James White Second Ending

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talking with authority on subjects about which he knew very little&
A few hours later he was present when the senior maintenance robot and another of the same type
scattered pieces of Sister all over the machine-shop floor. Ross wasn't squeamish about dismantled
machines, but the way 5B kept carrying on a conversation while lying about in that condition gave him the
creeps. In a surprisingly short time the senior had succeeded in doing for the other repair robot what
Courtland had done for Sister, and in an even shorter time the newly enlightened one had returned the
compliment. They put Sister together again in no time at all.
Ross now had three robot geniuses on call, and he knew that within a few weeks the Courtland
modification would have been extended to all the robots. It should have been a great moment for him, but
instead he felt strangely let down, for despite his recent intensive reading on cybernetics, he had not
understood a single thing which he had seen done.
Analyzing his feelings, Ross came to the conclusion that it was simply a matter of his pride being hurt.
He did not want to feel that a machine could be smarter in any subject than he was, although it was plain,
when he thought about it more deeply, that every robot in the hospital would soon be smarter than he
was on any subject. He had to remind himself forcefully that they were only tools. Complex, of course,
but still only gadgets designed for his use or convenience. The idea was to use, not try to compete
against, the things.
Only briefly did he wonder, with that uneasy fluttering in the pit of his stomach, if he knew what he
was doing. The first obvious change was that every robot acquired a trailer. Mounted on two wheels and
joined to the main robot body by a flexible coupling which also carried a bundle of connecting cable, this
was the housing for the extra data banks Ross had ordered. His idea had been to raise the general
intelligence level of the robots in order to make his later, and more complex, instructions understandable
to them. Instead, he often found himself having to explain the simplest, most obvious things obvious to
a human being, that is while they fairly romped through items which to Ross had seemed extremely
difficult. Gradually he found himself being forced into the position of a coordinator rather than a teacher,
but that did not mean that he had less work to do.
On the surface a large transparent dome was built to house the first Miner, and the fifty-odd robots
engaged in its construction. Higher on the hillside he built a smaller one, which enclosed a chair, some
communications equipment and thirty square yards of soil from which the ash had been cleared. When it
rained heavily and the wind was just right Ross could just make out the sea, but usually he looked out at
a dirty gray fog and a dull, hot sun with a red ring around it. It was very warm on the surface, even at
night, and Ross guessed that the sooty atmosphere was responsible for the general rise in temperature by
decreasing Earth's albedo.
Although he kept the soil inside his dome wet, and it got all the sunlight there was going, nothing grew.
Between working on methods for programming the search and mining robots to accept data in foreign
languages some of the places they would be going, English would be neither spoken nor printed he
set his longer-term plans in motion. The principles of flight he demonstrated by flying paper airplanes until
the robots engaged on that project were able to understand the literature available. Trying to put across
the idea of buoyancy in water was more difficult. Because his model floated, the robots seemed to
consider the water a form of mobile ground surface, and they kept trying to walk on it. The first couple of
times, Ross laughed.
As the Miner neared completion he instructed another team of repair robots to design a multipurpose
model which would not have to be as large as a railway locomotive. He gave them the few cybernetics
books he could, together with some notes Courtland had made for further modifications. The following
progress reports were disappointing and later ones grew as unintelligible to him as Courtland's notes had
been. Ross kept them at it, partly in the hope that they would fulfill their instructions and partly to see if it
was possible for robots to think subjectively.
Then one day, as he was inspecting the digging vanes of the new Miner, the ground stood on its end
and he buried his face in damp, sooty earth. When he came to Sister was calling him "Mr. Ross" and
putting him to bed, and he had to take a ten-minute lecture on the stupidity of human beings who insisted
on working like robots, continuously and without sufficient rest, until their body mechanisms which
could not be repaired or replaced became dangerously overstrained. His loss of consciousness on the
surface, according to her diagnostic equipment, had been caused by mental and physical exhaustion and
a long complete rest was indicated.
And by complete rest, Sister meant exactly that. Since acquiring the trailer which had more than
quadrupled her data-storage capacity, Ward Sister 5B had become very difficult to outsmart. This time
"rest" did not mean a change to working in a horizontal position; he was not allowed to make notes or
study technical volumes.
She insisted on bringing him a selection of light, romantic fiction!
It had been almost a year since his supreme authority had been usurped like this, and it both angered
and frightened him. He had urgent work to do and the thought of lying in bed without something to
occupy his mind nearly threw him into a panic. The books he had been given only made things worse,
describing as they did backgrounds and situations which were no longer a part of the real world, and
were therefore extremely painful for him. There were no sun-drenched lagoons fringed with palm trees,
no smell of freshly cut grass, no parents worrying about the current infatuation of their daughter. Ross
would have given all he possessed or ever would possess to be even in the losing corner of an eternal
triangle.
He stopped reading those books, not because all the vistas they described had become one
smoke and ashes lit by a red sun but because they were about people. It was almost a pleasure when [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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