Galactic Dreams

“Now concentrate Dan, think of the significance of my statement. The so-called Frankenstein monster is no stitched up collection of scraps, but a good honest zombie. A dead man who can walk but not talk, obey but not think. Animate — but still quite dead. Poor old Charley is a zombie, the creature whom you watched going through his act on the platform. But Charley is just about worn out. Since he’s dead he cannot replace the body cells that are destroyed during the normal wear and tear of the day. Why the fellow is like an animated pincushion from the act, holes everywhere. His feet are terrible, not a toe left, they keep breaking off when he walks too fast. I think it’s time to retire Charley. He has had a long life, and a long death. Stand up Dan.”

In spite of his mind crying No! No! Dan rose slowly to his feet. Victor smiled and nodded approval.

“Aren’t you interested in what Charley used to do before he became a sideshow monster? You should be, Dan. Old Charley was a reporter — just like you. And he uncovered what he thought was a really good story. Like you, he didn’t realize the importance of what he had discovered and talked to me about it. You reporters are very inquisitive — I must show you my scrapbook one day, it’s simply filled with Press cards. Show it to you before you die of course. You wouldn’t be able to appreciate it afterwards. Now come along.”

Dan walked after him, into the hot night, screaming inside in a haze of terror, yet walking quietly and silently down the street.

THE ROBOT WHO WANTED TO KNOW

That was the trouble with Filer 13B-445-K, he wanted to know things that he had just no business knowing. Things that no robot should be interested in — much less investigate. But Filer was a very different type of Robot.

The trouble with the blonde in tier 22 should have been warning enough for him. He had hummed out of the stack room with a load of books, and was cutting through tier 22 when he saw her bending over for a volume on the bottom shelf.

As he passed behind her he slowed down, then stopped a few yards farther on. He watched her intently, a strange glint in his metallic eyes.

As the girl bent over her short skirt rode up to display an astonishing length of nylon-clad leg. That it was a singularly attractive leg should have been of no interest to a robot — yet it was. He stood there, looking, until the blonde turned suddenly and noticed his fixed attention.

“If you were human, buster,” she said, “I would slap your face. But since you are a robot, I would like to know what your little photon-filled eyes find so interesting?”

Without a microsecond’s hesitation, Filer answered, “Your seam is crooked.”

Then he turned and buzzed away.

The blonde shook her head in wonder, straightened the offending stocking, and chalked up another credit to the honor of electronics.

She would have been very surprised to find out what Filer had been looking at. He had been staring at her leg. Of course he hadn’t lied when he answered her-since he was incapable of lying — but he had been looking at a lot more than a crooked seam. Filer was facing a problem that no other robot had ever faced before.

Love, romance, and sex were fast becoming a passionate interest for him.

That this interest was purely academic goes without saying, yet it was still an interest. It was the nature of his work that first aroused his curiosity about the realm of Venus.

A Filer is an amazingly intelligent robot and there aren’t very many being manufactured. You will find them only in the greatest libraries, dealing with only the largest and most complex collections. To call them simply librarians is to demean all librarians and to call their work simple. Of course very little intelligence is required to shelve books or stamp cards, but this sort of work has long been handled by robots that are little more than programmed computers on wheels. The cataloging of human information has always been an incredibly complex task. The Filer robots were the ones who finally inherited this job. It rested easier on their metallic shoulders than it ever had on the rounded ones of human librarians.

Beside having a very complete and easily accessible memory, Filer had other attributes that are usually connected with the human brain. Abstract connections for one thing. If he was asked for books on one subject, he could think of related books in other subjects that might be referred to. He could take a suggestion, pyramid it into a category, then produce tactile results in the form of a mountain of books.

These traits are usually confined to homo sapiens. They are the things that pulled him that last, long step above his animal relatives. If Filer was more human than other robots, he had only his builders to blame.