Robots,Isaac Asimov's Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction vol 9

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

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!

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.

Robots, Isaac Asimov's Wonderful Worlds of Science Fiction vol 9

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