Partners in Wonder

by Harlan Ellison

  “Don’t screw with it! It’ll set it—”

  The panel accordion-folded back. Polchik’s mouth fell open. “Oh my God,” he mumbled.

  The robot’s extruded arm worked inside for a long moment, then withdrew. “It is fully operable now.” The panel folded back into place.

  Polchik let the pin-mike slip from his fingers and it zzzzz’d back into the wristband. He walked away down the alley, looking haunted.

  Down at the corner, the Amsterdam Inn’s lights shone weakly, reflecting dully in the street oil slick. Polchik paused at the mouth of the alley and pulled out the pin-mike again. He thumbed the callbox on his wrist, feeling the heavy shadow of the robot behind him.

  “Polchik,” he said into the mike.

  “Okay, Mike?” crackled the reply. “How’s yer partner doing?”

  Glancing over his shoulder, Polchik saw the robot standing impassively, gooseneck arm vanished; ten feet behind him. Respectfully. “Don’t call it my partner.”

  Laughter on the other end of the line. “What’s’a’matter, Mike? ’Fraid of him?”

  “Ahhh…cut the clownin’. Everything quiet here, Eighty-two and Amsterdam.”

  “Okay. Oh, hey, Mike, remember…if it starts to rain, get yer partner under an awning before he starts t’rust!”

  He was still laughing like a jackass as Polchik let the spring-wire zzzzz back into the callbox.

  “Hey, Mike! What you got there?”

  Polchik looked toward the corner. It was Rico, the bartender from the Amsterdam Inn.

  “It’s a robot,” Polchik said. He kept his voice very flat. He was in no mood for further ribbing.

  “Real he is, yeah? No kidding?” Rico’s face always looked to Polchik like a brass artichoke, ready to be peeled. But he was friendly enough. And cooperative. It was a dunky neighborhood and Polchik had found Rico useful more than once. “What’s he supposed to do, eh?”

  “He’s supposed to be a cop.” Glum.

  Rico shook his vegetable head. “What they gonna do next? Robots. So what happens t’you, Mike? They make you a detective?”

  “Sure. And the week after that they make me Captain.”

  Rico looked uncertain, didn’t know whether he should laugh or sympathize. Finally, he said, “Hey, I got a bottle for ya,” feeling it would serve, whatever his reaction should properly have been. “Betcha your wife likes it…from Poland, imported stuff. Got grass or weeds or some kinda stuff in it. S’possed to be really sensational.”

  For just a second, peripherally seen, Polchik thought the robot had stirred.

  “Escuchar! I’ll get it for you.”

  He disappeared inside the bar before Polchik could stop him. The robot did move. It trembled…?

  Rico came out with a paper bag, its neck twisted closed around what was obviously a bottle of liquor.

  “I’ll have to pick it up tomorrow,” Polchik said. “I don’t have the car tonight.”

  “I’ll keep it for you. If I’m on relief when you come by, ask Maldonado.”

  The robot was definitely humming. Polchik could hear it. (The sort of sound an electric watch makes.) It suddenly moved, closing the distance, ten feet between them, till it passed Polchik, swiveled to face Rico—who stumbled backward halfway to the entrance to the Amsterdam Inn—then swiveled back to face Polchik.

  “Visual and audial data indicate a one-to-one extrapolation of same would result in a conclusion that a gratuity has been offered to you, Officer Polchik. Further, logic indicates that you intend to accept said gratuity. Such behavior is a programmed infraction of the law. It is—”

  “Shut up!”

  Rico stood very close to the door, wide-eyed.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow night,” Polchik said to him.

  “Officer Polchik,” the robot went on as though there had been no interruption, “it is clear if you intend to accept a gratuity, you will be breaking the law and liable to arrest and prosecution under Law Officer Statutes number—”

  “I said shuddup, dammit!” Polchik said, louder. “I don’t even know what the hell you’re talkin’ about, but I said shuddup, and that’s an order!”

  “Yes, sir,” the robot replied instantly. “However, my data tapes will record this conversation in its entirety and it will be transcribed into a written report at the conclusion of our patrol.”

  “What?” Polchik felt gears gnashing inside his head, thought of gears, thought of the robot, rejected gears and thought about Captain Summit. Then he thought about gears again…crushing him.

  Rico’s voice intruded, sounding scared. “What’s he saying? What’s that about a report?”

  “Now wait a minute, Brillo,” Polchik said, walking up to the robot. “Nothin’s happened here you can write a report on.”

  The robot’s voice—Reardon’s voice, Polchik thought irritatedly—was very firm. “Logic indicates a high probability that a gratuity has been accepted in the past, and another will be accepted in the future.”

  Polchik felt chili peppers in his gut. Hooking his thumbs in his belt—a pose he automatically assumed when he was trying to avert trouble—he deliberately toned down his voice. “Listen, Brillo, you forget the whole thing, you understand. You just for get it.”

  “Am I to understand you desire my tapes to be erased?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Erase it.”

  “Is that an order?”

  “It’s an order!”

  The robot hummed to itself for a heartbeat, then, “Primary programming does not allow erasure of data tapes. Tapes can be erased only post-transcription or by physically removing same from my memory bank.”

  “Listen—” Rico started, “—I don’t wan’ no trub—”

  Polchik impatiently waved him to silence. He didn’t need any complications right now. “Listen, Brillo…”

  “Yes. I hear it.”

  Polchik was about to continue speaking. He stopped. I hear it? This damned thing’s gone bananas. “I didn’t say anything yet.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry, sir. I thought you were referring to the sound of a female human screaming on 84th Street, third-floor front apartment.”

  Polchik looked everywhichway. “What are you talkin’ about? You crazy or something?”

  “No, sir. I am a model X-44. Though under certain special conditions my circuits can malfunction, conceivably, nothing in my repair programming parameters approximates ‘crazy.’”

  “Then just shuddup and let’s get this thing straightened out. Now, try’n understand this. You’re just a robot, see. You don’t understand the way real people do things. Like, for instance, when Rico here offers me a bottle of—”

  “If you’ll pardon me, sir, the female human is now screaming in the 17,000 cycle per-second range. My tapes are programmed to value-judge such a range as concomitant with fear and possibly extreme pain. I suggest we act at once.”

  “Hey, Polchik…” Rico began.

  “No, shuddup, Rico. Hey, listen, robot, Brillo, whatever: you mean you can hear some woman screaming, two blocks away and up three flights? Is the window open?” Then he stopped. “What’m I doin’? Talking to this thing!” He remembered the briefing he’d been given by Captain Summit. “Okay. You say you can hear her…let’s find her.”

  The robot took off at top speed. Back into the alley behind the Amsterdam Inn, across the 82nd-83rd block, across the 83rd-84th block, full-out with no clanking or clattering. Polchik found himself pounding along ten feet behind the robot, then twenty feet, then thirty feet; suddenly he was puffing, his chest heavy, the armament bandolier banging the mace cans and the riot-prod and the bull-horn and the peppergas shpritzers and the extra clips of Needler ammunition against his chest and back.

  The robot emerged from the alley, turned a 90° angle with the sharpest cut Polchik had ever seen, and jogged up 84th Street. Brillo was caught for a moment in the glare of a neon streetlamp, then was taking the steps of a crippled old brownstone three at a time.

  Troglody
tes with punch-presses were berkeleying Polchik’s lungs and stomach. His head was a dissenter’s punchboard. But he followed. More slowly now; and had trouble negotiating the last flight of stairs to the third floor. As he gained the landing, he was hauling himself hand-over-hand up the banister. If God’d wanted cops to walk beats he wouldn’t’a created the growler!

  The robot, Brillo, X-44, was standing in front of the door marked 3-A. He was quivering like a hound on point. (Buzzing softly with the sort of sound an electric watch makes.) Now Polchik could hear the woman himself, above the roar of blood in his temples.

  “Open up in there!” Polchik bellowed. He ripped the .32 Needle Positive off its Velcro fastener and banged on the door with the butt. The lanyard was twisted; he untwisted it. “This’s the police. I’m demanding entrance to a private domicile under Public Law 22-809, allowing for superced’nce of the ‘home-castle’ rule under emergency conditions. I said open up in there!”

  The screaming went up and plateau’d a few hundred cycles higher, and Polchik snapped at the robot, “Get outta my way.”

  Brillo obediently moved back a pace, and in the narrow hallway Polchik braced himself against the wall, locked the exoskeletal rods on his boots, dropped his crash-hat visor, jacked up his leg and delivered a power savate kick at the door.

  It was a pre-SlumClear apartment. The door bowed and dust spurted from the seams, but it held. Despite the rods, Polchik felt a searing pain gash up through his leg. He fell back, hopping about painfully, hearing himself going, “oo—oo—oo” and then prepared himself to have to do it again. The robot moved up in front of him, said, “Excuse me, sir,” and smoothly cleaved the door down the center with the edge of a metal hand that had somehow suddenly developed a cutting edge. He reached in, grasped both sliced edges of the hardwood, and ripped the door outward in two even halves.

  “Oh.” Polchik stared open-mouthed for only an instant.

  Then they were inside.

  The unshaven man with the beer gut protruding from beneath his olive drab skivvy undershirt was slapping the hell out of his wife. He had thick black tufts of hair that bunched like weed corsages in his armpits. She was half-lying over the back of a sofa with the springs showing. Her eyes were swollen and blue-black as dried prunes. One massive bruise was already draining down her cheek into her neck. She was weakly trying to fend off her husband’s blows with ineffectual wrist-blocks.

  “Okay! That’s it!” Polchik yelled.

  The sound of another voice, in the room with them, brought the man and his wife to a halt. He turned his head, his left hand still tangled in her long black hair, and he stared at the two intruders.

  He began cursing in Spanish. Then he burst into a guttural combination of English and Spanish, and finally slowed in his own spittle to a ragged English. “…won’t let me alone…go out my house…always botherin’ won’t let me alone…damn…” and he went back to Spanish as he pushed the woman from him and started across the room. The woman tumbled, squealing, out of sight behind the sofa.

  The man stumbled crossing the room, and Polchik’s needler tracked him. Behind him he heard the robot softly humming, and then it said, “Sir, analysis indicates psychotic glaze over subject’s eyes.”

  The man grabbed a half-filled quart bottle of beer off the television set, smashed it against the leading edge of the TV, giving it a half-twist (which registered instantly in Polchik’s mind: this guy knew how to get a ragged edge on the weapon; he was an experienced bar-room brawler) and suddenly lurched toward Polchik with the jagged stump in his hand.

  Abruptly, before Polchik could even thumb the needler to stun (it was on dismember), a metal blur passed him, swept into the man, lifted him high in the air with one hand, turned him upside-down so the bottle, small plastic change and an unzipped shoe showered down onto the threadbare rug. Arms and legs fluttered helplessly.

  “Aieeee!” the man screamed, his hair hanging down, his face plugged red with blood. “Madre de dios!”

  “Leave him alone!” It was the wife screaming, charging—if it could be called that, on hands and knees—from behind the sofa. She clambered to her feet and ran at the robot, screeching and cursing, pounding her daywork-reddened fists against his gleaming hide.

  “Okay, okay,” Polchik said, his voice lower but strong enough to get through to her. Pulling her and her hysteria away from the robot, he ordered, “Brillo, put him down.”

  “You goddam cops got no right bustin’ in here,” the man started complaining the moment he was on his feet again. “Goddam cops don’t let a man’n his wife alone for nothin’ no more. You got a warrant? Huh? You gonna get in trouble, plently trouble. This my home, cop, ‘home is a man’s castle,’ hah? Right? Right? An’ you an’ this tin can…” He was waving his arms wildly.

  Brillo wheeled a few inches toward the man. The stream of abuse cut off instantly, the man’s face went pale, and he threw up his hands to protect himself.

  “This man can be arrested for assault and battery, failure to heed a legitimate police order, attempted assault on a police officer with a deadly weapon, and disturbing the peace,” Brillo said. His flat, calm voice seemed to echo off the grimy walls.

  “It…it’s talkin’! Flavio! Demonio!” The wife spiraled toward hysteria again.

  “Shall I inform him of his rights under the Public Laws, sir?” Brillo asked Polchik.

  “You gon’ arrest me? Whu’for?”

  “Brillo…” Polchik began.

  Brillo started again, “Assault and battery, failure to—”

  Polchik looked annoyed. “Shuddup, I wasn’t asking you to run it again. Just shuddup.”

  “I din’t do nothin’! You come bust t’rough my door when me an’ my wife wass arguin’, an’ you beat me up. Look’a the bruise on my arm.” The arm was slightly inflamed where Brillo had grabbed him.

  “Flavio!” the woman whimpered.

  “Isabel; callete la bocà!”

  “I live right downstairs,” a voice said from behind them. “He’s always beating her up, and he drinks all the time and then he pisses out the window!” Polchik spun and a man in Levis and striped pajama tops was standing in the ruined doorway. “Sometimes it looks like it’s raining on half my window. Once I put my hand out to see—”

  “Get outta here!” Polchik bellowed, and the man vanished.

  “I din’t do nothin’!” Flavio said again, semi-surly.

  “My data tapes,” Brillo replied evenly, “will clearly show your actions.”

  “Day to tapes? Whass he talkin’ ’bout?” Flavio turned to Polchik, an unaccustomed ally against the hulking machine. Polchik felt a sense of camaraderie with the man.

  “He’s got everything down recorded…like on TV. And sound tapes, too.” Polchik looked back at him and recognized something in the dismay on the man’s fleshy face.

  Brillo asked again, “Shall I inform him of his rights, sir?”

  “Officer, sir, you ain’t gonna’rrest him?” the woman half-asked, half-pleaded, her eyes swollen almost closed, barely open, but tearful.

  “He came after me with a bottle,” Polchik said. “And he didn’t do you much good, neither.”

  “He wass work op. Iss allright. He’s okay now. It wass joss a’argumen’. Nobody got hort.”

  Brillo’s hum got momentarily higher. “Madam, you should inspect your face in my mirror.” He hummed and his skin became smoothly reflective. “My sensors detect several contusions and abrasions, particularly…”

  “Skip it,” Polchik said abruptly. “Come on, Brillo, let’s go.”

  Brillo’s metal hide went blank again. “I have not informed the prisoner…”

  “No prisoner,” Polchik said. “No arrest. Let’s go.”

  “But the data clearly shows…”

  “Forget it!” Polchik turned to face the man; he was standing there looking uncertain, rubbing his arm. “And you, strongarm…lemme hear one more peep outta this apartment and you’ll be in jail so fast it’ll make
your head swim…and for a helluva long time, too. If you get there at all. We don’t like guys like you. So I’m puttin’ the word out on you…I don’t like guys comin’ at me with bottles.”

  “Sir…I…”

  “Come on!”

  The robot followed the cop and the apartment was suddenly silent. Flavio and Isabel looked at each other sheepishly, then he began to cry, went to her and touched her bruises with the gentlest fingers.

  They went downstairs, Polchik staring and trying to figure out how it was such a massive machine could navigate the steps so smoothly. Something was going on at the base of the robot, but Polchik couldn’t get a good view of it. Dust puffed out from beneath the machine. And something sparkled.

  Once on the sidewalk, Brillo said, “Sir, that man should have been arrested. He was clearly violating several statutes.”

  Polchik made a sour face. “His wife wouldn’t of pressed the charge.”

  “He attacked a police officer with a deadly weapon.”

  “So that makes him Mad Dog Coll? He’s scared shitless, in the future he’ll watch it. For a while, at least.”

  Brillo was hardly satisfied at this noncomputable conclusion. “A police officer’s duty is to arrest persons who are suspected of having broken the law. Civil or criminal courts have the legal jurisdiction to decide the suspect’s guilt of innocence. Your duty, sir, was to arrest that man.”

  “Sure, sure. Have it your way, half the damn city’ll be in jail, and the other half’ll be springin’ ’em out.”

  Brillo said nothing, but Polchik thought the robot’s humming sounded sullen. He had a strong suspicion the machine wouldn’t forget it. Or Rico, either.

  And further up the street, to cinch Polchik’s suspicion, the robot once more tried to reinforce his position. “According to the Peace Officer Responsibility Act of 1975, failure of an officer to take into custody person or persons indisputably engaged in acts that contravene…”

  “Awright, dammit, knock it off. I tole you why I din’t arrest that poor jughead, so stop bustin’ my chops with it. You ain’t happy, you don’t like it, tell my Sergeant!”