Adam Link, Robot Page 6

  Not that she was annoyingly secretive. On the contrary, she was quite open and frank in her general curiosity about me. Oftentimes, with Jack, our conversation would turn to myself. I explained as best I could what made me “tick.” I told them my outlook on things. We would at times discuss humanity and social life, relative to the robot question. My very presence—the long-predicated metal man of intelligence—made that problem a looming one.

  Dr. Link had cautiously destroyed his ultimate secret of energizing and bringing to life an iridium-sponge brain. He had given me the key formula. It was locked in my mind. Therefore I, and I alone, would have the final decision to make, whether any more robots were to be made.

  “Eventually,” Jack said, in one of his more serious moments, “it will have to come to the government’s attention. Your record will soon prove, to them, that intelligent robots will be an economic asset to civilization. And no threat to man’s rule, all fantasy to the side. You, Adam, are already proof of those fundamental things.”

  “Not quite,” I returned. “The problem goes deeper. I was fortunate in being ‘brought up’ by a high-minded man, Dr. Link. My open, impressionable mind was given the best possible start in civilized life. But think of a robot brought into being and trained by an unscrupulous man, or an out-and-out criminal. Who would the robot be? The same.”

  Kay nodded. “A basic rule. Environment molding the mind. If we had no slums, there would be no slum children.” Her voice was a little tragic. “Some rise out of it; most don’t—” She stopped.

  “Kay did,” Jack went on, despite the girl’s startled hand on his arm. “We know you well enough, Adam, for you to hear this. Kay had two strikes on her from the start—the slums and her beauty. She survived them both. But her sister didn’t. Her sister—”

  It was a tragic story, and I knew the reason now for Kay’s somber moments. I was shocked at the revelation of slum life, poverty, maladjustment, side by side with a thriving mechanical civilization.

  “I’ve been wondering what to do with my money,” I said, when Jack was done. “Now I know. We’re going to buy up slum property, tear down the buildings, and erect new modern ones.” Already my rapid thoughts were outlining the project.

  Kay’s eyes were shining, through tears. Her hand touched my arm.

  “I don’t see you as a robot any more, Adam,” she exclaimed. “I see you as a man. You have character, personality, just like anyone else. You are like a man who is big and strong—and warmhearted. You have kindly eyes, sympathetic lips, a strong chin.” She was looking at me with half-closed eyes. “You have a grave, boyish face, a shock of unruly hair, seldom combed. Your hands are big, thick-fingered, but so very gentle. And when you smile—you often do, I know—it is like a warm sun breaking through clouds.”

  Jack and I were both a little startled.

  But Jack’s face lighted up with a wondering fascination. “You know, Kay,” he whispered, “you’ve described him to a ‘T’.”

  And after that, I felt more than ever a human being. I knew that in their eyes I was no longer Adam Link, robot, but Adam Link—man.

  CHAPTER 7

  Robot Meets Girl

  The slum-clearance project knit the three of us still more closely together. Jack quit his paper, where he had often editorialized against the city’s laxness, and became manager of activities. We could not clean up everything, but we would do as much as we could. My money—it had reached over a half million—poured into the venture. Firetrap, vermin-infested tenements began to go down, foundations up.

  Tom Link, my “cousin,” came from his west-coast law office to help with legal matters. I have forgotten to mention Tom. He hadn’t suddenly lost all interest in me, after his losing court battle, or I in him. It was just that he had gone to his new position, before the date of my near-execution, unable to bear being around for that bitter event. We had exchanged letters steadily, after my pardon. Now he came to help us.

  “Adam Link!” he greeted me, stepping off the train. It was all he could say for the moment. I couldn’t say anything.

  After aiding our slum project, Tom one day said, “I knew neither my uncle nor I was wrong about you, Adam. You’re proving your worth. I’m—well, I’m proud to be your cousin.”

  Tom had to leave a week later, but promised to be back more often. He had cleared away a legal tangle, and snipped much red tape for us.

  But in all our activity, Jack, Kay and I still found time to relax and have fun.

  One of my chief delights was driving. I had bought a speedy, powerful car and would sometimes drive it over a hundred miles an hour down wide highways. The feel of a powerful motor thrills me. I feel a vague kinship with it. It is perhaps the only psychological twist I have, away from the human. I think of every engine, motor, and power-plant as a “brother,” less fortunately equipped than myself, with an integrated center of control. But you can hardly understand. I will say no more.

  I had a bad accident once, in my driving. My own driving, frankly, is faultless. I have instantaneous reflexes, perfect control, absolute timing. But other drivers are human. One car passed another just ahead of me, both coming my way. I jammed on my foot-brakes so forcefully that the connecting rods snapped. The emergency brake alone was inadequate. Our two cars would smash violently together head-on, it seemed.

  To save the other man, I twisted my wheel, careened off the road, turned turtle twice, and ended up against a tree. The impact was thunderous, shoving the engine off its block, and there was an explosion and fire all around. I had crashed through the windshield, and against the tree, in the middle of the burning wreck.

  “Good God!” moaned the man who had caused this, running up after stopping at the roadside. “Good God—whoever was in that car is—”

  He couldn’t finish. He meant to say: “crushed to pulp and burned to a cinder.”

  At that moment I stepped out, a little sooty and with a wide dent in my front plate, but otherwise unharmed. The man looked once, shock in his face, and fled. But I later received a letter from him, after he had realized who I was, offering to pay for my car. I thanked him, refusing to accept. He had in the first place had the good grace to stop after the accident.

  I unwittingly caused another car to run off the road once, though no one was hurt. The driver glanced casually at me while I was passing. Startled and unnerved at seeing an unhuman creature driving, he lost control. After that, I rode with curtains on the side windows, and confined my sightseeing to the front windshield.

  I see that I have been digressing again. I know why I am doing it. It is because I am almost afraid to finish what I started to write. But I must get to it, or this account will ramble evasively without end.

  I must get back to Kay Temple and Jack Hall.

  Not very long ago, we three, as usual, went out together, to a movie. I forget the movie. I forget everything except that for the first time, Jack seemed annoyed at my presence. I had seen his hand, in the dark theatre, steal toward Kay’s, grasp it. She glanced quickly at me, then at Jack, slightly shaking her head, and withdrawing her hand. It was my presence that prompted her, not wishing to isolate me from a three-way companionship. Kay Temple is that thoroughbred sort. She wouldn’t hurt the feelings of anyone—even a metal man’s.

  That night I spoke to Jack. We had dropped Kay off at her place. Jack and I, I might mention, had had rooms together all this time. He had insisted on it.

  “Jack,” I began, and for once my words came haltingly. I didn’t know how much to intrude on his privacy. “About you and Kay—”

  It was as though I had touched off a fuse.

  “Never mind about that!” Jack snapped back explosively. “Keep your damned tin nose out of—”

  And then he changed, just as quickly. “Forgive me, Adam, old boy,” he apologized. “My nerves. Overwork, I guess.”

  I watched him while he sat at the edge of his bed, dangling a sock in his hand. He was miserable. Suddenly he looked up.

 
“Adam, you’re my friend. Why should I hide it from you? I love Kay. I met her in a restaurant. Waitress. I set my cap for her, day after day. At last I got a date. I thought—well, never mind, but first thing I knew—bang! My swelled head changed to a swelled heart. That was over a year ago. I heard her story, admired her all the more, wanted to help her. She refused, of course, though I wouldn’t have taken advantage.”

  The words rushed out now, welling from within, and it hardly seemed the same debonair, cheerful, semi-cynical Jack I had known.

  “I kept seeing her. I wanted to marry her. I proposed. She told me to wait, till we were both sure. And that’s what has kept me on edge, Adam. I think she cares for me, but I’m not sure. I’m just not sure. That’s the way it is right now, with me still waiting—and wondering. She, holding off for some reason. It’s not another man. She would tell me instantly if it were that.”

  He was looking at me, then, with a half-smile.

  “But I guess you don’t understand things like that, Adam. You don’t know how lucky you are, old boy, not to know the pangs of love and all that goes with it. At least when it turns out wrong. Damn, I wish I was a robot.”

  He said such things disarmingly, without offense. But still he stirred a vague unrest in me. I had known most of the human emotions—anger, fear, dismay, sorrow, quiet joys. But what about this mighty, mysterious thing called “love”? Love, more than anything, as I knew technically, was tied with strong bonds to the biological body. I had no biological body. Therefore I could never know love. Man I might be in all things save that. In that I was neuter. It was a world barred from me.

  I tried to grasp how Jack must feel. Just what sort of emotional pain did he feel? But I couldn’t know. I could only judge, from the smoldering ache deep in his eyes, that he was suffering in some strange, sweet-sad way.

  Jack laughed suddenly, still looking at me.

  “Say, Adam, you’d have it easy. Just make another robot, give it the feminine viewpoint, and she’d have to take you, with no other choice.”

  He laughed a little wildly, and slipped into bed.

  I went to my room where, as usual, I prepared to spend the night reading. For a few minutes, I heard smothered chucklings from behind Jack’s closed door. I felt glad that his sense of humor had rescued him from his downcast mood. But somehow, what he had said wasn’t at all humorous for me. I did less reading that night than thinking—wondering…

  A few days later, it happened.

  We had enlarged our offices, and Kay now had a separate office in which to work. We also had a boy for the filing. I had just taken care of one client, that day, sending him to Kay for a bill, and was interviewing another.

  “Here are the data, Mr. Link,” said this man, technology manager of a food-products cannery. “Is there any way we can speed up our photo-electric process, which spots and takes out bad peas? We want faster production. The photo-electric people say it can’t be done. But I thought perhaps you—”

  I looked at the pages of data, diagrams, complete mechanical outlay of automatic devices. I absorbed it all within ten minutes. I took a scratch pad and scrawled figures for another five minutes. I wrote a final formula on a separate sheet and handed it to him.

  “Here it is,” I said. “You can increase the rate 25 per cent by using a piezo-electric crystal in the secondary transformer circuit.”

  The man was amazed. The solution I had given clicked in his trained mind. “By God, that’s it!” He looked at me wonderingly. “You’ve given me in fifteen minutes, by proxy, what might have taken months of experiment and research. Adam Link—”

  I cut off his enthusiastic eulogies. I had had so much of it from others. Besides, for the past eleven minutes, only half my mind had been on that problem. The other half had been on what I faintly heard going on in Kay’s office.

  The previous client was still there, though he must have his bill by now. Like many another man, he had lingered, attracted by Kay’s loveliness. I barely made out some words of his. He was pressing her for a date which she had politely and patiently refused six times already.

  I urged my own visitor out, told my office boy to keep the door to the outer waiting room closed for the time being, and stepped into Kay’s office.

  The man, a big broad-shouldered, money executive, was leaning over her desk. He was handsome, and had probably succeeded with many a girl by refusing to be rebuffed at the first try.

  “Now look here, gorgeous,” he was saying, in a half-wheedling, half-arrogant way, “you don’t know who you’re turning down—”

  “I think she does,” I said moving close. “And she could turn down a dozen like you without any loss. May I ask you to leave—immediately?”

  He left—immediately—for the simple reason that my hand on his shoulder was propelling him out of the door. I gave him an extra squeeze at the last, cutting off his shouted threats to sue me for assault.

  I went back to Kay. “I’m sorry you were annoyed,” I said. “I should have come sooner.” Then, to lighten the moment, I added, “I really can’t blame the man, though, with a girl like you—”

  “Adam!”

  She just said the one word, staring at me in a strange way. It was the way she had been staring at me, watching me, surreptitiously, for long months. But now her gaze was open, revealed. And I was suddenly frightened at what I saw in her eyes. I strode out.

  But Kay followed me to my desk.

  “Adam,” she said, “I must tell you. I—”

  I have no lungs or human-like throat with which to cough. But at times, a slight static charge issues from my interior, very much like a cough. I conjured one up now, with a swift mental order to my electrical distributor. It interrupted her.

  “Kay,” I returned rapidly. “You’re a bit upset, I think. Don’t you want to take the afternoon off?”

  “No, I want to talk to you. I must.”

  “Then, remember,” I returned rather gruffly, “that I’m a robot. A metal being, not a man of flesh and blood.” I looked at her for a moment. “Kay, let’s talk about Jack. He’s a fine young man, Kay. He has character. He—”

  This time she interrupted me.

  “So do you have character, Adam. I described you once—big and strong, grave boyish face, and gentle, tender-hearted. Yes, you have more heart than many men I’ve known. It is a person’s mind that counts, not his physical body. Your mind, Adam, is that of a great man, and a good man. I love you.” She said it quite naturally, quite calmly. She wasn’t hysterical, or wrought-up. She was in perfect command of herself. Her eyes were steady, but there was also a glow in them. A glow that seemed like a blinding light to me, and I had to turn my eyes away.

  “Kay, this is sheer nonsense—”

  “No.” Her voice was clear, soft. She came close to me, placed a hand on my shiny chromium shoulder. “No, Adam. That’s the way it is. I feel more strongly for you than for any man I’ve ever met, even poor Jack—”

  What mad, incredible scene was this? I was confused, stunned, though I had been vaguely prepared. My mirrored eyes turned back to Kay Temple, drank in her beauty.

  For the first time, I hated my mechanical body. I longed to take Kay in arms of flesh and blood and know the secret joys of human love. I hated my metal body now, despite all its strength and power, and lack of sickness, weariness and the other human ailments. I was only living half a life. I could only stand at the portal of greater things and glance within, never to enter. I could, in time, have the greatest minds of earth look up to me, fawn on me as a giant of intellect. But I could never have a woman, not the poorest and meanest, look on me with eyes of love—

  And yet, what about Kay Temple?

  My mind staggered. This was madness. I arose, shaking off her hand, and stood at the window, with my back to her. I was actually afraid my metal face would show emotions I felt.

  “Jack is waiting for you, Kay.”

  I said it expressionlessly. I meant it for a rebuff. Almost as a gentle i
nsult, scorning what she had revealed, not even thanking her.

  She seemed not to take it that way. “I cared for Jack, still do. I might have married him, but for you.” Her voice was still clear, rational.

  Poor Jack! It was I, then, who unwittingly stood between him and his happiness. He had saved me from extinction. And now I, in return, stood on his heart with two feet of cold metal.

  What could I say? What could I do? And then it was so ridiculously simple that I laughed within myself. Almost, I had forgotten that I was a robot, not a man.

  “But Kay,” I said, “granting all that you have said, what more is there to say or do? I am still a creation of wheels and wires, not the boyish-faced human you picture me as. I’m still metal, not flesh.”

  Again I felt her hand on my shoulder, a sixth sense serving in place of feeling, for I have no sense of touch.

  “Adam,” she whispered in my ear, “it is only the mind that counts, not the body. I want to be with you always. I want to—”

  “Kay,” I said slowly, “Kay, I’ve got to go now. I’ve an appointment—” The lie was absurd and I knew that she knew it. Kay made all my appointments for me. She had looked after me like a mother or—the thought swept me shockingly—like a sweetheart.

  But I turned and left. Left her sitting there looking after me with her hands folded limply on the desk. I knew without having to turn that she watched me leave, and there were tears in her eyes. They were tears that I should have been able to shed instead.

  Then I got into my car and drove out to the quiet of the country, where I could think. For once even the metal-meshed gears of Adam Link, Robot, felt the necessity of solitude…

  Hours passed in blurred thought. My mind was in turmoil. There were some things that I realized were as inevitable for me as death is to humans. I knew what I must do. There on the dark teakwood table of my sitting room lay two letters which would go before I did.

  The first letter—

  Dear Jack: Perhaps Kay is near you as you read this letter. Wherever she is, go to her immediately, take her to City Hall. Marry her! Do that if you have to gag and bind her. Deep down in her heart there can be no other man for her but you. And to both of you, my deepest… love.