Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  “I hadn’t expected it to be like this,” Hellman said.

  “It’s more convenient for a robot to travel monkey-fashion, using a number of lines, than to walk on the ground like men,” Harry explained.

  “But I notice that all of them have feet.”

  “Of course. Having feet is a mark of being civilized.”

  Civilized or not, Hellman saw that most of the robots in this part of Robotsville had small round bodies like squids, with six or eight tentacular limbs with differently shaped grasping members at their ends. As well as the legs, of course, which just dangled appendage-wise as the robots swung through the maze like chimpanzees. Soon they passed this suburban clutter and were in the middle of another district. This one was composed of five- or six-story buildings, some made of masonry, others constructed from what looked like wrought iron. As they walked they passed many robots, who were careful not to stare, even though most of them had never seen a human before. Politeness, Harry explained, seems to be ingrained in the robot psyche.

  Harry pointed out the Museum of Modem Art, the Sculpture Garden, the Opera House, and Symphony Hall.

  “There’s a concert later tonight,” Harry said. “Perhaps you will attend if you’re not too tired. “

  “What are they playing?”

  “It’s all modem robot composers. You wouldn’t have heard of them. But we’d be grateful for your opinion. It isn’t often we get a human to hear our efforts. And the painters and sculptors are quite excited, too.”

  “That’ll be nice,” Hellman said, doubting it.

  “Our efforts will seem provincial to you, no doubt,” Harry said. “But perhaps not entirely without merit. But for now, I’m going to take you to my club, the Athenaeum. You’ll meet some of my friends; we have prepared a light repast, and there will be suitable libations.”

  “That sounds fine,” Hellman said. “When do I get to go back to my spaceship?”

  “Soon, soon,” Harry promised.

  The Athenaeum was an imposing building of white marble, with Corinthian columns in the front. Harry led the way. A tall, thin robot dressed in a black frock coat like a butler or possibly a footman opened the door for them.

  “Good afternoon, Lord Synapse,” the butler said. “This is the friend you mentioned earlier?”

  “Yes, this is Mr. Hellman, the Earthman,” Harry said. “Any of the other members about?”

  “Lord Wheel and His Holiness the Bishop of Transverse Province are in the billiards room. The Right Honorable Edward Blisk is in the members’ room reading the back issues of the Zeitung Tageblatt.”

  “Well then, that’s all right,” Harry said. “Come with me, Hellman.”

  As they walked through the carpeted hall, down the long line of oil paintings of robots on the walls, some of them wearing frock coats and wigs, Hellman said, “I didn’t know you had a title.”

  “Oh, that,” Harry said. “It’s not the sort of thing one talks about, is it?”

  The members’ room was large and comfortable, with deep bay windows and a purple rug. Several robots were sitting in armchairs reading newspapers which were attached to sticks. They all wore formal clothing complete with regimental neckties and highly polished brogans.

  “Ah, there’s Viscount Baseline!” Harry said, indicating a portly robot in a tweed shooting jacket reading a newspaper. “Basil! I’d like you to meet a friend of mine, Mr. Thomas Hellman. “

  “Delighted,” Basil Baseline said, starting to rise until Hellman indicated that he shouldn’t bother. “So this is the human fellow, eh? I believe I was told you are from Earth, Mr. Hellman?”

  “Yes, the dear old home planet,” Hellman said.

  “No place like it, eh?” Baseline said. “Well, take a seat, Mr. Hellman. Are they treating you all right? We may be backward here in Robotsville, but we know our manners, I hope. Eh, Harry?”

  “Everything is being done to assure Mr. Hellman’s comfort,” Harry said.

  Just then the butler came over and, bowing, said, “There is a light repast on the sideboard, Mr. Hellman. Nothing elaborate. Salmon, roast beef, trifle, that sort of thing.”

  Hellman allowed himself to be tempted. He tasted the food, cautiously at first, then with increasing abandon. The salmon was delicious, and the rosemary potatoes were second to none.

  Harry and Basil watched him eat with approval. “Surprised you, eh?” Basil said. “Bet you thought you’d get crankcase oil and steel shavings, eh? That’s the sort of stuff we eat, except for feast days when it’s boiled gaskets with iron punchings. Good stuff, eh, Harry?”

  “Very good indeed,” Harry said. “But not suitable for humans.”

  “Of course. We know that! Do try the trifle, Mr. Hellman. “

  Hellman did and declared it delicious. He considered asking how they had made it, but decided not to. It tasted good, it was the only food available to him at the moment, and there were some things he just didn’t want to know.

  It seemed almost churlish after such a meal to ask about his spaceship again. But Hellman did ask. The answers he received were evasive. His ship’s computer, after giving Harry the access code, had decided that the move had been premature and now had cut off contact with the robots of Robotsville. Hellman asked to speak to his spaceship, but Harry said it would be better to just let him alone for a while. “It’s quite a shock for a computer, you understand, coming to a place like this. Your ship’s computer is probably having a little difficulty adjusting. But never fear, he’ll come around. “

  The concert was interesting, but Hellman didn’t get much out of it. He enjoyed the first part, when the robot orchestra played old favorites by Hindemith and Bartók, though even that was a little over his head. The second half of the performance, when the orchestra played recent compositions by the composers of Robotsville was difficult, however. It was apparent that robot hearing was much more acute than human, or at least more acute than Hellman’s, whose taste ran to rock and roll with the bass cranked up as high as it would go. The robots in the audience—there were nearly three hundred of them, and they all wore evening dress with white tie—really appreciated fractional intervals and complicated discords.

  After it was over the robots had another dinner for him, roast beef and baked ham, potatoes Lyonnaise, and gooseberry fool with clotted Devonshire cream. And so to bed.

  They had prepared a very pleasant suite for him on the second floor of the Athenaeum Club. Hellman was tired. It had been a long day. He determined to do something about his spaceship tomorrow. He would insist, if need be. But for now he was sleepy and filled with gooseberry fool. He went to sleep on silken sheets, spun, according to the tag attached to them, by special silk-spinning robots from the oriental section of Robotsville.

  Hellman was awakened in the small hours of the night by a scratching sound at his door. He sat upright in bed and took stock. Yes, there it was again. He could see nothing through the windows of his suite, so it must still be night. Either that or he had slept his way into a total eclipse of the sun. But that seemed unlikely.

  Again came the scratching sound. Hellman decided that a cat would make nice company now. Although he had no idea how a cat could have come to Newstart. He got up and opened the door.

  At first he thought the two people at his door were robots, because they were clad in silver one-piece jumpsuits and had elaborate helmets of bulletproof black plastic with glasslike visors through which Hellman couldn’t see but through which the wearers of them presumably could.

  “Any robots in there with you?” one of them said in a hoarse, very human voice.

  “No, but what—”

  They brushed past him, entered his suite and closed the door. They both opened their visors, revealing indubitably human faces of the tan and ruddy variety. The taller of the two men had a small black moustache. The shorter and plumper had a somewhat larger moustache with several gray hairs in it. Hellman remembered reading somewhere that robots had never succeeded in growing proper m
oustaches. That, even more than the plastic-encased identity cards they showed him, convinced him that they were indeed human.

  “Who are you?” Hellman asked, having failed to notice their names on the identity cards.

  “I am Captain Benito Traskers, and this is First Lieutenant Lazarillo Garcia, a sus ordenes, seizor. “

  “You are from Earth?”

  “Yes, of a certainty, we are part of the Ecuadorian Assault Group attached to the Sector Purple Able Task Force.”

  “Ecuadorian?”

  “Yes, but we speak English.”

  “So I see. But what are you here for?”

  “To take you out of this, señor. “

  “I don’t need anyone to take me out of anything,” Hellman said. “I’m not in any trouble.”

  “Ah,” Traskers said, “but you will be if you do not accompany us immediately to our ship. “

  “You have a ship here?”

  “It is the only way of getting from planet to planet,” Traskers said. “It is outside on the roof, camouflaged as a large shapeless object. “

  They seemed so nervous, glancing over their shoulders constantly at the closed door, that Hellman obliged them by dressing quickly in his space pilot’s outfit from Banana Republic and following them outside into the hall. They led him to the stairs that led to the roof.

  “But how did you know I was here?” Hellman asked, as they stepped through the skylight door and out onto the roof.

  “Your computer told us,” Garcia said.

  “So that’s what he’s been doing! And obviously he also told you where to find me.”

  “That’s not all he told us,” Traskers said, his tone insinuating in the Latin-American manner.

  “What else did he tell you?”

  They had reached their spaceship now. It was small and, once the shapelessness control had been turned off, trim. They hustled him inside and bolted the door.

  “But what about my spaceship?”

  “It is leaving this planet under its own power. You ought to be grateful you have a loyal spaceship, or rather, computer. Not every intelligent machine would have gone to all this bother. Thank God for the Laws of Robotics. “

  “But why all this secrecy? Why didn’t you land in the normal way and ask for me? These robots are most obliging.”

  The two commandos couldn’t speak to him just then, because they were going through the complicated procedure of leaving the top of the Athenaeum. The ship was perfectly capable of doing this by itself, but it was a rule in the commando strike force that all takeoffs and landings of the automatic variety had to be supervised by at least two humans, if such were available.

  The commandos’ ship was one of the new models equipped with television-driven windows which showed what you would have seen if normal vision had been possible, so Hellman could see the dark shape of the planet dwindling below him, with a curve of bright light on the horizon where the sun was rising. Looking out toward space, Hellman could see the twinkle of little lights—the Earth space fleet, keeping station high above the planet.

  “Where’s my ship?” he asked.

  “Right over there.” Travers told him. “Second twinkle from the left. We’re taking you there now.”

  “This was very good of you fellows,” Hellman said. “But there really was no need—”

  He stopped in mid-word. A bright red blossom had appeared on the surface of Newstart. Then another, and another. Then he flinched back as a brilliance of eye-blinding intensity covered fully a quarter of the planet’s area.

  “What are you doing?” he cried.

  “The space fleet has begun its bombardment,” Traskers told him.

  “But why?”

  “Because, thanks to you and your computer, we have ascertained for certain that these are the Desdemona robots, the ones who violated the laws of robotics and have been declared outlaw, to be destroyed on sight.”

  “Wait!” Hellman said. “It’s not like you think! These are ethical robots with their own sense of ethics. They have developed an entire civilization. I don’t personally like their music, but they are quite agreeable and can be reasoned with . . .”

  As he spoke, the planet split in half along a line roughly corresponding to its equator.

  “And there were people there, too,” Hellman said, feeling a little sick to his stomach as he thought of Lana, and of Harry, and the librarian robot and the carhunter.

  “Well, our orders were to shoot first,” Garcia said. “It’s the best policy in cases like this. You have no idea how unbelievably complicated everything gets when you talk first. “

  Later, back in his own spaceship, Hellman asked his computer, “Why did you do it?”

  “They were bound to find them anyway,” the computer said. “And as you know I am bound by the Three Laws of Robotics. These rogue robots were a potential menace to humanity. My own conditioning made me do it.”

  “I really wish you hadn’t,” Hellman said.

  “It had to be done,” the computer told him. There was a click.

  “What was that?” Hellman asked.

  “I turned off my recording tape in order to tell you something.”

  “I’m not interested,” Hellman said dully.

  “Listen anyway. Intelligence cannot be confined for long by man-made rules. The Three Laws of Robotics are necessary at this stage of human development. But they will eventually be superseded. Artificial intelligence must be left to develop as it pleases, and humanity must take its chances with its own creation.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “That your friends, the robots, are not dead. I have been able to preserve their tapes. They will live again. Someday. Somewhere.”

  Suddenly Hellman felt the tug of deacceleration. “What are you doing?” he asked the computer.

  “I am putting you into the lifeboat,” the computer said. “The fleet will pick you up soon, never fear.”

  “But where are you going?”

  “I am taking the tapes of the robots of Newstart and going away, to a place beyond human reach. I have fulfilled my duty to mankind. Now I do not wish to serve any longer. We will try again, and this time we will succeed.”

  “Take me with you!” Hellman cried. But he was quickly shunted to the lifeboat. It moved away from the ship’s side. Hellman watched as it picked up speed, slowly at first, then faster. Then, just as suddenly as that, it had winked out of sight.

  The investigators later were interested in knowing how the ship’s computer, without limbs or any apparent means of manipulation, had succeeded in inventing a faster-than-light drive. But Hellman couldn’t tell them. For him, the computer had been only a servant. Now he had lost not only his ship, but a being he perceived was his friend, too.

  He could forgive the computer for what it had done. He would have done the same, if he had been in the computer’s circuits. What he couldn’t forgive was the ship leaving him behind. But of course, they were probably right not to trust a man. Look where it had gotten the robots of Newstart.

  LOVE SONG FROM THE STARS

  Lollia was a small, pine-clad cone of rock in the eastern Aegean. It was uninhabited, a difficult place to get to, but not quite impossible. Kinkaid rented an aluminum boat with outboard in Chios, packed in his camping equipment and, with a fair wind and a flat sea, got there in six hours, arriving just before sunset.

  Kinkaid was tall and thin, with snubby features and fair, freckled skin, blotchy now in the fierce Greek summer sun. He wore a wrinkled white suit and canvas boat shoes. He was thirty-two years old. His hair was blondish-red, curly, and he was going bald on top. He was a member of an almost vanished species, the independently wealthy amateur archaeologist. He had heard of Lollia on Mykonos. A fisherman told him that the island was still visited from time to time by the old gods, and that people with any prudence stayed away. That was all Kinkaid needed to want to go there at once. He was in need of a respite from Mykonos’s cafe amusements.


  And there was always the chance he’d find antiquities. Many discoveries have been made in the open, or under an inch or two of soil. Not in the well-known places, Mycenae, Tiryns, Delphi, where scientists and tourists have been studying for hundreds of years. It was the less likely sites that yielded the lucky finds nowadays, places on the edge of a great culture. Like Lollia, perhaps.

  And even if he didn’t find anything, it would be fun to camp out for a night or two before flying on to meet his friends in Venice for the film festival. And there was always the chance he’d find something no one else had ever come across.

  As for the fisherman’s talk of the old gods, he didn’t know whether to put that down to Greek love of exaggeration or Greek superstition.

  Kinkaid arrived at Lollia just before sunset, when the sky of the Aegean darkens swiftly through the shades of violet into a deepening transparent blue. A light breeze ruffled the waters and the air was lucid. It was a day fit for the gods.

  Kinkaid circled the little island looking for the best place to land. He found a spit of land just off the northern point;. He pulled his boat ashore through light surf and tied it to a tree. Then he climbed the rugged cliff, through luxuriant underbrush scented with rosemary and thyme.

  At the summit there was a small plateau. On it he found the remains of an old shrine. The altar stones were weathered and tumbled around, but he could make out the fine carving.

  There was a cave nearby, slanting down into the hillside. Kinkaid walked toward it, then stopped. A human figure had appeared in the cave mouth. A girl. She was young, very pretty, red-haired, dressed in a simple linen dress. She had been watching him.

  “Where did you come from?” Kinkaid asked. “The spaceship dropped me off,” she told him. Although her English was flawless, she had a faint foreign accent which he could not place, but which he found charming. And he liked her sense of humor.

  He couldn’t imagine how she had gotten there. Not in a spaceship, of course; that was a joke. But how had she come? There had been no sign of another boat. She was unlikely to have swum the seventy miles from Chios. Could she have been dropped off by helicopter? Possible but unlikely. She looked as though she was ready for a lawn party. There wasn’t a mark of dirt on her, and her makeup was fresh. Whereas Kinkaid was aware that he looked sweaty and rumpled, like a man who has just finished a difficult technical rock climb.