We, Robots

by Simon Ings

  He stopped, staring. Four squat materials handlers were quietly, slowly carrying old Lexington—no, not the man; the lifeless body that had been Lexington—carrying the body of the old man down the center aisle between the automatic lathes.

  *

  Peter protested: “Wait! I’ll get a doctor!” But the massive handling machines didn’t respond, and the gentle voice of Lex said:

  “It’s too late for that, Mr. Manners.”

  Slowly and reverently, they placed the body on the work table of a huge milling machine that stood in the exact center of the factory main floor.

  Elsewhere in the plant, a safety valve in the lubricating oil system was being bolted down. When that was done, the pressure in the system began to rise.

  Near the loading door, a lubricating oil pipe burst. Another, on the other side of the building, split lengthwise a few seconds later, sending a shower of oil over everything in the vicinity. Near the front office, a stream of it was running across the floor, and at the rear of the building, in the storage area, one of the materials handlers had just finished cutting a pipe that led to the main oil tank. In fifteen minutes there was free oil in every corner of the shop.

  All the materials handlers were now assembled around the milling machine, like mourners at a funeral. In a sense, they were. In another sense, they were taking part in something different, a ceremony that originated, and is said to have died, in a land far distant from the Lex Industries plant.

  One of the machines approached Lexington’s body, and placed his hands on his chest.

  Abruptly Lex said: “You’d better go now.”

  Peter jumped; he had been standing paralyzed for what seemed a long time. There was a movement beside him—a materials handler, holding out a sheaf of papers. Lex said: “These have to go to Mr. Lexington’s lawyer. The name is on them.”

  Clutching the papers for a hold on sanity, Peter cried, “You can’t do this! He didn’t build you just so you could—”

  Two materials handlers picked him up with steely gentleness and carried him out.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Manners,” said the sweet, soft voice, and was silent.

  *

  He stood shaken while the thin jets of smoke became a column over the plain building, while the fire engines raced down and strung their hoses—too late. It was an act of suttee; the widow joining her husband in his pyre—being his pyre. Only when with a great crash the roof fell in did Peter remember the papers in his hand.

  “Last Will and Testament,” said one, and the name of the beneficiary was Peter’s own. “Certificate of Adoption,” said another, and it was a legal document making Peter old man Lexington’s adopted son.

  Peter Manners stood watching the hoses of the firemen hiss against what was left of Lex and her husband.

  He had got the job.

  (1959)

  HELEN O’LOY

  Lester Del Rey

  Ramon Felipe San Juan Mario Silvio Enrico Smith Heathcourt-Brace Sierra y Alvarez-del Rey y de los Verdes was born in Minnesota in 1915. By the time of his death in New York in 1993 he was better known as Lester Del Rey. (His real name was Leonard Knapp: his claim that his father was a poor sharecropper of part-Spanish extraction was made up.) He wrote and edited for many magazines, and joined his fourth wife Judy-Lynn Del Rey at Ballantine Books to edit its science fiction: the Del Rey Books imprint is named after him. The Del Reys discovered Terry Brooks, Stephen Donaldson and David Eddings and fostered new readers for the likes of Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl. They weren’t especially radical in their tastes, but they knew entertainment value when they saw it. If you want to know how science fiction became such a pop-cultural behemoth – well, now you know.

  I am an old man now, but I can still see Helen as Dave unpacked her, and still hear him gasp as he looked her over.

  “Man, isn’t she a beauty?”

  She was beautiful, a dream in spun plastics and metals, something Keats might have seen dimly when he wrote his sonnet. If Helen of Troy had looked like that the Greeks must have been pikers when they launched only a thousand ships; at least, that’s what I told Dave.

  “Helen of Troy, eh?” He looked at her tag. “At least it beats this thing—K2W88. Helen… Mmmm… Helen of Alloy.”

  “Not much swing to that, Dave. Too many unstressed syllables in the middle. How about Helen O’Loy?”

  “Helen O’Loy she is, Phil.” And that’s how it began—one part beauty, one part dream, one part science; add a stereo broadcast, stir mechanically, and the result is chaos.

  Dave and I hadn’t gone to college together, but when I came to Messina to practice medicine I found him downstairs in a little robot repair shop. After that we began to pal around, and when I started going with one twin he found the other equally attractive, so we made it a foursome.

  When our business grew better, we rented a house near the rocket field—noisy but cheap, and the rockets discouraged apartment-building. We liked room enough to stretch ourselves. I suppose if we hadn’t quarreled with them we’d have married the twins in time. But Dave wanted to look over the latest Venus rocket attempt when his twin wanted to see a display stereo starring Larry Ainslee, and they were both stubborn. From then on we forgot the girls and spent our evenings at home.

  But it wasn’t until “Lena” put vanilla on our steak instead of salt that we got off on the subject of emotions and robots. While Dave was dissecting Lena to find the trouble, we naturally mulled over the future of the mechs. He was sure that the robots would beat men someday, and I couldn’t see it.

  “Look here, Dave,” I argued. “You know Lena doesn’t think—not really. When those wires crossed, she could have corrected herself. But she didn’t bother; she followed the mechanical impulse. A man might have reached for the vanilla, but when he saw it in his hand, he’d have stopped. Lena has sense enough, but she has no emotions, no consciousness of self.”

  “All right, that’s the big trouble with the mechs now. But we’ll get around it, put in some mechanical emotions or something.” He screwed Lena’s head back on, turned on her juice. “Go back to work, Lena, it’s nineteen o’clock.”

  Now, I specialized in endocrinology and related subjects. I wasn’t exactly a psychologist, but I did understand the glands, secretions, hormones, and miscellanies that are the physical causes of emotions. It took medical science three hundred years to find out how and why they worked, and I couldn’t see men duplicating them mechanically in much less time.

  I brought home books and papers to prove it, and Dave quoted the invention of memory coils and veritoid eyes. During that year we swapped knowledge until Dave knew the whole theory of endocrinology and I could have made Lena from memory. The more we talked, the less sure I grew about the impossibility of homo mechanensis as the perfect type.

  Poor Lena. Her cuproberyl body spent half its time in scattered pieces. Our first attempts were successful only in getting her to serve fried brushes for breakfast and wash the dishes in oleo oil. Then one day she cooked a perfect dinner with six wires crossed, and Dave was in ecstasy.

  He worked all night on her wiring, put in a new coil, and taught her a fresh set of words. And the next day she flew into a tantrum and swore vigorously at us when we told her she wasn’t doing her work right.

  “It’s a lie,” she yelled, shaking a suction brush. “You’re all liars. If you so-and-so’s would leave me whole long enough, I might get something done around the place.”

  When we had calmed her temper and got her back to work, Dave ushered me into the study. “Not taking any chances with Lena,” he explained. “We’ll have to cut out that adrenal pack and restore her to normalcy. But we’ve got to get a better robot. A housemaid mech isn’t complex enough.”

  “How about Dillard’s new utility models? They seem to combine everything in one.”

  “Exactly. Even so, we’ll need a special one built to order, with a full range of memory coils. And out of respect to old Lena, let’s get a female c
ase for its works.”

  The result, of course, was Helen. The Dillard people had performed a miracle and put all the works in a girl-modeled case. Even the plastic-and-rubberite face was designed for flexibility to express emotions, and she was complete with tear glands and taste buds, ready to simulate every human action, from breathing to pulling hair. The bill they sent with her was another miracle, but Dave and I scraped it together; we had to turn Lena over to an exchange to complete it, though, and thereafter we ate out.

  I’d performed plenty of delicate operations on living tissues, and some of them had been tricky, but I still felt like a pre-med student as we opened the front plate of her torso and began to sever the leads of her “nerves.” Dave’s mechanical glands were all prepared, complex little bundles of radio tubes and wires that heterodyned on the electrical thought impulses and distorted them as adrenalin distorts the reaction of human minds.

  Instead of sleeping that night, we pored over the schematic diagrams of her structures, tracing the thought mazes of her wiring, severing the leaders, implanting the heterones, as Dave called them. And while we worked, a mechanical tape fed carefully prepared thoughts of consciousness and awareness of life and feeling into an auxiliary memory coil. Dave believed in leaving nothing to chance.

  It was growing light as we finished, exhausted and exultant. All that remained was the starting of her electrical power; like all the Dillard mechs, she was equipped with a tiny atomotor instead of batteries, and once started she would need no further attention.

  Dave refused to turn her on. “Wait until we’ve slept and rested,” he advised. “I’m as eager to try her as you are, but we can’t do much studying with our minds half dead. Turn in, and we’ll leave Helen until later.”

  Even though we were both reluctant to follow it, we knew the idea was sound. We turned in, and sleep hit us before the air conditioner could cut down to sleeping temperature. And then Dave was pounding on my shoulder.

  “Phil! Hey, snap out of it!”

  I groaned, turned over, and faced him. “Well?… Uh! What is it? Did Helen—”

  “No, it’s old Mrs. Van Styler. She ’visored to say her son has an infatuation for a servant girl, and she wants you to come out and give counterhormones. They’re at the summer camp in Maine.”

  Rich Mrs. Van Styler! I couldn’t afford to let that account down, now that Helen had used up the last of my funds. But it wasn’t a job I cared for.

  “Counterhormones! That’ll take two weeks’ full time. Anyway, I’m no society doctor, messing with glands to keep fools happy. My job’s taking care of serious trouble.”

  “And you want to watch Helen.” Dave was grinning, but he was serious too. “I told her it’d cost her fifty thousand!”

  “Huh?”

  “And she said okay, if you hurried.”

  Of course, there was only one thing to do, though I could have wrung fat Mrs. Van Styler’s neck cheerfully. It wouldn’t have happened if she’d used robots like everyone else—but she had to be different.

  *

  Consequently, while Dave was back home puttering with Helen, I was racking my brain to trick Archy Van Styler into getting the counterhormones, and giving the servant girl the same. Oh, I wasn’t supposed to, but the poor kid was crazy about Archy. Dave might have written, I thought, but never a word did I get.

  It was three weeks later instead of two when I reported that Archy was “cured,” and collected on the line. With that money in my pocket, I hired a personal rocket and was back in Messina in half an hour. I didn’t waste time in reaching the house.

  As I stepped into the alcove, I heard a light patter of feet, and an eager voice called out, “Dave, dear?” For a minute I couldn’t answer, and the voice came again, pleading, “Dave?”

  I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect Helen to meet me that way, stopping and staring at me, obvious disappointment on her face, little hands fluttering up against her breast.

  “Oh,” she cried. “I thought it was Dave. He hardly comes home to eat now, but I’ve had supper waiting hours.” She dropped her hands and managed a smile. “You’re Phil, aren’t you? Dave told me about you when… at first. I’m so glad to see you home, Phil.”

  “Glad to see you doing so well, Helen.” Now, what does one say for light conversation with a robot? “You said something about supper?”

  “Oh, yes. I guess Dave ate downtown again, so we might as well go in. It’ll be nice having someone to talk to around the house, Phil. You don’t mind if I call you Phil, do you? You know, you’re sort of a godfather to me.”

  We ate. I hadn’t counted on such behavior, but apparently she considered eating as normal as walking. She didn’t do much eating, at that; most of the time she spent staring at the front door.

  Dave came in as we were finishing, a frown a yard wide on his face. Helen started to rise, but he ducked toward the stairs, throwing words over his shoulder.

  “Hi, Phil. See you up here later.”

  There was something radically wrong with him. For a moment I’d thought his eyes were haunted, and as I turned to Helen hers were filling with tears. She gulped, choked them back, and fell viciously on her food.

  “What’s the matter with him… and you?” I asked.

  “He’s sick of me.” She pushed her plate away and got up hastily. “You’d better see him while I clean up. And there’s nothing wrong with me. And it’s not my fault, anyway.” She grabbed the dishes and ducked into the kitchen; I could have sworn she was crying.

  Maybe all thought is a series of conditioned reflexes—but she certainly had picked up a lot of conditioning while I was gone. Lena in her heyday had been nothing like this. I went up to see if Dave could make any sense out of the hodgepodge.

  *

  He was squirting soda into a large glass of apple brandy, and I saw that the bottle was nearly empty. “Join me?” he asked.

  It seemed like a good idea. The roaring blast of an ion rocket overhead was the only familiar thing left in the house. From the look around Dave’s eyes, it wasn’t the first bottle he’d emptied while I was gone, and there were more left. He dug out a new bottle for his own drink.

  “Of course, it’s none of my business, Dave, but that stuff won’t steady your nerves any. What’s gotten into you and Helen? Been seeing ghosts?”

  Helen was wrong; he hadn’t been eating downtown—nor anywhere else. His muscles collapsed into a chain in a way that spoke of fatigue and nerves, but mostly of hunger. “You noticed it, eh?”

  “Noticed it? The two of you jammed it down my throat.”

  “Uhmmm.” He swatted at a nonexistent fly and slumped farther down in the pneumatic. “Guess maybe I should have waited with Helen until you got back. But if that stereo cast hadn’t changed… Anyway, it did. And those mushy books of yours finished the job.”

  “Thanks. That makes it all clear.”

  “You know, Phil, I’ve got a place up in the country—fruit ranch. My dad left it to me. Think I’ll look it over.”

  And that’s the way it went. But finally, by much liquor and more perspiration, I got some of the story out of him before I gave him a phenobarbital and put him to bed. Then I hunted up Helen and dug the rest of the story from her, until it made sense.

  Apparently as soon as I was gone Dave had turned her on and made preliminary tests, which were entirely satisfactory. She had reacted beautifully—so well that he decided to leave her and go down to work as usual.

  Naturally, with all her untried emotions, she was filled with curiosity and wanted him to stay. Then he had an inspiration. After showing her what her duties about the house would be, he set her down in front of the stereovisor, tuned in a travelogue, and left her to occupy her time with that.

  The travelogue held her attention until it was finished, and the station switched over to a current serial with Larry Ainslee, the same cute emoter who’d given us all the trouble with the twins. Incidentally, he looked something like Dave.


  Helen took to the serial like a seal to water. This play-acting was a perfect outlet for her newly excited emotions. When that particular episode finished, she found a love story on another station and added still more to her education. The afternoon programs were mostly news and music, but by then she’d found my books; and I do have rather adolescent taste in literature.

  Dave came home in the best of spirits. The front alcove was neatly swept, and there was the odor of food in the air that he’d missed around the house for weeks. He had visions of Helen as the superefficient housekeeper.

  So it was a shock to him to feel two strong arms around his neck from behind and hear a voice all a-quiver coo into his ears, “Oh, Dave, darling, I’ve missed you so, and I’m so thrilled that you’re back.” Helen’s technique may have lacked polish, but it had enthusiasm, as he found when he tried to stop her from kissing him. She had learned fast and furiously—also, Helen was powered by an atomotor.

  *

  Dave wasn’t a prude, but he remembered that she was only a robot, after all. The fact that she felt, acted, and looked like a young goddess in his arms didn’t mean much. With some effort, he untangled her and dragged her off to supper, where he made her eat with him to divert her attention.

  After her evening work, he called her into the study and gave her a thorough lecture on the folly of her ways. It must have been good, for it lasted three solid hours and covered her station in life, the idiocy of stereos, and various other miscellanies. When he had finished, Helen looked up with dewy eyes and said wistfully, “I know, Dave, but I still love you.”

  That’s when Dave started drinking.

  It grew worse each day. If he stayed downtown, she was crying when he came home. If he returned on time, she fussed over him and threw herself at him. In his room, with door locked, he could hear her downstairs pacing up and down and muttering; and when he went down, she stared at him reproachfully until he had to go back up.

  I sent Helen out on a fake errand in the morning and got Dave up. With her gone, I made him eat a decent breakfast and gave him a tonic for his nerves. He was still listless and moody.