War with the Robots

"Those two conversations you had over the emergency phone were, of course, taped and the playback concealed in the ship. Psych scripted them on the basis of fitting any need, apparently they worked. The second one was supposed to be the final touch of realism, in case you should start being doubtful. Then we used a variation of deep freeze that suspends about ninety-nine per cent of the body processes; it hasn’t been revealed or published yet. This along with anti-coagulants in the razor cut on Tony’s chin covered the fact that so much time had passed."

"What about the ship," Hal asked. "We saw it-it was only half-completed."

"Dummy," the colonel said. "Put there for the public’s benefit and all foreign intelligence services. Real one had been finished and tested weeks earlier. Getting the crew was the difficult part. What I said about no team finishing a practice exercise was true. You two men had the best records and were our best bets.

"We’ll never have to do it this way again, though. Psych says that the next crews won’t have that trouble; they’ll be reinforced by the psychological fact that someone else was there before them. They won’t be facing the complete unknown."

The colonel sat chewing his lip for a moment, then forced out the words he had been trying to say since Tony and Hal had regained consciousness.

"I want you to understand… both of you… that I would rather have gone myself than pull that kind of thing on you. I know how you must feel. Like we pulled some kind of a…"

"Interplanetary practical joke," Tony said. He didn’t smile when he said it.

"Yes, something like that," the colonel rushed on. "I guess it was a lousy trick-but don’t you see, we had to? You two were the only ones left, every other man had washed out. It had to be you two, and we had to do it the safest way.

"And only myself and three other men know what was done; what really happened on the trip. No one else will ever know about it, I can guarantee you that."

Hal’s voice was quiet, but cut through the still room like a sharp knife.

"You can be sure Colonel, that we won’t be telling anybody about it."

When Colonel Stegham left, he kept his head down because he couldn’t bring himself to see the look in the eyes of the first two explorers of Mars.

Sooner or later robots will be built that will fulfill the physical prophecies of fiction. The human body with its binocular vision and highly placed eyes, dextrous fingers placed at the ends of long and flexible extremities, and two-legged motive power for any kind of terrain, will surely be used as a pattern for the construction of robots. They will be machines that look like men-but they will not be metal men. This is not an easy distinction to make, and an even easier one to forget, as we do every time we strike out in anger at an inanimate object. But robots will not be inanimate, in truth they will be animate in every way. They will be man-shaped machines-and people will begin to think of them as another class of mankind…

THE VELVET GLOVE

JON VENEX FITTED THE KEY INTO the hotel room door. He had asked for a large room, the largest in the hotel, and had paid the desk clerk extra for it. All he could do now was pray that he hadn’t been cheated. He wouldn’t dare complain or try to get his money hack. He heaved a sigh of relief as the door swung open. The room was bigger than he had expected — fully three feet wide by five feet long. There was more than enough space to work in. He would have his leg off in a jiffy and by morning his limp would be gone.

There was the usual adjustable hook on the back wall. He slipped it though the recessed ring in the back of his neck and kicked himself up until his feet hung free of the floor. His legs relaxed with a rattle as he cut off all power below his waist.

The overworked leg motor would have to cool down be- fore he could work on it, plenty of time to skim through the newspaper. With the chronic worry of the unemployed he snapped it open at the want-ads and ran his eye down the Help Wanted — Robot column. There was nothing for him under the Specialist heading, even the Unskilled Labor listings were bare and unpromising. New York was a bad town for robots this year.

The want ads were just as depressing as usual but he could always get a lift from the comic section. He even had a favorite strip, a fact that he scarcely dared mention to himself—"Rattly Robot," a dull witted mechanical clod who was continually falling over himself and getting into trouble. It was a repellant caricature, but could still be very funny. Jon was just staffing to read it when the ceiling light went out.