The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works 1911-1987

by C. L. Moore

  "What a fool," Gallegher groaned, longing for the sane logics of electronics and chemistry. "The old Socratic syllogism. Even I could point out the flaw in that?"

  "Quiet," Mackenzie whispered. "All the lawyers really depend on is tying up the case in such knots nobody can figure it out. Your robot is perhaps not such a fool as you think."

  -

  An argument started as to whether thinking robots really were rational beings. Gallegher brooded. He couldn't see the point, really. Nor did it become clear until, from the maze of contradictions, there emerged the tentative decision that Joe was a rational being. This seemed to please the prosecutor immensely.

  "Mr. Justice," he announced, "we have learned that Mr. Galloway Gallegher two nights ago inactivated the robot before us now. Is this not true, Mr. Gallegher?"

  "But Mackenzie's hand kept Gallegher in his seat. One of the defending attorneys rose to meet the question.

  "We admit nothing," he said. "However, if you wish to pose a theoretical question, we will answer it."

  The query was posed theoretically.

  "Then the theoretical answer is 'yes', Mr. Prosecutor. A robot of this type can be turned on and off at will."

  "Can the robot turn itself off?"

  "Yes."

  "But this did not occur? Mr. Gallegher inactivated the robot at the time Mr. Jonas Harding was with him in his laboratory two nights ago?"

  "Theoretically, that is true. There was a temporary inactivation."

  "Then," said the prosecutor, "we wish to question the robot, who has been classed as a rational being."

  "The decision was tentative," a defense attorney objected.

  "Accepted. Mr. Justice—"

  "All right," said the Justice, who was still staring at Joe, "you may ask your questions."

  "Ah ... Ah—" The prosecutor, facing the robot, hesitated.

  "Call me Joe," Joe said.

  "Thank you. Ah ... is this true? Did Mr. Gallegher inactivate you at the time and place stated?"

  "Yes."

  "Then," the prosecutor said triumphantly, "I wish to bring a charge of assault and battery against Mr. Gallegher. Since this robot has been tentatively classed as a rational being, any activity causing him, or it, to lose consciousness or the power of mobility is contra bonos mores, and may be classed as mayhem."

  Mackenzie's attorneys were ruffled. Gallegher said: "What does that mean?"

  A lawyer whispered: "They can hold you, and hold that robot as a witness." He stood up. "Mr. Justice. Our statements were in reply to purely theoretical questions."

  The prosecutor said: "But the robot's statement answered a non-theoretical question."

  "The robot was not on oath."

  "Easily remedied," said the prosecutor, while Gallegher saw his last hopes slipping rapidly away. He thought hard, while matters proceeded.

  "Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God?"

  Gallegher leaped to his feet. "Mr. Justice, I object."

  "Indeed. To what?"

  "To the validity of that oath."

  Mackenzie said: "Ah—ha!"

  The Justice was thoughtful. "Will you please elucidate, Mr. Gallegher? Why should the oath not be administered to this robot?"

  "Such an oath is applicable to man only."

  "And?"

  "It presupposes the existence of the soul. At least it implies theism, a personal religion. Can a robot take an oath?"

  The Justice eyed Joe. "It's a point, certainly. Ah ... Joe. Do you believe in a personal deity?"

  "I do."

  The prosecutor beamed. "Then we can proceed."

  "Wait a minute," Murcoch Mackenzie said, rising. "May I ask a question, Mr. Justice?"

  "Go ahead."

  Mackenzie stared at the robot. "Well, now. Will you tell me, please, what this personal deity of yours is like?"

  "Certainly," Joe said. "Just like me."

  -

  After a while it degenerated into a theological argument. Gallegher left the attorneys debating the apparently vital point of how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, and went home temporarily scot-free, with Joe. Until such points as the robot's religious basics were settled, nothing could be done. All the way, in the aircab, Mackenzie insisted on pointing out the merits of Calvinism to Joe.

  At the door Mackenzie made a mild threat. "I did not intend to give you so much rope, you understand. But you will work all the harder with the threat of prison hanging over your head. I don't know how long I can keep you a free man. If you can work out an answer quickly—"

  "What sort of answer?"

  "I am easily satisfied. Jonas's body, now—"

  "Bah!" Gallegher said, and went into his laboratory and sat down morosely. He siphoned himself a drink before he remembered the little brown animal. Then he lay back, staring from the blue-eyed dynamo to Joe and back again.

  Finally he said: "There's an old Chinese idea that the man who first stops arguing and starts swinging with his fists admits his intellectual defeat."

  Joe said: "Naturally. Reason is sufficient; if you need experiment to prove your point, you're a lousy philosopher and logician."

  Gallegher fell back on casuistry. "First step, animal. Fist-swinging. Second step, human. Pure logic. But what about the third step?"

  "What third step?"

  "Men can know the nature of things—but you're not a man. Your personal deity isn't an anthropomorphic one. Three steps: animal, man, and what we'll call for convenience, superman—though man doesn't necessarily enter into it. We've always attributed godlike traits to the theoretical superbeing. Suppose, just for the sake of having a label, we call this third-stage entity Joe."

  "Why not?" Joe said.

  "Then the two basic concepts of logic don't apply. Men can know the nature of things by pure reason, and also by experiment and reason. But such second-stage concepts are as elementary to Joe as Plato's ideas were to Aristotle." Gallegher crossed his fingers behind his back. "The question is, then, what's the third-stage operation for Joe?"

  "Godlike?" the robot said.

  "You've got special senses, you know. You can varish, whatever that is. Do you need ordinary logical methods? Suppose—"

  "Yes," Joe said, "I can varish, all right. I can skren, too. Hm-m-m."

  Gallegher abruptly rose from the couch. "What a fool I am. 'Drink me'. That's the answer. Joe, shut up. Go off in a corner and varish."

  "I'm skrenning," Joe said.

  "Then skren. I've finally got an idea. When I woke up yesterday, I was thinking about a bottle labeled 'Drink me'. When Alice took a drink, she changed size, didn't she? Where's that reference book? I wish I knew more about technology. Vasoconstrictor ... hemostatic ... here it is—demonstrates the metabolic regulation mechanisms of the vegetative nervous system. Metabolism. I wonder now—"

  Gallegher rushed to the workbench and examined the bottles. "Vitalism. Life is the basic reality, of which everything else is a form or manifestation. Now. I had a problem to solve for Adrenals, Incorporated. Jonas Harding and Grandpa were here. Harding gave me an hour to fill the bill. The problem ... a dangerous and harmless animal. Paradox. That isn't it. Harding's clients wanted thrills and safety at the same time. I've got no lab animals on tap at the moment ... Joe!"

  "Well?"

  "Watch," Gallegher said. He poured a drink and watched the liquid vanish before he tasted it. "Now. What happened?"

  "The little brown animal drank it."

  "Is that little brown animal, by any chance—Grandpa?"

  "That's right," Joe said.

  Gallegher blistered the robot's transparent hide with sulphurous oaths. "Why didn't you tell me? You—"

  "I answered your question," the robot said smugly. "Grandpa's brown, isn't he? And he's an animal."

  "But—little! I thought it was a critter about as big as a rabbit."

  "The only standard of comparison is the majority of the species. That's t
he yardstick. Compared to the average height of humans, Grandpa is little. A little brown animal."

  "So it's Grandpa, is it?" Gallegher said, returning to the workbench. "And he's simply speeded up. Accelerated metabolism. Adrenalin. Hm-m-m. Now I know what to look for, maybe—"

  He fell to. But it was sundown before Gallegher emptied a small vial into a glass, siphoned whisky into it, and watched the mixture disappear.

  A flickering began. Something flashed from corner to corner of the room. Gradually it became visible as a streaking brownness that resolved itself, finally, into Grandpa. He stood before Gallegher, jittering like mad as the last traces of the accelerative formula wore off.

  "Hello, Grandpa," Gallegher said placatingly.

  Grandpa's nutcracker face wore an expression of malevolent fury. For the first time in his life, the old gentleman was drunk. Gallegher stared in utter amazement.

  "I'm going back to Maine," Grandpa cried, and fell over backwards.

  -

  "Never seen such a lot of slow pokes in my life," Grandpa said, devouring a steak. "My, I'm hungry. Next time I let you stick a needle in me I'll know better. How many months have I been like this?"

  "Two days," Gallegher said, carefully mixing up a formula. "It was a metabolic accelerator, Grandpa. You just lived faster, that's all."

  "All! Bah. Couldn't eat nothing. Food was solid as a rock. Only thing I could get down my gullet was liquor."

  "Oh?"

  "Hard chewing. Even with my store teeth. Even whisky tasted hotter. As for a steak like this, I couldn't've managed it."

  "You were living faster." Gallegher glanced at the robot, who was still quietly skrenning in a corner. "Let me see. The antithesis of an accelerator is a decelerator—Grandpa, where's Jonas Harding?"

  "In there," Grandpa said, pointing to the blue-eyed dynamo and thus confirming Gallegher's suspicion.

  "Vitaplasm. So that was it. That's why I had a lot of Vitaplasm sent over a couple of nights ago. Hm-m-m." Gallegher examined the sleek, impermeable surface of the apparent dynamo. After a while he tried a hypodermic syringe. He couldn't penetrate the hard shell.

  Instead, using a new mixture he had concocted from the bottles on his workbench, he dripped a drop of the liquid on the substance. Presently it softened. At that spot Gallegher made an injection, and was delighted to see a color-change spread out from the locus till the entire mass was pallid and plastic.

  "Vitaplasm," he exulted. "Ordinary artificial protoplasm cells, that's all. No wonder it looked hard. I'd given it a decelerative treatment. An approach to molecular stasis. Anything metabolizing that slowly would seem hard as iron." He wadded up great bunches of the surrogate and dumped it into a convenient vat. Something began to form around the blue eyes—the shape of a cranium, broad shoulders, a torso—

  Freed from the disguising mass of Vitaplasm, Jonas Harding was revealed crouching on the floor, silent as a statue.

  His heart wasn't beating. He didn't breathe. The decelerator held him in an unbreakable grip of passivity.

  Not quite unbreakable. Gallegher, about to apply the hypodermic, paused and looked from Joe to Grandpa. "Now why did I do that?" he demanded.

  Then he answered his own question.

  "The time limit. Harding gave me an hour to solve his problem. Time's relative—especially when your metabolism is slowed down. I must have given Harding a shot of the decelerator so he wouldn't realize how much time had passed. Let's see." Gallegher applied a drop to Harding's impermeable skin and watched the spot soften and change hue. "Uh-huh. With Harding frozen like that, I could take weeks to work on the problem, and when he woke up, he'd figure only a short time had passed. But why did I use the Vitaplasm on him?"

  Grandpa downed a beer. "When you're drunk, you're apt to do anything," he contended, reaching for another steak.

  "True, true. But Gallegher Plus is logical. A strange, eerie kind of logic, but logic nevertheless. Let me see. I shot the decelerator into Harding, and then—there he was. Rigid and stiff. I couldn't leave him kicking around the lab, could I? If anybody came in they'd think I had a corpse on my hands!"

  "You mean he ain't dead?" Grandpa demanded.

  "Of course not. Merely decelerated. I know! I camouflaged Harding's body. I sent out for Vitaplasm, molded the stuff around his body, and then applied the decelerator to the Vitaplasm. It works on living cellular substance—slows it down. And slowed down to that extent, it's impermeable and immovable!"

  "You're crazy," Grandpa said.

  "I'm short-sighted," Gallegher admitted. "At least, Gallegher Plus is. Imagine leaving Harding's eyes visible, so I'd be reminded the guy was under that pile when I woke up from my binge! What did I construct that recorder for, anyhow? The logic Gallegher Plus uses is far more fantastic than Joe's."

  "Don't bother me," Joe said. "I'm still skrenning."

  -

  Gallegher put the hypodermic needle into the soft spot on Harding's arm. He injected the accelerator, and within a moment or two Jonas Harding stirred, blinked his blue eyes, and got up from the floor. "Ouch!" he said, rubbing his arm. "Did you stick me with something?"

  "An accident," Gallegher said, watching the man warily. "Uh ... this problem of yours—"

  Harding found a chair and sat down, yawning. "Solved it?"

  "You gave me an hour."

  "Oh. Yes, of course." Harding looked at his watch. "It's stopped. Well, what about it?"

  "Just how long a time do you think has lapsed since you came into this laboratory?"

  "Half an hour?" Harding hazarded.

  "Two months," Grandpa snapped.

  "You're both right," Gallegher said. "I'd have another answer, but I'd be right, too."

  Harding obviously thought that Gallegher was still drunk. He stayed doggedly on the subject.

  "What about that specialized animal we need? You still have half an hour—"

  "I don't need it," Gallegher said, a great white light dawning in his mind. "I've got your answer for you. But it isn't quite what you think it is." He relaxed on the couch and considered the liquor-organ. Now that he could drink again, he found he preferred to prolong the anticipation.

  "I came upon no wine so wonderful as thirst," he remarked.

  "Claptrap," Grandpa said.

  Gallegher said: "The clients of Adrenals, Incorporated, want to hunt animals. They want a thrill, so they need dangerous animals. They have to be safe, so they can't have dangerous animals. It seems paradoxical, but it isn't. The answer doesn't lie in the animal. It's in the hunter."

  Harding blinked. "Come again?"

  "Tigers. Ferocious man-eating tigers. Lions. Jaguars. Water buffalo. The most vicious, carnivorous animals you can get. That's part of the answer."

  "Listen—" Harding said. "Maybe you've got the wrong idea. The tigers aren't our customers. We don't supply clients to the animals, it's the other way round."

  "I must make a few more tests," Gallegher said, "but the basic principle's right here in my hand. An accelerator. A latent metabolic accelerator with a strong concentration of adrenalin as the catalyst. Like this—"

  He sketched a vivid verbal picture.

  Armed with a rifle the client wandered through the artificial jungle, seeking quarry. He had already paid his fee to Adrenals, Incorporated,, and got his intravenous shot of the latent accelerator. That substance permeated his blood stream, doing nothing as yet, waiting for the catalyst.

  The tiger launched itself from the underbrush. It shot toward the client like catapulted murder, fangs bared. As the claws neared the man's back, the suprarenals shot adrenalin into the blood stream in strong concentration.

  That was the catalyst. The latent accelerative factor became active.

  The client speeded up—tremendously.

  He stepped away from the body of the tiger, apparently frozen in midair, and did what seemed best to him before the effect of the accelerator wore off. When it did, he returned to normal—and by that time he could be in the supply
station of Adrenals, Incorporated, getting another intravenous shot—unless he'd decided to bag his tiger the easy way.

  It was as simple as that.

  -

  "Ten thousand credits," Gallegher said, happily counting them. "The balance due as soon as I work out the catalytic angle. Which is a cinch. Any fourth-rate chemist could do it. What intrigues me is the forthcoming interview between Harding and Murdoch Mackenzie. When they compare the time element, it's going to be funny."

  "I want a drink," Grandpa said. "Where's a bottle?"

  "Even in court, I think I could prove I only took an hour or less to solve the problem. It was Harding's hour, of course, but time is relative. Entropy—metabolism—what a legal battle that would be! Still, it won't happen. I know the formula for the accelerator and Harding doesn't. He'll pay the other forty thousand—and Mackenzie won't have any kicks. After all, I'm giving Adrenals, Incorporated, the success factor they needed."

  "Well, I'm still going back to Maine," Grandpa contended. "Least you can do is give me a bottle."

  "Go out and buy one," Gallegher said, tossing the old gentleman several credits. "Buy several. I often wonder what the vintners buy—"

  "Eh?"

  "—one-half so precious as the stuff they sell. No, I'm not tight. But I'm going to be." Gallegher clutched the liquor-organ's mouthpiece in a loving grip and began to play alcoholic arpeggios on the keyboard. Grandpa, with a parting sneer at such new-fangled contraptions, took his departure.

  Silence fell over the laboratory. Bubbles and Monstro, the two dynamos, sat quiescent. Neither of them had bright blue eyes. Gallegher experimented with cocktails and felt a warm, pleasant glow seep through his soul.

  Joe came out of his corner and stood before the mirror, admiring his gears.

  "Finished skrenning?" Gallegher asked sardonically.

  "Yes."

  "Rational being, forsooth. You and your philosophy. Well, my fine robot, it turned out I didn't need your help after all. Pose away."

  "How ungrateful you are," Joe said, "after I've given you the benefit of my superlogic."

  "Your ... what? You've slipped a gear. What superlogic?"

  "The third-stage, of course. What we were talking about a while back. That's why I was skrenning. I hope you didn't think all your problems were solved by your feeble brain, in that opaque cranium of yours."