The Door Into Summer

“Will that be all?”

“Wait a minute.”

Apparently I had said the wrong thing, for the automaton reached inside itself and pulled out a stiff plastic sheet and handed it to me. The sheet remained fastened to him by a slim steel chain. I looked at it and found printed on it:

VOICE CODE-Eager Beaver Model XVJI-a

IMPORTANT NOTICE!! This service automaton DOES NOT understand human speech. it has no understanding at all, being merely a machine. But for your convenience it has been designed to respond to a list of spoken orders. It will ignore anything else said in its presence, or (if any phrase triggers it incompletely or such that a circuit dilemma is created) it will offer this instruction sheet. Please read it carefully.

Thank you,

Aladdin Autoengineering Corporation Manufacturers of EAGER BEAVER, WILL! WA W, DRAFTING DAN, BUILDER BILL, GREEN THUMB, and NANNY. Custom Designers and Consultants in Automation Problems

“At Your Service!”

The motto appeared on their trade-mark showing Aladdin rubbing his lamp and a genie appearing.

Below this was a long list of simple orders-STOP, GO, YES, NO, SLOWER, FASTER, COME HERE, FETCH A NURSE, etc. Then there was a shorter list of tasks common in hospitals, such as back rubs, and including some that I had never heard of. The list closed abruptly with the statement: “Routines 87 through 242 may be ordered only by hospital staff members and the order phrases are therefore not listed here.”

I had not voice-coded the first Flexible Frank; you had to punch buttons on his control board. It was not because I had not thought of it, but because the analyzer and telephone exchange for the purpose would have weighed and bulked and cost more than all the rest of Frank, Sr., net. I decided that I would have to learn some new wrinkles in miniaturization and simplification before I would be ready to practice engineering here. But I was anxious to get started on it, as I could see from Eager Beaver that it was going to be more fun than ever-lots of new possibilities. Engineering is the art of the practical and depends more on the total state of the art than it does on the individual engineer. When railroading time comes you can railroad-but not before. Look at poor Professor Langley, breaking his heart on a flying machine that should have flown-he had put the necessary genius in it-but he was just a few years too early to enjoy the benefit of collateral art he needed and did not have. Or take the great Leonardo da Vinci, so far out of his time that his most brilliant concepts were utterly unbuildable.

I was going to have fun here-I mean “now.”

I handed back the instruction card, then got out of bed and looked for the data plate. I had halfway expected to see “Hired Girl, Inc.” at the bottom of the notice and I wondered if “Aladdin” was a daughter corporation of the Mannix group. The data plate did not tell me much other than model, serial number, factory, and such, but it did list the patents, about forty of them-.and the earliest, I was very interested to see, was in 1970 . . . almost certainly based on my original model and drawings.

I found a pencil and memo pad on the table and jotted down the number of that first patent, but my interest was purely intellectual. Even if it had been stolen from me (I was sure it had been), it had expired in 1987-unless they had changed the patent laws-and only those granted later than 1983 would still be valid. But I wanted to know.

A light glowed on the automaton and he announced: “I am being called. May I leave?”

“Huh? Sure. Run along.” It started to reach for the phrase list; I hastily said, “Go!”

“Thank you. Good-by.” It detoured around me.

“Thank you.”

“You are welcome.”

Whoever had dictated the gadget’s sound responses had a very pleasant baritone voice.

I got back into bed and ate the breakfast I had let get cold-only it turned out not to be cold. Breakfast four-minus was about enough for a medium-sized bird, but I found that it was enough, even though I had been very hungry. I suppose my stomach had shrunk. It wasn’t until I had finished that I remembered that this was the first food I had eaten in a generation. I noticed it then because they had included a menu-what I had taken for bacon was listed as “grilled yeast strips, country style.”

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