"Well! I'll get started." Ashe shoved his chair back and rose. His pleasantly youthful face crinkled in a grin, "I've got the darnedest job of any of us, so I'm getting out of here and to work."
He left with a slurred, "B' seein' ye!"
Susan Calvin answered with a barely perceptible nod, but her eyes followed him out of sight and she did not answer when Lanning grunted and said, "Do you want to go up and see RB-34 now, Dr. Calvin?"
RB-34's photoelectric eyes lifted from the book at the muffled sound of binges turning and he was upon his feet when Susan Calvin entered.
She paused to readjust the huge "No Entrance" sign upon the door and then approached the robot.
"I've brought you the texts upon hyperatomic motors, Herbie - a few anyway. Would you care to look at them?"
RB-34 - otherwise known as Herbie - lifted the three heavy books from her arms and opened to the title page of one:
"Hm-m-m! 'Theory of Hyperatomics.' " He mumbled inarticulately to himself as he flipped the pages and then spoke with an abstracted air, "Sit down, Dr. Calvin! This will take me a few minutes."
The psychologist seated herself and watched Herbie narrowly as he took a chair at the other side of the table and went through the three books systematically.
At the end of half an hour, he put them down, "Of course, I know why you brought these."
The corner of Dr. Calvin's lip twitched, "I was afraid you would. It's difficult to work with you, Herbie. You're always a step ahead of me."
"It's the same with these books, you know, as with the others. They just don't interest me. There's nothing to your textbooks. Your science is just a mass of collected data plastered together by makeshift theory - and all so incredibly simple, that it's scarcely worth bothering about.
"It's your fiction that interests me. Your studies of the interplay of human motives and emotions" - his mighty hand gestured vaguely as he sought the proper words.
Dr. Calvin whispered, "I think I understand."
"I see into minds, you see," the robot continued, "and you have no idea how complicated they are. I can't begin to understand everything because my own mind has so little in common with them - but I try, and your novels help."
"Yes, but I'm afraid that after going through some of the harrowing emotional experiences of our present-day sentimental novel" - there was a tinge of bitterness in her voice - "you find real minds like ours dull and colorless."
"But I don't!"
The sudden energy in the response brought the other to her feet. She felt herself reddening, and thought wildly, "He must know!"
Herbie subsided suddenly, and muttered in a low voice from which the metallic timbre departed almost entirely. "But, of course, I know about it, Dr. Calvin. You think of it always, so how can I help but know?"
Her face was hard. "Have you - told anyone?"
"Of course not!" This, with genuine surprise, "No one has asked me."
"Well, then," she flung out, "I suppose you think I am a fool."
"No! It is a normal emotion."
"Perhaps that is why it is so foolish." The wistfulness in her voice drowned out everything else. Some of the woman peered through the layer of doctorhood. "I am not what you would call - attractive."
"If you are referring to mere physical attraction, I couldn't judge. But I know, in any case, that there are other types of attraction."
"Nor young." Dr. Calvin had scarcely heard the robot.
"You are not yet forty." An anxious insistence had crept into Herbie's voice.
"Thirty-eight as you count the years; a shriveled sixty as far as my emotional outlook on life is concerned. Am I a psychologist for nothing?"
She drove on with bitter breathlessness, "And he's barely thirty-five and looks and acts younger. Do you suppose he ever sees me as anything but... but what I am?"
"You are wrong!" Herbie's steel fist struck the plastic-topped table with a strident clang. "Listen to me-"
But Susan Calvin whirled on him now and the hunted pain in her eyes became a blaze, "Why should I? What do you know about it all, anyway, you... you machine. I'm just a specimen to you; an interesting bug with a peculiar mind spread-eagled for inspection. It's a wonderful example of frustration, isn't it? Almost as good as your books." Her voice, emerging in dry sobs, choked into silence.
The robot cowered at the outburst. He shook his head pleadingly. "Won't you listen to me, please? I could help you if you would let me."
"How?" Her lips curled. "By giving me good advice?"
"No, not that. It's just that I know what other people think - Milton Ashe, for instance."
There was a long silence, and Susan Calvin's eyes dropped. "I don't want to know what he thinks," she gasped. "Keep quiet."
"I think you would want to know what he thinks"
Her head remained bent, but her breath came more quickly. "You are talking nonsense," she whispered.
"Why should I? I am trying to help. Milton Ashe's thoughts of you-" he paused.
And then the psychologist raised her head, "Well?"
The robot said quietly, "He loves you."
For a full minute, Dr. Calvin did not speak. She merely stared. Then, "You are mistaken! You must be. Why should he?"
"But he does. A thing like that cannot be hidden, not from me."
"But I am so... so-" she stammered to a halt.