ALFRED LANNING LIT HIS CIGAR CAREFULLY, BUT the tips of his fingers were
trembling slightly. His gray eyebrows hunched low as he spoke between puffs.
“It reads minds all right-damn little doubt about that! But why?” He looked at
Mathematician Peter Bogert, “Well?”
Bogert flattened his black hair down with both hands, “That was the thirty-fourth
RB model we’ve turned out, Lanning. All the others were strictly orthodox.”
The third man at the table frowned. Milton Ashe was the youngest officer of U. S.
Robot & Mechanical Men, Inc., and proud of his post.
“Listen, Bogert. There wasn’t a hitch in the assembly from start to finish. I
guarantee that.”
Bogert’s thick lips spread in a patronizing smile, “Do you? If you can answer for
the entire assembly line, I recommend your promotion. By exact count, there are seventyfive
thousand, two hundred and thirty-four operations necessary for the manufacture of a
single positronic brain, each separate operation depending for successful completion
upon any number of factors, from five to a hundred and five. If any one of them goes
seriously wrong, the ‘brain’ is ruined. I quote our own information folder, Ashe.”
Milton Ashe flushed, but a fourth voice cut off his reply.
“If we’re going to start by trying to fix the blame on one another, I’m leaving.”
Susan Calvin’s hands were folded tightly in her lap, and the little lines about her thin,
pale lips deepened, “We’ve got a mind-reading robot on our hands and it strikes me as
rather important that we find out just why it reads minds. We’re not going to do that by
saying, ‘Your fault! My fault!’ “
Her cold gray eyes fastened upon Ashe, and he grinned.