"Oh, leave me alone with your descriptions," grumbled Powell. "How near are they?"
"Within fifty feet and coming this way. We'll be out in fifteen min-Uh-huh-HUH-HEY-Y!"
"What's going on?" It took Powell several seconds to recover from his stunned astonishment at Donovan's vocal gyrations. "Come on, give me a chance at that hole. Don't be a hog about it."
He fought his way upward, but Donovan kicked wildly, "They did an about-face, Greg. They're leaving. Dave! Hey, Da-a ave!"
Powell shrieked, "What's the use of that, you fool? Sound won't carry."
"Well, then," panted Donovan, "kick the walls, slam them, get some vibration started. We've got to attract their attention somehow, Greg, or we're through. " He pounded like a madman.
Powell shook him, "Wait, Mike, wait. Listen, I've got an idea. Jumping Jupiter, this is a fine time to get around to the simple solutions. Mike!"
"What do you want?" Donovan pulled his head in.
"Let me in there fast before they get out of range."
"Out of range! What are you going to do? Hey, what are you going to do with that detonator?" He grabbed Powell's arm.
Powell shook off the grip violently. "I'm going to do a little shooting."
"Why?"
"That's for later. Let's see if it works first. If it doesn't, then - Get out of the way and let me shoot!"
The robots were flickers, small and getting smaller, in the distance. Powell lined up the sights tensely, and pulled the trigger three times. He lowered the guns and peered anxiously. One of the subsidiaries was down! There were only six gleaming figures now.
Powell called into his transmitter uncertainly. "Dave!"
A pause, then the answer sounded to both men, "Boss? Where are you? My third subsidiary has had his chest blown in. He's out of commission."
"Never mind your subsidiary," said Powell. "We're trapped in a cave-in where you were blasting. Can you see our flashlight?"
"Sure. We'll be right there."
Powell sat back and relaxed, "That, my fran', is that"
Donovan said very softly with tears in his voice, "All right, Greg. You win. I beat my forehead against the ground before your feet. Now don't feed me any bull. Just tell me quietly what it's all about."
"Easy. It's just that all through we missed the obvious - as usual. We knew it was the personal initiative circuit, and that it always happened during emergencies, but we kept looking for a specific order as the cause. Why should it be an order?"
"Why not?"
"Well, look, why not a type of order. What type of order requires the most initiative? What type of order would occur almost always only in an emergency?"
"Don't ask me, dreg. Tell me!"
"I'm doing it! It's the six-way order. Under all ordinary conditions, one or more of the 'fingers' would be doing routine tasks requiring no close supervision - in the sort of offhand way our bodies handle the routine walking motions. But in an emergency, all six subsidiaries must be mobilized immediately and simultaneously. Dave must handle six robots at a time and something gives. The rest was easy. Any decrease in initiative required, such as the arrival of humans, snaps him back. So I destroyed one of the robots. When I did, he was transmitting only five-way orders. Initiative decreases - he's normal"
"How did you get all that?" demanded Donovan.
"Just logical guessing. I tried it and it worked."
The robot's voice was in their ears again, "Here I am. Can you hold out half an hour?"
"Easy!" said Powell. Then, to Donovan, he continued, "And now the job should be simple. We'll go through the circuits, and check off each part that gets an extra workout in a six-way order as against a five-way. How big a field does that leave us?"
Donovan considered, "Not much, I think. If Dave is like the preliminary model we saw back at the factory, there's a special coordinating circuit that would be the only section involved." He cheered up suddenly and amazingly, "Say, that wouldn't be bad at all. There's nothing to that."
"All right. You think it over and we'll check the blueprints when we get back. And now, till Daves reaches us, I'm relaxing."
"Hey, wait! Just tell me one thing. What were those queer shifting marches, those funny dance steps, that the robots went through every time they went screwy?"
"That? I don't know. But I've got a notion. Remember, those subsidiaries were Dave's 'fingers.' We were always saying that, you know. Well, it's my idea that in all these interludes, whenever Dave became a psychiatric case, he went off into a moronic maze, spending his time twiddling his fingers."
Susan Calvin Liar!
Susan Calvin
The third robot story I wrote, "Liar!" introduced Susan Calvin-with whom I promptly fell in love. She so dominated my thoughts thereafter that, little by little, she ousted Powell and Donovan from their position. Those two appeared only in the three stories included in the previous section, and in a forth, "Escape!" in which they appear with Susan Calvin.
Somehow the impression I get as I look back on my career is that I must have included dear Susan in innumerable stories, but the fact is that she appeared in only ten stories, all of which are listed in this section. In the tenth, "Feminine Intuition," she emerges from retirement as an old lady who, however, has lost none of her acid charm.
You will note, by the way, that although most of the Susan Calvin stories were written at a time when male chauvinism was taken for granted in science fiction, Susan asks no favors and beats the men at their own game. To be sure, she remains sexually unfulfilled-but you can't have everything.