The Shipshape Miracle: And Other Stories

by Clifford D. Simak

  Lee was in the kitchen, frying some eggs and bacon. He broke two more eggs and peeled off some extra bacon slices and found another plate and cup.

  “I was wondering how long it would be before you showed up,” he said. “I hope they haven’t found anything that carries a death penalty.”

  Knight told him, sparing nothing, and Lee, wiping egg yolk off his lips, was not too encouraging.

  “You’ll have to file the declaration of estimated income even if you can’t pay it,” he said. “Then, technically, you haven’t violated the law and all they can do is try to collect the amount you owe. They’ll probably slap an attachment against you. Your salary is under the legal minimum for attachment, but they can tie up your bank account.”

  “My bank account is gone,” said Knight.

  “They can’t attach your home. For a while, at least, they can’t touch any of your property, so they can’t hurt you much to start with. The personal property tax is another matter, but that won’t come up until next spring. I’d say you should do your major worrying about the How-2 suit, unless, of course, you want to settle with them. I have a hunch they’d call it off if you gave the robots back. As an attorney, I must advise you that your case is pretty weak.”

  “Albert will testify that I made him,” Knight offered hopefully.

  “Albert can’t testify,” said Lee. “As a robot, he has no standing in court. Anyhow, you’d never make the court believe you could build a mechanical heresy like Albert.”

  “I’m handy with tools,” protested Knight.

  “How much electronics do you know? How competent are you as a biologist? Tell me, in a dozen sentences or less, the theory of robotics.”

  Knight sagged in defeat. “I guess you’re right.”

  “Maybe you’d better give them back.”

  “But I can’t! Don’t you see? How-2 Kits doesn’t want Albert for any use they can make of him. They’ll melt him down and burn the blueprints and it might be a thousand years before the principle is rediscovered, if it ever is. I don’t know if the Albert principle will prove good or bad in the long run, but you can say that about any invention. And I’m against melting down Albert.”

  “I see your point,” said Lee, “and I think I like it. But I must warn you that I’m not too good a lawyer. I don’t work hard enough at it.”

  “There’s no one else I know who’ll do it without a retainer.”

  Lee gave him a pitying look. “A retainer is the least part of it. The court costs are what count.”

  “Maybe if I talked to Albert and showed him how it was, he might let me sell enough robots to get me out of trouble temporarily.”

  Lee shook his head. “I looked that up. You have to have a license to sell them and, before you get a license, you have to file proof of ownership. You’d have to show you either bought or manufactured them. You can’t show you bought them and, to manufacture them, you’ve got to have a manufacturer’s permit. And before you get a permit, you have to file blueprints of your models, to say nothing of blueprints and specifications of your plant and a record of employment and a great many other details.”

  “They have me cold then, don’t they?”

  “I never saw a man,” declared Lee, “in all my days of practice who ever managed to get himself so fouled up with so many people.”

  There was a knock upon the kitchen door.

  “Come in,” Lee called.

  The door opened and Albert entered. He stopped just inside the door and stood there, fidgeting.

  “Abner told me that he saw the sheriff hand you something,” he said to Knight, “and that you came here immediately. I started worrying. Was it How-2 Kits?”

  Knight nodded. “Mr. Lee will take our case for us, Albert.”

  “I’ll do the best I can,” said Lee, “but I think it’s just about hopeless.”

  “We robots want to help,” Albert said. “After all, this is our fight as much as yours.”

  Lee shrugged. “There’s not much you can do.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Albert said. “All the time I worked last night, I thought and thought about it. And I built a lawyer robot.”

  “A lawyer robot!”

  “One with a far greater memory capacity than any of the others and with a brain-computer that operates on logic. That’s what law is, isn’t it—logic?”

  “I suppose it is,” said Lee. “At least it’s supposed to be.”

  “I can make a lot of them.”

  Lee sighed. “It just wouldn’t work. To practice law, you must be admitted to the bar. To be admitted to the bar, you must have a degree in law and pass an examination and, although there’s never been an occasion to establish a precedent, I suspect the applicant must be human.”

  “Now let’s not go too fast,” said Knight. “Albert’s robots couldn’t practice law. But couldn’t you use them as clerks or assistants? They might be helpful in preparing the case.”

  Lee considered. “I suppose it could be done. It’s never been done, of course, but there’s nothing in the law that says it can’t be done.”

  “All they’d need to do would be read the books,” said Albert. “Ten seconds to a page or so. Everything they read would be stored in their memory cells.”

  “I think it’s a fine idea!” Knight exclaimed. “Law would be the only thing those robots would know. They’d exist solely for it. They’d have it at their fingertips—”

  “But could they use it?” Lee asked. “Could they apply it to a problem?”

  “Make a dozen robots,” said Knight. “Let each one of them become an expert in a certain branch of law.”

  “I’d make them telepathic,” Albert said. “They’d be working together like one robot.”

  “The gestalt principle!” cried Knight. “A hive psychology! Every one of them would know immediately every scrap of information any one of the others had.”

  Lee scrubbed at his chin with a knotted fist and the light of speculation was growing in his eyes. “It might be worth a try. If it works, though, it’ll be an evil day for jurisprudence.” He looked at Albert. “I have the books, stacks of them. I’ve spent a mint of money on them and I almost never use them. I can get all the others you’ll need. All right, go ahead.”

  Albert made three dozen lawyer robots, just to be sure they had enough.

  The robots invaded Lee’s study and read all the books he had and clamored for more. They gulped down contracts, torts, evidence and case reports. They absorbed real property, personal property, constitutional law and procedural law. They mopped up Blackstone, corpus juris, and all the other tomes as thick as sin and dry as dust.

  Grace was huffy about the whole affair. She would not live, she declared, with a man who persisted in getting his name into the papers, which was a rather absurd statement. With the newest scandal of space station café-dom capturing the public interest at the moment, the fact that How-2 Kits had accused one Gordon Knight of pilfering a robot got but little notice.

  Lee came down the hill and talked to Grace, and Albert came up out of the basement and talked to her, and finally they got her quieted down and she went back to her painting. She was doing seascapes now.

  And in Lee’s study, the robots labored on.

  “I hope they’re getting something out of it,” said Lee. “Imagine not having to hunt up your sources and citations, being able to remember every point of law and precedent without having to look it up!”

  He swung excitedly in his hammock. “My God! The briefs you could write!”

  He reached down and got the jug and passed it across to Knight. “Dandelion wine. Probably some burdock in it, too. It’s too much trouble to sort the stuff once you get it picked.”

  Knight had a snort.

  It tasted like quite a bit of burdock.

  “Double-barreled economics,
” Lee explained. “You have to dig up the dandelions or they ruin the lawn. Might as well use them for something once you dig them up.”

  He took a gurgling drink and set the jug underneath the hammock. “They’re in there now, communing,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the house. “Not saying a word, just huddled there talking it over. I felt out of place.” He stared at the sky, frowning. “As if I were just a human they had to front for them.”

  “I’ll feel better when it’s all over,” said Knight, “no matter how it comes out.”

  “So will I,” Lee admitted.

  The trial opened with a minimum of notice. It was just another case on the calendar.

  But it flared into headlines when Lee and Knight walked into court followed by a squad of robots.

  The spectators began to gabble loudly. The How-2 Kits attorneys gaped and jumped to their feet. The judge pounded furiously with his gavel.

  “Mr. Lee,” he roared, “what is the meaning of this?”

  “These, Your Honor,” Lee said calmly, “are my valued assistants.”

  “Those are robots!”

  “Quite so, Your Honor.”

  “They have no standing in this court.”

  “If Your Honor will excuse me, they need no standing. I am the sole representative of the defendant in this courtroom. My client—” looking at the formidable array of legal talent representing How-2 Kits—“is a poor man, Your Honor. Surely the court cannot deny me whatever assistance I have been able to muster.”

  “It is highly irregular, sir.”

  “If it please Your Honor, I should like to point out that we live in a mechanized age. Almost all industries and businesses rely in large part upon computers—machines that can do a job quicker and better, more precisely and more efficiently than can a human being. That is why, Your Honor, we have a fifteen-hour week today, when only a hundred years ago, it was a thirty-hour week, and a hundred years before that, a forty-hour week. Our entire society is based upon the ability of machines to lift from men the labors which in the past they were called upon to perform.

  “This tendency to rely upon intelligent machines and to make wide use of them is evident in every branch of human endeavor. It has brought great benefit to the human race. Even in such sensitive areas as drug houses, where prescriptions must be precisely mixed without the remotest possibility of error, reliance is placed, and rightly so, Your Honor, upon the precision of machines.

  “If, Your Honor, such machines are used and accepted in the production of medicines and drugs, an industry, need I point out, where public confidence is the greatest asset of the company—if such be the case, then surely you must agree that in courts of law where justice, a product in an area surely as sensitive as medicine, is dispensed—”

  “Just a moment, Mr. Lee,” said the judge. “Are you trying to tell me that the use of—ah—machines might bring about improvement of the law?”

  Lee replied. “The law, Your Honor, is a striving for an orderliness of relationships within a society of human beings. It rests upon logic and reason. Need I point out that it is in the intelligent machines that one is most likely to find a deep appreciation of logic and reason? A machine is not heir to the emotions of human beings, is not swayed by prejudices, has no preconceived convictions. It is concerned only with the orderly progression of certain facts and laws.

  “I do not ask that these robot assistants of mine be recognized in any official capacity. I do not intend that they shall engage directly in any of the proceedings which are involved in the case here to be tried. But I do ask, and I think rightly, that I not be deprived of any assistance which they may afford me. The plaintiff in this action has a score of attorneys, all good and able men. I am one against many. I shall do the best I can. But in view of the disparity of numbers, I plead that the court put me at no greater inequality.”

  Lee sat down.

  “Is that all you have to say, Mr. Lee?” asked the judge. “You are sure you are quite finished before I give my ruling?”

  “Only one thing further,” Lee said. “If Your Honor can point out to me anything in the law specifically stating I may not use a robot—”

  “That is ridiculous, sir. Of course there is no such provision. At no time anywhere did anyone ever dream that such a contingency would arise. Therefore there was, quite naturally, no reason to place within the law a direct prohibition of it.”

  “Or any citation,” said Lee, “which implies such is the case.”

  The judge reached for his gavel, rapped it sharply. “The court finds itself in a quandary. It will rule tomorrow morning.”

  In the morning, the How-2 Kits’ attorneys tried to help the judge. Inasmuch, they said, as the robots in question must be among those whose status was involved in the litigation, it seemed improper that they should be used by the defendant in trying the case at issue. Such procedure, they pointed out, would be equivalent to forcing the plaintiff to contribute to an action against his interest.

  The judge nodded gravely, but Lee was on his feet at once.

  “To give any validity to that argument, Your Honor, it must first be proved that these robots are, in fact, the property of the plaintiff. That is the issue at trial in this litigation. It would seem, Your Honor, that the gentlemen across the room are putting the cart very much before the horse.”

  His Honor sighed. “The court regrets the ruling it must make, being well aware that it may start a controversy for which no equitable settlement may be found in a long, long time. But in the absence of any specific ban against the use of—ah—robots in the legal profession, the court must rule that it is permissible for the defense to avail itself of their services.”

  He fixed Lee with a glare. “But the court also warns the defense attorney that it will watch his procedure carefully. If, sir, you overstep for a single instant what I deem appropriate rules of legal conduct, I shall forthwith eject you and your pack of machines from my courtroom.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” said Lee. “I shall be most careful.”

  “The plaintiff now will state its case.”

  How-2 Kits’ chief counsel rose.

  The defendant, one Gordon Knight, he said, had ordered from How-2 Kits, Inc., one mechano-biologic dog kit at the cost of two hundred and fifty dollars. Then, through an error in shipping, the defendant had been sent not the dog kit he had ordered, but a robot named Albert.

  “Your Honor,” Lee broke in, “I should like to point out at this juncture that the shipping of the kit was handled by a human being and thus was subject to error. Should How-2 Kits use machines to handle such details, no such error could occur.”

  The judge banged his gavel. “Mr. Lee, you are no stranger to court procedure. You know you are out of order.” He nodded at the How-2 Kits attorney. “Continue, please.”

  The robot Albert, said the attorney, was not an ordinary robot. It was an experimental model that had been developed by How-2 Kits and then, once its abilities were determined, packed away, with no intention of ever marketing it. How it could have been sent to a customer was beyond his comprehension. The company had investigated and could not find the answer. But that it had been sent was self-evident.

  The average robot, he explained, retailed at ten thousand dollars. Albert’s value was far greater—in was, in fact, inestimable.

  Once the robot had been received, the buyer, Gordon Knight, should instantly have notified the company and arranged for its return. But, instead, he had retained it wrongly and with intent to defraud and had used it for his profit.

  The company prayed the court that the defendant be ordered to return to it not only the robot Albert, but the products of Albert’s labor—to wit, an unknown number of robots that Albert had manufactured.

  The attorney sat down.

  V

  Lee rose. “Your Honor, we agree with everything the pla
intiff has said. He has stated the case exactly and I compliment him upon his admirable restraint.”

  “Do I understand, sir,” asked the judge, “that this is tantamount to a plea of guilty? Are you, by any chance, throwing yourself upon the mercy of the court?”

  “Not at all, Your Honor.”

  “I confess,” said the judge, “that I am unable to follow your reasoning. If you concur in the accusations brought against your client, I fail to see what I can do other than to enter a judgment in behalf of the plaintiff.”

  “Your Honor, we are prepared to show that the plaintiff, far from being defrauded, has shown an intent to defraud the world. We are prepared to show that, in its decision to withhold the robot Albert from the public, once he had been developed, How-2 Kits has, in fact, deprived the people of the entire world of a logical development which is their heritage under the meaning of a technological culture.

  “Your Honor, we are convinced that we can show a violation by How-2 Kits of certain statutes designed to outlaw monopoly, and we are prepared to argue that the defendant, rather than having committed a wrong against society, has performed a service which will contribute greatly to the benefit of society.

  “More than that, Your Honor, we intend to present evidence which will show that robots as a group are being deprived of certain inalienable rights…”

  “Mr. Lee,” warned the judge, “a robot is a mere machine.”

  “We will prove, Your Honor,” Lee said, “that a robot is far more than a mere machine. In fact, we are prepared to present evidence which, we are confident, will show, in everything except basic metabolism, the robot is the counterpart of Man and that, even in its basic metabolism, there are certain analogies to human metabolism.”

  “Mr. Lee, you are wandering far afield. The issue here is whether your client illegally appropriated to his own use the property of How-2 Kits. The litigation must be confined to that one question.”

  “I shall so confine it,” Lee said. “But, in doing so, I intend to prove that the robot Albert was not property and could not be either stolen or sold. I intend to show that my client, instead of stealing him, liberated him. If, in so doing, I must wander far afield to prove certain basic points, I am sorry that I weary the court.”