Bicentennial Man & Other Stories, The - Isaac Asimov

VIP免费
2024-12-07 0 0 763.83KB 106 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
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 after the latter’s arrival at
Flagstaff. Madarian was ecstatic and, characteristically, could not wait to report.
The message arrived by tubed laser beam, shielded, scrambled, and ordinarily impenetrable, but
Bogert felt exasperated. He knew it could be penetrated if someone with enough technological ability--the
government, for example--was determined to do so. The only real safety lay in the fact that the government
had no reason to try. At least Bogert hoped so.
He said, “For God’s sake, do you have to call?”
Madarian ignored him entirely. He burbled, “It was an inspiration. Sheer genius, I tell you.”
For a while, Bogert stared at the receiver. Then he shouted incredulously, “You mean you’ve got
the answer? Already?”
“No, no! Give us time, damn it. I mean the matter of her voice was an inspiration. Listen, after we
were chauffeured from the airport to the main administration building at Flagstaff, we uncrated Jane and
she stepped out of the box. When that happened, every man in the place stepped back. Scared! Nitwits! If
even scientists can’t understand the significance of the Laws of Robotics, what can we expect of the
average untrained individual? For a minute there I thought: This will all be useless. They won’t talk.
They’ll be keying themselves for a quick break in case she goes berserk and they’ll be able to think of
nothing else.”
“Well, then, what are you getting at?”
“So then she greeted them routinely. She said, ‘Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am so glad to meet
you.’ And it came out in this beautiful contralto....That was it. One man straightened his tie, and another ran
his fingers through his hair. What really got me was that the oldest guy in the place actually checked his fly
to make sure it was zipped. They’re all crazy about her now. All they needed was the voice. She isn’t a
robot any more; she’s a girl.”
“You mean they’re talking to her?”
“Are they talking to her! I should say so. I should have programmed her for sexy intonations.
They’d be asking her for dates right now if I had. Talk about conditioned reflex. Listen, men respond to
voices. At the most intimate moments, are they looking? It’s the voice in your ear--”
“Yes, Clinton, I seem to remember. Where’s Jane now?”
“With them. They won’t let go of her.”
“Damn! Get in there with her. Don’t let her out of your sight, man.”
Madarian’s calls thereafter, during his ten-day stay at Flagstaff, were not very frequent and
became progressively less exalted.
Jane was listening carefully, he reported, and occasionally she responded. She remained popular.
She was given entry everywhere. But there were no results.
Bogert said, “Nothing at all?”
Madarian was at once defensive. “You can’t say nothing at all. It’s impossible to say nothing at all
with an intuitive robot. You don’t know what might not be going on inside her. This morning she asked
Jensen what he had for breakfast.”
“Rossiter Jensen the astrophysicist?”
“Yes, of course. As it turned out, he didn’t have breakfast that morning. Well, a cup of coffee.”
“So Jane’s learning to make small talk. That scarcely makes up for the expense.”
“Oh, don’t be a jackass. It wasn’t small talk. Nothing is small talk for Jane. She asked because it
had something to do with some sort of cross-correlation she was building in her mind.”
“What can it possibly--”
“How do I know? If I knew, I’d be a Jane myself and you wouldn’t need her. But it has to mean
something. She’s programmed for high motivation to obtain an answer to the question of a planet with
optimum habitability/distance and--”
“Then let me know when she’s done that and not before. It’s not really necessary for me to get a
blow-by-blow description of possible correlations.”
He didn’t really expect to get notification of success. With each day, Bogert grew less sanguine, so
that when the notification finally came, he wasn’t ready. And it came at the very end.
That last time, when Madarian’s climactic message came, it came in what was almost a whisper.
Exaltation had come complete circle and Madarian was awed into quiet.
“She did it,” he said. “She did it. After I all but gave up, too. After she had received everything in
the place and most of it twice and three times over and never said a word that sounded like anything....I’m
on the plane now, returning. We’ve just taken off.”
Bogert managed to get his breath. “Don’t play games, man. You have the answer? Say so, if you
have. Say it plainly.”
“She has the answer. She’s given me the answer. She’s given me the names of three stars within
eighty light-years which, she says, have a sixty to ninety percent chance of possessing one habitable planet
each. The probability that at least one has is 0.972. It’s almost certain. And that’s just the least of it. Once
we get back, she can give us the exact line of reasoning that led her to the conclusion and I predict that the
whole science of astrophysics and cosmology will--”
“Are you sure--”
“You think I’m having hallucinations? I even have a witness. Poor guy jumped two feet when Jane
suddenly began to reel out the answer in her gorgeous voice”
And that was when the meteorite struck and in the thorough destruction of the plane that followed,
Madarian and the pilot were reduced to gobbets of bloody flesh and no usable remnant of Jane was
recovered.
The gloom at U. S. Robots had never been deeper. Robertson attempted to find consolation in the
fact that the very completeness of the destruction had utterly hidden the illegalities of which the firm had
been guilty.
摘要：

THEBICENTENNIALMANandOtherStoriesIsaacAsimovContentsThePrimeofLife................................................................................................................2FeminineIntuition.........................................................................................................

展开>> 收起<<
Bicentennial Man & Other Stories, The - Isaac Asimov.pdf

共106页,预览10页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

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

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：106 页 大小：763.83KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-07

开通VIP享超值会员特权

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

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 106
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注