The Rod of Light (Soul of the Robot)

The project director came to him next day, body bent forward with hands held behind his back, walking with short strutting steps. He seemed reluctant to speak, so deep was he in thought.

‘We have received a setback, Jasperodus,’ he said at last. ‘No further positive results can be elicited from the pile. We have used a new subject, thinking the former one might be partly depleted. We have added one or more of our number to the pile, we have shut it down and reactivated it many times … still nothing.’

‘So what do you infer?’ Jasperodus asked.

‘One cannot draw any definite conclusions. Still, I am inclined to view the earlier response as spurious. Transient events within the pile may have tricked the detector into giving false readings. I shall review its design.

‘In any case,’ he went on, ‘the pile was a diversionary essay from which, as I said earlier, no success was particularly expected. We were working on a different approach when the idea of the pile was mooted. We have lost only a short time from our main programme.’

Again Gargan launched into high-speed panlog, outlining the direction of the main research work. Jasperodus gained a vague impression of a system of retorts, but working according to a principle so abstract he could not fathom how it was to be translated into physical terms.

Gargan finished his speech in seconds. Then he stood staring at Jasperodus, with what thought or attitude the other could not tell.

‘Come, we will assess you,’ he said. ‘Then your usefulness can be decided upon.’

He turned and walked from the villa, leaving Jasperodus to follow with apprehension. They came not to the project shed but to another standing behind it, which on their entering presented a roughly-similar interior: hard white light, bare concrete, unnameable apparatus. It, too, was peopled by robots, but they were of fairly ordinary character, Jasperodus guessed, some of them samples of the standard silver-and-black-faced Gargan Cult servitors. All stood immobile as statues: waiting to be used. But now they stirred, looking expectantly to Gargan.

He ignored them. ‘Before we begin, you see before you our very first attack on the problem of extracting the superior light. Its crudity may surprise you. But it did yield valuable initial information.’

Gargan was pointing to a cube-shaped structure standing in the corner of the shed, reaching half the height of the roof. ‘Quite simply, it overloads the sense with input. We devised it on the erronious surmise that the stratagem might weaken the human brain’s hold on conscious substance. The valuable data I mentioned was negative in character. Just the same, human subjects invariably become insensible during the experience, while in general robots do not. Enter the enclosure, Jasperodus. See what you make of it.’

On Gargan’s insistent prompting, Jasperodus reluctantly allowed himself to be guided through a door panel that opened on his approach. He found himself in a bare, square chamber whose walls were lined with a milky micalike substance.

The panel closed and became invisible. As he placed himself in the centre of the chamber, Jasperodus became aware of a deep silence.

Then the assault began. There was gently-swelling music. Then, from another part of the room, a loud, raucous march broke in jarringly, followed by music of a different tempo from elsewhere, until as many as half a dozen orchestras were competing to be heard.

To them were added shouted messages and instructions: ‘ON LEAVING THIS BOOTH YOU WILL REMEMBER TO FACE NORTH … THE CHEMISTRY OF KURON COMPOUNDS DIFFERS FROM EARTH-TYPE IN THAT …’

Scents, ranging from the odious to the exquisite, wafted to him. And then came the visuals, a kaleidoscopic montage of moving full-colour full-parallax images, attracting his attention this way and that….

Inexorably the barrage of sense impressions built up. The cleverness of the programme was that it was not random. The sounds, voices and pictures—faces, landscapes, horrid images of large insects devouring one another—progressed in emotional content so that one’s attention never relapsed into accepting an homogenous blur. Further, the attention was never permitted to rest; it was constantly redirected, demanded, stretched thin by being forced to follow a dozen disparate themes at once.

Jasperodus, after a minute or so, began to feel dizzy. The human mind, when faced with this kind of overload, would respond by withdrawing into the enforced sleep that was called ‘unconsciousness’, but which was simply the refusal of the consciousness to admit any object whatever. This would not happen to the ordinary robot. Its mind would merely accommodate what it could, and shut out the rest.

If he did not behave like a normal robot, if he fainted like a human, Jasperodus would give himself away. He thought he could probably survive the barrage without losing himself … but he was not sure.