Clifford Simak - The Shipshape Miracle - And Other Stories

“They have me cold then, don’t they?”

“I never saw a man,” declared Lee, “in all my days of practice who ever managed to get himself so fouled up with so many people.”

There was a knock upon the kitchen door.

“Come in,” Lee called.

The door opened and Albert entered. He stopped just inside the door and stood there, fidgeting.

“Abner told me that he saw the sheriff hand you something,” he said to Knight, “and that you came here immediately. I started worrying. Was it How-2 Kits?”

Knight nodded. “Mr. Lee will take our case for us, Albert.”

“I’ll do the best I can,” said Lee, “but I think it’s just about hopeless.”

“We robots want to help,” Albert said. “After all, this is our fight as much as yours.”

Lee shrugged. “There’s not much you can do.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Albert said. “All the time I worked last night, I thought and thought about it. And I built a lawyer robot.”

“A lawyer robot!”

“One with a far greater memory capacity than any of the others and with a brain-computer that operates on logic. That’s what law is, isn’t it—logic?”

“I suppose it is,” said Lee. “At least it’s supposed to be.”

“I can make a lot of them.”

Lee sighed. “It just wouldn’t work. To practice law, you must be admitted to the bar. To be admitted to the bar, you must have a degree in law and pass an examination and, although there’s never been an occasion to establish a precedent, I suspect the applicant must be human.”

“Now let’s not go too fast,” said Knight. “Albert’s robots couldn’t practice law. But couldn’t you use them as clerks or assistants? They might be helpful in preparing the case.”

Lee considered. “I suppose it could be done. It’s never been done, of course, but there’s nothing in the law that says it can’t be done.”

“All they’d need to do would be read the books,” said Albert. “Ten seconds to a page or so. Everything they read would be stored in their memory cells.”

“I think it’s a fine idea!” Knight exclaimed. “Law would be the only thing those robots would know. They’d exist solely for it. They’d have it at their fingertips—”

“But could they use it?” Lee asked. “Could they apply it to a problem?”

“Make a dozen robots,” said Knight. “Let each one of them become an expert in a certain branch of law.”

“I’d make them telepathic,” Albert said. “They’d be working together like one robot.”

“The gestalt principle!” cried Knight. “A hive psychology! Every one of them would know immediately every scrap of information any one of the others had.”

Lee scrubbed at his chin with a knotted fist and the light of speculation was growing in his eyes. “It might be worth a try. If it works, though, it’ll be an evil day for jurisprudence.” He looked at Albert. “I have the books, stacks of them. I’ve spent a mint of money on them and I almost never use them. I can get all the others you’ll need. All right, go ahead.”

Albert made three dozen lawyer robots, just to be sure they had enough.

The robots invaded Lee’s study and read all the books he had and clamored for more. They gulped down contracts, torts, evidence and case reports. They absorbed real property, personal property, constitutional law and procedural law. They mopped up Blackstone, corpus juris, and all the other tomes as thick as sin and dry as dust.

Grace was huffy about the whole affair. She would not live, she declared, with a man who persisted in getting his name into the papers, which was a rather absurd statement. With the newest scandal of space station café-dom capturing the public interest at the moment, the fact that How-2 Kits had accused one Gordon Knight of pilfering a robot got but little notice.

Lee came down the hill and talked to Grace, and Albert came up out of the basement and talked to her, and finally they got her quieted down and she went back to her painting. She was doing seascapes now.

And in Lee’s study, the robots labored on.

“I hope they’re getting something out of it,” said Lee. “Imagine not having to hunt up your sources and citations, being able to remember every point of law and precedent without having to look it up!”

He swung excitedly in his hammock. “My God! The briefs you could write!”

He reached down and got the jug and passed it across to Knight. “Dandelion wine. Probably some burdock in it, too. It’s too much trouble to sort the stuff once you get it picked.”

Knight had a snort.

It tasted like quite a bit of burdock.

“Double-barreled economics,” Lee explained. “You have to dig up the dandelions or they ruin the lawn. Might as well use them for something once you dig them up.”

He took a gurgling drink and set the jug underneath the hammock. “They’re in there now, communing,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the house. “Not saying a word, just huddled there talking it over. I felt out of place.” He stared at the sky, frowning. “As if I were just a human they had to front for them.”

“I’ll feel better when it’s all over,” said Knight, “no matter how it comes out.”

“So will I,” Lee admitted.

The trial opened with a minimum of notice. It was just another case on the calendar.

But it flared into headlines when Lee and Knight walked into court followed by a squad of robots.

The spectators began to gabble loudly. The How-2 Kits attorneys gaped and jumped to their feet. The judge pounded furiously with his gavel.

“Mr. Lee,” he roared, “what is the meaning of this?”

“These, Your Honor,” Lee said calmly, “are my valued assistants.”

“Those are robots!”

“Quite so, Your Honor.”

“They have no standing in this court.”

“If Your Honor will excuse me, they need no standing. I am the sole representative of the defendant in this courtroom. My client—” looking at the formidable array of legal talent representing How-2 Kits—“is a poor man, Your Honor. Surely the court cannot deny me whatever assistance I have been able to muster.”

“It is highly irregular, sir.”

“If it please Your Honor, I should like to point out that we live in a mechanized age. Almost all industries and businesses rely in large part upon computers—machines that can do a job quicker and better, more precisely and more efficiently than can a human being. That is why, Your Honor, we have a fifteen-hour week today, when only a hundred years ago, it was a thirty-hour week, and a hundred years before that, a forty-hour week. Our entire society is based upon the ability of machines to lift from men the labors which in the past they were called upon to perform.

“This tendency to rely upon intelligent machines and to make wide use of them is evident in every branch of human endeavor. It has brought great benefit to the human race. Even in such sensitive areas as drug houses, where prescriptions must be precisely mixed without the remotest possibility of error, reliance is placed, and rightly so, Your Honor, upon the precision of machines.

“If, Your Honor, such machines are used and accepted in the production of medicines and drugs, an industry, need I point out, where public confidence is the greatest asset of the company—if such be the case, then surely you must agree that in courts of law where justice, a product in an area surely as sensitive as medicine, is dispensed—”

“Just a moment, Mr. Lee,” said the judge. “Are you trying to tell me that the use of—ah—machines might bring about improvement of the law?”

Lee replied. “The law, Your Honor, is a striving for an orderliness of relationships within a society of human beings. It rests upon logic and reason. Need I point out that it is in the intelligent machines that one is most likely to find a deep appreciation of logic and reason? A machine is not heir to the emotions of human beings, is not swayed by prejudices, has no preconceived convictions. It is concerned only with the orderly progression of certain facts and laws.