The Project Gutenberg eBook of One for the Robot—Two for the Same, by Rog Phillips

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Title: One for the Robot—Two for the Same

Author: Rog Phillips

Release Date: April 7, 2021 [EBook #65013]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ***

ONE FOR THE ROBOT—TWO FOR THE SAME

By ROG PHILLIPS

The ingredients were simple: one man for

one robot. But the results were something else!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy

October 1950

Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that

the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

I took an instinctive disliking to him from the very first. I don't know exactly what caused it. His appearance? He wore a well tailored gray plaid suit draped on what I would have sworn to be nothing but a skeleton. Blue-veined skin fitted over the exposed parts, such as his long slender hands, folded together on his lap, the stretch of bare leg below the cuffs of his perfectly pressed trousers and above his carelessly drooped sox, his turkey-like neck with its large Adam's apple threatened at any moment to wobble up and down while a gobble-gobble-gobble burst forth.

His face? It made me think of a broken handled cup inverted on a saucer, the edge of the saucer being his jaw line. If you were to wrap the cup and saucer in tightly stretched dull white plastic or rubber sheeting and paint eyes in the proper places you would have it down pat.

Maybe it was the eyes that made me dislike him. They were faded blue, but not the kind you would call characterless. It would be more accurate to call them emotionless. Not emotionless in a cold way, but in a dead way.

On either side of his head were cartilages shaped like ears, and over the top of his head faded and lifeless grey hair parted with artificial neatness.

Those were my impressions, though the hair was real enough, and I might have seen him through different eyes if I had been in a better mood.

He wore his suit like it didn't belong to him, or if it did he very seldom had one on. I looked closely at him, sitting near me on the park bench half turned toward where I was slouched, trying to imagine what type of clothes would be natural to him; all I could conjure up was a white frock and rubber gloves and a white face mask.

He had asked me, "Are you employed?", and I had swallowed an impulse to snap at him long enough to size him up.

So now I had sized him up. I didn't like anything about him. But a civil answer to his question might lead to the price of a badly needed meal. I forced a polite grin.

"Not at the moment," I said.

"I surmised as much," he said quickly, smirking. His voice had the quality of a high school chemistry teacher talking to an audience of sulphuric acid carboys.

I turned away, looking out across the expanse of lawn and trees and flower beds of the park to where the double decker busses bobbed along like water bugs above the carpet of cars flowing along the inner drive. The impatient honking of tired motorists on their way home after their day's work mingled with the contented quacking of ducks on the pond at my back.

"Would you like to earn some money?"

"Huh?" I said, jerking my attention back to him.

His smile was the kind a professor would give to a pupil who had just awakened from a sound sleep.

"I said, would you like to earn some money?"

"Uh, uh," I said. "I'm hungry. I'd mow your lawn on an empty stomach and get maybe fifty cents. That's one hamburger and two cups of coffee. I'd still be hungry."

Instead of answering, he reached one of his blue-veined hands inside his coat and drew out a new looking black leather billfold. I watched him while he pulled out a thick sheaf of currency.

He carefully counted out ten twenty dollar bills, dropping them one by one in a neat pile on the park bench. He stuck the rest back in his billfold and took out a white glossy card, dropping it on the pile of bills.

Then, smirking, he stood up and turned his back on me, slowly walking down the path that wound up onto a bridge over the duck pond, without looking back.

I waited until he was out of sight, then picked up the card and read the name printed on it in raised green lettering: Dr. Leopold Moriss.

I had a hamburger and two cups of coffee in a place where they'd never seen me before. It would have been too hard to explain a twenty dollar bill. Afterward I rented a room and soaked some of the accumulated dirt out of my pores.

Next morning I bought a new suit and the things that go with it. By noon I was wearing a hundred of that two hundred dollars. Most of the rest was in my pocket.

Everything was fine, except that Dr. Leopold Moriss' smirking bloodless lips and dead eyes, framed by his skin-covered jaw kept dancing before me, taunting me, daring me to use that money without eventually showing up to earn it.

I began to dislike him even more intensely. Instead of having lunch I went into a cocktail lounge and had a few Bourbons straight. When their warmth began to soak in Dr. Leopold's smirking face faded.

It came back, though, and with it came his classroom voice.

"I don't know who you are," it taunted. "If you never show up I can't find you, can't do anything about it." Its tones were laughing, knowing, goading. I drank. The face faded, the voice became inaudible.

Three days later, and God knows how many quarts, I took that drink every alcoholic dreads—the one you can't keep down.

I awoke a long time later and opened my eyes. Something vaguely like the desk clerk was hovering over me. A loud voice was pounding unmercifully against my tortured ears.

"Come on, get up and get out of here, you filthy bum," it was shouting. "We've got no rooms for the likes of you in this hotel."

I shook my head to clear away the fog over my eyes. The indignant face of a maid was staring at me.

"You ought to be ashamed," she said shrilly, "vomiting on the rug! Where do you think you are, in the park?"

"Get a wet towel and bring him to," the desk clerk ordered....

I reached the precarious footing of the sidewalk with a feeling that I had been rushed too much, and with the afternoon sun ejecting fiery red shafts of searing pain into my brain through my punctured eye-balls.

People were staring at me as they passed. In an attempt to appear casual I stuck my hands in my pockets. The fingers of my right hand encountered something stiff, with sharp corners.

Swaying to maintain my balance, and casually whistling snatches of some nameless tune, I pulled the thing out and held it up where I could focus my eyes on it. It was Dr. Leopold Moriss' card.

I managed an uncertain about face and thumbed my nose at the entrance to the hotel; only it was my ear, and my thumb bumped it so painfully that the pleasure I had anticipated at my insult was destroyed.

When my consciousness settled into enough stability to be aware of outside impressions once more, I was in a taxi, bumping along a cobblestone street. There were no springs on the cab, and the back of the driver's head sneered at me and dared me to open the door and jump to my death.

I wondered where I was being taken. Then my eyes caught the white rectangle still held in my fingers. The doctor's card. So I was on my way at last.

On my way? I was there! The taxi had swerved abruptly to the curb and stopped. I slid forward off the seat. When the driver came around and opened the door I managed to get up on my knees. That was all.

He opened the door and stood there patiently. I studied the sidewalk and tried to figure out how to make it from the position I was in. I gave up, and appealed to him with my eyes.

"Here we go," he said good naturedly, lifting me out and balancing me carefully on my feet. "The fare is a buck eighty-five."

"Help me up the steps," I said, stalling. I was trying to remember if I had any money left. I had a strong suspicion I hadn't.

His hands held me up and pushed me across the walk and up the steps while I fumbled in a fruitless search of my pockets.

At the top of the steps my fingers encountered the cool smoothness of a piece of paper in my coat pocket. I pulled it out and held it up to the driver. He steadied me against the frame of the door. Then he counted out change, closing my fingers over the money.

The sound of the taxi pulling away from the curb let me know I was on my own. It was a diminishing yellow spot far down the street.

The door frame was white set in brick. The door was stained oak. I reached out to lift the knocker and saw I had a fist full of money. I reached out with the other hand. It had the card in it. I hooked the little finger under the knocker and lifted it, letting it fall. It emitted a feeble tap.

After a while I saw the door moving inward. Pausing in my futile stabbing for my pockets, I lifted my eyes slowly, beginning with the shapely hips encased in spotlessly clean watermelon red, past the slim waist with its black belt, pausing at the firm lift of the breast, jumping to the smooth neck, and finally coming to the face with its smooth contours, red lips, blue eyes lit with questioning curiosity, and iridescent waves of spun brown hair.

Not daring to talk, I mutely held out the card.

Her graceful curves of eyebrows lifted just a trifle as she looked at the card. Then her eyes surveyed me again, quickly.

"Won't you please come in?" she asked, stepping backward invitingly.

I went past her with an attempt at dignity. The door closed behind me. Her feet tapped pertly on the foyer floor as she went past me and opened another door.

"Wait in here Mr. Stevens," she said, her voice rich in velvet overtones. "I'll tell my father you're here."

I ducked my head at her in acquiescence and went past her into the room, a luxurious library.

The door closed softly as I dropped into the soft enfoldment of a pillow-lined barrel chair. Abruptly I sat up, staring at the blank face of the closed door, my eyes large and round.

She had called me by name!

I was still staring at the door when it jerked open. Dr. Leopold Moriss strode in closing it after him, his steps and motions jerky and swift.

"Well, well, well," he said. "So you came after all."

"How did your daughter know my name?" I asked.

His shoulders arched back in a gesture of amusement.

"She should know," he said. "I've done nothing but talk about January Stevens this and January Stevens that for the past two months."

"Two months?" I echoed dumbly.

"The detective agency I put on the job of finding you did an almost impossible job," he went on, in high good humor. "They followed you from the time you moved out of your bachelor apartment three years ago, to Los Angeles, Seattle, through Kansas, and right back here to Chicago again. When they found you they came and got me, and pointed you out to me in the park."

"I don't get it," I said, bewildered. "That kind of a search would cost plenty. After paying that kind of dough I can understand your willingness to throw two hundred after it in a—childish gesture. But why? Since you know me, you must know I was kicked out of the Bentley Research Laboratories because I refused to account for five thousand dollars of research funds."

"I know more than that," Dr. Leopold Moriss said, crisp sureness in his tones.

"What do you mean?" I asked woodenly.

"Let's just say for the present, January," he said, "that I know why you refused to account for those funds."

"Let's just say goodbye," I said, staggering to my feet. I started for the door.

"Sit down, you drunken bum," he said.

"Why you—" I snarled, turning toward him sober with rage, my fingers constricting.

He sat there, grinning at me, undisturbed by my threatening posture. As if to flaunt his unconcern in my face he took out a long cigar and lit it nonchalantly.

I stared into his lifeless eyes through the screen of freshly generated blue smoke and sat down slowly.

He looked back at me, his face expressionless behind the cigar. My rage subsided gradually.

"That's better," he said finally. From that moment I hated him.

Then the door opened. The girl in the watermelon red dress entered, wheeling a tray crowded with white sandwiches, green pickles and steaming black coffee.

I scowled at the dream from heaven pushing the service cart, a friendly smile on her red lips, feeling a sense of defeat, of being crowded into a corner.

"No thanks," I said harshly. "My stomach couldn't hold even the coffee right now." I jerked my eyes away from hers, past Dr. Leopold Moriss, to the curtains on the windows.

"Get him a big glass of half tomato juice half grapefruit juice," the doctor said. "He can hold that down. It'll make him feel better."

I continued to hold my eyes on the curtains, but I knew that I was licked. Whipped. Beaten into submission. When I heard the pert footsteps return and felt the cold roundness of the glass against my hand, I turned and looked up into her smiling, sympathetic eyes.

"Thanks," I said gruffly.

The cold liquid stayed down, soothing the raw walls of my stomach. I half closed my eyes, experiencing the first pleasant body sensation since the warm glow of that first drink three or four days before.

I watched shapely legs below the swishing dress as they went across the room to a desk. When they returned I looked up to see a cigarette between fingernails the same shade of red as the dress. I followed the slender fingers to the slim wrist, up the graceful, slightly tanned arm to the short sleeve, and from there my eyes jumped to her smiling red lips.

"I'm Paula, January," she said.

"Oh yes, January," Dr. Moriss' voice broke in. "This is my daughter, Paula. Her mother died many years ago. There's just the two of us, besides the handyman."

I took the cigarette from her fingers without taking my eyes away from her face. She snapped a lighter and lit it the same way. I inhaled deeply, letting the smoke out slowly.

"Glad to know you, Paula," I murmured.

"I think you'd better leave us now, Paula," Dr. Moriss broke in in his school teacher voice. "January Stevens and I have a lot to discuss."

"We can talk later, if at all," I turned on him angrily. "Two or three days from now, after my stomach will hold food down."

"We'll talk now," he said with maddening calmness. "Three days from now you'll have had time to think. You'll refuse to talk. Just like you let yourself be branded a thief rather than talk before."

I reached out and picked up a cup of coffee from the tray. With slow deliberation I poured the black liquid into the empty glass that had held my tomato and grapefruit juice. There was a large plate glass mirror on the wall across the room. I threw the empty cup at it without rising from my chair. The mirror shattered.

Dr. Moriss looked back and forth from me to the broken mirror, like a spectator at a tennis match, the same kind of interest portrayed on his face.

"Why did you do that?" Paula asked, her eyes flashing fire.

"He did it because he likes you, Paula," the doctor's maddeningly unperturbed voice said. "If he didn't like you he would have thrown it at me." He puffed mockingly at his cigar, his eyes squinting through the smoke.

"You are expensive to know, January," Paula purred. The sound of her heels on the bare floor near the door jerked my eyes from Dr. Moriss' face.

"Don't leave," I said hastily.

"Why?" Paula asked, turning, her hand still on the knob.

"Because—" her father began.

"Shut up!" I snapped. "I'll tell her myself. Because if you do I might kill your father before I walk out of here."

Dr. Moriss nodded agreement, puffing contentedly, his features mocking me through the haze.

"He's afraid, Paula," he said abruptly. "It's the same fear that made him destroy his research and all the bills for materials and his notes, and let them smirch his name." He lifted on his elbows and leaned toward me. "The same fear that made you an alcoholic bum, January. But I'm going to get under that fear and find out what you discovered."

"You think so?" I sneered, my voice sounding reedy to my ears.

"Yes," he said. "You see, I've got to. I know everything you know—except what made you afraid."

"You think so?" I repeated monotonously.

"Yes," he matched my monotony. "Everything except that. I'll prove it to you. I know how you built the synthetic brain. I know how you built the robot body. I even know how you charged the brain. I even know that that Boston Bull Terrier pet you had at your feet while they questioned you, and which followed you out the door when you left, disgraced, was not a living creature!"

I lifted my hands and looked at them. They were trembling so much their outlines were blurred.

"Show him to his room," Dr. Leopold Moriss said suddenly. "Keep a generous supply of grapefruit and tomato juice near him."

"You heard what the man said." Paula soothed gently, tugging at the shoulder of my coat.

At the door I turned ponderously. Dr. Moriss was sitting there, his eyes on me, puffing at his cigar. Dully I turned away, following Paula into the hall. The door closed....

The bed was soft. The kind you sink down into, surrounded by billowing piles of shiny pink satin, fluffy orchid wool, white sheets, and an atmosphere of apple blossoms, with your head resting on down softer and warmer than your mother's breast.

The pajamas were new and my size, obviously bought in anticipation of my showing up.

I stood teetering in the middle of the bedroom, looking at them, the sound of water running into a tub coming from the adjoining bathroom. Tears forced themselves into my eyes. Hot scalding tears.

Paula stood less than three feet from me, an eager expression on her face, like a Spaniel wiggling in expectation of voiced approval.

I turned and staggered blindly toward the door. I wanted to get out. I felt strangled. I couldn't breathe, couldn't possibly get another breath of air until I got out of this house and felt my feet on God's pavement again. I fumbled for the knob, groaning in frantic desperation to escape.

My fingers settled around the knob. I jerked the door open and started out into the hall.

The placid face of a man twice my size, radiating peace and good will, blocked the doorway. I blinked at him blearily, backing away a step or two. He blinked back like a simpleton trying to understand geometry.

"Oh, January," Paula said behind me. "This is Carl Friedman, our Jack-of-all-work."

"Pleased to meet you, January," the giant said, sounding like an uncouth character concentrating on not saying pleeze t'meetcha.

My snarl was purely animal as I slammed the door on him and turned back into the room. I stood there, swaying and holding my head for a minute.

"All right," I gave up. "Get out. I'll take a nice warm bath and bury myself in apple blossoms. Then you can bring me some grapefruit juice and radiate at me like a harvest moon. Only get this straight. I hate your old man. I hate him more every minute."

"That's all right," Paula said, going to the door and opening it. "I hate him too—sometimes."

Carl backed away far enough for her to get out. She flashed me a sympathetic smile. The door closed. I was alone. With the smell of apple blossoms. And my hate.

I took off my clothes and climbed into the tub. The temperature was just right. I sighed in reluctant contentment, splashing around a little to help the warmth soak in.

"What made you afraid, January?" Dr. Moriss' voice came from the doorway.

I catapulted to my feet, water cascading off my body over the edge of the tub onto the floor. Glaring at him I carefully stepped out of the tub, my hands working in choking motions.

He watched me with that air of detached interest he would have used in observing the motions of a monkey in a zoo. I glared at him another moment, then turned my back on him, drying myself with the thick turkish towel.

"What made you afraid, January?" It was patient repetition, insistent and unemotional. A school teacher repeating a question to a stubborn pupil.

I ignored it. When I finished drying and turned to go out, he was gone.

There was a pitcher of bright red liquid with ice cubes floating in it on the table by the bed, and a glass of it already poured sitting beside it. I splashed it down my throat with loud swallows, struggled into the pajamas, and slid under the covers. It seemed only an instant later—

"What made you afraid, January?" When I opened my eyes the hand shaking my shoulder stopped. "What made you afraid, January?"

I stared without answering. Finally I closed my eyes to blot out that serene disinterested, hateful face. When I opened them again it was gone. I cursed with the vocabulary of the scum from New York to San Francisco. His psychological game was obvious, now. He hoped to wear me down, drive me to the point where I would tell him what I would never tell anyone, as the price of peace. He'd wake me again as soon as I fell asleep. He'd wake me again and again and again. And again....

"What made you afraid, January?"

"Go 'way," I murmured drowsily.

"What made you afraid, January? What made you afraid?"

No one but an alcoholic could possibly know how I suffered. With every cell in my body crying out in agony the only relief was the unconsciousness of sleep. Sleep, that welcomed me only to toss me back into the hell of consciousness and that mad, unemotionally reiterated question.

"What made you afraid, January?"

I grew to hate every syllable, every unvarying intonation and inflection. I began to force myself to stay awake each time, scheming ways to murder Dr. Leopold Moriss.

I dreamed of him with his throat cut, going down, puffing unconcernedly on his cigar while his throat spurted out his life's blood. I dreamed of him falling to the sidewalk outside my window.

"What made you afraid, January?"

I dreamed I was raining blow after blow on his battered head while he sagged slowly to the floor, his face that of an unemotional, disinterested automaton.

"What made you afraid, January?"

I sucked in my breath. A moment later I heard the soft closing of the door. I opened my eyes. The room was empty.

Slipping cautiously out of bed I took the pitcher of tomato juice to the bathroom and emptied it in the wash basin, then returned to bed with it, placing it under my pillows in such a way that I could bring it out and strike without warning.

"What made you afraid, January?"

I opened my eyes abruptly. The face above me bent closer suddenly, noting my new reaction.

My hand was around the handle of the heavy glass pitcher. I drew in a deep breath. With convulsive movement I struck, only to feel the pitcher caught and pulled from my fingers.

"I noticed it was gone," the doctor said calmly. "I'll get it filled again for you."

The door closed softly. I sobbed in angry frustration, in hopeless protest. In murderous hate, for I knew that Dr. Leopold Moriss' every move and every word were coldly calculated, directed toward one goal. To break me down.

"What made you afraid, January?"

My mind skidded through vast spaces to jar into its cradle of pain. I opened my eyes. There was a glass of red fluid hovering in front of my eyes, the doctor's fingers around it. I brought the back of my hand against where it had been. It had bobbed up so that I missed. The action half turned me on my face.

I stayed that way. There was the careful sound of the glass being set on the table, the sound of the door closing. With a deep sigh I turned on my back again.

There must be a way out. There had to be a way out. All I had to do was think about it, if I could think through the torture of my body. One thing I knew: I would never tell him what he wanted to know. Not to escape a thousand years of torture.

I sat up and drank the glass of tomato juice. The empty glass slipped out of my fingers to the floor, landing with a dull thud on the rug. Getting out of bed, I went into the bathroom and washed my face in cold water.

There had to be a way out. Maybe I could tell him a lie that would satisfy him. But what lie would satisfy him? What, other than the truth, could satisfy him?

I looked in the bathroom mirror at my unshaven, tortured features, my bloodshot eyes, my rats-nest of uncombed hair. And slowly I saw a smile crease my lips, distorting my face. I knew a lie he would accept as the truth—if I played it right.

I had to play it right. Just as there was only one truth, there was only one lie he would accept as the truth. If I failed to make him accept it I was licked.

How does an actor play his part? He lives it, believes it. I had to do that. I must keep repeating the lie in my mind, believing it, repeating it. Then I must break down in the way my torturer expected me to.

I snapped off the light in the bathroom and struggled back to bed.

When I awoke, blinding white sunlight was bursting into the room from between half closed slats in the Venetian blinds, sending searing pain through my dehydrated eyes into my aching brain. A window was half open behind the blinds. A bird was singing just outside the window, its song a shrill, jarring discordance to my tortured eardrums.

I looked blankly around the room, feeling that something was missing. The sight of the pitcher with its red liquid, and the glass beside it, brought back memory. What was missing was Dr. Leopold Moriss standing over me asking his eternal question.

I cursed in a low mumble, hating him for even that. He had kept up his torture until I figured out something, and had ended it before I could put my plan into action. He was a dancing, taunting opponent who struck painful blows with ease, and danced out of reach when I found a way to fight back.

"Shut up!" I shouted at the bird, and felt a small sense of triumph when it obeyed.

Getting out of bed, I went to the door and opened it cautiously. There was no one outside. From somewhere in the house came the all too familiar sound of Dr. Moriss' voice. It was interrupted by Paula's, raised angrily. I left my door open, sneaking along the hall to the head of the stairs, until I could make out what was being said.

"... stop torturing him," Paula's voice came, angry and insistent.

"It's the only way, Paula," the doctor's voice said, as unperturbed as ever, even in the face of his daughter's obvious anger. "A fear that silences a man, makes him remain silent while his employers brand him a thief and blackball him from his profession, that drives him down the road to alcoholism, can't be broken down with kindness nor anything less than complete destruction of his ability to fight."

"It isn't human!" Paula's voice shot back. "If you keep it up I'll—I'll hate you as much as January does, even though you are my father."

"I won't have to keep it up much longer," her father replied, and for the first time I heard a note of human emotion in his tones. "When he breaks down and gets the load off his mind he'll get over the past few years and be himself again. I think you're half falling for him. It wouldn't be any good being married to an alcoholic who is incurable because he's hiding the thing that made him an alcoholic to begin with."

His next words shocked their way into my startled thoughts.

"But my motive isn't that humanitarian and you know it," he said, returning to his school-teacherish, lecturing voice. "I've repeated January's experiments. Out in my laboratory I have the completed and tested robot body exactly like my own, all ready for the transfer of my mind. I could go out there right this minute, and come in again in less than half an hour in that immortal mechanical body. But I don't dare to until I find out what made January afraid."

My turbulent thoughts settled into a state of wondering confusion. If he had gone that far why didn't he know what had made me afraid? Could it be—? Suddenly I knew! He hadn't discovered that one last refinement. That was it! I felt like laughing. But my attention was jerked back to the conversation below.

"I don't care," Paula's voice said doggedly. "I don't care if you never finish. It's inhuman anyway—to discard the body you were born in and transfer the electronic pattern of your mind and consciousness to a mass of non-living colloid dielectric perched inside the head of a robot made of stainless steel bones, plastic muscles, and copper nerves. You've got to stop torturing January."

"I won't have to after a couple more hours," Dr. Moriss said. "I'm going to wake him up and get him to drink some of that tomato juice with a little seasoning in it designed to make him sicker than he is. A few glasses of that and pounding my repeated question at him a few more times should do it."

I stole back to my room and grinned at the tomato juice. Did you ever put a jigsaw together and get a flash of insight that made the pieces fall into place suddenly, completing the puzzle almost by itself? That pitcher of tomato juice was the last piece. Everything fit, including that.

I would be able to tell my lie, and make Dr. Leopold Moriss believe it. Then—I would help him. My wild laughter burst into my ears. By an effort of will I shut it off and climbed back into bed, simulating sleep, my ears tuned for the first sound of the doctor's coming.

The door opened. After a moment of suspense during which I kept my breathing slow and deep it closed softly. Padded footsteps came across the rug.

"January!" The doctor's voice was impersonal and insistent. His hand was gripped on my shoulder, shaking me. "Why were you afraid, January?"

I kept my eyes closed for a moment, mumbling protests. Inside I was laughing to myself, gloatingly. His voice was no longer torture. It was the senseless repetition of a parrot.

Suddenly it angered me. I opened my eyes, glaring, a corner of my mind thrilling to the beautiful way my emotions were giving authenticity to my acting.

"Why are you afraid, January?" the doctor repeated, his calm face hovering above me.

I shoved his hand away, sneering at him, and sat up. The movement sent stabs of pain through my head. I gripped my head in my hands, groaning.

"Drink this," Dr. Moriss ordered.

I looked up. He was holding the glass of tomato juice toward me, the tomato juice containing something to make me sicker. I felt the sneering smile distort the sensitive skin of my face as I reached out deliberately and took the glass from him. I looked into his dead eyes while I lifted it to my lips. Then I drank it.

I set the empty glass down on the stand.

"Get out!" I rasped. "Leave me alone."

"What made you afraid, January?"

Suddenly nausea gripped me. Blindly I struggled out of bed to the bathroom. As I went I felt a bitter laughter welling up silently in my mind.

"What made you afraid, January?"

I was retching. That was genuine. I clamped my hands over my ears. That was acting, because Dr. Leopold Moriss had lost his power to torture me.

"What made you afraid, January?"

With an animal snarl I straightened and turned on him, my eyes blinded with tears produced by the retching, my chin wet with vomit. He caught my flailing arms easily, folding them over my chest and pinning me against the wall.

"What made you afraid, January?"

I began to cry. It was an act, but my condition made anything resembling crying come out authentic.

I felt his hands drop from my arms. Still blubbering as though completely broken, I slid slowly to the tile floor, letting my head drop.

"All right, I'll tell you," I said weakly. A chill shudder shook my body. I buried my face in my arms resting on my knees.

"No, January!" It was Paula's voice. My head jerked upright. She was standing in the doorway, the living image of anger. The doctor had turned toward her, irritation showing on his face. "Dad," she said, her eyes flashing blue fire at him, "if you don't stop I'll get the police."

Alarm coursed through me. She was endangering my plan. I dropped my head back in the cradle of my arms to hide my expression.

"Paula!" the doctor was saying in exasperation. "Leave us—"

"I was afraid," I cut in, making my voice sound utterly listless and defeated, "of what I knew I would do unless I stopped my experiments and destroyed them.

"I had transferred the mind of a dog into a robot duplicate of its own body. The dog was a pet. It didn't know it was no longer in its own body, the body that had died when the mind pattern in the brain was lifted out and transplanted into the colloidal dielectric brain. It didn't know what had happened, so although it was often puzzled by things, it didn't mind.

"But I knew what the next step would be!" I lifted my head and stared at the doctor, avoiding Paula's eyes. They were standing there, holding their breath, waiting for my next words. I let my head drop into concealment in my arms again.

"The next step would be a robot body for myself," I said mechanically, tonelessly. "I would build it and enter it. And I would never be able to re-enter my normal body, because it would die in the transfer. I would be immortal—but at an awful price. The price of normal life, loving, being loved, and someday getting married and having children—and a mother for those children.

"And yet I knew that I would build that robot body and transfer my mind to it—if I kept on. So I destroyed my work, my reputation, my ability to earn the kind of money it would take to do what I didn't have the will not to do, if I could."

I looked up cautiously, my face lax, my eyes half veiled, to see how they were taking what I was saying. Paula's face was a mask of pity and sympathy. Her father's was one of fixed attention and belief. I dropped my head again and muffled my voice.

"Pepper—my dog—not comprehending what was wrong with him, grew more and more bewildered. He got run over a month later. It couldn't kill him, but it wrecked his robot frame. I smashed his colloid brain and buried him to put his immortal mind out of its bewildering confused—existence."

"But—" It was Dr. Moriss' voice, full of growing, pleased conviction. "Then there was nothing you discovered other than what I've already discovered and tried?"

"No," I lied. And he believed me.

The hours passed swiftly, with long gaps during which I slept, unconscious of the conflict of hunger and alcohol starvation being fought in every cell of my body. The sunlight through the lattice-work of the Venetian blinds became a pleasant and welcome warmth. The song of the persistent bird outside the window grew joyful, and something I missed when it didn't come for a long time.

Paula sat on the edge of the bed and washed my face and ran an electric razor over it while I basked in the pleasant rays from her deep blue eyes. She fed me tall glasses of tomato juice spiked only with grapefruit juice, and with cool, clinking ice cubes that caressed my fevered lips....

"You're looking much better this morning, January," she said, leaning back and inspecting her handiwork with the shaver. "Feel up to trying a scrambled egg fried in butter, with golden brown toast and nice crisp bacon?"

"And make the coffee black—and hot," I said.

"Yes, sir," she said in mock subservience.

She had her breakfast with me. The fluffy scrambled eggs and warm toast began to nestle comfortably in my stomach, and Paula nestled comfortably on the edge of the bed sipping her coffee, her hair radiant flows of rich browns and mahoganies capturing and transmitting the sunlight from the window.

Her red lips parted to reveal gleaming white teeth when she laughed intimately, happily, at my running humor. I relaxed, my mind at ease, Dr. Leopold Moriss momentarily forgotten....

She displayed my suit proudly on its coat hanger, freshly cleaned and pressed, the stack of four new shirts still in their cellophane wrappers. I watched her retreat from the room with something inside me, my heart perhaps, hurting.

I stood in front of the bathroom mirror putting a knot in the tie. It had been a long time since I'd had a choice of ties, ten of them. I inspected it in the glass. Then the realization that it wasn't a new tie rose to consciousness. It was Dr. Moriss'.

I tore it off, ripping the collar of the shirt in my anger. I stood there, panting with emotion. My purpose was back! Slowly, like the flames of a charcoal fire fanned by a gust of wind, the fire of hate in my eyes died down, leaving only the glowing coals, which would be unnoticed behind the mask of a smile.

I practiced that smile while I put on another shirt and knotted another of Dr. Leopold Moriss' ties about my neck. I had played enough poker in penny ante dives up and down the west coast during my wanderings to perfect the lazy unrevealing poker smile.

There was a knock. Paula's voice sounded. "Are you dressed?"

"Come in!" I called.

Her eyes literally bathed me with admiration. She let the door slam behind her without hearing it.

"That's right!" I said. "You've never seen me before when I looked like a decent human being."

"Oh, I have too," she retorted.

"Do I look anything like you thought I would?"

"That's just it," she said. "You look exactly like I dr— hoped you would." Then, like she was snapping out of a dream, "Dad wants you downstairs. That is, he said to tell you he would like you to drop into the study if you want to, but also to tell you you don't have to. You're free to come and go as you please. He said expressly to tell you that." She stopped breathlessly, the dreamy stare coming back into her eyes.

"Why, sure," I said. "I guess I won't mind dropping into his study—too much." I grinned. "Though I'd much rather ignore him and go out someplace with you."

"That's a date," she said softly, wrinkling her nose at me, "after you see dad."

We tripped lightly down the stairs hand in hand as if we had done it hundreds of times before.

"That the door?" I asked, looking at the one she had ushered me through when I had first arrived.

"Yes," she said.

I gently disengaged her hand and tapped her cheek with my fingers. Suddenly I took her chin between my fingers and tilted her face up. She looked gravely into my eyes. I bent to kiss her. Her red lips curved to meet mine....

"You stay out here," I said gruffly.

I turned to the door. My hand touched it, hesitated, then twisted the knob. On my face was the smile I had practiced.

Dr. Leopold Moriss was sitting as I had left him so long ago, puffing contentedly on a long black cigar, his dead eyes staring expressionlessly through the haze and streamers of blue smoke. I stepped inside, closing the door behind me. Its click seemed to be the spring that brought him to life.

"Well, January," he said like a school teacher welcoming a child who has been down with the mumps, "you're looking better." He nodded. "Much better. I hope you feel better, too." He shot me a questioning look.

"Yes sir," I said.

"Nothing like getting rid of something," he said. "Getting it off your chest so you can forget it—but that isn't what I wanted to see you about." He leaned forward suddenly. "Is that lipstick?" he asked.

"No, tomato juice," I said dryly. He chuckled while I wiped it off.

"I'd like you to go over my research with me," he said, reverting abruptly to his school teacher voice. "You're the only living man who knows anything about it other than me. You'd like that?" He looked almost pleading.

"All right," I said, shrugging indifferently.

"Not exactly keen about it?" he said, chuckling again. "After what you told me I don't blame you. But it'll be good therapy, and with Paula in the background I don't believe you'll have any trouble resisting the temptation to gain immortality in a non-living robot."

"Maybe you're right," I said.

"With me it's different," he went on enthusiastically, paying little attention to my comment. "I'm getting on in years. My wife has been gone long enough so that she's just a memory. Paula is grown up. There's nothing to keep me from making the jump. Of course, I get a rather peculiar feeling every time I think of actually taking this step, and waking up to find my original body lying there on the other table, dead. But it doesn't alter the milk to pour it into another bottle. And from my experiments with dogs there doesn't seem to be any sensation accompanying the process of transfer. As a matter of fact, with one dog I teased him with a juicy bone up to the instant of transfer. The first thing he did in the robot body was look around for the bone. Rapid as the flicker of a film."

"Yes, I know," I said dryly. "I found the same thing. No consciousness of transfer or any other sensation. With the scanner-transferer it takes place in less than a ten thousandth of a second. Every electrical pattern of the brain complex is lifted out as an infinitesimal segment and transplanted into the colloid dielectric complex without alteration."

"Like a television eye scans a scene, in a way," the doctor added. "But let's go out to my laboratory. I'll show you my body."

He laughed at the remark as he stood up and went to the door.

My hands were trembling visibly. I hid them in my pockets, gripping them into tight fists to stop their trembling. I followed him into the hall, holding onto my appearance of calm detachment with every ounce of my will. The doctor had not yet found out what had made me afraid. But he would. He'd find out when I was ready for him to.

"We're going out to the lab, Paula," Dr. Moriss was saying.

"Oh," Paula said, disappointment in her tone.

"Wait a minute, Dr. Moriss," I said. "Paula and I are going out for a walk first."

"That can wait a half hour," he said. "I just want to show you—my body." He chuckled.

"It can't wait," I said, "and even if it could I want a breath of fresh air before going into that lab."

"He's been sick for three days without being out," Paula said. "Stop being so selfish, dad."

"That's unkind, Paula," Dr. Moriss said, "but go ahead." He turned back into his study.

We walked along sidewalks hand in hand, with kids playing catch and hop-skip as hazards, and shapeless, harassed women struggling home with overloaded shopping bags.

We heard the dying wail of sirens and saw a crowd at a corner, and joined it to watch the callous internes lift a screaming woman onto a stretcher while she repeated, "Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God," over and over, and a white faced teenage boy kept repeating to an unsympathetic but silent police officer, "I didn't see her. I didn't see her. I didn't see her."

We had coffee and hamburgers in a smelly, ten stool hole-in-the-wall served by a jovial, potbellied cook-and-waiter who sweated olive oil profusely over a dirty griddle, while his cracked jukebox blared out music from cracked records—and looked at each other and laughed when we couldn't talk above the noise.

On impulse we climbed aboard a streetcar just as it was starting up, and grinned at the conductor when he yelled above the noise, "Watch it. Wanta get killed?" And sat very close together while the ancient monument to a past civilization thundered on, on what promised to be its last trip.

And we got off and pretended we were lost. We went into pawnshops and looked at second hand diamond rings, whose fires were dimmed by the grimy sweat of the pawnbroker's fingers and the secret knowledge they held within their secret carbon heart of broken romances and marriages, and poverty that had led their former owners here to exchange a dream that had shattered for a week's rent in a fourth rate hotel.

We bought a newspaper from a blind man, and had a coke in a corner drugstore while we read it and worried about the world situation, and a gaunt thing with brown bags under her eyes told the patient druggist all her symptoms in a whining monotone.

We looked in windows at fur coats marked down from four hundred and ninety-nine ninety-five. We bought a sack of popcorn in an automatic vending machine that cheated on the amount, and fought over it until it skidded out of our hands onto the sidewalk. We had our picture taken together in a twenty-five cent booth, pretending to each other it wasn't so we could sit with our heads together.

When our feet grew reluctant we looked about us and discovered we were back home, and wondered with real surprise how that had happened, and how our feet had known without us knowing.

I half turned to retreat, feeling a panic and a sense of having left something undone or unsaid that should have been said. Paula was looking at me, her eyes troubled, and suddenly I knew she felt the same way, only there was a basic difference. She was holding back her feelings about her father shuffling off his mortal body for an imperishable one of non-living matter. And I? The thought fled fearfully into my subconscious. There could be no turning back, whatever the price.

I took Paula's hand, patted the side of her face until her smile brightened again. Hand in hand we slowly walked toward the house, our eyes on the drawn curtains of the study window behind which waited a man whom I had grown to hate even more than I loved his daughter.

The laboratory was a two story building in back of the house, reached by a narrow sidewalk in the grudging space the builders had left between the two. I paused at the door after the doctor had opened it and gone in. Paula was still at the kitchen door where we had left her, her eyes round with unvoiced protest and mute appeal.

"Are you coming?" the doctor's voice protested my delay.

"O.K.," I said, stepping inside and closing the door.

Our feet rang hollowly on the wood floor as we crossed a conventional chemical laboratory to steps leading upward. The doctor's face was flushed with excitement and eagerness. His footsteps were light on the stairs, light and swift. My own were heavy and slow behind him, each hollow blow the beat of a devil drum in some voodoo jungle as my thoughts rushed back over the lifetime I had crowded into the past three years, to prepare me for what I would see.

"There it is," the doctor said as I reached the last step and paused.

I saw the trim panel of the transfer machine, the two leather upholstered tables. But they were no more than background impressions as my eyes fixed on the form lying full length on one of those two tables.

If Dr. Leopold Moriss had not been standing beside me I would have sworn it was him—or his corpse. Unconsciously my feet carried me forward and to one side where I could look down at that face of carefully molded synthetic rubber, tinted the exact shade of the doctor's living flesh, the open unblinking eyes with irises the same pale blue. And blue-veined hands that seemed to have died just the moment before.

"Color photography," the doctor was explaining. "The sensitized chemicals impregnated in the rubberoid, and the color image of my own flesh imprinted in it from a projector."

"As authentic as a counterfeit ten dollar bill," I wisecracked tonelessly. "Even to the clothes and shoes!"

"Exactly," Dr. Moriss said, laughing gleefully. "Take a look at the insides of the transferer and see if it looks familiar to you. I built it so the circuits are all exposed and easy to follow. Different colored wires."

I stepped around the duplicate of the doctor on the table, something inside me crawling frantically, and unfastened the back of the cabinet, exposing the circuit. Skills that had not dimmed and would never dim took control of my sight and traced each element of the circuit, comparing it with that which I myself had built—and destroyed....

The drops of solder that held wires in contact glistened dully—silver blobs dotting orderly geometrical designs composed of blue, yellow, green, orange, and too many other colors to count. Little cylinders that were condensers and resistors and tubes and coils.

My mind clicked off one detail after another. It was my circuit. I might have built it myself. But I had destroyed everything except what I carried in my mind. Dr. Leopold Moriss had repeated my discoveries step by step. Reason had followed the path I had destroyed, just as surely as the instinct of an insect makes it live the life pattern of its ancestors down to the finest detail.

"Does it check?" The doctor asked.

I looked at one particular blob of solder connecting a blue coated wire with a red one, and nodded.

"Yes," I said carefully.

"How about the hoods?" he asked.

I quickly examined the hoods, heavy things on maneuverable frames. They could almost have been cast from the same mold.

"They're O.K.," I said.

"Then I want to get it over with now," Dr. Moriss said.

"What!" I exclaimed.

"Yes. Now," he said. "The sooner the better. Paula isn't expecting me to do it this way."

I took a deep breath. My eyes studied the straps to be buckled around the robot in such a way that it could only release itself when it became activated by a calm intelligence, and the straps fastened into the vacant table that could be buckled and unbuckled the same way, that would keep the body from throwing itself around violently under the wild play of neutral forces set loose as the mind was plucked from the living brain.

"All right," I said, my voice sounding queer and remote to me. "Lie down and I'll strap you up."

As he climbed onto the vacant table my eyes searched the room frantically for something to cut the connection between that blue and that red wire.

"I'm ready," the doctor said, relaxing on the table with no more apparent concern than a man getting into a barber chair for a shave.

I buckled the straps with fumbling fingers, my thoughts racing. There was not a tool in sight anywhere. Nothing that could cut that wire.

"We forgot to warm up the tubes!" Dr. Moriss exclaimed.

"You aren't as calm as you pretend to be," I chided, hiding the thrill of triumph that rose in me. "As soon as I finish buckling the straps on you and your future receptacle I'll warm up the circuit."

"Thanks, January," he said with relief.

I finished with him and went to the robot, the robot so soon to be activated with the doctor's intelligence. I buckled the straps about its inert form exactly the way I had done with the living.

"Why don't you turn the current on before doing that?" Dr. Moriss asked.

I smiled at him slowly. "Plenty of time," I said.

"What do you mean by that?" he asked. His eyes were suddenly sharp with suspicion.

"Oh, nothing," I said, shrugging. "A minute won't make a big difference will it?"

He studied me closely. My heart was beating against my ribs.

"I've changed my mind," he said abruptly, his fingers fumbling with the buckle that would release his arms. "I'll wait until later to do this."

"No you don't!" I said, my calm deserting me. I leaped around the tables. His fingers were trying desperately to open the buckle that would free his arms. I slapped them away and stood over him.

"This is for those hours of torture," I said, leering into his blank eyes. My fist crashed against the side of his jaw just in front of the ear. He sank back, limp and unconscious.

It was better this way. I was glad it had happened. Now I could be sure of what I did. I crossed the room to a bench and searched swiftly through drawers of tools until I found a wire cutter. In a moment I had clipped the blue coated wire where it was soldered to the red one. Quickly, with sure movements, I fastened the cover back on the case, threw the switch that sent electric current glowing through the cold filaments of tubes, and returned the wire clipper to its drawer. And by the time I had adjusted the two hoods into position over Dr. Leopold Moriss' head and that of the waiting robot form, the meters on the instrument panel showed that everything was ready for the final moment. The moment I had been looking forward to, working toward; when I could touch the switch that would begin the final act, completing my revenge.

My breathing was the only sound in the room as I stood for a moment surveying everything to be sure. I grinned into the doctor's closed eyes. It was too bad now that he wasn't conscious so that I could watch his fear and horror, so that he could know before I jabbed down on that switch what he had tortured me to discover.

All the hate that had built up in my soul went into that final act. I heard the faint click as the switch snapped over to contact. A horrible scream welled from the throat of the unconscious man as I ran to the stairs and stumbled down them.

A wild laughter filled his eyes as he adjusted the controls and turned to see the figures stiffen under the jolting impact of the high electrical charge....

I waited in the chemical lab, knowing that Paula would be watching the door of the building, and not wanting to face her until it was all finished. I was waiting for the sound of footsteps over my head. Slow steps that would cross and come down the stairs.

And finally I heard them. I watched the stairs and saw first the legs and then the rest of the man that was descending. It was the robot, controlled by the mind of Dr. Leopold Moriss. There was no hostility in its expression as its eyes settled on me. Rather, there was grave respect. It stopped in front of me, its movements so natural and smooth that no one could have guessed it was a non-living robot. I returned its studied gaze in silence. Then it went on past me to the door. I watched without moving as the door closed.

"Dad!" It was Paula's voice. "Tell January to come in here. Lunch's ready. Dad!" Her voice was full of sudden alarm. "Dad!" Then, "January!" Her feet pounded on the back steps and the narrow sidewalk outside. The knob rattled as she fumbled, then the door burst open and she stood framed there, her eyes wide with fear and horror and a half realization of what her mind was not conditioned to quite accept.

She saw me, and with a sob of relief she was across the room and in my arms. I held her head against the cradle of my neck, waiting.

And then it came.

Over our heads sounded a faint scuffle of a shoe, a hesitant footstep, another, and then another, dragging, stumbling.

Paula's trembling body stiffened at the first sound. She looked up at me in numb unbelief, then wonder, seeing in my expression, my eyes, the culmination of my revenge. She started to pull away, to run toward the stairs.

"No!" I said softly. "Wait. He deserved this."

The defiance left her. She stood beside me while we both waited.

Feet came into view. Legs. Hands sliding weakly along the wall for support. A face bearing the shocked realization that another mind existed in the world identical with itself. A realization of the fallacy of believing that by destroying oneself at the instant of creation of that other mind it would in some absolute way become oneself.

As I looked at him standing there on the stairs the hate that I had nurtured disappeared. In its place was pity and sympathy.

I was up the stairs catching him before he could fall, lifting him, surprised at his lightness. Paula, her lips trembling on a hesitant worried smile, was opening doors ahead of me as I carried her father into the house and laid him on his bed.

And as Paula and I undressed him to treat the bruises caused by the straps, in my mind rose a picture of the other Dr. Leopold Moriss, the robot, hurrying along some street and, perhaps, already making plans to search for—the other January Stevens.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of One for the Robot—Two for the Same, by Rog Phillips

ONE FOR THE ROBOT—TWO FOR THE SAME

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