Dan walked after him, into the hot night, screaming inside in a haze of terror, yet walking quietly and silently down the street.
THE ROBOT WHO WANTED TO KNOW
That was the trouble with Filer 13B-445-K, he wanted to know things that he had just no business knowing. Things that no robot should be interested in — much less investigate. But Filer was a very different type of Robot.
The trouble with the blonde in tier 22 should have been warning enough for him. He had hummed out of the stack room with a load of books, and was cutting through tier 22 when he saw her bending over for a volume on the bottom shelf.
As he passed behind her he slowed down, then stopped a few yards farther on. He watched her intently, a strange glint in his metallic eyes.
As the girl bent over her short skirt rode up to display an astonishing length of nylon-clad leg. That it was a singularly attractive leg should have been of no interest to a robot — yet it was. He stood there, looking, until the blonde turned suddenly and noticed his fixed attention.
“If you were human, buster,” she said, “I would slap your face. But since you are a robot, I would like to know what your little photon-filled eyes find so interesting?”
Without a microsecond’s hesitation, Filer answered, “Your seam is crooked.”
Then he turned and buzzed away.
The blonde shook her head in wonder, straightened the offending stocking, and chalked up another credit to the honor of electronics.
She would have been very surprised to find out what Filer had been looking at. He had been staring at her leg. Of course he hadn’t lied when he answered her-since he was incapable of lying — but he had been looking at a lot more than a crooked seam. Filer was facing a problem that no other robot had ever faced before.
Love, romance, and sex were fast becoming a passionate interest for him.
That this interest was purely academic goes without saying, yet it was still an interest. It was the nature of his work that first aroused his curiosity about the realm of Venus.
A Filer is an amazingly intelligent robot and there aren’t very many being manufactured. You will find them only in the greatest libraries, dealing with only the largest and most complex collections. To call them simply librarians is to demean all librarians and to call their work simple. Of course very little intelligence is required to shelve books or stamp cards, but this sort of work has long been handled by robots that are little more than programmed computers on wheels. The cataloging of human information has always been an incredibly complex task. The Filer robots were the ones who finally inherited this job. It rested easier on their metallic shoulders than it ever had on the rounded ones of human librarians.
Beside having a very complete and easily accessible memory, Filer had other attributes that are usually connected with the human brain. Abstract connections for one thing. If he was asked for books on one subject, he could think of related books in other subjects that might be referred to. He could take a suggestion, pyramid it into a category, then produce tactile results in the form of a mountain of books.
These traits are usually confined to homo sapiens. They are the things that pulled him that last, long step above his animal relatives. If Filer was more human than other robots, he had only his builders to blame.
He blamed no one — he was just interested. All Filers are interested, they are designed that way. Another Filer, 9B-3670, librarian at the university of Tashkent, had turned his interest to language due to the immense amount of material at his disposal. He spoke thousands of languages and dialects, all that he could find texts on, and enjoyed a great reputation in linguistic circles. That was because of his library. Filer 1313, he of the interest in girls’ legs, labored in the dust filled corridors of New Washington. In addition to all the gleaming new microfiles, he had access to tons of ancient printed-on-paper books that dated back for centuries.
Filer had found his interest in the novels of that bygone time. At first he was confused by all the references to love and romance, as well as the mental and physical suffering that seemed to accompany them. He could find no satisfactory or complete definition of the terms and was intrigued. Intrigue led to interest and finally absorption. Unknown to the world at large, he became an authority on Love.
Very early in his interest, Filer realized that this was the most delicate of all human institutions. He therefore kept his researches a secret and the only records he had were in the capacious memory circuits of his brain. Just about the same time he discovered that he could do research in vivo to supplement the facts in his books. This happened when he found a couple locked in embrace in the zoology section.
Quickly stepping back into the shadows, Filer had turned up the gain on his audio pickup. The resulting dialogue he heard was dull to say the least. A gray and wasted shadow of the love lyrics he knew from his books. This comparison was interesting and enlightening.
After that he listened to male-female conversations whenever he had the opportunity. He also tried to look at women from the viewpoint of men, and vice versa. This is what had led him to the lower-limb observation in tier 22.
It also led him to his ultimate folly.
A researcher sought his aid a few weeks later and fumbled out a thick pile of reference notes. A card slid from the notes and fell unnoticed to the floor. Filer picked it up and handed it back to the man who put it away with mumbled thanks. After the man had been supplied with the needed books and gone, Filer sat back and reread the card. He had only seen it for a split second, and upside down at that, but that was all he needed. The image of the card was imprinted forever in his memory. Filer mused over the card and the first glimmerings of an idea assailed him.
The card had been an invitation to a masquerade ball. He was well acquainted with this type of entertainment — it was a stockin-trade of his dusty novels. People went to them disguised as various romantic figures.
Why couldn’t a robot go, disguised as people? Once the idea was fixed in his head there was no driving it out. It was an un-robot thought and a completely un-robot action. Filer had a glimmering of the first time that he was breaking down the barrier between himself and the mysteries of romance. This only made him more eager to go. And of course he did.
There was no possible way to purchase a costume, but there was no problem in obtaining some ancient curtains from one of the storerooms. A book on sewing taught him the technique and a plate from a book gave him the design for his costume. It was predestined that he go as a cavalier.
With a finely ground pen point he printed an exact duplicate of the invitation on heavy card stock. His mask was part face and part mask, it offered no barrier to his talent or technology. Long before the appointed date he was ready. The last days were filled with browsing through stories about other masquerade balls and learning the latest dance steps.
So enthused was he by the idea, that he never stopped to ponder the strangeness of what he was doing. He was just a scientist studying a species of animal. Man. Or rather woman.
The night finally arrived and he left the library late with what looked like a package of books, and of course wasn’t. No one noticed him enter the patch of trees on the library grounds. If they had, they would certainly never have connected him with the elegant gentleman who swept out of the far side a few moments later. Only the empty wrapping paper bore mute evidence of the disguise.