James White - Second Ending

Ross had difficulty in phrasing his next question, but the Sister answered it without trouble.

“The directives against harming another robot are only slightly less strict than those against damaging a human being,” she said. “During the dismantling and reassembly I should incur no loss of memory or function.”

“Good,” said Ross, “then here is what I want done. First, all robots, both existing and those which are to be built, to have the capacity to store data on at least three specialties, with provision for further learning. Next, all robots are to be made capable of abstracting data by every aural and visual means. That includes the spoken word, radio, photographs, circuit diagrams, charts, graphs, contour maps, astronomical observations and the meteorological phenomena encountered in air and sea navigation. And when they are capable of doing this I want them to absorb data in all fields until they can’t hold any more, then extend their memory banks and go on learning, indefinitely. Do you understand my instructions?”

“Yes, sir,” said the maintenance robot.

“You require a robot which is unspecialized,” said Ward Sister, and added, “Such a mechanism may be too large to operate inside the hospital.”

Ross hadn’t considered that angle, but it wasn’t important. He said, “I’ll require hundreds of such robots, and we can stable them on the surface. Any other objections?”

The repair robot said, “The building program as outlined is possible, but I require a breakdown of your instructions and the sequence in which you want them carried out.”

Ross groaned inwardly; he hadn’t considered details himself yet. But he was becoming expert at talking with authority on subjects about which he knew very little…

A few hours later he was present when the senior maintenance robot and another of the same type scattered pieces of Sister all over the machine-shop floor. Ross wasn’t squeamish about dismantled machines, but the way 5B kept carrying on a conversation while lying about in that condition gave him the creeps. In a surprisingly short time the senior had succeeded in doing for the other repair robot what Courtland had done for Sister, and in an even shorter time the newly enlightened one had returned the compliment. They put Sister together again in no time at all.

Ross now had three robot geniuses on call, and he knew that within a few weeks the Courtland modification would have been extended to all the robots. It should have been a great moment for him, but instead he felt strangely let down, for despite his recent intensive reading on cybernetics, he had not understood a single thing which he had seen done.

Analyzing his feelings, Ross came to the conclusion that it was simply a matter of his pride being hurt. He did not want to feel that a machine could be smarter in any subject than he was, although it was plain, when he thought about it more deeply, that every robot in the hospital would soon be smarter than he was on any subject. He had to remind himself forcefully that they were only tools. Complex, of course, but still only gadgets designed for his use or convenience. The idea was to use, not try to compete against, the things.

Only briefly did he wonder, with that uneasy fluttering in the pit of his stomach, if he knew what he was doing. The first obvious change was that every robot acquired a trailer. Mounted on two wheels and joined to the main robot body by a flexible coupling which also carried a bundle of connecting cable, this was the housing for the extra data banks Ross had ordered. His idea had been to raise the general intelligence level of the robots in order to make his later, and more complex, instructions understandable to them. Instead, he often found himself having to explain the simplest, most obvious things — obvious to a human being, that is — while they fairly romped through items which to Ross had seemed extremely difficult. Gradually he found himself being forced into the position of a coordinator rather than a teacher, but that did not mean that he had less work to do.

On the surface a large transparent dome was built to house the first Miner, and the fifty-odd robots engaged in its construction. Higher on the hillside he built a smaller one, which enclosed a chair, some communications equipment and thirty square yards of soil from which the ash had been cleared. When it rained heavily and the wind was just right Ross could just make out the sea, but usually he looked out at a dirty gray fog and a dull, hot sun with a red ring around it. It was very warm on the surface, even at night, and Ross guessed that the sooty atmosphere was responsible for the general rise in temperature by decreasing Earth’s albedo.

Although he kept the soil inside his dome wet, and it got all the sunlight there was going, nothing grew.

Between working on methods for programming the search and mining robots to accept data in foreign languages — some of the places they would be going, English would be neither spoken nor printed — he set his longer-term plans in motion. The principles of flight he demonstrated by flying paper airplanes until the robots engaged on that project were able to understand the literature available. Trying to put across the idea of buoyancy in water was more difficult. Because his model floated, the robots seemed to consider the water a form of mobile ground surface, and they kept trying to walk on it. The first couple of times, Ross laughed.

As the Miner neared completion he instructed another team of repair robots to design a multipurpose model which would not have to be as large as a railway locomotive. He gave them the few cybernetics books he could, together with some notes Courtland had made for further modifications. The following progress reports were disappointing and later ones grew as unintelligible to him as Courtland’s notes had been. Ross kept them at it, partly in the hope that they would fulfill their instructions and partly to see if it was possible for robots to think subjectively.

Then one day, as he was inspecting the digging vanes of the new Miner, the ground stood on its end and he buried his face in damp, sooty earth. When he came to Sister was calling him “Mr. Ross” and putting him to bed, and he had to take a ten-minute lecture on the stupidity of human beings who insisted on working like robots, continuously and without sufficient rest, until their body mechanisms — which could not be repaired or replaced — became dangerously overstrained. His loss of consciousness on the surface, according to her diagnostic equipment, had been caused by mental and physical exhaustion and a long complete rest was indicated.

And by complete rest, Sister meant exactly that. Since acquiring the trailer which had more than quadrupled her data-storage capacity, Ward Sister 5B had become very difficult to outsmart. This time “rest” did not mean a change to working in a horizontal position; he was not allowed to make notes or study technical volumes.

She insisted on bringing him a selection of light, romantic fiction!

It had been almost a year since his supreme authority had been usurped like this, and it both angered and frightened him. He had urgent work to do and the thought of lying in bed without something to occupy his mind nearly threw him into a panic. The books he had been given only made things worse, describing as they did backgrounds and situations which were no longer a part of the real world, and were therefore extremely painful for him. There were no sun-drenched lagoons fringed with palm trees, no smell of freshly cut grass, no parents worrying about the current infatuation of their daughter. Ross would have given all he possessed or ever would possess to be even in the losing corner of an eternal triangle.

He stopped reading those books, not because all the vistas they described had become one — smoke and ashes lit by a red sun — but because they were about people. It was almost a pleasure when Sister ticked him off every morning for overworking, or lectured about the advisability of taking rest in addition to his sleeping period.