Part 1

Love Among The Robots

By EMMETT McDOWELL

Henry Ohm, staid scientist, found he couldn't keep his mind on his work--with that girl around. Such was the development of her--ah--personality that even the robots began getting ideas!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1946. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Henry Ohm leaped to his feet, stared across the intervening ground at igloo number 2, plainly visible through the clear plastic walls. Its door had just been flung violently open. Then Sofi Jokai scooted out and fled madly across the jagged surface of the asteroid.

Hard on the girl's heels pounded R-7. The robot, Hen saw with a gulp, was waving a large wrench in one metal fist.

"Oh-oh!" Hen muttered and plunged down the incline for the airlock.

He shot a second glance through the transparent curved walls, slowed down. The robot would never catch Sofi. Even burdened by her oxygen suit, the girl was leaving R-7 far in the rear.

At the airlock, Henry Ohm paused, regarding the chase with sober, deep-set black eyes. He was a tall, thin young man, nearing thirty. His face was narrow; prominent cheek bones and a thin, straight nose gave his features an angular pleasant mould. He made no move to don the emergency oxygen helmet beside the lock, but waited with a vague expression of annoyance.

Sofi reached the airlock, burst inside, sealed and locked the outer door behind her. The air had scarcely filled the chamber before she flung open the inner door, confronted Henry Ohm, and exploded into a flood of angry words. Not a sound escaped her plastic helmet which she had forgotten to remove.

He let her rattle away silently inside her helmet, nodding at intervals, rubbing his chin until she paused for breath.

"That's what you get for trying to run a mine all alone on this god-forsaken asteroid," he informed her, "even if you are a yellow-haired hell cat."

Sofi looked at him blankly.

Ohm rapped with his knuckles on her helmet. "If you'd take that thing off, you could hear me. But you're the excitable type. Probably have an overactive thyroid."

Sofi jerked off her helmet. She had a mass of fine wavy yellow hair cut like a halo about her oval face. Her features were delicately moulded, her eyes large and blue. She was only a few inches shorter than Henry Ohm, but more slenderly built.

"What the hell were you saying?" she demanded suspiciously.

"I wanted to know what you'd been doing to the robots this time?"

"Me?"

"What happened in the mine?"

"Rational robots!" Sofi Jokai planted hands on slender but ample hips. "I was an idiot to listen to you, Hen."

He repressed a chuckle. His glance flicked to the surface of the asteroid beyond the plastic walls of the igloo. R-7, he saw, had taken a stance at the lock like a cat at a mouse hole.

* * * * *

Although built along the general design of man, the robot was no grotesque copy. He was a complex functional piece of machinery as beautiful in his way as the cobwebby spans of a bridge, a streamlined jet plane, or a fine watch.

"But Sofi, they're still in the experimental stage. They--"

"Experimental's right," the girl interrupted passionately. "D'you realize what R-7 has done now?"

He grinned. "No. What?"

"He's taken the mining worm apart--that's what. I knew he would!"

"Knew he would? Did you warn him not to?"

"Yes. Of course I did. I had to leave him to check the reduction plant. I had a presentiment...."

"Woman's intuition, I suppose," Hen interrupted. "You'd sold yourself on the idea R-7 was going to take the worm apart."

"If you like," returned Sofi in a chilly voice. "When I came back, R-7 was gone and the worm was strewn all over the floor. I was furious. I found R-7 on the fourth level. I started to land into him, but--but--"

"But what?"

"He looked so queer."

"How the hell can a piece of machinery look queer?"

"Well, he did," said Sofi indignantly. "He looked as if he was going to take me apart, too!"

Henry groaned. "Go on," he said resignedly.

"Why, then R-7 wanted to know if I was put together or if I came all in one piece." She bit her lip. "He started to find out."

She slipped off the oxygen suit. She was clad in comfortable baggy coveralls similar to Hen's.

"That rascal," Hen chuckled. Sofi grew pink with rage.

"Rascal!" she retorted witheringly. "Is that all you can say? One of those mechanical monstrosities dismantles the worm, then starts on me--and you think it's cute!"

"Well, it's damned queer they always react emotionally when you're around."

Sofi set her jaw, began to stride up the incline. She was a rangy girl with a long pantherish stride. Hen followed her, his brow furrowed.

When they came out on the sun deck of the two-storied half-sphere of clear plastic that was the living quarters, he began, "I'll take a look at the mining worm. I think I can get it reassembled all right." He frowned, cracked his bony knuckles. "The robots have been developing some unexpected quirks. I wouldn't be surprised, Sofi, if this tinkering with machinery isn't the expression of a sexual urge. The emergence of an instinct to perpetuate the species...."

"Sexual urge!" Sofi Jokai halted before Hen, shook her finger under his nose. "If I could sneak up behind R-7, he'd never make calf-eyes at another mining worm!"

But Hen wasn't listening. He fumbled in the pockets of his coveralls, resurrected a notebook, wrote: "Robots manifesting decided curiosity towards machinery. May be emergence of secondary sex characteristics." He frowned, added in bold script: "Have noted nascent antipathy towards organic life." Again he hesitated, then scrawled: "Shows signs of developing into active antagonism." He snapped the notebook shut, jammed it in his pocket.

"Where are you going," Sofi asked as he started for the door.

"Get my oxygen suit. I want a look at their mining worm."

"You'd better take a crowbar along to fend off R-7."

"Poor psychology," Hen replied with more confidence than he felt. "Fear and coercion'll only cause their antagonism to become firmly implanted. The rational robot, Sofi, can be either the greatest single step man has made towards freedom or...."

"Or what?"

"Enslavement!" It sounded sententious after he had said it. But it was true. He started for the door again.

"What do you mean by that crack?" Sofi stopped him.

He didn't answer her directly. Instead, he replied: "I'm not sure that Robots Incorporated didn't make a mistake when they selected this asteroid as a proving ground. It's too...."

"Don't you go turning in any report like that!" interrupted the girl hotly.

* * * * *

Sofi Jokai had been operating her wildcat uranium mine on a shoestring before Robots Incorporated approached her with their proposition. Now the corporation was paying all the operational expenses so that the proceeds of the mine were pure gravy. Further, they had guaranteed that any improvements which they installed would automatically revert to Sofi when the experimental units were withdrawn. Machinery damaged by the robots was to be replaced at the corporation's expense. A substantial bonus to compensate for the risk involved was included. Robots Incorporated hadn't even over-looked Henry Ohm, their experimental physicist, whom they'd sent along to check the robots. Sofi was to get a monthly check to cover Henry Ohm's board, lodging and nuisance value.

"Hell," said Sofi, "R-7 can chase me twice around the asteroid before breakfast. Just because I blew my top about the mining worm doesn't mean...."

"That's got nothing to do with it," Hen said grimly. "The asteroid's too well adapted to the robots' needs. Airless, waterless, an abundant supply of metals. There's the laboratory. Your mine and equipment. And only the two of us as a check on them."

"Check?" Sofi's blue eyes had gradually widened. "What are you driving at?"

"Why do you suppose Robots Incorporated chose this asteroid as a proving ground?"

"They--they said the mine would afford an opportunity to observe how well the robots adapted themselves to actual working conditions."

"That's not all. They wouldn't let you go into this blind."

"No," she admitted nervously. "They mentioned something else that struck me at the time, but it was too golden an opportunity to pass up. They said that should the experiment prove--ah--impractical, they would have the infection isolated on a small asteroid well out in the belt."

"Exactly. Look, I helped develop these robots. I've been on the problem seven years, but it was started long before I joined the experimental staff of Robots Incorporated." He paused.

"In fact," he went on dryly, "they were predicted even before science had advanced to a point where it could set up the intricate nervous system necessary. A conscious machine, Sofi, is the result of fusing two sciences which have always been considered more or less antagonistic."

"You mean psychology and physics?" Sofi had begun to pace nervously up and down the room.

He nodded.

"It was a logical deduction from mechanistic psychology, which itself is an outgrowth of the old school of Behaviorism. Mental life is response to stimulus. Consciousness is like the spark between two electrodes in a circuit of feeling arising from viscera, muscles, blood vessels, glands--"

"Get to the point!" commanded Sofi.

Hen set his jaw. He was sounding like a lecturer, he realized. But it annoyed him for the girl to point it out.

"I'm getting there as fast as I can. We were faced with devising an intricate mechanical nervous system. Thus, should a joint grow warm from lack of lubrication, an impulse of distress could be telegraphed to the central clearing center, identified, shunted to the lubricatory system which would oil the joints. A spark of consciousness would be created. It would manifest itself as acute distress in the defective joint.

"We incorporated a simple metabolism by which the robots converted raw stuff into fuel and lubrication. The rest of the mechanism was much the same as that of any animal confronted by the necessity of self preservation. Organs for locomotion and work. Organs for perception."

Sofi frowned. "So?"

"Most things in nature serve multiple purposes. Arms and legs are no exception. They provide offensive as well as defensive weapons. We've succeeded in building a conscious machine without any adequate control."

"But you sound as if you thought it might turn on man," protested the girl with a shudder. "Why should it?"

"For the same reason we built it," he said with a touch of irony. "Freedom. So long as it doesn't learn to reproduce itself, though, it's not a danger. That is, not to the race."

"But a machine! Surely you can forecast how a machine will act!"

"Can we?" His voice was savage. "How would a conscious machine react to its environment? What would its thoughts be? I tell you, once it integrates itself, we have no means of predicting its reactions!"

* * * * *

Once in his own quarters, Henry Ohm began dragging on his oxygen suit. He could still see the girl through the glass partitions of the igloo. She had dropped into a chair, lit a cigarette.

"About as private," he thought wryly, "as a gold fish bowl."

The igloos, he knew, were manufactured for housing on the airless asteroids of the belt. They were built of a clear thermal plastic and incorporated heating, atmosphere and water units. Henry Ohm felt rather strongly though that the partitions could have been clouded.

Sofi's holdings had not been designed to accommodate visitors. In fact, Henry Ohm had spent the past week in a state of mild embarrassment.

He settled his helmet over his head, bolted it in place. He glanced toward the living room, but Sofi wasn't there. Then he saw her in her own quarters. She was skinning out of her coveralls, preparing to shower.

"Damn all glass houses," he muttered and bolted for the air lock.

Hen emerged on the surface, swept the tight horizon with his eyes. It was empty of life. R-7 had lost patience, evidently, and wandered off.

To the left was the laboratory and machine shop, a gleaming plastic igloo resembling the living quarters. Robots Incorporated had provided it for him to observe, diagnose, repair his mechanical charges. Beyond the laboratory a somewhat larger igloo housed the mine shaft, reduction plant and tipple. A dilapidated tramp freighter sprawled beside the tipple like a foundered whale.

Hen frowned. Operations had come to a halt. He could catch no glimpse of movement through the plastic walls.

He lengthened his stride, passed through the door, still open just as Sofi had left it when she fled. The interior reminded him of the appearance of a shop from which the proprietor has just stepped to buy a paper.

A subtle feeling of uneasiness began to pervade his whole being. He descended the shaft in the automatic cage. The light was burning on each of the four levels. Tools had been abandoned and left lying on the floors. He found the dismembered anatomy of the mining worm on level three. But of the eight robots there was no sign.

Hen ran the cage back to the surface at top speed. He was sweating profusely. A trickle kept running off his forehead into his eye. He pawed at the plastic helmet, shook his head. Then perversely his nose began to itch.

It did no good to tell himself these were nervous manifestations. He could only grit his teeth and suffer. He ran outside, glanced hopefully about the surface once more.

The landscape was rough, inhospitable, barren, resembling a clinker on a larger scale. The sun hung just above the western horizon. It was a brilliant but unimposing disc about the size of a dime.

There was still no sign of the robots.

* * * * *

Hen swore softly to himself. In a few minutes it would be dark. It was hopeless to begin a search now. He returned to his quarters in the igloo, shucked off the oxygen suit.

Maybe he could raise them with the radio. The robots' hearing and speaking apparatus extended beyond the range of audible sound into the realm of electro-magnetic waves. He went out to the sun deck, switched on the communicator. He was unable to contact them, though. There was no ionized strata of air on the asteroid to reflect the waves back to the surface, and he concluded they had wandered below the horizon.

With a groan, he flung himself into a chair. He pulled the notebook out of his pocket, thumbed through the pages, reading bits here and there.

"... machine thought processes diverging from human at progressively increasing rate ... amazing deductive and assimilative faculties. Able to assimilate page of text at a glance. But seem to lack creativeness...."

He paused, frowned, wondering if the inability to perform creative, inductive thinking wasn't a fundamental limitation of the machine. Organic life differed in four precepts which until a short time ago science had been unable to duplicate. It was able to grow and reproduce itself; it felt emotion and thought.

But the robots appeared to think.

And some forms of organic life didn't feel emotion. Plants, for one. The oviparous man-like bowmen of Venus, who had emerged from the Great Swamp and which a few crackpot visionaries were hailing as homo superior, for another.

Only the ability to grow and reproduce itself seemed inherently organic. The act of conception both in a biologic and mental sense was the birthright of the organism.

With an increase of the uneasiness he had felt since the discovery of the robots' defection, he returned to his notes.

"... robots showing aversion to water, oxygen, corrosive acids; believe to be caused by dread and/or attendant pain of oxidation ... have been forced to release air in mine and laboratory and discontinue atmosphere units to induce robots to return to work. Humidity of atmosphere being especially distasteful to them ... treated R-3 for mild acid corrosion of right pedal digit. Complained of itching sensation...."

He frowned. How in the hell could a hunk of metal experience an itching sensation? From what source could it have plucked the mental pattern? He came to the end of his notes, wrote: "All work at stand still. Robots have disappeared."

He returned the book to his pocket, elevated his feet on another chair, closed his eyes.

He was still in that position when Sofi streamed out of her quarters with a towel draped about herself.

"Resting the old brain?" she inquired brightly.

Hen opened his eyes, said in a pained voice, "I'm thinking," and closed them again.

"Which end do you use?"

Hen allowed his feet to clomp to the floor, sat up. He said grimly, "The robots have run off."

Sofi's blue eyes widened. "Wait a minute," she said breathlessly and flashed from the room.

Hen kept his eyes studiously on the deck.

The sprawling sun-drenched hives of Terra, he was beginning to realize, insured an impersonal attitude by the multitude of their citizenry. That same impersonalness was disconcertingly hard to maintain when a man and a girl were cooped together on an uninhabited asteroid. The pre-plastic emotions were only too apt to assert themselves.

It distracted him when he felt he needed his full powers of concentration.

Sofi returned in belted coveralls. She took a seat, asking him, "What does it mean?"

"The disappearance of the robots? I don't know. I didn't think they were sufficiently integrated yet to mutiny."

"But what can they do?"

He frowned. "I don't want to sound like an alarmist, but I've pointed out before how suited the asteroids are to them. If once they learned how to duplicate themselves, there'd be no end to them. They have everything here they need to get a fundamental grasp of our science--even to a rocket ship. They could spread through the asteroid belt like a plague."

Sofi bit her lip. Her eyes were opened wide and brilliant. Her cheeks were flushed. She didn't interrupt.

Hen said, "Look what it would mean. An alien, intelligent, almost indestructible race of monsters saddling the planetary system!"

He drove his right fist into his left palm. "A control! That's what we have to discover! A control!"

* * * * *

Hen had no idea what he ate that night at supper. He said suddenly over coffee and cigarettes, "Ceres is approaching an inferior conjunction. If those robots haven't appeared by morning, I'm going to radio the station there for help. Then I'm going to scour every inch of this diminutive world."

"That shouldn't be too difficult for you," Sofi remarked maliciously. "Of course, there's only about two thousand-five hundred square kilometers to cover."

Hen looked disgruntled.

"Maybe they've jumped off," suggested Sofi with a giggle.

He made a remark under his breath.

"Why, Henry! What an idea! You're worrying yourself into a nervous breakdown. Relax. I'll tell you what: we'll play some checkers."

"Checkers!" he snorted. He had played checkers every night since he had been on the asteroid and he didn't even like the game. Besides, the girl always beat him.

Undeterred by his lack of enthusiasm, Sofi began to clear away the dishes and get out the men.

* * * * *

Hen sat back with a pained expression. It was black outside the plastic hemisphere. Only the vivid stars relieved the absence of light. Jupiter, by far the brightest, was visible as a small disc. The lights were still on in mine and lab, but nothing stirred in the two igloos.

"It's your move," said Sofi.

She was seated directly across from him, knees touching his. Her coveralls were open at the neck, and he could see the white pillar of her throat, the swell of her small, high, virginal breasts. He was conscious of his pulse ticking away in his throat, and grew furious with himself. He couldn't concentrate on the game; he couldn't concentrate on the much more serious problem of the robots.

The girl, he felt sure, was aware of her effect on him and used it deliberately to confuse him. He said grumpily, "I can't beat both of you."

"Both of me?"

"Yeah. You and your body."

"Why, what a thought, Hen!" She was obviously trying to hold back laughter. "But I thought you were superior to that sort of thing."

He jumped up from the table, turned his back to the girl staring off through the plastic walls. Immediately all thoughts of Sofi vanished.

"They're back!"

"What?"

"The robots. They've come back. They're in the laboratory. Look."

She came around the table, brushing against him, stared out at the lighted igloo. The heavy man-like machines were moving about inside the laboratory. Hen started for his quarters.

"Where are you going?" Sofi cried sharply.

"Get my oxygen suit."

"Wait. Don't be foolhardy. How do you know what they're up to? Talk to them first."

Hen hesitated. "All right." He went out onto the sun deck instead, snapped on the communicator.

"R-7," he called. "R-7."

"_Here_," came the robot's voice through the audio. "_Is that you, father?_"

"Father?" Hen ejaculated. He heard Sofi giggle. "Where did you get that idea?"

"_Didn't you make us, father?_"

"Yes," he admitted. Sofi was laughing out loud. "But you didn't think of that yourself."

"_The girl told us, father_," said the robot.

Hen ground his teeth. That, of course, was Sofi's idea of a joke. "Where have you been?" he asked.

"_Prospecting._"

"Prospecting for what?"

"_Radium, father._"

Sofi said, "Ask them if they found anything!" Her voice was eager.

Hen narrowed his black eyes, ignored her. He said to R-7 over the transmitter, "Go back to work at once."

"_But you don't work, father._"

Hen felt a surge of uncertainty. The robots were too delicately receptive to expect to keep them in ignorance. Their perceptions were infinitely more sensitive than man's. Even on this asteroid there were too many factors involved to regulate their environment. He had tried to implant science without revealing the greater implication of science. But language was too faulty a tool. There was the girl, too--headstrong, excitable, hyper-thyroid. It was amazing how faithfully the robots tended to reflect her emotional instability.

How much of the robots' erraticness originated in Sofi's inexact thinking?

He said, "Everything has to work."

"_Why?_"

"Man either produces the needs of his body or he dies," he explained with growing irritability. The conversation was progressing further and further out of hand. "In your case, it's fuel and repairs. Without them you would terminate."

"_But we have those here, father. Why should we work for you or the girl?_"

That was it--the ultimate question which he had foreseen and which he could neither avoid nor answer. It was impossible to explain the complicated social system in which man, the disinherited, exchanged his labor for a small percentage of the articles he produced. But the robots were self sufficient.

He said with growing desperation, "Either you return at once to work, or I'll terminate you."

"_How, father?_"

How indeed? Hen fumed inwardly, said with sudden inspiration, "We'll radio for help. There are machines capable of blasting the lot of you into your component atoms."

"_But the radio station is here in the laboratory_," R-7 pointed out. There was a faint hesitation, then the robot added, "_We will terminate you instead._" The instrument clicked off.

* * * * *

Hen gulped, realized in dismay that it hadn't occurred to the robots to destroy them until he had planted it in their minds.

"You are the bright lad," drawled Sofi. "What do you propose now--Brain?"

He turned his black eyes on her, regarded her without seeing her. His glance strayed beyond the girl to the lab.

"What the devil are they doing now?" he cried suddenly.