by Eando Binder
“Adam Link!” he greeted me, stepping off the train. It was all he could say for the moment. I couldn’t say anything.
After aiding our slum project, Tom one day said, “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 more often. 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.
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, it seemed.
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—”
He couldn’t finish. He meant to say: “crushed to pulp and burned to a cinder.”
At that moment I stepped out, a little sooty and with a wide dent in my front plate, but otherwise unharmed. The man looked once, shock in his face, and fled. But I later received a letter from him, after he had realized who I was, offering to pay for my car. I thanked him, refusing to accept. He had in the first place had the good grace to stop after the accident.
I unwittingly caused another car to run off the road once, though no one was hurt. The driver glanced casually at me while I was passing. Startled and unnerved at seeing an unhuman creature driving, he lost control. After that, I rode with curtains on the side windows, and confined my sightseeing to the front windshield.
I see that I have been digressing again. I know why I am doing it. It is because I am almost afraid to finish what I started to write. But I must get to it, or this account will ramble evasively without end.
I must get back to Kay Temple and Jack Hall.
Not very long ago, we three, as usual, went out together, to a movie. I forget the movie. I forget everything except that for the first time, Jack seemed annoyed at my presence. I had seen his hand, in the dark theatre, steal toward Kay’s, grasp it. She glanced quickly at me, then at Jack, slightly shaking her head, and withdrawing her hand. It was my presence that prompted her, not wishing to isolate me from a three-way companionship. Kay Temple is that thoroughbred sort. She wouldn’t hurt the feelings of anyone—even a metal man’s.
That night I spoke to Jack, We had dropped Kay off at her place. Jack and I, I might mention, had had rooms together all this time. He had insisted on it.
“Jack,” I began, and for once my words came haltingly. I didn’t know how much to intrude on his privacy. “About you and Kay—”
It was as though I had touched off a fuse.
“Never mind about that!” Jack snapped back explosively. “Keep your damned tin nose out of—”
And then he changed, just as quickly. “Forgive me, Adam, old boy,” he apologized. “My nerves. Overwork, I guess.”
I watched him while he sat at the edge of his bed, dangling a sock in his hand. He was miserable. Suddenly he looked up.
“Adam, you’re my friend. Why should I hide it from you? I love Kay. I met her in a restaurant. Waitress. I set my cap for her, day after day. At last I got a date. I thought—well, never mind, but first thing I knew—bang! My swelled head changed to a swelled heart. That was over a year ago. I heard her story, admired her all the more, wanted to help her. She refused, of course, though I wouldn’t have taken advantage.”
The words rushed out now, welling from within, and it hardly seemed the same debonair, cheerful, semi-cynical Jack I had known.
“I kept seeing her. I wanted to marry her. I proposed. She told me to wait, till we were both sure. And that’s what has kept me on edge, Adam. I think she cares for me, but I’m not sure. I’m just not sure. That’s the way it is right now, with me still waiting—and wondering. She, holding off for some reason. It’s not another man. She would tell me instantly if it were that.”
He was looking at me, then, with a half-smile.
“But I guess you don’t understand things like that, Adam. You don’t know how lucky you are, old boy, not to know the pangs of love and all that goes with it. At least when it turns out wrong. Damn, I wish I was a robot.”
He said such things disarmingly, without offense. But still he stirred a vague unrest in me. I had known most of the human emotions—anger, fear, dismay, sorrow, quiet joys. But what about this mighty, mysterious thing called “love”? Love, more than anything, as I knew technically, was tied with strong bonds to the biological body. I had no biological body. Therefore I could never know love. Man I might be in all things save that. In that I was neuter. It was a world barred from me.
I tried to grasp how Jack must feel. Just what sort of emotional pain did he feel? But I couldn’t know. I could only judge, from the smoldering ache deep in his eyes, that he was suffering in some strange, sweet-sad way.
Jack laughed suddenly, still looking at me.
“Say, Adam, you’d have it easy. Just make another robot, give it the feminine viewpoint, and she’d have to take you, with no other choice.”
He laughed a little wildly, and slipped into bed.
I went to my room where, as usual, I prepared to spend the night reading. For a few minutes, I heard smothered chucklings from behind Jack’s closed door. I felt glad that his sense of humor had rescued him from his downcast mood. But somehow, what he had said wasn’t at all humorous for me. I did less reading that night than thinking—wondering . . .
A few days later, it happened.
We had enlarged our offices, and Kay now had a separate office in which to work. We also had a boy for the filing. I had just taken care of one client, that day, sending him to Kay for a bill, and was interviewing another.
“Here are the data, Mr. Link,” said this man, technology manager of a food-products cannery. “Is there any way we can speed up our photo-electric process, which spots and takes out bad peas? We want faster production. The photo-electric people say it can’t be done. But I thought perhaps you—”
I looked at the pages of data, diagrams, complete mechanical outlay of automatic devices. I absorbed it all within ten j minutes. I took a scratch pad and scrawled figures for another five minutes. I wrote a final formula on a separate sheet and handed it to him.
“Here it is,” I said. “You can increase the rate 25 per cent by using a piezo-electric crystal in the secondary transformer circuit.”
The man was amazed. The solution I had given clicked in his trained mind. “By God, that’s it!” He looked at me wonderingly. “You’ve given me in fifteen minutes, by proxy, what might have taken months of experiment and research. Adam Link—”
I cut off his enthusiastic eulogies. I had had so much of it from others. Besides, for the past eleven minutes, only half my mind had been on that problem. The other half had been on what I faintly heard going on in Kay’s office.
The previous client was still there, though he must have his bill by now. Like many another man, he had
lingered, attracted by Kay’s loveliness. I barely made out some words of his. He was pressing her for a date which she had politely and patiently refused six times already.
I urged my own visitor out, told my office boy to keep the door to the outer waiting room closed for the time being, and stepped into Kay’s office.
The man, a big broad-shouldered, money executive, was leaning over her desk. He was handsome, and had probably succeeded with many a girl by refusing to be rebuffed at the first try.
“Now look here, gorgeous,” he was saying, in a halfwheedling, half-arrogant way, “you don’t know who you’re turning down—”
“I think she does,” I said moving close. “And she could turn down a dozen like you without any loss. May I ask you to leave—immediately?”
He left—immediately—for the simple reason that my hand on his shoulder was propelling him out of the door. I gave him an extra squeeze at the last, cutting off his shouted threats to sue me for assault.
I went back to Kay. “I’m sorry you were annoyed,” I said. “I should have come sooner.” Then, to lighten the moment, I added, “I really can’t blame the man, though, with a girl like you—”
“Adam!”
She just said the one word, staring at me in a strange way. It was the way she had been staring at me, watching me, surreptitiously, for long months. But now her gaze was open, revealed. And I was suddenly frightened at what I saw in her eyes. I strode out.
But Kay followed me to my desk.
“Adam,” she said, “I must tell you. I—”
I have no lungs or human-like throat with which to cough. But at times, a slight static charge issues from my interior, very much like a cough. I conjured one up now, with a swift mental order to my electrical distributor. It interrupted her.
“Kay,” I returned rapidly. “You’re a bit upset, I think. Don’t you want to take the afternoon off?”
“No, I want to talk to you. I must.”
“Then, remember,” I returned rather gruffly, “that I’m a robot. A metal being, not a man of flesh and blood.” I looked at her for a moment. “Kay, let’s talk about Jack. He’s a fine young man, Kay. He has character. He—”
This time she interrupted me.
“So do you have character, Adam. I described you once—big and strong, grave boyish face, and gentle, tender-hearted. Yes, you have more heart than many men I’ve known. It is a person’s mind that counts, not his physical body. Your mind, Adam, is that of a great man, and a good man. I love you.”
She said it quite naturally, quite calmly. She wasn’t hysterical, or wrought-up. She was in perfect command of herself. Her eyes were steady, but there was also a glow in them. A glow that seemed like a blinding light to me, and I had to turn my eyes away.
“Kay, this is sheer nonsense—”
“No.” Her voice was clear, soft. She came close to me, placed a hand on my shiny chromium shoulder. “No, Adam. That’s the way it is. I feel more strongly for you than for any man I’ve ever met, even poor Jack—”
What mad, incredible scene was this? I was confused, stunned, though I had been vaguely prepared. My mirrored eyes turned back to Kay Temple, drank in her beauty.
For the first time, I hated my mechanical body. I longed to take Kay in arms of flesh and blood and know the secret joys of human love. I hated my metal body now, despite all its strength and power, and lack of sickness, weariness and the other human ailments. I was only living half a life. I could only stand at the portal of greater things and glance within, never to enter. I could, in time, have the greatest minds of earth look up to me, fawn on me as a giant of intellect. But I could never have a woman, not the poorest and meanest, look on me with eyes of love—
And yet, what about Kay Temple?
My mind staggered. This was madness. I arose, shaking off her hand, and stood at the window, with my back to her. I was actually afraid my metal face would show emotions I felt.
“Jack is waiting for you, Kay.”
I said it expressionlessly. I meant it for a rebuff. Almost as a gentle insult, scorning what she had revealed, not even thanking her.
She seemed not to take it that way. “I cared for Jack, still do. I might have married him, but for you.” Her voice was still clear, rational.
Poor Jack! It was I, then, who unwittingly stood between him and his happiness. He had saved me from extinction. And now I, in return, stood on his heart with two feet of cold metal.
What could I say? What could I do? And then it was so ridiculously simple that I laughed within myself. Almost, I had forgotten that I was a robot, not a man.
“But Kay,” I said, “granting all that you have said, what more is there to say or do? I am still a creation of wheels and wires, not the boyish-faced human you picture me as. I’m still metal, not flesh.”
Again I felt her hand on my shoulder, a sixth sense serving in place of feeling, for I have no sense of touch.
“Adam,” she whispered in my ear, “it is only the mind that counts, not the body. I want to be with you always. I want to—”
“Kay,” I said slowly, “Kay, I’ve got to go now. I’ve an appointment—” The lie was absurd and I knew that she knew it. Kay made all my appointments for me. She had looked after me like a mother or—the thought swept me shockingly—like a sweetheart.
But I turned and left. Left her sitting there looking after me with her hands folded limply on the desk. I knew without having to turn that she watched me leave, and there were tears in her eyes. They were tears that I should have been able to shed instead.
Then I got into my car and drove out to the quiet of the country, where I could think. For once even the metal-meshed gears of Adam Link, Robot, felt the necessity of solitude . . .
Hours passed in blurred thought. My mind was in turmoil. There were some things that I realized were as inevitable for me as death is to humans. I knew what I must do. There on the dark teakwood table of my sitting room lay two letters which would go before I did.
The first letter—
Dear Jack: Perhaps Kay is near you as you read this letter. Wherever she is, go to her immediately, take her to City Hall. Marry her! Do that if you have to gag and bind her. Deep down in her heart there can be no other man for her but you. And to both of you, my deepest . . . love.
The other letter went into my diary, together with my written account, locked in vaults that were not to be opened for a year after my “death or destruction”. It read:
These may be the last recorded thoughts of Adam Link.
I am going away to a place that I have owned secretly for some time, a place that I have never mentioned and will not now. I may return, but whether in a year or twenty I cannot say. To that end I have arranged for all the supplies necessary to my existence to be brought by circumspect methods, to what will be my hermitage until I know better what I must do.
I know at last my full capabilities—and my weaknesses. The capacity for emotion, rooted in me by my creator, has again betrayed me, and this time with me it has added another victim. Unless I can return to life among humans without running the dangers of hurting them, perhaps it is best for me never to return.
But I don’t know. I don’t know. There is so much good that I can do. The harm must never happen again. I must never tell another half-truth like the one in which I told Jack that there can never be another man for Kay but him. Not a man. . .
I am going away then, and I will not come back until Adam Link, the Robot, the machine—is truly a machine again.
CHAPTER 8
Metal Mate
I was away for a week. I had fled to my secret retreat in the Ozark Mountains—fled from Ray. It was a small cabin, a study and laboratory that I had built for myself, for moments of solitude and thought, when the world of men weighed heavily upon me. Jack and Kay did not know of this place.
I had to think—think.
But my thoughts all led to the same conclusion—a conclusion forced on me by Kay. She had made it c
lear that a robot mind, knowing of but lacking the capacity for human love, must live only in a bitter loneliness. Think of yourself as the only human being on Mars, among utterly alien beings. Beings with intelligent minds but strange bodies and strange customs. You would know true loneliness.
And loneliness closed in on me, relentlessly.
My solitude was broken one day by a visitor. “I’m Dr. Paul Hillory,” he introduced himself. He was a small wizened man of middle-age, bald as an egg. He had a certain sly look in his eyes that I took for either humor or a cynical outlook. But I didn’t care. I hardly knew he was there as he continued.
“I’m a scientist, retired. I have a small summer cabin a mile away. I saw you drive up here like a demon a week ago. Of course I’ve heard of you, Adam Link. All about your trial and business venture. It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir. An intelligent robot!”
Most people had known fear or even panic at meeting me. Dr. Hillory was too intelligent to be frightened. He was instead excited and eager. Suddenly he noticed my dejected pose.
“You seem sad somehow,” he said, “what’s the trouble?”
I told him the story in low defeated tones.
Then, without another word, I stalked from the cabin. I strode along the path through the trees that sheltered the place from prying eyes. Beyond was a clearing of a hundred feet. It ended abruptly in a cliff, which dropped five hundred feet to hard rocks. I would find my death down there. I had decided on that.
Dr. Hillory had followed me. When he divined my purpose, he cried in protest and tugged at my arm. He might as well have tried to hold back a tractor. I didn’t know he was there. He grasped my middle—and was dragged along like a sack of feathers.
The cliff edge was now fifty feet away. I would keep right on walking. Suddenly he was running in front of me, pushing at me and talking.
“You can’t do this, Adam Link!” he screeched. “You have the secret of the metal-brain. It must not go with you. Robots can be useful—”
He was talking to the wind. The cliff was twenty feet away.