Voyage From Yesteryear

“Why don’t you piss off,” he growled at last.

“Why don’t you?”

For a moment Driscoll thought the machine had read his mind. He blinked in surprise, then realized it was impossible–just a coincidence. “How can I?” he said. ‘I’ve

got my orders.” “So have I.” “That’s different.” “How?”

“You don’t have to do this.”

“Do you?”

“Of course I do.”

“Why?”

Driscoll sighed irritably. This was no time for long debates. “You don’t understand,” he said.

“Don’t I?” the robot replied.

Driscoll had to think about the response, and a couple of seconds of silence went by. “It’s not the same,” he said.

“You’re just humoring kids.”

“What are you doing?”

Driscoll didn’t have a ready answer to that. Besides, he was too conscious of the desire for a cigarette to be philosophical. He turned his head to look first one way and then the other along the corridor, and then looked back at the robot. “Can you tell if any of our people are near here?”

“Yes, I can, and no, there aren’t. Why–getting fed up?”

“Would it worry anyone if I smoked?”

“It wouldn’t worry me if you burst into flames.” The robot chuckled raspily.

“How do you know there’s no one around?”

“The video ‘monitoring points around the ship are all activated at the moment, and I’m coupled into the net. I can see what’s going on everywhere. Go ahead. lt’s okay. The round cover on the wall next to you is an inlet to a trash incinerator. You can use it as an ashtray.”

Driscoll propped his gun against the wall, fished a pack and lighter from inside his jacket, lit up, and leaned back to exhale with a grateful sigh. The irritability that he had been feeling wafted away with the smoke. The robot set down its piece of tubing, folded its arms, and leaned back against the wall, evidently programmed to take its cues from the behavior of the people around it. Driscoll looked at it with a new curiosity. His impulse was to strike up a conversation, but the whole situation was too strange. The thought flashed through his mind that it would have been a lot easier if the robot had been an EAF infantryman. Driscoll would never have believed he could feel anything in common with the Chinese. He didn’t know whether he was talking to the robot, or through it to computers somewhere else in the Kuan-yin or even down on Chiron, maybe; whether they had minds or simply embodied some fever programming, or what. He had talked to Colman about machine intelligence once. Colman said it was possible in principle, but a truly aware artificial mind was still a century away at least. Surely the Chironians couldn’t have advanced that much. “What kind of a machine are you?” he asked, “I mean, can you think like a person? Do you know who you are?’

“Suppose I said I could. Would that tell you anything?’ Driscoll took another drag of his cigarette. “I guess not. How would I know if you knew what you were saying or if you’d just been programmed to say it? There’s no way of telling the difference.”

‘Then is there any difference?’

Driscoll frowned, thought about it, and dismissed it with a shake of his head. “This is kinda funny,” he said to

change the subject.”What is?”

“Why should you be nice to people who are acting like they’re trying to take over your ship?’

“Do you want to take over the ship?”

“Me? Hell no. What would I do with it?”

“Then there’s your answer.”

“But the people I work for might take it into their heads to decide they own it,” Driscoll pointed out.

“That’s up to them. If it pleases them to say so, why should we mind?”

“The people here ‘wouldn’t mind if our people started

telling them what to do?””Why should they?”

Driscoll couldn’t buy that. “You mean they’d be just as happy doing what our people told them to?” he said.

“I never said they’d do anything,” the robot replied. “I just said that people telling them wouldn’t bother them.”

Just then, two Chironian girls strolled around the corner from the narrow corridor. They looked fresh and pretty in loose blouses worn over snug-fitting slacks, and had lightweight stretch-boots of some silvery, lustrous material. One of them had brown, wavy hair with a reddish tint to it, and looked as if she were in her mid-thirties; the other was a blonde of perhaps twenty-two. For a split second, Driscoll felt an instinctive twinge of apprehension at the thought of looking ridiculous, but the girls showed no surprise. Instead they paused and looked at him not unpleasantly, but with a hint of reserve as if they wanted to smile but weren’t quite sure if they should.

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