The Complete Stories_ Volume 1 - Isaac Asimov [310]
I said, "Just a minute. I want to ring up Cliff."
She frowned a little, "Can't it wait?"
"I was supposed to call him two hours ago," I explained.
It only took two minutes. I rang the lab. Cliff was putting in an evening of work and so he answered. I asked something, then he said something, I
asked some more and he explained. The details don't matter, but as I said, he's the mathematician of the combination. When I build the circuits and put things together in what look like impossible ways, he's the guy who shuffles the symbols and tells me whether they're really impossible. Then, just as I finished and hung up, there was a ring at the door. For a minute, I thought Mary Ann had another caller and got sort of stiff-backed as I watched her go to the door. I was scribbling down some of what Cliff had just told me while I watched. But then she opened the door and it was only Cliff Anderson after all.
He said, "I thought I'd find you here— Hello, Mary Ann. Say, weren't you going to ring me at six? You're as reliable as a cardboard chair." Cliff is short and plump and always willing to start a fight, but I know him and pay no attention. I said, "Things turned up and it slipped my mind. But I just called, so what's the difference?"
"Called? Me? When?"
I started to point to the telephone and gagged. Right then, the bottom fell out of things. Exactly five seconds before the doorbell had sounded I had been on the phone talking to Cliff in the lab, and the lab was six miles away from Mary Ann's house.
I said, "I—just spoke to you."
I wasn't getting across. Cliff just said, "To me?" again.
I was pointing to the phone with both hands now, "On the phone. I called the lab. On this phone here! Mary Ann heard me. Mary Ann, wasn't I just talking to—"
Mary Ann said, "I don't know whom you were talking to. —Well, shall we go?" That's Mary Ann. She's a stickler for honesty.
I sat down. I tried to be very quiet and clear. I said, "Cliff, I dialed the lab's phone number, you answered the phone, I asked you if you had the details worked out, you said, yes, and gave them to me. Here they are. I wrote them down. Is this correct or not?"
I handed him the paper on which I had written the equations.
Cliff looked at them. He said, "They're correct. But where could you have gotten them? You didn't work them out yourself, did you?"
"I just told you. You gave them to me over the phone."
Cliff shook his head, "Bill, I haven't been in the lab since seven fifteen. There's nobody there."
"I spoke to somebody, I tell you."
Mary Ann was fiddling with her gloves. "We're getting late," she said.
I waved my hands at her to wait a bit, and said to Cliff, "Look, are you sure—"
"There's nobody there, unless you want to count Junior." Junior was what we called our pint-sized mechanical brain. We stood there, looking at one another. Mary Ann's toe was still ***hitting the floor like a time bomb waiting to explode.
Then Cliff laughed. He said, "I'm thinking of a cartoon I saw, somewhere. It shows a robot answering the phone and saying, 'Honest, boss, there's nobody here but us complicated thinking machines.' " I didn't think that was funny. I said, "Let's go to the lab."
Mary Ann said, "Hey! We won't make the show."
I said, "Look, Mary Ann, this is very important. It's just going to take a minute. Come along with us and we'll go straight to the show from there."
She said, "The show starts—" And then she stopped talking, because I grabbed her wrist and we left. That just shows how excited I was. Ordinarily, I wouldn't ever have dreamed of shoving her around. I mean, Mary Ann is quite