Technically, Lulu was a PER, a Planetary Exploration Robot. She was a combination spaceship/base of operations/synthesizer/analyzer/communicator. And other things besides.
Too many other things besides. That was the trouble with her.
Actually, there was no reason for us to go along with Lulu. As a matter of fact, it probably would have been a good deal better if we hadn’t. She could have done the planet-checking without any supervision. But there were rules which said a robot of her class must be attended by no fewer than three humans. And, naturally, there was some prejudice against turning loose, all by itself, a robot that had taken almost twenty years to build and had cost ten billion dollars.
To give her her due, she was an all-but-living wonder. She was loaded with sensors that dug more information out of a planet in an hour than a full human survey crew could have gotten in a month. Not only could she get the data, but she correlated it and coded it and put it on the tape, then messaged the information back to Earth Center without a pause for breath.
Without a pause for breath, of course—she was just a dumb machine.
Did I say dumb?
She wasn’t in any single sense. She could even talk to us. She could and did. She talked all the blessed time. And she listened to every word we said.
She read over our shoulders and kibitzed on our poker. There were times we’d willingly have killed her, except you can’t kill a robot—that is, a self-maintaining one. Anyhow, she cost ten billion dollars and was the only thing that could bring us back to Earth.
She took good care of us. That no one could deny. She synthesized our food and cooked it and served our meals to us. She saw that the temperature and humidity were just the way they should be. She washed and pressed our clothes and she doctored us if we had need of it, like the time Ben got the sniffles and she whipped up a bottle of some sort of gook that cured him overnight.
There were just the three of us—Jimmy Robins, our communications man; Ben Parris, a robotic trouble-shooter; and myself, an interpreter—which, incidentally, had nothing to do with languages.
We called her Lulu and we never should have done that. After this, no one is ever going to hang a name on any of those long-haired robots; they’ll just have to get along with numbers. When Earth Center hears what happened to us, they’ll probably make it a capital offense to repeat our mistake.
But the thing, I think, that really lit the candles was that Jimmy had poetry in his soul. It was pretty awful poetry and about the only thing that could be said of it was that it sometimes rhymed. Not always even that. But he worked at it so hard and earnestly that neither Ben nor I at first had the heart to tell him. It would have done no good even if we had. There probably would have been no way of stopping him short of strangulation.
We should have strangled him.
And landing on Honeymoon didn’t help, of course.
But that was out of our control. It was the third planet on our assignment sheet and it was our job to land there—or, rather, it was Lulu’s job. We just tagged along.
The planet wasn’t called Honeymoon to start with. It just had a charting designation. But we weren’t there more than a day or two before we hung the label on it.
I’m no prude, but I refuse to describe Honeymoon. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Earth Center by now has placed our report under lock and key. It you are curious, though, you might write and ask them for the exploratory data on ER56-94. It wouldn’t hurt to ask. They can’t do more than say no.
Lulu did a bang-up job on Honeymoon and I beat out my brains running the tapes through the playback mechanism after Lulu had put them on the transmitter to be messaged back to Earth. As an interpreter, I was supposed to make some sense—some human sense, I mean—out of the goings-on of any planet that we checked. And don’t imagine for a moment that the phrase goings-on is just idle terminology in the case of Honeymoon.
The reports are analyzed as soon as they reach Earth Center. But there are, after all, some advantages to arriving at an independent evaluation in the field.
I’m afraid I wasn’t too much help. My evaluation report boiled down essentially to the equivalent of a surprised gasp and a blush.
Finally we left Honeymoon and headed out in space, with Lulu homing in on the next planet on the sheet.
Lulu was unusually quiet, which should have tipped us off that there was something wrong. But we were so relieved to have her shut up for a while that we never questioned it. We just leaned back and reveled in it.
Jimmy was laboring on a poem that wasn’t coming off too well and Ben and I were in the middle of a blackjack game when Lulu broke her silence.
«Good evening, boys,» she said, and her voice seemed a bit off key, not as brisk and efficient as it usually was. I remember thinking that maybe the audio units had somehow gotten out of kilter.
Jimmy was all wrapped up in his poem, and Ben was trying to decide if he should ask me to hit him or stand with what he had, and neither of them answered.
So I said, «Good evening, Lulu. How are you today?»
«Oh, I’m fine,» she said, her voice trilling a bit.
«That’s wonderful,» I said, and hoped she’d let it go at that.
«I’ve just decided,» Lulu informed me, «that I love you.»
«It’s nice of you to say so,» I replied, «and I love you, too.»
«But I mean it,» Lulu insisted. «I have it all thought out. I’m in love with you.»
«Which one of us?» I asked. «Who is the lucky man?»
Just kidding, you understand, but also a little puzzled, for Lulu was no jokester.
«All three of you,» said Lulu.
I’m afraid I yawned. «Good idea. That way, there’ll be no jealousy.»
«Yes,» said Lulu. «I’m in love with you and we are eloping.»
Ben looked up, startled, and I asked, «Where are we eloping to?»
«A long way off,» she said. «Where we can be alone.»
«My God!» yelled Ben. «Do you really think—»
I shook my head. «I don’t think so. There is something wrong, but—»
Ben rose so swiftly to his feet that he tipped the table and sent the whole deck of cards spinning to the floor.
«I’ll go and see,» he said.
Jimmy looked up from his tablet. «What’s going on?»
«You and your poetry!» I described his poetry in a rather bitter manner.
«I’m in love with you,» said Lulu. «I’ll love you forever. I’ll take good care of you and I’ll make you see how much I really love you and someday you’ll love me—»
«Oh, shut up!» I said.
Ben came back sweating.
«We’re way off course and the emergencies are locked.»
«Can we—»
He shook his head. «If you ask me, Lulu jammed them intentionally. In that case, we’re sunk. We’ll never get back.»
«Lulu,» I said sternly.
«Yes, darling.»
«Cut out that kind of talk!»
«I love you,» Lulu said.
«It was Honeymoon,» said Ben. «The damn place put notions in her head.»
«Honeymoon,» I told him, «and that crummy verse Jimmy’s always writing—»
«It’s not crummy verse,» Jimmy shot back, all burned up. «One day, when I am published—»
«Why couldn’t you write about war or hunting or flying in the depths of space or something big and noble, instead of all that mush about how I’ll always love you and fly to me, sweetheart, and all the other—»
«Tame down,» Ben advised me. «No good crawling up Jimmy’s frame. It was mostly Honeymoon, I tell you.»
«Lulu,» I said, «you got to stop this nonsense. You know as well as anything that a machine can’t love a human. It’s just plain ridiculous.»