We didn’t do anything for several days but just mope around.
As far as I could see, there was nothing we could do. I ran through my mind all the things a man might do to get a woman sore at him.
Most women would get burned up at gambling. But the only reason they got sore at that was because it was a threat to their security. Here that threat could not possibly exist. Lulu was entirely self-sufficient. We were no breadwinners.
Most women would get sore at excessive drinking. Security again. And, besides, we had not a thing to drink.
Some women raised hell if a man stayed away from home. We had no place to go.
All women would resent another woman. And here there were no women—no matter what Lulu thought she was.
There was no way, it seemed, to get Lulu sore at us.
And arguing with her simply did no good.
I lay in bed and ran through all the possibilities, going over them again and again, trying to find a chink of hope in one of them. By reciting and recounting them, I might suddenly happen on one that I’d never thought of, and that might be the one that would do the job.
And even as I turned these things over in my head, I knew there was something wrong with the way I had been thinking. I knew there was some illogic in the way I was tackling the problem—that somehow I was going at it tail-end to.
I lay there and thought about it and I mulled it considerably and, all at once, I had it.
I was approaching the problem as if Lulu were a woman, and when you thought about it, that didn’t make much sense. For Lulu was no woman, but just a robot.
The problem was: How do you make a robot sore?
The untidiness business had upset her, but it had just outraged her sense of rightness; it was something she could overlook and live with. The trouble with it was that it wasn’t basic.
And what would be basic with a robot—with any machine, for that matter?
What would a machine value? What would it idealize?
Order?
No, we’d tried that one and it hadn’t worked.
Sanity?
Of course.
What else?
Productiveness? Usefulness?
I tossed insanity around a bit, but it was too hard to figure out. How in the name of common sense would a man go about pretending that he was insane—especially in a limited space inside an all-knowing intelligent machine?
But just the same, I lay there and dreamed up all kinds of insanities. If carried out, they might have fooled people, but not a robot.
With a robot, you had to get down to basics and what, I wondered, was the fundamental of insanity? Perhaps the true horror of insanity, I told myself, would become apparent to a robot only when it interfered with usefulness.
And that was it!
I turned it around and around and looked at it from every angle.
It was airtight.
Even to start with, we hadn’t been much use. We’d just come along because Earth Center had rules about sending Lulu out alone. But we represented a certain potential usefulness.
We did things. We read books and wrote terrible poetry and played cards and argued. There wasn’t much of the time we just sat around. That’s a trick you learn in space—keep busy doing something, no matter what it is, no matter how piddling or purposeless.
In the morning, after breakfast, when Ben wanted to play cards, I said no, I didn’t want to play. I sat down on the floor with my back against the wall; I didn’t even bother to sit in a chair. I didn’t smoke, for smoking was doing something and I was determined to be as utterly inactive as a living man could manage. I didn’t intend to do a blessed thing except eat and sleep and sit.
Ben prowled around some and tried to get Jimmy to play a hand or two, but Jimmy wasn’t much for cards and, anyhow, he was busy with a poem.
So Ben came over and sat on the floor beside me.
«Want a smoke?» he asked, offering me his tobacco pouch.
I shook my head.
«What’s the matter? You haven’t had your after-breakfast smoke.»
«What’s the use?» I said.
He tried to talk to me and I wouldn’t talk, so he got up and paced around some more and finally came back and sat down beside me again.
«What’s the trouble with you two?» Lulu troubledly wanted to know.
«Why aren’t you doing something?»
«Don’t feel like doing anything,» I told her. «Too much bother to be doing something all the time.»
She berated us a bit and I didn’t dare look at Ben, but I felt sure that he began to see what I was up to.
After a while, Lulu left us alone and the two of us just sat there, lazier than hillbillies on a Sunday afternoon.
Jimmy kept on with his poem. There was nothing we could do about him.
But Lulu called his attention to us when we dragged ourselves to lunch. She was just a little sharper than she had been earlier and she called us lazy, which we surely were, and wondered about our health and made us step into the diagnosis booth, which reported we were fine, and that got her more burned up than ever.
She gave us a masterly chewing out and listed all the things there were for us to occupy our time. So when lunch was over, Ben and I went back and sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall. This time, Jimmy joined us.
Try sitting still for days on end, doing absolutely nothing. At first it’s uncomfortable, then it’s torture, and finally it gets to be almost intolerable.
I don’t know what the others did, but I made up complex mathematical problems and tried to solve them. I started mental chess game after chess game, but was never able to hold one in my mind beyond a dozen moves. I went clean back to childhood and tried to recreate, in sequence, everything I had ever done or experienced. I delved into strange areas of the imagination and hung onto them desperately to string them out and kill all the time I could.
I even composed some poetry and, if I do say so myself, it was better than that junk of Jimmy’s.
I think Lulu must have guessed what we were doing, must have known that our attitude was deliberate, but for once her cold robotic judgment was outweighed by her sense of outrage that there could exist such useless hulks as us.
She pleaded with us, she cajoled us, she lectured us—for almost five days hand-running, she never shut her yap. She tried to shame us. She told us how worthless and low-down and no-account we were and she used adjectives I didn’t think she knew.
She gave us pep talks.
She told us of her love in prose poems that made Jimmy’s sound almost restrained.
She appealed to our manhood and the honor of humanity.
She threatened to heave us out in space.
We just sat there.
We didn’t do a thing.
Mostly we didn’t even answer. We didn’t try to defend ourselves. At times we agreed with all she said of us and that, I believe, was most infuriating of all to her.
She got cold and distant. Not sore. Not angry. Just icy.
Finally she quit talking.
We sat, sweating it out.
Now came the hard part. We couldn’t talk, so we couldn’t try to figure out together what was going on.
We had to keep on doing nothing. Had to, for it would have spoiled whatever advantage we might have to do anything else.
The days dragged on and nothing happened. Lulu didn’t speak to us. She fed us, she washed the dishes, she laundered, she made up the bunks. She took care of us as she always had, but she did it without a word.
She sure was fuming.
A dozen crazy thoughts crossed my mind and I worried them to tatters.
Maybe Lulu was a woman. Maybe a woman’s brain was somehow welded into that great hulk of intelligent machinery. After all, none of us knew the full details of Lulu’s structure.