"I can believe your nerves get frayed," Gaspard said dryly. "I've had a demonstration."
She grinned at him. "I really blew you up last night, didn't I? Did everything I could to blast your male confidence and ruin your sleep."
He shrugged. "That last might conceivably have happened without you, dear Nurse Bishop," he told her. "I didn't have anything new to read and without wordwooze I seem to sleep short and wake up sudden. But what you said last night about sex-" He paused, looking around at the silent silver eggs. "Say, can they hear what we're saying?" he asked in a hushed voice.
"Of course they can," she replied loudly and contentiously. "Most of them are having look-listen. You wouldn't want them unplugged and put in the dark, would you, just so you could feel private? They have to be unplugged five hours a day anyway. They're supposed to sleep then, but all of them swear to me they never can sleep, the closest they can get to it is what they call black dreaming. They've discovered that consciousness never dies wholly, they say-no matter what we body-clogged people think. So you just say anything you want to, Gaspard, and forget about them."
"Still-" Gaspard said, looking around again dubiously. "I don't give a damn what they hear me say," Nurse Bishop said, then shouted, "You hear that, you pack of dirty old men and hairy old lesbians?"
"Whee-wheet!"
"Zane Gort, who let you in?" she demanded, turning on the robot.
"The old gentleman in the reception cubicle," he replied respectfully.
"You mean you hypnotized the combination out of Zangwell as he lay there snoring and perfuming the air for seven yards. It must be wonderful to be a robot-no sense of smell. Or do you?"
"No, I don't, except for a few powerful chemicals that tickle my transitors. And yes, it is indeed wonderful to be a robot and alive today!" Zane admitted.
"Hey, you're supposed to be at Rocket House babysitting Half Pint and Nick and Double Nick," Nurse Bishop said.
"It is true I told you I would," Zane said, "but Mr. Cullingham said I was having a disturbing influence on the conference, so I asked Miss Blushes to take over for me."
"Well, that's something," Nurse Bishop said. "Miss Blushes seems a solid sensible soul, in spite of her little nervous flare-up yesterday."
"I'm so glad to hear you say that. I mean, that you like Miss Blushes," Zane said. "Nurse Bishop, could I-? Would you-"
"What can I do for you, Zane?" she asked.
He hesitated. "Miss Bishop, I would like your advice on a rather personal matter."
"Why, of course. But what possible good would my advice be to you on a personal matter? I'm no robot and I'm ashamed of how little I know about them."
"I know," Zane said, "but you impress me as having a bluff common sense, an instinct for going straight to the heart of a problem, that is very rare, believe me, in both flesh and metal men-and women too. And personal problems seem to be remarkably the same for all intelligent or quasi-intelligent beings, whether organic or inorganic. My problem is highly personal, by the by."
"Should I leave, Old Battery?" Gaspard asked.
"No, please stay, Old Gland. Nurse Bishop, as you may well have noted, I am more than a little interested in Miss Blushes."
"An attractive creature," Nurse Bishop commented without blinking. "Generations of flesh women would have sold their souls for that wasp waist and curves as smooth as hers."
"True indeed. Perhaps too attractive-at any rate I have no problem there. No, it's the intellectual side I'm bothered about, the mental companionship angle. I'm sure you've noticed that Miss Blushes is a little-no, let's not mince words-really quite stupid. Oh, I know I've laid it to the shock she received when she was attacked in the riot (nasty business that, attacking a walking robot, a true robot) but I'm afraid she's naturally rather stupid. For instance she was completely bored, she told me, by the talk on antigravity I gave at a robots' hobby club last night. And she is very puritanical, as you'd expect from the profession built into her-but puritanism does narrow mental horizons and there's no two ways about it, even though prudery does have its rather dangerous charms. So there's my problem: physical attraction, a mental gulf. Miss Bishop, you're female, I'd deeply appreciate getting your impressions. How far do you think I should go with this lovely robix?"
Nurse Bishop stared at him.
"Well, I'll be a tin Dorothy Dix," she said.
TWENTY-SIX
Nurse Bishop lifted her hand. "Excuse me, Zane, please excuse me," she said. "I didn't mean to be flippant. You just threw me off balance. I'll do my best to answer your question. But to begin with you'll have to tell me how far do robots generally go with each other? Oh Lord, now I'm sounding flippant again, but I honestly am not too sure of my knowledge. After all, you're not only a different species of creature, you're an artificial species, capable of evolution by alteration and manufacture, which makes it hard to keep up with you. And then ever since the riots men and robots are forever being so careful of each other's feelings, afraid of upsetting our present state of peaceful coexistence, pussyfooting around instead of speaking straight out, and that makes for more mutual ignorance. Oh, I know you're divided into robots and robixes, and that these two sexes find some sort of comfort in each other, but beyond that I'm a little hazy."
"Quite understood," Zane assured her. "Well, briefly here's how it is. Robot sexuality emerged in exactly the same way as robot literature and on the latter I'm truly an authority, even if I'm still up to my cheekplates in debt to my manufacturer and splitting royalties with him forty-sixty; you know, it's no joke being a free business machine, you're launched into life with a crushing debt load (since you're approximately as expensive as a space cruiser or re search satellite) and you knock yourself out just keeping up the interest payments, while your normal repairs, replacements and tune-ups are ten times bigger than a hypochondriac's doctor bill. Often you dream, as freedmen did in Roman times, of how much simpler it would be and how much more secure you'd feel if you were just a slave, owned and cared for by someone else, a light-hearted machine without responsibilities.
"But I digress. What I want to explain to you is how robot literature emerged, as a background to help you understand the emergence of robot sexuality. So here goes, dear humans-hold onto your heads!" He briefly twinkled his headlight at Gaspard and Nurse Bishop in a robot equivalent of a grin.
"The earliest true robots," he began, "(asexual, of course, or rather protosexual) were highly intelligent and could do their work very well-no human complaints on those scores-but they were subject to fits of extreme depression, often expressing itself in an exaggerated slave-psychology and leading to a sort of melancholia or involutional psychosis which even electroshock was well-nigh powerless to cure and which resulted in rapid general deterioration terminating only in death. Few people realized then how easily robots could die, or can die today for that matter, by Saint Isaac! They were blind to the awesome mystery whereby the churning of electrons in complex circuits gives birth to conscious mind and they had no idea of how easily that mind might wink out. Even today people seem to think that a robot doesn't need to be conscious, they think he can be taken apart and put in storage for days or decades and then be the same robot when he's put together again. By Saint Isaac, it is not so! Just a trickle of consciousness will keep a robot alive and essentially himself, but once even trickleconsciousness is broken (as by complete disassembly) that robot dies and any being made from his parts is another robot, a metal zombie. That's why we robots have to organize and to invoke the law to protect ourselves, why we feel about electricity the way you feel about air and water!