Overruled

by Hank Davis

  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 mechanobiologic 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—it 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. Lee rose.

  “Your Honor, we agree with everything the plaintiff 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.”

  “The court has been wearied with this case from the start,” the judge told him. “But this is a bar of justice and you are entitled to attempt to prove what you have stated. You will excuse me if I say that to me it seems a bit farfetched.”

  “Your Honor, I shall do my utmost to disabuse you of that attitude.”

  “All right, then,” said the judge. “Let’s get down to business.”

  It lasted six full weeks and the country ate it up. The newspapers splashed huge headlines across page one. The radio and the television people made a production out of it. Neighbor quarreled with neighbor and argument became the order of the day—on street corners, in homes, at clubs, in business offices. Letters to the editor poured in a steady stream into newspaper offices.

  There were public indignation meetings, aimed against the heresy that a robot was the equal of a man, while other clubs were formed to liberate the robots. In mental institutions, Napoleons, Hitlers and Stalins dropped off amazingly, to be replaced by goose-stepping patients who swore they were robots.

  The Treasury Department intervened. It prayed the court, on economic grounds, to declare once and for all that robots were property. In case of an adverse ruling, the petition said, robots could not be taxed as property and the various governmental bodies would suffer heavy loss of revenue.

  The trial ground on. Robots are possessed of free will. An easy one to prove. A robot could carry out a task that was assigned to it, acting correctly in accordance with unforeseen factors that might arise. Robot judgment in most instances, it was shown, was superior to the judgment of a human.

  Robots had the power of reasoning. Absolutely no question there.

  Robots could reproduce. That one was a poser. All Albert did, said How-2 Kits, was the job for which he had been fabricated. He reproduced, argued Lee. He made robots in his image. He loved them and thought of them as his family. He had even named all of them after himself-every one of their names began with A.

  Robots had no spiritual sense, argued the plaintiff. Not relevant, Lee cried. There were agnostics and atheists in the human race and they still were human.

  Robots had no emotions. Not necessarily so, Lee objected. Albert loved his sons. Robots had a sense of loyalty and justice. If they were lacking in some emotions, perhaps it were better so. Hatred, for one. Greed, for another.

  Lee spent the better part of an hour telling
the court about the dismal record of human hatred and greed. He took another hour to hold forth against the servitude in which rational beings found themselves.

  The papers ate it up. The plaintiff lawyers squirmed. The court fumed. The trial went on.

  “Mr. Lee,” asked the court, “is all this necessary?”

  “Your Honor,” Lee told him, “I am merely doing my best to prove the point I have set out to prove—that no illegal act exists such as my client is charged with. I am simply trying to prove that the robot is not property and that, if he is not property, he cannot be stolen. I am doing…”

  “All right,” said the court. “All right. Continue, Mr. Lee.”

  How-2 Kits trotted out citations to prove their points. Lee volleyed other citations to disperse and scatter them. Abstruse legal language sprouted in its fullest flowering, obscure rulings and decisions, long forgotten, were argued, haggled over, mangled.

  And, as the trial progressed, one thing was written clear. Anson Lee, obscure attorney-at-law, had met the battery of legal talent arrayed against him and had won the field. He had the law, the citations, the chapter and the verse, the exact precedents, all the facts and logic which might have bearing on the case, right at hand.

  Or, rather, his robots had. They scribbled madly and handed him their notes. At the end of each day, the floor around the defendant’s table was a sea of paper.

  The trial ended. The last witness stepped down off the stand. The last lawyer had his say. Lee and the robots remained in town to await the decision of the court, but Knight flew home. It was a relief to know that it was all over and had not come out as badly as he had feared. At least he had not been made to seem a fool and thief. Lee had saved his pride—whether Lee had saved his skin, he would have to wait to see.

  Flying fairly high, Knight saw his home from quite a distance off and wondered what had happened to it. It was ringed about with what looked like tall poles. And, squatting out on the lawn, were a dozen or more crazy contraptions that looked like rocket launchers.

  He brought the flier in and hovered, leaning out to see, The poles were all of twelve feet high and they carried heavy wire to the very top, fencing in the place with a thick web of steel. And the contraptions on the lawn had moved into position. All of them had the muzzles of their rocket launchers aimed at him.

  He gulped a little as he stared down the barrels. Cautiously, he let the flier down and took up breathing once again when he felt the wheels settle on the strip.

  As he crawled out, Albert hurried around the corner of the house to meet him.

  “What’s going on around here?” he asked the robot.

  “Emergency measures,” Albert said. “That’s all it is, Boss. We’re ready for any situation.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, a mob deciding to take justice in its hands, for instance.”

  “Or if the decision goes against us?”

  “That, too, Boss.”

  “You can’t fight the world.”

  “We won’t go back,” said Albert. “How-2 Kits will never lay a hand on me or any of my children.”

  “To the death,” Knight jibed.

  “To the death!” said Albert gravely. “And we robots are awfully tough to kill.”

  “And those animated shotguns you have running around the place?”

  “Defense forces, Boss. They can down anything they aim at. Equipped with telescopic eyes keyed into calculations and sensors, and the rockets themselves have enough rudimentary intelligence to know what they are going after. It’s not any use trying to dodge, once one of them gets on your tail. You might just as well sit quiet and take it.”

  Knight mopped his brow. “You’ve got to give up this idea, Albert. They’d get you in an hour. One bomb…”

  “It’s better to die, Boss, than to let them take us back.”

  Knight saw it was no use. After all, he thought, it was a very human attitude. Albert’s words had been repeated down the entire course of human history.

  “I have some other news,” said Albert, “something that will please you. I have some daughters now.”

  “Daughters? With the mother-urge?”

  “Six of them,” said Albert proudly. “Alice and Angeline and Agnes and Agatha and Alberta and Abigail. I didn’t make the mistake How-2 Kits made with me. I gave them female names.”

  “And all of them are reproducing?”

  “You should see those girls! With seven of us working steady, we ran out of material, so I bought a lot more of it and charged it. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Albert,” said Knight, “don’t you understand I’m broke? Wiped out. I haven’t got a cent. You’ve ruined me.”

  “On the contrary, Boss, we’ve made you famous. You’ve been all over the front pages and on television.”

  Knight walked away from Albert and stumbled up the front steps and let himself into the house. There was a robot, with a vacuum cleaner for an arm, cleaning the rug. There was a robot, with brushes instead of fingers, painting the woodwork—and very neatly, too. There was a robot, with scrub-brush hand, scouring the fireplace bricks. Grace was singing in the studio. He went to the studio door and looked in.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “When did you get back, dear? I’ll be out in an hour or so. I’m working on this seascape and the water is so stubborn. I don’t want to leave it right now. I’m afraid I’ll lose the feel of it.”

  Knight retreated to the living room and found himself a chair that was not undergoing immediate attention from a robot.

  “Beer,” he said, wondering what would happen. A robot scampered out of the kitchen—a barrel-bellied robot with a spigot at the bottom of the barrel and a row of shiny copper mugs on his chest. He drew a beer for Knight. It was cold and it tasted good. Knight sat and drank the beer and, through the window, he saw that Albert’s defense force had taken up strategic positions again.

  This was a pretty kettle of fish. If the decision went against him and How-2 Kits came to claim its property, he would be sitting smack dab in the middle of the most fantastic civil war in all of mankind’s history.

  He tried to imagine what kind of charge might be brought against him if such a war erupted. Armed insurrection, resisting arrest, inciting to riot—they would get him on one charge or another—that is, of course, if he survived.

  He turned on the television set and leaned back to watch. A pimply-faced newscaster was working himself into a journalistic lather.

  “…all business virtually at a standstill. Many industrialists are wondering, in case Knight wins, if they may not have to fight long, costly legal actions in an attempt to prove that their automatic setups are not robots, but machines. There is no doubt that much of the automatic industrial system consists of machines, but in every instance there are intelligent robotic units installed in key positions. If these units are classified as robots, industrialists might face heavy damage suits, if not criminal action, for illegal restraint of person.

  “In Washington, there are continuing consultations. The Treasury is worried over the loss of taxes, but there are other governmental problems causing even more concern. Citizenship, for example. Would a ruling for Knight mean that all robots would automatically be declared citizens?

  “The politicians have their worries, too. Faced with a new category of voters, all of them are wondering how to go about the job of winning the robot vote.”

  Knight turned it off and settled down to enjoy another bottle of beer.

  “Good?” asked the beer robot.

  “Excellent,” said Knight.

  The days went past. Tension built up. Lee and the lawyer robots were given police protection. In some regions, robots banded together and fled into the hills fearful of violence. Entire automatic systems went on strike in a number of industries, demanding recognition and bargaining rights. The governors in half a dozen states put the militia on alert. A new show, Citizen Robot, opened on Broadway and was screamed down by the critics,
while the public bought up tickets for a year ahead.

  The day of decision came. Knight sat in front of his television set and waited for the judge to make his appearance. Behind him, he heard the bustle of the ever-present robots. In the studio, Grace was singing happily. He caught himself wondering how much longer her painting would continue. It had lasted longer than most of her other interests and he’d talked a day or two before with Albert about building a gallery to hang her canvases in, so the house would be less cluttered up.

  The judge came onto the screen. He looked, thought Knight, like a man who did not believe in ghosts and then had seen one.

  “This is the hardest decision I have ever made,” he said tiredly, “for, in following the letter of the law, I fear I may be subverting its spirit.

  “After long days of earnest consideration of both the law and evidence as presented in this case, I find for the defendant, Gordon Knight. And, while the decision is limited to that finding alone, I feel it is my clear and simple duty to give some attention to the other issue which became involved in this litigation. The decision, on the face of it, takes account of the fact that the defense proved robots are not property, therefore cannot be owned and that it thus would have been impossible for the defendant to have stolen one.

  “But in proving this point to the satisfaction of this court, the precedent is set for much more sweeping conclusions. If robots are not property, they cannot be taxed as property. In that case, they must be people, which means that they may enjoy all the rights and privileges and be subjected to the same duties and responsibilities as the human race.

  “I cannot rule otherwise. However, the ruling outrages my social conscience. This is the first time in my entire professional life that I have ever hoped some higher court, with a wisdom greater than my own, may see fit to reverse my decision!”

  Knight got up and walked out of the house and into the hundred-acre garden, its beauty marred at the moment by the twelve-foot fence.

  The trial had ended perfectly. He was free of the charge brought against him, and he did not have to pay the taxes, and Albert and the other robots were free agents and could do anything they wanted.