I, Robot - Isaac Asimov [40]
Susan Calvin talked about Powell and Donovan with unsmiling amusement, but warmth came into her voice when she mentioned robots. It didn’t take her long to go through the Speedies, the Cuties and the Daves, and I stopped her. Otherwise, she would have dredged up half a dozen more.
I said, “Doesn’t anything ever happen on Earth?”
She looked at me with a little frown, “No, we don’t have much to do with robots in action here on Earth.”
“Oh, well that’s too bad. I mean, your field-engineers are swell, but can’t we get you into this? Didn’t you ever have a robot go wrong on you? It’s your anniversary, you know.”
And so help me she blushed. She said, “Robots have gone wrong on me. Heavens, how long it’s been since I thought of it. Why, it was almost forty years ago. Certainly! 2021! And I was only thirty-eight. Oh, my—I’d rather not talk about it.”
I waited, and sure enough she changed her mind. “Why not?” she said. “It cannot harm me now. Even the memory can’t. I was foolish once, young man. Would you believe that?”
“No,” I said.
“I was. But Herbie was a mind-reading robot.”
“What?”
“Only one of its kind, before or since. A mistake,—somewheres—”
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 seventy-five 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 RB-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