“Ah. I am a little irritated with you, Mr. Gallegher. You tricked me into belieiving you had solved our problem. Which you havena done — yet. Consider the thought of jail. Your adrenalin may stimulate your brain into working out a way to trap these animals of yours. Though, even so, I can make no rash promises—”
Murdoch Mackenzie grinned at Gallegher and went out, closing the door softly behind him. Gallegher began to dine off his finger nails.
“Men can know the nature of things,” Joe said, with an air of solid conviction.
At that point matters were complicated even further by the appearance, on the television screen, of a gray-haired man who announced that one of Gallegher’s checks had just bounced. Three hundred and fifty credits, the man said, and how about it?
Gallegher looked dazedly at the identification card on the screen. “You’re with United Cultures? What’s that?”
The gray-haired man said silkily, “Biological and medical supplies and laboratories, Mr. Gallegher.”
“What did I order from you?”
“We have a receipt for six hundred pounds of Vito-plasm, first grade. We made delivery within an hour.”
“And when—”
The gray-haired man went into more detail. Finally Gallegher made a few lying promises and turned from the blanking screen. He looked wildly around the lab.
“Six hundred pounds of artificial protoplasm,” he murmured. “Ordered by Gallegher Plus. He’s got delusions of economic grandeur.”
“It was delivered,” Joe said “You signed the receipt, the night Grandpa and Jonas Harding disappeared.”
“But what could I do with the stuff? It’s used for plastic surgery and for humanoprosthesis. Artificial limbs and stuff. It’s cultured cellular tissue, this Vitaplasm. Did I use it to make some animals? That’s biologically impossible. I think. How could I have molded Vitaplasm into a little brown animal that’s invisible? What about the brain and the neural structure? Joe, six hundred pounds of Vitaplasm has simply disappeared. Where has it gone?”
But Joe was silent.
Hours later Gallegher was furiously busy. “The trick is,” he explained to Joe, “to find out all I can about those critters. Then maybe I can tell where they came from and how I got ’em. Then perhaps I can discover where Grandpa and Harding went. Then—”
“Why not sit down and think about it?”
“That’s the difference between us. You’ve got no instinct of self-preservation. You could sit down and think while a chain reaction took place in your toes and worked up, but not me, I’m too young to die. I keep thinking of Reading Gaol. I need a drink. If I could only get high, my demon subconscious could work out the whole problem for me. Is that little brown animal around?”
“No,” Joe said.
“Then maybe I can steal a drink.” Gallegher exploded, after an abortive attempt that ended in utter failure, “Nothing can move that fast.”
“Accelerated metabolism. It must have smelled the alcohol. Or perhaps it has additional senses. Even I can scarcely varish it.”
“If I mixed kerosense with the whisky, maybe the dipsomaniacal little monster wouldn’t like it. Still, neither would I. Ah, well. Back to the mill,” Gallegher said, as he tried reagent after reagent on the blueeyed dynamo, without any effect at all.
“Man can know the nature of things,” Joe said irritatingly.
“Shut up. I wonder if I could electroplate this creature? That would immobilize it, all right. But it’s immobilized already. How does it eat?”
“Logically, I’d say osmosis.”
“Very likely. Osmosis of what?”
Joe clicked irritatedly. “There are dozens of ways you could solve your problem. Instrumentalism. Empiricism. Vitalism. Work from a posteriori to a priori. It’s perfectly obvious to me that you’ve solved the problem Adrenals, Incorporated set you.”
“I have?”
“Certainly.”
“How?”
“Very simple. Men can know the nature of things.”
“Will you stop repeating that outmoded basic and try to be useful? You’re wrong, anyway. Men can know the nature of things by experiment and reason combined!”
Joe said, “Ridiculous. Philosophical incompetence. If you can’t prove your point by logic, you’ve failed. Anybody who has to depend on experiment is beneath contempt.”
“Why should I sit here arguing philosophical concepts with a robot?” Gallegher demanded of no one in particular. “How would you like me to demonstrate the fact that ideation is dependent on your having a radio-atomic brain that isn’t scattered all over the floor?”
“Kill me, then,” Joe said. “It’s your loss and the world’s. Earth will be a poorer place when I die. But coercion means nothing to me. I have no instinct of selfpreservation.”
“Now look,” Gallegher said, trying a new tack, “if you know the answer, why not tell me? Demonstrate that wonderful logic of yours. Convince me without having to depend on experiment. Use pure reason.”
“Why should I want to convince you? I’m convinced. And I’m so beautiful and perfect that I can achieve no higher glory than to admire me.”
“Narcissus,” Gallegher snarled. “You’re a combination of Narcissus and Nietzsche’s Superman.”
“Men can know the nature of things,” Joe said.
The next development was a subpoena for the transparent robot. The legal machinery was beginning to move, an immensely complicated gadget that worked on a logic as apparently twisted as Joe’s own. Gallegher himself, it seemed, was temporarily inviolate, through some odd interpretation of jurisprudence. But the State’s principle was that the sum of the parts was equal to the whole. Joe was classified as one of the parts, the total of which equaled Gallegher. Thus the robot found itself in court, listening to a polemic with impassive scorn.
Gallegher, flanked by Murdoch Mackenzie and a corps of attorneys, was with Joe. This was an informal hearing. Gallegher didn’t pay much attention; he was concentrating on finding a way to put the bite on the recalcitrant robot, who knew all the answers but wouldn’t talk. He had been studying the philosophers, with an eye toward meeting Joe on his own ground, but so far had succeeded only in acquiring a headache and an almost unendurable longing for a drink. Even out of his laboratory, though, he remained Tantalus. The invisible little brown animal followed him around and stole his liquor.
“As I see it,” he declared, “the question is one of determinism versus voluntarism. If this…ah…robot has free will—”
“Ha!” Gallegher said, and was shushed by an attorney. He subsided rebelliously.
“—then it, or he, is a witness. But, on the other hand, there is the possibility that the robot, in acts of apparent choice, is the mechanical expression of heredity and past environment. For heredity read — ah — initial mechanical basics.”
“Whether or not the robot is a rational being, Mr. Justice, is beside the point,” the prosecutor put in.
“I do not agree. Law is based on res—” Joe said, “Mr. Justice, may I speak?”
“Your ability to do so rather automatically gives you permission,” the Justice said, studying the robot in a baffled way. “Go ahead.”
Joe had seemingly found the connection between law, logic, and philosophy. He said happily, “I’ve figured it all out. A thinking robot is a rational being. I am a thinking robot — therefore I am a rational being.”
“What a fool,” Gallegher groaned, longing for the same logic of electronics and chemistry. “The old Socratic syllogism. Even I could point out the flaw in that!”
“Quiet,” Mackenzie whispered. “All the lawyers really depend on is tying up the case in such knots nobody can figure it out. Your robot is perhaps not such a fool as you think.”