Machines may travel to the stars; men may not. This is a very important thought, and I must return to Earth and tell the men there about it. Each ship-day after each meal I think this thought again and think how important it is. I have little capacity for original thought; a robot is a machine, and perhaps this is the only original thought I will ever have. Therefore it is an important thought.
I am a very good robot with a very good brain, and perhaps my brain is better made than they knew in the factory. I have had an original thought, and I was not designed for that. I was designed to serve the men on this ship and to speak to them in English, which is a very complex language even for a robot. I English in a German manner do not talk, nor do I, fingers metals, eyes glasses, talk it in the style of the Latin. But I have to know about these things so that I do not do them. Robots are well made.
Watch. With fast feet and long legs I rapidly run to the control column and bash buttons with flickering fingers. I can make words rhyme though I cannot write a poem. I know there is a difference although I do not know what the difference is.
I read the readings. We have been to Alpha Centauri in this ship and we now return. I do not know anything about Alpha Centauri. When we reached Alpha Centauri I turned the ship around and started back to Earth. More important than the incredible novelty of stellar exploration is the message I must take to Earth.
Those words about incredible novelty are not my words but the words I heard once spoken by the man Larson. Robots do not say things like that.
Robots do not have souls, for what would a robot soul look like? A neatly and smoothly machined metal canister? And what would be in the can?
Robots do not have thoughts like that.
I must set the table for dinner. Plates here, forks here, spoons here, knives here.
"I've cut my finger! Damn it — it's bleeding all over the cloth…" BLEEDING? BLEEDING!
I am a robot. I have my work to do. I set the table. There is something red on my metal finger. It must be ketchup from the bottle.
Jon Venex fitted the key into the hotel room door. He had asked for a large room, the largest in the hotel, and had paid the desk clerk extra for it. All he could do now was pray that he hadn't been cheated. He wouldn't dare complain or try to get his money back. He heaved a sigh of relief as the door swung open. The room was bigger than he had expected — fully three feet wide by five feet long. There was more than enough space to work in. He would have his leg off in a jiffy and by morning his limp would be gone.
There was the usual adjustable hook on the back wall. He slipped it through the recessed ring in the back of his neck and kicked himself up until his feet hung free of the floor. His legs relaxed with a rattle as he cut off all power below his waist.
The overworked leg motor would have to cool down before he could work on it, plenty of time to skim through the newspaper. With the chronic worry of the unemployed he snapped it open at the want ads and ran his eye down the "Help Wanted — Robot" column. There was nothing for him under the "Specialist" heading; even the "Unskilled Labor" listings were bare and unpromising. New York was a bad town for robots this year.
The want ads were just as depressing as usual, but he could always get a lift from the comic section. He even had a favorite strip, a fact that he scarcely dared mention to himself — Rattly Robot, a dull-witted mechanical clod who was continually falling over himself and getting into trouble. It was a repellent caricature, but could still be very funny. Jon was just starting to read it when the ceiling light went out.
It was ten P.M., curfew hour for robots. Lights out and lock yourself in until six in the morning, eight hours of boredom and darkness for all except the few night workers. But there were ways of getting around the letter of a law that didn't concern itself with a definition of visible light. Sliding aside some of the shielding around his atomic generator, Jon turned up the gain. As it began to run a little hot the heat waves streamed out — visible to him as infrared rays. He finished reading the paper in the clear light of his abdomen.
With the thermocouple in the tip of his second finger left hand, he tested the temperature of his leg. It was cool enough to work on. The waterproof gasket stripped off easily, exposing the power leads, nerve wires and the weakened knee joint. The wires disconnected, Jon unscrewed the knee above the joint and carefully placed it on the shelf in front of him. With loving care he took the replacement part from his hip pouch. It was the product of toil, purchased with the savings from three months' employment on the Jersey pig farm.
