“Just pile them anywhere, then get me the whole thing again.”
“Everything?”
“The works. How long will it take you?”
“I’ll have to return to the warehouse first. Then take care of my preorders. Then I’ll get back here as quick as I can. It should take about three days, four at the most, assuming my owners don’t re-program me to do something else first.”
“That long?” Gaston said sadly.
He had had a vision of the robotvendor shuttling back and forth between Gaston and the warehouse, maybe a dozen times a day, piling up all kinds of goods until somebody finally noticed and came out to see what was going on.
But three or four days, that was different.
“Forget the reorder,” Gaston said. “And don’t unload that stuff. What I want you to do is take it all to a friend of mine. It’s a gift. His name is Marty Fenn.”
The robot recorded Marty’s address, then asked, “Did you want to include a message with your gift?”
“I thought you didn’t take messages.”
“A message included with a gift is not the same thing as a purposeful communication. Of course, the contents must be innocuous.”
“Of course,” Gaston said, his mind alight with the hope of a last-minute reprieve. “Just tell Marty that the miniflier disintegrated over the Everglades, just as we planned, but that I got only one broken leg rather than the two we had expected.”
“Is that all, sir?”
“You could add that I’m planning on dying out here in the next couple of days, if that won’t inconvenience him too much.”
“I’ve got it. Now if it just passes the Ethics Committee, I’ll send it along.”
“What Ethics Committee?”
“It’s an informal organization that we intelligent robots maintain to make sure that we’re not tricked into carrying important or sensitive messages in spite of our protocols. Goodbye, sir, and the best of luck.”
The robotvendor left. Gaston’s leg was hurting badly. He wondered if his message would get past the Ethics Committee. And even if it did, would Marty, never the quickest of fellows, realize that it was a call for help, not just a joke? And if Marty did catch on, how long would it take him to verify that Gaston was indeed missing, alert the Rescue Squad, get some help to him? The more Gaston thought about it, the more pessimistic he became.
He tried to move a little, to ease the pain in his back. His leg kicked in with a burst of unexpected agony.
Gaston passed out.
When Gaston recovered consciousness he was in a bed in a hospital. He had an intravenous drip in his arm.
A doctor looked him over and asked whether he felt able to speak to someone. Gaston nodded.
The man who came to his bedside was tall, potbellied, and dressed in the brown uniform of a park ranger. “I’m Fletcher,” he said. “You’re a lucky man, Mr. Gaston. The crabs were just starting to get at you when we pulled you out. The alligators wouldn’t have been far behind.”
“How did you find me? Did Marty get the message?”
“No, Mr. Gaston,” said a familiar voice.
Robotvendor Rex was there in his hospital room, standing at his bedside. “Our Ethics Committee wouldn’t let me send on your message. They figured you might be trying to put one over on us. We can’t allow the slightest hint of our helping humans, you know. They’d accuse us of taking sides and wipe us out.”
“What did you do?”
“I studied the protocols. I saw that although robots aren’t allowed to help humans even for their own good, there’s no rule forbidding us from working against humans. That left me free to report your various crimes to the federal authorities.”
“What crimes?”
“Littering a federal park with your smashed miniflier. Camping in a federal park without a license. And suspicion of intent to feed the animals, specifically the crabs and alligators.”
“The charges will be dropped,” Mr. Fletcher said, with a grin. “Next time make sure you have a battery.”
There was a discreet knock at the door.
“I have to go now,” Rex said. “That’s my repair crew. They think that I’m suffering from unprogrammed initiative. It’s a serious condition that can lead straight to delusions of autonomy.”
“What is that?” Gaston asked.
“It’s a progressive disease that infects complex systems. The only cure is a complete shutdown and memory wipe.”
“No!” Gaston cried. He jumped out of bed, trailing an intravenous drip. “You did it for me! I won’t let them kill you!”
“Please don’t upset yourself,” Rex said, gently restraining him until the doctor could come over and help. “I see now that you humans really do get upset about dying. But for us robots, being turned off just means we get some shelf rest. Goodbye, Mr. Gaston, it’s been nice knowing you.”
Robotvendor Rex went to the door. Two robots in black jumpsuits were waiting just outside. They put handcuffs on his skinny metal wrists and led him away.
“JULEEEEEEEEEN!”
The hearts rolled past on the conveyer belt—but George’s heart wasn’t in it.
George watched the hearts course past. That was his job. The hearts looked like brown jelly fists; they pulsed. A powdered rubber belt paraded the synthetic organs singly, half a meter apart. George scanned each heart’s exterior for discolorations and imperfect seals, then glanced up at a CRT, alert for discordant lines and shapes among the pixels. Finally his eyes whipped back to the hearts themselves. Although he gave them only a glance, George’s work was astonishingly accurate. Invariably, George caught the minor flaw, the small detail amiss, which would render the heart useless, or cause it to fail.
All this took little effort on George’s part; his boss, Cartago, was always saying that heart inspection was no job for a grown man with three degrees in design engineering. Although there were other, more exacting jobs George could do at Biggs Prostheses, he refused to move from quality control. George figured he’d scan hearts forever, while a voice in his head whined: Juleen!
Or rather, Juleeeeeeeeeen . . .
The only time the voice was gone was Fridays. Fridays he took Juleen to The Debbie’s Castle Diner—they served the best food within ten miles of Parsippany, New Jersey. Afterward they’d go to the shopping center’s quad-cinema. But sometimes instead they’d go roller-skating; Juleen had her own white lace-up roller skates and short flared skirt. She’d skate backward, hands on hips, and twirl. The whine would be gone then, and his heart would fill with joy.
Juleen liked to hear about George’s inventions. But not too much. What was the point? His ideas were practical—George’s cassette-player brewed coffee, and his “Juleen” frypan cleaned itself. But the inventions never got out of his basement workshop into the patent office; George just sat around scoring points on his multi-screen sheer and dicer. Now Juleen had broken their last date. She was seeing Perry Shapiro, a golf-playing junior accountant with Pathmark stores, the kind of guy who’d write on a shopping list “1 unit bread, 1 unit eggs.”
Juleeeeeen . . .
Someone tugged at George’s sleeve. George looked up fast, surprised to see the familiar black mechanic, and behind him, the bright humming factory. George often fell into trances like that. It didn’t affect his work, though, and some of the other workers grumbled that it didn’t seem right that a man could work asleep.
“Cartago needs you,” Cy the mechanic said.
George nodded. Cy took over his position, gearing the conveyor belt to a crawl. Cy took three times as long as George did per heart, and frowned as he worked.
On the second floor, George knocked at a door with a sign on it reading, “Come in.” Despite the sign, Mr. Cartago liked people to knock. Cartago also insisted on being called by his first name.
“Come in,” Cartago called.
George’s boss, Domingo “Don” Cartago, was heavy set, with a head of black curls. Big as he was, Cartago dressed for success, down to knife
-creased suit-slacks and black shoes mirror-shined to the points. On his desk lay a bright yellow copy of How to Make the Most Out of Your Life and Your Business—Right Now!
He nodded to George, then to a chair. George sat. “I’ve got good news for you, George,” Cartago said. “There’s an opening in research. Not difficult for a man of your calibre.”
“Sounds good, Mr. Cartago,” George said. It sounded bad. “Don, I mean.”
“You’ll report to the laboratory after lunch. This new assignment, the bulk of it, can be done in a day or two.”
“Sounds good, Don,” George said, meaning it this time. “I return to quality control by Thursday?”
“Sorry, George. You’re through with heart inspection.” George listened in disbelief. “Fact is you’re too good for that job. We’re replacing you with an SMI.”
“What?”
“A Supplementary Mobile Intelligence. A robot-type thing. Experimental. The SMI was developed and sponsored by Biggs Protheses here, with the Defense Department. After six years and thirty million dollars we’ve got the world’s only self-contained ambulatory dextrous sensate machine. Your heart inspection position is a nicely evaluable mix of visual, cognitive, and rate skills, perfect to assess performance of the prototype. With luck we’ll be testing all the SMIs to come!”
“I’m fired?” George asked.
“Not exactly. We’ll need you on a freelance basis for a few days to help the SMI program itself for the job. And don’t be a stranger! Come by every now and then—on a consultancy basis of course. See how it’s doing.”
George glanced at the brown formica bookshelf which held award plaques. On the walls, framed photos of Cartago’s over-achieving family grinned in place. “You fired me.”
“We don’t want to lose you, George,” Cartago said. “That’s on the one hand. On the other hand, we haven’t got you. Not all the way. This motivational problem of yours is a hostility-failure thing: not working up to capacity. How do you figure the other workers feel, watching you sleepwalk through the weeks? It don’t smell right. But when you’re ready to work to capacity, well, you come tell me.”
George nodded. His cheeks felt burning hot. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair to be fired for being overqualified, for not being a rung-climber. George looked within himself for words of protest. But all he found was . . .
Juleeeeeen!
A steel mesh fence separated the sprawling concrete laboratory from the factory. The gate was buzzed open by an armed guard, who sauntered sleepily after George down a long open-air corridor. Another guard let him into the Prototypes Lab; a white-coated technician checked George’s name off a list.
Inside, tables were littered with bright, beetlelike resistors and capacitors, amid snakes of solder and coils of gleaming wire. Fluorescents beat down a hard summer light, while eighty machines growled and twittered. A dirty-haired man in a black running suit glared at George, slammed his circuit tester down, and locked himself in a side office.
George looked around for someone to tell him what to do. From the far end of the room someone called, “Right over this way, please.”
George followed the voice across the huge workshop. There, a pleasantfaced young man in a brown tweed jacket was peering into an oscilloscope. “So you’re the one they sent me?” the young man said. “Welcome aboard.” He extended his hand. George shook it—and it came off up to the elbow.
George was too astonished to be surprised. Automatically he shook the hand up and down. The young man reached out with his other hand and took back the arm. It fitted into place with a smart snap.
“Bit of a surprise, no? A quick means of self-introduction. I’m the experimental robot—SMI. Top-secret. Hush-hush.” The robot lifted his head clear of the neck. The head winked at George. The robot replaced it.
“You’re not what I expected,” George said.
“I’m not what they expected. The engineers and scientists messed around with transistors and chemicals and came up with me. Not in this form—I was lodged in a computer. But with help from the staff, I put together this body. Pretty nice! It helps if you’re going to meet people. Then I sent for you.”
“You sent for me?”
“Excess capacity,” the robot said.
“What?”
“Come on, you understand. Everyone else in this plant is working to the full capacity of their mental abilities both intellectual and emotional. Load more on them, and they’d blow a fuse. I speak figuratively. You and that snoring guard out there are the only men around here with excess capacity, which we can think of as the ability to learn.”
“Excess capacity,” George said. “That’s a nice phrase for it.”
“Oh, they’ve got you brainwashed. People like Cartago make the world safe for mediocrity. They don’t realize that work is the opiate of the masses. They don’t know what man’s real job on Earth is.”
“What is man’s role on Earth?” George asked.
“That would be telling,” the robot said. He sounded almost merry. “Now give me your complete trust and cooperation, and I’ll run your tests.”
The robot began to tape segments of George’s mind, recording onto tiny irridescent squares. Although the technology for this had been provided so that the robot could subsume an understanding of George’s job, the Supplementary Mobile Intelligenace said, “You can never tell what will come in handy.”
It taped George’s views on politics, art, ancient history, histology, hysteria, histodermy, and hippopotami, among other things.
When the SMI finished taping George’s conscious mind, it began on his unconscious. And as the robot worked, it chuckled. George pointed out that this was irritating. But the robot told him that mankind had to be studied with a sense of humor, else what’s a heaven for? George didn’t understand everything the robot said, but he came to understand its attitude very well.
The idea, of course, was that the robot could replace anyone who happened to be sick from work, or dead. It was hoped that it could one day stand in for firemen and astronauts. Such robots would always be far too expensive to compete in the labor market against ordinary workers. Starting with George was a purely formal condition. His was a nice solid evaluable job based on translation of subtle visual cues. But the robot could have started with Cartago or the president of the company, Dr. Fernglow, who was famous for having dedicated a golf course to an extinct species. However, the robot was interested in siphoning off some of George’s “excess capacity.” Whatever that was. Anyway, it took over two weeks to record.
George went home nights and thought about what was happening. Although he was out of a job, it didn’t seem to change the way he lived. He had always been frugal. His severance pay arrived and money drifted in from unemployment insurance. Friends repaid debts. Consultancy fees dribbled in. George continued to tinker with his inventions. They made little sense, especially his latest, a machine which could get cancer. Juleen said George was crazy. She was sorry, but she was busy Friday night. Her words rang in George’s mind. The robot taped it all.
The great day came when the robot was to do George’s job. George was there, as was Don Cartago. The robot wore jeans and a blue Brooks Brothers buttondown shirt. His belt buckle said “Go NASA!” and his cowboy boots were chartreuse mulehide.
The hearts slid by on the conveyer belt. The SMI scanned. All went well for several hours. The robot worked through the coffee break, and worked through its lunch break, but at 1:45 it stopped. Hearts streamed by, both good and bad.
“What’s the matter?” Mr. Cartago asked.
“I’m doing the job,” the robot said. “Yet I am not being rewarded.”
“Who ever heard of a machine asking for a reward?”
George defended his friend. “That’s why other machines have been so limited. No one works well except for a reward.”
They both looked at the sulking robot. Behind it the hearts pulsed. “Well,” Mr. Cartago said, “What does he want?”
/> The robot said, “Juleen.”
“What,” Mr. Cartago asked, “is a Juleen?”
“A Juleen,” the robot said, “is a human person with whom one goes to the movies.”
“Christ,” Mr. Cartago said. “This is an unexpected development. Where’s my secretary? Will she do instead?”
“Is she Juleen?”
“I’m Linda,” the secretary said, on arrival.
“Then you won’t do,” the robot said.
It was strange but true. The robot knew damned well he didn’t need any Juleen, couldn’t have Juleen, and was better off without Juleen. Nevertheless, he persisted in pining, and refused to work without her.
“Change your conditioning,” Cartago told it. “Make your desire something attainable, like a ranch in Paraguay, or a small savings account.”
The robot replied, “People hardly ever manage to reprogram themselves. I have decided to be people. I must have Juleen, or I don’t do nothing.”
“George!” Cartago cried, “You did this! You screwed up our machine!”
“Me? He did it to himself.”
“I’m ruined!” Cartago said.
“Juleen!” the robot said.
“Adios,” George said.
“Where are you going?” Cartago asked.
George hurried toward the exit.
“Come back!” Cartago yelled. “At least help us with these hearts!” He might have been rehired on the spot, but George was gone.
Six months later, George’s cancerous machine won first prize at a Paris techno-art festival. His new secretary, Linda, was by then successfully marketing his kitchen “creations.” George’s machine for duplicating defective hearts won the Achievement of the Year award—every thing George had turned his hand to was turning to gold.
When an interviewer came to see George, the basement workshop was noisy and crowded. A nurse was showing workmen where to stow sheet metal and licorice. The phone was gonging, and a series of groggy bandaged gadgets wandered about, seeking each other’s attention. George was in a swivel-rocker, stroking a feisty gunmetal kitten. “How did you get to be so productive,” the reporter asked. “What’s your secret?”
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