I, Robot

Eight-year-old Gloria plays hide-and-seek with Robbie, her nursemaid robot. She then tells him the story of Cinderella; she gets to the part where the clock strikes midnight, but her mother interrupts with a call to dinner. Robbie brings her in; Mrs. Weston is curt with him as always, but he bears it calmly and departs.

Gloria’s father, George, relaxes with the Sunday paper. His wife interrupts him to complain about Robbie, “that terrible machine,” who is always at Gloria’s side. George says Robbie is doing his job properly and is a “darn sight cleverer than half my office staff” (7). Grace says Gloria should play with other children. She is also worried that something horribly wrong might happen; George retorts that the robot would become completely unusable long before it violated its prime directive, the First Law. Such an event is a “mathematical impossibility.”

Two nights later, Grace complains to George that the neighbors do not like Robbie and refuse to let their children come near it; meanwhile, New York now forbids robots on the street after dark. George insists that he has a right to keep a robot, but the argument continues for a week.

One day, George takes Gloria to a movie; when they return, there is a beautiful collie waiting on the porch, a gift for her. She is delighted and wants Robbie to see it, but her mother lies and says that Robbie simply got up and left, and they cannot find him.

Over the next month, Gloria becomes morose, refuses to play with the dog, and loses five pounds. Mrs. Watson finally gives back the dog and insists to George that they spend time in New York, where Gloria will find new friends and interests. Gloria perks up at this idea; she decides they are taking her there to search for Robbie. They board a flying taxi into the city, where they spend a month museum hopping, movie watching, and sightseeing.

At one museum, Gloria sees a sign for a talking robot and rushes off to find it. It is a large machine festooned with cables and gears. It is 1998, and teenager Susan Calvin sits before the robot, taking notes for her high-school physics class. Gloria asks the machine if it can help her find Robbie, her robot with a face. The concept of a humanoid robot so baffles the talking robot that it breaks down. Grace finds Gloria, who bursts into tears because she misses Robbie.

Hoping to convince their daughter that Robbie is merely a machine and not a person, they take her on a tour of the US Robots factory. In a room where robots build more robots, Gloria sees one that looks like Robbie. She rushes toward him, but a tractor threatens to run her over; Robbie jumps forward, plucks her from the tractor’s path, and saves her life.

Grace immediately accuses George of engineering the entire stunt. He admits it, and admits it was more dangerous than he expected, but Robbie saved her anyway. Grace finally relents: “I guess he can stay with us until he rusts” (23).

In a postscript, Dr. Calvin reminisces that, shortly after Gloria got her robot back, voiced robots became available, which so frightened people that governments banned most humanoid machines. US Robots then switched to producing robots for colonies on other worlds.

It is only hours since Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan arrived at the long-abandoned Sunside Mining Station on the planet Mercury, and already they are in trouble. The only robot they could bring, Speedy, out on the blazing-hot surface searching for selenium to energize the photo-banks that will power and cool the station, has gotten stuck walking in circles around a pool of the stuff.

The station has six gigantic robots that might retrieve Speedy, if they can be restarted. Powell inserts into each of the robot’s chests a small sphere of nuclear material. He addresses the first robot, learns that it can walk on the hot surface, and orders it to go out and retrieve Speedy. It refuses to move unless Powell rides atop it.

Powell remembers that, years earlier, robots were designed to do nothing unless attended by a human. They also reply to commands with “Yes, Master,” as part of a campaign by US Robots to convince the world that robots are safe. The two men realize that they can travel most of the distance toward Speedy via a network of underground tunnels, and then survive a short stint on the hot surface by wearing their insosuits, which will let them withstand the heat for about 25 minutes.

They don the suits, climb up to the seats high on the robots’ backs, and ride the machines through the airless tunnels. They emerge miles later at a broken-down exit station and continue on the surface. They locate Speedy, who runs toward them, singing, then darts away as if playing a game. Powell and Donovan realize that, somehow, Speedy’s mind has been altered so that he behaves as if drunk.

Thinking hard, Powell reviews the Three Laws of Robotics, which state that, firstly, a robot may not, through action or inaction, cause harm to a human; secondly, it must obey orders unless these harm humans; and finally, it must preserve itself unless this violates the first two laws. Speedy, an expensive machine, takes care to preserve himself, and the closer he gets to the selenium lake, the more he is conflicted about obeying commands and/or protecting his complex body. The selenium pool is part of a volcanic vent, and its carbon monoxide gas will combine with the iron in Speedy to create a carbonyl powder.

Powell remembers jars of oxalic acid back at the mining station; their robots can toss the jars beyond Speedy, where they will break, release the acid, which in the heat will decompose into gases, including carbon monoxide, and drive the robot toward them for retrieval.

They hurry to the station and bring back the jars. When Speedy passes by on one of his jogs around the lake, the big robots toss the jars of oxylic acid, which break and release the monoxide. Instead of regaining his sanity, though, the robot simply keeps his distance from the monoxide until it dissipates, then resumes his jogging.

Powell decides to put himself in danger to jolt Speedy back to reality. He rides his robot out toward Speedy, then dismounts and keeps walking. On the radio, he begs Speedy to retrieve him, but his own robot steps forward to help. Backing away and frantically ordering the giant robot to stop, Powell suddenly feels Speedy’s hands on him, the robot saying “Holy smokes, boss, what are you doing here? And what am I doing—I’m so confused—” (45). Faint from the heat, Powell orders Speedy to take him to the shadow of a nearby cliff.

Donovan later orders Speedy to retrieve selenium no matter what; this command works perfectly, and Speedy has the material back in minutes. The robot is embarrassed about his recent behavior until Powell tells him it was not his fault. Powell says to Donovan that, when they are finished restarting the mine, Dr. Calvin will send them to the space stations, where it will be “Two hundred seventy-three degrees Centigrade below zero. Won’t it be a pleasure?” (45)

The equations predict that the new QT robot series will perform flawlessly, but Powell, working on one at a space station, discovers that it is troubled by its own existence. The robot, nicknamed Cutie, is trying to reason out how it came to be, and he does not accept the simple answer that Powell and Donovan assembled him from shipped parts.

Cutie has reasoned out that the tiny lights outside the station are attached to a nearby “black material,” but Powell explains them as distant stars, surrounded by planets. He says Cutie is one of the most advanced robots designed by humans, and that his job is to run the space station so it can beam energy to Earth and the other planets.

When Cutie does not believe what Powell says, he departs. Hours later, after completing a routine installation, the robot returns and announces that he has figured things out. It is impossible, he believes, that creatures as weak, flabby, and “makeshift” as humans could have constructed him. Instead, it must have been the station’s energy converter, “the Master,” that created first humans, then robots, and finally himself.

Powell and Donovan are dumbstruck and irritated. Powell reminds Cutie that he must obey their orders or be dismantled. Donovan worries that the robot will cause trouble.

Not long after, with a solar storm approaching, Donovan goes downstairs to check on Cutie and the giant engines that send power to the planets. Donovan finds Cutie standing before a line of worker robots who intone, “There is no Master but the Master […] and QT-1 is his prophet” (54). Angry, Donovan insists that there is no Master—he spits at the engine—and that they take orders from him. Cutie disagrees and directs two robots to escort Donovan from the engine room.

Cutie has Powell and Donovan restricted to the officer’s room. The solar storm will disrupt the power beam and cause huge damage to Earth; Powell and Donovan’s futures are on the line. Cutie announces that, now that the robots have complete control of the station, the humans are no longer needed. He expects that the Master will soon dismantle them, but he likes them and promises in the meantime to give them food and other necessities.

Powell asks Cutie how he can explain the motions of the planets. Cutie is not interested in those workings of the Master. He has already figured everything out and does not need to concern himself with such questions: “Since when is the evidence of our senses any match for the clear light of rigid reason?” (58). The men reckon that Cutie will not anticipate the solar storm, and disaster will ensue.

The only way to convince Cutie he is wrong is to assemble another robot. Under Cutie’s watchful eyes, they put together a worker robot from shipped parts. The robot awakens, gets to its feet, and requests a work assignment. They send it outside. Cutie says the men did a good job of assembling the machine from parts, but those parts were created by the Master.

Desperate, Powell asks Cutie to read the books in the library, which will explain everything. Cutie says he did so and found them to be amusing works that the Master clearly wrote to keep the humans pacified. Powell realizes that Cutie only argues from his initial assumptions and has no interest in proof by evidence.

The storm hits the beam, but Cutie manages to keep it perfectly aligned, better than anyone has done before. The men congratulate him, but he scoffs at their stories about energy beams and Earth. He simply did what the Master designed him to do.

Powell realizes that Cutie’s cult makes no difference: The robot manages the station perfectly either way. When the men’s relief ship arrives and they prepare to depart, Cutie decides they are about to undergo dissolution. He is sad but unwilling to disabuse the humans of their quaintly reassuring beliefs.

The relief man asks about the station’s QT robot. Powell simply says, “The robot is pretty good […] I don’t think you’ll have to bother much with the controls” (67).

Powell and Donovan have tested the new DV-5 robots—one master robot and six helpers, as if a hand with six fingers—and everything works perfectly, except that, when the men aren’t watching, no ore gets mined. The master robot, Dave, communicates with his helper robots via a positronic field, a poorly understood phenomenon. Dave is perturbed: He cannot recall the day’s activity, except that the mine cars are empty.

Powell puts Dave through a series of standard tests that the robot passes admirably. To cook a rabbit—that is, to solve this puzzle—they first must catch the rabbit in the act. Powell decides to install a visiplate that monitors the robots so he can watch continuously as the machines work. Quickly they discover that the robots, instead of mining, are marching in close formation, up and down the tunnels, changing patterns elegantly like it is a performance.

The men don suits and sneak up on the bots; when Dave sees them, the helper robots depart. Dave, still bewildered, tells them he again cannot remember any of his recent activities. Powell interviews one of the helper-robot “fingers,” who reports that, during difficult situations, an order is given, then countered with a second order to march in formation.

They watch the visiplate for eight days, but nothing unusual happens. Donovan suggests that the marching only happens during emergencies, and that they should create their own crisis and see what happens. They put on suits, hike down the tunnels, and try to set off a charge, but the rumble causes a cave-in around them, and they are trapped.

Through a small hole, Powell fires a weapon at one of the helper robots, disabling it, and Dave suddenly comes online, conscious again. Removing one of Dave’s six “fingers” reduces the stress of decision-making on his brain. The brain circuit involved will be simple to modify. Dave’s marching robots were what Dave did when his mind misfired and he started “twiddling his fingers” (90).

In a postscript, the interviewer asks Dr. Calvin if she ever had trouble herself with a robot. She recalls one named Herbie, the only mind-reading robot ever produced.

(The story of Herbie is told in Chapter 5.)