Robots Have No Tails

by Henry Kuttner

  Gallegher’s jaw dropped. He breathed hoarsely, in an asthmatic fashion, as he stared at Smeith, who drew back.

  “Wires,” Gallegher whispered. “And a…a stereoscopic screen that can be viewed from any angle, you said—wires!”

  “Take him away,” Hopper ordered brusquely.

  Gallegher tried to wrench away from the officers holding him. “Wait a minute! One minute! I’ve got the answer now. It must be the answer. Hopper, I’ve done what you wanted—and you, too, commander. Let me go-”

  Hopper sneered and jerked his thumb toward the door. Narcissus walked forward, cat-footed. “Shall I break their heads, chief?” he inquired gently. “I like blood. It’s a primary color.”

  Commander Wall put down his coffee cup and rose, his voice sounding crisp and metallic. “All right, officers. Let Mr. Gallegher go.”

  “Don’t do it,” Hopper insisted. “Who are you anyway? A space captain!”

  Wall’s weathered cheeks darkened. He brought out a badge in a small leather case. “Commander Wall,” he said. “Administrative Space Commission. You”—he pointed to Narcissus—“I’m deputizing you as a government agent, pro tern. If these officers don’t release Mr. Gallegher in five seconds, go on and break their heads.”

  But that was unnecessary. The Space Commission was big. It had the government behind it, and local officials were, by comparison, small potatoes. The officers hastily released Gallegher and tried to look as though they’d never touched him.

  Hopper seemed ready to explode. “By what right do you interfere with justice, Commander?” he demanded.

  “Right of priority. The government needs a device Mr. Gallegher has made for us. He deserves a hearing, at least.”

  “He does not!”

  Wall eyed Hopper coldly. “I think he said, a few moments ago, that he had fulfilled your commission also.”

  “With that?” The big shot pointed to the machine. “Does that look like a stereoscopic screen?”

  Gallegher said, “Get me an ultraviolet, Narcissus. Fluorescent.” He went to the device, praying that his guess was right. But it had to be. There was no other possible answer. Extract nitrogen from dirt or rock, extract all gaseous content, and you have inert matter.

  Gallegher touched the switch. The machine started to sing “St. James Infirmary.” Commander Wall looked startled and slightly less sympathetic. Hopper snorted. Smeith ran to the window and ecstatically watched the long tentacles cut dirt, swirling madly in the moonlit pit below.

  “The lamp, Narcissus.”

  It was already hooded up on an extension cord. Gallegher moved it slowly about the machine. Presently he had reached the grooved wheel at the extreme end, farthest from the window.

  Something fluoresced.

  It fluoresced blue—emerging from the little valve in the metal cylinder, winding about the grooved wheel, and piling in coils on the laboratory floor. Gallegher touched the switch; as the machine stopped, the valve snapped shut, cutting off the blue, cryptic thing that emerged from the cylinder. Gallegher picked up the coil. As he moved the light away, it vanished. He brought the lamp closer—it reappeared.

  “Here you are, commander,” he said. “Try it.”

  Wall squinted at the fluorescence. “Tensile strength?”

  “Plenty,” Gallegher said. “It has to be. Nonorganic, mineral content of solid earth, compacted and compressed into wire. Sure it’s got tensile strength. Only you couldn’t support a ton weight with it.”

  Wall nodded. “Of course not. It would cut through steel like a thread through butter. Fine, Mr. Gallegher. We’ll have to make tests—”

  “Go ahead. It’ll stand up. You can run this wire around corners all you want, from one end of a spaceship to another, and it’ll never snap under stress. It’s too thin. It won’t—it can’t—be strained unevenly, because it’s too thin. A wire cable couldn’t do it. You needed flexibility that wouldn’t cancel tensile strength. The only possible answer was a thin, tough wire.”

  The commander grinned. That was enough.

  “We’ll have the routine test,” he said. “Need any money now, though? We’ll advance anything you need, within reason—say up to ten thousand.”

  Hopper pushed forward. “I never ordered wire, Gallegher. So you haven’t fulfilled my commission.”

  Gallegher didn’t answer. He was adjusting his lamp. The wire changed from blue to yellow fluorescence, and then to red.

  “This is your screen, wise guy,” Gallegher said, “See the pretty colors?”

  “Naturally I see them! I’m not blind. But—”

  “Different colors, depending on how many angstroms I use. Thus. Red. Blue. Red again. Yellow. And when I turn off the lamp—”

  The wire Wall still held became invisible.

  Hopper closed his mouth with a snap. He leaned forward, cocking his head to one side.

  Gallegher said, “The wire’s got the same refractive index as air. I made it that way, on purpose.” He had the grace to blush slightly. Oh, well—he could buy Gallegher Plus a drink later.

  “On purpose?”

  “You wanted a stereoscope screen which could be viewed from any angle without optical distortion. And in color—that goes without saying, these days. Well, here it is.”

  Hopper breathed hard.

  Gallegher beamed at him. “Take a box frame and string each square with this wire. Make a mesh screen. Do that on all four sides. String enough wires inside of the box. You have, in effect, an invisible cube, made of wire. All right. Use ultraviolet to project your film or your television, and you have patterns of fluorescence, depending on the angstrom strength patterns. In other words—a picture. A colored picture. A three-dimensional picture, because it’s projected onto an invisible cube. And, finally, one that can be viewed from any angle without distortion because it does more than give an optical illusion of stereoscopic vision—it’s actually a threedimensional picture. Catch?”

  Hopper said feebly, “Yes. I understand. You…why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  Gallegher changed the subject in haste. “I’d like some police protection, Commander Wall. A crook named Max Cuff has been trying to get his hooks on this machine. His thugs kidnapped me this afternoon, and—”

  “Interfering with government business, eh?” Wall said grimly. “I know these jackpot politicians. Max Cuff won’t trouble you any more—if I may use the visor?”

  Smeith beamed at the prospect of Cuff getting it in the neck. Gallegher caught his eye. There was a pleasant, jovial gleam in it, and somehow it reminded Gallegher to offer his guests drinks. Even the commander accepted this time, turning from his finished visor call to take the glass Narcissus handed him.

  “Your laboratory will be under guard,” he told Gallegher. “So you’ll have no further trouble.”

  He drank, stood up, and shook Gallegher’s hand. “I must make my report. Good luck, and many thanks. We’ll call you tomorrow.”

  He went out, after the two officers. Hopper, gulping his cocktail, said, “I ought to apologize. But it’s all water under the bridge, eh, old man?”

  “Yeah,” Gallegher said. “You owe me some money.”

  “Trench will mail you the check. And…uh…a—” His voice died away.

  “Something?”

  “N-nothing,” Hopper said, putting down his glass and turning green. “A little fresh air…urp!”

  The door slammed behind him, Gallegher and Smeith eyed each other curiously.

  “Odd,” Smeith said.

  “A visitation from heaven, maybe,” Gallegher surmised. “The mills of the gods—”

  “I see Hopper’s gone,” Narcissus said, appearing with fresh drinks.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “I thought he would. I gave him a Mickey Finn,” the robot explained. “He never looked at me once. I’m not exactly vain but a man so insensitive to beauty deserves a lesson. Now don’t disturb me. I’m going into t
he kitchen and practice dancing, and you can get your own liquor out of the organ. You may come and watch if you like.”

  Narcissus spun out of the lab, his innards racing. Gallegher sighed.

  “That’s the way it goes,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Oh, I dunno. Everything. I get, for example, orders for three entirely different things, and I get drunk and make a gadget that answers all three problems. My subconscious does things the easy way. Unfortunately, it’s the hard way for me—after I sober up,”

  “Then why sober up?” Smeith asked cogently. “How does that liquor organ work?”

  Gallegher demonstrated. “I feel lousy,” he confided. “ What I need is either a week’s sleep, or else—”

  “What?”

  “A drink. Here’s how. You know—one item still worries me.”

  “What, again?”

  “The question of why that machine sings ‘St. James Infirmary’ when it’s operating.”

  “It’s a good song,” Smeith said.

  “Sure, but my subconscious works logically. Crazy logic, I’ll admit. Nevertheless—”

  “Here’s how,” Smeith said.

  Gallegher relaxed. He was beginning to feel like himself again. A warm, rosy glow. There was money in the bank. The police had been called off. Max Cuff was, no doubt, suffering for his sins. And a heavy thumping announced that Narcissus was dancing in the kitchen.

  It was past midnight when Gallegher choked on a drink and said, “Now I remember!”

  “Swmpmf,” Smeith said, startled. “ Whatzat?”

  “I feel like singing.”

  “So what?”

  “Well, I feel like singing ‘St. James Infirmary.’”

  “Go right ahead,” Smeith invited.

  “But not alone,” Gallegher amplified. “I always like to sing that when I get tight, but I figure it sounds best as a duet. Only I was alone when I was working on that machine.”

  “Ah?”

  “ I must have built a recording play-back,” Gallegher said, lost in a vast wonder at the mad resources and curious deviations of Gallegher Plus. “My goodness. A machine that performs four operations at once. It eats dirt, turns out a spaceship manual control, makes a stereoscopic nondistorting projection screen, and sings a duet with me. How strange it all seems.”

  Smeith considered, “You’re a genius.”

  “That, of course. Hm-m-m.” Gallegher got up, turned on the machine, and returned to perch atop Bubbles. Smeith, fascinated by the spectacle, went to hang on the window sill and watch the flashing tentacles eat dirt. Invisible wire spun out along the grooved wheel. The calm of the night was shattered by the more or less melodious tones of the “St. James Infirmary.”

  Above the lugubrious voice of the machine rose a deeper bass, passionately exhorting someone unnamed to search the wild world over.

  “But you’ll never find

  Another sweet ma-a-ahn like me.”

  Gallegher Plus was singing too.

  Ex Machina

  “I got the idea out of a bottle labeled ‘DRINK ME,’” Gallegher said wanly. “I’m no technician, except when I’m drunk. I don’t know the difference between an electron and an electrode, except that one’s invisible. At least I do know, sometimes, but they get mixed up. My trouble is semantics.”

  “Your trouble is you’re a lush,” said the transparent robot, crossing its legs with a faint crash. Gallegher winced.

  “Not at all. I get along fine when I’m drinking. It’s only during my periods of sobriety that I get confused. I have a technological hangover. The aqueous humor in my eyeballs is coming out by osmosis. Does that make sense?”

  “No,” said the robot, whose name was Joe. “You’re crying, that’s all. Did you turn me on just to have an audience? I’m busy at the moment.”

  “Busy with what?”

  “I’m analyzing philosophy, per se. Hideous as you humans are, you sometimes get bright ideas. The clear, intellectual logic of pure philosophy is a revelation to me.”

  Gallegher said something about a hard, gemlike flame. He still wept sporadically, which reminded him of the bottle labeled, “DRINK ME,” which reminded him of the liquor organ beside the couch. Gallegher stiffly moved his long body across the laboratory, detouring around three bulky objects which might have been the dynamos, Monstro and Bubbles, except for the fact that there were three of them. This realization flickered only dimly through Gallegher’s mind. Since one of the dynamos was looking at him, he hurriedly averted his gaze, sank down on the couch, and manipulated several buttons. When no liquor flowed through the tube into his parched mouth, he removed the mouthpiece, blinked at it hopelessly, and ordered Joe to bring beer.

  The glass was brimming as he raised it to his lips. But it was empty before he drank.

  “That’s very strange,” Gallegher said. “I feel like Tantalus.”

  “Somebody’s drinking your beer,” Joe explained. “Now do leave me alone. I’ve an idea I’ll be able to appreciate my baroque beauty even more after I’ve mastered the essentials of philosophy.”

  “No doubt,” Gallegher said. “Come away from that mirror. Who’s drinking my beer? A little green man?”

  “A little brown animal,” Joe explained cryptically, and turned to the mirror again, leaving Gallegher to glare at him hatefully. There were times when Mr. Galloway Gallegher yearned to bind Joe securely under a steady drip of hydrochloric. Instead, he tried another beer, with equal ill luck.

  In a sudden fury, Gallegher rose and procured soda water. The little brown animal had even less taste for such fluids than Gallegher himself; at any rate, the water didn’t mysteriously vanish. Less thirsty but more confused than ever, Gallegher circled the third dynamo with the bright blue eyes and morosely examined the equipment littering his workbench. There were bottles filled with ambiguous liquids, obviously nonalcoholic, but the labels meant little or nothing. Gallegher’s subconscious self, liberated by liquor last night, had marked them for easy reference. Since Gallegher Plus, though a top-flight technician, saw the world through thoroughly distorted lenses, the labels were not helpful. One said “RABBITS ONLY.” Another inquired, “WHY NOT!” A third said “CHRISTMAS NIGHT.”

  There was also a complicated affair of wheels, gears, tubes, sprockets and light tubes plugged into an electric outlet.

  “Cogito, ergo sum, ” Joe murmured softly. “When there’s no one around on the quad. No. Hm-m-m.”

  “What about this little brown animal?” Gallegher wanted to know. “Is it real or merely a figment?”

  “What is reality?” Joe inquired, thus confusing the issue still further. “I haven’t resolved that yet to my own satisfaction.”

  “Your satisfaction!” Gallegher said. “I wake up with a tenth-power hangover and can’t get a drink. You tell me fairy stories about little brown animals stealing my liquor. Then you quote moldy philosophical concepts at me. If I pick up that crowbar over there, you’ll neither be nor think in very short order.”

  Joe gave ground gracefully. “It’s a small creature that moves remarkably fast. So fast it can’t be seen.”

  “How come you can see it?”

  “I don’t. I varish it,” said Joe, who had more than the five senses normal to humans.

  “Where is it now?”

  “It went out a while ago.”

  “Well—” Gallegher sought inconclusively for words. “Something must have happened last night.”

  “Naturally,” Joe agreed. “But you turned me off after the ugly man with the ears came in.”

  “I remember that. You were beating your plastic gums…what man?”

  “The ugly one. You told your grandfather to take a walk, too, but you couldn’t pry him loose from his bottle.”

  “Grandpa. Uh. Oh. Where’s he?”

  “Maybe he went back to Maine,” Joe suggested. “He kept threatening to do that.”

  “He
never leaves till he’s drunk out the cellar,” Gallegher said. He tuned in the audio system and called every room in the house. There was no response. Presently Gallegher got up and made a search. There was no trace of Grandpa.

  He came back to the laboratory, trying to ignore the third dynamo with the big blue eyes, and hopelessly studied the workbench again. Joe, posturing before the mirror, said he thought he believed in the basic philosophy of intellectualism. Still, he added, since obviously Gallegher’s intellect was in abeyance, it might pay to hook up the projector and find out what had happened last night.

  This made sense. Some time before, realizing that Gallegher sober never remembered the adventures of Gallegher tight, he had installed a visio-audio gadget in the laboratory, cleverly adjusted to turn itself on whenever circumstances warranted it. How the thing worked Gallegher wasn’t quite sure any more, except that it could run off miraculous blood-alcohol tests on its creator and start recording when the percentage was sufficiently high. At the moment the machine was shrouded in a blanket. Gallegher whipped this off, wheeled over a screen, and watched and listened to what had happened last night.

  Joe stood in a corner, turned off, probably cogitating. Grandpa, a wizened little man with a brown face like a bad-tempered nutcracker, sat on a stool cuddling a bottle. Gallegher was removing the liquor organ mouthpiece from between his lips, having just taken on enough of a load to start the recorder working.

  A slim, middle-aged man with large ears and an eager expression jittered on the edge of his relaxer, watching Gallegher.

  “Claptrap,” Grandpa said in a squeaky voice. “When I was a kid we went out and killed grizzlies with our hands. None of these new-fangled ideas—”

  “Grandpa,” Gallegher said, “shut up. You’re not that old. And you’re a liar anyway.”

  “Reminds me of the time I was out in the woods and a grizzly came at me. I didn’t have a gun. Well, I’ll tell you. I just reached down his mouth—”

  “Your bottle’s empty,” Gallegher said cleverly, and there was a pause while Grandpa, startled, investigated. It wasn’t.