The Light at The End of The Universe -, page 27
“Well, she did come back pretty quick, though,” Emie said.
“You shoulda counted your stars, then,” said the Old Man. “Kids ’round here got better things t’ do than worry ’bout me.”
“What do you do?” said Ernie. He sat down on a fallen tree-trunk and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Do you hunt?”
The Old Man spat a quick stream of juice at a butterfly that passed too close to him; he missed and the butterfly zigzagged quickly away. “Yeah, I hunt sometimes. Coyote, sometimes, or deer.”
“And you never come down out of the mountains,” Ernie said. “Except maybe sometimes.”
“Can’t stand people,” the Old Man muttered. “Can’t stand you much either, boy. You talk almost as much as your uncle.”
“You aren’t so ugly,” Ernie said. “He said you were the most ugly man on earth, but that isn’t true.”
‘
The Old Man fixed him with a sudden piercing stare. “I’m as ugly as anybody you’re ever likely to see, boy,” he said. “Don’t you know folks ‘say I can curdle milk just by lookin’ at it?”
“Well, I don’t think that’s true,” Ernie said. “You know, Uncle Dan himself was no beauty, nobody to be talking.”
“Boy, you better get yourself home!” the Old Man said, raising his cane, which was nearly the size of a tree-limb. “I don’t believe you even got any respect for the dead, an’ that’s somethin’ even I got. A little, anyways. Wouldn’t bother me none to just split your skull, boy.”
Ernie stood up quickly and backed away from the advancing Old Man. Short-legged or not, that man looked like he had the muscles and the meanness to do anything he said. “I was beginning to get tired walking anyway,” Ernie said. “But I’ll say this, you probably are about the meanest one man I ever met You know, I’ll bet you hate people so much because you think you’re so ugly nobody could stand you.”
The old man shook his cane at him menacingly. “And I claim I can’t stand ’em because they don’t mind their own business! I’m warning’ you, boy, clear out!”
Ernie turned and walked quickly away from the Old
Man. But after a few steps he turned again. He watched the man walking off the other way, leaning tiredly on his cane now that he thought he was not being watched. A huge, ugly, dirty-grey haired man, leaning on his cane.
“Do you use a gun when you go hunting?” he called after him.
The Old Man stopped and looked around at him over one hide-covered shoulder. “Sometimes, boy, sometimes,” he said. “And sometimes I just run after ’em and kick ’em in the butt!” He laughed deeply and prodigiously, and walked off up the mountain.
When Ernie got back to the house he didn’t say anything about meeting the Old Man. It was nightfall by then, and Brad and Harry drove up the road. They laughed and joked while .Marth fixed dinner, and Ernie sat reading the Grants Pass paper under the television lamp. Judging from the ads in the paper, Grants Pass too was growing up. There were ads for department stores and supermarkets, and drive-in movies. Ernie grinned at himself, put the paper down and joined the others at the supper table.
“The beer isn’t cold,” Marth said. “The refrigerator went on the blink this afternoon.”
“Well, that’s a problem we never had when I was here,” Ernie said. “Civilization has its drawbacks.”
“There are always problems,” Marth said. “Things go wrong.”
After dinner they all sat watching television until the picture started rolling up so much that they had to turn it off. Ernie got a book from his suitcase and sat reading it, thinking of the refrigerator and the bad tv reception. Things were pretty much the same, really. Hello, Old Man.
I don’t know about you, but I tend to write notes to myself on odd pieces of paper which I stuff into my wallet and subsequently forget; these can be addresses of interesting-sounding shops, names of good veterinarians or phone numbers of chance acquaintances at parties. Or whatever—almost anything.
Those little slips of paper are often so completely forgotten that when I run across them months later I have no idea at all what they’re about. And once, when staring in perplexity at such a note, it occurred to me that this was exactly the sort of situation that would make a good beginning for a story: a narrative hook, as we call it.
Not long after, Fred Pohl sent me a photostat of a Jack Gaughan painting he’d bought for If, with a note saying he’d like me to write a story around it The painting showed a number of robots moving toward the viewer, each with a different body and limbs: some were globular some looked like metal insects; two of them ran on wheels and another had tri-pronged feet; their arms ended in tool-like hands that could have been wrenches or riveters. And over all of them hovered the figure of a great Cyclopean robot, its eye spinning like a vortex.
They looked quite comical to me, and I thought: What would a robot clown be like? How would a bunch of incompetent robots act if they were programmed with the Campbell-Asimov Laws of Robotics?
Thus armed with a basic idea and a narrative hook (which I had found written on a slip of paper in my wal- let), I went to my typewriter and produced “The Robots Are Here.”
(Incidentally, when I wrote this story, the Killer Bees of Rm7.il had just been crossbred and hadn’t yet begun marauding their way toward Central America. But don’t worry about them: The robots will protect us.)
THE ROBOTS ARE HERE
When it started, I had just finished up the charts on our new rocket propulsion system, and I felt a little funny. I sat back in my chair, lit a cigarette, and reflected with an effort at sanguinity that we could now deliver more hell quicker to anywhere on Earth than ever before. I blew a smoke ring which drifted slowly toward the ceiling of my office, and I frowned at it. Damn it, with a two-year project wrapped up at last, I should have felt relief and elation, not some vague unease.
Nerves, I told myself. Overwork. Time to go out and celebrate, shake the cobwebs out of the old pleasure centers. I reached for the telephone to call Betty at home.
But then I thought of something: Hadn’t Betty talked about a meeting of her damned Azalea Committee tonight? Hadn’t I written it down on a slip of paper in my wallet? I got out the wallet and looked. Yes, there was the note, and yes, damn it, that meeting was tonight. I muttered something halfway between a curse and a simple “Ah hell.”
Then I saw another note, which had fallen onto the floor when I’d slipped out the first one. I picked it up and glanced at it: It was a phone number. I started to put it back into the wallet compartment
Wait a minute—whose phone number? I looked again, and gradually felt a frown creep onto my face. The number was a local exchange, but I didn’t recognize it. And it was written in my own handwriting—I have a particularly bad “3” which looks sort of like a snake that didn’t know when to stop. The slip of paper had evidently been right behind the one with the note about Betty, so that ought to make it recent.
But I couldn’t figure out whose number it was, and the note didn’t give any clue.
Ever have that happen to you? Or maybe you’re one of those guys who keeps his wallet in order, nothing in it but money and credit cards and pictures of the wife and kids and maybe a pocket calendar. Me, I write notes to myself about things to do when I get home or to the office, or names of books I want to look up someday, or the number of a cough-medicine prescription, or directions to someone’s house. And, of course, people’s phone numbers. Usually, though, I put their names down, too.
After about half a minute of frowning at the number I decided to shrug and forget it. So I put the paper back into my wallet and turned to glance through the mail in my incoming tray. But the mail wasn’t interesting, nor even important, and my secretary could handle all of it anyway. I turned to my desk calendar, but there wasn’t anything on the agenda for today, not even a lunch date. I’d been so involved in the Project these last weeks that I’d gradually slipped out of the mainstream of executive work at the Corporation.
Hell. I sat back again, feeling definitely at loose ends. And I kept thinking about that silly phone number.
Anybody with the stuff to get a four-window office in the high-pressure world of 1982 has to be a decisive man, I told myself. I took out the slip of paper with the number on it, picked up my phone and punched out the number.
A woman’s tinny voice on the other end said, “877-0313.” (Or some such number.)
“Hello,” I said. “May I ask what company this is?”
There were two clicks, then one. The tinny voice said, “877-0313.”
“Excuse me,” I said, speaking more loudly this time. “I think we have a bad connection. I was asking what company this is.”
More clicks. “What is your name, please?” asked the voice.
“Is this an answering service?” I asked.
“What is your name, please?” the voice asked again.
I sighed. Yes, it sounded like some answering service that wasn’t about to give out any information unless you were on the Approved list.
“This is Charles Barrow. I don’t know if you—”
Click. Click click. “Your appointment is at five o’clock this afternoon,” the voice said. “723 Madison, Room 1100.”
“My what?” I said. “Look, really, I don’t even know who I’m talking to. What appointment?”
“Five o’clock this afternoon, 723 Madison, Room 1100.” Then there was a final click, as she hung up.
For a minute I stared at the suddenly dead phone; then I laughed. Then I stopped and wondered if I ought to be annoyed. I wasn’t annoyed, but I thought maybe I should be. What kind of business could afford to antagonize customers with that kind of disrespect, anyway?
Which brought me right back to what I’d been wondering about when I’d called: Who was that on the other end?
I looked at my desk calendar again and it was still blank. Sighing, I wrote on it, Appt 723 Mad Rm 1100—5:00.
723 Madison was a big square office building like most of the newly constructed people-boxes in that area. It had a glass revolving door leading into a large lobby serviced by eight automatic elevators. At that hour of the day most people were just leaving work; I caught an elevator as it disgorged a load of them and rode alone up to the eleventh floor.
Room 1100 was at the end of the hall on my right: a nondescript door with a frosted-glass window lettered R.O.B.O.T. I paused, looking at that; then I knocked and entered.
For a minute I didn’t see the receptionist. There was a teak desk, imitation-Danish midcentury, with some papers on it and a telephone switchboard behind it. Next to the switchboard, behind the desk, was a whirring and clicking mass of polished steel with metal arms that ran on visible pulleys, a round globe from which a web of telephone wires ran into the switchboard, and a spring-steel neck beneath this globular “head.” As I hesitated inside the door, a familiar tinny voice issued from a grille where the machine might have had a mouth.
“What is your name, please?” the voice asked.
I stared for a moment, caught off guard. Robots of one sort or another were in common use in a lot of industries these days (though seldom along the Madison Avenue circuit), but the construction of this one struck me as bizarre in the extreme. Then the receptionist clicked once and twice and said, “Your appointment is at nine o’clock tomorrow morning,” and I realized it was speaking into the phone, not to me. “723 Madison, Room 1100,” it said.
I waited for it to go through its cycle.
“Nine o’clock tomorrow morning. 723 Madison, Room 1100,” it said, and one of the lines in the switchboard pulled itself out and snaked back down into the panel at its base. The receptionist whirred, then revolved to face me.
“My name is Charles Barrow,” I said. “I have an appointment”
“Yes, Mr. Barrow,” the tinny female voice said. “Will you be seated, please.” The machine revolved back to face its switchboard.
I sat down on the couch and took a few moments lighting a cigarette to gather my thoughts. Here I was at the office, and I still hadn’t solved the silly question which had brought me here: What was this place?
I leaned forward and asked conversationally, “What does R.O.B.O.T. stand for, anyway?”
“R.O.B.O.T. spells ‘robot,’” the receptionist said without turning.
“I know,” I said. “But what is R.O.B.O.T.?”
There was a rapid whirr inside the machine, then it said, “Robot, noun: An automatic apparatus or device that performs functions ordinarily ascribed to human beings or operates with what appears to be almost human intelligence.”
“That’s fine,” I said patiently. “But what is this place, this organization?”
The receptionist clicked twice. “877-0313,” it said. Then it clicked some more. “What is your name, please?”
I sighed. “I’m Charles Barrow. 1 have an appointment for five o’clock.”
“Yes, Mr. Barrow. Will you be seated, please.”
I sat back and waited.
Half an hour later I was still sitting there, and getting irritated. I’m not used to being kept waiting. I was debating with myself whether to try communicating my displeasure to the obviously limited robot receptionist, or simply to walk out. I could phone Betty and maybe convince her to let the azaleas evolve by themselves for one more week, and we could still make a night of it.
I decided just to walk out. Picking up my hat, I stood up—and the receptionist gave a rapid clickclickclickclick and said, “You may go in now.”
I hesitated, looking at the impassive metal globe-face with the telephone cords running to the switchboard. Like a metal Medusa, I thought angrily. You’re supposed to look at it and turn to stone so that you’ll wait until whoever the hell’s inside finally gets around to seeing you.
Whoever the hell’s inside …
That was what did it. There’d be no use in telling off the under-programmed robot receptionist, but the man inside was a different matter. Setting an appointment for five o’clock, then keeping me waiting…Yes, he deserved a word or two.
The receptionist was pointing a level metal arm to a door at my right. I turned and went through it.
On the other side was a long hall, wide and empty like a hospital corridor, except that some distance down it I could see a couple of figures scurrying along from one room to another opening off the hall. They were robots too—the one I saw most clearly ran on two wheels and had a series of metal arms ending in wrenchlike “hands.” It turned its small head toward me briefly and I saw bright green eyes; then it disappeared into a room.
Out of the door nearest to me along the hall came another robot, this one tall and slender, basically manlike in construction: two legs and two arms, a torso and a bead. The head had three red circles about where you’d expect eyes and a mouth, and as it turned and approached I saw that this was apparently the case, for the eyes were faceted like a bee’s and the mouth was a speaker-grille.
It stumped up to me on its metal feet, stopped and said politely, “Please follow me.” Then, without waiting for an answer, it turned and led me down the hall.
I followed.
We went all the way to the end, where the corridor branched right, and then turned to follow that one. Occasional robots passed us in the hall: yellow ones, blue ones, gray ones; short, squat floor-sweepers brushing by on broom-feet; inspector-robots with rows of eyes circling tubular bodies at top and bottom, minutely checking the flooring and plaster; strange-shaped repair robots like the one I’d seen before, with wrenches or screwdrivers or cutting tools for hands; and quite a few with such a variety of peculiar extensors, sense-organs, manipulators and other paraphernalia that I had no idea what they were for.
The second corridor was about a city block long. My robot guide took me to the end of that and turned right again. Another long hall lay ahead, no different from the two we’d already passed.
“Just how much further are we going?” I asked, catching up with the long-limbed robot and striding beside it
“Please follow me,” it said without turning its head.
A suspicion came to me. “Say, did you know your left arm has fallen off?” I asked.
“Please follow me,” it said, not pausing to look.
“Your head is coming unscrewed!” I said more urgently.
“Please follow me,” it said.
There hadn’t even been the soft clicking that the receptionist had made when switching to its programmed response. Either this one had nothing else to say, or I hadn’t hit the right verbal button. I kept following for awhile, my annoyance growing as my feet got tired. I’m not a peripatetic man.
We came to the end of this third corridor and turned right. The robot guide kept going as impassively as ever, and down at the end of the hall I saw a door which looked suspiciously like the one I’d come in by. I stopped.
“Now just a damn minute!” I said. “You’ve taken me around in a circle!”
“Please follow me.”
“The hell I will! I’m leaving!”
That did it. Whirr, clickclick went the robot. “This is the room,” it said, striding to the nearest door and opening it for me.
I stood still for a moment, looking past my guide-robot into the room. It was a fairly small cubicle, about a third the size of my own office, with no rug and no windows. There was just a green leather swivel chair in the middle of the room, and facing it was a large robot which seemed to be all head, and that head all one eye. The head with the eye turned slowly to gaze at me.
I don’t know exactly what I’d been expecting at the end of the trail. What kind of appointment would a man make and then forget? Dentist? Analyst? Tax consultant? Well, whatever I’d had in mind, it had involved a human, not a one-eyed robot.
But I was here now, and curiosity is a great motivating force when you have time on your hands. I stepped into the room.
