"It’s too late for that, Mr. Manners."
Slowly and reverently, they placed the body on the work table of a huge milling machine that stood in the exact center of the factory main floor.
Elsewhere in the plant, a safety valve in the lubricating oil system was being bolted down. When that was done, the pressure in the system began to rise.
Near the loading door, a lubricating oil pipe burst. Another, on the other side of the building, split lengthwise a few seconds later, sending a shower of oil over everything in the vicinity. Near the front office, a stream of it was running across the floor, and at the rear of the building, in the storage area, one of the materials handlers had just finished cutting a pipe that led to the main oil tank. In fifteen minutes there was free oil in every corner of the shop.
All the materials handlers were now assembled around the milling machine, like mourners at a funeral. In a sense, they were. In another sense, they were taking part in something different, a ceremony that originated, and is said to have died, in a land far distant from the Lex Industries plant.
One of the machines approached Lexington’s body, and placed his hands on his chest.
Abruptly Lex said: "You’d better go now."
Peter jumped; he had been standing paralyzed for what seemed a long time. There was a movement beside him—a materials handler, holding out a sheaf of papers. Lex said: "These have to go to Mr. Lexington’s lawyer. The name is on them."
Clutching the papers for a hold on sanity, Peter cried, "You can’t do this! He didn’t build you just so you could—"
Two materials handlers picked him up with steely gentleness and carried him out.
"Good-bye, Mr. Manners," said the sweet, soft voice, and was silent.
He stood shaken while the thin jets of smoke became a column over the plain building, while the fire engines raced down and strung their hoses—too late. It was an act of suttee; the widow joining her husband in his pyre—being his pyre. Only when with a great crash the roof fell in did Peter remember the papers in his hand.
"Last Will and Testament," said one, and the name of the beneficiary was Peter’s own. "Certificate of Adoption," said another, and it was a legal document making Peter old man Lexington’s adopted son.
Peter Manners stood watching the hoses of the firemen hiss against what was left of Lex and her husband.
He had got the job.
(1959)
HELEN O’LOY
Lester Del Rey
Ramon Felipe San Juan Mario Silvio Enrico Smith Heathcourt-Brace Sierra y Alvarez-del Rey y de los Verdes was born in Minnesota in 1915. By the time of his death in New York in 1993 he was better known as Lester Del Rey. (His real name was Leonard Knapp: his claim that his father was a poor sharecropper of part-Spanish extraction was made up.) He wrote and edited for many magazines, and joined his fourth wife Judy-Lynn Del Rey at Ballantine Books to edit its science fiction: the Del Rey Books imprint is named after him. The Del Reys discovered Terry Brooks, Stephen Donaldson and David Eddings and fostered new readers for the likes of Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl. They weren’t especially radical in their tastes, but they knew entertainment value when they saw it. If you want to know how science fiction became such a pop-cultural behemoth – well, now you know.
I am an old man now, but I can still see Helen as Dave unpacked her, and still hear him gasp as he looked her over.
"Man, isn’t she a beauty?"
She was beautiful, a dream in spun plastics and metals, something Keats might have seen dimly when he wrote his sonnet. If Helen of Troy had looked like that the Greeks must have been pikers when they launched only a thousand ships; at least, that’s what I told Dave.
"Helen of Troy, eh?" He looked at her tag. "At least it beats this thing—K2W88. Helen… Mmmm… Helen of Alloy."
"Not much swing to that, Dave. Too many unstressed syllables in the middle. How about Helen O’Loy?"
"Helen O’Loy she is, Phil." And that’s how it began—one part beauty, one part dream, one part science; add a stereo broadcast, stir mechanically, and the result is chaos.
Dave and I hadn’t gone to college together, but when I came to Messina to practice medicine I found him downstairs in a little robot repair shop. After that we began to pal around, and when I started going with one twin he found the other equally attractive, so we made it a foursome.
When our business grew better, we rented a house near the rocket field—noisy but cheap, and the rockets discouraged apartment-building. We liked room enough to stretch ourselves. I suppose if we hadn’t quarreled with them we’d have married the twins in time. But Dave wanted to look over the latest Venus rocket attempt when his twin wanted to see a display stereo starring Larry Ainslee, and they were both stubborn. From then on we forgot the girls and spent our evenings at home.
But it wasn’t until "Lena" put vanilla on our steak instead of salt that we got off on the subject of emotions and robots. While Dave was dissecting Lena to find the trouble, we naturally mulled over the future of the mechs. He was sure that the robots would beat men someday, and I couldn’t see it.
"Look here, Dave," I argued. "You know Lena doesn’t think—not really. When those wires crossed, she could have corrected herself. But she didn’t bother; she followed the mechanical impulse. A man might have reached for the vanilla, but when he saw it in his hand, he’d have stopped. Lena has sense enough, but she has no emotions, no consciousness of self."
"All right, that’s the big trouble with the mechs now. But we’ll get around it, put in some mechanical emotions or something." He screwed Lena’s head back on, turned on her juice. "Go back to work, Lena, it’s nineteen o’clock."
Now, I specialized in endocrinology and related subjects. I wasn’t exactly a psychologist, but I did understand the glands, secretions, hormones, and miscellanies that are the physical causes of emotions. It took medical science three hundred years to find out how and why they worked, and I couldn’t see men duplicating them mechanically in much less time.
I brought home books and papers to prove it, and Dave quoted the invention of memory coils and veritoid eyes. During that year we swapped knowledge until Dave knew the whole theory of endocrinology and I could have made Lena from memory. The more we talked, the less sure I grew about the impossibility of homo mechanensis as the perfect type.
Poor Lena. Her cuproberyl body spent half its time in scattered pieces. Our first attempts were successful only in getting her to serve fried brushes for breakfast and wash the dishes in oleo oil. Then one day she cooked a perfect dinner with six wires crossed, and Dave was in ecstasy.
He worked all night on her wiring, put in a new coil, and taught her a fresh set of words. And the next day she flew into a tantrum and swore vigorously at us when we told her she wasn’t doing her work right.
"It’s a lie," she yelled, shaking a suction brush. "You’re all liars. If you so-and-so’s would leave me whole long enough, I might get something done around the place."
When we had calmed her temper and got her back to work, Dave ushered me into the study. "Not taking any chances with Lena," he explained. "We’ll have to cut out that adrenal pack and restore her to normalcy. But we’ve got to get a better robot. A housemaid mech isn’t complex enough."
"How about Dillard’s new utility models? They seem to combine everything in one."
"Exactly. Even so, we’ll need a special one built to order, with a full range of memory coils. And out of respect to old Lena, let’s get a female case for its works."