THE VACATION WAS LONGER THAN TWO WEEKS, that, Mike Donovan had to admit.
It had been six months, with pay. He admitted that, too. But that, as he explained
furiously, was fortuitous. U. S. Robots had to get the bugs out of the multiple robots, and
there were plenty of bugs, and there are always at least half a dozen bugs left for the
field-testing. So they waited and relaxed until the drawing-board men and the slide-rule
boys had said “OK!” And now he and Powell were out on the asteroid and it was not OK.
He repeated that a dozen times, with a face that had gone beety, “For the love of Pete,
Greg, get realistic. What’s the use of adhering to the letter of the specifications and
watching the test go to pot? It’s about time you got the red tape out of your pants and
went to work.”
“I’m only saying,” said Gregory Powell, patiently, as one explaining electronics
to an idiot child, “that according to spec, those robots are equipped for asteroid mining
without supervision. We’re not supposed to watch them.”
“All right. Look -- logic!” He lifted his hairy fingers and pointed. “One: That new
robot passed every test in the home laboratories. Two: United States Robots guaranteed
their passing the test of actual performance on an asteroid. Three: The robots are not
passing said tests. Four: If they don’t pass, United States Robots loses ten million credits
in cash and about one hundred million in reputation. Five: If they don’t pass and we can’t
explain why they don’t pass, it is just possible two good jobs may have to be bidden a
fond farewell.”
Powell groaned heavy behind a noticeably insincere smile. The unwritten motto
of United States Robot and Mechanical Men Corp. was well known: “No employee
makes the same mistake twice. He is fired the first time.”
Aloud he said, “You’re as lucid as Euclid with everything except the facts.
You’ve watched that robot group for three shifts, you redhead, and they did their work
perfectly. You said so yourself. What else can we do?”
“Find out what’s wrong, that’s what we can do. So they did work perfectly when I
watched them. But on three different occasions when I didn’t watch them, they didn’t
bring in any ore. They didn’t even come back on schedule. I had to go after them.”
“And was anything wrong?”
“Not a thing. Not a thing. Everything was perfect. Smooth and perfect as the
luminiferous ether. Only one little insignificant detail disturbed me -- there was no ore.”
Powell scowled at the ceiling and pulled at his brown mustache. “I’ll tell you
what, Mike. We’ve been stuck with pretty lousy jobs in our time, but this takes the
iridium asteroid. The whole business is complicated past endurance. Look, that robot,
DV-5, has six robots under it. And not just under it -- they’re part of it.”
“I know that--”
“Shut up!” said Powell, savagely, “I know you know it, but I’m just describing
the hell of it. Those six subsidiaries are part of DV-5 like your fingers are part of you and
it gives them their orders neither by voice nor radio, but directly through positronic fields.
Now -- there isn’t a roboticist back at United States Robots that knows what a positronic
field is or how it works. And neither do I. Neither do you.”
“The last,” agreed Donovan, philosophically, “I know.”
“Then look at our position. If everything works -- fine! If anything goes wrong --
we’re out of our depth and there probably isn’t a thing we can do, or anybody else. But
the job belongs to us and not to anyone else so we’re on the spot, Mike.” He blazed away
for a moment in silence. Then, “All right, have you got him outside?”
“Yes.”
“Is everything normal now?”
“Well he hasn’t got religious mania, and he isn’t running around in a circle
spouting Gilbert and Sullivan, so I suppose he’s normal.”
Donovan passed out the door, shaking his head viciously.
Powell reached for the “Handbook of Robotics” that weighed down one side of
his desk to a near-founder and opened it reverently. He had once jumped out of the
window of a burning house dressed only in shorts and the “Handbook.” In a pinch, he
would have skipped the shorts.
The “Handbook” was propped up before him, when Robot DV-5 entered, with
Donovan kicking the door shut behind him.
Powell said somberly, “Hi, Dave. How do you feel?”
“Fine,” said the robot. “Mind if I sit down?” He dragged up the specially
reinforced chair that was his, and folded gently into it.
Powell regarded Dave -- laymen might think of robots by their serial numbers;
roboticists never -- with approval. It was not over-massive by any means, in spite of its
construction as thinking-unit of an integrated seven-unit robot team. It was seven feet tall,
and a half-ton of metal and electricity. A lot? Not when that half-ton has to be a mass of
condensers, circuits, relays, and vacuum cells that can handle practically any
psychological reaction known to humans. And a positronic brain, which with ten pounds
of matter