link’s robot!—the monster!—killer!” Then something struck my frontal plate with a clang. A bullet.
“Stop—wait!” I shouted, bewildered. Why was I being hunted like a wild beast? I had taken a step forward, hand upraised. But they would not listen, or explain. More shots rang out, denting my metal body. I turned and ran. Bullets might harm me, in time, if they shattered my eyes or other delicate mechanisms. Terry followed me faithfully, barking back at them.