Timmy hung on to the branch with one hand and leaned down, tiny brown and white feather in the other. PAPPI’s camera eye slid out on a slender stalk for about a foot, then retracted.
“A very fine specimen. But look at the small white growths on the tree trunk, a form of fungus, division name Mycota. The spores have been carried up there accidentally by a bird, perhaps by the Passer domesticus whose feather you are holding. “
“Huh?”
“A house sparrow.”
“Neat!”
“There are about fifty thousand fungi, or saprophytic and parasitic plantlike organisms, that have been identified and described. But there are probably a hundred thousand more. They include mushrooms, mildews, molds, yeasts-”
Timmy frowned. The thing was starting to sound like his schoolteacher.
“I can tell you about lichens too, if you want me to.”
“Not hardly!” Timmy said.
“Well, then,” the robot said. “Would you like to play horse?”
“How do I do that?”
“You can ride around on me. I am very strongly built.”
So Timmy rode around the yard on top of PAPPI, held in place by two of the long metal arms, shouting “Giddyap!” and “Whoa!” until his throat was scratchy. It was almost possible to forget PAPPI was a robot and imagine he was really riding a stallion with flowing mane across a Western mesa, just like the programs on the Tri-D that Karin frowned at him watching.
By the time the sky got dark and Karin came home again, Timmy knew he’d discovered a real friend, one who never grew bored with playing, never thought any question too stupid to answer, never criticized or blamed.
But it wasn’t the same thing at all as having a real father.
With PAPPI’s help, Timmy did better in school that year. PAPPI was programmed to learn too, right alongside Timmy, so that made a contest out of it-one PAPPI usually won. But since the robot never boasted of its success, Timmy really didn’t mind. And four mechanical hands meant the robot was a real wizard at assembling model spaceships and shuffling playing cards or juggling balls.
From time to time, Karin brought new programs home for PAPPI as they developed them at the lab. Timmy watched when she took the robot’s “head” apart and inserted them. Sometimes he held the tiny tools she used to work on the positronic brain. Afterward, PAPPI could do a lot more things to entertain Timmy, like playing the banjo, or telling jokes and drawing silly pictures to make him laugh.
Karin rarely brought anyone home for supper, not even people from U.S. Robots. But once, a lady she shared the office with came to Timmy’s house.
“It doesn’t look a bit like a mechanical man,” Timmy complained.
He and this fierce-looking lady hunkered down on the rug to look at PAPPI, who had just slithered to a halt in front of them. The robot’s wheels scuffed the polished floor as it braked.
“It doesn’t need to,” Karin’s officemate replied. “Form should follow function.”
“At least it could’ve hag legs, not wheels!” Timmy said, fingering one of the scratches in the wood.
“This was meant to be a utility robot. Your mother modified its brain, not its body.”
Karin had told him that Dr. Calvin didn’t build the robots quite like she did; Dr. Calvin was a robopsychologist, whatever that meant. In the kitchen, Karin, in an uncharacteristic display of domesticity, clattered dishes into the dishwasher.
Timmy frowned. “PAPPI thinks it’s more than that!”
“But you don’t.”
“How can you tell?”
Dr. Calvin didn’t answer. She was about as old as his mother, Timmy judged, and neither of them wore lipstick or smiled as much as Joey’s mother did.
Karin bustled back into the living room with a tray of pastries she’d bought at the store. “ Anyone ready for dessert?”
“I do not think Timmy should have any more sugar in his diet today,” PAPPI said. “By my count, since getting up this morning he has consumed-”
“Oh, shut up!” Timmy said.
“Well,” Karin began, “if you think-”
“One of these days, you ‘re going to have trouble with that one,” Dr. Calvin said thoughtfully.
For a moment, Timmy thought she was speaking of him. But her eyes were on the robot squatting between them on the rug.
“I’m being very careful, Susan,” Karin said. “ And Timmy knows not to take the robot outside.”
“I can’t tell my friends about PAPPI, either,” Timmy grumbled. “When Joey comes over to play I have to put PAPPI in the closet. And Joey’s my best friend!”
“That’s good to know, Timmy,” Dr. Calvin said. “But antirobot sentiment isn’t all I was referring to. Though goodness knows the Fundies are enough of a threat to our work.”
“Then what?” Karin said.
“I don’t think we realize yet what these positronic brains may be capable of someday.”
“I’m not that good, Susan,” Karin said, laughing. “Not like you!”.
The talk turned away from robots after that.
Then one day when they were in eighth grade, Joey’s mother got married again, and his new father took him on a trip to the moon.
“Why can’t we go to the moon, Karin?” Timmy demanded as Karin frowned at some work she’d brought home from the lab.
“Hmm?” She gazed at him over the top of the glasses she’d recently started wearing.
“I want to go to the moon. See the craters.”
“We can’t afford it.”
“I’ve got money saved up!”
“I can’t spare the time right now. Things are really busy at U.S. Robots. Susan and I may finally be getting our own offices!”
“If I had a father…” Timmy began darkly.
Karin set her notes down and gazed at him. “I’m sorry you’re still feeling a lack, Timmy. I’d hoped PAPPI would fill it.”
“Seems like I don’t have a father or a mother”‘ Timmy said.
The following year, Timmy took a class in physics at Karin’s urging and learned that he hated the subject. He became interested in sports, grew three inches, and discovered girls-one in particular, a dark-haired lovely with big breasts. PAPPI explained how to handle the sudden rush of hormones and awkwardness Timmy was feeling. Karin had done her part earlier, lecturing Timmy on the birds and the bees and the whole ecology of flowers, a discussion that bored him and left him feeling as if either he-or Karin-had totally missed the point. But PAPPI explained about Romeo and Juliet, whether it was a good idea to kiss a girl on a first date, and what to say to the other guys afterward.
In an attempt to influence him to take an interest in science, Karin bought him a telescope kit, and PAPPI helped him assemble it. PAPPI knew the names of all the stars and constellations they could see through the lens, and pointed out some of the orbiting space stations as well. Karin pretended not to notice when they stayed up well past Timmy’s bedtime.
Timmy went out for the school swim team. PAPPI listened to his bragging and sympathized when he lost. Timmy changed his name to Tim, and PAPPI, unlike Karin, never made a mistake after that. All in all, it was a good time.
But Joe got to have man-to-man talks with his new father.
Tim activated the visorphone again and made an appointment to see the mayor, Stephen Byerley.
Then he tried to put the whole thing out of his mind.
He’d forgotten Karin’s house was so small. He went through the rooms methodically, making lists of what to dump and what to pack. There wasn’t too much of the latter. Living quarters on a space station were small, but at least there was a sense of the vastness just beyond the screened walls. This house was a box, a tract house thrown up by greedy developers, cutting up the land that had once been countryside around New York City into smaller and smaller parcels. He remembered how Karin had explained to him that they couldn’t move farther out because she needed to be near U.S. Robots. By then, Joe and his parents had moved to a large house on Long Island where there was room for a swimming pool and a tennis court. And they could keep dogs. Tim remembered how he’d hated U.S. Robots when he heard about the dogs.
Beth deserved better. Tomorrow he’d meet the man Rathbone wanted him to kill.
The weapon one of his father-in-law’s ex-boxer bodyguards had given him weighed heavily in his pocket. Something to make hash out of that obscene positronic brain, Rathbone had said. For some reason he’d brought it with him when he Bed. Maybe even then he’d known he couldn’t really get away so easily.
He had to stop thinking of Byerley as a man. It was only a robot they were talking about, after all. Only a robot. That would become obvious in the inquest. Then there’d be public outrage at the revelation of the stupendous hoax. The “assassin,” if he were to be caught, would be released, a hero. Only of course, Rathbone would see to it that Tim wasn’t caught.
And in return, Tim would get a chance to have something he desperately wanted, namely a large share of Mercury Mining and Manufacturing.
There was a good chance Byerley wouldn’t keep the appointment anyway. His secretary had seemed doubtful the mayor would find time in his schedule for the vague reasons Tim had given her. Maybe nothing would come of it at all and he’d be off the hook. “Couldn’t get near him, “ he’d tell Rathbone. “Not my fault!”