His future and Beth’s were on the line. He’d either have the money to be father and mother both to little Beth, or they’d both be on the run from Rathbone for the rest of their lives.
“You have to think about your life. You need to make plans for the future,” Karin said, some time in’ 18. “What subjects are you interested in pursuing for a career?”
Tim leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the table. He was in a truculent mood. “I don’t know. Something that pays well. Probably sports.”
“Sports?” Karin frowned. “How’re you going to make a living from sports?”
Swimming had developed Tim ‘s muscles enough to make the girls eager to go out with him now. Heady stuff. “The University of Hawaii has this great program-”
“I’d like to see you go into robotics,” Karin said. “The space colonies have a tremendous need for people like you.”
“Aw, Karin!”
“If I may interrupt,” PAPPI said. “ A good liberal arts college will allow Tim to put off crucial decisions for at least another year without penalty.”
“You’re vetoing robotics?” Karin bit a fingernail. Tim noticed for the first time how much gray there was in her hair. She never colored it the way Joe’s mother did.
“No, I’m only suggesting he might broaden his education first,” the robot said.
Karin considered this. “I’m not going to pay for a college on the other side of the planet!”
“That’s hardly fair of you, Karin,” the robot said.
“I can’t afford to pay if he goes out of state! Do you think I’m rich or something? And Timmy’s hardly going to get a scholarship.”
“There could be some financial assistance available-”
“Timmy’s all I’ve got. I’ll miss him!”
“I love him, too,” PAPPI said.
Karin was suddenly very still. “What did you say?”
“That his absence would be noticeable to me, too,” the robot said cautiously.
She stared at the robot for a long moment. “What other feelings do you have, PAPPI?”
Untypically, the robot seemed reluctant to answer. “What did you expect, Karin, with all the special Calvin/Minsky subprograms you’ve given me over the years?”
“But it’s never proved out in the lab. Susan says-”
“What’re you talking about?” Tim interrupted.
“Positronic sentience,” Karin said slowly. “I’m just wondering if PAPPI-”
Exasperated, he said, “Well, of course PAPPI’s alive! I thought we were discussing my future?”
Karin looked as if she were watching something very far away. ‘‘I’ll have to take you back to the lab, PAPPI. If this is for real, then Susan will want to run the Turing series on you.”
Tim stared at his mother. She chose the worst moments to get all wrapped up in her work. “Look, I’ve got a serious decision to make here. “
“We’ve had no evidence for the development of full self-awareness in the lab,” Karin said thoughtfully. “As an extended function of advanced positronic intelligence, that is. My guess would be it’s prolonged exposure to humans in a real family situation that’s caused the difference. But I’ll have to talk to Susan about it. We’ll need to do the research. “
“I don’t want to go back to the lab” the robot began.
“I don’t see a choice, PAPPI. This is big-time. I mean-”
“All right, everybody listen up!” Tim said. “I’m going to make my own decisions from now on. I’ll go to school if and when-and wherever-I please!”
Karin glanced at him as if she’d forgotten he was there. “Well, of course, Timmy. But this is rather urgent, don’t you see?”
Once again, he thought angrily, he came out second in importance to a robot.
The University of Luna offered financial aid in return for taking part in athletic research in low or zero-grav. Since this freed him from Karin’s money, Tim enrolled. Karin didn’t come to see him off when he boarded the shuttle. Couldn’t wait to get down to the lab and her tests on PAPPI, he thought resentfully.
He worked through the university vacations as an assistant to a moon geologist who needed someone to keep track of his rocks. Since this wasn’t so different from keeping a stamp collection, Tim rather enjoyed it.
Other guys had parents shuttle up to visit from time to time, well-dressed men and women who conversed knowledgeably about interactive theater and world politics and preserving traditional human values in a mechanized world. Just because humans had ventured out into space and depended on robot help, didn’t mean they should abandon the historic virtues of the simple life-the family and physical labor-his new friends said. Tim knew what they meant. The kind of work his mother was doing at U.S. Robots was dangerous. “Mechanical Men,” for goodness sake! Couldn’t she see it wasn’t wise to allow robots to become too clever? They were designed as servants, not partners in the human enterprise. If humans didn’t keep that in mind, someday the robots would be a problem. Tim felt a growing estrangement from Karin and never invited her.
The most dazzling of these new friends was Sylvia Rathbone, daughter of an old-style entrepreneur in space, and as different in spirit from her father as he was from Karin. Sylvia represented everything he felt he’d been deprived of in life-money, a large family of aunts and uncles and cousins, a father who spoiled her shamelessly. She was a beautiful, merry, delicate-boned girl with movements as bright and swift as quicksilver. And to his great wonder and gratitude, she fell in love with him, too.
They were married in a small, intimate ceremony in the spring of ‘27, in a chapel carved from one of the moon’s vast underground caverns. They planned to keep it secret while he finished up the degree in geology he’d recently switched to, and she worked on her father to accept her marriage to a penniless student. But the following year, Beth was born. They sent notice of the event to both parents, and waited nervously.
Karin almost forgot to reply; she mentioned the birth finally in a postscript to her regular monthly fax transmission.
Mr. Rathbone’s attorney notified them that Sylvia had been cut out of his will until such time as she divorced her unsuitable husband.
It was hard managing a family on a student’s income, he found. But they went on. In the evening, he went home to his wife and his baby in the family area of the moon settlement. Sylvia had a small hydroponics garden where she grew tomatoes and corn to supplement their diet, and chrysanthemums for their spirits, she said. He was happy for the first time in his life, determined his daughter would have the proper family life that had been denied him. But he began to see that took money, and his happiness leaked away little by little.
He was off-world a year later, on a research trip with his geologist friend to bring in a little extra money, when a small piece of space debris hurtled in undetected and punctured the skin of the settlement in his sector. The atmosphere bled out swiftly. Automatic airlocks prevented the hemorrhage from spreading beyond the damaged area, but the robot rescue team was too late to save Sylvia. The baby had been in a creche in an unaffected sector.
The bill for the disposal of Sylvia’s remains arrived just as he broke out of his stunned inaction and began to mourn. One of the settlement’s robots brought it.
The wheel of his life had turned full circle. He, a child who’d been fatherless, raised by his mother, must play father to a motherless child. And he was broke. Swamp-black despair settled over him.
Two things happened.
Into this despair came Howard Rathbone III, who wanted his grandchild so urgently that he was prepared to make a deal with her father.
And Dr. Susan Calvin notified him by express fax that Karin had died suddenly after a brief illness and left him the little house in New York where he’d grown up. He’d never felt close to Karin, but it was difficult to comprehend that now she’d gone out of his life altogether.
He didn’t want to accept Rathbone’s suggestion, tempting though the money was. But he saw he’d have trouble keeping Beth from her grandfather otherwise.
There seemed to be only one thing to do. He fled with the baby, catching the first shuttle to Earth.
Tim sorted through the accumulated junk of his childhood. He found little of value in the house, little worth the exorbitant cost of lobbing it up to the colony. Karin had never been much of a homemaker. He packed a box of Scouting books he remembered treasuring as a boy, his old stamp collection in its dog-eared albums, the telescope PAPPI had helped him assemble.
He lugged the box of books out to the hall and set it down by the wall. Something on the polished wood floor drew his gaze, long blurred lines in the dust. He gently blew the dust aside. Scuff marks. He had a sudden jolting vision of PAPPI’s wheels whooshing over the slippery floor, skidding to a stop by the front door as the robot retrieved the morning’s mail. He saw, as if they were arriving now in Karin’s hallway, the papers, the garish advertisements, the pleas for contributions to worthy causes (he remembered how angry Karin became each time she found a request for money from the antirobot people), all the second-class junk that the law didn’t allow to clutter up the fax machines of the city’s households. Sorting through this paper rubbish had been one of PAPPI’s daily tasks. Preventing me from having apoplexy! Karin always said.