“Pleash… pleash, shir…”
“Brek… break…”
“Your servant…”
The barracks buzzed and roared with rusty voices, at one point it was filled with a breathless scream, I began to retreat and stumbled backward into the sunlight, blinded, squinting; I stood awhile, shielding my eyes with my hand; behind me was a drawn-out grating sound; the robot had shut the door and bolted it.
“Sirrrr…” This still reached me through the wave of muffled voices from behind the wall. “Pleash… service… a mistake…”
I passed the glass annex. I did not know where I was going — I only wanted to get away from those voices, not to hear them; I jumped when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Marger, fair-haired, handsome, smiling.
“I do apologize, Mr. Bregg. It took forever…”
“What will happen to them… ?” I interrupted, almost rudely, indicating the solitary barracks with my hand.
“I beg your pardon?” he blinked. “To whom?”
Suddenly he understood and was surprised:
“Ah, you went there? There was no need…”
“Why no need?”
“That’s scrap.”
“How do you mean?”
“Scrap for recasting, after selection. Shall we go? We have to sign the official record.”
“In a minute. Who conducts this selection?”
“Who? The robots.”
“What? They do it themselves?”
“Certainly.”
He fell silent under my gaze.
“Why aren’t they repaired?”
“It wouldn’t pay,” he said slowly, with surprise.
“And what happens to them?”
“To the scrap? It goes there,” he pointed at the thin, solitary column of the furnace.
In the office the forms were ready, spread out on the desk — the official record of the inspection, some other slips of paper — and Marger filled in the blanks in order, signed, and gave me the pen. I turned it over in my fingers.
“And is there no possibility of error?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“There, in that… scrap, as you call it, can they wind up there… even when they are still efficient, in working order — what do you think?”
He looked at me as if he did not understand what I was saying.
“That was the impression I got,” I finished slowly.
“But that is not our concern,” he replied.
“Then whose concern is it?”
“The robots’.”
“But it is we who make the inspection.”
“Ah, no,” he smiled with relief at finally perceiving the source of my error. “The one has nothing to do with the other. We inspect the synchronization of processes, their tempo and efficiency, but we do not go into such details as selection. That is not our province. Apart from the fact that it is unnecessary, it also would be quite impossible, because today there are about eighteen automata for every living person; of these, five end their cycle daily and become scrap. That amounts to something on the order of two billion tons a day. You can see for yourself that we would be unable to keep track of this, and in any case the structure of our system is based on precisely the opposite relationship: the automata serve us, not we them…”
I could not dispute what he said. Without another word I signed the papers. We were about to part when I surprised myself by asking him if humanoid robots were also produced.
“Not really,” he said, and added reluctantly, “In their day they caused a bit of trouble…”
“How so?”
“Well, you know engineers! They reached such a level of perfection in their simulations that certain models could not be distinguished from live human beings. Some people could not tolerate that…”
Suddenly I remembered the stewardess on the ship that I had taken from Luna.
“Could not tolerate that… ?” I repeated his words. “Was it, then, something like a… phobia?”
“I am no psychologist, but I suppose you could call it that. Anyway, this is ancient history.”
“And are there still such robots?”
“Oh yes, they are found on short-range rockets. Did you meet one of them?”
I gave an evasive answer.
“Will you have time now to take care of your business?” He was concerned.
“My business… ?”
Then I remembered that I was supposed to have something to attend to in the city. We parted at the entrance to the station, where he had led me, all the while thanking me for extricating him from a difficult situation.
I wandered about the streets; I went to a realon but left before sitting through half of the ridiculous show, and I rode to Clavestra in the lowest spirits. I sent back the gleeder a kilometer from the villa and went the rest of the way on foot. Everything was in order. They were mechanisms of metal, wire, glass, one could assemble them and disassemble them, I told myself; but I could not shake off the memory of that hall, of the darkness and the distorted voices, that cacophony of despair which held too much meaning, too much of the most ordinary fear. I could tell myself that I was a specialist on that subject, I had tasted it enough, horror at the prospect of sudden annihilation has ceased to be fiction for me, as it was for them, those sensible designers who had organized the whole thing so well: robots took care of their own kind, did so to the very end, and man did not interfere. It was a closed cycle of precision instruments that created, reproduced, and destroyed themselves, and I had needlessly overheard the agony of mechanical death.
I stopped at the top of a hill. The view, in the slanting rays of the sun, was indescribably beautiful. Every now and then a gleeder, gleaming like a black bullet, sped along the ribbon highway, aimed at the horizon, where mountains rose in a bluish outline, softened by the distance. And suddenly I felt that I could not look — as if I did not have the right to look, as if there lay a horrible deception in this, squeezing at my throat. I sat down among the trees, buried my face in my hands; I regretted having returned. When I entered the house a white robot approached me.
“You have a telephone call,” it said confidingly. “Long distance: Eurasia.”
I walked after it quickly. The telephone was in the hall, so that while speaking I could see the garden through the glass door.
“Hal?” came a faraway but clear voice. “It’s Olaf.”
“Olaf… Olaf!” I repeated in a triumphant tone. “Where are you, friend?”
“Narvik.”
“What are you doing? How is it going? You got my letter?”
“Of course. That’s how I knew where to find you.”
A moment of silence.
“What are you doing… ?” I repeated, less certain.
“What is there to do? I’m doing nothing. And you?”
“Did you go to Adapt?”
“I did. But only for a day. I stopped. I couldn’t, you know…”
“I know. Listen, Olaf… I’ve rented a villa here. It might not be… but — listen! Come and stay here!”
He did not answer at once. When he did, there was hesitation in his voice.
“I’d like to come. And I might, Hal, but you know what they told us…”
“I know. But what can they do to us? Anyway, to hell with them. Come on.”
