I, Robot: Little Lost Robot & Escape!

I mean, there was only one mind-reading robot ever developed, and Space-Stations are already outmoded and in disuse, and robot mining is taken for granted.

In an age of Atomic Power and a clearly coming Hyperatomic Drive, she remained quietly provincial.

He continued with a note of desperation, “I needn’t tell you the importance of our work here. More than eighty percent of last year’s appropriations for scientific research have gone to us—”
“Why, we know that,” said Bogert, agreeably.

“So that the sixty-third, I take it, is the missing prodigal?” Dr. Calvin’s eyes darkened.
“Yes, but we have no way of telling which is the sixty-third.”

“It wasn’t removed, it was modified,” explained Kallner. “Positronic brains were constructed that contained the positive aspect only of the Law, which in them reads: ‘No robot may harm a human being.' That is all. They have no compulsion to prevent one coming to harm through an extraneous agency such as gamma rays. I state the matter correctly, Dr. Bogert?”

Susan Calvin, except for two hours of resentful lassitude, experienced nothing approaching sleep.

He saw no reason to change his perennial opinion of her as a sour and fidgety frustration.

She had dismissed him years ago as a smooth and pretentious sleekness.

In his stained white smock, he was half rebellious and wholly uncertain.

General Kallner cleared his throat ominously, “Why have no complaints reached me on the matter, Black?”

“They are? Do you realize one of them is lying? One of the sixty-three robots I have just interviewed has deliberately lied to me after the strictest injunction to tell the truth. The abnormality indicated is horribly deep-seated, and horribly frightening.”

He said, “Not at all. Look! Nestor 10 was given orders to lose himself. Those orders were expressed in maximum urgency by the person most authorized to command him. You can’t counteract that order either by superior urgency or superior right of command. Naturally, the robot will attempt to defend the carrying out of his orders. In fact, objectively, I admire his ingenuity. How better can a robot lose himself than to hide himself among a group of similar robots?”

And here we have a young man ordering a robot to leave him, to lose himself, with every verbal appearance of revulsion, disdain, and disgust. Granted, that robot must follow orders, but subconsciously, there is resentment.

“We got some replacements, but mostly it was a job of indoctrination. Anyway, the people who make them want to figure out robots that aren’t hit so bad by gamma rays.”

A weight dropped, crashed downward, then pounded aside at the last moment under the synchronized thump of a sudden force beam.

Number twenty-eight was due in now—Thirty-five still lay ahead of her.
Number Twenty-eight entered, diffidently.

Fortunately for the general situation, Kallner felt it impolitic to display his anger openly.

“Compartment C?” explained Calvin quickly. “That’s the one that holds the robots, isn’t it? Who did it?”
“From the inside,” said Black, laconically.

Nestor 10—if it was Nestor 10—took another step, and then, under force of her imperious gesture, two more. He was only ten feet away, when he spoke harshly, “I have been told to be lost—”

Its material for submission contains all known developments of Franciacci’s space-warp theory, and, apparently, all pertinent astrophysical and electronic data.

It doesn’t really understand what it does—it just does it. And because it is really a child, it is more resilient. Life isn’t so serious, you might say.

Bogert first gazed speculatively at his fingernails, and then bit at them in abstracted fashion.

He was ruminating, “We’ll need our top field men for that.”

Lanning was peevish, and his eyebrows curled down in an eye-hiding frown.

No martinet in the system could have put as much spit-and-polish into a surface as those robots had.

The voice that interrupted Donovan’s tirade was not Powell’s.

It was there, hanging in open air—stentorian and petrifying in its effects.

It was there, hanging in open air—stentorian and petrifying in its effects.

The short businesslike sentences became interlarded and adulterated with screaming and emphatic profanity, but the cold, calling voice repeated and repeated and repeated unwearyingly.

Donovan hesitated, “What’s the menu?”
“How do I know! Are you finicky?”

His hand hovered and selected a shining elliptical can whose flatness seemed reminiscent of salmon or similar delicacy.

He said brusquely to Calvin, “You take care of your end, Susan.”

Then the words came, unctuous and sonorous, thundering over him in a foam of sound:
“Does your coffin fit differently lately? Why not try Morbid M. Cadaver’s extensible caskets? They are scientifically designed to fit the natural curves of the body, and are enriched with Vitamin B1. Use Cadaver’s caskets for comfort. Remember—you’re—going—to—be—dead—a—long—long—time!’’

Then the words came, unctuous and sonorous, thundering over him in a foam of sound:
“Does your coffin fit differently lately? Why not try Morbid M. Cadaver’s extensible caskets? They are scientifically designed to fit the natural curves of the body, and are enriched with Vitamin B1. Use Cadaver’s caskets for comfort. Remember—you’re—going—to—be—dead—a—long—long—time!’’

The white thread that might have been Powell heaved uselessly at the insubstantial eons of time that existed all about him—and collapsed upon itself as the piercing shriek of a hundred million ghosts of a hundred million soprano voices rose to a crescendo of melody:
“I’ll be glad when you're dead, you rascal, you.
“I'll be glad when you're dead, you rascal, you.
“I'll be glad—"

The white thread that was Powell groveled backward before the advancing shout, and felt the sharp stab of the pointing finger.

She was weary of repetitions, weary of circumlocutions, weary of everything.

“Brain,” she supplicated faintly, “Brain, do you hear me?”

“No harm!” gasped Donovan. “Oh, if that cute little tyke only had a neck.”

It wasn’t as bad a mess as they expected and it turned out well, but their intentions weren’t pious.