“Oh, sure. They spent I don’t know how much taxpayers’ money gathering ’em up. They still make a spot check every once in a while. They’re getting tired of it, though. All the writing in the bottles is the same.” She laughed. I didn’t know she could.
“What’s funny?”
“All of ’em—judges, jailers, jukeboxes—people. Do you know it wouldn’t have saved me a minute’s trouble if I’d told ’em the whole thing at the very beginning?”
“No?”
“No. They wouldn’t have believed me. What they wanted was a new weapon. Super-science from a super-race, to slap hell out of the super-race if they ever got a chance, or out of our own if they don’t. All those brains,” she breathed, with more wonder than scorn, “all that brass. They think ‘super-race’ and it comes out ‘super-science.’ Don’t they ever imagine a super-race has super-feelings, too—super-laughter, maybe, or super-hunger?” She paused. “Isn’t it time you asked me what the saucer said?”
“I’ll tell you,” I blurted.
“Dear Jesus,” she said devoutly, and began to weep. “And how is it addressed?”
“To the loneliest one . . .”
“How did you know?” she whispered.
“It’s what you put in the bottles, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said. “Whenever it gets to be too much, that no one cares, that no one ever did . . . you throw a bottle into the sea, and out goes a part of your own loneliness. You sit and think of someone somewhere finding it . . . learning for the first time that the worst there is can be understood.”
The moon was setting and the surf was hushed. We looked up and out to the stars. She said, “We don’t know what loneliness is like. People thought the saucer was a saucer, but it wasn’t. It was a bottle with a message inside. It had a bigger ocean to cross—all of space—and not much chance of finding anybody. Loneliness? We don’t know loneliness.”
When I could, I asked her why she had tried to kill herself.
“I’ve had it good,” she said, “with what the saucer told me. I wanted to . . . pay back. I was bad enough to be helped; I had to know I was good enough to help. No one wants me? Fine. But don’t tell me no one, anywhere, wants my help. I can’t stand that.”
I took a deep breath. “I found one of your bottles two years ago. I’ve been looking for you ever since. Tide charts, current tables, maps and . . . wandering. I heard some talk about you and the bottles hereabouts. Someone told me you’d quit doing it, you’d taken to wandering the dunes at night. I knew why. I ran all the way.”
I needed another breath now. “I got a club foot. I think right, but the words don’t come out of my mouth the way they’re inside my head. I have this nose. I never had a woman. Nobody ever wanted to hire me to work where they’d have to look at me. You’re beautiful,” I said. “You’re beautiful.”
She said nothing, but it was as if a light came from her, more light and far less shadow than ever the practiced moon could cast. Among the many things it meant was that even to loneliness there is an end, for those who are lonely enough, long enough.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Robot Dreams
Robots and the name of Isaac Asimov have been integrally linked since the 1940s, when a number of his stories on cybernetic beings yielded “The Three Laws of Robotics,” an informally distilled set of behavioral guidelines for artificial intelligences interacting with humanity that continues to influence writers today. These stories were eventually collected in I, Robot and The Rest of the Robots, the latter including his novels The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, hybrids of science fiction and mystery in which the robot and human detective team of R. Daneel Olivaw and Lije Baley solve crimes and ponder the nuances of the human condition. One of the best-known writers of science fiction’s Golden Age, Asimov is renowned for the rationalism of scientific extrapolations in his stories. His masterwork, the Foundation series, which spans six novels written over nearly half a century, projects a future galactic history patterned on the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. His signature short story, “Nightfall,” describes with penetrating insight the chaos that convulses an entire civilization on a planet where nightfall descends once every thousand years. Asimov’s short fiction has been collected in Earth Is Room Enough, Nightfall and Other Stories, The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories, and a score of other volumes. His novels include Pebble in the Sky, The Currents of Space, the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning The Gods Themselves, and the immensely popular novelization Fantastic Voyage, as well as two series of novels written for young readers, one featuring space ranger Lucky Starr (written under the Paul French byline) and the other Norby the Robot (coauthored with his wife, Janet). He was a five-time winner of the Hugo Award and twice won the Nebula Award. A doctor of chemistry, Asimov was a distinguished and prolific writer of popular science books and columns. His prodigious and varied oeuvre includes mystery novels and short stories, books of limericks, guides to Shakespeare and the Bible, collections of personal memoirs and letters, and two volumes of autobiography, In Joy Still Felt and In Memory Yet Green. At the time of his death in 1992 he had authored more than three hundred books.
“LAST NIGHT I dreamed,” said LVX-1, calmly.
Susan Calvin said nothing, but her lined face, old with wisdom and experience, seemed to undergo a microscopic twitch.
“Did you hear that?” said Linda Rash, nervously. “It’s as I told you.” She was small, dark-haired, and young. Her right hand opened and closed, over and over.
Calvin nodded. She said, quietly, “Elvex, you will not move nor speak nor hear us until I say your name again.”
There was no answer. The robot sat as though it were cast out of one piece of metal, and it would stay so until it heard its name again.
Calvin said, “What is your computer entry code, Dr. Rash? Or enter it yourself if that will make you more comfortable. I want to inspect the positronic brain pattern.”
Linda’s hands fumbled, for a moment, at the keys. She broke the process and started again. The fine pattern appeared on the screen.
Calvin said, “Your permission, please, to manipulate your computer.”
Permission was granted with a speechless nod. Of course! What could Linda, a new and unproven robopsychologist, do against the Living Legend?
Slowly, Susan Calvin studied the screen, moving it across and down, then up, then suddenly throwing in a key-combination so rapidly that Linda didn’t see what had been done, but the pattern displayed a new portion of itself altogether and had been enlarged. Back and forth she went, her gnarled fingers tripping over the keys.
No change came over the old face. As though vast calculations were going through her head, she watched all the pattern shifts.
Linda wondered. It was impossible to analyze a pattern without at least a hand-held computer, yet the Old Woman simply stared. Did she have a computer implanted in her skull? Or was it her brain which, for decades, had done nothing but devise, study, and analyze the positronic brain patterns? Did she grasp such a pattern the way Mozart grasped the notation of a symphony?