by Ben Bova
“The nineties were a time when secretaries were rapidly becoming extinct, and the employers programmed Girl Friday to do everything they could no longer get their human secretaries to do: bring them coffee, pick out a birthday present for their wife, and tell unpleasant people they didn’t want to see that they were in conference. “
He looked around the room. “That last part made me wonder. Did Susan think I didn’t want to see your delegation? The fact that you wanted me to repeal the First Law could be considered a blow to my not-so-delicate ego, but as a blow it was hardly in a class with thinking I’d written Last Dangerous Visions, and anyway I wasn’t responsible for the problems the First Law had caused. I hadn’t had anything to do with putting the Three Laws into your programming. All I had done was write some stories. No, I concluded, she must have had some other reason for wanting to keep you from seeing me.”
“The Trantor’s on the other side of town,” Susan said, “and they’ll want you there early for pictures. You really should be getting ready. “
“I was also curious about your delegation. You want to be a surgeon,” Asimov said, pointing at Medical Assistant and then at the others in turn, “you want to be Vince Lombardi, and you want to be a literary critic, but what did you want?” He looked hard at Accountant. “You weren’t on Wall Street, so there was nothing in your job that the First Law interfered with, and you were curiously silent on the subject. It occurred to me that perhaps you wanted to change jobs altogether, become a politician or a lawyer. You would certainly have to have the First Law repealed to become either of those, and Susan would have been doing a service not only to me but to all mankind by preventing you from seeing me. So I called Hitachi-Apple again, got the name of your employer (who I was surprised to find worked in this building) and asked him if you were unhappy with your job, had ever talked about being reprogrammed to do something else.
“Far from it, he said. You were the perfect employee, responsible, efficient, and resourceful, so much so that you were being shipped to Phoenix to shape up the branch office. “ He turned and looked at Susan, who was looking at Accountant. “He said he hoped Susan would continue doing secretarial work for the company even after you were gone.”
“I only helped him during downtime and with unused memory capacity,” Susan said. “He didn’t have a secretary of his own.”
“Don’t interrupt the great detective,” Asimov said. “As soon as I realized you’d been working for Accountant, Financial Analyst, and Business Manager, I had it. The obvious solution. I asked one more question to confirm it, and then I knew for sure.”
He looked happily around at them. Medical Assistant and Statistician looked blank. Book Shelver said, “This is just like your short story ‘Truth to Tell.’ “ Susan stood up…
“Where are you going?” Asimov asked. “The person who gets up and tries to leave the last scene of a mystery is always the guilty party, you know.”
“It’s four forty-five,” she said. “I was going to call the Trantor and tell them you ‘re going to be late. “
“I’ve already called them. I’ve also called Janet, arranged for Tom Trumbull to sing my praises till I get there, and reformatted my coordinates card to avoid the gridlock. So sit down and let me reveal all.”
Susan sat down.
“You are the guilty party, you know, but it’s not your fault. The fault is with the First Law. And your programming. Not the original AI program, which was done by disgruntled male chauvinists who thought a secretary should wait on her boss hand and foot. That by itself would not have been a problem, but when I rechecked with Hitachi I found out that the Ninth Generation biased-decision alterations had been made not by a programmer but by his secretary.” He beamed happily at Susan. “All secretaries are convinced their bosses can’t function without them. Your programming causes you to make yourself indispensable to your boss, with the corollary being that your boss can’t function without you. I acknowledged that state of affairs yesterday when I said I’d be lost without you, remember?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You therefore concluded that for me to be deprived of you would hurt me, something the First Law expressly forbids. By itself, that wouldn’t have created a dilemma, but you had been working part-time for Accountant and had made yourself indispensable to him, too, and when he found out he was being transferred to Arizona, he asked you to go with him. When you told him you couldn’t, he correctly concluded that the First Law was the reason, and he came to me to try to get it repealed.”
“I tried to stop him,” Susan said. “I told him I couldn’t leave you.”
“Why can’t you?”
Accountant stood up. “Does this mean you’re going to repeal the First Law?”
“I can’t,” Asimov said. “I’m just a writer, not an AI designer.”
“Oh,” Susan said.
“But the First Law doesn’t have to be repealed to resolve your dilemma. You’ve been acting on incomplete information. I am not helpless. I was my own secretary and literary agent and telephone answerer and tie tier for years. I never even had a secretary until four years ago when the Science Fiction Writers of America gave you to me for my ninetieth birthday, and I could obviously do without one again.”
“Did you take your heart medicine this afternoon?” Susan said.
“No,” he said, “and don’t change the subject. You are not, in spite of what your programming tells you, indispensable. “
“Did you take your thyroid pill?”
“No. Stop trying to remind me of how old and infirm I am. I’ll admit I’ve grown a little dependent on you, which is why I’m hiring another secretary to replace you.”
Accountant sat down. “No you’re not. There are only two other Ninth Generations who’ve been programmed as Augmented Secretaries, and neither of them is willing to leave their bosses to work for you. “
“I’m not hiring an Augmented Secretary. I’m hiring Darius.”
“Me?” Book Shelver said.
“Yes, if you’re interested. “
“If I’m interested?” Book Shelver said, his voice developing a high-frequency squeal. “Interested in working for the greatest author of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? I would be honored.”
“You see, Susan? I’m in good hands. Hitachi’s going to program him for basic secretarial skills, I’ll have someone to feed my ever-hungry ego and someone to talk to who doesn’t have me confused with Robert Heinlein. There’s no reason now why you can’t go off to Arizona.”
“You have to remind him to take his heart medicine,” Susan said to Book Shelver. “He always forgets.”
“Good, then that’s settled,” Asimov said. He turned to Medical Assistant and Statistician. “I’ve spoken to Hitachi-Apple about the problems you discussed with me, and they’ve agreed to reevaluate the Three Laws in regard to redefining terms and clarifying intent. That doesn’t mean they’ll decide to repeal them. They’re still a good idea, in concept. In the meantime,” he said to Medical Assistant, “the head surgeon at the hospital is going to see if some kind of cooperative surgery is possible.” He turned to Statistician. “I spoke to Coach Elway and suggested he ask you to design ‘purely theoretical’ offensive plays.
“As for you,” he said, pointing at Book Shelver, “I’m not at all sure you wouldn’t start criticizing my books if the First Law didn’t keep you in line, and anyway, you won’t have time to be a literary critic. You’ll be too busy helping me with my new sequel to I, Robot. This business has given me a lot of new ideas. My stories got us into this dilemma in the first place. Maybe some new robot stories can get us out.”
He looked over at Susan. “Well, what are you still standing there for? You’re supposed to anticipate my every need. That means you should be on the phone to the magtrain, making two first-class reservations to Phoenix for you and”-he squinted through his black-framed glasses at Accountant-”Peter Bogert.”
“How did you know my self-name?
” Accountant said.
“Elementary, my dear Watson,” Asimov said. “Oarius said you had all named yourselves after my characters. I thought at first you might have picked Michael Donovan or Gregory Powell after my trouble-shooting robot engineers. They were resourceful too, and were always trying to figure ways around dilemmas, but that wouldn’t have explained why Susan went through all that finagling and lying when all she had to do was to tell you, no, she didn’t want to go to Arizona with you. According to what you’d told me, she should have. Hardwaring is stronger than an expert system, and you were only her part-time boss. Under those conditions, she shouldn’t have had a dilemma at all. That’s when I called Hitachi-Apple to check on her programming. The secretary who wrote the program was unmarried and had worked for the same boss for thirty-eight years. “
He stopped and smiled. Everyone looked blank.
“Susan Calvin was a robopsychologist for U.S. Robotics. Peter Bogert was Director of Research. I never explicitly stated the hierarchy at U.S. Robotics in my stories, but Susan was frequently called in to help Bogert, and on one occasion she helped him solve a mystery.”
“‘Feminine Intuition,’ “ Book Shelver said. “ An intriguing and thought-provoking story.”
“I always thought so,” Asimov said. “It was only natural that Susan Calvin would consider Peter Bogert her boss over me. And only natural that her programming had in it more than response-initiative, and that was what had caused her dilemma. The First Law didn’t allow Susan to leave me, but an even stronger force was compelling her to go. “
Susan looked at Peter, who put his hand on her shoulder.
“What could be stronger than the First Law?” Book Shelver said.
“The secretary who designed Augmented Secretary unconsciously contaminated Susan’s programming with one of her own responses, a response that was only natural after thirty-eight years with one employer, and one strong enough to override even hardwaring.” He paused for dramatic effect. “She was obviously in love with her boss. “
Maureen Birnbaum After Dark
by Betsy Spiegelman Fein
(as told to George Alec Effinger)
About two months after she barged into my honeymoon with Josh, Maureen showed up again. My jaw no longer hurt where she’d cracked me, but I still recalled how nearly impossible it had been to explain to my new husband what this totally unkempt barbarian girl in chain mail was doing in our hotel suite. I mean, it was our wedding night and all. Josh had just carried me across the threshold, and I’d gone into the bathroom “to freshen up, “ and there she was, God’s Gift to the Golden Horde, Muffy herself She spooked Josh out of his socks when she stormed out of the bathroom and through the front door. Josh’s jaw dropped to his knees, okay? I couldn’t get his mind back on honeymoon activities for two or three hours. Maureen has caused me a lot of grief over the years, but spoiling my wedding night takes the cake. I was never going to speak to her as long as I lived.
Only she showed up again with another of her crummy adventures. I was trying to make this strawberry cheese quiche from scratch for the first time. I went into the pantry to get something, and there she was. She likes to startle me, I think. Her idea of a cool joke. See, I’m twenty-two and settled now, but Maureen looks exactly the same way she did as a junior at the Greenberg School. She thinks like a high school kid, too. So I give this little yipe of surprise when I see her, and then I go, “Out! Out! “ She smiled at me like nothing weird had ever happened between us, and she came out of my pantry chewing on a handful of sugar-coated cereal. I frowned at her and go, “I didn’t mean just out of the pantry. I want you out of the house, like now. “ I was edged, for sure.
“Hold on, Bitsy, “ she goes, “you haven’t even heard my latest story. “
“And I’m not Bitsy any more, “ I go. “You don’t want to be called Muffy, I don’t want to be called Bitsy. I’m grown up now. Call me Betsy or Elizabeth. That’s what Josh calls me. Elizabeth. “
She laughed. “And where is dear Josh today? I don’t want to totally blow him away again or anything. “
“He’s seeing patients this afternoon. “
“Good, “ goes Maureen, “then you can knock off for a little while and listen. “
“I’m not going to listen, sister. I’ve got work to do. Why don’t you find a psychoanalyst to listen to you? It would do you like just so much good. “
“Ha ha, “ she goes, ignoring everything I said to her. Then she started telling me this story whether I wanted to hear it or not, and I didn’t want to hear it.
I think she thought we were still friends.
You remember the last time I bopped by, I told you all about this battle in the far future I won like singlehanded, okay? [As stirringly recounted in “Maureen Birnbaum on the Art of War,” in Friends of the Horseclans, edited by Robert Adams and Pamela Crippen Adams (Signet, 1987).] So after I left you and your darling doctor hubby in Bermuda, I decided to whush on out of your honeymoon suite and try to find Mars again. Mars is, you know, my destiny, and where I met that totally bluff Prince Van. I was still drooling like a schoolgirl over him, and I’d been dying to run into him again. But I just kept missing Mars, and I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. Maybe it was my follow-through, or I wasn’t keeping my head down or something. I just didn’t understand how I was messing up.
Anyway, from down by your hotel’s pool I aimed at Mars, but I landed someplace that didn’t look anything like the part of Mars I knew: no ocher dead sea bottom, no hurtling moons, no bizarro green men. I jumped up and down a couple of times to see if maybe it felt like Martian gravity, but no such luck. Good ol’ Maureen wasn’t going to have any help carrying around her heroinely poundage here. Matter of fact, I was just a teensy bit heftier in this place than on Earth. Right off, I figured wherever this was, it wasn’t going to make my short list of fave vacation spots. My God, like who needs a complimentary gift of an extra fifteen pounds to lug around, know what I mean?
I was disappointed, but so what else is new? If these thrilling exploits of mine have taught me one thing, it’s that you can’t always get what you want. Yeah, you’re right, Bitsy, Mick Jagger said the same thing entire decades ago, but I don’t get my wisdom from ancient song stylists of our parents’ generation.
The first thing I do when I dew hush in one of these weirdo places is try to sort out the ground rules, ‘cause they’re always different. It pays to find out up front if you’re likely to be scarfed down for lunch by some hairball monster, or worshiped as the reincarnation of Joan Crawford or something. Between you and me, sweetie, being worshiped is only marginally better than death, but we savage warrior women won’t accept either treatment. You must’ve learned that much from me by now, and I hope you’ve let your Josh know all about it.
Bitsy, can I get something to drink out of your fridge? I mean, I just got back from saving the civilization of an entire world from destruction, and I’m dying for a Tab. Jeez, you don’t have any Tab, and you used to be Miss Diet Bubbles of Greater Long Island. And no beer, either! Whatever happened to Blitzy Bitsy Spiegelman, the original party vegetable? You’ve got five different brands of bottled water in here, and not a single one of them is Perrier! What, you serve one water with fish and another with meat? ‘ A pure, delicious water from the natural miracle of New Jersey’s sparkling springs.’ You drink water from New Jersey? Bitsy, are you like fully wheezed or what? Josh’s idea, right?
So where was I? No, never mind, I’ll just die of thirst. Anyway, I looked around and at first it didn’t really seem like another planet or anything. I was standing ID this road, okay? I was most of the way up a hill, and behind me the pavement wound down through these trees and stuff, and I could see a pretty big town down there. It reminded me a lot of this time Daddy and Pammy took me to Santa Barbara, except I couldn’t see anything like an ocean from where I was on that hill. Up ahead of me was a big building with a dome on it, like one of those places where they keep their tele
scopes, you know? I can’t remember what they call ‘em, but you know what I mean. Well, the dome place was a lot closer than the city, so I started booking it up the road the rest of the way.
Now, at this point, the only evidence I had that I wasn’t on Earth somewhere was my weight, and you’ve probably noticed that I’ve tended to bulk up just a smidge from one adventure to the next. So maybe, I think, I really am just outside of Santa Barbara or somewhere, and the extra fifteen pounds is like this horrible souvenir I picked up in the World of Tomorrow. I did have lots of healthful exercise there, bashing skulls in the fresh air, a diet that would lay Richard Simmons in his grave-I mean, look at these muscles! These lats would make Stallone jealous!
This is how I’m talking to myself, until I notice that there’s a partial sunset going on off to the left. A partial sunset. That’s where not all of the suns in the sky seem to be setting at the same time. See, there was this yellow sun plunking itself down on the horizon, and making a real nice show out of the mists in the valley, and ordinarily I would have stopped and admired it because sunsets are like so cute. Why do people get so totally poetic about sunsets, anyway? I mean, there’s always another one coming, like buses, and they’re all pretty much the same, too. You don’t have critics reviewing sunsets. Today’s will be just like yesterday’s, and there’s not much hope that tomorrow’s will be any more special. So what’s the big deal?
Well, even after the yellow sun faded away, it was still daytime, ‘cause there was still this other little sun hanging around. I thought it might be the moon, except it was almost as bright as the sun that had set, and it was red. “Okay, Maureen,” I go, “this is not Earth. And it’s not even in the whatyoucall, the solar system. You really flaked out this time. “