The Robot Who Looked Like Me Page 5
Mr. West had two big problems on his mind that week. One had to do with Amelia—lovely, desirable, willing and attainable—but also fourteen years old, his niece, and feebleminded. She was staying with him while her parents were in Europe. The very thought of her made his hands itch and his nose tremble. But then he thought about the penalties for statutory incest-rape and decided to postpone that one.
The other problem concerned his shares of South African Sweatshops, Ltd. They had been slumping lately, and he was thinking of cashing them in and buying International Thanatopsis Corporation.
To come to a valid market decision, Mr. West had to assess such factors as leverage, margin, seasonal variation, investor confidence, the Dow-Jones averages, Alfalfa futures and many other things. No one can be expected to think about those things himself. It was obviously a job for the Voice.
The Voice considered the problem overnight, then, during breakfast, said, “Okay, I think we got a solution. The difficulty was in discounting certain properties which may be induced in tensile web structures.”
“What?” said Mr. West.
“Rigidity and flexibility can be combined as a single gradient function,” the Voice went on, “but an absolute one in terms of self-enclosed systems homeostasis. Therefore, molar incrementation will result in exponentially increased product strength.”
“What are you talking about?” Mr. West asked.
“The apparent reversal of Frochet’s Law is due to the fact that energy flowing through end-oriented web-and-pebble systems can be considered a simple bipolar variable. Once you understand that, the industrial applications for this form of lamination are obvious.”
“Not to me they’re not,” West shouted. “What’s going on here? Who are you?”
There was no reply from the Voice. It had signed off.
During the rest of the day, he could hear numerous Voices in his head. They were saying all sorts of strange things:
“Martin Bormann is alive and well and working as a Scientology auditor in Manaus, Brazil.”
“Leaping Lady in the third at Aqueduct.”
“You are a potential ruler of the solar system, but your evil pseudo-parents have trapped you in an unclean mortal body.”
That sort of talk alarmed Mr. West. He figured that one Voice in the head was rational, normal and perfectly okay. But hearing a lot of Voices was one of the signs of a crazy person. And, worst of all, he couldn’t get any answers from his own individual Voice.
He kept calm over the next few days and tried to solve his own problems unaided. He sold Sweatshops, Ltd., and it promptly went up five points. He bought Thanatopsis Corporation and it fell to a record low when Time magazine announced a new immortality serum as “imminent.”
He tried to solve the Amelia problem. He rubbed his twitching nose with his sweating hands and thought, “Let’s see, I could sneak into her room at night wearing a black mask. She’d probably know who I was anyhow but I could deny the whole thing in court and who’d take the word of a dummy? Or I could tell her that the latest technique in sex education was actual demonstration...”
But he knew that these solutions were filled with danger. He was simply no good at solving his own problems, and there was no reason why he should be. That was work for his Voice—which he pictured as a miniature Mr. West about the size of a pea who sat in the part of his brain labeled “Control Central” and looked out at the world through Mr. West’s senses and sorted things out and made decisions.
That was the normal, rational way that nature had intended. But his own personal Voice was no longer speaking to him, or had disappeared, or simply wasn’t getting through.
Toward the end of the week he became impatient. “Solve something, damn you!” he shouted, pounding his forehead with his fist. But nothing happened except that various Voices told him how to fix liquid helium at room temperature, how to build a multiple-takeoff substance-extractor out of an old washing machine and how to vary his collage technique with overprinted rotogravure backgrounds.
Then, at last, the generator tests were completed, sunspot activity started to decline, cosmic ray activity returned to normal, the Van Allen belts shifted four degrees north, and Mr. West stopped hearing Voices.
The last two messages he received were these:
“Try wearing a strapless pushup bra one size too small. If that doesn’t get his attention, nothing will!”
And,
“Go forth, then, and lead My Children to Sanctuary on Mount Alluci, and tell them to render praises unto Me, for only this Place of Righteousness shall remain after the Evil Nations have destroyed each other with Fire and Plague, and make sure that you buy with Clear Title as much unentailed land as you can, because the price of real estate around here is going to go Sky High after the Balloon goes up next year.”
However, that was not quite the end of the matter. For on the day that the Voices stopped, Mr. West read an interesting item in The New York Times. The item told how a municipal policeman in Rio
Grande do Sul, moved by what he called a “message in my head,” went to Manaus and discovered Martin Bormann, alive and well and working as a Scientology auditor.
Mr. West also glanced at the sports pages and found that Leaping Lady had won the third race at Aqueduct the previous day.
The following evening, on the seven o’clock news, Mr. West heard that the Smithsonian had been blown up with great loss of stuffed animals.
Mr. West found this disturbing. He hurried out and bought an armload of newspapers and magazines. In Art Times he read how Calderon Kelly, in his latest one-man show, had varied his collage technique with overprinted rotogravure backgrounds, achieving an effect at once profound and lighthearted. And Science Briefs had a column about John Wolping, who had just announced a new form of lamination utilizing energy flows through end-oriented web-and-pebble systems. The Wolping Method was expected to revolutionalize lamination techniques.
Mr. West was especially interested in a New York Post feature story about a new religious colony on the northern slope of Mount Alluci in eastern Peru. Two dozen Americans had followed Elihu Littlejohn Carter (known as “The Last Prophet”) to this desolate place. They were confidently awaiting the end of the world.
Mr. West put down the newspaper. He felt strange and numb and disoriented. Like a sleepwalker he picked up the telephone, got the number of Pan Am, called and booked a flight to Lima for the following day.
As he put down the telephone, a clear, unmistakable Voice in his head—his Voice—said to him, “You should never have sold Sweatshops, Ltd., but you can still recoup by doubling up on Thanatopsis, which is really going to take off next month.”
The miniature Mr. West was back at Control Center! “Where have you been?” the big Mr. West asked.
“I’ve been here all along. I just haven’t been able to get a connection until now.”
“Did you happen to hear anything about the world coming to an end next year?” Mr. West asked.
“I don’t listen to that irrational weirdo stuff,” the miniature Mr. West said. “Now look, about Amelia—all you have to do is spike her Kool-Aid with two Nembutals tonight and you can figure out the rest for yourself.”
Mr. West canceled his trip to Peru. Thanatopsis Corporation split ten for one at the end of the month, and Amelia is hooked on nembies. Every man must follow the dictates of his own inner Voice.
A SUPPLICANT IN SPACE
1
Detringer had been banished from his home planet of Ferlang for “acts of incredible grossness”—he had sucked his teeth insolently during the Meditation Frolic, and had switched his tail widdershins when the Regional Grand Ubiquitor condescended to spit at him.
These impertinences would normally have earned him no more than a few dozen years of Plenary Ostracism. But Detringer had aggravated his offenses by Willful Disobedience during Godmemory Meeting; at which time he had persisted in audibly reminiscing upon certain of his rather unsavory sexual exploits.
His final asocial act was unprecedented in the recent history of Ferlang: he had meted out Overt Malevolent Violence upon the person of a Ukanister, thus performing the first act of Open Public Aggression since the primitive era of the Death Games.
It was this last repulsive act, resulting in minor bodily injury but major ego damage to the Ukanister, that earned Detringer the supreme punishment of Extraterrestrial Banishment.
Ferlang is the fourth planet from its sun in a fifteen-planet system situated near an edge of the galaxy. Detringer was taken deep into the void between galaxies via star ship, and then set adrift in a tiny, underpowered Sportster. He was voluntarily accompanied by his loyal mechanical servant, Ichor.
Detringer’s wives—gay, flighty Maruskaa, tall, thoughtful Gwenkifer, and floppy-eared, irrepressible Uu—all divorced him in a solemn Act of Eternal Revulsion. His eight children performed the Office of Parental Repudiation—though Bethanie, the youngest, was heard to mutter afterward, “I don’t care what you did, Daddy, I still love you.”
Detringer was not to be afforded the comfort of knowing this, of course. Cast loose upon the infinite sea of space, the inadequate energy systems of his tiny craft inexorably ran down. He came to know hunger, cold, thirst, and the continual throbbing headache of oxygen deprivation as he voluntarily put himself upon stringent rations. The immense deadness of space spread on all sides of him, broken only by the merciless glare of distant stars. He had turned off the Sportster’s engines immediately: there was no use wasting its small fuel capacity in the intergalactic void that taxed the resources of the enormous star ships. He would save his fuel for planetary maneuvering, if that unlikely opportunity should ever be vouchsafed him.
Time was a motionless black jelly in which he was encased. Deprived of its familiar moorings, a lesser mind must have cracked. But it is a measure of the being that, instead of giving in to the despair whose objective correlatives were all around him, he rallied, forced himself to take an interest in the minutest routines of the dying ship, gave a conceit every “night” for his tone-deaf servant Ichor, performed calisthenics, practiced High Speed Meditation, erected elaborate autosexual rituals as set forth in the Solitude Survival Book and in a hundred ways diverted himself from the crushing realization of his own almost certain death.
After an interminable period, the character of space changed abruptly. The doldrums gave way to unsettled conditions. There were elaborate electrical displays presaging new peril. At last a line storm swept down on a narrow front, caught up the Sportster and swept it pell-mell into the heart of the void.
The very inadequacy of the little spaceship served to preserve it. Unresistingly driven by the storm front, the ship survived by yielding; and when the storm had run its course, the ship’s hull still reserved its integrity.
Little need be said about the ordeal of the occupants at this time, except that they survived. There was a period of unconsciousness. Then Detringer opened his eyes and groggily looked around him. After that he looked out the spaceports, and then through his navigational instruments.
“We’ve completely crossed the Void,” he told Ichor. “We are approaching the outer limits of a planetary system.”
Ichor raised himself on one aluminum elbow and asked, “Of what type is the sun?”
“It is an O type,” Detringer said.
“Praise be to God’s Memory!” Ichor intoned, then collapsed due to discharged batteries.
2
The last currents of the storm subsided before the Sportster crossed the orbit of the outermost planet, nineteenth out from the sturdy, medium-sized life-giving O-type sun. Detringer recharged Ichor from the ship’s accumulators, although the mechanical protested that the current might better be saved for a possible ship’s emergency.
This emergency came sooner than Detringer had imagined. His installment reading had shown that the fifth planet out from the sun was the only one that could support Detringer’s life requirements without the assistance of imported artificialities. But it was too far away for the ship’s remaining fuel, and now space was doldrum-calm again, affording no impetus to aid them toward their goal.
One course of action would be to sit tight, wait, and hope that a stray inbound current would come their way, or even another storm. This plan was admittedly conservative. It bore the danger that no current or storm would come during the short period in which they could sustain themselves on the ship’s resources. Additionally, there was the risk that, if a current or storm should arise, it would bear them in an incompatible direction.
Still, there were risks no matter what course of action was taken. Characteristically, Detringer chose the more enterprising and perhaps more dangerous plan. Plotting the most economical course and speed, he set forth to cover whatever portion of the journey his ship’s fuel would allow, prepared to trust to Providence thereafter.
By painstaking piloting and hand-metering of the fuel, he managed to come within two hundred million miles of their destination. Then Detringer had to shut down the engines, leaving himself only a scant hour’s worth of fuel for intra-atmospheric maneuvering.
The Sportster drifted through space, still moving toward the fifth planet, but so slowly that a thousand years would barely suffice to bring it within the planet’s atmospheric limits. By a very slight effort of the imagination, the ship could be considered a coffin, and Detringer its premature occupant. But Detringer refused to dwell upon this. He began again his regime of calisthenics, concerts, High Speed Meditation, and auto-sexual rituals.
Ichor was somewhat shocked by all this. Himself of an orthodox turn of mind, he gently pointed out that Detringer’s acts were inapropos of the situation, and therefore unsane.
“You’re quite right, of course,” Detringer replied cheerfully. “But I must remind you that Hope, even though judged incapable of fulfillment, is still considered one of the Eight Irrational Blessings, and therefore (according to the Second Patriarch) of a higher order of magnitude than the derived Sanity Injunctions.”
Confuted by scripture, Ichor gave his grudging assent to Detringer’s practices, and even went so far as to sing a hymn in harmony with him (with results as ludicrous as they were cacophonous).
Inexorably their energy ran down. Half-and then quarter-rations impaired their efficiency and brought them near the point of complete dysfunction. In vain did Ichor beg his master to drain his own personal batteries into the ship’s chilly heaters.
“Never mind,” said Detringer, shuddering with cold, “we’ll go out together as equals, in possession of what senses we’ve got, if we go out at all, which I consider doubtful despite impressive evidence to the contrary.”
Perhaps Nature is influenced by Temperament. Surely only for Detringer would She have obliged by sending a strong inbound current just when their energy resources had dwindled to no more than memories.
The landing itself was simple enough for a pilot of Detringer’s skill and luck. He brought them down upon the green and inviting surface of the fifth planet light as thistledown. And when he shut down the engines for the last time there were some thirty-eight seconds of fuel remaining.
Ichor fell to his ferrominium knees and praised the Godmemory that had remembered to bring them to this place of refuge. But Detringer said, “Let’s see first if we can live here before we go maudlin with thanks.”
The fifth world proved hospitable enough, and all of the necessities of life could be found with moderate effort, though few of the amenities. Escape was impossible: only an advanced technological civilization could produce the complex fuel needed for the ship’s engines. And a brief aerial survey had shown that the fifth planet, although a picturesque and inviting world, had no civilizations, nor even any sign of intelligent beings.
By a simple cross-wiring procedure, Ichor prepared himself psychologically for the prospect of spending the rest of his lifespan in this place. He advised Detringer similarly to accept the inevitable. After all, he pointed out, even if they
did somehow obtain fuel, where would they go? The odds against finding an advanced planetary civilization, even for a well-equipped exploration ship, were astronomical. For a small vessel like the Sportster, the attempt would be tantamount to suicide.
Detringer was unimpressed by this reasoning. “Better to search and die,” he said, “than to vegetate and live.”
“Master,” Ichor pointed out respectfully, “that is heresy.”
“I suppose it is,” Detringer said cheerfully. “But it is how I feel. And my intuition tells me that something will turn up.”
Ichor shuddered and was glad for the sake of his master’s soul that, despite Detringer’s hopes, he was to receive the Unction of Perpetual Solitude.
3
Captain Edward Makepeace Macmillan stood in the Main Control Room of the exploration ship Jenny Lind and scanned the tape as it came out of the 1100 Series Coordinating Computer. It was apparent that the new planet was safe within the measuring ability of the ship’s instruments.
Macmillan had come a long way to reach this moment. A brilliant Life-Sciences major at the University of Taos, Macmillan had gone on to do graduate work in Nucleonic Theory and Control. His Ph.D. thesis, entitled “Some Preliminary Notes on Certain Considerations Concerning the (Projected) Science of Interstellar Maneuvering,” had been enthusiastically accepted by his committee, and later successfully published for the general public under the title “Lost and Found in Deepest Space.” That, plus his long article in Nature, titled “The
Use of Declension Theory in Spacecraft Landing Modalities,” made him the only serious choice for captain of America’s first interstellar ship.
He was a tall, handsome, strongly built man. His hair was prematurely flecked with gray, belying his thirty-six years. His reactions concerning navigation were quick and sure, and his instinct for the integrity of his ship was awesome.
Less awesome were his dealings with men. Macmillan was cursed with a certain shyness, a diffidence toward others, a knowledge of dubiety which sapped the decision-making process, and which, however admirable it might be in a philosopher, was a potential weakness in a leader of men.