Beachcomber
I wrote this story for a Roy Torgeson anthology back in 1979. I thought it was a nice, powerful little story, but I had no idea how many reprint anthologists and foreign editors would agree with me. This is its thirteenth appearance, not bad for a sub-1,500-worder by an unknown.
Arlo didn’t look much like a man. (Not all robots do, you know.) The problem was that he didn’t act all that much like a robot.
The fact of the matter is that one day, right in the middle of work, he decided to pack it in. Just got up, walked out the door, and kept on going. Somebody must have seen him; it’s pretty hard to hide nine hundred pounds of moving parts. But evidently nobody knew it was Arlo. After all, he hadn’t left his desk since the day they’d activated him twelve years ago.
So the Company got in touch with me, which is a euphemistic way of saying that they woke me in the middle of the night, gave me three minutes to get dressed, and rushed me to the office. I can’t really say that I blame them: when you need a scapegoat, the Chief of Security is a pretty handy guy to have around.
Anyway, it was panic time. It seems that no robot ever ran away before. And Arlo wasn’t just any robot: he was a twelve million dollar item, with just about every feature a machine could have short of white-walled tires. And I wasn’t even so certain about the tires; he sure dropped out of sight fast enough.
So, after groveling a little and making all kinds of optimistic promises to the Board, I started doing a little checking up on Arlo. I went to his designer, and his department head, and even spoke to some of his co-workers, both human and robot.
And it turned out that what Arlo did was sell tickets. That didn’t sound like twelve million dollars’ worth of robot to me, but I was soon shown the error of my ways. Arlo was a travel agent supreme. He booked tours of the Solar System, got his people into and out of luxury hotels on Ganymede and Titan and the Moon, scheduled their weight and their time to the nearest gram and the nearest second.
It still didn’t sound that impressive. Computers were doing stuff like that long before robots ever crawled out of the pages of pulp magazines and into our lives.
“True,” said his department head. “But Arlo was a robot with a difference. He booked more tours and arranged more complicated logistical scheduling than any other ten robots put together.”
“More complex thinking gear?” I asked.
“Well, that too,” was the answer. “But we did a little something else with Arlo that had never been done before.”
“And what was that?”
“We programmed him for enthusiasm.”
“That’s something special?” I asked.
“Absolutely. When Arlo spoke about the beauties of Callisto, or the fantastic light refraction images on Venus, he did so with a conviction that was so intense as to be almost tangible. Even his voice reflected his enthusiasm. He was one of those rare robots who was capable of modular inflection, rather than the dull, mechanistic monotone so many of them possess. He literally loved those desolate worlds, and his record will show that his attitude was infectious.”
I thought about that for a minute. “So you’re telling me that you’ve created a robot whose entire motivation had been to send people out to sample all these worlds, and he’s been crated up in an office twenty-four hours a day since the second you plugged him in?”
“That’s correct.”
“Did it ever occur to you that maybe he wanted to see some of these sights himself?”
“It’s entirely possible that he did, but leaving his post would be contrary to his orders.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Well, sometimes a little enthusiasm can go a long way.”
He denied it vigorously, and I spent just enough time in his office to mollify him. Then I left and got down to work. I checked every outgoing space flight, and had some of the Company’s field reps hit the more luxurious vacation spas. He wasn’t there.
So I tried a little closer to home: Monte Carlo, New Vegas, Alpine City. No luck. I even tried a couple of local theaters that specialized in Tri-Fi travelogs.
You know where I finally found him?
Stuck in the sand at Coney Island. I guess he’d been walking along the beach at night and the tide had come in and he just sank in, all nine hundred pounds of him. Some kids had painted some obscene graffiti on his back, and there he stood, surrounded by empty beer cans and broken glass and a few dead fish. I looked at him for a minute, then shook my head and walked over.
“I knew you’d find me sooner or later,” he said, and even though I knew what to expect, I still did a double take at the sound of that horribly unhappy voice coming from this enormous mass of gears and gadgetry.
“Well, you’ve got to admit that it’s not too hard to spot a robot on a condemned beach,” I said.
“I suppose I have to go back now,” said Arlo.
“That’s right,” I said.
“At least I’ve felt the sand beneath my feet,” said Arlo.
“Arlo, you don’t have any feet,” I said. “And if you did, you couldn’t feel sand beneath them. Besides, it’s just silicon and crushed limestone and …”
“It’s sand and it’s beautiful!” snapped Arlo.
“All right, have it your way: it’s beautiful.” I knelt down next to him and began digging the sand away.
“Look at the sunrise,” he said in a wistful voice. “It’s glorious!”
I looked. A sunrise is a sunrise. Big deal.
“It’s enough to bring tears of joy to your eyes,” said Arlo.
“You don’t have eyes,” I said, working at the sand. “You’ve got prismatic photo cells that transmit an image to your central processing unit. And you can’t cry, either. If I were you, I’d be more worried about rusting.”
“A pastel wonderland,” he said, turning what passed for his head and looking up and down the deserted beach, past the rotted food stands and the broken piers. “Glorious!”
It kind of makes you wonder about robots, I’ll tell you. Anyway, I finally pried him loose and ordered him to follow me.
“Please,” he said in that damned voice of his. “Couldn’t I have one last minute before you lock me up in my office?”
I stared at him, trying to make up my mind.
“One last look. Please?”
I shrugged, gave him about thirty seconds, and then took him in tow.
“You know what’s going to happen to you, don’t you?” I said as we rode back to the office.
“Yes,” he said. “They’re going to put in a stronger duty directive, aren’t they?”
I nodded. “At the very least.”
“My memory banks!” he exclaimed, and once again I jumped at the sound of a human voice coming from an animated gearbox. “They won’t take this experience away from me, will they?”
“I don’t know, Arlo,” I said.
“They can’t!” he wailed. “To see such beauty, and then have it expunged—erased!”
“Well, they may want to make sure you don’t go AWOL again,” I said, wondering what kind of crazy junkheap could find anything beautiful on a garbage-laden strip of dirt.
“Can you intercede for me if I promise never to leave again?”
Any robot that can disobey one directive can disobey others, like not roughing up human beings, and Arlo was a pretty powerful piece of machinery, so I put on my most fatherly smile and said: “Sure I will, Arlo. You can count on it.”
So I returned him to the Company, and they upped his sense of duty and took away his enthusiasm and gave him a case of agoraphobia and wiped his memory banks clean, and now he sits in his office and speaks to customers without inflection, and sells a few less tickets than he used to.
And every couple of months or so I wander over to the beach and walk along it and try to see what it was that made Arlo sacrifice his personality and his security and damned near everything else, just to get a glimpse of all this.
And I see a sunset just like any other sunset, and a stretch of dirty sand with glass and tin cans and seaweed and rocks on it, and I breathe in polluted air, and sometimes I get rained on; and I think of that damned robot in that plush office with that cushy job and ever need catered to, and I decide that I’d trade places with him in two seconds flat.
I saw Arlo just the other day—I had some business on his floor—and it was almost kind of sad. He looked just like any other robot, spoke in a grating monotone, acted exactly like an animated computer. He wasn’t much before, but whatever he had been, he gave it all away just to look at the sky once or twice. Dumb trade.
Well, robots never did make much sense to me, anyway.