By now, the habit of responding to Campbellian emphasis only with a) questions, or b) facts, is so ingrained that, lacking a really good question-story …
MAN-LIKE DEVICES USED
IN U. S. TESTS
THEY FEEL HEAT AND COLD, SENSE SHOCK
AND EVEN BREATHE AND BLEED
[Headlines from The New York Times, Jan. 10, 1960.]
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 9 (AP)—The age of the robot is closer than you think.
Synthetic men that can feel heat and cold, sense shock in a way that is equivalent to pain, even bleed and breathe, are in use every day as stand-ins for humans in dangerous experiments.
They are anthropomorphic; that is, they have the shape of men. They are anthropometric, or weighted like men, with a man’s center of gravity.
And they can be made to talk and walk like men whenever the need arises.
They can be bought for $1,500 up, depending on instrumentation.
The $1,500 model can’t do much. He’s the rugged, stupid type that gets thrown out of airplanes to test parachutes.
A $5,000 model rides on rocket sleds and centrifuges, pre-testing the forces of gravity and velocity that man will meet in space travel.
What would a walkie-talkie model cost?
“That’s hard to say. We haven’t made one yet,” says Harry Daulton, President of Sierra Engineering Company in suburban Sierra Madre, the country’s largest manufacturer of the robots.
“But I know we could make one,” he says. “Two producers have asked us about them for science-fiction movies and our engineers said it could be done.”
Daulton’s top seller is Sierra Sam, a six-foot, 200-pounder made of vinyl-dipped foam Latex, with bones and joints of steel and aluminum.
Sam’s midwife and physician is John Meyers, a former truck driver. “He can take 100 G’s,” Mr. Meyers said with pride.
That’s 100 times the force of gravity, or five times as much as a strong-man can take.
Mr. Meyers has made more than 200 Sams, and repaired most of them. Some have come back six or seven times from Air Force tests with their heads torn off, their backs and limbs broken, their bodies slashed, smashed, burnt and bent.
Mr. Meyers simply whips up a batch of foam Latex, pours it from mixer into mold and cures it in an electric oven. After dipping in vinyl, the new torso, head or limb is bolted into place.
The Air Force recently ordered a five-foot-six-inch dummy that may take a ride into space in a Project Mercury capsule one day.
The first Sam was built in 1949. As a maker of prosthetic devices-—artificial arms and legs—Sierra Engineering saw the need for an instrumented human-like shape for rocket-sled speed tests.
The company fabricated a dummy and sold it to the Air Force, where it was promptly dubbed “Sierra Sam,” a name that the company has copyrighted.
Since then Sams have parachuted from planes, tested ejection seats, whirled in centrifuges and crashed in hundreds of cars. They have figuratively saved thousands of lives by improving the safety design of vehicles that man rides in.
Now Sam has been instrumented with electronic devices that sense heat, cold, gravity forces, shock and wind velocity. Other devices closely duplicate human breathing apparatus for determination of what would happen to a man under such stresses.
A DEATH IN THE HOUSE
by Clifford D. Simak
from Galaxy
My first conscious acquaintance with Cliff Simak was in the body of a Jovian “Loper”—a lizard-sort-of-thing through whose keen senses we—Simak and I, along with the hero of the story, and his dog—were able to perceive for the first time the true grandeur of the giant planet’s beauty.
If this sounds like a travelogue, it’s just because it is. I doubt that anyone who read “Desertion” when it was first published in Astounding, or later as part of the prize-winning book. City, has ever quite forgotten the fresh tingling scent of that ammonia storm… .
Well, that was way back; and that was when I started looking for the Simak label on story titles. Exactly what sort of awareness Mr. Simak has that enables him to understand with a unique clarity the nature of strange beasts, I do not know; nor what specialized talent it is that contrives to communicate this empathy so sharply even to such a human-jingoist as me (as cool a clam as ever you’ve come across when it comes to cats and dogs and canaries, yet, let alone alien entities). All I know is that he is a newspaperman in Milwaukee, which is almost far enough away from Milford, Pa., for me to believe—most anything.
Old Mose Abrams was out hunting cows when he found the alien. He didn’t know it was an alien, but it was alive and it was in a lot of trouble and Old Mose, despite everything the neighbors said about him, was not the kind of man who could bear to leave a sick thing out there in the woods.
It was a horrid-looking thing, green and shiny, with some purple spots on it, and it was repulsive even twenty feet away. And it stank.
It had crawled, or tried to crawl, into a clump of hazel brush, but hadn’t made it. The head part was in the brush and the rest lay out there naked in the open. Every now and then the parts that seemed to be arms and hands clawed feebly at the ground, trying to force itself deeper in the brush, but it was too weak; it never moved an inch.
It was groaning, too, but not too loud - just the kind of keening sound a lonesome wind might make around a wide, deep eave. But there was more in it than just the sound of winter wind: there was a frightened, desperate note that made the hair stand up on Old Mose’s nape.
Old Mose stood there for quite a spell, making up his mind what he ought to do about it, and a while longer after that working up his courage, although most folks offhand would have said that he had plenty. But this was the sort of situation that took more than just ordinary screwed-up courage. It took a lot of foolhardiness.
But this was a wild, hurt thing and he couldn’t leave it there, so he walked up to it, and knelt down, and it was pretty hard to look at, though there was a sort of fascination in its repulsiveness that was hard to figure out - as if it were so horrible that it dragged one to it. And it stank in a way that no one had ever smelled before.
Mose, however, was not finicky. In the neighborhood, he was not well known for fastidity. Ever since his wife had died almost ten years before, he had lived alone on his untidy farm and the housekeeping that he did was the scandal of all the neighbor women. Once a year, if he got around to it, he sort of shoveled out the house, but the rest of the year he just let things accumulate.
So he wasn’t as upset as some might have been with the way the creature smelled. But the sight of it upset him, and it took him quite a while before he could bring himself to touch it. and when he finally did, he was considerably surprised. He had been prepared for it to be either cold or slimy, or maybe even both. But it was neither. It was warm and hard and it had a clean feel to it, and he was reminded of the way a green corn stalk would feel.
He slid his hand beneath the hurt thing and pulled it gently from the clump of hazel brush and turned it over so he could see its face. It hadn’t any face. It had an enlargement at the top of it, like a flower on top of a stalk, although its body wasn’t any stalk, and there was a fringe around this enlargement that wiggled like a can of worms, and it was then that Mose almost turned around and ran.