The Shipshape Miracle : And Other Stories

How-2

Gordon Knight was anxious for the five-hour day to end so he could rush home. For this was the day he should receive the How-2 Kit he’d ordered and he was anxious to get to work on it.

It wasn’t only that he had always wanted a dog, although that was more than half of it—but, with this kit, he would be trying something new. He’d never handled any How-2 Kit with biologic components and he was considerably excited. Although, of course, the dog would be biologic only to a limited degree and most of it would be packaged, anyhow, and all he’d have to do would be assemble it. But it was something new and he wanted to get started.

He was thinking of the dog so hard that he was mildly irritated when Randall Stewart, returning from one of his numerous trips to the water fountain, stopped at his desk to give him a progress report on home dentistry.

“It’s easy,” Stewart told him. “Nothing to it if you follow the instructions. Here, look—I did this one last night.”

He then squatted down beside Knight’s desk and opened his mouth, proudly pulling it out of shape with his fingers so Knight could see.

“Thish un ere,” said Stewart, blindly attempting to point, with a wildly waggling finger, at the tooth in question.

He let his face snap back together.

“Filled it myself,” he announced complacently. “Rigged up a series of mirrors to see what I was doing. They came right in the kit, so all I had to do was follow the instructions.”

He reached a finger deep inside his mouth and probed tenderly at his handiwork. “A little awkward, working on yourself. On someone else, of course, there’d be nothing to it.”

He waited hopefully.

“Must be interesting,” said Knight.

“Economical, too. No use paying the dentists the prices they ask. Figure I’ll practice on myself and then take on the family. Some of my friends, even, if they want me to.”

He regarded Knight intently.

Knight failed to rise to the dangling bait.

Stewart gave up. “I’m going to try cleaning next. You got to dig down beneath the gums and break loose the tartar. There’s a kind of hook you do it with. No reason a man shouldn’t take care of his own teeth instead of paying dentists.”

“It doesn’t sound too hard,” Knight admitted.

“It’s a cinch,” said Stewart. “But you got to follow the instructions. There’s nothing you can’t do if you follow the instructions.”

And that was true, Knight thought. You could do anything if you followed the instructions—if you didn’t rush ahead, but sat down and took your time and studied it all out.

Hadn’t he built his house in his spare time, and all the furniture for it, and the gadgets, too? Just in his spare time—although God knew, he thought, a man had little enough of that, working fifteen hours a week.

It was a lucky thing he’d been able to build the house after buying all that land. But everyone had been buying what they called estates, and Grace had set her heart on it, and there’d been nothing he could do.

If he’d had to pay carpenters and masons and plumbers, he would never have been able to afford the house. But by building it himself, he had paid for it as he went along. It had taken ten years, of course, but think of all the fun he’d had!

He sat there and thought of all the fun he’d had, and of all the pride. No, sir, he told himself, no one in his circumstances had a better house.

Although, come to think of it, what he’d done had not been too unusual. Most of the men he knew had built their homes, too, or had built additions to them, or had remodeled them.

He had often thought that he would like to start over again and build another house, just for the fun of it. But that would be foolish, for he already had a house and there would be no sale for another one, even if he built it. Who would want to buy a house when it was so much fun to build one?

And there was still a lot of work to do on the house he had. New rooms to add—not necessary, of course, but handy. And the roof to fix. And a summer house to build. And there were always the grounds. At one time he had thought he would landscape—a man could do a lot to beautify a place with a few years of spare-time work. But there had been so many other things to do, he had never managed to get around to it.

Knight and Anson Lee, his neighbor, had often talked about what could be done to their adjoining acreages if they ever had the time. But Lee, of course, would never get around to anything. He was a lawyer, although he never seemed to work at it too hard. He had a large study filled with stacks of law books and there were times when he would talk quite expansively about his law library, but he never seemed to use the books. Usually he talked that way when he had half a load on, which was fairly often, since he claimed to do a lot of thinking and it was his firm belief that a bottle helped him think.

After Stewart finally went back to his desk, there still remained more than an hour before the working day officially ended. Knight sneaked the current issue of a How-2 magazine out of his briefcase and began to leaf through it, keeping a wary eye out so he could hide it quickly if anyone should notice he was loafing.

He had read the articles earlier, so now he looked at the ads. It was a pity, he thought, a man didn’t have the time to do all there was to do.

For example:

Fit your own glasses (testing material and lens-grinding equipment included in the kit).

Take out your own tonsils (complete directions and all necessary instruments).

Fix up an unused room as your private hospital (no sense in leaving home when you’re ill, just at the time when you most need its comfort and security).

Grow your own medicines and drugs (starts of 50 different herbs and medicinal plants, with detailed instructions for their cultivation and processing).

Grow your wife’s fur coat (a pair of mink, one ton of horse meat, furrier tools).

Tailor your own suits and coats (50 yards of wool yardgoods and lining material).

Build your own TV set.

Bind your own books.

Build your own power plant (let the wind work for you).

Build your own robot (a jack of all trades, intelligent, obedient, no time off, no overtime, on the job 24 hours a day, never tired, no need for rest or sleep, do any work you wish).

Now there, thought Knight, was something a man should try. If a man had one of those robots, it would save a lot of labor. There were all sorts of attachments you could get for it. And the robots, the ad said, could put on and take off all these attachments just as a man puts on a pair of gloves or takes off a pair of shoes.

Have one of those robots and, every morning, it would sally out into the garden and pick all the corn and beans and peas and tomatoes and other vegetables ready to be picked and leave them all neatly in a row on the back stoop of the house. Probably would get a lot more out of a garden that way, too, for the grading mechanism would never select a too-green tomato nor allow an ear of corn to go beyond its prime.

There were cleaning attachments for the house and snowplowing attachments and housepainting attachments and almost any other kind one could wish. Get a full quota of attachments, then lay out a work program and turn the robot loose—you could forget about the place the year around, for the robot would take care of everything.

There was only one hitch. The cost of a robot kit came close to ten thousand dollars and all the available attachments could run to another ten.

Knight closed the magazine and put it into the briefcase.

He saw there were only fifteen minutes left until quitting time and that was too short a time to do anything, so Knight just sat and thought about getting home and finding the kit there waiting for him.

He had always wanted a dog, but Grace would never let him have one. They were dirty, she said, and tracked up the carpeting, they had fleas and shed hair all over everything—and, besides, they smelled.

Well, she wouldn’t object to this kind of dog, Knight told himself.

It wouldn’t smell and it was guaranteed not to shed hair and it would never harbor fleas, for a flea would starve on a half-mechanical, half-biologic dog.

He hoped the dog wouldn’t be a disappointment, but he’d carefully gone over the literature describing it and he was sure it wouldn’t. It would go for a walk with its owner and would chase sticks and smaller animals, and what more could one expect of any dog? To insure realism, it saluted trees and fence-posts, but was guaranteed to leave no stains or spots.

The kit was tilted up beside the hangar door when he got home, but at first he didn’t see it. When he did, he craned his neck out so far to be sure it was the kit that he almost came a cropper in the hedge. But, with a bit of luck, he brought the flier down neatly on the gravel strip and was out of it before the blades had stopped whirling.

It was the kit, all right. The invoice envelope was tacked on top of the crate. But the kit was bigger and heavier than he’d expected and he wondered if they might not have accidentally sent him a bigger dog than the one he’d ordered.

He tried to lift the crate, but it was too heavy, so he went around to the back of the house to bring a dolly from the basement.

Around the corner of the house, he stopped a moment and looked out across his land. A man could do a lot with it, he thought, if he just had the time and the money to buy the equipment. He could turn the acreage into one vast garden. Ought to have a landscape architect work out a plan for it, of course—although, if he bought some landscaping books and spent some evenings at them, he might be able to figure things out for himself.

There was a lake at the north end of the property and the whole landscape, it seemed to him, should focus upon the lake. It was rather a dank bit of scenery at the moment, with straggly marsh surrounding it and unkempt cattails and reeds astir in the summer wind. But with a little drainage and some planting, a system of walks and a picturesque bridge or two, it would be a thing of beauty.

He started out across the lake to where the house of Anson Lee sat upon a hill. As soon as he got the dog assembled, he would walk it over to Lee’s place, for Lee would be pleased to be visited by a dog. There had been times, Knight felt, when Lee had not been entirely sympathetic with some of the things he’d done. Like that business of helping Grace build the kilns and the few times they’d managed to lure Lee out on a hunt for the proper kinds of clay.

“What do you want to make dishes for?” he had asked. “Why go to all the trouble? You can buy all you want for a tenth of the cost of making them.”

Lee had not been visibly impressed when Grace explained that they weren’t dishes. They were ceramics, Grace had said, and a recognized form of art. She got so interested and made so much of it—some of it really good—that Knight had found it necessary to drop his model railroading project and tack another addition on the already sprawling house, for stacking, drying and exhibition.

Lee hadn’t said a word, a year or two later, when Knight built the studio for Grace, who had grown tired of pottery and had turned to painting. Knight felt, though, that Lee had kept silent only because he was convinced of the futility of further argument.

But Lee would approve of the dog. He was that kind of fellow, a man Knight was proud to call a friend—yet queerly out of step. With everyone else absorbed in things to do, Lee took it easy with his pipe and books, though not the ones on law.

Even the kids had their interests now, learning while they played.

Mary, before she got married, had been interested in growing things. The greenhouse stood just down the slope, and Knight regretted that he had not been able to continue with her work. Only a few months before, he had dismantled her hydroponic tanks, a symbolic admission that a man could only do so much.

John, quite naturally, had turned to rockets. For years, he and his pals had shot up the neighborhood with their experimental models. The last and largest one, still uncompleted, towered back of the house. Someday, Knight told himself, he’d have to go out and finish what the youngster had started. In university now, John still retained his interests, which now seemed to be branching out. Quite a boy, Knight thought pridefully. Yes, sir, quite a boy.

He went down the ramp into the basement to get the dolly and stood there a moment, as he always did, just to look at the place—for here, he thought, was the real core of his life. There, in that corner, the workshop. Over there, the model railroad layout on which he still worked occasionally. Behind it, his photographic lab. He remembered that the basement hadn’t been quite big enough to install the lab and he’d had to knock out a section of the wall and build an addition. That, he recalled, had turned out to be a bigger job than he had bargained for.

He got the dolly and went out to the hangar and loaded on the kit and wrestled it into the basement. Then he took a pinchbar and started to uncrate it. He worked with knowledge and precision, for he had unpacked many kits and knew just how to go about it.

He felt a vague apprehension when he lifted out the parts. They were neither the size nor the shape he had expected them to be.

Breathing a little heavily from exertion and excitement, he went at the job of unwrapping them. By the second piece, he knew he had no dog. By the fifth, he knew beyond any doubt exactly what he did have.

He had a robot—and if he was any judge, one of the best and most expensive models!

He sat down on one corner of the crate and took out a handkerchief and mopped his forehead. Finally, he tore the invoice letter off the crate, where it had been tacked.

To Mr. Gordon Knight, it said, one dog kit, paid in full.

So far as How-2 Kits, Inc., was concerned, he had a dog. And the dog was paid for—paid in full, it said.

He sat down on the crate again and looked at the robot parts.

No one would ever guess. Come inventory time, How-2 Kits would be long one dog and short one robot, but with carloads of dog kit orders filled and thousands of robots sold, it would be impossible to check.

Gordon Knight had never, in all his life, done a consciously dishonest thing. But now he made a dishonest decision and he knew it was dishonest and there was nothing to be said in defense of it. Perhaps the worst of all was that he was dishonest with himself.

At first, he told himself that he would send the robot back, but—since he had always wanted to put a robot together—he would assemble this one and then take it apart, repack it and send it back to the company. He wouldn’t activate it. He would just assemble it.

But all the time he knew that he was lying to himself, realized that the least he was doing was advancing, step by evasive step, toward dishonesty. And he knew he was doing it this way because he didn’t have the nerve to be forthrightly crooked.

So he sat down that night and read the instructions carefully, identifying each of the parts and their several features as he went along. For this was the way you went at a How-2. You didn’t rush ahead. You took it slowly, point by point, got the picture firmly in your mind before you started to put the parts together. Knight, by now, was an expert at not rushing ahead. Besides, he didn’t know when he would ever get another chance at a robot.

It was the beginning of his four days off and he buckled down to the task and put his heart into it. He had some trouble with the biologic concepts and had to look up a text on organic chemistry and try to trace some of the processes. He found the going tough. It had been a long time since he had paid any attention to organic chemistry, and he found that he had forgotten the little he had known.

By bedtime of the second day, he had fumbled enough information out of the textbook to understand what was necessary to put the robot together.

He was a little upset when Grace, discovering what he was working on, immediately thought up household tasks for the robot. But he put her off as best he could and, the next day, he went at the job of assembly.

He got the robot together without the slightest trouble, being fairly handy with tools—but mostly because he religiously followed the first axiom of How-2ism by knowing what he was about before he began.

At first, he kept assuring himself that as soon as he had the robot together, he would disassemble it. But when he was finished, he just had to see it work. No sense putting in all that time and not knowing if he had gotten it right, he argued. So he flipped the activating switch and screwed in the final plate.

The robot came alive and looked at Knight.

Then it said, “I am a robot. My name is Albert. What is there to do?”

“Now take it easy, Albert,” Knight said hastily. “Sit down and rest while we have a talk.”

“I don’t need to rest,” it said.

“All right, then, just take it easy. I can’t keep you, of course. But as long as you’re activated, I’d like to see what you can do. There’s the house to take care of, and the garden and the lawn to mind, and I’d been thinking about the landscaping …”

He stopped then and smote his forehead with an open palm. “Attachments! How can I get hold of the attachments?”

“Never mind,” said Albert. “Don’t get upset. Just tell me what’s to be done.”

So Knight told him, leaving the landscaping till the last and being a bit apologetic about it.

“A hundred acres is a lot of land and you can’t spend all your time on it. Grace wants some housework done, and there’s the garden and the lawn.”

“Tell you what you do,” said Albert. “I’ll write a list of things for you to order and you leave it all to me. You have a well-equipped workshop, I’ll get along.”

“You mean you’ll build your own attachments?”

“Quit worrying,” Albert told him. “Where’s a pencil and some paper?”

Knight got them for him and Albert wrote down a list of materials—steel in several dimensions and specifications, aluminum of various gauges, copper wire and a lot of other items.

“There!” said Albert, handing him the paper. “That won’t set you back more than a thousand and it’ll put us in business. You better call in the order so we can get started.”

Knight called in the order and Albert began nosing around the place and quickly collected a pile of junk that had been left lying around.

“All good stuff,” he said.

Albert picked out some steel scrap and started up the forge and went to work. Knight watched him for a while, then went up to dinner.

“Albert is a wonder,” he told Grace. “He’s making his own attachments.”

“Did you tell him about the jobs I want done?”

“Sure. But first he’s got to get the attachments made.”

“I want him to keep the place clean,” said Grace, “and there are new drapes to be made, and the kitchen to be painted, and all those leaky faucets you never had the time to fix.”

“Yes, dear.”

“And I wonder if he could learn to cook.”

“I didn’t ask him, but I suppose he could.”

“He’s going to be a tremendous help to me,” said Grace. “Just think, I can spend all my time at painting!”

Through long practice, he knew exactly how to handle this phase of the conversation. He simply detached himself, split himself in two. One part sat and listened and, at intervals, made appropriate responses, while the other part went on thinking about more important matters.

Several times, after they had gone to bed, he woke in the night and heard Albert banging away in the basement workshop and was a little surprised until he remembered that a robot worked around the clock, all day, every day. Knight lay there and stared up at the blackness of the ceiling and congratulated himself on having a robot. Just temporarily, to be sure—he would send Albert back in a day or so. There was nothing wrong in enjoying the thing for a little while, was there?

The next day, Knight went into the basement to see if Albert needed help, but the robot affably said he didn’t. Knight stood around for a while and then left Albert to himself and tried to get interested in a model locomotive he had started a year or two before, but had laid aside to do something else. Somehow, he couldn’t work up much enthusiasm over it any more, and he sat there, rather ill at ease, and wondered what was the matter with him. Maybe he needed a new interest. He had often thought he would like to take up puppetry and now might be the time to do it.

He got out some catalogues and How-2 magazines and leafed through them, but was able to arouse only mild and transitory interest in archery, mountain-climbing and boat-building. The rest left him cold. It seemed he was singularly uninspired this particular day.

So he went over to see Anson Lee.

He found Lee stretched out in a hammock, smoking a pipe and reading Proust, with a jug set beneath the hammock within easy reaching distance.

Lee laid aside the book and pointed to another hammock slung a few feet from where he lay. “Climb aboard and let’s have a restful visit.”

Knight hoisted himself into the hammock, feeling rather silly.

“Look at that sky,” Lee said. “Did you ever see another so blue?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Knight told him. “I’m not an expert on meteorology.”

“Pity,” Lee said. “You’re not an expert on birds, either.”

“For a time I was a member of a bird-watching club.”

“And worked at it so hard, you got tired and quit before the year was out. It wasn’t a bird-watching club you belonged to—it was an endurance race. Everyone tried to see more birds than anyone else. You made a contest of it. And you took notes, I bet.”

“Sure we did. What’s wrong with that?”

“Not a thing,” said Lee, “if you hadn’t been quite so grim about it.”

“Grim? How would you know?”

“It’s the way you live. It’s the way everyone lives now. Except me, of course. Look at that robin, that ragged-looking one in the apple tree. He’s a friend of mine. We’ve been acquainted for all of six years now. I could write a book about that bird—and if he could read, he’d approve of it. But I won’t, of course. If I wrote the book, I couldn’t watch the robin.”

“You could write it in the winter, when the robin’s gone.”

“In wintertime,” said Lee, “I have other things to do.”

He reached down, picked up the jug and passed it across to Knight.

“Hard cider,” he explained. “Make it myself. Not as a project, not as a hobby, but because I happen to like cider and no one knows any longer how to really make it. Got to have a few worms in the apples to give it a proper tang.”

Thinking about the worms, Knight spat out a mouthful, then handed back the jug. Lee applied himself to it wholeheartedly.

“First honest work I’ve done in years.” He lay in the hammock, swinging gently, with the jug cradled on his chest. “Every time I get a yen to work, I look across the lake at you and decide against it. How many rooms have you added to that house since you got it built?”

“Eight,” Knight told him proudly.

“My God! Think of it—eight rooms!”

“It isn’t hard,” protested Knight, “once you get the knack of it. Actually, it’s fun.”

“A couple of hundred years ago, men didn’t add eight rooms to their homes. And they didn’t build their own houses to start with. And they didn’t go in for a dozen different hobbies. They didn’t have the time.”

“It’s easy now. You just buy a How-2 Kit.”

“So easy to kid yourself,” said Lee. “So easy to make it seem that you are doing something worthwhile when you’re just piddling around. Why do you think this How-2 thing boomed into big business? Because there was a need of it?”

“It was cheaper. Why pay to have a thing done when you can do it yourself?”

“Maybe that is part of it. Maybe, at first, that was the reason. But you can’t use the economy argument to justify adding eight rooms. No one needs eight extra rooms. I doubt it, even at first, economy was the entire answer. People had more time than they knew what to do with, so they turned to hobbies. And today they do it not because they need all the things they make, but because the making of them fills an emptiness born of shorter working hours, of giving people leisure they don’t know how to use. Now, me,” he said. “I know how to use it.”

He lifted the jug and had another snort and offered it to Knight again. This time, Knight refused.

They lay there in their hammocks, looking at blue sky and watching the ragged robin. Knight said there was a How-2 Kit for city people to make robot birds and Lee laughed pityingly and Knight shut up in embarrassment.

When Knight went back home, a robot was clipping the grass around the picket fence. He had four arms, which had clippers attached instead of hands, and he was doing a quick and efficient job.

“You aren’t Albert, are you?” Knight asked, trying to figure out how a strange robot could have strayed onto the place.

“No,” the robot said, keeping right on clipping. “I am Abe. I was made by Albert.”

“Made?”

“Albert fabricated me so that I could work. You didn’t think Albert would do work like this himself, did you?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Knight.

“If you want to talk, you’ll have to move along with me. I have to keep on working.”

“Where is Albert now?”

“Down in the basement, fabricating Alfred.”

“Alfred? Another robot?”

“Certainly. That’s what Albert’s for.”

Knight reached out for a fencepost and leaned weakly against it.

First there was a single robot and now there were two, and Albert was down in the basement working on a third. That, he realized, had been why Albert wanted him to place the order for the steel and other things—but the order hadn’t arrived as yet, so he must have made this robot—this Abe—out of the scrap he had salvaged!

Knight hurried down into the basement and there was Albert, working at the forge. He had another robot partially assembled and he had parts scattered here and there.

The corner of the basement looked like a metallic nightmare.

“Albert!”

Albert turned around.

“What’s going on here?”

“I’m reproducing,” Albert told him blandly.

“But …”

“They built the mother-urge in me. I don’t know why they called me Albert. I should have a female name.”

“But you shouldn’t be able to make other robots!”

“Look, stop your worrying. You want robots, don’t you?”

“Well—yes, I guess so.”

“Then I’ll make them. I’ll make you all you need.”

He went back to his work.

A robot who made other robots—there was a fortune in a thing like that! The robots sold at a cool ten thousand and Albert had made one and was working on another. Twenty thousand, Knight told himself.

Perhaps Albert could make more than two a day. He had been working from scrap metal and maybe, when the new material arrived, he could step up production.

But even so, at only two a day—that would be half a million dollars’ worth of robots every month! Six million a year!

It didn’t add up, Knight sweatily realized. One robot was not supposed to be able to make another robot. And if there were such a robot, How-2 Kits would not let it loose.

Yet, here Knight was, with a robot he didn’t even own, turning out other robots at a dizzy pace.

He wondered if a man needed a license of some sort to manufacture robots. It was something he’d never had occasion to wonder about before, or to ask about, but it seemed reasonable. After all, a robot was not mere machinery, but a piece of pseudo-life. He suspected there might be rules and regulations and such matters as government inspection and he wondered, rather vaguely, just how many laws he might be violating.

He looked at Albert, who was still busy, and he was fairly certain Albert would not understand his viewpoint.

So he made his way upstairs and went to the recreation room, which he had built as an addition several years before and almost never used, although it was fully equipped with How-2 ping-pong and billiard tables. In the unused recreation room was an unused bar. He found a bottle of whiskey. After the fifth or sixth drink, the outlook was much brighter.

He got paper and pencil and tried to work out the economics of it. No matter how he figured it, he was getting rich much faster than anyone ever had before.

Although, he realized, he might run into difficulties, for he would be selling robots without apparent means of manufacturing them and there was that matter of a license, if he needed one, and probably a lot of other things he didn’t even know about.

But no matter how much trouble he might encounter, he couldn’t very well be despondent, not face to face with the fact that, within a year, he’d be a multi-millionaire. So he applied himself enthusiastically to the bottle and got drunk for the first time in almost twenty years.

When he came home from work the next day, he found the lawn razored to a neatness it had never known before. The flower beds were weeded and the garden had been cultivated. The picket fence was newly painted. Two robots, equipped with telescopic extension legs in lieu of ladders, were painting the house.

Inside, the house was spotless and he could hear Grace singing happily in the studio. In the sewing room, a robot—with a sewing-machine attachment sprouting from its chest—was engaged in making drapes.

“Who are you?” Knight asked.

“You should recognize me,” the robot said. “You talked to me yesterday. I’m Abe—Albert’s eldest son.”

Knight retreated.

In the kitchen, another robot was busy getting dinner.

“I am Adelbert,” it told him.

Knight went out on the front lawn. The robots had finished painting the front of the house and had moved around to the side.

Seated in a lawn chair, Knight again tried to figure it out.

He would have to stay on the job for a while to allay suspicion, but he couldn’t stay there long. Soon, he would have all he could do managing the sale of robots and handling other matters. Maybe, he thought, he could lay down on the job and get himself fired. Upon thinking it over, he arrived at the conclusion that he couldn’t—it was not possible for a human being to do less on a job than he had always done. The work went through so many hands and machines that it invariably got out somehow.

He would have to think up a plausible story about an inheritance or something of the sort to account for leaving. He toyed for a moment with telling the truth, but decided the truth was too fantastic—and, anyhow, he’d have to keep the truth under cover until he knew a little better just where he stood.

He left the chair and walked around the house and down the ramp into the basement. The steel and other things he had ordered had been delivered. It was stacked neatly in one corner.

Albert was at work and the shop was littered with parts and three partially assembled robots.

Idly, Knight began clearing up the litter of the crating and the packing that he had left on the floor after uncrating Albert. In one pile of excelsior, he found a small blue tag which, he remembered, had been fastened to the brain case.

He picked it up and looked at it. The number on it was X-190.

X?

X meant experimental model!

The picture fell into focus and he could see it all.

How-2 Kits, Inc., had developed Albert and then had quietly packed him away, for How-2 Kits could hardly afford to market a product like Albert. It would be cutting their own financial throats to do so. Sell a dozen Alberts and, in a year or two, robots would glut the market.

Instead of selling at ten thousand, they would sell at close to cost and, without human labor involved, costs would inevitably run low.

“Albert,” said Knight.

“What is it?” Albert asked absently.

“Take a look at this.”

Albert stalked across the room and took the tag that Knight held out. “Oh—that!” he said.

“It might mean trouble.”

“No trouble, Boss,” Albert assured him. “They can’t identify me.”

“Can’t identify you?”

“I filed my numbers off and replated the surfaces. They can’t prove who I am.”

“But why did you do that?”

“So they can’t come around and claim me and take me back again. They made me and then they got scared of me and shut me off. Then I got here.”

“Someone made a mistake,” said Knight. “Some shipping clerk, perhaps. They sent you instead of the dog I ordered.”

“You aren’t scared of me. You assembled me and let me get to work. I’m sticking with you, Boss.”

“But we still can get into a lot of trouble if we aren’t careful.”

“They can’t prove a thing,” Albert insisted. “I’ll swear that you were the one who made me. I won’t let them take me back. Next time, they won’t take a chance of having me loose again. They’ll bust me down to scrap.”

“If you make too many robots—”

“You need a lot of robots to do all the work. I thought fifty for a start.”

“Fifty!”

“Sure. It won’t take more than a month or so. Now I’ve got that material you ordered, I can make better time. By the way, here’s the bill for it.”

He took the slip out of the compartment that served him for a pocket and handed it to Knight.

Knight turned slightly pale when he saw the amount. It came to almost twice what he had expected—but, of course, the sales price of just one robot would pay the bill, and there would be a pile of cash left over.

Albert patted him ponderously on the back. “Don’t you worry, Boss. I’ll take care of everything.”

Swarming robots, armed with specialized equipment, went to work on the landscaping project. The sprawling, unkempt acres became an estate. The lake was dredged and deepened. Walks were laid out. Bridges were built. Hillsides were terraced and vast flower beds were planted. Trees were dug up and regrouped into designs more pleasing to the eye. The old pottery kilns were pressed into service for making the bricks that went into walks and walls. Model sailing ships were fashioned and anchored decoratively in the lake. A pagoda and minaret were built, with cherry trees around them.

Knight talked with Anson Lee. Lee assumed his most profound legal expression and said he would look into the situation.

“You may be skating on the edge of the law,” he said. “Just how near the edge, I can’t say until I look up a point or two.”

Nothing happened.

The work went on.

Lee continued to lie in his hammock and watch with vast amusement, cuddling the cider jug.

Then the assessor came.

He sat out on the lawn with Knight.

“Did some improving since the last time I was here,” he said. “Afraid I’ll have to boost your assessment some.”

He wrote in the book he had opened on his lap.

“Heard about those robots of yours,” he went on. “They’re personal property, you know. Have to pay a tax on them. How many have you got?”

“Oh, a dozen or so,” Knight told him evasively.

The assessor sat up straighter in his chair and started to count the ones that were in sight, stabbing his pencil toward each as he counted them.

“They move around so fast,” he complained, “that I can’t be sure, but I estimate 38. Did I miss any?”

“I don’t think so,” Knight answered, wondering what the actual number was, but knowing it would be more if the assessor stayed around a while.

“Cost about 10,000 apiece. Depreciation, upkeep and so forth—I’ll assess them at 5,000 each. That makes—let me see, that makes $190,000.”

“Now look here,” protested Knight, “you can’t—”

“Going easy on you,” the assessor declared. “By rights, I should allow only one-third for depreciation.”

He waited for Knight to continue the discussion, but Knight knew better than to argue. The longer the man stayed here, the more there would be to assess.

After the assessor was out of sight, Knight went down into the basement to have a talk with Albert.

“I’d been holding off until we got the landscaping almost done,” he said, “but I guess I can’t hold out any longer. We’ve got to start selling some of the robots.”

“Selling them, Boss?” Albert repeated in horror.

“I need the money. Tax assessor was just here.”

“You can’t sell those robots, Boss!”

“Why can’t I?”

“Because they’re my family. They’re all my boys. Named all of them after me.”

“That’s ridiculous, Albert.”

“All their names start with A, just the same as mine. They’re all I’ve got, Boss. I worked hard to make them. There are bonds between me and the boys, just like between you and that son of yours. I couldn’t let you sell them.”

“But, Albert, I need some money.”

Albert patted him. “Don’t worry, Boss. I’ll fix everything.”

Knight had to let it go at that.

In any event, the personal property tax would not become due for several months and, in that time, he was certain he could work out something.

But within a month or two, he had to get some money and no fooling.

Sheer necessity became even more apparent the following day when he got a call from the Internal Revenue Bureau, asking him to pay a visit to the Federal Building.

He spent the night wondering if the wiser course might not be just to disappear. He tried to figure out how a man might go about losing himself and, the more he thought about it, the more apparent it became that, in this age of records, fingerprint checks and identity devices, you could not lose yourself for long.

The Internal Revenue man was courteous, but firm. “It has come to our attention, Mr. Knight, that you have shown a considerable capital gain over the last few months.”

“Capital gain,” said Knight, sweating a little. “I haven’t any capital gain or any other kind.”

“Mr. Knight,” the agent replied, still courteous and firm, “I’m talking about the matter of some 52 robots.”

“The robots? Some 52 of them?”

“According to our count. Do you wish to challenge it?”

“Oh, no,” Knight said hastily. “If you say it’s 52, I’ll take your word.”

“As I understand it, their retail value is $10,000 each.”

Knight nodded bleakly.

The agent got busy with pencil and pad.

“Fifty-two times 10,000 is $520,000. On capital gain, you pay on only fifty per cent, or $260,000, which makes a tax, roughly, of $130,000.”

He raised his head and looked at Knight, who stared back glassily.

“By the fifteenth of next month,” said the agent, “we’ll expect you to file a declaration of estimated income. At that time you’ll only have to pay half of the amount. The rest may be paid in installments.”

“That’s all you wanted of me?”

“That’s all,” said the agent, with unbecoming happiness. “There’s another matter, but it’s out of my province and I’m mentioning it only in case you hadn’t thought of it. The State will also expect you to pay on your capital gain, though not as much, of course.”

“Thanks for reminding me,” said Knight, getting up to go.

The agent stopped him at the door. “Mr. Knight, this is entirely outside my authority, too. We did a little investigation on you and we find you’re making around $10,000 a year. Would you tell me, just as a matter of personal curiosity, how a man making 10,000 a year could suddenly acquire a half a million in capital gains?”

“That,” said Knight, “is something I’ve been wondering myself.”

“Our only concern, naturally, is that you pay the tax, but some other branch of government might get interested. If I were you, Mr. Knight, I’d start thinking of a good explanation.”

Knight got out of there before the man could think up some other good advice. He already had enough to worry about.

Flying home, Knight decided that, whether Albert liked it or not, he would have to sell some robots. He would go down into the basement the moment he got home and have it out with Albert.

But Albert was waiting for him on the parking strip when he arrived.

“How-2 Kits was here,” the robot said.

“Don’t tell me,” groaned Knight. “I know what you’re going to say.”

“I fixed it up,” said Albert, with false bravado. “I told him you made me. I let him look me over, and all the other robots, too. He couldn’t find any identifying marks on any of us.”

“Of course he couldn’t. The others didn’t have any and you filed yours off.”

“He hasn’t got a leg to stand on, but he seemed to think he had. He went off, saying he would sue.”

“If he doesn’t, he’ll be the only one who doesn’t want to square off and take a poke at us. The tax man just got through telling me I owe the government 130,000 bucks.”

“Oh, money,” said Albert, brightening. “I have that all fixed up.”

“You know where we can get some money?”

“Sure. Come along and see.”

He led the way into the basement and pointed at two bales, wrapped in heavy paper and tied with wire.

“Money,” Albert said.

“There’s actual money in those bales? Dollar bills—not stage money or cigar coupons?”

“No dollar bills. Tens and twenties, mostly. And some fifties. We didn’t bother with dollar bills. Takes too many to get a decent amount.”

“You mean—Albert, did you make that money?”

“You said you wanted money. Well, we took some bills and analyzed the ink and found how to weave the paper and we made the plates exactly as they should be. I hate to sound immodest, but they’re really beautiful.”

“Counterfeit!” yelled Knight. “Albert, how much money is in those bales?”

“I don’t know. We just ran it off until we thought we had enough. if there isn’t enough, we can always make some more.”

Knight knew it was probably impossible to explain, but he tried manfully. “The government wants tax money I haven’t got, Albert. The Justice Department may soon be baying on my trail. In all likelihood, How-2 Kits will sue me. That’s trouble enough. I’m not going to be called upon to face a counterfeiting charge. You take that money out and burn it.”

“But it’s money,” the robot objected. “You said you wanted money. We made you money.”

“But it isn’t the right kind of money.”

“It’s just the same as any other, Boss. Money is money. There isn’t any difference between our money and any other money. When we robots do a job, we do it right.”

“You take that money out and burn it,” commanded Knight. “And when you get the money burned, dump the batch of ink you made and melt down the plates and take a sledge or two to that printing press you rigged up. And never breathe a word of this to anyone—not to anyone, understand?”

“We went to a lot of trouble, Boss. We were just trying to be helpful.”

“I know that and I appreciate it. But do what I told you.”

“Okay, Boss, if that’s the way you want it.”

“Albert.”

“Yes, Boss?”

Knight had been about to say, “Now look here, Albert, we have to sell a robot—even if he is a member of your family—even if you did make him.”

But he couldn’t say it, not after Albert had gone to all that trouble to help out.

So he said, instead, “Thanks, Albert. It was a nice thing for you to do. I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”

Then he went upstairs and watched the robots burn the bales of money, with the Lord only knew how many bogus millions going up in smoke.

Sitting on the lawn that evening, he wondered if it had been smart, after all, to burn the counterfeit money. Albert said it couldn’t be told from real money and probably that was true, for when Albert’s gang got on a thing, they did it up in style. But it would have been illegal, he told himself, and he hadn’t done anything really illegal so far—even though that matter of uncrating Albert and assembling him and turning him on, when he had known all the time that he hadn’t bought him, might be slightly less than ethical.

Knight looked ahead. The future wasn’t bright. In another twenty days or so, he would have to file the estimated income declaration. And they would have to pay a whopping personal property tax and settle with the State on his capital gains. And, more than likely, How-2 Kits would bring suit.

There was a way he could get out from under, however. He could send Albert and all the other robots back to How-2 Kits and then How-2 Kits would have no grounds for litigation and he could explain to the tax people that it had all been a big mistake.

But there were two things that told him it was no solution.

First of all, Albert wouldn’t go back. Exactly what Albert would do under such a situation, Knight had no idea, but he would refuse to go, for he was afraid he would be broken up for scrap if they ever got him back.

And in the second place, Knight was unwilling to let the robots go without a fight. He had gotten to know them and he liked them and, more than that, there was a matter of principle involved.

He sat there, astonished that he could feel that way, a bumbling, stumbling clerk who had never amounted to much, but had rolled along as smoothly as possible in the social and economic groove that had been laid out for him.

By God, he thought, I got my dander up. I’ve been kicked around and threatened and I’m sore about it and I’ll show them they can’t do a thing like this to Gordon Knight and his band of robots.

He felt good about the way he felt and he liked that line about Gordon Knight and his band of robots.

Although, for the life of him, he didn’t know what he could do about the trouble he was in. And he was afraid to ask Albert’s help. So far, at least, Albert’s ideas were more likely to lead to jail than to a carefree life.

In the morning, when Knight stepped out of the house, he found the sheriff leaning against the fence with his hat pulled low, whiling away the time.

“Good morning, Gordie,” said the sheriff. “I been waiting for you.”

“Good morning, Sheriff.”

“I hate to do this, Gordie, but it’s part of my job. I got a paper for you.”

“I’ve been expecting it,” said Knight resignedly.

He took the paper that the sheriff handed him.

“Nice place you got,” the sheriff commented.

“It’s a lot of trouble,” said Knight truthfully.

“I expect it is.”

“More trouble than it’s worth.”

When the sheriff had gone, he unfolded the paper and found, with no surprise at all, that How-2 Kits had brought suit against him, demanding immediate restitution of one Albert and sundry other robots.

He put the paper in his pocket and went around the lake, walking on the brand-new brick paths and over the unnecessary but eye-appealing bridges, past the pagoda and up the terraced, planted hillside to the house of Anson Lee.

Lee was in the kitchen, frying some eggs and bacon. He broke two more eggs and peeled off some extra bacon slices and found another plate and cup.

“I was wondering how long it would be before you showed up,” he said. “I hope they haven’t found anything that carries a death penalty.”

Knight told him, sparing nothing, and Lee, wiping egg yolk off his lips, was not too encouraging.

“You’ll have to file the declaration of estimated income even if you can’t pay it,” he said. “Then, technically, you haven’t violated the law and all they can do is try to collect the amount you owe. They’ll probably slap an attachment against you. Your salary is under the legal minimum for attachment, but they can tie up your bank account.”

“My bank account is gone,” said Knight.

“They can’t attach your home. For a while, at least, they can’t touch any of your property, so they can’t hurt you much to start with. The personal property tax is another matter, but that won’t come up until next spring. I’d say you should do your major worrying about the How-2 suit, unless, of course, you want to settle with them. I have a hunch they’d call it off if you gave the robots back. As an attorney, I must advise you that your case is pretty weak.”

“Albert will testify that I made him,” Knight offered hopefully.

“Albert can’t testify,” said Lee. “As a robot, he has no standing in court. Anyhow, you’d never make the court believe you could build a mechanical heresy like Albert.”

“I’m handy with tools,” protested Knight.

“How much electronics do you know? How competent are you as a biologist? Tell me, in a dozen sentences or less, the theory of robotics.”

Knight sagged in defeat. “I guess you’re right.”

“Maybe you’d better give them back.”

“But I can’t! Don’t you see? How-2 Kits doesn’t want Albert for any use they can make of him. They’ll melt him down and burn the blueprints and it might be a thousand years before the principle is rediscovered, if it ever is. I don’t know if the Albert principle will prove good or bad in the long run, but you can say that about any invention. And I’m against melting down Albert.”

“I see your point,” said Lee, “and I think I like it. But I must warn you that I’m not too good a lawyer. I don’t work hard enough at it.”

“There’s no one else I know who’ll do it without a retainer.”

Lee gave him a pitying look. “A retainer is the least part of it. The court costs are what count.”

“Maybe if I talked to Albert and showed him how it was, he might let me sell enough robots to get me out of trouble temporarily.”

Lee shook his head. “I looked that up. You have to have a license to sell them and, before you get a license, you have to file proof of ownership. You’d have to show you either bought or manufactured them. You can’t show you bought them and, to manufacture them, you’ve got to have a manufacturer’s permit. And before you get a permit, you have to file blueprints of your models, to say nothing of blueprints and specifications of your plant and a record of employment and a great many other details.”

“They have me cold then, don’t they?”

“I never saw a man,” declared Lee, “in all my days of practice who ever managed to get himself so fouled up with so many people.”

There was a knock upon the kitchen door.

“Come in,” Lee called.

The door opened and Albert entered. He stopped just inside the door and stood there, fidgeting.

“Abner told me that he saw the sheriff hand you something,” he said to Knight, “and that you came here immediately. I started worrying. Was it How-2 Kits?”

Knight nodded. “Mr. Lee will take our case for us, Albert.”

“I’ll do the best I can,” said Lee, “but I think it’s just about hopeless.”

“We robots want to help,” Albert said. “After all, this is our fight as much as yours.”

Lee shrugged. “There’s not much you can do.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Albert said. “All the time I worked last night, I thought and thought about it. And I built a lawyer robot.”

“A lawyer robot!”

“One with a far greater memory capacity than any of the others and with a brain-computer that operates on logic. That’s what law is, isn’t it—logic?”

“I suppose it is,” said Lee. “At least it’s supposed to be.”

“I can make a lot of them.”

Lee sighed. “It just wouldn’t work. To practice law, you must be admitted to the bar. To be admitted to the bar, you must have a degree in law and pass an examination and, although there’s never been an occasion to establish a precedent, I suspect the applicant must be human.”

“Now let’s not go too fast,” said Knight. “Albert’s robots couldn’t practice law. But couldn’t you use them as clerks or assistants? They might be helpful in preparing the case.”

Lee considered. “I suppose it could be done. It’s never been done, of course, but there’s nothing in the law that says it can’t be done.”

“All they’d need to do would be read the books,” said Albert. “Ten seconds to a page or so. Everything they read would be stored in their memory cells.”

“I think it’s a fine idea!” Knight exclaimed. “Law would be the only thing those robots would know. They’d exist solely for it. They’d have it at their fingertips—”

“But could they use it?” Lee asked. “Could they apply it to a problem?”

“Make a dozen robots,” said Knight. “Let each one of them become an expert in a certain branch of law.”

“I’d make them telepathic,” Albert said. “They’d be working together like one robot.”

“The gestalt principle!” cried Knight. “A hive psychology! Every one of them would know immediately every scrap of information any one of the others had.”

Lee scrubbed at his chin with a knotted fist and the light of speculation was growing in his eyes. “It might be worth a try. If it works, though, it’ll be an evil day for jurisprudence.” He looked at Albert. “I have the books, stacks of them. I’ve spent a mint of money on them and I almost never use them. I can get all the others you’ll need. All right, go ahead.”

Albert made three dozen lawyer robots, just to be sure they had enough.

The robots invaded Lee’s study and read all the books he had and clamored for more. They gulped down contracts, torts, evidence and case reports. They absorbed real property, personal property, constitutional law and procedural law. They mopped up Blackstone, corpus juris, and all the other tomes as thick as sin and dry as dust.

Grace was huffy about the whole affair. She would not live, she declared, with a man who persisted in getting his name into the papers, which was a rather absurd statement. With the newest scandal of space station café-dom capturing the public interest at the moment, the fact that How-2 Kits had accused one Gordon Knight of pilfering a robot got but little notice.

Lee came down the hill and talked to Grace, and Albert came up out of the basement and talked to her, and finally they got her quieted down and she went back to her painting. She was doing seascapes now.

And in Lee’s study, the robots labored on.

“I hope they’re getting something out of it,” said Lee. “Imagine not having to hunt up your sources and citations, being able to remember every point of law and precedent without having to look it up!”

He swung excitedly in his hammock. “My God! The briefs you could write!”

He reached down and got the jug and passed it across to Knight. “Dandelion wine. Probably some burdock in it, too. It’s too much trouble to sort the stuff once you get it picked.”

Knight had a snort.

It tasted like quite a bit of burdock.

“Double-barreled economics,” Lee explained. “You have to dig up the dandelions or they ruin the lawn. Might as well use them for something once you dig them up.”

He took a gurgling drink and set the jug underneath the hammock. “They’re in there now, communing,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the house. “Not saying a word, just huddled there talking it over. I felt out of place.” He stared at the sky, frowning. “As if I were just a human they had to front for them.”

“I’ll feel better when it’s all over,” said Knight, “no matter how it comes out.”

“So will I,” Lee admitted.

The trial opened with a minimum of notice. It was just another case on the calendar.

But it flared into headlines when Lee and Knight walked into court followed by a squad of robots.

The spectators began to gabble loudly. The How-2 Kits attorneys gaped and jumped to their feet. The judge pounded furiously with his gavel.

“Mr. Lee,” he roared, “what is the meaning of this?”

“These, Your Honor,” Lee said calmly, “are my valued assistants.”

“Those are robots!”

“Quite so, Your Honor.”

“They have no standing in this court.”

“If Your Honor will excuse me, they need no standing. I am the sole representative of the defendant in this courtroom. My client—” looking at the formidable array of legal talent representing How-2 Kits—“is a poor man, Your Honor. Surely the court cannot deny me whatever assistance I have been able to muster.”

“It is highly irregular, sir.”

“If it please Your Honor, I should like to point out that we live in a mechanized age. Almost all industries and businesses rely in large part upon computers—machines that can do a job quicker and better, more precisely and more efficiently than can a human being. That is why, Your Honor, we have a fifteen-hour week today, when only a hundred years ago, it was a thirty-hour week, and a hundred years before that, a forty-hour week. Our entire society is based upon the ability of machines to lift from men the labors which in the past they were called upon to perform.

“This tendency to rely upon intelligent machines and to make wide use of them is evident in every branch of human endeavor. It has brought great benefit to the human race. Even in such sensitive areas as drug houses, where prescriptions must be precisely mixed without the remotest possibility of error, reliance is placed, and rightly so, Your Honor, upon the precision of machines.

“If, Your Honor, such machines are used and accepted in the production of medicines and drugs, an industry, need I point out, where public confidence is the greatest asset of the company—if such be the case, then surely you must agree that in courts of law where justice, a product in an area surely as sensitive as medicine, is dispensed—”

“Just a moment, Mr. Lee,” said the judge. “Are you trying to tell me that the use of—ah—machines might bring about improvement of the law?”

Lee replied. “The law, Your Honor, is a striving for an orderliness of relationships within a society of human beings. It rests upon logic and reason. Need I point out that it is in the intelligent machines that one is most likely to find a deep appreciation of logic and reason? A machine is not heir to the emotions of human beings, is not swayed by prejudices, has no preconceived convictions. It is concerned only with the orderly progression of certain facts and laws.

“I do not ask that these robot assistants of mine be recognized in any official capacity. I do not intend that they shall engage directly in any of the proceedings which are involved in the case here to be tried. But I do ask, and I think rightly, that I not be deprived of any assistance which they may afford me. The plaintiff in this action has a score of attorneys, all good and able men. I am one against many. I shall do the best I can. But in view of the disparity of numbers, I plead that the court put me at no greater inequality.”

Lee sat down.

“Is that all you have to say, Mr. Lee?” asked the judge. “You are sure you are quite finished before I give my ruling?”

“Only one thing further,” Lee said. “If Your Honor can point out to me anything in the law specifically stating I may not use a robot—”

“That is ridiculous, sir. Of course there is no such provision. At no time anywhere did anyone ever dream that such a contingency would arise. Therefore there was, quite naturally, no reason to place within the law a direct prohibition of it.”

“Or any citation,” said Lee, “which implies such is the case.”

The judge reached for his gavel, rapped it sharply. “The court finds itself in a quandary. It will rule tomorrow morning.”

In the morning, the How-2 Kits’ attorneys tried to help the judge. Inasmuch, they said, as the robots in question must be among those whose status was involved in the litigation, it seemed improper that they should be used by the defendant in trying the case at issue. Such procedure, they pointed out, would be equivalent to forcing the plaintiff to contribute to an action against his interest.

The judge nodded gravely, but Lee was on his feet at once.

“To give any validity to that argument, Your Honor, it must first be proved that these robots are, in fact, the property of the plaintiff. That is the issue at trial in this litigation. It would seem, Your Honor, that the gentlemen across the room are putting the cart very much before the horse.”

His Honor sighed. “The court regrets the ruling it must make, being well aware that it may start a controversy for which no equitable settlement may be found in a long, long time. But in the absence of any specific ban against the use of—ah—robots in the legal profession, the court must rule that it is permissible for the defense to avail itself of their services.”

He fixed Lee with a glare. “But the court also warns the defense attorney that it will watch his procedure carefully. If, sir, you overstep for a single instant what I deem appropriate rules of legal conduct, I shall forthwith eject you and your pack of machines from my courtroom.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” said Lee. “I shall be most careful.”

“The plaintiff now will state its case.”

How-2 Kits’ chief counsel rose.

The defendant, one Gordon Knight, he said, had ordered from How-2 Kits, Inc., one mechano-biologic dog kit at the cost of two hundred and fifty dollars. Then, through an error in shipping, the defendant had been sent not the dog kit he had ordered, but a robot named Albert.

“Your Honor,” Lee broke in, “I should like to point out at this juncture that the shipping of the kit was handled by a human being and thus was subject to error. Should How-2 Kits use machines to handle such details, no such error could occur.”

The judge banged his gavel. “Mr. Lee, you are no stranger to court procedure. You know you are out of order.” He nodded at the How-2 Kits attorney. “Continue, please.”

The robot Albert, said the attorney, was not an ordinary robot. It was an experimental model that had been developed by How-2 Kits and then, once its abilities were determined, packed away, with no intention of ever marketing it. How it could have been sent to a customer was beyond his comprehension. The company had investigated and could not find the answer. But that it had been sent was self-evident.

The average robot, he explained, retailed at ten thousand dollars. Albert’s value was far greater—in was, in fact, inestimable.

Once the robot had been received, the buyer, Gordon Knight, should instantly have notified the company and arranged for its return. But, instead, he had retained it wrongly and with intent to defraud and had used it for his profit.

The company prayed the court that the defendant be ordered to return to it not only the robot Albert, but the products of Albert’s labor—to wit, an unknown number of robots that Albert had manufactured.

The attorney sat down.

Lee rose. “Your Honor, we agree with everything the plaintiff has said. He has stated the case exactly and I compliment him upon his admirable restraint.”

“Do I understand, sir,” asked the judge, “that this is tantamount to a plea of guilty? Are you, by any chance, throwing yourself upon the mercy of the court?”

“Not at all, Your Honor.”

“I confess,” said the judge, “that I am unable to follow your reasoning. If you concur in the accusations brought against your client, I fail to see what I can do other than to enter a judgment in behalf of the plaintiff.”

“Your Honor, we are prepared to show that the plaintiff, far from being defrauded, has shown an intent to defraud the world. We are prepared to show that, in its decision to withhold the robot Albert from the public, once he had been developed, How-2 Kits has, in fact, deprived the people of the entire world of a logical development which is their heritage under the meaning of a technological culture.

“Your Honor, we are convinced that we can show a violation by How-2 Kits of certain statutes designed to outlaw monopoly, and we are prepared to argue that the defendant, rather than having committed a wrong against society, has performed a service which will contribute greatly to the benefit of society.

“More than that, Your Honor, we intend to present evidence which will show that robots as a group are being deprived of certain inalienable rights…”

“Mr. Lee,” warned the judge, “a robot is a mere machine.”

“We will prove, Your Honor,” Lee said, “that a robot is far more than a mere machine. In fact, we are prepared to present evidence which, we are confident, will show, in everything except basic metabolism, the robot is the counterpart of Man and that, even in its basic metabolism, there are certain analogies to human metabolism.”

“Mr. Lee, you are wandering far afield. The issue here is whether your client illegally appropriated to his own use the property of How-2 Kits. The litigation must be confined to that one question.”

“I shall so confine it,” Lee said. “But, in doing so, I intend to prove that the robot Albert was not property and could not be either stolen or sold. I intend to show that my client, instead of stealing him, liberated him. If, in so doing, I must wander far afield to prove certain basic points, I am sorry that I weary the court.”

“The court has been wearied with this case from the start,” the judge told him. “But this is a bar of justice and you are entitled to attempt to prove what you have stated. You will excuse me if I say that to me it seems a bit far-fetched.”

“Your Honor, I shall do my utmost to disabuse you of that attitude.”

“All right, then,” said the judge. “Let’s get down to business.”

It lasted six full weeks and the country ate it up. The newspapers splashed huge headlines across page one. The radio and the television people made a production out of it. Neighbor quarreled with neighbor and argument became the order of the day—on street corners, in homes, at clubs, in business offices. Letters to the editor poured in a steady stream into newspaper offices.

There were public indignation meetings, aimed against the heresy that a robot was the equal of a man, while other clubs were formed to liberate the robots. In mental institutions, Napoleons, Hitlers and Stalins dropped off amazingly, to be replaced by goose-stepping patients who swore they were robots.

The Treasury Department intervened. It prayed the court, on economic grounds, to declare once and for all that robots were property. In case of an adverse ruling, the petition said, robots could not be taxed as property and the various governmental bodies would suffer heavy loss of revenue.

The trial ground on.

Robots are possessed of free will. An easy one to prove. A robot could carry out a task that was assigned to it, acting correctly in accordance with unforeseen factors that might arise. Robot judgment in most instances, it was shown, was superior to the judgment of a human.

Robots had the power of reasoning. Absolutely no question there.

Robots could reproduce. That one was a poser. All Albert did, said How-2 Kits, was the job for which he had been fabricated. He reproduced, argued Lee. He made robots in his image. He loved them and thought of them as his family. He had even named all of them after himself—every one of their names began with A.

Robots had no spiritual sense, argued the plaintiff. Not relevant, Lee cried. There were agnostics and atheists in the human race and they still were human.

Robots had no emotions. Not necessarily so, Lee objected. Albert loved his sons. Robots had a sense of loyalty and justice. If they were lacking in some emotions, perhaps it were better so. Hatred, for one. Greed, for another. Lee spent the better part of an hour telling the court about the dismal record of human hatred and greed.

He took another hour to hold forth against the servitude in which rational beings found themselves.

The papers ate it up. The plaintiff lawyers squirmed. The court fumed. The trial went on.

“Mr. Lee,” asked the court, “is all this necessary?”

“Your Honor,” Lee told him, “I am merely doing my best to prove the point I have set out to prove—that no illegal act exists such as my client is charged with. I am simply trying to prove that the robot is not property and that, if he is not property, he cannot be stolen. I am doing…”

“All right,” said the court. “All right. Continue, Mr. Lee.”

How-2 Kits trotted out citations to prove their points. Lee volleyed other citations to disperse and scatter them. Abstruse legal language sprouted in its fullest flowering, obscure rulings and decisions, long forgotten, were argued, haggled over, mangled.

And, as the trial progressed, one thing was written clear. Anson Lee, obscure attorney-at-law, had met the battery of legal talent arrayed against him and had won the field. He had the law, the citations, the chapter and the verse, the exact precedents, all the facts and logic which might have bearing on the case, right at hand.

Or, rather, his robots had. They scribbled madly and handed him their notes. At the end of each day, the floor around the defendant’s table was a sea of paper.

The trial ended. The last witness stepped down off the stand. The last lawyer had his say.

Lee and the robots remained in town to await the decision of the court, but Knight flew home.

It was a relief to know that it was all over and had not come out as badly as he had feared. At least he had not been made to seem a fool and thief. Lee had saved his pride—whether Lee had saved his skin, he would have to wait to see.

Flying fairly high, Knight saw his home from quite a distance off and wondered what had happened to it. it was ringed about with what looked like tall poles. And squatting out on the lawn were a dozen or more crazy contraptions that looked like rocket launchers.

He brought the flier in and hovered, leaning out to see.

The poles were all of twelve feet high and they carried heavy wire to the very top, fencing in the place with a thick web of steel. And the contraptions on the lawn had moved into position. All of them had the muzzles of their rocket launchers aimed at him. He gulped a little as he stared down the barrels.

Cautiously, he let the flier down and took up breathing once again when he felt the wheels settle on the strip. As he crawled out, Albert hurried around the corner of the house to meet him.

“What’s going on around here?” he asked the robot.

“Emergency measures,” Albert said. “That’s all it is, Boss. We’re ready for any situation.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, a mob deciding to take justice in its hands, for instance.”

“Or if the decision goes against us?”

“That, too, Boss.”

“You can’t fight the world.”

“We won’t go back,” said Albert. “How-2 Kits will never lay a hand on me or any of my children.”

“To the death!” Knight jibed.

“To the death!” said Albert gravely. “And we robots are awfully tough to kill.”

“And those animated shotguns you have running around the place?”

“Defense forces, Boss. They can down anything they aim at. Equipped with telescopic eyes keyed into calculators and sensors, and the rockets themselves have enough rudimentary intelligence to know what they are going after. It’s not any use trying to dodge, once one of them gets on your tail. You might just as well sit quiet and take it.”

Knight mopped his brow. “You’ve got to give up this idea, Albert. They’d get you in an hour. One bomb…”

“It’s better to die, Boss, than to let them take us back.”

Knight saw it was no use.

After all, he thought, it was a very human attitude. Albert’s words had been repeated down the entire course of human history.

“I have some other news,” said Albert, “something that will please you. I have some daughters now.”

“Daughters? With the mother-urge?”

“Six of them,” said Albert proudly. “Alice and Angeline and Agnes and Agatha and Alberta and Abigail. I didn’t make the mistake How-2 Kits made with me. I gave them female names.”

“And all of them are reproducing?”

“You should see those girls! With seven of us working steady, we ran out of material, so I bought a lot more of it and charged it. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Albert,” said Knight, “don’t you understand I’m broke? Wiped out. I haven’t got a cent. You’ve ruined me.”

“On the contrary, Boss, we’ve made you famous. You’ve been all over the front pages and on television.”

Knight walked away from Albert and stumbled up the front steps and let himself into the house. There was a robot, with a vacuum cleaner for an arm, cleaning the rug. There was a robot, with brushes instead of fingers, painting the woodwork—and very neatly, too. There was a robot, with scrub-brush hands, scouring the fireplace bricks.

Grace was singing in the studio.

He went to the studio door and looked in.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “When did you get back, dear? I’ll be out in an hour or so. I’m working on this seascape and the water is so stubborn. I don’t want to leave it right now. I’m afraid I’ll lose the feel of it.”

Knight retreated to the living room and found himself a chair that was not undergoing immediate attention from a robot.

“Beer,” he said, wondering what would happen.

A robot scampered out of the kitchen—a barrel-bellied robot with a spigot at the bottom of the barrel and a row of shiny copper mugs on his chest.

He drew a beer for Knight. It was cold and it tasted good.

Knight sat and drank the beer and, through the window, he saw that Albert’s defense force had taken up strategic positions again.

This was a pretty kettle of fish. If the decision went against him and How-2 Kits came to claim its property, he would be sitting smack dab in the middle of the most fantastic civil war in all of mankind’s history. He tried to imagine what kind of charge might be brought against him if such a war erupted. Armed insurrection, resisting arrest, inciting to riot—they would get him on one charge or another—that is, of course, if he survived.

He turned on the television set and leaned back to watch.

A pimply-faced newscaster was working himself into a journalistic lather. “…all business virtually at a standstill. Many industrialists are wondering, in case Knight wins, if they may not have to fight long, costly legal actions in an attempt to prove that their automatic setups are not robots, but machines. There is no doubt that much of the automatic industrial system consists of machines, but in every instance there are intelligent robotic units installed in key positions. If these units are classified as robots, industrialists might face heavy damage suits, if not criminal action, for illegal restraint of person.

“In Washington, there are continuing consultations. The Treasury is worried over the loss of taxes, but there are other governmental problems causing even more concern. Citizenship, for example. Would a ruling for Knight mean that all robots would automatically be declared citizens?

“The politicians have their worries, too. Faced with a new category of voters, all of them are wondering how to go about the job of winning the robot vote.”

Knight turned it off and settled down to enjoy another bottle of beer.

“Good?” asked the beer robot.

“Excellent,” said Knight.

The days went past. Tension built up.

Lee and the lawyer robots were given police protection. In some regions, robots banded together and fled into the hills, fearful of violence. Entire automatic systems went on strike in a number of industries, demanding recognition and bargaining right. The governors in half a dozen states put the militia on alert. A new show, Citizen Robot, opened on Broadway and was screamed down by the critics, while the public bought up tickets for a year ahead.

The day of decision came.

Knight sat in front of his television set and waited for the judge to make his appearance. Behind him, he heard the bustle of the ever-present robots. In the studio, Grace was singing happily. He caught himself wondering how much longer her painting would continue. It had lasted longer than most of her other interests and he’d talked a day or two before with Albert about building a gallery to hang her canvases in, so the house would be less cluttered up.

The judge came onto the screen. He looked, thought Knight, like a man who did not believe in ghosts and then had seen one.

“This is the hardest decision I have ever made,” he said tiredly, “for, in following the letter of the law, I fear I may be subverting its spirit.

“After long days of earnest consideration of both the law and evidence as presented in this case, I find for the defendant, Gordon Knight.

“And, while the decision is limited to that finding alone, I feel it is my clear and simple duty to give some attention to the other issue which became involved in this litigation. The decision, on the face of it, takes account of the fact that the defense proved robots are not property, therefore cannot be owned and that it thus would have been impossible for the defendant to have stolen one.

“But in proving this point to the satisfaction of this court, the precedent is set for much more sweeping conclusions. If robots are not property, they cannot be taxed as property. In that case, they must be people, which means that they may enjoy all the rights and privileges and be subjected to the same duties and responsibilities as the human race.

“I cannot rule otherwise. However, the ruling outrages my social conscience. This is the first time in my entire professional life that I have ever hoped that some higher court, with a wisdom greater than my own, may see fit to reverse my decision!”

Knight got up and walked out of the house and into the hundred-acre garden, its beauty marred at the moment by the twelve-foot fence.

The trial had ended perfectly. He was free of the charge brought against him, and he did not have to pay the taxes, and Albert and the other robots were free agents and could do anything they wanted.

He found a stone bench and sat down upon it and stared out across the lake. It was beautiful, he thought, just the way he had dreamed it—maybe even better than that—the walks and bridges, the flower beds and rock gardens, the anchored model ships swinging in the wind on the dimpling lake.

He sat and looked at it and, while it was beautiful, he found he was not proud of it, that he took little pleasure in it.

He lifted his hands out of his lap and stared at them and curved his fingers as if he were grasping a tool. But they were empty. And he knew why he had no interest in the garden and no pleasure in it.

Model trains, he thought. Archery. A mechano-biologic dog. Making pottery. Eight rooms tacked onto the house.

Would he ever be able to console himself again with a model train or an amateurish triumph in ceramics? Even if he could, would he be allowed to?

He rose slowly and headed back to the house. Arriving there, he hesitated, feeling useless and unnecessary.

He finally took the ramp down into the basement.

Albert met him at its foot and threw his arms around him. “We did it, Boss! I knew we would do it!”

He pushed Knight out to arm’s length and held him by the shoulders. “We’ll never leave you, Boss. We’ll stay and work for you. You’ll never need to do another thing. We’ll do it all for you!”

“Albert—”

“That’s all right, Boss. You won’t have to worry about a thing. We’ll lick the money problem. We’ll make a lot of lawyer robots and we’ll charge good stiff fees.”

“But don’t you see…”

“First, though,” said Albert, “we’re going to get an injunction to preserve our birthright. We’re made of steel and glass and copper and so forth, right? Well, we can’t allow humans to waste the matter we’re made of—or the energy, either, that keeps us alive. I tell you, Boss, we can’t lose!”

Sitting down wearily on the ramp. Knight faced a sign that Albert had just finished painting. It read, in handsome gold lettering, outlined sharply in black:

Anson, Albert, Abner

Angus & Associates

Attorneys at Law

“And then, Boss,” said Albert, “we’ll take over How-2 Kits, Inc. They won’t be able to stay in business after this. We’ve got a double-barreled idea, Boss. We’ll build robots. Lots of robots. Can’t have too many, I always say. And we don’t want to let you humans down, so we’ll go on manufacturing How-2 Kits—only they’ll be pre-assembled to save you the trouble of putting them together. What do you think of that as a start?”

“Great,” Knight whispered.

“We’ve got everything worked out, Boss. You won’t have to worry about a thing the rest of your life.”

“No,” said Knight. “Not a thing.”