I, Robot - Isaac Asimov [32]
He looked at Dave thoughtfully and then at the Field-Test outline given in the “Handbook.” He said, “See here, Dave, what about sitting through a test? It would be the wise thing to do.”
The robot rose, “If you say so, boss.” There was pain in his voice.
It started simply enough. Robot DV-5 multiplied five-place figures to the heartless ticking of a stop watch. He recited the prime numbers between a thousand and ten thousand. He extracted cube roots and integrated functions of varying complexity. He went through mechanical reactions in order of increasing difficulty. And, finally, worked his precise mechanical mind over the highest function of the robot world—the solutions of problems in judgment and ethics.
At the end of two hours, Powell was copiously besweated. Donovan had enjoyed a none-too-nutritious diet of fingernail and the robot said, “How does it look, boss?”
Powell said, “I’ve got to think it over, Dave. Snap judgments won’t help much. Suppose you go back to the C-shift. Take it easy. Don’t press too hard for quota just for a while—and we’ll fix things up.”
The robot left. Donovan looked at Powell.
“Well—”
Powell seemed determined to push up his mustache by the roots. He said, “There is nothing wrong with the currents of his positronic brain.”
“I’d hate to be that certain.”
“Oh, Jupiter, Mike! The brain is the surest part of a robot. It’s quintuple-checked back on Earth. If they pass the field test perfectly, the way Dave did, there just isn’t a chance of brain misfunction. That test covered every key path in the brain.”
“So where are we?”
“Don’t rush me. Let me work this out. There’s still the possibility of a mechanical breakdown in the body. That leaves about fifteen hundred condensers, twenty thousand individual electric circuits, five hundred vacuum cells, a thousand relays, and umpty-ump thousand other individual pieces of complexity that can be wrong. And these mysterious positronic fields no one knows anything about.”
“Listen, Greg,” Donovan grew desperately urgent. “I’ve got an idea. That robot may be lying. He never—”
“Robots can’t knowingly lie, you fool. Now if we had the McCormack-Wesley tester, we could check each individual item in his body within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, but the only two M.-W. testers existing are on Earth, and they weigh ten tons, are on concrete foundations and can’t be moved. Isn’t that peachy?”
Donovan pounded the desk, “But, Greg, he only goes wrong when we’re not around. There’s something—sinister—about—that.” He punctuated the sentence with slams of fist against desk.
“You,” said Powell, slowly, “make me sick. You’ve been reading adventure novels.”
“What I want to know,” shouted Donovan, “is what we’re going to do about it.”
“I’ll tell you. I’m going to install a visiplate right over my desk. Right on the wall over there, see!” He jabbed a vicious finger at the spot. “Then I’m going to focus it at whatever part of the mine is being worked, and I’m going to watch. That’s all.”
“That’s all? Greg—”
Powell rose from his chair and leaned his balled fists on the desk, “Mike, I’m having a hard time.” His voice was weary. “For a week, you’ve been plaguing me about Dave. You say he’s gone wrong. Do you know how he’s gone wrong? No! Do you know what shape this wrongness takes? No! Do you know what brings it on? No! Do you know what snaps him out? No! Do you know anything about it? No! Do I know anything about it? No! So what do you want me to do?”
Donovan’s arm swept outward in a vague, grandiose gesture, “You got me!”
“So I tell you again. Before we do anything toward a cure, we’ve got to find out what the disease is in the first place. The first step in cooking rabbit stew is catching the rabbit. Well, we’ve got to catch that rabbit! Now get out of here.”
Donovan stared at the preliminary outline of his field report with weary eyes. For one thing, he was tired and for another,