IT WAS THE DAY OF THE ROBOT Read online

  Between slaps I spoke to the poor devil in a whisper, deliberately keeping my voice low, knowing that you can’t reason with a sick or mortally terrified man by shouting at him.

  “Careful — the guard’s watching you!” I warned. “Don’t force him to use his sap. Do you hear? If you do you won’t walk out of here alive!”

  Abruptly the poor devil stopped screaming, sagged forward, and would have collapsed if I hadn’t caught him.

  The guard was instantly at my side. “That was quick thinking, friend. Maybe just a little too quick. Don’t you know that helping the wrong people can get you into serious trouble?”

  I didn’t answer. I just waited, hoping he’d let my interference pass.

  He glared at me, then said. “All right, I suppose you can’t be blamed too much. I might have done the same thing myself, if it wasn’t my duty to see that things stay normal here. When anyone goes off the beam like that, you let him alone for a minute. He may do or say something the Monitors should know about.”

  He shrugged and most of the animosity went out of his stare. “Get his arm around my shoulder. I want to find out if he can walk.”

  I stood watching the guard assisting the poor devil out of the vault.

  It’s funny how tension can distort reality by blocking out what may concern you most by channeling your awareness in just one direction. I watched the guard pass from the vault before I turned back to reassure the girl I’d taken so impetuously into my arms.

  She was gone.

  For a moment I stood staring around the vault, shaken, de­spairing. Then, slowly, balance and sanity returned to my mind. I remembered what I’d told her about the mad impulse that had come upon us both at the same time. “Call it anything you wish,” she’d said and I’d replied, “There’s a name for it you don’t often hear in the ruins.”

  But had I really meant that we’d fallen in love? In ten or fifteen minutes, when we’d been complete strangers to start with? Could love spring up between a man and a woman that fast? Had it ever been known to happen, actually? It’s the most precious thing in the world, but all really precious things have a growth stage before they become precious to you. You look at a beautiful emerald and right off it dazzles you, sure. But unless you’re as mercenary as hell that emerald doesn’t become really precious to you until you’ve had it set in a ring and worn it for a week or two.

  At least a week. You have to turn it about on your finger and hold it up to the light and admire the way it catches and holds the light and delight in the brilliance and splendor of it. It has to become your emerald, different from all other precious gems. It must, in a sense, grow into your flesh and sing in your blood and become completely a part of you.

  Infatuation? Of course. That could be a singing flame too, and so overwhelming at times it could easily be mistaken for love. It was perhaps the beginning of love — the very first warning you get that you’re headed for trouble or an eternity of rapture. Infatuation was seldom wholly physical. Sex entered into it, sure — maybe it was four-fifths sex. But it went much deeper than sex, because you can be physically stirred by a woman and not feel that you’re in the slightest danger of becoming really involved with her. Infatuation is sex with something very important added that makes it just about as unique as love, though not as precious — to lead at times to a man’s total enslavement.

  All that I told myself as I stood there completely alone again, realizing with a shudder of relief by what a narrow margin I’d been saved from utter disaster. Unlike the screaming man, I could face the future with confidence.

  I was a potential “marriage privilege permitted” type and I knew that hopes temporarily dashed wouldn’t stay buried. I knew that when I left the vault and emerged into the clear, bright sunlight it would light up the world for me.

  My heart was singing when I turned and walked out into the corridor and descended to the street.

  *****

  I wouldn’t be lonely any more! She’d be slender and very beautiful, with tumbled, red-gold hair; and when she came forward to greet me for the first time her smile would warm me as I’d never been warmed before.

  I had spoken to the man and it was all arranged. I was on my way to pick her up. My beetle purred as it sped swiftly down the shop level driveway, red sunlight gleaming on its fused tungsten hood. The air was crisp, cool and invigorating and the future looked bright.

  All I had to do now was conquer a tendency toward fuzzy thinking and face up to the facts. It was as if I could hear the computers humming, giving it to me straight. All right, the computers couldn’t talk. You fed them your identity data and the answers came out punched into a metaltape. But it was as if I could hear the Big Brain itself whispering to me.

  “Not for you a quiet fireside and a cloak around your shoulders when you’re too old to dream, boy! You’ll die on Venus Base. You’ll be with the lost and forgotten men — or so everyone will think on Earth. But you won’t be lost and you won’t be forgotten, if you take your happiness while you can. It’s yours for the taking, in full measure and brimming over.

  “Make the best of things as they are. You’ve got strength and you’ve got courage far beyond the average — so take it in your stride. This is the year 2263! There are gadgets, a million satisfying gadgets — glittering and beautiful and new. Gadgets to make up for everything nature or Society or the perversity of fate has denied you.

  “There are compensations for every bitter frustration, every handicap of body and mind, every tragic lack of the raw materials of happiness. Men infinitely more unfortunate than you have found substitute satisfactions for everything they’ve been cheated out of in life. So wade in and wise up. Take a substitute for what doesn’t come naturally.

  “Drive down to the shop level arcades and buy yourself a wig with synthetic nerve roots which will grow into your scalp. Buy yourself a bone ear, a music or art appreciation groove-in, a money-sense illusion, anything you’d care to name.

  “You don’t have to be reminded that there are some men who might say, ‘There’s no substitute for the real thing. You’ll never get around it and you may as well stop lying to yourself.’

  “But not you, boy! You’d never say that because you don’t give up as easily as that. Naturally they’ve been keeping it quiet. You have to dial the right shop. You’ve got to speak in a persuasive whisper to the right people. You’ve got to mention just how many trips you’ve made to Venus Base.

  “Buy yourself a beautiful android woman. Naturally it’s labeled: For Spacemen Only! If you’ve got something new and tremendous to see you’d be crazy to offer it on the open market, wouldn’t you? Mass production takes years to build up. Until the mass production stage is reached high profits can only be made without State Bureau interference.

  “Why not sell your products to men whose need is so great and urgent — they’ll pay specialty prices, in an under-the-counter deal. Pay eagerly and disappear into space.

  “It’s the only policy that makes sense and you’ve no quarrel with it, have you, boy? You’ve spoken to the man and you know exactly what you want and you’ve the money to pay for it.”

  The Big Brain, of course, wouldn’t speak quite so frankly. It wouldn’t conspire with an outlaw firm to deceive the State Bureaus, much as it might want me to accept a substitute for the wife I couldn’t have.

  I was really listening to a separate, rebellious part of myself arguing with my more cautious self. My reckless self was now completely in the saddle, and I had no real fear that I would come a cropper. But arguments do not harm and it pleased me to listen to that inner voice hammering home the facts, garnished up a bit by the Big Brain’s authority.

  We’d better get it straight right at the start that artificial women are as old as the human race. There are Aurignacian Venuses from rock caverns in the Pyrenees you could date in your dreams with no effort at all. Big-bosomed women with flaring hips — the kind of women that Rubens painted and that some men prefer for variety’s
sake even today. Distinctly on the plump side, but what of that?

  What is a statue, really? Hasn’t a statue a definite mechanical function to perform? Isn’t the statue of a beautiful woman a kind of android designed to delight the eye and trigger the sex mechanism in the human brain? No — perhaps not always designed for that purpose. But doesn’t it do that most of the time? Can a normal male pass a shop window and see a beautiful wax mannequin without experiencing at least a faint stirring of sex awareness, even though he knows that a wax woman is quite different from a woman who can think and feel and is in all respects alive?

  Consider it honestly. Has it ever failed to happen to you? There’s nothing abnormal or perverse about it. The female form, even when it’s just a wax replica of the real thing, can do that to the male.

  Remember, a statue doesn’t have to move at all to be functional in that respect. If a certain arrangement of synthetic lines and curves and dimples can evoke a response in the viewer you’ve got a mechanical prime mover and if that object happens to be a statue you’ve got an android in the strict sense. You can even do without the electronic stimulus-response circuits and the Cybernetic mem­ory banks.

  The Pygmalion fantasy is the key. Every man carries about with him a subconscious image of the one perfect woman. There’s a biological norm and that norm constitutes the ultimate in desirability. Every individual woman departs from the norm to a greater or lesser degree. Nature is constantly attempting to alter the course of evolution through mutation and environmental departures from the norm — mutation plus natural and sexual selection — and that tendency toward variation keeps modifying the norm, throwing it off center.

  Features too large or too small will distort or completely shatter the norm. A woman with a too large mouth, for instance, may have other features so perfect that she will still be beautiful. But her beauty won’t be perfect if a single one of her features departs from the norm. The closer women approach the norm in all respects the more beautiful they are by human standards

  It’s important to accent the human. Complete symmetry of features may have a certain classical beauty all apart from sex, but in the main when we say that a woman is beautiful we simply mean that she seems beautiful to us because her features or her body trigger a sexual response. To a Martian — we know now that there is no life on Mars, but the assumption can still be useful — both men and women may seem completely unbeautiful, scrawny, white, hair­less bipeds not particularly well formed. We might feel the same way if we could be completely detached and scientific about it. But sex triggers a biological response which prevents us from realizing, in an emotional way, that the human race might not seem beautiful at all if the veil of glamor which sex casts could be stripped away and we could see ourselves as others see us.

  There are other, completely human difficulties and complications. On Earth alone the norm varies, and a woman who seems beautiful to an African bushman may not seem beautiful to you. But that does not mean that she is less beautiful. You’ve got to go back to your ancestry for the key; you’ve got to find out precisely the kind of norm your ancestors mated with for hundreds of thousands of years.

  You could marry any one of ten thousand women picked al­most at random, and be reasonably happy. But to be perfectly content, you have to have a perfect biogenetic mate.

  And now, for the first time, you could get your norm girl. Your biogenetic tape recordings supplied the key. You gave the man your biogenetic tape number, all the data available to the Big Brain, and the firm did the rest.

  Waiting for me was an android female with a living colloidial brain. The human brain is a colloid with a billion teeming memory cells, made up of molecular aggregates just large enough to be visible in a powerful electron microscope.

  Just large enough to be visible. Visibility was the key, for a visible structure can be studied and duplicated. Not exactly, perhaps — we’ll get that in another century or so. But enough of the structure could be duplicated to yield results.

  I had been warned that there would be no complex emotional overtones in the woman who was awaiting me. A seven-year-old level of intelligence perhaps, no more. Curiously enough, the limitation did not depress me too much. When physical beauty be­comes overwhelming you can think of nothing else. And she would be beautiful, completely my norm girl in her physical attributes. There are many different kinds of women in every man’s ancestry, but one kind always predominates and establishes an individual norm preference which corresponds to the ancient tribal preferences of his remote ancestors in a general way. She would undoubtedly resemble quite a few of my great-great-grandmothers.

  CHAPTER 3

  The shop level arcades were a purple and gold glimmer for ten thousand feet. At night the lights are so dazzling that you can’t see the individual shop windows, but in broad daylight every window stands out and the level becomes a tunnel of weaving lights and shadows.

  It’s like plunging into a revolving kaleidoscope to pluck out a rare and glittering prize. Come early, take your pick.

  I knew that the shop where I’d left my order would be using some kind of false front. But I wasn’t prepared for the beauty of the display which filled the window: a terraced garden with a fountain gushing silver spray, a breathtaking Watteau-gambol of fauns and satyrs in a twilight nymph pursuit.

  In the window a little square sign read:

  Enjoy Yourself Without Breaking the Law

  Which shall it be? Ten Minutes of Emotional

  Illusion Therapy or Ten Months of Freud?

  For an instant I was tempted to go inside and forget to mention my name. I knew the routine of the illusion therapy shops backwards. If the human brain is paralyzed in certain centers and stimulated abnormally in others, you get an illusion that can only be compared to sheet lightning.

  When I closed my eyes I was inside the shop, relaxing in the scented darkness. I could feel the incredible lightness of the big, impulse-transmitting helmet resting on my head. I could hear the therapist saying in a cool, soothing voice: “These women whom you are about to meet are incredibly beautiful. Not one woman, but seven. Now if you’ll just relax —”

  It’s a swift, effective way to cure frustration. But when you wake up, the savor of living is dulled for you, just as heavy smoking often dulls the pleasures of the palate. There is no anticipatory thrill in knowing that the dream experience you’ve just shared with a non-existent woman can be repeated again and again, and is always available. When you emerge from an emotional illusion therapy trance you couldn’t care less. I told myself I’d be crazy to pay that kind of penalty when I could have the real thing.

  The man was expecting me. He was tall, quiet and soft-spoken; but I never really got a good look at his face.

  You know how it is when you whisper over a wire. Someone has to be at the other end to take down your message. He may be young or old, an executive of the firm or just a front man, a go-between. Instinctively you’re almost sure you’re not going to like him. When you actually meet him, you see no reason for studying him closely. If he has authority to conclude the deal and wrap it up for you, you simply accept him as a vital link in the arrangement. He becomes a person with no real identity, a figurehead. He becomes — the man.

  He looked me over carefully. It takes skilled training and insight to judge a man’s occupation at a glance. Often as not it’s a hit-or-miss task — but if you’re really good at it there is always a high-salaried undercover job waiting for you.

  He was good at it. You spend two years at Venus Base and it shows in your eyes, the way you carry your shoulders when you walk, the very rhythms of your speech. Spend a lifetime hoeing a field in blazing sunlight or pacing the deck of a ship at sea and you’ll get deep creases in the back of your neck, crow’s feet about your eyes and a leathery texture of skin such as you can’t possibly get if you’re a sedentary worker under glass.

  Two years at Venus Base can’t quite do all that to you, but a really good occupation-guess ca
n tag you every time.

  The man said, “I think you’ll be satisfied, sir. But you’ve got to remember that a woman can be made for just one man alone and not quite satisfy him at first glance.”

  I wasn’t sure I liked the way he smiled when he said that — as if he knew a great deal about women himself and was treating the matter as an amusing episode in the course of his philanderings. As if he’d discovered a girl that suited him fine, and was trying to palm off an old flame on the first gullible lad to walk into the trap. Some girl he’d decided not to like for no particular reason.

  “I guess you know that caution is our stockin-trade,” he said. “We have to be careful right from the start. You’ve got to forgive me if I seem a little ill at ease. I’ll be frank with you. The work I do here is not entirely to my liking. In some respects it goes against the grain. By natural inclination I am — well, I should have much preferred to be a creative artist, a painter, or a musician or something of the sort. But I guess we all get sidetracked. You’re sidetracked in a bad way.”

  His eyes grew suddenly sympathetic and for a moment I found myself almost liking him.

  “I’ve been married ten years myself,” he said. “My wife is a very attractive woman, and very feminine. All woman, you might say. But you’d be amazed how strong-willed she can be at times. Seems to feel she has to compete, and that’s always infuriating. A wife should cooperate with her husband, not compete — should give him support when he’s going over the hurdles.

  “What I’m really trying to say is that married life is never smooth sailing. But I wouldn’t want to be alone on Venus Base without a woman. That’s one thing I don’t envy you lads. To have no woman at all in your life —”

  He’d have gone right on talking if I hadn’t reminded him that I was very eager to complete my purchase and be on my way. There was a hammering at my temples and my heart was pounding like a bass drum. I’m not being melodramatic. It happened to be true and it wasn’t the least surprising. It was a terribly important moment for me, a critical moment, because if she was really my norm woman and all of my expectations were about to be fulfilled I would walk out of the shop a changed man. There would be so bright a future stretching out before me that the whole of my life — my work and my holiday excursions and moments of creative leisure — would take on a new dimension.