THE BICENTENNIAL MAN Read online

  Madarian said, “If we announce a female robot, it doesn’t matter what she is. The public will automatically assume she is mentally backward. We just publicize the robot as Jane-1 and we don’t have to say another word. We’re safe.”

  “Actually,” said Peter Bogert quietly, “there’s more to it than that. Madarian and I have gone over the mathematics carefully and the JN series, whether John or Jane, would be quite safe. They would be less complex and intellectually capable, in an orthodox sense, than many another series we have designed and constructed. There would only be the one added factor of, well, let’s get into the habit of calling it ‘intuition.’ “

  “Who knows what it would do?” muttered Robertson.

  “Madarian has suggested one thing it can do. As you all know, the Space Jump has been developed in principle. It is possible for men to attain what is, in effect, hyper-speeds beyond that of light and to visit other stellar systems and return in negligible time--weeks at the most.”

  Robertson said, “That’s not new to us. It couldn’t have been done without robots.”

  “Exactly, and it’s not doing us any good because we can’t use the hyper-speed drive except perhaps once as a demonstration, so that U. S. Robots gets little credit. The Space Jump is risky, it’s fearfully prodigal of energy and therefore it’s enormously expensive. If we were going to use it anyway, it would be nice if we could report the existence of a habitable planet. Call it a psychological need. Spend about twenty billion dollars on a single Space Jump and report nothing but scientific data and the public wants to know why their money was wasted. Report the existence of a habitable planet, and you’re an interstellar Columbus and no one will worry about the money.”

  “So?”

  “So where are we going to find a habitable planet? Or put it this way--which star within reach of the Space Jump as presently developed, which of the three hundred thousand stars and star systems within three hundred light-years has the best chance of having a habitable planet? We’ve got an enormous quantity of details on every star in our three-hundred-light-year neighborhood and a notion that almost every one has a planetary system. But which has a habitable planet? Which do we visit?...We don’t know.”

  One of the directors said, “How would this Jane robot help us?”

  Madarian was about to answer that, but he gestured slightly to Bogert and Bogert understood. The Director would carry more weight. Bogert didn’t particularly like the idea; if the JN series proved a fiasco, he was making himself prominent enough in connection with it to insure that the sticky fingers of blame would cling to him. On the other hand, retirement was not all that far off, and if it worked, he would go out in a blaze of glory. Maybe it was only Madarian’s aura of confidence, but Bogert had honestly come to believe it would work.

  He said, “It may well be that somewhere in the libraries of data we have on those stars, there are methods for estimating the probabilities of the presence of Earth-type habitable planets. All we need to do is understand the data properly, look at them in the appropriate creative manner, make the correct correlations. We haven’t done it yet. Or if some astronomer has, he hasn’t been smart enough to realize what he has.

  “A JN-type robot could make correlations far more rapidly and far more precisely than a man could. In a day, it would make and discard as many correlations as a man could in ten years. Furthermore, it would work in truly random fashion, whereas a man would have a strong bias based on preconception and on what is already believed.”

  There was a considerable silence after that Finally Robertson said, “But it’s only a matter of probability, isn’t it? Suppose this robot said, ‘The highest-probability habitable-planet star within so-and-so light-years is Squidgee-17” or whatever, and we go there and find that a probability is only a probability and that there are no habitable planets after all. Where does that leave us?”

  Madarian struck in this time. “We still win. We know how the robot came to the conclusion because it--she--will tell us. It might well help us gain enormous insight into astronomical detail and make the whole thing worthwhile even if we don’t make the Space Jump at all. Besides, we can then work out the five most probable sites of planets and the probability that one of the five has a habitable planet may then be better than 0.95. It would be almost sure--”

  They went on for a long time after that.

  The funds granted were quite insufficient, but Madarian counted on the habit of throwing good money after bad. With two hundred million about to be lost irrevocably when another hundred million could save everything, the other hundred million would surely be voted.

  Jane-1 was finally built and put on display. Peter Bogert studied it --her--gravely. He said, “Why the narrow waist? Surely that introduces a mechanical weakness?”

  Madarian chuckled. “Listen, if we’re going to call her Jane, there’s no point in making her look like Tarzan.”

  Bogert shook his head. “Don’t like it. You’ll be bulging her higher up to give the appearance of breasts next, and that’s a rotten idea. If women start getting the notion that robots may look like women, I can tell you exactly the kind of perverse notions they’ll get, and you’ll really have hostility on their part.”

  Madarian said, “Maybe you’re right at that. No woman wants to feel replaceable by something with none of her faults. Okay.”

  Jane-2 did not have the pinched waist. She was a somber robot which rarely moved and even more rarely spoke.

  Madarian had only occasionally come rushing to Bogert with items of news during her construction and that had been a sure sign that things were going poorly. Madarian’s ebullience under success was overpowering. He would not hesitate to invade Bogert’s bedroom at 3 A.M. with a hot-flash item rather than wait for the morning. Bogert was sure of that.

  Now Madarian seemed subdued, his usually florid expression nearly pale, his round cheeks somehow pinched. Bogert said, with a feeling of certainty, “She won’t talk.”

  “Oh, she talks.” Madarian sat down heavily and chewed at his lower lip. “Sometimes, anyway,” he said.

  Bogert rose and circled the robot. “And when she talks, she makes no sense, I suppose. Well, if she doesn’t talk, she’s no female, is she?”

  Madarian tried a weak smile for size and abandoned it. He said, “The brain, in isolation, checked out.”

  “I know,” said Bogert. “But once that brain was put in charge of the physical apparatus of the robot, it was necessarily modified, of course.”

  “Of course,” agreed Bogert unhelpfully. “But unpredictably and frustratingly. The trouble is that when you’re dealing with n-dimensional calculus of uncertainty, things are--”

  “Uncertain?” said Bogert. His own reaction was surprising him. The company investment was already most sizable and almost two years had elapsed, yet the results were, to put it politely, disappointing. Still, he found himself jabbing at Madarian and finding himself amused in the process.

  Almost furtively, Bogert wondered if it weren’t the absent Susan Calvin he was jabbing at. Madarian was so much more ebullient and effusive than Susan could ever possibly be--when things were going well. He was also far more vulnerably in the dumps when things weren’t going well, and it was precisely under pressure that Susan never cracked. The target that Madarian made could be a neatly punctured bull’s-eye as recompense for the target Susan had never allowed herself to be.

  Madarian did not react to Bogert’s last remark any more than Susan Calvin would have done; not out of contempt, which would have been Susan’s reaction, but because he did not hear it

  He said argumentatively, “The trouble is the matter of recognition. We have Jane-2 correlating magnificently. She can correlate on any subject, but once she’s done so, she can’t recognize a valuable result from a valueless one. It’s not an easy problem, judging how to program a robot to tell a significant correlation when you don’t know what correlations she will be making.”

  “I presume you’ve thoug
ht of lowering the potential at the W-21 diode junction and sparking across the--”

  “No, no, no, no--” Madarian faded off into a whispering diminuendo. “You can’t just have it spew out everything. We can do that for ourselves. The point is to have it recognize the crucial correlation and draw the conclusion. Once that is done, you see, a Jane robot would snap out an answer by intuition. It would be something we couldn’t get ourselves except by the oddest kind of luck.”

  “It seems to me,” said Bogert dryly, “that if you had a robot like that, you would have her do routinely what, among human beings, only the occasional genius is capable of doing.”

  Madarian nodded vigorously. “Exactly, Peter. I’d have said so myself if I weren’t afraid of frightening off the execs. Please don’t repeat that in their hearing.”

  “Do you really want a robot genius?”

  “What are words? I’m trying to get a robot with the capacity to make random correlations at enormous speeds, together with a key-significance high-recognition quotient. And I’m trying to put those words into positronic field equations. I thought I had it, too, but I don’t. Not yet.”

  He looked at Jane-2 discontentedly and said, “What’s the best significance you have, Jane?”

  Jane-2’s head turned to look at Madarian but she made no sound, and Madarian whispered with resignation, “She’s running that into the correlation banks.”

  Jane-2 spoke tonelessly at last. “I’m not sure.” It was the first sound she had made.

  Madarian’s eyes rolled upward. “She’s doing the equivalent of setting up equations with indeterminate solutions.”

  “I gathered that,” said Bogert. “Listen, Madarian, can you go anywhere at this point, or do we pull out now and cut our losses at half a billion?”

  “Oh, I’ll get it, “ muttered Madarian.

  Jane-3 wasn’t it. She was never as much as activated and Madarian was in a rage.

  It was human error. His own fault, if one wanted to be entirely accurate. Yet though Madarian was utterly humiliated, others remained quiet. Let he who has never made an error in the fearsomely intricate mathematics of the positronic brain fill out the first memo of correction.

  Nearly a year passed before Jane-4 was ready. Madarian was ebullient again. “She does it,” he said. “She’s got a good high-recognition quotient.”

  He was confident enough to place her on display before the Board and have her solve problems. Not mathematical problems; any robot could do that; but problems where the terms were deliberately misleading without being actually inaccurate.

  Bogert said afterward, “That doesn’t take much, really.”

  “Of course not. It’s elementary for Jane-4 but I had to show them something, didn’t I?”

  “Do you know how much we’ve spent so far?”

  “Come on, Peter, don’t give me that. Do you know how much we’ve got back? These things don’t go on in a vacuum, you know. I’ve had over three years of hell over this, if you want to know, but I’ve worked out new techniques of calculation that will save us a minimum of fifty thousand dollars on every new type of positronic brain we design, from now on in forever. Right?”

  “Well--”

  “Well me no wells. It’s so. And it’s my personal feeling that n-dimensional calculus of uncertainty can have any number of other applications if we have the ingenuity to find them, and my Jane robots will find them. Once I’ve got exactly what I want, the new JN series will pay for itself inside of five years, even if we triple what we’ve invested so far.”

  “What do you mean by ‘exactly what you want’? What’s wrong with Jane-4?”

  “Nothing. Or nothing much. She’s on the track, but she can be improved and I intend to do so. I thought I knew where I was going when I designed her. Now I’ve tested her and I know where I’m going. I intend to get there.”

  Jane-5 was it. It took Madarian well over a year to produce her and there he had no reservations; he was utterly confident.

  Jane-5 was shorter than the average robot, slimmer. Without being a female caricature as Jane-1 had been, she managed to possess an air of femininity about herself despite the absence of a single clearly feminine feature.

  “It’s the way she’s standing,” said Bogert. Her arms were held gracefully and somehow the torso managed to give the impression of curving slightly when she turned.

  Madarian said, “Listen to her....How do you feel, Jane?”

  “In excellent health, thank you,” said Jane-5, and the voice was precisely that of a woman; it was a sweet and almost disturbing contralto.

  “Why did you do that, Clinton?” said Peter, startled and beginning to frown.

  “Psychologically important,” said Madarian. “I want people to think of her as a woman; to treat her as a woman; to explain.”

  “What people?” Madarian put his hands in his pockets and stared thoughtfully at Bogert. “I would like to have arrangements made for Jane and myself to go to flagstaff.”

  Bogert couldn’t help but note that Madarian didn’t say Jane-5. He made use of no number this time. She was the Jane. He said doubtfully, “To flagstaff? Why?”

  “Because that’s the world center for general planetology, isn’t it? It’s where they’re studying the stars and trying to calculate the probability of habitable planets, isn’t it?”

  “I know that, but it’s on Earth.”

  “Well, and I surely know that.”

  “Robotic movements on Earth are strictly controlled. And there’s no need for it. Bring a library of books on general planetology here and let Jane absorb them.”

  “No! Peter, will you get it through your head that Jane isn’t the ordinary logical robot; she’s intuitive.”

  “So?”

  “So how can we tell what she needs, what she can use, what will set her off? We can use any metal model in the factory to read books; that’s frozen data and out of date besides. Jane must have living information; she must have tones of voice, she must have side issues; she must have total irrelevancies even. How the devil do we know what or when something will go click-click inside her and fall into a pattern? If we knew, we wouldn’t need her at all, would we?”

  Bogert began to feel harassed. He said, “Then bring the men here, the general planetologists.”

  “Here won’t be any good. They’ll be out of their element. They won’t react naturally. I want Jane to watch them at work; I want her to see their instruments, their offices, their desks, everything about them that she can. I want you to arrange to have her transported to flagstaff. And I’d really like not to discuss it any further.”

  For a moment he almost sounded like Susan. Bogert winced, and said, “It’s complicated making such an arrangement. Transporting an experimental robot--”

  “Jane isn’t experimental. She’s the fifth of the series.”

  “The other four weren’t really working models.”

  Madarian lifted his hands in helpless frustration. “Who’s forcing you to tell the government that?”

  “I’m not worried about the government. It can be made to understand special cases. It’s public opinion. We’ve come a long way in fifty years and I don’t propose to be set back twenty-five of them by having you lose control of a--”

  “I won’t lose control. You’re making foolish remarks. Look! U. S. Robots can afford a private plane. We can land quietly at the nearest commercial airport and be lost in hundreds of similar landings. We can arrange to have a large ground car with an enclosed body meet us and take us to Flagstaff. Jane will be crated and it will be obvious that some piece of thoroughly non-robotic equipment is being transported to the labs. We won’t get a second look from anyone. The men at Flagstaff will be alerted and will be told the exact purpose of the visit. They will have every motive to cooperate and to prevent a leak.”

  Bogert pondered. “The risky part will be the plane and the ground car. If anything happens to the crate--”

  “Nothing will.”

&nb
sp; “We might get away with it if Jane is deactivated during transport. Then even if someone finds out she’s inside--”

  “No, Peter. That can’t be done. Uh-uh. Not Jane-5. Look, she’s been free-associating since she was activated. The information she possesses can be put into freeze during deactivation but the free associations never. No, sir, she can’t ever be deactivated.”

  “But, then, if somehow it is discovered that we are transporting an activated robot--”

  “It won’t be found out.” Madarian remained firm and the plane eventually took off. It was a late-model automatic Computo-jet, but it carried a human pilot--one of U. S. Robots’ own employees--as backup. The crate containing Jane arrived at the airport safely, was transferred to the ground car, and reached the Research Laboratories at Flagstaff without incident.

  Peter Bogert received his first call from Madarian not more than an hour after the latter’s arrival at Flagstaff. Madarian was ecstatic and, characteristically, could not wait to report.

  The message arrived by tubed laser beam, shielded, scrambled, and ordinarily impenetrable, but Bogert felt exasperated. He knew it could be penetrated if someone with enough technological ability--the government, for example--was determined to do so. The only real safety lay in the fact that the government had no reason to try. At least Bogert hoped so.

  He said, “For God’s sake, do you have to call?”

  Madarian ignored him entirely. He burbled, “It was an inspiration. Sheer genius, I tell you.”

  For a while, Bogert stared at the receiver. Then he shouted incredulously, “You mean you’ve got the answer? Already?”

  “No, no! Give us time, damn it. I mean the matter of her voice was an inspiration. Listen, after we were chauffeured from the airport to the main administration building at Flagstaff, we uncrated Jane and she stepped out of the box. When that happened, every man in the place stepped back. Scared! Nitwits! If even scientists can’t understand the significance of the Laws of Robotics, what can we expect of the average untrained individual? For a minute there I thought: This will all be useless. They won’t talk. They’ll be keying themselves for a quick break in case she goes berserk and they’ll be able to think of nothing else.”