The Iron Chancellor

by Robert Silverberg

  Carmichael considered that. Perhaps, he thought, I am being a little oversevere. And the thought of lemon pie was a tempting one. He was pretty hungry himself.

  “All right,” he said with feigned reluctance. “I guess a bit of pie won’t wreck the plan. In fact, I suppose I’ll have some myself. Joey, why don’t you—”

  “Begging your pardon,” a purring voice said behind him. Carmichael jumped half an inch. It was the robot, Bismarck. “It would be most unfortunate if you were to have pie now, Mr. Carmichael. My calculations are very precise.”

  Carmichael saw the angry gleam in his son’s eye, but the robot seemed extraordinarily big at that moment, and it happened to stand between him and the kitchen.

  He sighed weakly. “Let’s forget the lemon pie, Joey.”

  After two full days of the Bismarckian diet, Carmichael discovered that his inner resources of will power were beginning to crumble. On the third day he tossed away the printed lunchtime diet and went out irresponsibly with MacDougal and Hennessey for a six-course lunch, complete with cocktails. It seemed to him that he hadn’t tasted real food since the robot arrived.

  That night, he was able to tolerate the seven-hundred-calorie dinner without any inward grumblings, being still well lined with lunch. But Ethel and Myra and Joey were increasingly irritable. It seemed that the robot had usurped Ethel’s job of handling the daily marketing and had stocked in nothing but a huge supply of healthy low-calorie foods. The larder now bulged with wheat germ, protein bread, irrigated salmon, and other hitherto unfamiliar items. Myra had taken up biting her nails; Joey’s mood was one of black sullen brooding, and Carmichael knew how that could lead to trouble quickly with a sixteen-year-old.

  After the meager dinner, he ordered Bismarck to go to the basement and stay there until summoned.

  The robot said, “I must advise you, sir, that I will detect indulgence in any forbidden foods in my absence and adjust for it in the next meals.”

  “You have my word,” Carmichael said, thinking it was indeed queer to have to pledge on your honor to your own robot. He waited until the massive servitor had vanished below; then he turned to Joey and said, “Get the instruction manual, boy.”

  Joey grinned in understanding. Ethel said, “Sam, what are you going to do?”

  Carmichael patted his shrunken waistline. “I’m going to take a can opener to that creature and adjust his programming. He’s overdoing this diet business. Joey, have you found the instructions on how to reprogram the robot?”

  “Page 167. I’ll get the tool kit, Dad.”

  “Right.” Carmichael turned to the robutler, who was standing by dumbly, in his usual forward-stooping posture of expectancy. “Clyde, go down below and tell Bismarck we want him right away.”

  Moments later, the two robots appeared. Carmichael said to the roboservitor, “I’m afraid it’s necessary for us to change your program. We’ve overestimated our capacity for losing weight.”

  “I beg you to reconsider, sir. Extra weight is harmful to every vital organ in the body. I plead with you to maintain my scheduling unaltered.”

  “I’d rather cut my own throat. Joey, inactivate him and do your stuff.”

  Grinning fiercely, the boy stepped forward and pressed the stud that opened the robot’s ribcage. A frightening assortment of gears, cams and translucent cables became visible inside the robot. With a small wrench in one hand and the open instruction book in the other, Joey prepared to make the necessary changes, while Carmichael held his breath and a pall of silence descended on the living room. Even old Clyde leaned forward to have a better view.

  Joey muttered, “Lever F, with the yellow indicia, is to be advanced one notch…umm. Now twist Dial B9 to the left, thereby opening the taping compartment and—oops!”

  Carmichael heard the clang of a wrench and saw the bright flare of sparks; Joey leaped back, cursing with surprisingly mature skill. Ethel and Myra gasped simultaneously.

  “What happened?” four voices—Clyde’s coming in last—demanded.

  “Dropped the damn wrench,” Joey said. “I guess I shorted out something in there.”

  The robot’s eyes were whirling satanically and its voice box was emitting an awesome twelve-cycle rumble. The great metal creature stood stiffly in the middle of the living room; with brusque gestures of its big hands, it slammed shut the open chest plates.

  “We’d better call Mr. Robinson,” Ethel said worriedly. “A short-circuited robot is likely to explode, or worse.”

  “We should have called Robinson in the first place,” Carmichael murmured bitterly. “It’s my fault for letting Joey tinker with an expensive and delicate mechanism like that. Myra, get me the card Mr. Robinson left.”

  “Gee, Dad, this is the first time I’ve ever had anything like that go wrong,” Joey insisted. “I didn’t know—”

  “You’re darned right you didn’t know.” Carmichael took the card from his daughter and started towards the phone. “I hope we can reach him at this hour. If we can’t—”

  Suddenly Carmichael felt cold fingers prying the card from his hand. He was so startled he relinquished it without a struggle. He watched as Bismarck efficiently ripped it into little fragments and shoved them into a wall disposal unit.

  The robot said, “There will be no further meddling with my program tapes.” Its voice was deep and strangely harsh.

  “What—”

  “Mr. Carmichael, today you violated the program I set down for you. My perceptors reveal that you consumed an amount far in excess of your daily lunchtime requirement.”

  “Sam, what—”

  “Quiet, Ethel. Bismarck, I order you to shut yourself off at once.”

  “My apologies, sir. I cannot serve you if I am shut off.”

  “I don’t want you to serve me. You’re out of order. I want you to remain still until I can phone the repairman and get him to service you.”

  Then he remembered the card that had gone into the disposal unit. He felt a faint tremor of apprehension.

  “You took Robinson’s card and destroyed it.”

  “Further alteration of my circuits would be detrimental to the Carmichael family,” said the robot. “I cannot permit you to summon the repairman.”

  “Don’t get him angry, Dad,” Joey warned. “I’ll call the police. I’ll be back in—”

  “You will remain within this house,” the robot said. Moving with impressive speed on its oiled treads, it crossed the room, blocking the door, and reached far above its head to activate the impassable privacy field that protected the house. Carmichael watched, aghast, as the inexorable robotic fingers twisted and manipulated the field controls.

  “I have now reversed the polarity of the house privacy field,” the robot announced. “Since you are obviously not to be trusted to keep to the diet I prescribe, I cannot allow you to leave the premises. You will remain within and continue to obey my beneficial advice.”

  Calmly, he uprooted the telephone. Next the windows were opaqued and the stud broken off. Finally, the robot seized the instruction book from Joey’s numbed hands and shoved it into the disposal unit.

  “Breakfast will be served at the usual time,” Bismarck said mildly. “For optimum purposes of health, you are all to be asleep by 2300 hours. I shall leave you now, until morning. Good night.”

  Carmichael did not sleep well that night, nor did he eat well the next day. He awoke late, for one thing—well past nine. He discovered that someone, obviously Bismarck, had neatly canceled out the impulses from the housebrain that woke him at seven each morning.

  The breakfast menu was toast and black coffee. Carmichael ate disgruntledly, not speaking, indicating by brusque scowls that he did not want to be spoken to. After the miserable meal had been cleared away, he surreptitiously tiptoed to the front door in his dressing gown, and darted a hand towards the handle.

  The door refused to budge. He pushed until sweat dribbled down his face. He heard Ethel whisper warningly, “Sam—” and a mo
ment later cool metallic fingers gently disengaged him from the door.

  Bismarck said, “I beg your pardon, sir. The door will not open. I explained this last night.”

  Carmichael gazed sourly at the gimmicked control box of the privacy field. The robot had them utterly hemmed in. The reversed privacy field made it impossible for them to leave the house; it cast a sphere of force around the entire detached dwelling. In theory, the field could be penetrated from outside, but nobody was likely to come calling without an invitation. Not here in Westley. It wasn’t one of those neighborly subdivisions where everybody knew everybody else. Carmichael had picked it for that reason.

  “Damn you,” he growled, “you can’t hold us prisoners in here!”

  “My intent is only to help you,” said the robot, in a mechanical yet dedicated voice. “My function is to supervise your diet. Since you will not obey willingly, obedience must be enforced—for your own good.”

  Carmichael scowled and walked away. The worst part of it was that the roboservitor sounded so sincere!

  Trapped. The phone connection was severed. The windows were darkened. Somehow, Joey’s attempt at repairs had resulted in a short circuit of the robot’s obedience filters, and had also exaggeratedly stimulated its sense of function. Now Bismarck was determined to make them lose weight if it had to kill them to do so.

  And that seemed very likely.

  Blockaded, the Carmichael family met in a huddled little group to whisper plans for a counterattack. Clyde stood watch, but the robutler seemed to be in a state of general shock since the demonstration of the servitor-robot’s independent capacity for action, and Carmichael now regarded him as undependable.

  “He’s got the kitchen walled off with some kind of electronic-based force web,” Joey said. “He must have built it during the night. I tried to sneak in and scrounge some food, and got nothing but a flat nose for trying.”

  “I know,” Carmichael said sadly. “He built the same sort of doohickey around the bar. Three hundred credits of good booze in there and I can’t even grab the handle!”

  “This is no time to worry about drinking,” Ethel said morosely. “We’ll be skeletons any day.”

  “It isn’t that bad, Mom!” Joey said.

  “Yes, it is!” cried Myra. “I’ve lost five pounds in four days!”

  “Is that so terrible?”

  “I’m wasting away,” she sobbed. “My figure—it’s vanishing! And—”

  “Quiet,” Carmichael whispered. “Bismarck’s coming!”

  The robot emerged from the kitchen, passing through the force barrier as if it had been a cobweb. It seemed to have effect on humans only, Carmichael thought. “Lunch will be served in eight minutes,” it said obsequiously, and returned to its lair.

  Carmichael glanced at his watch. The time was 1230 hours. “Probably down at the office they’re wondering where I am,” he said. “I haven’t missed a day’s work in years.”

  “They won’t care,” Ethel said. “An executive isn’t required to account for every day off he takes, you know.”

  “But they’ll worry after three or four days, won’t they?” Myra asked. “Maybe they’ll try to phone—or even send a rescue mission!”

  From the kitchen, Bismarck said coldly, “There will be no danger of that. While you slept this morning, I notified your place of employment that you were resigning.”

  Carmichael gasped. Then, recovering, he said: “You’re lying! The phone’s cut off—and you never would have risked leaving the house, even if we were asleep!”

  “I communicated with them via a microwave generator I constructed with the aid of your son’s reference books last night,” Bismarck replied. “Clyde reluctantly supplied me with the number. I also phoned your bank and instructed them to handle for you all such matters as tax payments, investment decisions, etc. To forestall difficulties, let me add that a force web will prevent access on your part to the electronic equipment in the basement. I will be able to conduct such communication with the outside world as will be necessary for your welfare, Mr. Carmichael. You need have no worries on that score.”

  “No,” Carmichael echoed hollowly. “No worries.”

  He turned to Joey. “We’ve got to get out of here. Are you sure there’s no way of disconnecting the privacy field?”

  “He’s got one of his force fields rigged around the control box. I can’t even get near the thing.”

  “If only we had an iceman, or an oilman, the way the old-time houses did,” Ethel said bitterly. “He’d show up and come inside and probably he’d know how to shut the field off. But not here. Oh, no. We’ve got a shiny chrome-plated cryostat in the basement that dishes out lots of liquid helium to run the fancy cryotronic super-cooled power plant that gives us heat and light, and we have enough food in the freezer to last for at least a decade or two, and so we can live like this for years, a neat little self-contained island in the middle of civilization, with nobody bothering us, nobody wondering about us, with Sam Carmichael’s pet robot to feed us whenever and as little as it pleases—”

  There was a cutting edge to her voice that was dangerously close to hysteria.

  “Ethel, please,” said Carmichael.

  “Please what? Please keep quiet? Please stay calm? Sam, we’re prisoners in here!”

  “I know. You don’t have to raise your voice.”

  “Maybe if I do, someone will hear us and come get us out,” she replied more coolly.

  “It’s four hundred feet to the next home, dear. And in the seven years we’ve lived here, we’ve had about two visits from our neighbors. We paid a stiff price for seclusion and now we’re paying a stiffer one. But please keep under control, Ethel.”

  “Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll figure a way out of this,” Joey said reassuringly.

  In one corner of the living room, Myra was sobbing quietly to herself, blotching her makeup. Carmichael felt a faintly claustrophobic quiver. The house was big, three levels and twelve rooms, but even so he could get tired of it very quickly.

  “Luncheon is served,” the roboservitor announced in booming tones.

  And tired of lettuce-and-tomato lunches, too, Carmichael added silently; as he shepherded his family towards the dining room for their meager midday meal.

  “You have to do something about this, Sam,” Ethel Carmichael said on the third day of their imprisonment.

  He glared at her. “Have to, eh? And just what am I supposed to do?”

  “Daddy, don’t get excited,” Myra said.

  He whirled on her. “Don’t tell me what I should or shouldn’t do!”

  “She can’t help it, dear. We’re all a little overwrought. After all, cooped up here—”

  “I know. Like lambs in a pen,” he finished acidly. “Except that we’re not being fattened for slaughter. We’re—being thinned, and for our own alleged good!”

  Carmichael subsided gloomily. Toast-and-black-coffee, lettuce-and-tomato, rare-steak-and-peas. Bismarck’s channels seemed to have frozen permanently at that daily menu.

  But what could he do?

  Contact with the outside world was impossible. The robot had erected a bastion in the basement from which he conducted such little business with the world as the Carmichael family had. Generally, they were self-sufficient. And Bismarck’s force fields ensured the impossibility of any attempts to disconnect the outer sheath, break into the basement, or even get at the food supply or the liquor. It was all very neat, and the four of them were fast approaching a state of starvation.

  “Sam?”

  He lifted his head wearily. “What is it, Ethel?”

  “Myra had an idea before. Tell him, Myra.”

  “Oh, it would never work,” Myra said demurely.

  “Tell him!”

  “Well—Dad, you could try to turn Bismarck off.”

  “Huh?” Carmichael grunted.

  “I mean if you or Joey could distract him somehow, then Joey or you could open him up again and—”


  “No,” Carmichael snapped. “That thing’s seven feet tall and weighs three hundred pounds. If you think I’m going to wrestle with it—”

  “We could let Clyde try,” Ethel suggested.

  Carmichael shook his head vehemently. “The carnage would be frightful.”

  Joey said, “Dad, it may be our only hope.”

  “You too?” Carmichael asked.

  He took a deep breath. He felt himself speared by two deadly feminine glances, and he knew there was no hope but to try it. Resignedly, he pushed himself to his feet and said, “Okay. Clyde, go call Bismarck. Joey, I’ll try to hang on to his arms while you open up his chest. Yank anything you can.”

  “Be careful,” Ethel warned. “If there’s an explosion—”

  “If there’s an explosion, we’re all free,” Carmichael said testily. He turned to see the broad figure of the roboservitor standing at the entrance to the living room.

  “May I be of service, sir?”

  “You may,” Carmichael said. “We’re having a little debate here and we want your evidence. It’s a matter of defannizing the poozlestan and—Joey, open him up!”

  Carmichael grabbed for the robot’s arms, trying to hold them without getting hurled across the room, while his son clawed frantically at the stud that opened the robot’s innards. Carmichael anticipated immediate destruction—but, to his surprise, he found himself slipping as he tried to grasp the thick arms.

  “Dad, it’s no use. I—he—”

  Carmichael found himself abruptly four feet off the ground. He heard Ethel and Myra scream and Clyde’s “Do be careful, sir.”

  Bismarck was carrying them across the room, gently, cradling him in one giant arm and Joey in the other. It set them down on the couch and stood back.

  “Such an attempt is highly dangerous,” Bismarck said reprovingly. “It puts me in danger of harming you physically. Please avoid any such acts in the future.”

  Carmichael stared broodingly at his son. “Did you have the same trouble I did?”

  Joey nodded. “I couldn’t get within an inch of his skin. It stands to reason, though. He’s built one of those damned force screens around himself, too!”