The Creator and Other Stories Page 6

  'It is all of that,' said Doc.

  'Nicest spring I've ever seen,' said Con, working his way around to what he had to say.

  'I was thinking that,' said Doc. 'It seems to me the lilacs never smelled so good before.'

  'Doc,' said Con, 'I figure I owe you quite a bit of money.'

  'You owe me some,' said Doc.

  'You got an idea how much it might be?'

  'Not the faintest,' Doc told him. 'I never bothered to keep track of it.'

  'Figured it was a waste of time,' said Con. 'Figured I would never pay it.'

  'Something like that,' Doc agreed.

  'Been doctoring with you for a right long time,' said Con.

  'That's right, Con.'

  'I got three hundred here. You figure that might do it?'

  'Let's put it this way. Con,' said Doc. 'I'd settle for a whole lot less.'

  'I guess, then, that sort of makes us even. Seems to me three hundred might be close to fair.'

  'If you say so,' said Doc.

  Con dug out his billfold, extracted a wad of bills and handed them across. Doc took them and folded them and stuffed them in his pocket.

  'Thank you, Con,' he said.

  And suddenly he had a funny feeling, as if there were something he should know, as if there were something that he should be able to just reach out and grab.

  But he couldn't, no matter how he tried, figure what it was.

  Con got up and shuffled across the porch, heading for the steps.

  'Be seeing you around,' he said.

  Doc jerked himself back to reality.

  'Sure, Con. Be seeing you around. And thanks.'

  He sat in the chair, not rocking, and listened to Con going down the walk and out the gate and then down the street until there was only silence.

  And if he ever was going to get at it, he'd have to go in now and start reading in the journal.

  Although, more than likely, it was all damn foolishness. He'd probably never again need to know a thing out of any medic journal.

  Doc pushed the journal to one side and sat there, wondering what was wrong with him. He'd been reading for twenty minutes and none of it had registered. He couldn't have told a word that he had read.

  Too upset, he thought. Too excited about Operation Kelly. And wasn't that a thing to call it — Operation Kelly!

  And he remembered it once again exactly.

  How he'd tried it out on Millville, then gone to the county medical association and how the doctors in the county, after some slight amount of scoffing and a good deal of skepticism, had become convinced. And from there it had gone to state and the AMA.

  And finally that great day in the United Nations, when the Ellen had appeared before the delegates and when he, himself, had been introduced — and at last the great London man arising to suggest that the project could be called nothing else but Kelly.

  A proud moment, he told himself — and he tried to call up the pride again, but it wasn't there, not the whole of it. Never in his life again would he know that kind of pride.

  And here he sat, a simple country doctor once again, in his study late at night, trying to catch up with reading he never seemed to get the time to do.

  Although that was no longer strictly true. Now he had all the time there was.

  He reached out and pulled the journal underneath the lamp and settled down to read.

  But it was slow going.

  He went back and read a paragraph anew.

  And that, he told himself, was not the way it should be.

  Either he was getting old or his eyes were going bad or he was plain stupid.

  And that was the word — that was the key to the thing that it had seemed he should have been able to just reach out and grab.

  Stupid!

  Probably not actually stupid. Maybe just a little slow. Not really less intelligent, but not so sharp and bright as he had been. Not so quick to catch the hang of things.

  Martha Anderson had forgotten how much yeast to use in those famous, prize-winning rolls of hers. And that was something that Martha should never have forgotten.

  Con had paid his bill, and on the scale of values that Con had subscribed to all his life, that was plain stupidity. The bright thing, the sharp thing would have been for Con, now that he'd probably never need a doctor, just to forget the obligation. After all, it would not have been hard to do; he'd been forgetful of it up to this very night.

  And the alien had said something that, at the time, he'd thought of as a joke.

  'Never fear,' the alien had said, 'we'll cure all your ills. Including, more than likely, a few you don't suspect.'

  And was intelligence a disease?

  It was hard to think of it as such.

  And yet, when any race was as obsessed with intelligence as Man was, it might be classed as one.

  When it ran rampant as it had during the last half century, when it piled progress on top of progress, technology on top of technology, when it ran so fast that no man caught his breath, then it might be disease.

  Not quite so sharp, thought Doc. Not quite so quick to grasp the meaning of a paragraph loaded with medical terminology — being forced to go a little slower to pack it in his mind.

  And was that really bad?

  Some of the stupidest people he'd ever known, he told himself, had been the happiest.

  And while one could not make out of that a brief for planned stupidity, it at least might be a plea for a less harassed humanity.

  He pushed the journal to one side and sat staring at the light.

  It would be felt in Millville first because Millville had been the pilot project. And six months from tomorrow night it would be felt in all the world.

  How far would it go, he wondered — for that, after all, was the vital question.

  Only slightly less sharp?

  Back to bumbling?

  Clear back to the ape?

  There was no way one could tell…

  And all he had to do to stop it was pick up the phone.

  He sat there, frozen with the thought that perhaps Operation Kelly should be stopped — that after all the years of death and pain and misery, Man must buy it back.

  But the aliens, he thought — the aliens would not let it go too far. Whoever they might be, he believed they were decent people.

  Maybe there had been no basic understanding, no meeting of the minds, and yet there had been a common ground — the very simple ground of compassion for the blind and halt.

  But if he were wrong, he wondered — what if the aliens proposed to limit Man's powers of self-destruction even if that meant reducing him to abject stupidity… what was the answer then? And what if the plan was to soften man up before invasion?

  Sitting there, he knew.

  Knew that no matter what the odds were against his being right, there was nothing he could do.

  Realized that as a judge in a matter such as this he was unqualified, that he was filled with bias, and could not change himself.

  He'd been a doctor too long to stop Operation Kelly.

  All the Traps of Earth

  The inventory list was long. On its many pages, in his small and precise script, he had listed furniture, paintings, china, silverware and all the rest of it — all the personal belongings that had been accumulated by the Barringtons through a long family history.

  And now that he had reached the end of it, he noted down himself, the last item of them all:

  One domestic robot, Richard Daniel, antiquated but in good repair.

  He laid the pen aside and shuffled all the inventory sheets together and stacked them in good order, putting a paper weight upon them — the little exquisitely carved ivory paper weight that aunt Hortense had picked up that last visit she had made to Peking.

  And having done that, his job came to an end.

  He shoved back the chair and rose from the desk and slowly walked across the living room, with all its clutter of possessions from the family's past
. There, above the mantel, hung the sword that ancient Jonathon had worn in the War Between the States, and below it, on the mantelpiece itself, the cup the Commodore had won with his valiant yacht, and the jar of moon-dust that Tony had brought back from Man's fifth landing on the Moon, and the old chronometer that had come from the long-scrapped family spacecraft that had plied the asteroids.

  And all around the room, almost cheek by jowl, hung the family portraits, with the old dead faces staring out into the world that they had helped to fashion.

  And not a one of them from the last six hundred years, thought Richard Daniel, staring at them one by one, that he had not known.

  There, to the right of the fireplace, old Rufus Andrew Barrington, who had been a judge some two hundred years ago. And to the right of Rufus, Johnson Joseph Barrington, who had headed up that old lost dream of mankind, the Bureau of Paranormal Research. There, beyond the door that led out to the porch, was the scowling pirate face of Danley Barrington, who had first built the family fortune.

  And many others — administrator, adventurer, corporation chief. All good men and true.

  But this was at an end. The family had run out.

  Slowly Richard Daniel began his last tour of the house — the family room with its cluttered living space, the den with its old mementos, the library and its rows of ancient books, the dining hall in which the crystal and the china shone and sparkled, the kitchen gleaming with the copper and aluminum and the stainless steel, and the bedrooms on the second floor, each of them with its landmarks of former occupants. And finally, the bedroom where old Aunt Hortense had finally died, at long last closing out the line of Barringtons.

  The empty dwelling held a not-quite-haunted quality, the aura of a house that waited for the old gay life to take up once again. But it was a false aura. All the portraits, all the china and the silverware, everything within the house would be sold at public auction to satisfy the debts. The rooms would be stripped and the possessions would be scattered and, as a last indignity, the house itself be sold.

  Even he, himself, Richard Daniel thought, for he was chattel, too. He was there with all the rest of it, the final item on the inventory.

  Except that what they planned to do with him was worse than simple sale. For he would be changed before he was offered up for sale. No one would be interested in putting up good money for him as he stood. And, besides, there was the law — the law that said no robot could legally have continuation of a single life greater than a hundred years.

  And he had lived in a single life six times a hundred years. He had gone to see a lawyer and the lawyer had been sympathetic, but had held forth no hope.

  "Technically," he had told Richard Daniel in his short, clipped lawyer voice, "you are at this moment much in violation of the statute. I completely fail to see how your family got away with it."

  "They liked old things," said Richard Daniel. "And, besides, I was very seldom seen. I stayed mostly in the house. I seldom ventured out."

  "Even so," the lawyer said, "there are such things as records. There must be a file on you…"

  "The family," explained Richard Daniel, "in the past had many influential friends. You must understand, sir, that the Barringtons, before they fell upon hard times, were quite prominent in politics and in many other matters."

  The lawyer grunted knowingly.

  "What I can't quite understand," he said, "is why you should object so bitterly. You'll not be changed entirely. You'll still be Richard Daniel."

  "I would lose my memories, would I not?'

  "Yes, of course you would. But memories are not too important. And you'd collect another set."

  "My memories are dear to me," Richard Daniel told him.

  "They are all I have. After some six hundred years, they are my sole worthwhile possession. Can you imagine, counselor, what it means to spend six centuries with one family?"

  "Yes, I think I can," agreed the lawyer. "But now, with the family gone, isn't it just possible the memories may prove painful?"

  "They're a comfort. A sustaining comfort. They make me feel important. They give me perspective and a niche."

  "But don't you understand? You'll need no comfort, no importance once you're reoriented. You'll be brand new. All that you'll retain is a certain sense of basic identity — that they cannot take away from you even if they wished. There'll be nothing to regret. There'll be no leftover guilts, no frustrated aspirations, no old loyalties to hound you."

  "I must be myself," Richard Daniel insisted stubbornly. "I've found a depth of living, a background against which my living has some meaning. I could not face being anybody else."

  "You'd be far better off," the lawyer said wearily. "You'd have a better body. You'd have better mental tools. You'd be more intelligent."

  Richard Daniel got up from the chair. He saw it was no use.

  "You'll not inform on me?" he asked.

  "Certainly not," the lawyer said. "So far as I'm concerned, you aren't even here."

  "Thank you," said Richard Daniel. "How much do I owe you?"

  "Not a thing," the lawyer told him. "I never make a charge to anyone who is older than five hundred."

  He had meant it as a joke, but Richard Daniel did not smile. He had not felt like smiling.

  At the door he turned around.

  "Why?" he was going to ask. "Why this silly law."

  But he did not have to ask — it was not hard to see.

  Human vanity, he knew. No human being lived much longer than a hundred years, so neither could a robot. But a robot, on the other hand, was too valuable simply to be junked at the end of a hundred years of service, so there was this law providing for the periodic breakup of the continuity of each robot's life. And thus no human need undergo the psychological indignity of knowing that his faithful serving man might manage to outlive him by several thousand years.

  It was illogical, but humans were illogical.

  Illogical, but kind. Kind in many different ways.

  Kind, sometimes, as the Barringtons had been kind, thought Richard Daniel. Six hundred years of kindness. It was a prideful thing to think about. They had even given him a double name. There weren't many robots nowadays who had double names. It was a special mark of affection and respect.

  The lawyer having failed him, Richard Daniel had sought another source of help. Now, thinking back on it, standing in the room where Hortense Barrington had died, he was sorry that he'd done it. For he had embarrassed the religico almost unendurably. It had been easy for the lawyer to tell him what he had. Lawyers had the statutes to determine their behavior, and thus suffered little from agonies of personal decision.

  But a man of the cloth is kind if he is worth his salt. And this one had been kind instinctively as well as professionally, and that had made it worse.

  "Under certain circumstances," he had said somewhat awkwardly, "I could counsel patience and humility and prayer. Those are three great aids to anyone who is willing to put them to his use. But with you I am not certain."

  "You mean," said Richard Daniel, "because I am a robot." "Well, now…" said the minister, considerably befuddled at this direct approach.

  "Because I have no soul?"

  "Really," said the minister miserably, "you place me at a disadvantage. You are asking me a question that for centuries has puzzled and bedeviled the best minds in the church."

  "But one," said Richard Daniel, "that each man in his secret heart must answer for himself."

  "I wish I could," cried the distraught minister. "I truly wish I could."

  "If it is any help," said Richard Daniel, "I can tell you that sometimes I suspect I have a soul."

  And that, he could see, had been most upsetting for this kindly human. It had been, Richard Daniel told himself, unkind of him to say it. For it must have been confusing, since coming from himself it was not opinion only, but expert evidence.

  So he had gone away from the minister's study and come back to the empty house to get on with
his inventory work.

  Now that the inventory was all finished and the papers stacked where Dancourt, the estate administrator, could find them when be showed up in the morning, Richard Daniel had done his final service for the Barringtons and now must begin doing for himself.

  He left the bedroom and closed the door behind him and went quietly down the stairs and along the hallway to the little cubby, back of the kitchen, that was his very own.

  And that, he reminded himself with a rush of pride, was of a piece with his double name and his six hundred years. There were not too many robots who had a room, however small, that they might call their own.

  He went into the cubby and turned on the light and closed the door behind him.

  And now, for the first time, he faced the grim reality of what he meant to do.

  The cloak and hat and trousers hung upon a hook and the galoshes were placed precisely underneath them. His attachment kit lay in one corner of the cubby and the money was cached underneath the floor board he had loosened many years ago to provide a hiding place.

  There was, he, told himself, no point in waiting. Every minute counted. He had a long way to go and he must be at his destination before morning light.

  He knelt on the floor and pried up the loosened board, shoved in a hand and brought out the stacks of bills, money hidden through the years against a day of need.

  There were three stacks of bills, neatly held together by elastic bands — money given him throughout the years as tips and Christmas gifts, as birthday presents and rewards for little jobs well done.

  He opened the storage compartment located in his chest and stowed away all the bills except for half a dozen which he stuffed into a pocket in one hip.

  He took the trousers off the hook and it was an awkward business, for he'd never worn clothes before except when he'd tried on these very trousers several days before. It was a lucky thing, he thought, that long-dead Uncle Michael had been a portly man, for otherwise the trousers never would have fit.

  He got them on and zippered and belted into place, then forced his feet into the overshoes. He was a little worried about the overshoes. No human went out in the summer wearing overshoes. But it was the best that he could do. None of the regular shoes he'd found in the house had been nearly large enough.