by James White
Pictures of Alice in crisp blue and white, serious, dedicated, untouchable. With her short hair, unplucked eyebrows and thin lips, her face had resembled that of a studious young boy. When he had discovered that she was neither unapproachable nor untouchable — toward himself, anyway — he had once told her that she looked like a boy. They had been swimming and Alice’s dark brown hair was plastered tightly against her scalp, increasing the resemblance. A small, wet, feminine hand had made contact with his dripping back in a slap which stung, in memory, even now, and he had had to add a hasty qualifier to the effect that he meant from the neck up. Strangely enough, it had been later in that same day that he discovered that her lips were not thin, that they only seemed that way because she habitually kept them pressed together. Alice worried a lot, about examinations, her patients, about many trivial things which a less dedicated type would have ignored. She had very nice lips.
Pictures of Alice stretched on the sand behind the low rock which sheltered them from the wind, the heat of the sun covering them like a too-warm blanket. It was a picture in five sensual dimensions: the warm, damp smell as the sun blotted up the last remaining sea water from swimsuit and hair; the sensitive, tanned face looking up into his with eyes which seemed to grow larger and softer until he could see nothing else; then the kiss which, no matter how long, never lasted long enough; sometimes then she would sigh and murmur softly to him — but he rarely heard what she said, because the silly girl kept playing with his ears every time she tried to tell him something. They would kiss again and the emotional gale rising within him, the roaring in his ears and the mounting thunder of his pulse, would almost drown the slower thunder of the breakers, the great dead, filthy breakers which still crashed against a black and lifeless beach…
No matter how hard he tried to avoid it, his mind always slipped back into the same pit of despair. Until this moment “loneliness” had been a word with only a shadow of meaning. Until now nobody had known the crushing sense of loss and grief of a man whose loved ones, friends and everyone else have been taken away to leave him alone on a dead world. The fact that, by his own subjective time, only three or four days had gone by since Alice had kissed him a tearful good night and Pellew had growled his best wishes, and Ross’s world had contained a crowded hospital which was part of a civilization covering a planet whose every square yard had teemed with life of some sort, made his loss that much more terrible.
Many times Ross wanted to die. But he was too young and healthy to die of grief, and any more positive approach to dying would certainly be checked by the Sister. And so his despair found its lowest point and, because the only way to go from there was up, it began to recede. Not that he felt hope or anything like it; it was simply an acceptance of his present circumstances and the feeling that perhaps he should look more closely into them before he made a more determined effort to end it all. After all, he had a hospital, hundreds of robots and he didn’t know what else at his disposal and taking stock seemed like a good idea. Besides, it would keep his mind occupied.
At about the same time Ross made this decision he discovered that while the robot continued to ignore all his orders and/or invective, it would accede to reasonable requests of the type which convalescent patients could be expected to make. The Ward Sister did not forbid him to read.
The first book Ross asked for was, of course, Pellew’s diary. He read it through carefully from beginning to end, then reread it in conjunction with the green folder. Now he knew exactly what had happened to the hospital, and when. Pellew had begun his diary as the usual personal record of events, but toward the end it became a series of orders and suggestions directed toward Ross himself, when the doctor had realized that he was likely to be the only survivor with medical training.
Ross requested books which Dr. Pellew had suggested he study. Works on genetics for the most part, which must have been heavy going even for the good Doctor. For his own information he asked for books on robotics, and one of them turned out to be a popularization which he could just barely understand. He also began to make plans for the time when the Sister would stop calling him “Mr. Ross.”
Then one “morning” when the lights had come on after his eight-hour sleep period the robot placed three food cans beside him and asked, “Have you any instructions, sir?”
Ross said yes with quite unnecessary force, and while he was struggling into a fresh toga he began issuing orders. Some of them, he feared, were pretty tall orders. First, he wanted the case histories of the people who had died between the time of Pellew’s death and his own awakening. He was not hopeful of finding survivors in Deep Sleep, because the Sister had stated that there were none. But Pellew’s diary had said that Ross was the only survivor with medical training, which implied that there must be other survivors without training, and he wanted that point cleared up. Second, he asked for a census to be made of all the operable or repairable robots in the hospital, their numbers, types, relative intelligence and specialties. Any who had been placed in a state of low alert by humans prior to their deaths were to be reactivated. Third, he wanted a report on the water, food and power supply position.
Ross paused. From his reading he knew that the Sister had been relaying his instructions as he had spoken them to the other robots in this level, who, because Sister’s transmitter could not punch a signal through a mile of solid rock, would relay them physically to the higher levels.
He took a deep breath and went on: “You will detail cleaning and maintenance robots to repair and clear the damaged upper levels, including where necessary elevators and communication circuits. And I want a small area of the surface cleared of ash and soil samples taken at one-foot intervals to a depth of twenty feet. I’ll require samples of the air and sea water as well.”
Ross hesitated, then asked, “Does your training, I mean programming, enable you to do an air or soil analysis?”
“No, sir,” the Sister replied, “but there are Pathology Sisters capable of doing so.”
“Very well, put them onto it…”
He broke off as a Cleaner rolled in, deposited a small pile of folders beside him and began making his bed. The notes Ross had made while lying down were knocked to the floor, and the robot picked them up and thrust them into its built-in wastepaper basket.
“I want those back!” said Ross angrily. When the sheets had been returned, slightly crumpled, he added, “I’ll do my own tidying up from now on. No Cleaners are to come here unless I send for them.”
When the robot had gone Ross looked through the case histories it had brought. There were five of them, all relating to patients suffering from conditions which in his time had been considered fatal. Like him, their 508 forms bore the words treatment successful, to BE REVIVED PERMANENTLY IN — YEARS FROM THIS date — the number of years ranged from forty to seventy-five. Unlike his own, they were all stamped died during revivication, and in all cases the attending physician was down as Ward Sister 5B. In spite of himself, Ross shivered. For the first time since meeting the robots on the day after his awakening, he felt afraid of them.
“Why did these patients die?” he said, as steadily as he could manage. “Tell me the exact circumstances.”
The Sister ticked a couple of times, then said briskly, “Dr. Pellew’s orders were to awaken all Deep Sleep patients when their revivication was due, and he did not cancel or modify these orders prior to his death. We therefore revived all patients as they fell due, using robot assistance. Specifically, I attended to the revivication while two Cleaners restrained the patients so that they would not injure themselves by moving too suddenly or too soon. On awakening the patients displayed extreme agitation and tried to break free of the robot arms which were holding them immobile. Their struggles were of sufficient violence to cause internal damage from which they subsequently died.”
Remembering his nightmares in which the thin, metal arms of cleaning robots had gripped his chest, head and arms, Ross could understand the extreme agitation of
those patients. He knew now that they had been trying to keep him from injuring himself, but then he had been convinced that something was intent on crushing the life out of him. But at the thought of those five patients dying like that, patients over whom Doctors like Pellew and Hanson had labored for so long to cure and preserve so that their race might go on, Ross gritted his teeth. With five people — three of them had been female — and almost unlimited robot labor, much might have been accomplished. In time they might have filled these echoing, empty wards, might have spread to the surface and begun filling the world again. Before that happened Ross would have had to work himself to death, probably, bringing children into the world, anxiously guarding the health of its tiny population, coordinating human and robot effort and generally behaving like a frantic mother hen — that was what Pellew had had in mind for him, according to one of the last entries in the diary. It might not have been an entirely pleasant future, but Purpose would have obliterated Despair and loneliness would have again become a word which had only a shadow of meaning.
“You stupid, blundering machine!” he raged suddenly. “Didn’t you know they were long-term patients, from the prerobot era, and bound to be frightened by such an awakening? And why did you go on reviving them, letting them die, killing them! After the first patient died you should have tried—”
“My previous experience had been with short-term patients who showed no surprise at their awakening being supervised by a robot,” the Sister broke in. “And Dr. Pellew had promised to issue instructions regarding the six long-term patients, but he died before doing so. There are three possible reasons for his neglecting to do so: that he did not know what instructions to give; that he intended living through until the first patient was due and awakening him personally, because he had stated several times to me that he was a very lonely man; or that he knew what orders to give but simply forgot to give them, he being very old at that time and tending to forget things…”
“He wasn’t doddering,” said Ross angrily. “I’ve read his diary I know,”
“…But we had definite instructions to awaken these patients,” the Sister continued, as if he hadn’t spoken, “and had therefore no choice but to do so. This despite the fact that our basic function is to serve man and save men’s lives. We kept reviving the patients in the hope that some of them would survive the process, but none did. Then we came to you and were faced with a dilemma.
“To a robot,” it went on, “allowing a human to remain in Deep Sleep forever is the same as allowing him to die, and bringing one out of Deep Sleep was the same as killing him. And if we killed you, who were the last man, we would both fail in our purpose of saving human lives and at the same time remove our other reason for existence. We could not serve Man if there were no human beings left. That was why, when we commenced revivication on you and you began to display the same symptoms of increasing mental distress and violent muscular activity as had the others, I halted the process and returned you to Deep Sleep. In this I exceeded my instructions, but it seemed the only way possible at the time of not killing you…”
The Ward Sister became technical at that point as it went into details of conferences with various repair robots. As the most intelligent single robot in the hospital — the last modification produced by the great cyberneticist Courtland — the responsibility for solving the dilemma naturally fell on it. Its purpose in going to the repair robots was to have them try various modifications and extensions of its memory banks in the hope of emulating the creative or intuitive thinking used by humans in order to solve the problem. Whether the resultant modifications helped or not the Ward Sister had no way of knowing, but after several months and another halted revivication had passed, a new method of attacking the problem suggested itself…
’For a successful awakening I needed at least one human being in attendance,” the robot continued in its brisk, feminine voice, “and by breaking down the function of the human during such a time into separate parts, converting the large problem into several small ones, I arrived at the solution. The human had to be seen, heard and had to assist the patient physically to do some gentle exercise. I knew of one of Dr. Pellew’s ornaments which resembled a human being, and could be painted to increase that resemblance. I had access to tapes containing Dr. Pellew’s voice, which were edited to fit the situation, and the exercise was provided by causing you to go into the corridor for your file, which also began the process of reorientation. It remained only for us to keep out of sight until you understood what had happened while you were in Deep Sleep, which was supposed to be after your reading of Dr. Pellew’s diary. Instead, you ordered us to come out—”
“You’ve done very well,” said Ross heavily. “Mr. Courtland would be proud of you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“But you shouldn’t have bothered.”
The Sister began ticking at him.
Ross turned suddenly and strode out of the room, along the corridor and up the sloping ramp until he came to a compartment with maintenance on the door. With the Sister trailing a few yards behind, he entered and began searching the tool lockers until he found a long-handled wrench, which weighed about eight pounds and was over two feet long.
“I want you to do something for me,” Ross said in a mild voice. “I want you to stand still.” Then he swung the wrench against the robot’s smooth metal casing with all his strength.
The blow landed with a shock which jarred him to his heels and a crash which was the loudest noise he had heard since awakening. It battered in one of the flush panels, bludgeoning through the mass of delicate surgical and medical gadgetry underneath. From the wound multicolored blood spurted as underlying drug containers shattered, and three syringes on extensible arms sprang out and sagged downward. Ross swung again.
The second blow caused only a shallow dent, because the robot had moved away, and the third one missed entirely.
“Stand still!” said Ross thickly, raising his metal club again and aiming for the robot’s lenses. One of those last five patients had been a nineteen-year-old girl. An eye for an eye, he thought with a cold ferocity, and for a girl’s life a dead mass of scrap iron…
“Mr. Ross,” said the robot, retreating again, “you are not behaving in a sane—”
“This is a scientific experiment,” said Ross, a little breathlessly, “to determine whether or not you can feel pain. And I am not a patient, so call me ‘sir.’ ”
That was important, Ross told himself. If he gave good, logical reasons for wanting to smash it into its component nuts and bolts, he might get away with it — he would still be the boss. But once let it start thinking of him as a patient and then it would be the boss. He advanced again, silent and blank-faced, trying to hide his killing rage behind a facade of scientific curiosity. He had the Sister in a corner now.
One of the robot’s body panels opened briefly. Ross did not see or feel or smell anything. His wrench hit the floor an instant before he did, and he didn’t feel that because by that time he was asleep.
When Ross came to there was a big, multijointed angular object resembling a surrealistic spider working on the Ward Sister. Several of its panels had been detached, revealing a considerable amount of internal circuitry, and the overall effect seemed vaguely indecent to Ross. The Sister spoke first:
“The data which you required could have been obtained by a verbal request,” it said in the brisk, pleasant voice it always used no matter what the circumstances, “so that your experiment, which has caused me a temporary loss of efficiency, was unnecessary. I do not feel pain, or pleasure, in the manner of a human being although I am trained to observe and treat its symptoms in patients. Primarily I have been built to serve Man and anything which hinders my doing so causes me a robot equivalent of pain and anything which aids me toward that end is a form of pleasure. To expand that, pleasure lies in working as hard as possible at the direction of human beings, maintaining myself at peak efficiency to further that end, and avoidin
g all situations likely to bring about a loss of efficiency when such avoidance will not endanger a human.”
“So you got a kick out of knocking me over just now?” Ross said woozily. “An anesthetic gas, wasn’t it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ross shook his head. He was beginning to feel ashamed of his recent berserker rage — especially as it had been such a dishonest, camouflaged sort of rage — against this machine, which had, after all, been doing its best. He felt that he should apologize to the Sister, except that apologizing to a machine struck him as being ridiculous.
Awkwardly, he said, “Then I hurt you by causing a temporary loss of efficiency, and by defending yourself against a possible permanent loss of efficiency you gained pleasure. That makes us even.”
“We are not competing, sir,” the robot said. “You do not fully understand the position. All the robots here are your servants, because obeying you and protecting you gives us the only pleasure we are capable of experiencing. It is a matter of basic programming. If you should ever die that would hurt all of us very much.”
Ross felt a prickling among the short hairs of his neck. If you should ever die… The robot must surely know that all human beings died in time, so why should it use that particular form of wording? This posed an interesting psychological point, he thought, and one which he must go into thoroughly at some later date. An electronic brain which made Freudian slips was something to think about.
He climbed slowly to his feet and stood for a few minutes until a slight dizziness had passed, then walked across to Sister and the repair robot.
“I shall be finished in twenty minutes,” said the repair robot in a deep, masculine voice which matched its functional but unbeautiful body. “The damage is superficial.”
Ross nodded. He said, “Most of the books down here are medical texts, and medicine looks like becoming somewhat of a dead science at the moment. But there used to be a good patients’ library on the second level and it may still be there. I’m going up there to start learning something useful…”