James White - Second Ending

“Very well,” said Ross. “Get that maintenance robot down here. I know you can transmit vision as well as sound, but I’d feel more comfortable if he was right here. I’ve some sketches and illustration I want you both to see.”

He went across to his desk, opened the big ledger, which over the months had grown into a cross between a diary and a scrapbook, and sat down. The Ward Sister stood behind him and shortly afterward the maintenance robot squeezed through the door, its blocky, multijointed body making the room seem suddenly crowded.

“What I have in mind is this,” Ross began, without further preamble. “Robots of the Cleaner and Ward Sister type to have their wheels replaced by treads similar to those on the diggers, also whatever modifications necessary added to protect them against rain or drifting ash, so that they can operate for long periods on the surface. I know that they have infrared vision, so that working at night or in bad visibility will not hamper them. In addition I want them fitted with a means of detecting metal, digging it out and transporting it back here. These sketches will show you what I have in mind. But this is only the first step.

“The metal is to build more robots,” Ross continued quickly, “who will go looking for metal to build yet more robots. For my purpose I will require thousands of robots, working hard and continuously, and the metal available in the ruins of the nearer cities will not be sufficient. Eventually we may be forced to mine and process the raw ore. But before that stage is reached I want to have robots searching the ocean bed, and the search extended into other countries by amphibious and airborne models…”

Ross was becoming excited in spite of himself. He was turning pages and jabbing his finger at sketches which he had not meant to discuss at this early stage, and babbling about submarines, helicopters, Archimedes and jet engines. He was leaving his audience behind, yet he couldn’t stop himself. In a disjointed and nearly incoherent way Ross was outlining what was to be his life’s work, the goal which would keep him sane and make him as happy as it was possible to be in his position, and suddenly he could no longer keep his hopes bottled up.

“…I want the whole damned planet searched!” he went on wildly. “Every square foot of it. Somewhere there are other hospitals like this one, perhaps with patients still in Deep Sleep, or undersea bases which survived the war. It happened here so it could happen somewhere else! That is why the search robots must retain their medical knowledge, and extend it wherever possible. The descendants of those survivors are likely to be in bad shape.

“And if you should come on another Deep Sleep patient, I will supervise the awakening…”

Both the robots were ticking at him, a sure sign that they were hopelessly confused. Ross broke off awkwardly, then, in a more subdued voice, began to question the robots regarding the problems of converting his nursing staff to heavy industry.

And there were problems, all right. They lay solidly, one on top of the other, like a brick wall. One of the chief difficulties lay in the limited capacity of the robot brains to store new data. After basic programming a robot possessed the ability to learn by experience — in a very narrow sense, of course — because a small proportion of its memory bank was deliberately left unfilled. But this tiny fraction was not enough to contain data on a whole new specialty, and the result would be a cross between a very smart nurse and a hopelessly stupid miner. The answer was to cancel a large part of its medical programming, but Ross did not want to do that.

Another problem was the difficulty in putting ideas across to the repair robot. To it an illustration was just so many lines on paper; it had no understanding of perspective or of the solidity which they represented. Ross had to go over every line individually, explaining that this one was the radio antenna, that this particular squiggle was the towing hook and this series of parallel lines represented part of the caterpillar treads. Even then he could not make it understand properly. His frustration increased to the point where he felt like shaking it until its insides rattled or going at it with the two-foot wrench in an attempt to beat some sense into it, even though he knew that either course was likely to have the opposite effect. Finally he lost his temper completely and intemperately told it to get out of his sight.

In its maddeningly emotionless voice it requested clarification on the term “hell” and directions for getting there.

Ross closed his notebook and gently thumped the side of his head with a fist. “Why are you so stupid?” he said wearily. “You’re supposed to be the mechanical wizard here, yet Sister, who is only a nurse, seems to get what I’m driving at better than you do—”

“It is a matter of programming, sir,” the Ward Sister broke in. “Maintenance robots cannot abstract data from lines on a chart, such as pulse and temperature graphs, or from X-ray pictures as are the nursing robots—”

“I read circuit diagrams…” began the repair robot.

“Let’s not start a fight,” said Ross drily. “Just tell me why one of you seems more intelligent than the other.”

There were two reasons, and as Ross listened to the Ward Sister’s reply he realized that he should have seen one of them without being told. Ward Sister 5B was the last, most recent modification built by the great Court-land. Robots were not supposed to be able to think creatively, but Ross could not forget that this particular Sister, when faced with the dilemma of possibly killing the last human being, had achieved something remarkably like creative thought. It had been too little and too late, but an achievement nonetheless. The second reason was simply a matter of increased capacity for memory storage, as represented by the large box riveted to Sister’s ovoid body just above the rear wheel struts.

Which meant, among other things, that Ross could have his nurse-miner or even nurse-mining-and-repair robot combinations, merely by increasing the memory-storage capacity. To be sure, he put the idea to the senior maintenance robot, and received the reply that there was nothing against such combinations providing the memory bank was of sufficient capacity.

“Then what’s all the fuss about?” Ross demanded angrily. “Why didn’t you tell me it was only a matter of—”

“The normal type of robot,” put in Sister at that point, “is not capable of volunteering information.”

Listening to her, Ross had to remind himself that machines were not supposed to be capable of smugness, either.

“Then it’s time we had a few more super-normal robots,” he said seriously. “I’ve read Courtland’s notes on the 5B modification, and from the little I understand of them it appears that Sister here has had a small change in circuitry which, when she is faced with a problem, makes available data on all similar problems which have been solved previously… No, that isn’t what I meant. Courtland says that she has a choice of answers to any problem, and if she makes the wrong answer that error is filed as a datum and she will never make exactly the same mistake again.

“Anyway,” he ended, “is it possible for 5B’s modification to be reproduced in the other robots?”

The answer was yes, provided the senior maintenance robot was allowed to dismantle 5B to do so. When he heard that Ross felt oddly concerned about the Sister. Like any lay friend of a patient, he wanted to ask if the operation was likely to prove fatal, and similar anxious queries. He realized that Sister had come to mean a lot to him in the past few weeks. Whether deliberate or otherwise, her refusal to grant him a moment’s privacy either day or night, while infuriating and at first downright embarrassing, had kept him from feeling too badly the loneliness of his position, and she was the smartest robot he had. The fact that her concern for him was an artificial, built-in feeling did not seem to matter.