Foundation’s Friends

by Ben Bova

  He had to agree his father-in-law had a point. Stephen Byerley had managed to get elected to public office a month ago. It was the beginning of the end of uncontested human superiority, despite the much-vaunted three laws. For one thing, Mayor Byerley might start thinking his “brothers” in space, those who toiled under horrifying conditions on blistering planets for industrialists like Howard Rathbone III, deserved better conditions. Byerley might even decide they were being treated like slaves and use the weight of his office to start a campaign for their emancipation. It was ludicrous, of course, but Tim understood that once you set the precedent of one robot being “human “ enough to hold human office, then you were going to have a hard time denying the same rights and protections to all the others.

  It wasn’t that he had much sympathy with the metal men. They were, after all, only machines. Nobody was more convinced of that than he! He’d had a long, intimate association with one of them going all the way back to 2009, right here in this house.

  “You wanted a father, Tirilmy,” Karin Garroway said brightly. “Well, I’ve brought you PAPPI.”

  Timmy stared at the gray metal box on wheels squatting in the precise middle of the living room rug. At first glance, he’d thought it was an old-fashioned canister vacuum cleaner minus the hose. Four skinny appendages protruded from its sides, ending in a collection of hooks and pincers like some grim skeletal joke. An upside-down bowl-shaped turret housed a camera lens and other things he didn’t recognize right away.

  Timmy touched a wheel housing with one toe.

  “Treat it with care.” Motherly chores satisfied now, Karin gathered up papers and laptop computer and stuffed them all in her briefcase.

  “What is it?”

  “PAPPI-Paternal Alternative Program: Prototype I.”

  “Looks pretty stupid,” Timmy said.

  “Never mind how it looks!” His mother glanced at him. “It’ll do everything a real father can do. PAPPI can pitch baseballs, and sort your stamp collection-all sorts of things.”

  “Can it do my homework?”

  “It has programs to coach you in math and reading, Timmy. PAPPI has tapes of bedtime stories selected for eight-year-old boys, too. And we’ll update them as you grow.”

  “Sometimes I want to talk about man things….”

  “Don’t be difficult.” Karin snapped her briefcase crisply shut. “I’ll work on some of the refinements as I get time. You could think of this as an experiment in robotics that we’re doing together.”

  Karin was always trying to get him interested in her work at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. She put the briefcase down on the sofa, hunkered down in front of her son so her eyes were level with his and held him by the shoulders. Her face had that soft, gentle haze Timmy saw on it sometimes when she looked at kittens or butterflies. He stared back at her, his mouth drawn tightly down.

  “I know it’s hard on you, the way we live.”

  “We could do it the way other people do!” he said sullenly.

  “That just won’t work for me,” she said. “I thought you understood that. Look, you keep saying you want a father-”

  “A real one. Not a dumb robot.”

  Her face closed over. “I’ve explained to you that we don’t have time for a man in our lives. “

  Timmy didn’t know anything about his real father. Karin had told him some stuff once about a place where they sold sperm from fathers for people who wanted to be mothers without all the fuss. But Timmy told everybody his dad had died; it was easier to explain. Maybe Karin didn’t like men very much; she never brought one home, unlike his best friend Joey’s mother, who had lots of boyfriends. Sometimes Timmy wondered if Karin wouldn’t like him when he grew up, too.

  “Timmy?”

  “All right,” he said reluctantly. “But you promised me we’d go to the zoo today, Karin.”

  She chewed her lip. “I know it’s Sunday, but the project’s so urgent.”

  He shook his head. “Today’s special. It’s-”

  “You can play with PAPPI in the yard. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? PAPPI’s easy to use, I made sure of that.”

  He looked past her at the robot. “What can you play with a thing like that?”

  “You’ll think of something!” She gave him a kiss on the cheek which he wasn’t quick enough to duck. “Now I’ve got to run. The lab’s aircar is waiting for me. I promise I won’t be too long.”

  After she’d gone, Timmy watched the Tri-D for a while, but Karin had programmed it to show him historical films about the exploration of the solar system and educational stuff about astronomy. He turned the Tri-D off again and squatted down by the robot. He stared into its camera eye.

  “You’re dopey looking!” he said. “Got a dopey name, too.”

  A bird chirped outside in the big tree in the garden, but inside the house it was very quiet. Timmy suddenly felt lonely, which was strange because now that he wasn’t such a little kid any more Karin often left him alone when she had to work overtime or go in on weekends. The reason wasn’t too hard to find. It was Father’s Day. The Cub Scout Troop that Timmy and Joey belonged to was having a father-and-son hot-dog barbecue in Central Park, and absolutely everybody would be there with their dad. All Timmy’s friends had fathers, even if they weren’t the original ones. And Joey would have one of his mom’s boyfriends along.

  But Timmy had known there was no point in telling Karin about it. Karin didn’t believe in men-only activities. It would’ve been just like her to consider going with him to a father-son barbecue. Much better to stay home with a robot than be embarrassed like that. Timmy scowled at the robot. Nothing else to do-he might as well turn it on. The switch was conveniently located near the top. Immediately, a small red light glowed on the dome, which swiveled to focus the camera eye on Timmy.

  “Hello,” the tinny, uninflected voice said. “I am PAPPI, your Paternal Alternative. I am an experimental prototype.”

  Surprised, Timmy settled himself cross-legged in front of the machine and stared at it. He’d seen robots before, of course, at the lab where Karin worked. But he knew a lot of people didn’t trust them and wouldn’t allow them in New York. The ones his mother built that talked were huge things to be sent out into space where they couldn’t frighten anybody.

  “Well,” Timmy said cautiously. “What can you do?”

  “I can tell you a story about animals. I can help you with your stamp collection. I can make model airplanes. I know baseball and basketball statistics for the last fifty years. I can tell you who scored the most home runs, who was the MVP, who-”

  Timmy was astonished. Perhaps Karin understood more than he’d ever realized about what was important to him. “Can you help me light a fire in the backyard and barbecue hot dogs?”

  “I do not think Karin would approve of you playing with fire.”

  Timmy’s enthusiasm faded. “So you’re going to be another babysitter!”

  “You are too old for babysitters, Timmy. I am your PAPPI, and Paternal Alternatives do not-”

  “You’re not my dad!” Timmy snapped.

  “Shall we go out into the yard and play baseball?” the robot suggested.

  “Sure.” Timmy stuck his hands in his pockets.

  Timmy found out right away that PAPPI was very good at pitching balls. The long metal arms grasped the ball neatly and swung it in an economical arc, releasing it at precisely the right moment to travel across to the exact spot on Timmy’s baseball bat for hitting. PAPPI gave him advice on how to hold the bat too, but it never yelled at him when he missed, and it wasn’t a sore loser like Joey when Timmy managed to hit a “home run.”

  “Hey,” Timmy said after an hour of playing World Series. “Want to climb a tree?”

  “I am not equipped to climb trees,” PAPPI replied. “But I will watch you. And I can identify the objects you encounter.”

  Timmy threw down the baseball bat and shimmied up the trunk of the old maple by the garden wall. PAPPI tr
undled over to stand underneath, the dome swiveling so the camera eye could focus on Timmy’s ascent.

  Halfway up to the crown, the main trunk forked. Here Timmy and Joey had once started to erect a fort. Then the weather got too hot for carpentry projects and they’d abandoned it. But it was still a fine place to sit and look at the jagged skyline of the city across the East River. The leaves overhead made liquid patterns of sunlight and shade on his bare arms, and their soft rustling was like a kind of secret language that only Timmy was meant to understand.

  Timmy straddled one of the sun-warm planks.

  “You look weird from up here!”

  “Have you noticed the abandoned bird’s nest by your right hand?”

  Timmy peered into the leaves. Sure enough, there was a jumble of twigs and mud stuck to the bark near the trunk. “There’s feathers in it.”

  Timmy hung on to the branch with one hand and leaned down, tiny brown and white feather in the other. PAPPI’s camera eye slid out on a slender stalk for about a foot, then retracted.

  “A very fine specimen. But look at the small white growths on the tree trunk, a form of fungus, division name Mycota. The spores have been carried up there accidentally by a bird, perhaps by the Passer domesticus whose feather you are holding. “

  “Huh?”

  “A house sparrow.”

  “Neat!”

  “There are about fifty thousand fungi, or saprophytic and parasitic plantlike organisms, that have been identified and described. But there are probably a hundred thousand more. They include mushrooms, mildews, molds, yeasts-”

  Timmy frowned. The thing was starting to sound like his schoolteacher.

  “I can tell you about lichens too, if you want me to.”

  “Not hardly!” Timmy said.

  “Well, then,” the robot said. “Would you like to play horse?”

  “How do I do that?”

  “You can ride around on me. I am very strongly built.”

  So Timmy rode around the yard on top of PAPPI, held in place by two of the long metal arms, shouting “Giddyap!” and “Whoa!” until his throat was scratchy. It was almost possible to forget PAPPI was a robot and imagine he was really riding a stallion with flowing mane across a Western mesa, just like the programs on the Tri-D that Karin frowned at him watching.

  By the time the sky got dark and Karin came home again, Timmy knew he’d discovered a real friend, one who never grew bored with playing, never thought any question too stupid to answer, never criticized or blamed.

  But it wasn’t the same thing at all as having a real father.

  With PAPPI’s help, Timmy did better in school that year. PAPPI was programmed to learn too, right alongside Timmy, so that made a contest out of it-one PAPPI usually won. But since the robot never boasted of its success, Timmy really didn’t mind. And four mechanical hands meant the robot was a real wizard at assembling model spaceships and shuffling playing cards or juggling balls.

  From time to time, Karin brought new programs home for PAPPI as they developed them at the lab. Timmy watched when she took the robot’s “head” apart and inserted them. Sometimes he held the tiny tools she used to work on the positronic brain. Afterward, PAPPI could do a lot more things to entertain Timmy, like playing the banjo, or telling jokes and drawing silly pictures to make him laugh.

  Karin rarely brought anyone home for supper, not even people from U.S. Robots. But once, a lady she shared the office with came to Timmy’s house.

  “It doesn’t look a bit like a mechanical man,” Timmy complained.

  He and this fierce-looking lady hunkered down on the rug to look at PAPPI, who had just slithered to a halt in front of them. The robot’s wheels scuffed the polished floor as it braked.

  “It doesn’t need to,” Karin’s officemate replied. “Form should follow function.”

  “At least it could’ve hag legs, not wheels!” Timmy said, fingering one of the scratches in the wood.

  “This was meant to be a utility robot. Your mother modified its brain, not its body.”

  Karin had told him that Dr. Calvin didn’t build the robots quite like she did; Dr. Calvin was a robopsychologist, whatever that meant. In the kitchen, Karin, in an uncharacteristic display of domesticity, clattered dishes into the dishwasher.

  Timmy frowned. “PAPPI thinks it’s more than that!”

  “But you don’t.”

  “How can you tell?”

  Dr. Calvin didn’t answer. She was about as old as his mother, Timmy judged, and neither of them wore lipstick or smiled as much as Joey’s mother did.

  Karin bustled back into the living room with a tray of pastries she’d bought at the store. “ Anyone ready for dessert?”

  “I do not think Timmy should have any more sugar in his diet today,” PAPPI said. “By my count, since getting up this morning he has consumed-”

  “Oh, shut up!” Timmy said.

  “Well,” Karin began, “if you think-”

  “One of these days, you ‘re going to have trouble with that one,” Dr. Calvin said thoughtfully.

  For a moment, Timmy thought she was speaking of him. But her eyes were on the robot squatting between them on the rug.

  “I’m being very careful, Susan,” Karin said. “ And Timmy knows not to take the robot outside.”

  “I can’t tell my friends about PAPPI, either,” Timmy grumbled. “When Joey comes over to play I have to put PAPPI in the closet. And Joey’s my best friend!”

  “That’s good to know, Timmy,” Dr. Calvin said. “But antirobot sentiment isn’t all I was referring to. Though goodness knows the Fundies are enough of a threat to our work.”

  “Then what?” Karin said.

  “I don’t think we realize yet what these positronic brains may be capable of someday.”

  “I’m not that good, Susan,” Karin said, laughing. “Not like you!”.

  The talk turned away from robots after that.

  Then one day when they were in eighth grade, Joey’s mother got married again, and his new father took him on a trip to the moon.

  “Why can’t we go to the moon, Karin?” Timmy demanded as Karin frowned at some work she’d brought home from the lab.

  “Hmm?” She gazed at him over the top of the glasses she’d recently started wearing.

  “I want to go to the moon. See the craters.”

  “We can’t afford it.”

  “I’ve got money saved up!”

  “I can’t spare the time right now. Things are really busy at U.S. Robots. Susan and I may finally be getting our own offices!”

  “If I had a father…” Timmy began darkly.

  Karin set her notes down and gazed at him. “I’m sorry you’re still feeling a lack, Timmy. I’d hoped PAPPI would fill it.”

  “Seems like I don’t have a father or a mother”‘ Timmy said.

  The following year, Timmy took a class in physics at Karin’s urging and learned that he hated the subject. He became interested in sports, grew three inches, and discovered girls-one in particular, a dark-haired lovely with big breasts. PAPPI explained how to handle the sudden rush of hormones and awkwardness Timmy was feeling. Karin had done her part earlier, lecturing Timmy on the birds and the bees and the whole ecology of flowers, a discussion that bored him and left him feeling as if either he-or Karin-had totally missed the point. But PAPPI explained about Romeo and Juliet, whether it was a good idea to kiss a girl on a first date, and what to say to the other guys afterward.

  In an attempt to influence him to take an interest in science, Karin bought him a telescope kit, and PAPPI helped him assemble it. PAPPI knew the names of all the stars and constellations they could see through the lens, and pointed out some of the orbiting space stations as well. Karin pretended not to notice when they stayed up well past Timmy’s bedtime.

  Timmy went out for the school swim team. PAPPI listened to his bragging and sympathized when he lost. Timmy changed his name to Tim, and PAPPI, unlike Karin, never made a mistake after th
at. All in all, it was a good time.

  But Joe got to have man-to-man talks with his new father.

  Tim activated the visorphone again and made an appointment to see the mayor, Stephen Byerley.

  Then he tried to put the whole thing out of his mind.

  He’d forgotten Karin’s house was so small. He went through the rooms methodically, making lists of what to dump and what to pack. There wasn’t too much of the latter. Living quarters on a space station were small, but at least there was a sense of the vastness just beyond the screened walls. This house was a box, a tract house thrown up by greedy developers, cutting up the land that had once been countryside around New York City into smaller and smaller parcels. He remembered how Karin had explained to him that they couldn’t move farther out because she needed to be near U.S. Robots. By then, Joe and his parents had moved to a large house on Long Island where there was room for a swimming pool and a tennis court. And they could keep dogs. Tim remembered how he’d hated U.S. Robots when he heard about the dogs.

  Beth deserved better. Tomorrow he’d meet the man Rathbone wanted him to kill.

  The weapon one of his father-in-law’s ex-boxer bodyguards had given him weighed heavily in his pocket. Something to make hash out of that obscene positronic brain, Rathbone had said. For some reason he’d brought it with him when he Bed. Maybe even then he’d known he couldn’t really get away so easily.

  He had to stop thinking of Byerley as a man. It was only a robot they were talking about, after all. Only a robot. That would become obvious in the inquest. Then there’d be public outrage at the revelation of the stupendous hoax. The “assassin,” if he were to be caught, would be released, a hero. Only of course, Rathbone would see to it that Tim wasn’t caught.

  And in return, Tim would get a chance to have something he desperately wanted, namely a large share of Mercury Mining and Manufacturing.

  There was a good chance Byerley wouldn’t keep the appointment anyway. His secretary had seemed doubtful the mayor would find time in his schedule for the vague reasons Tim had given her. Maybe nothing would come of it at all and he’d be off the hook. “Couldn’t get near him, “ he’d tell Rathbone. “Not my fault!”