Memoirs of a Space Traveler

The case, to which the press gave considerable attention, gradually turned into a cause celebre, because ships passing the Crab picked up snatches of radio conversations conducted by the so-called Mattrass; in these, he referred to himself as “Cathodius Sub One.” It seemed that Cathodius Sub One — or Mattrass — was speaking to others (other robots?) as if conversing with his own hands and feet. The chatter in the region about Cathodius Sub One suggested that what one had here was a government established by either Mattrass or his robot derivatives. The State Department made a thorough investigation of the situation. The patrols reported that at times a metal sphere, at times a humanoid creature five hundred miles in length, was moving through the nebula, that it was speaking to itself about this and that, but concerning its statehood it gave evasive answers.

The authorities decided to put an immediate stop to the usurper’s activity, but since the action would be (had to be) official, it was necessary to give it a name. Here the first obstacles arose. The MacFlacon Act, an annex to the civil code, dealt with movable property. In effect, electronic brains are considered movables, even when lacking legs. But here was a body the size of a planetoid in a nebula, and celestial bodies, though moving, are not considered movables. The question then came up whether or not a planet could be arrested; whether an assemblage of robots could be a planet; and, finally, whether this was one dismountable robot or a robot multitude.

Mattrasa’s legal adviser appeared before the authorities and submitted to them a statement from his client in which the latter declared that he was setting out for the Crab Nebula to transform himself into robots.

The initial interpretation of this datum, offered by the legal section of the State Department, went as follows: Mattrass, transforming himself into robots, had thereby destroyed his living organism and thus committed suicide. Which act was not punishable. The robot or robots that were a continuation of Mattrass, however, had been fabricated by the said individual and were therefore his property, and therefore now, after his demise, ought to devolve to the Treasury, since Mattrass had left no heir. On the basis of this decision, the State Department dispatched a bailiff to the nebula with the order to seize and seal everything he found there.

Mattrass’s lawyer appealed, maintaining that the decision’s acknowledgment of Mattrass’s continuation ruled out suicide, because a person who continues exists, and if he exists, he has not committed suicide. Hence there were no “robots the property of Mattrass” but only Cathodius Mattrass, who had altered himself as he saw fit. Bodily alterations were not and could not be punished; nor was it lawful to impound the parts of a person’s body — be they gold teeth or robots.

The State Department disagreed: from such an interpretation it followed that a living creature, in this instance a human being, could be built from obviously dead parts — robots. Then Mattrass’s lawyer submitted to the authorities the deposition of a group of prominent physicists at Harvard, who testified unanimously that every living organism, the human organism included, is built of atomic particles, and these can only be regarded as dead.

Seeing that the case was taking a disturbing turn, the State Department gave up its attack on “Mattrass and successors” from the physio-biological standpoint and returned to the original decision, in which the word “continuation” was replaced by the word “product.” The lawyer thereupon presented in court a new Mattrass statement, wherein the latter declared that the robots were in reality his children. The State Department demanded that adoption papers be produced — a ruse, since adoption of robots was not permitted by law. Mattrass’s lawyer explained that actual paternity, not adoption, was the issue. The Department said that regulations required that children, to so qualify, have a father and a mother. The lawyer, prepared for this, added to the record the letter of one electrical engineer Melanie Fortinbras, who revealed that the birth of the parties in question had occurred in the course of her close collaboration with Mattrass.

The State Department questioned the nature of that collaboration as lacking “natural parental features.” “In the aforementioned case,” declared the government report, “one may speak of paternity or maternity in a figurative sense only, for the parentage involved is mental; whereas statutes require, for family law to come into effect, physical parentage.”

Mattrass’s lawyer demanded an explanation of how mental parentage differed from physical, and asked on what grounds the State Department regarded Cathodius Mattrass’s union with Melanie Fortinbras as lacking physicality with respect to procreation.

The Department replied that the mental element in procreation, as recognized by and in accordance with the law, was negligible, whereas the physical predominated. Which latter did not occur in the case under discussion.

The lawyer then submitted the testimony of expert cybernetic midwives, indicating how greatly — in a physical sense — Cathodius and Melanie had to labor to bring into the world their autonomous offspring.

The Department finally decided to throw public decency aside and take a desperate step. It stated that the parental activities that causally and inevitably preceded the existence of children differed, in a fundamental way, from the programming of robots.

The lawyer was just waiting for this. He declared that children, too, were in a certain sense programmed by their parents in the course of their preparatory-preliminary activities; he asked the Department to describe precisely how, in its opinion, children should be conceived, that the act be in strict conformity with the law.

The Department, enlisting the aid of experts, prepared a voluminous reply, illustrated with plates and topographical diagrams, but since the main author of this so-called Pink Book was eighty-nine-year-old Professor Stockton-Mumford, the dean of American obstetrics, the lawyer immediately questioned his competence — in the area of causative-preparatory functions as regards parenthood — in view of the fact that, given his extremely advanced age, the professor must have lost all recollection of a number of details crucial to the case and was relying on rumors and the accounts of third parties.

The Department then undertook to substantiate the Pink Book with the sworn testimony of numerous fathers and mothers, but it was found that their statements differed considerably in places. About certain elements of the preliminary phase there was no agreement whatever. The Department, seeing that a fatal ambiguity was beginning to obscure this key issue, decided to question the material from which the alleged “children” of Mattrass and Fortinbras had been created, but then the rumor circulated (it was spread, they later discovered, by the lawyer) that Mattrass had ordered 450,000 tons of veal from Consolidated Corned Beef, Inc., and the Undersecretary of State dropped this plan in a hurry.

Instead, the Department, at the unfortunate suggestion of a theology professor, one Waugh, cited the Scripture. An unwise move, because Mattrass’s lawyer parried with an exhaustive disquisition in which he proved, giving chapter and verse, that the Lord used only one part to program Eve, proceeding by a method most outlandish compared with that customarily employed by people, and yet He created a human being, for surely no one in his right mind considered Eve a robot. The Department then charged Mattrass and his successors with violating the MacFlacon Act, since as a robot (or robots) he had come into possession of a celestial body, and robots are forbidden ownership of planets or any other real estate.

This time the lawyer submitted to the Supreme Court all the documents that had been issued by the Department against Mattrass. First — he emphasized — it was evident, when one compared these texts, that in the State Department’s view Mattrass was both his own father and his own son, and, at the same time, a celestial body. Second, the Department had misinterpreted the MacFlacon Act. The body of a certain individual, of Citizen Cathodius Mattrass, had been arbitrarily designated a planet. This conclusion was based on a legal, logical, and semantic absurdity.

That was how it began. Soon all the press wrote about was the “Celestial Body — Father — Son.” The government commenced new legal actions, but each was nipped in the bud by Mattrass’s indefatigable lawyer.

The State Department understood perfectly that Mattrass was not floating about in multiplied form in the Crab Nebula for the fun of it. No, his purpose was to create a legal precedent. Mattrass’s going unpunished would have incalculable consequences, so the finest specialists pored over the record day and night, devising ever more tortuous juridical constructions, in the toils of which Mattrass was to meet his end. But each action was countered immediately by Mattrass’s legal adviser. I myself followed the course of this struggle with keen interest. Then, unexpectedly, the Bar Association invited me to a special plenary session devoted to the problems of interpreting “Casus United States contra Cathodius Mattrass alias Cathodius Sub One alias the offspring of Mattrass and Fortinbras alias a planet in the Crab Nebula.”

I was there at the designated time and place, and found the hall packed. The flower of the Bar filled tiers