The Collected Stories

by Earl

  “And these things here,” I commented, noticing that the wires trailing from them were copper with violin strings twined about, “make up your thought-transmitter?”

  “My telepsychoscope, to be exact,” confirmed Doc Fothergill, bobbing his head importantly. “It will pick up your thought-train, after amplifying it with an induced current through your body, and transmit it along the wires.”

  “But where to?” I tried to crane by neck backward to see where the wires led, but his finger pointed directly ahead. I blinked at the creation in tin which reposed in that corner. It looked like the surrealistic interpretation of the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  “To my robot,” Doc cackled. “My mechanical man. He is an improvement over all other robots ever made. He has a brain, a metallic sponge-brain sensitive to the flick of a magnetic needle. My hobby for twenty years, you know, has been working on robots. He is suitably equipped with audio, optic and aural mechanisms. All that remains is to get his brain started. I want you to think strongly, Ian, when I turn on the switch. Think of anything. His brain will absorb your thoughts like a sponge—literally. Now——”

  “Wait! Is this the first time——”

  He pushed me back again. “Yes. You have the signal honor of being first to use my telepsychoscope.”

  “I think I’ll decline. I don’t deserve it. I——”

  He pushed me back harder. “Bosh! Not afraid, are you?”

  “No, but it’s a little weird and——”

  “Hazel wouldn’t like a coward,” he said. His voice dripped oil, and his sidelong glance spoke volumes. I’d heard before that the old are cunning. I sat back before he could push me this time.

  “That’s better. Just relax. There’s absolutely no danger. Anyway, none that I can think of.”

  With a hand on my shoulder he turned to one side, reaching his other hand toward what looked like a telephone switchboard. He squinted with his myopic eyes and jammed in a plug. A whine arose that made my teeth vibrate, or perhaps chatter. I wouldn’t be the judge of that.

  “Now!”

  With this word he knifed a throw-switch.

  “Ouch!”

  That was all I could say as an electric shock ran through me, making my legs and arms twitch like I had a chill. And my neck. It was over in a few seconds as Doc unknifed the switch again.

  “Wrong one,” he announced, grinning self-consciously like a schoolboy. “Did it hurt?” He jerked over another switch.

  “Damn right it did!”

  I thought I had said that, but the words came from in front of me, loud and metallic. It was from the tin man in the corner. He—or it—had come to life. Its eye-shutters flicked open and shut and one of its jointed arms moved jerkily. Then it lolled its shiny head, as though reproving us for something.

  But if I had been surprised, Doc Fothergill was utterly amazed. “It works!” he chirped idiotically.

  PERHAPS it was the full moon riding over the trees, or the mellowness of this summer evening. Anyway, I put my arm around her and drew her close. She didn’t resist. Before long I had captured one of her hands and squeezed it. So far I hadn’t spoken. But presently I murmured, “Romance is in the air, don’t you think?”

  She agreed and gave me a veiled glance from her wonderful blue eyes. I hoped I didn’t imagine that there was an expectant air about her. Was she hoping I’d go on? I had now reached the same point I had three evenings ago, when we’d been so rudely interrupted.

  “Hazel, I——”

  “Ian, Dr. Fothergill would like to see you in his laboratory.” It was a stentorian, rasping voice.

  We both jumped. Then Hazel laughed, but a bit nervously. “It’s father’s robot. He’s been working frantically with it in the past three days, training it and teaching it. It almost seems to be human.”

  Leaving Hazel with momentary thoughts of homicide on the robot, if not on Doc Fothergill, I went inside. Old Doc, who had been beside the robot, was in the process of commanding it to turn around and go back. “Turn around to the right—a little more—just a little more. Now take slow steps forward—slow——”

  He grinned elatedly over his shoulder at me. Then he stooped to pick up the thick insulated cable that trailed from the robot’s back. As the mechanical man took measured treads down the hall, Doc Fothergill carefully coiled the wire behind it. It was ridiculous in a way, like tending a baby trying its first faltering steps. But at the same time it was fascinating.

  Unfortunately, the tin man wasn’t aimed right. Before Doc could screech out the necessary commands to make him stop and turn a little, the robot had scraped into the wall, tearing off a square yard of wallpaper and gouging deep into the plaster. Then some slow instinct made it turn and it struck diagonally for the other side, blundering into that wall with an unholy clanking and rattling.

  The noise drowned out Doc’s commanding shrieks of “Turn!—no, left!—stop!—stop, you tin idiot!”

  The hall mirror went next, in a sparkling shower of glass, then an expensive oil painting, with an adamant metal shoulder through it, not to mention more wallpaper and plaster as the creature swung from side to side. In a china-shop, this robot would have been superb.

  Doc’s shouts stopped it at last. Either that or the closed door that barred its way. From here on Doc Fothergill did a better job of directing it, and they reached the laboratory without further mishap. I came in a moment later with a pain in my side.

  “What was so funny?” growled Doc Fothergill. “After all, this is the first time I’ve taken him around without the telepsychoscope. The robot had to give its own directions to its legs, from commands through its aural apparatus. And it had to translate those commands from the small fund of words it has absorbed in the last three days.”

  Doc’s old eyes lit up brightly then. “But it won’t be long before he will be able to do anything within his mechanical limitations. And he is already showing signs of growing intelligence. His sponge brain, fed by electric current, is accumulating knowledge as fast as I can give it.”

  I looked my skepticism. “Aren’t you jumping to fantastic conclusions?” I scoffed. “They had robots twenty years ago that could walk, talk and smoke cigarettes. Can this one smoke?”

  “No, but he can talk.” Doc reinserted the electric plug he had removed from the robot’s back socket, explaining that all of its internal machinery worked from a central power-unit in its chest cavity. Its metallic brain, however, was cut into every circuit as an inductive rheostat. Every outside stimulus—for instance, a voiced command—went to the brain first, from thence to other centers of operation.

  WITH THE PLUG in, the thing immediately began lolling its head again, while its iron jaw flipped up and down rapidly. These movements were accompanied by showers of sparks from its jointed neck and hinged chin, and strange grindings from within. Now and then its whole body jerked and clanked fitfully.

  I winced and waited for it to explode, but in a moment it quieted down except for a deep, steady hum.

  “Excess charge accumulation,” Doc Fothergill informed. “In plain words, he ‘ate’ too many watts and had indigestion. As a result, he—eh—belched.” The old guy was more serious than you’d think. “But that’s neither here nor there,” he mumbled on. “To demonstrate his mental equipment, I’ll ask him some questions.”

  Facing it like he would any human, Doc Fothergill spoke incisively: “What is the sum of two plus two?”

  The creature’s jaw wagged in response, but no sound came out. Its creator asked twice more, with less result. The jaw stopped moving.

  “Ask it something easy,” I suggested.

  “Two plus two!” shouted Doc Fothergill at the robot. “How much?” To me at the side he bleated pathetically that that very afternoon it had repeated the entire multiplication ‘table up to twelves, and now it wouldn’t even talk.

  “Maybe it’s bashful because I’m here?”

  Doc Fothergill’s face glared at me balefully, red with exasperat
ion. Then he turned and put a hand on the robot’s shoulder. With a supplicating whine he tried once more: “Two added on two equals?—please——”

  “Twenty!”

  I jumped. I could swear the thing winked at me. At least one of its eye-shutters twinkled up and down while it nodded as though complimenting itself.

  Doc Fothergill turned away with an ill look in his lace. “Twenty!” he groaned. “At least he could have said twenty-two and had some reason for it. After all my work for three days——”

  Wink or not, I suddenly caught on. “You asked it five times, I believe! Well, that equals twenty! Maybe two and two was too easy for it—it waited for something harder. It wanted to show off, maybe.”

  Old Doc’s face became the picture of a man whose soul has been saved. He whirled on the robot.

  “Six plus five?” Silence. “Oh, all right—28 times 73 is how much, you stubborn brass mule!”

  “2044,” returned the robot promptly.

  Doc Fothergill staggered. He had to Check the answer himself with pencil and paper. He rapped out several more teasers, even cube roots, and the answers were fast and right.

  “It’s a mental prodigy!” he gasped. “I spent all afternoon leading him by the nose through kindergarten tables, and now this! I taught him the abc’s too. Maybe——”

  He queried the robot eagerly. “Say, how much do you know?”

  IT LOOKED like a balk at first, with some head lolling, blinking, a bit of sparkling and much jaw action without sound, but presently it rasped, “Neither here nor there.”

  “What?” squeaked Fothergill.

  “Two plus two—how much?”

  Doc gagged. “He’s mocking me!”

  “Something easy,” droned the robot.

  “Is it or isn’t it?” appealed the one with the goatee.

  “Bashful because I am here? Ate too many watts . . . . indigestion . . . . belched . . . . stubborn brass mule—whoosh!”

  The last, however, came from farther down in the metal man, and with this it shuddered through every part of its framework and became utterly silent. Even the low hum within stopped altogether. Then I noticed that Doc Fothergill had jerked out the plug. “Amen!” I said, for it was like nothing more than a person giving up the ghost.

  “Must be a short circuit somewhere, or some twisted up inductances,” Doc mused, referring I suppose to the robot’s crazy mimicry. “But the rascal is further along than I thought. Was it mimicry or a salient of independent thought-association? Of course, its mathematical ability is simply a function of its photo-electric eyes—which can count electrons in any quantity. Any adding machine or ‘electric eye’ can do the same or better. The rest was all repetition of what it had heard. Yet maybe it is beginning to think by itself, too!”

  “It’s just a clever alloy ape, mentally,” I said, heading for the door—and the back porch.

  He gave me a strange leer. “We shall see,” he said solemnly. Then he became faintly jovial. “I had wanted you to put on the telepsychoscope tonight and transmit some of your knowledge to him, but I just wonder.”

  “Wonder what?” I said, putting out my neck.

  “Which way it would go!”

  Even Hazel couldn’t soothe me after that.

  “THE ROBOT is so funny!” Hazel was saying a few evenings later. We were on the porch swing again, watching the heat-lightning which now and then lit up the landscape in momentary luridness. Only I was watching their, reflections in her eyes.

  “It follows father around like a big, clumsy dog,” she continued. “It says the craziest things. Then yesterday it sat at the table with us, watching us eat, and suddenly grabbed up some cake and began stuffing it down its throat. Father stopped it, but a few minutes later something clicked inside and oil came out of its ears. It acted quite sick for a while.”

  Her voice changed suddenly. “But it frightens me too, Ian! _ It’s so heavy and strong. It knocked the big dining-room table over yesterday, just bumping into it. Father and I are alone in the house all day with it and—well, sometimes its eyes have the strangest look in them. Father says it has a mind of its own and that——”

  I interrupted because she was getting excited. “If it has, give it credit for using it. What purpose would it have in doing harm of any kind—if that’s what you’re thinking of?”

  She turned her large eyes toward me while a flash of lightning lit them up, revealing their worry. It is the male instinct to comfort and protect, so quite naturally I slipped my arm about her. Then came the usual ups and downs in my courage. On one of the ups I spoke, “Hazel, you don’t know how much——”

  History repeated itself with these words from the doorway: “Ian, Dr. Fothergill would like to see you.”

  “Oh, father must have come home early,” pouted Hazel. “See what he wants, like a good boy.”

  I gave the robot my very best glare, and looked around for Doc in the hallway. He wasn’t there. Evidently he had trained the thing to carry out commands without his presence. I saw as it followed me down the hallway that it had mastered the technique of coiling up the insulated cable attached to its back. It knew which side its bread was buttered on, so to speak.

  “Not bad, Doc,” I complimented as I entered the lab, hoping to please him so I could make an early excuse for breaking away. I just wonder what my expression was when I saw that Doc wasn’t there, though the lights were on.

  “Where is he?” I involuntarily asked the robot, like one would a person. Then, not expecting an answer, I felt foolish.

  I felt more so, though, when it answered: “He is not here.”

  “Come out, Doc!” I said triumphantly, jerking open the door of the adjacent closet where I suspected he was hiding and grinning.

  “He is not there,” rasped the tin man. Baffled, I saw that he wasn’t. There was no other place for him to be, except in some room toward the front of the house.

  “You are here,” the robot informed me as I tried to figure things out. He waggled that loose jaw of his several times, then added wisely, “You are.”

  No appropriate repartee came to me, so I ignored him—it, I mean—and stalked toward the door. I think I jumped six feet when the robot suddenly began to sing. And not with its usual gravellike tones, but with a clear, high tenor. It was a popular ballad, about holding a girl in his arms and knowing the acme of romance and whatnot.

  IMAGINE a big iron brute warbling that sort of thing! I stood there with my chin bumping my Adam’s-apple, wondering—— Well, wondering. The song ended with a splendid high note, worthy of applause, but I wasn’t going to give it.

  But there was applause, and then a deep voice: “That was Kenny Lane, your Dreamy Tenor. Station W——”

  The robot clipped the rest off and became silent.

  “Don’t be amazed,” said Hazel. She had just come up. “It does that now and then. Father says it can pick up any etheric vibrations.”

  “Animated radio-set,” I muttered. “But where is your father?”

  We went through the other rooms. “Father must still be out,” Hazel said. “He said he wouldn’t be back till quite late.”

  “Did he leave the lights on in his workroom when he left?”

  Hazel was certain he hadn’t.

  “That settles it,” I cried and told Hazel to stay where she was. Then I hurried back to the lab. I stopped at the door and peered in. To my relief, the robot was sitting in its corner. By some chance it had struck the pose of Rodin’s Thinker, with chin on fist, elbow on knee. It ignored me as I sauntered to the panel board, but my feelings weren’t hurt. I jerked out the plug connecting it to the current.

  “That fixes you,” I chirruped as I snapped off the lights.

  For answer I heard a clash as though a dozen dishpans had decided there was an earthquake. Maybe the robot had tumbled over. I hoped it had.

  Before I faced Hazel, I passed a handkerchief over my forehead. It was a humid night, I guess, and I didn’t want her to think I w
as disturbed so she wouldn’t get nervous. But would you believe it, I couldn’t get that cursed robot out of my mind all evening?

  “WHEN I WAS here the other night, it called me in under your authority,” I expostulated. Hazel was waiting for me on the back porch, but I felt I had to say a thing or two about the robot to Doc Fothergill first.

  “But you weren’t there,” I continued. “Now, Doc, there’s a limit to everything——”

  “Tush, tush, my boy,” he interrupted disparagingly. “I absent-mindedly left the plug connected. He simply repeated something he had done before. Probably an effect of the lightning that night. His electrical brain is sensitive to voltaic stimuli of any sort. I haven’t shielded him properly yet. And I must, for I certainly don’t want his poor brain deluged with the tommyrot coming over the radio waves. But I’m pleased that Orestes did something absolutely on his own initiative. Certainly that’s a sign of quasi-intelligence.” He patted the creature’s bald metal knob. “You’re getting there, aren’t you, Orestes!”

  “Orestes!” I echoed weakly.

  “Sure,” Doc nodded, beaming. “I gave him a name since he has as much right to one as any other being. Orestes, in mythology, was the brother of Electra, whose name in Latin became the root for our word ‘electricity’. Appropriate, eh?”

  Before Doc Fothergill could give me a formal introduction, I spoke up. “Look here, Doc, mightn’t that thing become—well, dangerous? Hazel tells me it blew up half the laboratory yesterday.” Doc Fothergill looked embarrassed for a moment. Then he said scoffingly, “Half the laboratory, indeed!” He pointed to some discolorations on the ceiling. “I gave Orestes his first lesson in chemistry yesterday. Unfortunately, when I wasn’t watching, he tossed some magnesium metal in boiling sulfuric acid. I didn’t have to scold him, though. He was punished enough when the acid got in his neck-joint and made him blow a fuse.”