Liar!
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.
Lanning grinned too, and, as always at such times, his long white hair and shrewd
little eyes made him the picture of a biblical patriarch, “True for you, Dr. Calvin.”
His voice became suddenly crisp, “Here’s everything in pill-concentrate form.
We’ve produced a positronic brain of supposedly ordinary vintage that’s got the
remarkable property of being able to tune in on thought waves. It would mark the most
important advance in robotics in decades, if we knew how it happened. We don’t, and we
have to find out. Is that clear?”
“May I make a suggestion?” asked Bogert.
“Go ahead!”
“I’d say that until we do figure out the mess -- and as a mathematician I expect it
to be a very devil of a mess -- we keep the existence of RD-34 a secret. I mean even from
the other members of the staff. As heads of the departments, we ought not to find it an
insoluble problem, and the fewer know about it--”
“Bogert is right,” said Dr. Calvin. “Ever since the Interplanetary Code was
modified to allow robot models to be tested in the plants before being shipped out to
space, antirobot propaganda has increased. If any word leaks out about a robot being able
to read minds before we can announce complete control of the phenomenon, pretty
effective capital could be made out of it.”
Lanning sucked at his cigar and nodded gravely. He turned to Ashe; “I think you
said you were alone when you first stumbled on this thought-reading business.”
“I’ll say I was alone -- I got the scare of my life. RB-34 had just been taken off
the assembly table and they sent him down to me. Obermann was off somewheres, so I
took him down to the testing rooms myself -- at least I started to take him down.” Ashe
paused, and a tiny smile tugged at his lips, “Say, did any of you ever carry on a thought
conversation without knowing it?”
No one bothered to answer, and he continued, “You don’t realize it at first, you
know. He just spoke to me -- as logically and sensibly as you can imagine -- and it was
only when I was most of the way down to the testing rooms that I realized that I hadn’t
said anything. Sure, I thought lots, but that isn’t the same thing, is it? I locked that thing
up and ran for Lanning. Having it walking beside me, calmly peering into my thoughts
and picking and choosing among them gave me the willies.”
“I imagine it would,” said Susan Calvin thoughtfully. Her eyes fixed themselves
upon Ashe in an oddly intent manner. “We are so accustomed to considering our own
thoughts private.”
Lanning broke in impatiently, “Then only the four of us know. All right! We’ve
got to go about this systematically. Ashe, I want you to check over the assembly line
from beginning to end --everything. You’re to eliminate all operations in which there was
no possible chance of an error, and list all those where there were, together with its nature
and possible magnitude.”
“Tall order,” grunted Ashe.
“Naturally! Of course, you’re to put the men under you to work on this -- every
single one if you have to, and I don’t care if we go behind schedule, either. But they’re
not to know why, you understand.”
“Hm-m-m, yes!” The young technician grinned wryly. “It’s still a lulu of a job.”
Lanning swiveled about in his chair and faced Calvin, “You’ll have to