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Unwise Child, a novel by Randall Garrett |
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Chapter 17 |
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_ Leda Crannon was standing outside the cubicle that had been built for Snookums. Her back and the palms of her hands were pressed against the door. Her head was bowed, and her red hair, shining like a hellish flame in the light of the glow panels, fell around her shoulders and cheeks, almost covering her face. "Leda," said Mike the Angel gently. She looked up. There were tears in her blue eyes. "Mike! Oh, Mike!" She ran toward him, put her arms around him, and tried to bury her face in Mike's chest. "What's the matter, honey? What's happened?" He was certain she couldn't have heard about Mellon's death yet. He held her in his arms, carefully, tenderly, not passionately. "He's crazy, Mike. He's completely crazy." Her voice had suddenly lost everything that gave it color. It was only dead and choked. Mike the Angel knew it was an emotional reaction. As a psychologist, she would never have used the word "crazy." But as a woman ... as a human being.... "Fitz is still in there talking to him, but he's--he's--" Her voice choked off again into sobs. Mike waited patiently, holding her, caressing her hair. "Eight years," she said after a minute or so. "Eight years I spent. And now he's gone. He's broken." "How do you know?" Mike asked. She lifted her head and looked at him. "Mike--did he really hit you? Did he refuse to stop when you ordered him to? What _really_ happened?" Mike told her what had happened in the darkened companionway just outside his room. When he finished, she began sobbing again. "He's lying, Mike," she said. "_Lying!_" Mike nodded silently and slowly. Leda Crannon had spent all of her adult life tending the hurts and bruises and aches of Snookums the Child. She had educated him, cared for him, taken pleasure in his triumphs, worried about his health, and watched him grow mentally. And now he was sick, broken, ruined. And, like all parents, she was asking herself: "What did I do wrong?" Mike the Angel didn't give her an answer to that unspoken question, but he knew what the answer was in so many cases: The grieving parent has not necessarily done anything wrong. It may simply be that there was insufficient or poor-quality material to work with. With a human child, it is even more humiliating for a parent to admit that he or she has contributed inferior genetic material to a child than it is to admit a failure in upbringing. Leda's case was different. Leda had lost her child, but Mike hesitated to point out that it wasn't her fault in the first place because the material wasn't up to the task she had given it, and in the second place because she hadn't really lost anything. She was still playing with dolls, not human beings. "Hell!" said Mike under his breath, not realizing that he was practically whispering in her ear. "Isn't it?" she said. "Isn't it Hell? I spent eight years trying to make that little mind of his tick properly. I wanted to know what was the right, proper, and logical way to bring up children. I had a theory, and I wanted to test it. And now I'll never know." "What sort of theory?" Mike asked. She sniffled, took a handkerchief from her pocket, and began wiping at her tears. Mike took the handkerchief away from her and did the wiping job himself. "What's this theory?" he said. "Oh, it isn't important now. But I felt--I still feel--that everybody is born with a sort of Three Laws of Robotics in him. You know what I mean--that a person wouldn't kill or harm anyone, or refuse to do what was right, in addition to trying to preserve his own life. I think babies are born that way. But I think that the information they're given when they're growing up can warp them. They still think they're obeying the laws, but they're obeying them wrongly, if you see what I mean." Mike nodded without saying anything. This was no time to interrupt her. "For instance," she went on, "if my theory's right, then a child would never disobey his father--unless he was convinced that the man was not really his father, you see. For instance, if he learned, very early, that his father never spanks him, that becomes one of the identifying marks of 'father.' Fine. But the first time his father _does_ spank him, doubt enters. If that sort of thing goes on, he becomes disobedient because he doesn't believe that the man is his father. "I'm afraid I'm putting it a little crudely, but you get the idea." "Yeah," said Mike. For all he knew, there might be some merit in the girl's idea; he knew that philosophers had talked of the "basic goodness of mankind" for centuries. But he had a hunch that Leda was going about it wrong. Still, this was no time to argue with her. She seemed calmer now, and he didn't want to upset her any more than he had to. "That's what you've been working on with Snookums?" he asked. "That's it." "For eight years?" "For eight years." "Is that the information, the data, that makes Snookums so priceless, aside from his nucleonics work?" She smiled a little then. "Oh no. Of course not, silly. He's been fed data on everything--physics, subphysics, chemistry, mathematics--all kinds of things. Most of the major research laboratories on Earth have problems of one kind or another that Snookums has been working on. He hasn't been given the problem _I_ was working on at all; it would bias him." Then the tears came back. "And now it doesn't matter. He's insane. He's lying." "What's he saying?" "He insists that he's never broken the First Law, that he has never hurt a human being. And he insists that he has followed the orders of human beings, according to the Second Law." "May I talk to him?" Mike asked. She shook her head. "Fitz is running him through an analysis. He even made me leave." Then she looked at his face more closely. "You don't just want to confront him and call him a liar, do you? No--that's not like you. You know he's just a machine--better than I do, I guess.... What is it, Mike?" _No_, he thought, looking at her, _she still thinks he's human. Otherwise, she'd know that a computer can't lie--not in the human sense of the word._ _Most people, if told that a man had said one thing, and that a computer had given a different answer, would rely on the computer._ "What is it, Mike?" she repeated. "Lew Mellon," he said very quietly, "is dead." The blood drained from her face, leaving her skin stark against the bright red of her hair. For a moment he thought she was going to faint. Then a little of the color came back. "Snookums." Her voice was whispery. He shook his head. "No. Apparently he tried to jump Vaneski and got hit with a stun beam. It shouldn't have killed him--but apparently it did." "God, God, God," she said softly. "Here I've been crying about a damned machine, and poor Lew has been lying up there dead." She buried her face in her hands, and her voice was muffled when she spoke again. "And I'm all cried out, Mike. I can't cry any more." Before Mike could make up his mind whether to say anything or not, the door of Snookums' room opened and Dr. Fitzhugh came out, closing the door behind him. There was an odd, stricken look on his face. He looked at Leda and then at Mike, but the expression on his face showed that he really hadn't seen them clearly. "Did you ever wonder if a robot had a soul, Mike?" he asked in a wondering tone. "No," Mike admitted. Leda took her hands from her face and looked at him. Her expression was a bright blank stare. "He won't answer my questions," Fitzhugh said in a hushed tone. "I can't complete the analysis." "What's that got to do with his soul?" Mike asked. "He won't answer my questions," Fitzhugh repeated, looking earnestly at Mike. "He says God won't allow him to." _ |
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