Jack Williamson - With Folded Hands

VIP免费
2024-12-18 0 0 191.68KB 28 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
WITH FOLDED HANDS
by Jack Williamson
Underhill was walking home from the office, because his wife had the car, the afternoon he first
met the new mechanicals. His feet were following his usual diago-nal path across a weedy vacant
block—his wife usually had the car—and his preoccupied mind was rejecting various impossible
ways to meet his notes at the Two Rivers bank, when a new wall stopped him.
The wall wasn't any common brick or stone, but some-thing sleek and bright and strange.
Underhill stared up at a long new building. He felt vaguely annoyed and sur-prised at this glittering
obstruction—it certainly hadn't been here last week.
Then he saw the thing in the window.
The window itself wasn't any ordinary glass. The wide, dustless panel was completely
transparent, so that only the glowing letters fastened to it showed that it was there at all. The letters
made a severe, modernistic sign:
Two Rivers Agency
HUMANOID INSTITUTE
The Perfect Mechanicals
"To Serve and Obey,
And Guard Men from Harm."
His dim annoyance sharpened, because Underhill was in the mechanicals business himself. Times
were already hard enough, and mechanicals were a drug on the market. Androids, mechanoids,
electronoids, automatoids, and or-dinary robots. Unfortunately, few of them did all the salesmen
promised, and the Two Rivers market was already sadly oversaturated.
Underhill sold androids—when he could. His next con-signment was due tomorrow, and he didn't
quite know how to meet the bill.
Frowning, he paused to stare at the thing behind that invisible window. He had never seen a
humanoid. Like any mechanical not at work, it stood absolutely motionless. Smaller and slimmer
than a man. A shining black, its sleek silicone skin had a changing sheen of bronze and metallic blue.
Its graceful oval face wore a fixed look of alert and slightly surprised solicitude. Altogether, it was
the most beautiful mechanical he had ever seen.
Too small, of course, for much practical utility. He murmured to himself a reassuring quotation
from the Android Salesman: "Androids are big—because the makers refuse to sacrifice power,
essential functions, or dependability. Androids are your biggest buy!"
The transparent door slid open as he turned toward it, and he walked into the haughty opulence of
the new display room to convince himself that these streamlined items were just another flashy effort
to catch the woman shopper.
He inspected the glittering layout shrewdly, and his breezy optimism faded. He had never heard of
the Hu-manoid Institute, but the invading firm obviously had big money and big-time merchandising
know-how.
He looked around for a salesman, but it was another mechanical that came gliding silently to meet
him. A twin of the one in the window, it moved with a quick, surpris-ing grace. Bronze and blue
lights flowed over its lustrous blackness, and a yellow name plate flashed from its naked breast:
HUMANOID
Serial No. 81-H-B-27
The Perfect Mechanical
"To Serve and Obey,
And Guard Men from Harm."
Curiously, it had no lenses. The eyes in its bald oval head were steel-colored, blindly staring. But
it stopped a few feet in front of him, as if it could see anyhow, and it spoke to him with a high,
melodious voice:
"At your service, Mr. Underhill."
The use of his name startled him, for not even the androids could tell one man from another. But
this was a clever merchandising stunt, of course, not too difficult in a town the size of Two Rivers.
The salesman must be some local man, prompting the mechanical from behind the partition.
Underhill erased his momentary astonishment, and said loudly.
"May I see your salesman, please?"
"We employ no human salesmen, sir," its soft silvery voice replied instantly. "The Humanoid
Institute exists to serve mankind, and we require no human service. We ourselves can supply any
information you desire, sir, and accept your order for immediate humanoid service."
Underhill peered at it dazedly. No mechanicals were competent even to recharge their own
batteries and reset their own relays, much less to operate their own branch office. The blind eyes
stared blankly back, and he looked uneasily around for any booth or curtain that might con-ceal the
salesman.
Meanwhile, the sweet thin voice resumed persuasively.
"May we come out to your home for a free trial demonstration, sir? We are anxious to introduce
our ser-vice on your planet, because we have been successful in eliminating human unhappiness on
so many others. You will find us far superior to the old electronic mechanicals in use here."
Underhill stepped back uneasily. He reluctantly aban-doned his search for the hidden salesman,
shaken by the idea of any mechanicals promoting themselves. That would upset the whole industry.
"At least you must take some advertising matter, sir."
Moving with a somehow appalling graceful deftness, the small black mechanical brought him an
illustrated booklet from a table by the wall. To cover his confused and increasing alarm, he thumbed
through the glossy pages.
In a series of richly colored before-and-after pictures, a chesty blond girl was stooping over a
kitchen stove, and then relaxing in a daring negligee while a little black mechanical knelt to serve her
something. She was wearily hammering a typewriter, and then lying on an ocean beach, in a revealing
sun suit, while another mechanical did the typing. She was toiling at some huge industrial machine,
and then dancing in the arms of a golden-haired youth, while a black humanoid ran the machine.
Underhill sighed wistfully. The android company didn't supply such fetching sales material.
Women would find this booklet irresistible, and they selected eighty-six per cent of all mechanicals
sold. Yes, the competition was going to be bitter.
"Take it home, sir," the sweet voice urged him. "Show it to your wife. There is a free trial
demonstration order blank on the last page, and you will notice that we require no payment down."
He turned numbly, and the door slid open for him. Retreating dazedly, he discovered the booklet
still in his hand. He crumpled it furiously, and flung it down. The small black thing picked it up tidily,
and the insistent silver voice rang after him:
"We shall call at your office tomorrow, Mr. Underhill, and send a demonstration unit to your
home. It is time to discuss the liquidation of your business, because the elec-tronic mechanicals you
have been selling cannot compete with us. And we shall offer your wife a free trial demon-stration."
Underhill didn't attempt to reply, because he couldn't trust his voice. He stalked blindly down the
new sidewalk to the corner, and paused there to collect himself. Out of his startled and confused
impressions, one clear fact emerged—things looked black for the agency.
Bleakly, he stared back at the haughty splendor of the new building. It wasn't honest brick or
stone; that invisible window wasn't glass; and he was quite sure the foundation for it hadn't even
been staked out, the last time Aurora had the car.
He walked on around the block, and the new sidewalk took him near the rear entrance. A truck
was backed up to it, and several slim black mechanicals were silently busy, unloading huge metal
crates.
He paused to look at one of the crates. It was labeled for interstellar shipment. The stencils
showed that it had come from the Humanoid Institute, on Wing IV. He failed to recall any planet of
that designation; the outfit must be big.
Dimly, inside the gloom of the warehouse beyond the truck, he could see black mechanicals
opening the crates. A lid came up, revealing dark, rigid bodies, closely packed. One by one, they
came to life. They climbed out of the crate, and sprang gracefully to the floor. A shining black,
glinting with bronze and blue, they were all identi-cal.
One of them came out past the truck, to the sidewalk, staring with blind steel eyes. Its high silver
voice spoke to him melodiously:
"At your service, Mr. Underhill."
He fled. When his name was promptly called by a courteous mechanical, just out of the crate in
which it had been imported from a remote and unknown planet, he found the experience trying.
Two blocks along, the sign of a bar caught his eye, and he took his dismay inside. He had made it
a business rule not to drink before dinner, and Aurora didn't like him to drink at all; but these new
mechanicals, he felt, had made the day exceptional.
Unfortunately, however, alcohol failed to brighten the brief visible future of the agency. When he
emerged, after an hour, he looked wistfully back in hope that the bright new building might have
vanished as abruptly as it came. It hadn't. He shook his head dejectedly, and turned uncer-tainly
homeward.
Fresh air had cleared his head somewhat, before he arrived at the neat white bungalow in the
outskirts of the town, but it failed to solve his business problems. He also realized, uneasily, that he
would be late for dinner.
Dinner, however, had been delayed. His son Frank, a freckled ten-year-old, was still kicking a
football on the quiet street in front of the house. And little Gay, who was tow-haired and adorable
and eleven, came running across the lawn and down the sidewalk to meet him.
"Father, you can't guess what!" Gay was going to be a great musician some day, and no doubt
properly dignified, but she was pink and breathless with excitement now. She let him swing her high
off the sidewalk, and she wasn't critical of the bar aroma on his breath. He couldn't guess, and she
informed him eagerly;
"Mother's got a new lodger!"
Underhill had foreseen a painful inquisition, because Aurora was worried about the notes at the
bank, and the bill for the new consignment, and the money for little Gay's lessons.
The new lodger, however, saved him from that. With an alarming crashing of crockery, the
household android was setting dinner on the table, but the little house was empty. He found Aurora
in the back yard, burdened with sheets and towels for the guest.
Aurora, when he married her, had been as utterly adorable as now her little daughter was. She
might have remained so, he felt, if the agency had been a little more successful. However, while the
pressure of slow failure had gradually crumbled his own assurance, small hardships had turned her a
little too aggressive.
Of course he loved her still. Her red hair was still alluring, and she was loyally faithful, but
thwarted ambi-tions had sharpened her character and sometimes her voice. They never quarreled,
really, but there were small differences.
There was the little apartment over the garage—built for human servants they had never been able
to afford. It was too small and shabby to attract any responsible tenant, and Underhill wanted to
leave it empty. It hurt his pride to see her making beds and cleaning floors for strangers.
Aurora had rented it before, however, when she wanted money to pay for Gay's music lessons,
or when some colorful unfortunate touched her sympathy, and it seemed to Underhill that her
lodgers had all turned out to be thieves and vandals.
She turned back to meet him, now, with the clean linen in her arms.
"Dear, it's no use objecting." Her voice was quite determined. "Mr. Sledge is the most wonderful
old fellow, and he's going to stay just as long as he wants."
"That's all right, darling." He never liked to bicker, and he was thinking of his troubles at the
agency. "I'm afraid we'll need the money. Just make him pay in advance."
"But he can't!" Her voice throbbed with sympathetic warmth. "He says he'll have royalties coming
in from his inventions, so he can pay in a few days."
Underhill shrugged; he had heard that before.
"Mr. Sledge is different, dear," she insisted. "He's a traveler, and a scientist. Here, in this dull little
town, we don't see many interesting people."
"You've picked up some remarkable types," he com-mented.
"Don't be unkind, dear," she chided gently. "You haven't met him yet, and you don't know how
wonderful he is." Her voice turned sweeter. "Have you a ten, dear?"
He stiffened. "What for?"
"Mr. Sledge is ill." Her voice turned urgent. "I saw him fall on the street, downtown. The police
were going to send him to the city hospital, but he didn't want to go. He looked so noble and sweet
and grand. So I told them I would take him. I got him in the car and took him to old Dr. Winters. He
has this heart condition, and he needs the money for medicine."
Reasonably, Underhill inquired, "Why doesn't he want to go to the hospital?"
"He has work to do," she said. "Important scientific work—and he's so wonderful and tragic.
Please, dear, have you a ten?"
Underhill thought of many things to say. These new mechanicals promised to multiply his
troubles. It was foolish to take in an invalid vagrant, who could have free care at the city hospital.
Aurora's tenants always tried to pay their rent with promises, and generally wrecked the apartment
and looted the neighborhood before they left.
But he said none of those things. He had learned to compromise. Silently, he found two fives in
his thin pock-etbook, and put them in her hand. She smiled, and kissed him impulsively—he barely
remembered to hold his breath in time.
Her figure was still good, by dint of periodic dieting. He was proud of her shining red hair. A
sudden surge of affection brought tears to his eyes, and he wondered what would happen to her and
the children if the agency failed.
"Thank you, dear!" she whispered. "I'll have him come for dinner, if he feels able, and you can
meet him then. I hope you don't mind dinner being late."
He didn't mind, tonight. Moved by a sudden impulse of domesticity, he got hammer and nails
from his workshop in the basement, and repaired the sagging screen on the kitchen door with a neat
diagonal brace.
He enjoyed working with his hands. His boyhood dream had been to be a builder of fission
power plants. He had even studied engineering—before he married Aurora, and had to take over the
ailing mechanicals agency from her indolent and alcoholic father. He was whistling happily by the
time the little task was done.
When he went back through the kitchen to put up his tools, he found the household android
busily clearing the untouched dinner away from the table—the androids were good enough at strictly
routine tasks, but they could never learn to cope with human unpredictability.
"Stop, stop!" Slowly repeated, in the proper pitch and rhythm, his command made it halt, and
then he said carefully, "Set—table; set—table."
Obediently, the gigantic thing came shuffling back with the stack of plates. He was suddenly
struck with the difference between it and those new humanoids. He sighed wearily. Things looked
black for the agency.
Aurora brought her new lodger in through the kitchen door. Underhill nodded to himself. This
gaunt stranger, with his dark shaggy hair, emaciated face, and threadbare garb, looked to be just the
sort of colorful, dramatic vagabond that always touched Aurora's heart. She intro-duced them, and
they sat down to wait in the front room while she went to call the children.
The old rogue didn't look very sick, to Underhill. Per-haps his wide shoulders had a tired stoop,
but his spare, tall figure was still commanding. The skin was seamed and pale, over his rawboned,
cragged face, but his deep-set eyes still had a burning vitality.
His hands held Underhill's attention. Immense hands, they hung a little forward when he stood,
swung on long bony arms in perpetual readiness. Gnarled and scarred, darkly tanned, with the small
hairs on the back bleached to a golden color, they told their own epic of varied adventure, of battle
perhaps, and possibly even of toil. They had been very useful hands.
"I'm very grateful to your wife, Mr. Underhill." His voice was a deep-throated rumble, and he had
a wistful smile, oddly boyish for a man so evidently old. "She rescued me from an unpleasant
predicament, and I'll see that she is well paid."
Just another vivid vagabond, Underhill decided, talking his way through life with plausible
inventions. He had a little private game he played with Aurora's tenants—just remembering what they
said and counting one point for every impossibility. Mr. Sledge, he thought, would give him an
excellent score.
"Where are you from?" he asked conversationally.
Sledge hesitated for an instant before he answered, and that was unusual—most of Aurora's
tenants had been exceedingly glib.
"Wing IV." The gaunt old man spoke with a solemn reluctance, as if he should have liked to say
something else. "All my early life was spent there, but I left the planet nearly fifty years ago. I've
been traveling ever since."
Startled, Underhill peered at him sharply. Wing IV, he remembered, was the home planet of those
sleek new mechanicals, but this old vagabond looked too seedy and impecunious to be connected
with the Humanoid Institute. His brief suspicion faded. Frowning, he said casually:
"Wing IV must be rather distant."
The old rogue hesitated again, and then said gravely,
"One hundred and nine light-years, Mr. Underhill."
That made the first point, but Underhill concealed his satisfaction. The new space liners were
pretty fast, but the velocity of light was still an absolute limit. Casually, he played for another point:
"My wife says you're a scientist, Mr. Sledge?"
"Yes."
The old rascal's reticence was unusual. Most of Au-rora's tenants required very little prompting.
Underhill tried again, in a breezy conversational tone:
"Used to be an engineer myself, until I dropped it to go into mechanicals." The old vagabond
straightened, and Underhill paused hopefully. But he said nothing, and Un-derhill went on, "Fission
plant design and operation. What's your specialty, Mr. Sledge?"
The old man gave him a long, troubled look, with those brooding, hollowed eyes, and then said
slowly, "Your wife has been kind to me, Mr. Underhill, when I was in desperate need. I think you
are entitled to the truth, but I must ask you to keep it to yourself. I am engaged on a very important
research problem, which must be finished secretly."
"I'm sorry." Suddenly ashamed of his cynical little game, Underhill spoke apologetically. "Forget
it." But the old man said deliberately, "My field is rhodomagnetics."
"Eh?" Underhill didn't like to confess ignorance, but he had never heard of that. "I've been out of
the game for fifteen years," he explained. "I'm afraid I haven't kept up.
The old man smiled again, faintly.
"The science was unknown here until I arrived, a few days ago," he said. "I was able to apply for
basic patents. As soon as the royalties start coming in, I'll be wealthy again."
Underhill had heard that before. The old rogue's solemn reluctance had been very impressive, but
he remembered that most of Aurora's tenants had been very plausible gentry.
"So?" Underhill was staring again, somehow fascinated by those gnarled and scarred and
strangely able hands. "What, exactly, is rhodomagnetics?"
He listened to the old man's careful, deliberate answer, and started his little game again. Most of
Aurora's tenants had told some pretty wild tales, but he had never heard anything to top this.
"A universal force," the weary, stooped old vagabond said solemnly. "As fundamental as
ferromagnetism or grav-itation, though the effects are less obvious. It is keyed to the second triad of
the periodic table, rhodium and ru-thenium and palladium, in very much the same way that
ferromagnetism is keyed to the first triad, iron and nickel and cobalt."
Underhill remembered enough of his engineering courses to see the basic fallacy of that.
Palladium was used for watch springs, he recalled, because it was completely non-magnetic. But he
kept his face straight. He had no malice in his heart, and he played the little game just for his own
amusement. It was secret, even from Aurora, and he always penalized himself for any show of
doubt.
He said merely, "I thought the universal forces were already pretty well known."
"The effects of rhodomagnetism are masked by nature," the patient, rusty voice explained. "And,
besides, they are somewhat paradoxical, so that ordinary laboratory meth-ods defeat themselves."
"Paradoxical?" Underhill prompted.
"In a few days I can show you copies of my patents, and reprints of papers describing
demonstration experi-ments," the old man promised gravely. "The velocity of propagation is infinite.
The effects vary inversely with the first power of the distance, not with the square of the distance.
And ordinary matter, except for the elements of the rhodium triad, is generally transparent to
rhodomag-netic radiations."
That made four more points for the game. Underhill felt a little glow of gratitude to Aurora, for
摘要：

WITHFOLDEDHANDSbyJackWilliamsonUnderhillwaswalkinghomefromtheoffice,becausehiswifehadthecar,theafternoonhefirstmetthenewmechanicals.Hisfeetwerefollowinghisusualdiago­nalpathacrossaweedyvacantblock—hiswifeusuallyhadthecar—andhispreoccupiedmindwasrejectingvariousimpossiblewaystomeethisnotesattheTwoRiv...

展开>> 收起<<
Jack Williamson - With Folded Hands.pdf

共28页,预览6页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：28 页 大小：191.68KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-18

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 28
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注