Isaac Asimov - Wonderful Worlds of SciFi Vol 9 - Robots

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FROM THE ERA OF MAN
TO THE AGE OF ROBOTS…
“The Warm Space” by David Brin--The robots had staked their claim to the
stars, but wasn’t there any place for those organic units called humans in the
greater universe?
“How-2” by Clifford D. Simak--All he’d wanted to build was a pet robot rover,
but what he got was a being that was never meant to leave the factory, a metal
creature that might be the mother of all robot kind!
“Sally” by Isaac Asimov--They were automatobiles, cars which understood
humans’ every request and had obeyed their masters faithfully, but now they’d
been retired from service and no one was going to get them on the road again!
These are but a few glimpses of our possible futures, those distant--or not so
distant--times, when not only men but machines will have minds of their own.
ROBOTS
ISAAC ASIMOV’S
WONDERFUL WORLDS OF SCIENCE FICTION #9
ROBOTS
Isaac Asimov’s Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction #9
Edited by
Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh
Copyright © 1989
Contents
INTRODUCTION: ROBOTS
THE TUNNEL UNDER THE WORLD
by Frederik Pohl
BROTHER ROBOT
by Henry Slesar
THE LIFEBOAT MUTINY
by Robert Sheckley
THE WARM SPACE
by David Brin
HOW-2
by Clifford D. Simak
TOO ROBOT TO MARRY
by George H Smith
THE EDUCATION OF TIGRESS MCCARDLE
by C. M. Kornbluth
SALLY
by Isaac Asimov
BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS
by Thomas A. Easton
SUN UP
by A.A. Jackson IV and Howard Waldrop
SECOND VARIETY
by Philip K. Dick
THE PROBLEM WAS LUBRICATION
by David R. Bunch
FIRST TO SERVE
by Algis Budrys
TWO-HANDED ENGINE
by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore
THOUGH DREAMERS DIE
by Lester Del Rey
SOLDIER BOY
by Michael Shaara
FAREWELL TO THE MASTER
by Harry Bates
ABOUT THE EDITORS
INTRODUCTION: ROBOTS
Robots are not a modern concept. They are as old as pottery at the very
least.
Once human beings learned to fashion objects out of clay and bake them
hard--especially objects that looked like human beings--it was an easy
conceptual leap to suppose that human beings themselves had been fashioned out
of clay. Whereas ordinary lifeless statues and figurines needed nothing more
than a human potter, the more miraculous human body, living and thinking,
required a divine potter.
Thus, in the Bible, God is described as forming the first man,
potter-wise, out of clay. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the
ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a
living soul.” (Genesis 2:7)
In the Greek myths, it was Prometheus who fashioned the first human
beings out of clay and water and Athena breathed life into them. No doubt one
could go through the myths of many nations and find gods busily making little
statues that became human beings.
What’s more, the gods continued making living things or quasi--living
things later on. With time, of course, human beings learned that clay was not
the only building material, but that metals were superior, so that the
divinely created beings came to be thought of as metallic in nature, and no
longer as pottery.
In the eighteenth book of the Iliad, for instance, Hephaistos, the
divine smith, is forging new armor for Achilles, and he is described as having
“a couple of maids to support him. These are made of gold exactly like living
girls; they have sense in their heads, they can speak and use their muscles,
they can spin and weave and do their work.” Hephaistos was also described as
having formed a bronze giant, Talos, that served to guard the shores of Crete
by walking around the island three times a day and repelling anyone trying to
land. Folk tales and legends of all nations tell of objects, usually
considered inanimate, that through magic of one kind or another, achieve human
or even superhuman intelligence. These can vary from the “golem,” a giant made
of clay, supposedly given magical life by a rabbi in sixteenth-century
Bohemia, down to the magic mirror in “Snow White” who could tell “who is the
fairest of them all.” Various medieval scholars, such as Albertus Magnus,
Roger Bacon, and Pope Sylvester II were supposed to have fashioned talking
heads that gave them needed information.
Human beings, of course, tried to devise “automata” (singular
“automaton”--from Greek words meaning “selfmoving”) that would work through
springs, levers, and compressed air rather than through magic, and give the
illusion of possessing purpose and intelligence. Even among the ancients were
those who possessed sufficient ingenuity who could make use of the primitive
technologies of those days to construct such devices.
The breakthrough came, however, with the development of mechanical
clocks in the thirteenth century. Clever technologists learned how to use
“clockwork”--gears, wheels, springs, and so on--to produce not merely the
regular motion of clock hands, but more complex motions that gave the illusion
of life.
The golden age of automata came in the eighteenth century, when automata
in the shape of soldiers, or tigers, or small figures on a stage could mimic
various life-related behavior. Thus, Jacques de Vaucanson built a mechanical
duck in 1738. It quacked, bathed, drank water, ate grain, seemed to digest it,
and then eliminated it. It was all perfectly automatic, of course, and without
volition or consciousness, but it amazed spectators. In 1774 Pierre
Jacquet-Droz devised an automatic scribe, a mechanical boy whose clockwork
mechanism caused it to dip a pen in ink and write a letter (always the same
letter, to be sure. )
These were only toys, of course, but important ones. The principles of
automata were applied to automatic machinery intended for useful purposes,
which led to the invention of punched cards in 1801, which in turn set the
feet of humanity on the path toward computers.
The Industrial Revolution, which had its beginnings as the golden age of
automata came to an end, was therefore a continuation of the notion of the
mechanical production of apparently purposive behavior. As machines grew more
and more elaborate, the notion that human beings could eventually construct
devices that had some modicum of human intelligence grew stronger.
In 1818 a book by Mary Shelley was published that was entitled
Frankenstein and that dealt with the construction of a human body that was
given life by its inventor. It was subtitled “The New Prometheus” and has been
popular ever since its appearance. In the book, the created life-form (called
“the Monster”) took vengeance on being neglected’ by killing Frankenstein and
his family.
That is considered by some to have initiated modern “science fiction,”
in which the possibility of manufacturing “mechanical men” remained a
frequently recurring subject.
In 1920 Karel Capek, a Czeck playwright, wrote R. U. R. , a play in
which automata were mass-produced by an Englishman named Rossum. The automata
were meant to do the world’s work and to make a better life for human beings.
In the end, though, the automata rebelled, wiped out humanity, and started a
new race of intelligent beings themselves. It was Frankenstein again on a much
more grandiose scale.
R. U. R. stood for Rossum’s Universal Robots. Rossum seems to be from a
Czech word meaning “reason,” while “robot” is from a Czech word meaning
“slave.” The popularity of the play threw the old term, “automaton,” out of
use. The expression “robot” replaced it in every language, so that now a robot
is any artificial device (often metallic and often pictured in vaguely human
form, though neither is absolutely necessary) that will perform functions
ordinarily thought to be appropriate only for human beings.
In 1939 Isaac Asimov (that’s me), who was only nineteen at the time,
grew tired of science-fictional robots that were either unrealistically wicked
or unrealistically noble, and began to write science-fiction tales in which
robots were viewed merely as machines, built, as all machines are, with an
attempt at adequate safeguards. In 1942 he formulated these safeguards into
the “Three Laws of Robotics.” Other writers adopted the laws, which introduced
a useful rationalization into the concept of robots. They did not, however,
unduly hamper those writers.
In this collection of modern stories about robots, you will find robots
of all shapes and purposes, some of them, despite the Three Laws, being
dedicated to war and destruction. Even a robot story of mine that is included
involves robots built in the shape of automobiles, rather than men, and allows
them to act with (deservedly) hostile intent.
In any case, enjoy.
--Isaac Asimov
THE TUNNEL UNDER THE WORLD
by Frederik Pohl
On the morning of June 15th, Guy Burckhardt woke up screaming out of a dream.
It was more real than any dream he had ever had in his life. He could
still hear and feel the sharp, ripping-metal explosion, the violent heave that
had tossed him furiously out of bed, the searing wave of heat.
He sat up convulsively and stared, not believing what he saw, at the
quiet room and the bright sunlight coming in the window.
He croaked, “Mary?”
His wife was not in the bed next to him. The covers were tumbled and
awry, as though she had just left it, and the memory of the dream was so
strong that instinctively he found himself searching the floor to see if the
dream explosion had thrown her down.
But she wasn’t there. Of course she wasn’t, he told himself, looking at
the familiar vanity and slipper chair, the uncracked window, the unbuckled
wall. It had only been a dream.
“Guy?” His wife was calling him querulously from the foot of the stairs.
“Guy, dear, are you all right?”
He called weakly, “Sure.”
There was a pause. Then Mary said doubtfully, “Breakfast is ready. Are
you sure you’re all right? I thought I heard you yelling.”
Burckhardt said more confidently, “I had a bad dream, honey. Be right
down.”
In the shower, punching the lukewarm-and-cologne he favored, he told
himself that it had been a beaut of a dream. Still bad dreams weren’t unusual,
especially bad dreams about explosions. In the past thirty years of H-bomb
jitters, who had not dreamed of explosions?
Even Mary had dreamed of them, it turned out, for he started to tell her
about the dream, but she cut him off. “You did?” Her voice was astonished.
“Why, dear, I dreamed the same thing! Well, almost the same thing. I didn’t
actually hear anything. I dreamed that something woke me up, and then there
was a sort of quick bang, and then something hit me on the head. And that was
all. Was yours like that?”
Burckhardt coughed. “Well, no,” he said. Mary was not one of the
strong-as-a-man, brave-as-a-tiger women. It was not necessary, he thought, to
tell her all the little details of the dream that made it seem so real. No
need to mention the splintered ribs, and the salt bubble in his throat, and
the agonized knowledge that this was death. He said, “Maybe there really was
some kind of explosion downtown. Maybe we heard it and it started us
dreaming.”
Mary reached over and patted his hand absently. “Maybe,” she agreed.
“It’s almost half-past eight, dear. Shouldn’t you hurry? You don’t want to be
late to the office.”
He gulped his food, kissed her and rushed out--not so much to be on time
as to see if his guess had been right.
But downtown Tylerton looked as it always had. Coming in on the bus,
Burckhardt watched critically out the window, seeking evidence of an
explosion. There wasn’t any. If anything, Tylerton looked better than it ever
had before. It was a beautiful crisp day, the sky was cloudless, the buildings
were clean and inviting. They had, he observed, steamblasted the Power & Light
Building, the town’s only skyscraper--that was the penalty of having Contro
Chemicals’ main plant on the outskirts of town; the fumes from the cascade
stills left their mark on stone buildings.
None of the usual crowd were on the bus, so there wasn’t anyone
Burckhardt could ask about the explosion. And by the time he got out at the
corner of Fifth and Lehigh and the bus rolled away with a muted diesel moan,
he had pretty well convinced himself that it was all imagination.
He stopped at the cigar stand in the lobby of his office building, but
Ralph wasn’t behind the counter. The man who sold him his pack of cigarettes
was a stranger.
“Where’s Mr. Stebbins?” Burckhardt asked.
The man said politely, “Sick, sir. He’ll be in tomorrow. A pack of
Marlins today?”
“Chesterfields,” Burckhardt corrected.
“Certainly, sir,” the man said. But what he took from the rack and slid
across the counter was an unfamiliar green-and-yellow pack.
“Do try these, sir,” he suggested. “They contain an anticough factor.
Ever notice how ordinary cigarettes make you choke every once in a while?”
Burckhardt said suspiciously, “I never heard of this brand.”
“Of course not. They’re something new.” Burckhardt hesitated, and the
man said persuasively, “Look, try them out at my risk. If you don’t like them,
bring back the empty pack and I’ll refund your money. Fair enough?”
Burckhardt shrugged. “How can I lose? But give me a pack of
Chesterfields, too, will you?”
He opened the pack and lit one while he waited for the elevator. They
weren’t bad, he decided, though he was suspicious of cigarettes that had the
tobacco chemically treated in any way. But he didn’t think much of Ralph’s
stand-in; it would raise hell with the trade at the cigar stand if the man
tried to give every customer the same high-pressure sales talk.
The elevator door opened with a low-pitched sound of music. Burckhardt
and two or three others got in and he nodded to them as the door closed. The
thread of music switched off and the speaker in the ceiling of the cab began
its usual commercials.
No, not the usual commercials, Burckhardt realized. He had been exposed
to the captive-audience commercials so long that they hardly registered on the
outer ear any more, but what was coming from the recorded program in the
basement of the building caught his attention. It wasn’t merely that the
brands were mostly unfamiliar; it was a difference in pattern.
There were jingles with an insistent, bouncy rhythm, about soft drinks
he had never tasted. There was a rapid patter dialogue between what sounded
like two ten-year-old boys about a candy bar, followed by an authoritative
bass rumble: “Go right out and get a DELICIOUS Choco-Bite and eat your TANGY
Choco-Bite all up. That’s Choco-Bite!” There was a sobbing female whine: “I
wish I had a Feckle Freezer! I’d do anything for a Feckle Freezer!” Burckhardt
reached his floor and left the elevator in the middle of the last one. It left
him a little uneasy. The commercials were not for familiar brands; there was
no feeling of use and custom to them.
But the office was happily normal--except that Mr. Barth wasn’t in. Miss
Mitkin, yawning at the reception desk, didn’t know exactly why. “His home
phoned, that’s all. He’ll be in tomorrow.”
“Maybe he went to the plant. It’s right near his house.”
She looked indifferent. “Yeah.”
A thought struck Burkhardt. “But today is June 15th! It’s quarterly tax
return day--he has to sign the return!”
Miss Mitkin shrugged to indicate that that was Burckhardt’s problem, not
hers. She returned to her nails.
Thoroughly exasperated, Burckhardt went to his desk. It wasn’t that he
couldn’t sign the tax returns as well as Barth, he thought resentfully. It
simply wasn’t his job, that was all; it was a responsibility that Barth, as
office manager for Contro Chemicals’ downtown office, should have taken.
He thought briefly of calling Barth at his home or trying to reach him
at the factory, but he gave up the idea quickly enough. He didn’t really care
much for the people at the factory and the less contact he had with them, the
better. He had been to the factory once, with Barth; it had been a confusing
and, in a way, a frightening experience. Barring a handful of executives and
engineers, there wasn’t a soul in the factory--that is, Burckhardt corrected
himself, remembering what Barth had told him, not a living soul--just the
machines.
According to Barth, each machine was controlled by a sort of computer
which reproduced, in its electronic snarl, the actual memory and mind of a
human being. It was an unpleasant thought. Barth, laughing, had assured him
that there was no Frankenstein business of robbing graveyards and implanting
brains in machines. It was only a matter, he said, of transferring a man’s
habit patterns from brain cells to vacuum-tube cells. It didn’t hurt the man
and it didn’t make the machine into a monster.
But they made Burckhardt uncomfortable all the same.
He put Barth and the factory and all his other irritations out of his
mind and tackled the tax returns. It took him until noon to verify the
figures--which Barth could have done out of his memory and his private ledger
in ten minutes, Burckhardt resentfully reminded himself.
He sealed them in an envelope and walked out to Miss Mitkin. “Since Mr.
Barth isn’t here, we’d better go to lunch in shifts,” he said. “You can go
first.”
“Thanks.” Miss Mitkin languidly took her bag out of the desk drawer and
began to apply makeup.
Burckhardt offered her the envelope. “Drop this in the mail for me, will
you? Uh--wait a minute. I wonder if I ought to phone Mr. Barth to make sure.
Did his wife say whether he was able to take phone calls?”
“Didn’t say,” Miss Mitkin blotted her lips carefully with a Kleenex.
“Wasn’t his wife, anyway. It was his daughter who called and left the
message.”
“The kid?” Burckhardt frowned. “I thought she was away at school.”
“She called, that’s all I know.”
Burckhardt went back to his own office and stared distastefully at the
unopened mail on his desk. He didn’t like nightmares; they spoiled his whole
day. He should have stayed in bed, like Barth.
A funny thing happened on his way home. There was a disturbance at the
corner where he usually caught his bus--someone was screaming something about
a new kind of deep-freeze--so he walked an extra block. He saw the bus coming
and started to trot. But behind him, someone was calling his name. He looked
over his shoulder; a small harried--looking man was hurrying toward him.
Burckhardt hesitated, and then recognized him. It was a casual
acquaintance named Swanson. Burckhardt sourly observed that he had already
missed the bus.
He said, “Hello.”
Swanson’s face was desperately eager. “Burckhardt?” he asked
inquiringly, with an odd intensity. And then he just stood there silently,
watching Burckhardt’s face, with a burning eagerness that dwindled to a faint
hope and died to a regret. He was searching for something, waiting for
something, Burckhardt thought. But whatever it was he wanted, Burckhardt
didn’t know how to supply it.
Burckhardt coughed and said again, “Hello, Swanson.”
Swanson didn’t even acknowledge the greeting. He merely sighed a very
deep sigh.
“Nothing doing,” he mumbled, apparently to himself. He nodded
abstractedly to Burckhardt and turned away.
Burckhardt watched the slumped shoulders disappear in the crowd. It was
an odd sort of day, he thought, and one he didn’t much like. Things weren’t
going right.
Riding home on the next bus, he brooded about it. It wasn’t anything
terrible or disastrous; it was something out of his experience entirely. You
live your life, like any man, and you form a network of impressions and
reactions. You expect things. When you open your medicine chest, your razor is
expected to be on the second shelf; when you lock your front door, you expect
to have to give it a slight extra tug to make it latch.
It isn’t the things that are right and perfect in your life that make it
familiar. It is the things that are just a little bit wrong--the sticking
latch, the light switch at the head of the stairs that needs an extra push
because the spring is old and weak, the rug that unfailingly skids underfoot.
It wasn’t just that things were wrong with the pattern of Burckhardt’s
life; it was that the wrong things were wrong. For instance, Barth hadn’t come
into the office, yet Barth always came in.
Burckhardt brooded about it through dinner. He brooded about it, despite
his wife’s attempt to interest him in a game of bridge with the neighbors, all
through the evening. The neighbors were people he liked--Anne and Farley
Dennerman. He had known them all their lives. But they were odd and brooding,
too, this night and he barely listened to Dennerman’s complaints about not
being able to get good phone service or his wife’s comments on the disgusting
variety of television commercials they had these days.
Burckhardt was well on the way to setting an all-time record for
continuous abstraction when, around midnight, with a suddenness that surprised
him--he was strangely aware of it happening--he turned over in his bed and,
quickly and completely, fell asleep.
On the morning of June 15th, Burckhardt woke up screaming.
It was more real than any dream he had ever had in his life. He could
still hear the explosion, feel the blast that crushed him against a wall. It
did not seem right that he should be sitting bolt upright in bed in an
undisturbed room.
His wife came pattering up the stairs. “Darling!” she cried. “What’s the
matter?”
He mumbled. “Nothing. Bad dream.”
She relaxed, hand on heart. In an angry tone, she started to say: “You
gave me such a shock--”
But a noise from outside interrupted her. There was a wail of sirens and
a clang of bells; it was loud and shocking.
The Burckhardts stared at each other for a heartbeat, then hurried
fearfully to the window.
There were no rumbling fire engines in the street, only a small panel
truck, cruising slowly along. Flaring loud-speaker horns crowned its top. From
them issued the screaming sound of sirens, growing in intensity, mixed with
the rumble of heavy-duty engines and the sound of bells. It was a perfect
record of fire engines arriving at a four-alarm blaze.
Burckhardt said in amazement, “Mary, that’s against the law! Do you know
what they’re doing? They’re playing records of a fire. What are they up to?”
“Maybe it’s a practical joke,” his wife offered.
“Joke! Waking up the whole neighborhood at six o’clock in the morning?”
He shook his head. “The police will be here in ten minutes,” he predicted.
“Wait and see.”
But the police weren’t--not in ten minutes, or at all. Whoever the
pranksters in the car were, they apparently had a police permit for their
games.
The car took a position in the middle of the block and stood silent for
a few minutes Then there was a crackle from the speaker, and a giant voice
chanted:
Feckle Freezers!
Feckle Freezers!
Gotta have a
Feckle Freezer!
Feckle, Feckle, Feckle,
Feckle, Feckle, Feckle--
It went on and on. Every house on the block had faces staring out of
windows by then. The voice was not merely loud; it was nearly deafening.
Burckhardt shouted to his wife, over the uproar, “What the hell is a
Feckle Freezer?”
“Some kind of a freezer, I guess, dear,” she shrieked back unhelpfully.
Abruptly the noise stopped and the truck stood silent. It was still
misty morning; the sun’s rays came horizontally across the rooftops. It was
impossible to believe that, a moment ago, the silent block had been bellowing
the name of a freezer.
“A crazy advertising trick,” Burckhardt said bitterly. He yawned and
turned away from the window. “Might as well get dressed. I guess that’s the
end of--”
The bellow caught him from behind; it was almost like a hard slap on the
ears. A harsh, sneering voice, louder than the archangel’s trumpet, howled:
“Have you got a freezer? It stinks! If it isn’t a Feckle Freezer, it
stinks! If it’s a last year’s Feckle Freezer, it stinks! Only this year’s
Feckle Freezer is any good at all! You know who owns an Ajax Freezer? Fairies
own Ajax Freezers! You know who owns a Triplecold Freezer? Commies own
Triplecold Freezers! Every freezer but a brand-new Feckle Freezer stinks!”
The voice screamed inarticulately with rage. “I’m warning you! Get out
and buy a Feckle Freezer right away! Hurry up! Hurry for Feckle! Hurry for
Feckle! Hurry, hurry, hurry, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle,
Feckle...”
It stopped eventually. Burckhardt licked his lips. He started to say to
his wife, “Maybe we ought to call the police about--” when the speakers
erupted again. It caught him off guard; it was intended to catch him off
guard. It screamed:
“Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle. Cheap
freezers ruin your food. You’ll get sick and throw up. You’ll get sick and
die. Buy a Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle! Ever take a piece of meat out of
the freezer you’ve got and see how rotten and moldy it is? Buy a Feckle,
Feckle, Feckle, Feckle, Feckle. Do you want to eat rotten, stinking food? Or
do you want to wise up and buy a Feckle, Feckle, Feckle--”
That did it. With fingers that kept stabbing the wrong holes, Burckhardt
finally managed to dial the local police station. He got a busy signal--it was
apparent that he was not the only one with the same idea--and while he was
shakily dialing again, the noise outside stopped.
He looked out the window. The truck was gone.
Burckhardt loosened his tie and ordered another Frosty-Flip from the
waiter. If only they wouldn’t keep the Crystal Cafe so hot! The new paint
job--searing reds and blinding yellows--was bad enough, but someone seemed to
have the delusion that this was January instead of June; the place was a good
ten degrees warmer than outside.
He swallowed the Frosty-Flip in two gulps. It had a kind of peculiar
flavor, he thought, but not bad. It certainly cooled you off, just as the
waiter had promised. He reminded himself to pick up a carton of them on the
way home; Mary might like them. She was always interested in something new.
He stood up awkwardly as the girl came across the restaurant toward him.
She was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in Tylerton. Chin-height,
honey-blond hair and a figure that--well, it was all hers. There was no doubt
in the world that the dress that clung to her was the only thing she wore. He
felt as if he were blushing as she greeted him.
“Mr. Burckhardt.” The voice was like distant tomtoms. “It’s wonderful of
you to let me see you, after this morning.”
He cleared his throat. “Not at all. Won’t you sit down, Miss--”
“April Horn,” she murmured, sitting down--beside him, not where he had
pointed on the other side of the table. “Call me April, won’t you?”
She was wearing some kind of perfume, Burckhardt noted with what little
of his mind was functioning at all. It didn’t seem fair that she should be
using perfume as well as everything else. He came to with a start and realized
that the waiter was leaving with an order for filets mignon for two.
“Hey!” he objected.
“Please, Mr. Burckhardt.” Her shoulder was against his, her face was
turned to him, her breath was warm, her expression was tender and solicitous.
“This is all on the Feckle Corporation. Please let them--it’s the least they
can do.”
He felt her hand burrowing into his pocket.
“I put the price of the meal into your pocket,” she whispered
conspiratorially. “Please do that for me, won’t you? I mean I’d appreciate it
if you’d pay the waiter--I’m old-fashioned about things like that.”
She smiled meltingly, then became mock-businesslike. “But you must take
the money,” she insisted. “Why, you’re letting Feckle off lightly if you do!
You could sue them for every nickel they’ve got, disturbing your sleep like
that.”With a dizzy feeling. as though he had just seen someone make a rabbit
disappear into a top hat, he said, “Why, it really wasn’t so bad, uh, April. A
little noisy, maybe, but--”
“Oh, Mr. Burckhardt!” The blue eyes were wide and admiring. “I knew
you’d understand. It’s just that--well, it’s such a wonderful freezer that
some of the outside men get carried away, so to speak. As soon as the main
office found out about what happened, they sent representatives around to
every house on the block to apologize. Your wife told us where we could phone
you--and I’m so very pleased that you were willing to let me have lunch with
you, so that I could apologize, too. Because truly, Mr. Burckhardt, it is a
fine freezer.
“I shouldn’t tell you this, but--” The blue eyes were shyly
lowered--”I’d do almost anything for Feckle Freezers. It’s more than a job to
me.” She looked up. She was enchanting. “I bet you think I’m silly, don’t
you?” Burckhardt coughed. “Well, I--”
“Oh, you don’t want to be unkind!” She shook her head. “No, don’t
pretend. You think it’s silly. But really, Mr. Burckhardt, you wouldn’t think
so if you knew more about the Feckle. Let me show you this little booklet--”
Burckhardt got back from lunch a full hour late. It wasn’t only the girl
who delayed him. There had been a curious interview with a little man named
Swanson, whom he barely knew, who had stopped him with desperate urgency on
the street--and then left him cold.
But it didn’t matter much. Mr. Barth, for the first time since
Burckhardt had worked there, was out for the day--leaving Burckhardt stuck
with the quarterly tax returns.
What did matter, though, was that somehow he had signed a purchase order
for a twelve-cubic-foot Feckle Freezer, upright model, self-defrosting, list
price $625, with a ten per cent “courtesy” discount--”Because of that horrid
affair this morning, Mr. Burckhardt,” she had said.
And he wasn’t sure how he could explain it to his wife.
He needn’t have worried. As he walked in the front door, his wife said
almost immediately, “I wonder if we can’t afford a new freezer, dear. There
was a man here to apologize about that noise and--well, we got to talking
and--”
She had signed a purchase order, too.
It had been the damnedest day, Burckhardt thought later, on his way up
to bed. But the day wasn’t done with him yet. At the head of the stairs, the
weakened spring in the electric light switch refused to click at all. He
snapped it back and forth angrily and, of course, succeeded in jarring the
tumbler out of its pins. The wires shorted and every light in the house went
out. “Damn!” said Guy Burckhardt.
“Fuse?” His wife shrugged sleepily. “Let it go till the morning, dear.”
Burckhardt shook his head. “You go back to bed. I’ll be right along.”
It wasn’t so much that he cared about fixing the fuse, but he was too
restless for sleep. He disconnected the bad switch with a screwdriver, tumbled
down into the black kitchen, found the flashlight and climbed gingerly down
the cellar stairs. He located a spare fuse, pushed an empty trunk over to the
fuse box to stand on and twisted out the old fuse.
When the new one was in, he heard the starting click and steady drone of
the refrigerator in the kitchen overhead.
He headed back to the steps, and stopped.
Where the old trunk had been, the cellar floor gleamed oddly bright. He
inspected it in the flashlight beam. It was metal!
“Son of a gun,” said Guy Burckhardt. He shook his head unbelievingly. He
peered closer, rubbed the edges of the metallic patch with his thumb and
acquired an annoying cut--the edges were sharp.
The stained cement floor of the cellar was a thin shell. He found a
hammer and cracked it off in a dozen spots--everywhere was metal.
The whole cellar was a copper box. Even the cement-brick walls were
false fronts over a metal sheath!
Baffled, he attacked one of the foundation beams. That, at least, was
real wood. The glass in the cellar windows was real glass.
He sucked his bleeding thumb and tried the base of the cellar stairs.
Real wood. He chipped at the bricks under the oil burner. Real bricks. The
retaining walls, the floor--they were faked.
It was as though someone had shored up the house with a frame of metal
and then laboriously concealed the evidence.
The biggest surprise was the upside-down boat hull that blocked the rear
half of the cellar, relic of a brief home-workshop period that Burckhardt had
gone through a couple of years before. From above, it looked perfectly normal.
Inside, though, where there should have been thwarts and seats and lockers,
there was a mere tangle of braces, rough and unfinished.
“But I built that!” Burckhardt exclaimed, forgetting his thumb. He
leaned against the hull dizzily, trying to think this thing through. For
reasons beyond his comprehension, someone had taken his boat and his cellar
away, maybe his whole house, and replaced them with a clever mock-up of the
real thing.
“That’s crazy,” he said to the empty cellar. He stared around in the
light of the flash. He whispered, “What in the name of Heaven would anybody do
that for?”
Reason refused an answer; there wasn’t any reasonable answer. For long
minutes, Burckhardt contemplated the uncertain picture of his own sanity.
He peered under the boat again, hoping to reassure himself that it was a
mistake, just his imagination. But the sloppy, unfinished bracing was
unchanged. He crawled under for a better look, feeling the rough wood
incredulously. Utterly impossible!
He switched off the flashlight and started to wriggle out. But he didn’t
make it. In the moment between the command to his legs to move and the
crawling out, he felt a sudden draining weariness flooding through him.
Consciousness went--not easily, but as though it were being taken away,
and Guy Burckhardt was asleep.
On the morning of June 16th, Guy Burckhardt woke up in a cramped
position huddled under the hull of the boat in his basement--and raced
upstairs to find it was June 15th.
The first thing he had done was to make a frantic, hasty inspection of
the boat hull, the faked cellar floor, the imitation stone. They were all as
he had’ remembered them, all completely unbelievable.
The kitchen was its placid, unexciting self. The electric clock was
purring soberly around the dial. Almost six o’clock, it said. His wife would
be waking at any moment.
Burckhardt flung open the front door and stared out into the quiet
street. The morning paper was tossed carelessly against the steps, and as he
retrieved it, he noticed that this was the 15th day of June.
But that was impossible. Yesterday was the 15th of June. It was not a
date one would forget, it was quarterly tax-return day.
He went back into the hall and picked up the telephone; he dialed for
Weather Information, and got a well-modulated chant: “--and cooler, some
showers. Barometric pressure thirty point zero four, rising... United States
摘要：

FROMTHEERAOFMANTOTHEAGEOFROBOTS…“TheWarmSpace”byDavidBrin--Therobotshadstakedtheirclaimtothestars,butwasn’tthereanyplaceforthoseorganicunitscalledhumansinthegreateruniverse?“How-2”byCliffordD.Simak--Allhe’dwantedtobuildwasapetrobotrover,butwhathegotwasabeingthatwasnevermeanttoleavethefactory,ametalc...

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