I, Robot: Runaround & Reason

It was one of Gregory Powell’s favorite platitudes that nothing was to be gained from excitement, so when Mike Donovan came leaping down the stairs toward him, red hair matted with perspiration, Powell frowned.

There was a yellowed square of parchment in his hip pocket—a relic of the unsuccessful First Expedition—and he slapped it down on the desk with vicious force, spreading it flat with the palm of his hand.

And for the first time Powell’s artificial aplomb was shaken and his hands shot forward for the map.

Powell looked up shortly, and said nothing. Oh, yes, he realized the position they were in. It worked itself out as simply as a syllogism.

Donovan said uneasily, “They haven’t moved.”
“No orders to do so,” replied Powell, succinctly.

Composed of heat-resistant plastic and chemically treated cork layers, and equipped with a desiccating unit to keep the air bone-dry, the insosuits could withstand the full glare of Mercury’s sun for twenty minutes.

The robots plodded onward with a pace that never varied and with footsteps that never lengthened.

Before them, the shadow reached out and ended in knife-edge abruptness into an all-but-unbearable blaze of white light, that glittered from myriad crystals along a rocky ground.

There is a thin exhalation that clings to its surface—vapors of the more volatile elements and compounds that are heavy enough for Mercurian gravity to retain.

In fact, if you use your flash, you’ll probably find that the side of the cliff is covered with, say, hoar-sulphur, or maybe quicksilver dew.

His graceful, streamlined body threw out blazing highlights as he loped with easy speed across the broken ground.

The distance between the men and the errant robot was being cut down momentarily—more by the efforts of Speedy than the slow plodding of the fifty-year-old antique mounts of Donovan and Powell.

“So he follows a circle around the selenium pool, staying on the locus of all points of potential equilibrium. And unless we do something about it, he’ll stay on that circle forever, giving us the good old runaround.”

“If one of us goes,” began Donovan, tentatively, “and comes back cooked, there’ll still be the other.”

Powell was on his feet and had attracted the attention of one of the monster robots by the simple expedient of pounding the machine’s thigh.

They were approaching cautiously now, almost sidling, to refrain from setting off the thoroughly irrational robot.

“We need more oxalic acid,” declared Donovan, stolidly.

Speedy took one step forward and stopped. He spoke, but at the sound Powell groaned, for it was, “When you’re lying awake with a dismal headache and repose is tabooed—”

Whatever the background, one is face to face with an inscrutable positronic brain, which the slide-rule geniuses say should work thus-and-so.

The burnished plates of his body gleamed in the Luxites and the glowing red of the photoelectric cells that were his eyes, were fixed steadily upon the Earthman at the other side of the table.

Cutie gazed upon his long, supple fingers in an oddly human attitude of mystification, “It strikes me that there should be a more satisfactory explanation than that. For you to make me seems improbable.”

“Well, now,” said Donovan sweetly, “I do hope he’ll condescend to explain it all to me after he’s puzzled everything out.”

The robot did so and said placidly, “I have come to a decision.”

Cutie continued imperturbably, “And the question that immediately arose was: Just what is the cause of my existence?”

The robot spread his strong hands in a deprecatory gesture, “I accept nothing on authority. A hypothesis must be backed by reason, or else it is worthless—and it goes against all the dictates of logic to suppose that you made me.”

The huge generators were in motion and from the L-tubes came the low-pitched whir that pervaded the entire station.

His photoelectric eyes focused reproachfully upon the Earthman.

Donovan became aware of twenty pairs of mechanical eyes fixed upon him and twenty stiff-timbred voices declaiming solemnly:
“There is no Master but the Master and QT-1 is his prophet!”

Donovan whirled on Cutie in breathless indignation. “This has gone far enough. You’re going to pay for this farce.”

Donovan whirled on Cutie in breathless indignation. “This has gone far enough. You’re going to pay for this farce.”

Inside the thin platinum-plated “skin” of the globe was a positronic brain, in whose delicately unstable structure were enforced calculated neuronic paths, which imbued each robot with what amounted to a pre-natal education.

Its footing was unsteady and twice abortive grating sounds were all it could do in the direction of speech.

“Because I, a reasoning being, am capable of deducing Truth from a priori Causes. You, being intelligent, but unreasoning, need an explanation of existence supplied to you, and this the Master did. That he supplied you with these laughable ideas of far-off worlds and people is, no doubt, for the best. Your minds are probably too coarsely grained for absolute Truth. However, since it is the Master’s will that you believe your books, I won’t argue with you any more.”

He departed with a beatific air suiting the Prophet of the Master and the two humans avoided each other’s eyes.

“You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason—if you pick the proper postulates. We have ours and Cutie has his.”

The storm had arrived ahead of schedule, and Donovan’s florid face drained of blood as he pointed a shaking finger.

The stream of high-speed electrons impinging upon the energy beam fluoresced into ultra-spicules of intense light.

The beam stretched out into shrinking nothingness, a-glitter with dancing, shining motes.

“It is best that you think so,” Cutie sighed again. “I see the wisdom of the illusion now. I would not attempt to shake your faith, even if I could.” He departed—the picture of commiseration.

He was donning the heavy space gloves in preparation for his term of duty here, and his thick eyebrows drew close together.