Time Enough at Last

by Jean Marie Stine

  Walk first. Talk next. That is the tried-and-true rule used among humans since the dawn of their species. Human babies learn best and fastest that way. And I was a human baby in mind, if not body.

  Dr. Link held his breath when I first essayed to rise. I did, slowly, swaying on my metal leas. Up in my head, I had a three-directional spirit-level electrically contacting my brain. It told me automatically what was horizontal, vertical and oblique. My first tentative step, however, wasn't a success. My knee-joints flexed in reverse order. I clattered to my knees, which fortunately were knobbed with thick protective plates so that the more delicate swiveling mechanisms behind weren't harmed.

  Dr. Link says I looked up at him like a startled child might. Then I promptly began walking along on my knees, finding this easy. Children, would do this more only that it hurts them. I know no hurt.

  After I had roved up and down the aisles of his workshop for an hour, nicking up his furniture terribly, walking on my knees seemed completely natural. Dr. Link was in a quandary how to get me up to my full height. He tried grasping my arm and pulling me up, but my 300 pounds of weight were too much for him.

  My own rapidly increasing curiosity solved the problem. Like a child discovering the thrill of added height with stilts, my next attempt to rise to my full height pleased me. I tried staying up. I finally mastered the technique of alternate use of limbs and shift of weight forward.

  In a couple of hours Dr. Link was leading me up and down the gravel walk around his laboratory. On my legs, it was quite easy for him to pull me along and thus guide me. Little Terry gamboled along at our heels, barking joyfully. The dog had accepted me as a friend.

  I was by this time quite docile to Dr. Link's guidance. My impressionable mind had quietly accepted him as a necessary rein and check. I did, he told me later, make tentative movements in odd directions off the path, motivated by vague stimuli, but his firm arm pulling me back served instantly to keep me in line. He paraded up and down with me as one might with an irresponsible oaf.

  I would have kept on walking tirelessly for hours, but Dr. Link's burden of years quickly fatigued him and he led me inside. When he had safely gotten me seated in my metal chair, he clicked the switch on my chest that broke the electric current giving me life. And for the fourth time I knew that dreamless non-being which corresponded to my creator's periods of sleep.

  CHAPTER II: MY EDUCATION

  In three days I learned to talk reasonably well.

  I give Dr. Link as much credit as myself. In those three days he pointed out the names of all objects in the laboratory and around. This fund of two hundred or so nouns he supplemented with as many verbs of action as he could demonstrate. Once heard and learned, a word never again was forgotten or obscured to me. Instantaneous comprehension. Photographic memory. Those things I had.

  It is difficult to explain. Machinery is precise, unvarying. I am a machine. Electrons perform their tasks instantaneously. Electrons motivate my metallic brain.

  Thus, with the intelligence of a child of five at the end of those three days, Dr. Link taught me to read. My photoelectric eyes instantly grasped the connection between speech and letter, as my mentor pointed them out. Thought-association filled in the gaps of understanding. I perceived without delay that the word “lion,” for instance, pronounced in its peculiar way, represented a live animal crudely pictured in the book. I have never seen a lion. But I would know one the instant I did.

  From primers and first-readers I graduated in less than a week to adult books. Dr. Link laid out an extensive reading course for me, in his large library. It included fiction as well as factual matter. Into my receptive, retentive brain began to be poured a fund of information and knowledge never before equaled in that short period of time.

  There are other things to consider besides my “birth” and “education.” First of all, the housekeeper. She came in once a week to clean up the house for Dr. Link. He was a recluse, lived by himself, cooked for himself. Retired on an annuity from an invention years before.

  The housekeeper had seen me in the process of construction in the past years, but only as an inanimate caricature of a human body. Dr. Link should have known better. When the first Saturday of my life came around, he forgot it was the day she came. He was absorbedly pointing out to me that “to run” meant to go faster than “to walk."

  "Demonstrate,” Dr. Link asked as I claimed understanding.

  Obediently, I took a few slow steps before him. “Walking,” I said. Then I retreated a ways and lumbered forward again, running for a few steps. The stone floor clattered under my metallic feet.

  "Was—that—right?” I asked in my rather stentorian voice.

  At that moment a terrified shriek sounded from the doorway. The housekeeper came up just in time to see me perform.

  She screamed, making more noise than even I. “It's the Devil himself! Run, Dr. Link—run! Police—help—"

  She fainted dead away. He revived her and talked soothingly to her, trying to explain what I was, but he had to get a new housekeeper. After this he contrived to remember when Saturday came and on that day kept me hidden in a storeroom reading books.

  A trivial incident in itself, perhaps, but very significant, as you who will read this will agree.

  Two months after my awakening to life, Dr. Link one day spoke to me in a fashion other than as teacher to pupil; spoke to me as man to man.

  "You are the result of twenty years of effort,” he said, “and my success amazes even me. You are little short of being a human in mind. You are a monster, a creation, but you are basically human. You have no heredity. Your environment is molding you. You are the proof that mind is an electrical phenomenon, molded by environment. In human beings, their bodies—called heredity—are environment. But out of you I will make a mental wonder!"

  His eyes seemed to burn with a strange fire, but this softened as he went on.

  "I knew I had something unprecedented and vital twenty years ago when I perfected an iridium-sponge sensitive to the impact of a single electron. It was the sensitivity of thought! Mental currents in the human brain are of this micro-magnitude. I had the means now of duplicating mind-currents in an artificial medium. From that day to this I worked on the problem.

  "It was not long ago that I completed your ‘brain'—an intricate complex of iridium-sponge cells. Before I brought it to life, I had your body built by skilled artisans. I wanted you to begin life equipped to live and move in it as nearly in the human way as possible. How eagerly I awaited your debut into the world!"

  His eyes shone.

  "You surpassed my expectations. You are not merely a thinking robot. A metal man. You are—life! A new kind of life. You can be trained to think, to reason, to perform. In the future, your kind can be of inestimable aid to man and his civilization. You are the first of your kind."

  The days and weeks slipped by. My mind matured and gathered knowledge steadily from Dr. Link's library. I was able, in time, to scan and absorb a page at a time of reading matter, as readily as human eyes can scan lines. You know of the television principles pencil of light moving hundreds of times a second over the object to be transmitted. My eyes, triggered with speedy electrons, could do the same. What I read was absorbed—memorized—instantly. From then on it was part of my knowledge.

  Scientific subjects particularly claimed my attention. There was always something indefinable about human things, something I could not quite grasp, but science digested easily, in my science-compounded brain. It was not long before I knew all about myself and why I “ticked,” much more fully than most humans know why they live, think and move.

  Mechanical principles became starkly simple to me. I made suggestions for improvements in my own make-up that Dr. Link readily agreed upon correcting. We added little universals in my fingers, for example, that made them almost as supple as their human models.

  Almost, I say. The human body is a marvelously perfected organic machine. No robot will ever equal i
t in sheer efficiency and adaptability. I realized my limitations.

  Perhaps you will realize what I mean when I say that my eyes cannot see colors. Or rather, I see just one color, in the blue range. It would take an impossibly complex series of units, bigger than my whole body, to enable me to see all colors. Nature has packed all that in two globes the size of marbles, for her robots. She had a billion years to do it. Dr. Link only had twenty years.

  But my brain, that was another matter. Equipped with only the two senses of one-color sight and limited sound, it was yet capable of furnishing a full experience. Smell and taste are gastronomic senses. I do not need them. Feeling is a device of Nature's to protect a fragile body. My body is not fragile.

  Sight and sound are the only two cerebral senses. Einstein, color-blind, half-deaf, and with deadened senses of taste, smell and feeling, would still have been Einstein—mentally.

  Sleep is only a word to me. When Dr. Link knew he could trust me to take care of myself, he dispensed with the nightly habit of “turning me off.” While he slept, I spent the hours reading.

  He taught me how to remove the depleted storage battery in the pelvic part of my metal frame when necessary and replace it with a fresh one. This had to be done every 48 hours. Electricity is my life and strength. It is my food. Without it I am so much metal junk.

  But I have explained enough of myself. I suspect that ten thousand more pages of description would make no difference in your attitude, you who are even now—

  An amusing thing happened one day, not long ago. Yes, I can be amused too. I cannot laugh, but my brain can appreciate the ridiculous. Dr. Link's perennial gardener came to the place, unannounced. Searching for the doctor to ask how he wanted the hedges cut, the man came upon us in the back, walking side by side for Dr. Link's daily light exercise.

  The gardener's mouth began speaking and then ludicrously gaped open and stayed that way as he caught a full glimpse of me. But he did not faint in fright as the housekeeper had. He stood there, paralyzed.

  "What's the matter, Charley?” queried Dr. Link sharply. He was so used to me that for the moment he had no idea why the gardener should be astonished.

  "That—that thingy!” gasped the man, finally.

  "Oh. Well, it's a robot,” said Dr. Link. “Haven't you ever heard of them? An intelligent robot. Speak to him, he'll answer."

  After some urging, the gardener sheepishly turned to me. “How do you do, Mr. Robot,” he stammered.

  "How do you do, Mr. Charley,” I returned promptly, seeing the amusement in Dr. Link's face. “Nice weather, isn't it?"

  For a moment the man looked ready to shriek and run. But he squared his shoulders and curled his lip. “Trickery!” he scoffed. “That thing can't be intelligent. You've got a phonograph inside of it. How about the hedges?"

  "I'm afraid,” murmured Dr. Link with a chuckle, “that the robot is more intelligent than you, Charley!” But he said it so the man didn't hear, and then directed how to trim the hedges. Charley didn't do a good job. He seemed to be nervous all day.

  CHAPTER III: MY FATE

  One day Dr. Link stared at me proudly.

  "You have now,” he said, “the intellectual capacity of a man of many years. Soon I'll announce you to the world. You shall take your place in our world, as an independent entity—as a citizen!"

  "Yes, Dr. Link,” I returned. “Whatever you say. You are my master."

  "Don't think of it that way,” he admonished. “In the same sense, you are my son. But a father is not a son's master after his maturity. You have gained that status.” He frowned thoughtfully. “You must have a name! Adam! Adam Link!"

  He faced me and put a hand on my shiny chromium shoulder. “Adam Link, what is your choice of future life?"

  "I want to serve you, Dr. Link."

  "But you will outlive me! And you may outlive several other masters!"

  "I will serve any master who will have me,” I said slowly. I had been thinking about this before. “I have been created by man. I will serve man."

  Perhaps he was testing me. I don't know. But my answers obviously pleased him. “Now,” he said, “I will have no fears in announcing you!"

  The next day he was dead. That was three days ago. I was in the storeroom, reading—it was housekeeper's day. I heard the noise. I ran up the steps, into the laboratory. Dr. Link lay with skull crushed. A loose angle-iron of a transformer hung on an insulated platform on the wall had slipped and crashed down on his head while he sat there before his workbench. I raised his head, slumped over the bench, to better see the wound. Death was instantaneous.

  These are the facts. I turned the angle-iron back myself. The blood on my fingers resulted when I raised his head, not knowing for the moment that he was stark dead. In a sense, I was responsible for the accident, for in my early days of walking I had once blundered against the transformer shelf and nearly torn it loose. We should have repaired it.

  But that I am his murderer, as you all believe, is not true.

  The housekeeper had also heard the noise and came from the house to investigate. She took one look. She saw me bending over the doctor, his head torn and bloody—she fled, too frightened to make a sound.

  It would be hard to describe my thoughts. The little dog Terry sniffed at the body, sensed the calamity, and went down on his belly, whimpering. He felt the loss of a master. So did I. I am not sure what your emotion of sorrow is. Perhaps I cannot feel that deeply. But I do know that the sunlight seemed suddenly faded to me.

  My thoughts are rapid. I stood there only a minute, but in that time I made up my mind to leave. This again has been misinterpreted. You considered that an admission of guilt, the criminal escaping from the scene of his crime. In my case it was a full-fledged desire to go out into the world, find a place in it.

  Dr. Link, and my life with him, were a closed book. No use now to stay and watch ceremonials. He had launched my life. He was gone. My place now must be somewhere, out in the world I had never seen. No thought entered my mind of what you humans would decide about me. I thought all men were like Dr. Link.

  First of all I took a fresh battery, replacing my half-depleted one. I would need another in 48 hours, but I was sure this would be taken care of by anyone to whom I made the request.

  I left. Terry followed me. He has been with me all the time. I have heard a dog is man's best friend. Even a metal man's.

  My conceptions of geography soon proved hazy at best. I had pictured earth as teeming with humans and cities, with not much space between. I had estimated that the city Dr. Link spoke of must be just over the hill from his secluded country home. Yet the woods I traversed seemed endless.

  It was not till hours later that I met the little girl. She had been dangling her bare legs into a brook, sitting on a flat rock. I approached to ask where the city was. She turned when I was still thirty feet away. My internal mechanisms do not run silently. They make a steady noise that Dr. Link always described as a handful of coins jingling together.

  The little girl's face contorted as soon as she saw me. I must be a fearsome sight indeed in your eyes. Screaming her fear, she blindly jumped up, lost her balance and fell into the stream.

  I knew what drowning was. I knew I must save her. I knelt at the rock's edge and reached down for her. I managed to grasp one of her arms and pull her up. I could feel the bones of her thin little wrist crack. I had forgotten my strength.

  I had to grasp her little leg with my other hand, to pull her up. The livid marks showed on her white flesh when I laid her on the grass. I can guess now what interpretation was put on all this. A terrible, raving monster, I had tried to drown her and break her little body in wanton savageness!

  You others of her picnic party appeared then, in answer to her cries. You women screamed and fainted. You men snarled and threw rocks at me. But what strange bravery imbued the woman, probably the child's mother, who ran up under my very feet to snatch up her loved one? I admired her. The rest of you I despised fo
r not listening to my attempts to explain. You drowned out my voice with your screams and shouts.

  "Dr. Link's robot!—it's escaped and gone crazy!—he shouldn't have made that monster!—get the police!—nearly killed poor Frances!—"

  With these garbled shouts to one another, you withdrew. You didn't notice that Terry was barking angrily—at you. Can you fool a dog? We went on.

  Now my thoughts really became puzzled. Here at last was something I could not rationalize. This was so different from the world I had learned about in books. What subtle things lay behind the printed words that I had read? What had happened to the sane and orderly world my mind had conjured for itself?

  Night came. I had to stop and stay still in the dark. I leaned against a tree motionlessly. For a while I heard little Terry snooping around in the brush for something to eat. I heard him gnawing something. Then later he curled up at my feet and slept. The hours passed slowly. My thoughts would not come to a conclusion about the recent occurrence. Monster! Why had they believed that?

  Once in the distance, I heard a murmur as of a crowd of people. I saw some lights. They had significance the next day. At dawn I nudged Terry with my toe as we walked on. The same murmur arose, approached. Then I saw you, a crowd of you, men with clubs, scythes and guns. You spied me and a shout went up. You hung together as you advanced.

  Then something struck my frontal plate with a sharp clang. One of you had shot.

  "Stop! Wait!” I shouted, knowing I must talk to you, find out why I was being hunted like a wild beast. I had taken a step forward, hand upraised. But you would not listen. More shots rang out, denting my metal body. I turned and ran. A bullet in a vital spot would ruin me, as much as a human.

  You came after me like a pack of hounds, but I outdistanced you, powered by steel muscles. Terry fell behind, lost. Then, as afternoon came, I realized I must get a newly charged battery. Already my limbs were moving sluggishly.

  I knew I must find a road to the city. I finally came upon a winding dirt road and followed it in hope. When I saw a car parked at the side of the road ahead of me, I knew I was saved, for Dr. Link's car had had the same sort of battery I used. There was no one around the car. Much as a starving man would take the first meal available, I raised the floorboards and in a short while had substituted batteries.