Isaac Asimov - The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories

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THE BICENTENNIAL MAN
and Other Stories
Isaac Asimov
Contents
The Prime of Life 2
Feminine Intuition 4
Waterclap 16
That Thou Art Mindful of Him 33
Stranger in Paradise 46
The life and Times of Multivac 60
The Winnowing 67
The Bicentennial Man 72
Marching In 92
Old-fashioned 96
The Tercentenary Incident 101
Birth of a Notion 109
Dedicated to:
Judy-Lynn del Rey,
And the swath she is cutting in our field
Here I am with another collection of science fiction stories, and I sit here
and think, with more than a little astonishment, that I have been writing and
publishing science fiction now for just three-eighths of a century. This isn’t
bad for someone who only admits to being in his late youth-or a little over
thirty, if pinned down.
It seems longer than that, I imagine, to most people who have tried to
follow me from book to book and from field to field. As the flood of words
continues year after year with no visible signs of letting up, the most
peculiar misapprehensions naturally arise.
Just a few weeks ago, for instance, I was at a librarian’s convention
signing books, and some of the kindly remarks I received were:
“I can’t believe you’re still alive!”
“But how can you possibly look so young?”
“Are you really only one person?”
It goes even beyond that. In a review of one of my books [ASIMOV ON
CHEMISTRY (Doubleday, 1974), and it was a very favorable review.] in the
December 1975 Scientific American, I was described as: “Once a Boston
biochemist, now label and linchpin of a New York corporate authorship--”
Dear me! Corporate authorship? Merely the linchpin and label?
It’s not so. I’m sorry, if my copious output makes it seem impossible,
but I’m alive, I’m young, and I’m only one person.
In fact, I’m an absolutely one-man operation. I have no assistants of
any kind. I have no agent, no business manager, no research aides, no
secretary, no stenographer. I do all my own typing, all my own proofreading,
all my own indexing, all my own research, all my own letter writing, all my
own telephone answering.
I like it that way. Since I don’t have to deal with other people, I can
concentrate more properly on my work, and get more done.
I was already worrying about this misapprehension concerning myself ten
years ago. At that time, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (
commonly known as F & SF) was planning a special Isaac Asimov issue for
October 1966. I was asked for a new story to be included and I obliged [That
story was THE KEY, and it appears in my collection ASIMOV’S MYSTERIES
(Doubleday, 1968). ], but I also wrote a short poem on my own initiative.
That poem appeared in the special issue and it has never appeared
anywhere else-until now. I’m going to include it here because it’s appropriate
to my thesis. Then, too, seven years after the poem appeared, I recited it to
a charming maiden, who, without any sign of mental effort, immediately
suggested a change that was so inevitable, and so great an improvement, that I
have to get the poem into print again in order to make that change.
I originally called the poem I’M IN THE PRIME OF LIFE, YOU ROTTEN KID!
Edward L. Ferman, editor of F & SF, shortened that to THE PRIME OF LIFE. I
like the longer version much better, but I decided it would look odd on the
contents page, so I’m keeping the shorter version. (Heck!)
The Prime of Life
It was, in truth, an eager youth
Who halted me one day.
He gazed in bliss at me, and this
Is what he had to say;
“Why, mazel tov, it’s Asimov,
A blessing on your head!
For many a year, I’ve lived in fear
That you were long since dead.
Or if alive, one fifty-five
Cold years had passed you by,
And left you weak, with poor physique,
Thin hair and rheumy eye.
For sure enough, I’ve read your stuff
Since I was but a lad
And couldn’t spell or hardly tell
The good yarns from the bad.
My father, too, was reading you
Before he met my Ma.
For you he yearned, once he had learned
About you from his Pa.
Since time began, you wondrous man,
My ancestors did love
That s.f. dean and writing machine
The aged Asimov.”
I’d had my fill. I said, “Be still!
I’ve kept my old-time spark.
My step is light, my eye is bright,
My hair is thick and dark.”
His smile, in brief, spelled disbelief,
So this is what I did;
I scowled, you know, and with one blow,
I killed that rotten kid.
The change I mentioned occurs in the first line of the second stanza. I
had it read, originally, “Why, stars above, it’s Asimov,” but the
aforementioned maiden saw at once it ought to be “mazel tov.” This is a Hebrew
phrase meaning “good fortune” and it is used by Jews as a joyful greeting on
jubilant occasions--as a meeting with me should surely be. .
Ten years have passed since I wrote the poem and, of course, the
impression of incredible age which I leave among those who know me only from
my writings is now even stronger. When this poem was written, I had published
a mere 66 books, and now, ten years later, the score stands at 175, so that
it’s been a decade of constant mental conflagration.
Just the same, I’ve kept my old-time spark even yet. My step is still
light and my eye is still bright. What’s more, I’m as suave in my
conversations with young women as I have ever been (which is very suave
indeed). That bit about my hair being “thick and dark” must be modified,
however. There is no danger of baldness but, oh me, I am turning gray. In
recent years, I have grown a generous pair of fluffy sideburns, and they are
almost white.
And now that you know the worst about me, let’s go on to the stories
themselves or, rather (for you are not quite through with me), to my
introductory comments to the first story.
The beginning of FEMININE INTUITION is tied up with Judy-Lynn Benjamin, whom I
met at the World Science Fiction Convention in New York City in 1967.
Judy-Lynn has to be seen to be believed-an incredibly intelligent,
quick-witted, hard-driving woman who seems to be burning constantly with a
bright radioactive glow.
She was managing editor of Galaxy in those days.
On March 21, 1971, she married that lovable old curmudgeon Lester del
Rey, and knocked off all his rough edges in two seconds flat. At present, as
Judy-Lynn del Rey, she is a senior editor at Ballantine Books and is generally
recognized (especially by me) as one of the top editors in the business. [You
may have noticed that this book is dedicated to her.]
Back in 1968, when Judy-Lynn was still at Galaxy, we were sitting in a
bar in a New York hotel and she introduced me, I remember, to something called
a “grasshopper.” I told her I didn’t drink because I had no capacity for
alcohol, but she said I would like this one, and the trouble is I did.
It’s a green cocktail with creme de menthe, and cream, and who knows
what else in it, and it is delicious. I only had one on this occasion, so I
merely graduated to a slightly higher than normal level of the loud bonhomie
that usually characterizes me and was still sober enough to talk business. [A
year or so later during the course of a science fiction convention, Judy-Lynn
persuaded me to have two grasshoppers and I was instantly reduced to a kind of
wild drunken merriment, and since then no one lets me have grasshoppers any
more. Just as well!]
Judy-Lynn suggested I write a story about a female robot. Well, of
course, my robots are sexually neutral, but they all have masculine names and
I treat them all as males. The turnabout suggestion was good.
I said, “Gee, that’s an interesting idea,” and was awfully pleased,
because Ed Ferman had asked me for a story with which to celebrate the
twentieth anniversary of Fantasy and Science Fiction and I had agreed, but, at
the moment, did not have an idea in my head.
On February 8, 1969, in line with the suggestion, I began FEMININE
INTUITION. When it was done, Ed took it and the story was indeed included in
the October 1969 Fantasy and Science Fiction, the twentieth-anniversary issue.
It appeared as the lead novelette, too.
Between the time I sold it, however, and the time it appeared, Judy-Lynn
said casually to me one day, “Did you ever do anything about my idea that you
write a story about a female robot?”
I said enthusiastically, “Yes, I did, Judy-Lynn, and Ed Ferman is going
to publish it. Thanks for the suggestion.”
Judy-Lynn’s eyes opened wide and she said in a very dangerous voice,
“Stories based on my ideas go to me, you dummy. You don’t sell them to the
competition.”
She went on to expound on that theme for about half an hour and my
attempts to explain that Ed had asked me for a story before the time of the
suggestion and that she had never quite made it clear that she wanted the
story for herself were brushed aside with scorn.
Anyway, Judy-Lynn, here’s the story again, and I’m freely admitting that
the suggestion of a female robot was yours. Does that make everything all
right? (No, I didn’t think so.)
Feminine Intuition
The Three Laws of Robotics:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human
being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such
orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not
conflict with the First or Second Law.
For the first time in the history of United States Robots and Mechanical
Men Corporation, a robot had been destroyed through accident on Earth itself.
No one was to blame. The air vehicle had been demolished in mid-air and
an unbelieving investigating committee was wondering whether they really dared
announce the evidence that it had been hit by a meteorite. Nothing else could
have been fast enough to prevent automatic avoidance; nothing else could have
done the damage short of a nuclear blast and that was out of the question.
Tie that in with a report of a flash in the night sky just before the
vehicle had exploded--and from Flagstaff Observatory, not from an amateur--and
the location of a sizable and distinctly meteoric bit of iron freshly gouged
into the ground a mile from the site and what other conclusion could be
arrived at?
Still, nothing like that had ever happened before and calculations of
the odds against it yielded monstrous figures. Yet even colossal
improbabilities can happen sometimes.
At the offices of United States Robots, the hows and whys of it were
secondary. The real point was that a robot had been destroyed.
That, in itself, was distressing.
The fact that JN-5 had been a prototype, the first, after four earlier
attempts, to have been placed in the field, was even more distressing.
The fact that JN-5 was a radically new type of robot, quite different
from anything ever built before, was abysmally distressing.
The fact that JN-5 had apparently accomplished something before its
destruction that was incalculably important and that that accomplishment might
now be forever gone, placed the distress utterly beyond words.
It seemed scarcely worth mentioning that, along with the robot, the
Chief Robopsychologist of United States Robots had also died.
Clinton Madarian had joined the firm ten years before. For five of those
years, he had worked uncomplainingly under the grumpy supervision of Susan
Calvin.
Madarian’s brilliance was quite obvious and Susan Calvin had quietly
promoted him over the heads of older men. She wouldn’t, in any case, have
deigned to give her reasons for this to Research Director Peter Bogert, but as
it happened, no reasons were needed. Or, rather, they were obvious.
Madarian was utterly the reverse of the renowned Dr. Calvin in several
very noticeable ways. He was not quite as overweight as his distinct double
chin made him appear to be, but even so he was overpowering in his presence,
where Susan had gone nearly unnoticed. Madarian’s massive face, his shock of
glistening red-brown hair, his ruddy complexion and booming voice, his loud
laugh, and most of all, his irrepressible self-confidence and his eager way of
announcing his successes, made everyone else in the room feel there was a
shortage of space.
When Susan Calvin finally retired (refusing, in advance, any cooperation
with respect to any testimonial dinner that might be planned in her honor,
with so firm a manner that no announcement of the retirement was even made to
the news services) Madarian took her place.
He had been in his new post exactly one day when he initiated the JN
project.
It had meant the largest commitment of funds to one project that United
States Robots had ever had to weigh, but that was something which Madarian
dismissed with a genial wave of the hand.
“Worth every penny of it, Peter,” he said. “And I expect you to convince
the Board of Directors of that.”
“Give me reasons,” said Bogert, wondering if Madarian would. Susan
Calvin had never given reasons.
But Madarian said, “Sure,” and settled himself easily into the large
armchair in the Director’s office.
Bogert watched the other with something that was almost awe. His own
once-black hair was almost white now and within the decade he would follow
Susan into retirement. That would mean the end of the original team that had
built United States Robots into a globe-girdling firm that was a rival of the
national governments in complexity and importance. Somehow neither he nor
those who had gone before him ever quite grasped the enormous expansion of the
firm. But this was a new generation. The new men were at ease with the
Colossus” They lacked the touch of wonder that would have them tiptoeing in
disbelief. So they moved ahead, and that was good.
Madarian said, “I propose to begin the construction of robots without
constraint.”
“Without the Three Laws? Surely--”
“No, Peter. Are those the only constraints you can think of? Hell, you
contributed to the design of the early positronic brains. Do I have to tell
you that, quite aside from the Three Laws, there isn’t a pathway in those
brains that isn’t carefully designed and fixed? We have robots planned for
specific tasks, implanted with specific abilities.”
“And you propose--”
“That at every level below the Three Laws, the paths be made open-ended.
It’s not difficult.”
Bogert said dryly, “It’s not difficult, indeed. Useless things are never
difficult. The difficult thing is fixing the paths and making the robot
useful.”
“But why is that difficult? Fixing the paths requires a great deal of
effort because the Principle of Uncertainty is important in particles the mass
of positrons and the uncertainty effect must be minimized. Yet why must it? If
we arrange to have the Principle just sufficiently prominent to allow the
crossing of paths unpredictably--”
“We have an unpredictable robot.”
“We have a creative robot,” said Madarian, with a trace of impatience.
“Peter, if there’s anything a human brain has that a robotic brain has never
had, it’s the trace of unpredictability that comes from the effects of
uncertainty at the subatomic level. I admit that this effect has never been
demonstrated experimentally within the nervous system, but without that the
human brain is not superior to the robotic brain in principle.”
“And you think that if you introduce the effect into the robotic brain,
the human brain will become not superior to the robotic brain in principle.”
“That, “ said Madarian, “is exactly what I believe.” They went on for a
long time after that.
The Board of Directors clearly had no intention of being easily
convinced.
Scott Robertson, the largest shareholder in the firm, said, “It’s hard
enough to manage the robot industry as it is, with public hostility to robots
forever on the verge of breaking out into the open. If the public gets the
idea that robots will be uncontrolled...Oh, don’t tell me about the Three
Laws. The average man won’t believe the Three Laws will protect him if he as
much as hears the word ‘uncontrolled.’ “
“Then don’t use it, “ said Madarian. “Call the robot--call it
‘intuitive.’ “
“An intuitive robot, “ someone muttered. “A girl robot?” A smile made
its way about the conference table.
Madarian seized on that. “All right. A girl robot. Our robots are
sexless, of course, and so will this one be, but we always act as though
they’re males. We give them male pet names and call them he and him. Now this
one, if we consider the nature of the mathematical structuring of the brain
which I have proposed, would fall into the JN-coordinate system. The first
robot would be JN-1, and I’ve assumed that it would be called John-10....I’m
afraid that is the level of originality of the average roboticist. But why not
call it Jane-1, damn it? If the public has to be let in on what we’re doing,
we’re constructing a feminine robot with intuition.”
Robertson shook his head, “What difference would that make? What you’re
saying is that you plan to remove the last barrier which, in principle, keeps
the robotic brain inferior to the human brain. What do you suppose the public
reaction will be to that?”
“Do you plan to make that public?” said Madarian. He thought a bit and
then said, “Look. One thing the general public believes is that women are not
as intelligent as men.”
There was an instant apprehensive look on the face of more than one man
at the table and a quick look up and down as though Susan Calvin were still in
her accustomed seat.
Madarian said, “If we announce a female robot, it doesn’t matter what
she is. The public will automatically assume she is mentally backward. We just
publicize the robot as Jane-1 and we don’t have to say another word. We’re
safe.”
“Actually,” said Peter Bogert quietly, “there’s more to it than that.
Madarian and I have gone over the mathematics carefully and the JN series,
whether John or Jane, would be quite safe. They would be less complex and
intellectually capable, in an orthodox sense, than many another series we have
designed and constructed. There would only be the one added factor of, well,
let’s get into the habit of calling it ‘intuition.’ “
“Who knows what it would do?” muttered Robertson.
“Madarian has suggested one thing it can do. As you all know, the Space
Jump has been developed in principle. It is possible for men to attain what
is, in effect, hyper-speeds beyond that of light and to visit other stellar
systems and return in negligible time--weeks at the most.”
Robertson said, “That’s not new to us. It couldn’t have been done
without robots.”
“Exactly, and it’s not doing us any good because we can’t use the
hyper-speed drive except perhaps once as a demonstration, so that U. S. Robots
gets little credit. The Space Jump is risky, it’s fearfully prodigal of energy
and therefore it’s enormously expensive. If we were going to use it anyway, it
would be nice if we could report the existence of a habitable planet. Call it
a psychological need. Spend about twenty billion dollars on a single Space
Jump and report nothing but scientific data and the public wants to know why
their money was wasted. Report the existence of a habitable planet, and you’re
an interstellar Columbus and no one will worry about the money.”
“So?”
“So where are we going to find a habitable planet? Or put it this
way--which star within reach of the Space Jump as presently developed, which
of the three hundred thousand stars and star systems within three hundred
light-years has the best chance of having a habitable planet? We’ve got an
enormous quantity of details on every star in our three-hundred-light-year
neighborhood and a notion that almost every one has a planetary system. But
which has a habitable planet? Which do we visit?...We don’t know.”
One of the directors said, “How would this Jane robot help us?”
Madarian was about to answer that, but he gestured slightly to Bogert
and Bogert understood. The Director would carry more weight. Bogert didn’t
particularly like the idea; if the JN series proved a fiasco, he was making
himself prominent enough in connection with it to insure that the sticky
fingers of blame would cling to him. On the other hand, retirement was not all
that far off, and if it worked, he would go out in a blaze of glory. Maybe it
was only Madarian’s aura of confidence, but Bogert had honestly come to
believe it would work.
He said, “It may well be that somewhere in the libraries of data we have
on those stars, there are methods for estimating the probabilities of the
presence of Earth-type habitable planets. All we need to do is understand the
data properly, look at them in the appropriate creative manner, make the
correct correlations. We haven’t done it yet. Or if some astronomer has, he
hasn’t been smart enough to realize what he has.
“A JN-type robot could make correlations far more rapidly and far more
precisely than a man could. In a day, it would make and discard as many
correlations as a man could in ten years. Furthermore, it would work in truly
random fashion, whereas a man would have a strong bias based on preconception
and on what is already believed.”
There was a considerable silence after that Finally Robertson said, “But
it’s only a matter of probability, isn’t it? Suppose this robot said, ‘The
highest-probability habitable-planet star within so-and-so light-years is
Squidgee-17” or whatever, and we go there and find that a probability is only
a probability and that there are no habitable planets after all. Where does
that leave us?”
Madarian struck in this time. “We still win. We know how the robot came
to the conclusion because it--she--will tell us. It might well help us gain
enormous insight into astronomical detail and make the whole thing worthwhile
even if we don’t make the Space Jump at all. Besides, we can then work out the
five most probable sites of planets and the probability that one of the five
has a habitable planet may then be better than 0.95. It would be almost
sure--”
They went on for a long time after that.
The funds granted were quite insufficient, but Madarian counted on the
habit of throwing good money after bad. With two hundred million about to be
lost irrevocably when another hundred million could save everything, the other
hundred million would surely be voted.
Jane-1 was finally built and put on display. Peter Bogert studied it
--her--gravely. He said, “Why the narrow waist? Surely that introduces a
mechanical weakness?”
Madarian chuckled. “Listen, if we’re going to call her Jane, there’s no
point in making her look like Tarzan.”
Bogert shook his head. “Don’t like it. You’ll be bulging her higher up
to give the appearance of breasts next, and that’s a rotten idea. If women
start getting the notion that robots may look like women, I can tell you
exactly the kind of perverse notions they’ll get, and you’ll really have
hostility on their part.”
Madarian said, “Maybe you’re right at that. No woman wants to feel
replaceable by something with none of her faults. Okay.”
Jane-2 did not have the pinched waist. She was a somber robot which
rarely moved and even more rarely spoke.
Madarian had only occasionally come rushing to Bogert with items of news
during her construction and that had been a sure sign that things were going
poorly. Madarian’s ebullience under success was overpowering. He would not
hesitate to invade Bogert’s bedroom at 3 A.M. with a hot-flash item rather
than wait for the morning. Bogert was sure of that.
Now Madarian seemed subdued, his usually florid expression nearly pale,
his round cheeks somehow pinched. Bogert said, with a feeling of certainty,
“She won’t talk.”
“Oh, she talks.” Madarian sat down heavily and chewed at his lower lip.
“Sometimes, anyway,” he said.
Bogert rose and circled the robot. “And when she talks, she makes no
sense, I suppose. Well, if she doesn’t talk, she’s no female, is she?”
Madarian tried a weak smile for size and abandoned it. He said, “The
brain, in isolation, checked out.”
“I know,” said Bogert. “But once that brain was put in charge of the
physical apparatus of the robot, it was necessarily modified, of course.”
“Of course,” agreed Bogert unhelpfully. “But unpredictably and
frustratingly. The trouble is that when you’re dealing with n-dimensional
calculus of uncertainty, things are--”
“Uncertain?” said Bogert. His own reaction was surprising him. The
company investment was already most sizable and almost two years had elapsed,
yet the results were, to put it politely, disappointing. Still, he found
himself jabbing at Madarian and finding himself amused in the process.
Almost furtively, Bogert wondered if it weren’t the absent Susan Calvin
he was jabbing at. Madarian was so much more ebullient and effusive than Susan
could ever possibly be--when things were going well. He was also far more
vulnerably in the dumps when things weren’t going well, and it was precisely
under pressure that Susan never cracked. The target that Madarian made could
be a neatly punctured bull’s-eye as recompense for the target Susan had never
allowed herself to be.
Madarian did not react to Bogert’s last remark any more than Susan
Calvin would have done; not out of contempt, which would have been Susan’s
reaction, but because he did not hear it
He said argumentatively, “The trouble is the matter of recognition. We
have Jane-2 correlating magnificently. She can correlate on any subject, but
once she’s done so, she can’t recognize a valuable result from a valueless
one. It’s not an easy problem, judging how to program a robot to tell a
significant correlation when you don’t know what correlations she will be
making.”
“I presume you’ve thought of lowering the potential at the W-21 diode
junction and sparking across the--”
“No, no, no, no--” Madarian faded off into a whispering diminuendo. “You
can’t just have it spew out everything. We can do that for ourselves. The
point is to have it recognize the crucial correlation and draw the conclusion.
Once that is done, you see, a Jane robot would snap out an answer by
intuition. It would be something we couldn’t get ourselves except by the
oddest kind of luck.”
“It seems to me,” said Bogert dryly, “that if you had a robot like that,
you would have her do routinely what, among human beings, only the occasional
genius is capable of doing.”
Madarian nodded vigorously. “Exactly, Peter. I’d have said so myself if
I weren’t afraid of frightening off the execs. Please don’t repeat that in
their hearing.”
“Do you really want a robot genius?”
“What are words? I’m trying to get a robot with the capacity to make
random correlations at enormous speeds, together with a key-significance
high-recognition quotient. And I’m trying to put those words into positronic
field equations. I thought I had it, too, but I don’t. Not yet.”
He looked at Jane-2 discontentedly and said, “What’s the best
significance you have, Jane?”
Jane-2’s head turned to look at Madarian but she made no sound, and
Madarian whispered with resignation, “She’s running that into the correlation
banks.”
Jane-2 spoke tonelessly at last. “I’m not sure.” It was the first sound
she had made.
Madarian’s eyes rolled upward. “She’s doing the equivalent of setting up
equations with indeterminate solutions.”
“I gathered that,” said Bogert. “Listen, Madarian, can you go anywhere
at this point, or do we pull out now and cut our losses at half a billion?”
“Oh, I’ll get it, “ muttered Madarian.
Jane-3 wasn’t it. She was never as much as activated and Madarian was in
a rage.
It was human error. His own fault, if one wanted to be entirely
accurate. Yet though Madarian was utterly humiliated, others remained quiet.
Let he who has never made an error in the fearsomely intricate mathematics of
the positronic brain fill out the first memo of correction.
Nearly a year passed before Jane-4 was ready. Madarian was ebullient
again. “She does it,” he said. “She’s got a good high-recognition quotient.”
He was confident enough to place her on display before the Board and
have her solve problems. Not mathematical problems; any robot could do that;
but problems where the terms were deliberately misleading without being
actually inaccurate.
Bogert said afterward, “That doesn’t take much, really.”
“Of course not. It’s elementary for Jane-4 but I had to show them
something, didn’t I?”
“Do you know how much we’ve spent so far?”
“Come on, Peter, don’t give me that. Do you know how much we’ve got
back? These things don’t go on in a vacuum, you know. I’ve had over three
years of hell over this, if you want to know, but I’ve worked out new
techniques of calculation that will save us a minimum of fifty thousand
dollars on every new type of positronic brain we design, from now on in
forever. Right?”
“Well--”
“Well me no wells. It’s so. And it’s my personal feeling that
n-dimensional calculus of uncertainty can have any number of other
applications if we have the ingenuity to find them, and my Jane robots will
find them. Once I’ve got exactly what I want, the new JN series will pay for
itself inside of five years, even if we triple what we’ve invested so far.”
“What do you mean by ‘exactly what you want’? What’s wrong with
Jane-4?”
“Nothing. Or nothing much. She’s on the track, but she can be improved
and I intend to do so. I thought I knew where I was going when I designed her.
Now I’ve tested her and I know where I’m going. I intend to get there.”
Jane-5 was it. It took Madarian well over a year to produce her and
there he had no reservations; he was utterly confident.
Jane-5 was shorter than the average robot, slimmer. Without being a
female caricature as Jane-1 had been, she managed to possess an air of
femininity about herself despite the absence of a single clearly feminine
feature.
“It’s the way she’s standing,” said Bogert. Her arms were held
gracefully and somehow the torso managed to give the impression of curving
slightly when she turned.
Madarian said, “Listen to her....How do you feel, Jane?”
“In excellent health, thank you,” said Jane-5, and the voice was
precisely that of a woman; it was a sweet and almost disturbing contralto.
“Why did you do that, Clinton?” said Peter, startled and beginning to
frown.
“Psychologically important,” said Madarian. “I want people to think of
her as a woman; to treat her as a woman; to explain.”
“What people?” Madarian put his hands in his pockets and stared
thoughtfully at Bogert. “I would like to have arrangements made for Jane and
myself to go to flagstaff.”
Bogert couldn’t help but note that Madarian didn’t say Jane-5. He made
use of no number this time. She was the Jane. He said doubtfully, “To
flagstaff? Why?”
“Because that’s the world center for general planetology, isn’t it? It’s
where they’re studying the stars and trying to calculate the probability of
habitable planets, isn’t it?”
“I know that, but it’s on Earth.”
“Well, and I surely know that.”
“Robotic movements on Earth are strictly controlled. And there’s no need
for it. Bring a library of books on general planetology here and let Jane
absorb them.”
“No! Peter, will you get it through your head that Jane isn’t the
ordinary logical robot; she’s intuitive.”
“So?”
“So how can we tell what she needs, what she can use, what will set her
off? We can use any metal model in the factory to read books; that’s frozen
data and out of date besides. Jane must have living information; she must have
tones of voice, she must have side issues; she must have total irrelevancies
even. How the devil do we know what or when something will go click-click
inside her and fall into a pattern? If we knew, we wouldn’t need her at all,
would we?”
Bogert began to feel harassed. He said, “Then bring the men here, the
general planetologists.”
“Here won’t be any good. They’ll be out of their element. They won’t
react naturally. I want Jane to watch them at work; I want her to see their
instruments, their offices, their desks, everything about them that she can. I
want you to arrange to have her transported to flagstaff. And I’d really like
not to discuss it any further.”
For a moment he almost sounded like Susan. Bogert winced, and said,
“It’s complicated making such an arrangement. Transporting an experimental
robot--”
“Jane isn’t experimental. She’s the fifth of the series.”
“The other four weren’t really working models.”
Madarian lifted his hands in helpless frustration. “Who’s forcing you to
tell the government that?”
“I’m not worried about the government. It can be made to understand
special cases. It’s public opinion. We’ve come a long way in fifty years and I
don’t propose to be set back twenty-five of them by having you lose control of
a--” “I won’t lose control. You’re making foolish remarks. Look! U. S. Robots
can afford a private plane. We can land quietly at the nearest commercial
airport and be lost in hundreds of similar landings. We can arrange to have a
large ground car with an enclosed body meet us and take us to Flagstaff. Jane
will be crated and it will be obvious that some piece of thoroughly
non-robotic equipment is being transported to the labs. We won’t get a second
look from anyone. The men at Flagstaff will be alerted and will be told the
exact purpose of the visit. They will have every motive to cooperate and to
prevent a leak.”
Bogert pondered. “The risky part will be the plane and the ground car.
If anything happens to the crate--”
“Nothing will.”
“We might get away with it if Jane is deactivated during transport. Then
even if someone finds out she’s inside--”
“No, Peter. That can’t be done. Uh-uh. Not Jane-5. Look, she’s been
free-associating since she was activated. The information she possesses can be
put into freeze during deactivation but the free associations never. No, sir,
she can’t ever be deactivated.”
“But, then, if somehow it is discovered that we are transporting an
activated robot--”
“It won’t be found out.” Madarian remained firm and the plane eventually
took off. It was a late-model automatic Computo-jet, but it carried a human
pilot--one of U. S. Robots’ own employees--as backup. The crate containing
Jane arrived at the airport safely, was transferred to the ground car, and
reached the Research Laboratories at Flagstaff without incident.
Peter Bogert received his first call from Madarian not more than an hour
摘要：

THEBICENTENNIALMANandOtherStoriesIsaacAsimovContentsThePrimeofLife2FeminineIntuition4Waterclap16ThatThouArtMindfulofHim33StrangerinParadise46ThelifeandTimesofMultivac60TheWinnowing67TheBicentennialMan72MarchingIn92Old-fashioned96TheTercentenaryIncident101BirthofaNotion109Dedicatedto:Judy-LynndelRey,...

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