The Forgetful Robot Read online

  “You know better than that. Granddad never gives up.”

  Janet sighed. “It would have been great to have Barney along on Mars and Venus and the asteroids.”

  “We won’t even be going ourselves if Granddad doesn’t get the money. With every dime in the world sunk into the Gallant Lady—”

  “Well, at least she’s ours. And maybe Granddad will go on a TV interview program again and bring in some more backing.”

  “Let’s get this stuff over to the space port,” Larry said. “I’m getting hungry, and the sooner we get back the sooner we eat.”

  They picked up the clothes and left. I’d expected to be switched off, but they forgot. I was glad, because it gave me a chance to think about what had gone wrong with me.

  It had to be my memory bank. Everything else seemed to be all right. My sensors were working perfectly—so perfectly that I heard someone coming up the steps from below ten minutes and fourteen seconds after Janet and Larry left.

  There was a knock. After that, the door opened a crack and someone peeked in. A voice said, “Nobody home,” and then two men entered. Larch and Slezak, the two from my dream.

  I still knew nothing about them except their names, and I wondered what they were doing there.

  They saw me standing by the wall and Larch said, “Well, there’s our robot. I told you we’d find it.”

  Larch was short and solidly built. He had skin like old leather. That meant he had spent a lot of time out of doors in all kinds of weather. He had a round face without much expression to it.

  Slezak was different. Taller and slimmer, he had very alert eyes and was quick of movement. You could see how fast his brain worked by watching his expressions change. He looked disgusted with Larch. “That doesn’t excuse your stupidity. A 69S Wellington robot, and you send it out for sandwiches!”

  “Well, a 69S Wellington should be able to run a simple errand.”

  “And not just downstairs, either,” Slezak growled. “Clear across town!”

  “So the food’s better over there.”

  “You and your stomach. Why didn’t you go yourself? You could use the exercise.”

  “Quit moaning. We got it back, didn’t we?”

  “Yes, because I snooped around for three days and asked questions—tracked it step by step. I wonder where the two kids are that the junkman saw leading it away?”

  “Probably at school.”

  “We were lucky to find somebody who knew where they lived. What a dump!”

  “You’ve got a strange idea of luck,” Slezak said. “As though we walked in here blindfolded.”

  “Okay, so you’re smart,” Larch said cheerfully. “And you never forget to let me know it.”

  My reaction to Larch and Slezak was negative. That’s as close as a robot can come to being hostile. But mainly, I was confused by the things they said. They talked as though they owned me. But I was certain they didn’t.

  “You’re right,” Slezak said, “this is a dump.” But he spoke more thoughtfully than with contempt, as though some kind of an idea had popped into his mind.

  But where had I known Larch and Slezak before, and how did they fit into my previous history? I remembered the dream about the forbidden city on Mars. They were a part of that. So all I was doing was trying to tie together two things I knew nothing about instead of one. It was bewildering, especially to a robot that didn’t have a brain to work with in the first place—just a lot of electronic circuits and a defective memory bank.

  “Well,” Larch said, “let’s take Barney and get out of here. It will save a lot of explaining.”

  But Slezak gestured impatiently. He scratched his chin and pointed at me suddenly.

  He said, “Wait a minute. Maybe we’ll leave the robot where it is.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That character we questioned said the kids were named Ravencraft, didn’t he?”

  “So what difference does it make? Living in a place like this, they’re nobodies.”

  “Doesn’t the name ring a bell with you?”

  “No. Can’t say that it does.”

  “It does with me. And they’re not exactly nobodies. There’s an old joker named Dudley Farthington Ravencraft. He was on a TV show the other night. A real eccentric old coot. He’s a dramatic actor—comes from a long line of them. And he’s got a bug about creating interplanetary understanding by taking live drama around the System. This must be the same guy, because the interviewer on the show said he lived in an old theater and had two grandchildren.”

  “I still don’t see why we can’t take our robot and get out of here.”

  “There’s something else. Ravencraft lives in this dump because he’s put every cent into his project. He keeps after people to give him donations.”

  “So—?”

  “He owns a spaceship, you idiot! You know our problem. Doesn’t that give you an idea?”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Larch said. “If you’ve got something on your mind, quit pussyfooting around.”

  “We give the old man enough money to go ahead with his crazy scheme.”

  “That’s the silliest thing I’ve heard today.”

  “Is it?” Slezak asked. “We have to find a way to get back to that city, don’t we?”

  “We do it the same as before—to Colony City on New Mars and across the desert to Zark.”

  “Perhaps you’ve forgotten how tough it was getting there and back—the fifteen-day hike across those old Martian deserts almost killed us.”

  “I remember that,” Larch growled. “When the air car ran out of fuel, the robot had to carry you.”

  “Well, getting there and back would be even tougher now, without even a permit.”

  Larch brightened. “Say, you give me an idea. If we back this guy Ravencraft—give him the money to lift off—we could bypass Colony City and go straight to Zark.”

  Slezak’s look of disgust was lost on Larch. “Brilliant,” Slezak muttered. “I wondered when the light would dawn.”

  “But how can we set it up?” Larch asked.

  “First we get out of here and come back when Ravencraft is home. I’ll do the talking, and I don’t think we’ll have any trouble.”

  They left, paying no more attention to me. Probably they thought I’d been switched off because I hadn’t spoken or moved. I was doubly glad Larry and Janet had forgotten, because I’d heard everything Larch and Slezak had said, and it gave me a lot to think about.

  I must have been the robot they said had carried Slezak in the desert, so that put me on Mars with them. But why? And where was the place they called Zark? Probably the forbidden city I’d seen in my dream, but that was all I knew about it.

  What had happened to my memory bank? I struggled with it, trying to get my command unit to order out the required data. Nothing came, except questions about the disjointed images that had broken through.

  Then something did come. A new image. I thought about it a while and felt an urge to investigate it. This was possible, because no one had ordered me to stay where I was. They had just assumed that I would.

  So I could leave the theater without disobeying an order.

  But still, it made me a very unreliable robot as well as a forgetful one.

  I realized that, but I went anyhow… .

  3.

  The Space Museum

  The Space Museum is a big building, bright and beautiful in the sun. When I looked at it I was glad I had a color component, because it would not have looked nearly so impressive in black and white.

  It was several miles from the old theater, but nobody stopped me. There were many robots of all makes and capacities on the streets. They were running errands, wheeling baby carriages, looking after children in the parks. I also saw a maintenance robot lift a manhole cover and go down into the sewer.

  The robots were of various intelligence levels, each one programmed for the job it was assigned to. But very few of them had a high-competency reasoning circuit, because that made them very expensive and was not necessary for the jobs they were given. I had one of the most complex memory banks made. But what good was it if it didn’t work?

  I was as unhappy as a robot can be, because I didn’t know who owned me, so I couldn’t be loyal to any human. A robot’s reason for being is to serve. Each of us exists to be commanded by a human.

  Of course there are a lot of different command patterns. Some of the more sophisticated robots are programmed to several humans and accept commands from all of them. Domestic robots, for instance, serve a whole family.

  Still others perform routine services under orders from computers—those that keep the visiphone lines working or make street repairs.

  Simply-programmed robots under human command would simply stop functioning and remain immobile if anything went wrong with their command units. But I am a 69S All-Purpose unit with the most sophisticated response components made and the most intricate programming. That puts me as close to a human, I guess, as a robot can get. So I don’t necessarily cut out when things get complicated. My components keep right on trying to correct the malfunction and figure things out because of a high survival capacity built into me.

  My problem, of course, was to remember the human who dominated my command unit—to whom I’d been programmed—to whom I owed complete loyalty.

  But even with my memory bank messed up, I was sure that I was not dominated jointly—that I belonged to only one human. That eliminated Larch and Slezak; or either one of them for that matter, because I felt no basic loyalty to them. Loyalty might not be quite the right word. Electronic affinity would probably better describe a robot’s reaction in such a situation.

  As I walked along the street with the Space Museum in range of my op
tube, I suddenly stopped in front of another building, because it looked so familiar. It was a building with a tall spire on top and many narrow windows. Then I had a recall. I knew the name of it. The building was a church, a place where humans, some of them, go when they have problems.

  I went inside and knew I’d been there before, with some human. And I knew why I had liked it.

  A robot is very sensitive to all the waves and vibrations that fill the air, and in the church the vibrations are very restful. They are not harsh and disjointed and irritating.

  I stood in the back of the church and watched the humans who were in there. They were quiet and looked thoughtful, and I got the idea that maybe they had the same problem I did. Maybe they were looking for someone to be loyal to also.

  It could not have been the same, though, because humans do not have owners. They own themselves, so they always know exactly what to do.

  I didn’t stay in church very long, because it didn’t help my command unit. I was just as confused as ever. So I went to the Space Museum and walked inside.

  Nobody bothered me, because I could have had a lot of reasons for being there. Some humans put recording units into their robots and send them to places like museums to get impression data. Then the humans record the data from the tapes, transferring it to their own memory banks through sleep induction. So a robot can walk around a museum like a tourist.

  Some kind of preconditioning was indicated when I went straight to the Mars Wing and everything seemed familiar. The whole history of Mars was laid out for the people to see, at least all that was known about Mars.

  Humans think of it as having two parts, Old Mars and New Mars, even though it is one planet and cannot really be separated.

  New Mars is the most habitable part, where the peoples of other planets in the System came in their spaceships. The Earth people came first, and then those from the other inhabited planets—the fire men of Mercury, the silicon-based natives from Jupiter’s moons, and the tough-skinned people from Venus.

  They all have different types of bodies—built through evolution to survive in their particular environments. The Jupiter people have bodies almost as hard as those of robots and aren’t much affected by heat or cold, while the Mercurians are made with red shells and have some kind of a cooling system inside so that they can walk through fire if they have to.

  The people of Venus have bright green skins, which are very colorful, but they have trouble with the thinner atmosphere of planets other than their own, and their spacemen have to be conditioned to it.

  So the people of the various planets look different, but they all think pretty much the same. They all have people who make laws and people who break them, and they all try to survive in one way or another. They all helped build Colony City in New Mars and joined the Space Authority that kept law and order on the spaceways and on Mars—more or less.

  No people were found on Old Mars, but scientific research in the ancient city there indicated a long-dead civilization of very high order. Scientific opinion differed as to what had happened to the people. Some scientists said they had all killed each other in a war. Others said changing climatic conditions had been responsible.

  So there was a lot still to be learned about the planet, but it went very slowly because of a law the Space Authority made. It was the Orderly Exploration and Development Law. It said that for the common good, exploration and development should proceed slowly from the perimeter of New Mars.

  I think what the common good meant was that nobody from one planet should get to Old Mars and take away anything valuable while the others weren’t looking.

  The law didn’t actually say that, though, but humans very often do not seem to say what they mean. It said that exploration was very dangerous, that sophisticated equipment was needed to cross the vast arid deserts and that there were unknown dangers.

  So the cities that aerial survey revealed on Old Mars were called Forbidden Cities, and if the Space Authority caught anybody going there, they were tried and convicted in the Space Court and barred from the spaceways.

  There was one exception to the law. Permits were issued to qualified scientists to go into Old Mars and do research if they wanted to try it at their own risk. The Space Authority didn’t have men or equipment to go with them and protect them.

  I think the reason the exception was made was that they didn’t think a few scientists could steal much anyhow.

  There were rumors that people lived under the Forbidden Cities on Old Mars. But they were only rumors, because the few scientists who had explored on the New Mars perimeter hadn’t found any. And if people had been found by those who went out illegally, they weren’t saying anything about it. So the natives of Mars, who might or might not have existed, were called Shadow People. But the rumors still persisted.

  That was how things stood when Janet and Larry Ravencraft found me in the junkyard and took me home with them. And as I stood looking at things in the Mars Wing of the museum, I was confused by being able to remember all that data clearly but not able to remember immediate things that were more important: like who owned me and where Larch and Slezak fitted into the picture.

  While I was thinking that over, trying to get some logical continuity, a human tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Why, Barney! It is you, isn’t it?” He checked my identification plate to make sure. Every robot has one. My identification number is 695W37. “I didn’t know Professor Dixon was back,” he said.

  Neither did I. It was the same as with Larch and Slezak. My memory responses were blocked by the same breakdown. I knew the name—Professor Dixon—but I didn’t know anything else about him except the voice calling to me in the dream had been his.

  I also knew the name of the man who had spoken to me. He was Assistant Curator Martin Campbell of the Space Museum.

  I said, “Hello, Professor Campbell.”

  “Imagine that rascal not getting in touch with me. I’m very angry with him.”

  This did not require a reply from me, so I remained silent.

  “I suppose he is exhausted from his trip,” Professor Campbell went on. “But I’m delighted that he’s back safely from Old Mars.” He looked around with a happy smile on his face. “Where is Frank?”

  I replied, “I don’t know.”

  There was no reason why my saying that should confuse him. A human does not necessarily tell a robot where he will be at all times.

  Professor Campbell said, “Oh, he sent you on an errand, then. Well, I’m sure we will bump into each other shortly. Tell him I’m looking for him.” With that, he hurried away.

  I saw no reason for staying at the museum any longer. In fact, I didn’t really know why I’d come there in the first place. So I started for the door. Then I decided that the visit actually had done me some good, because some new information came grudgingly out of my memory bank. A name.

  Roger Gardner.

  I knew Professor Gardner had been the curator of the Space Museum. He was one of the men who’d been lost while exploring Old Mars.

  He had insisted upon using the first exploration permit issued to the museum two years earlier. They had tried to talk him out of it, telling him he was too valuable a man to risk such a perilous trip. But he insisted on going, and there was no way anybody could stop him.

  So he took two helpers along and went to Old Mars, and that was the last anybody ever saw of him. It was assumed that the three of them had died while trying to cross the vast and terrible Martian deserts. The air scooter they used was never found. An air scooter is supposed to skim along just above the surface of the ground and make the going easy. The authorities decided they must have had an accident somewhere and broken their radio, because they did not make contact and ask for help.

  Now logic and what I’d gathered from Assistant Curator Campbell filled in a little more. Professor Dixon went to Old Mars also, probably looking for Professor Gardner. But had he returned? If so, Professor Campbell didn’t know anything about it. And from what had been said, it seemed pretty likely that Professor Dixon owned me. But the new data still left a lot of unanswered questions. It didn’t tell me who Larch and Slezak were or what I was doing on Earth—separated from Professor Dixon.

  No more information came, so I quit puzzling about it, telling myself that everything would work out in the end. I’d heard humans tell themselves that and had never quite understood it. I didn’t see how things would work out if you didn’t give them some help. Humans are smarter than robots, though, so I decided the advice was good and took it.