late date, Mrs. Charney, I would have to file a writ of-"
"File it, then."
"The intervening parties will certainly object to the extra expense and inconvenience involved."
"Let them stay home from the hearings, then. I wouldn't want them put to the slightest inconvenience, not for all the world. But Andrew and I intend to be in that courtroom."
"Andrew and you, Mrs. Charney?"
"Did you think I was going to stay home that day?"
And so it came to pass that the appropriate writ was filed, and the intervening parties grumbled but could raise no sustainable objection-for it was still anyone's right to have his day in court, electronic testimony being by no means mandatory-and on the appointed day Andrew and Little Miss at last presented themselves at the surprisingly modest chambers of Judge Kramer of the Fourth Circuit of the Regional Court for the long-awaited hearing on the petition that was, for purely technical reasons, listed on the docket as Martin vs. Martin.
Stanley Feingold accompanied them. The courtroom-located in a tired-looking old building that might have gone back to Twentieth Century times-was surprisingly small and unglamorous, a modest little room with a plain desk at one end for the judge, a few uncomfortable chairs for those rare people who insisted on appearing in person, and an alcove that contained the electronic playback devices.
The only other human beings present were Judge Kramer himself-unexpectedly youthful, dark-haired, with quick glinting eyes-and a lawyer named James Van Buren, who represented all the intervening parties gathered into a single class. The various intervening parties themselves were not present. Their interventions would be shown on the screen. There was nothing they could do to overturn the writ Feingold had secured, but they had no desire to make the trip to court themselves. Almost no one ever did. So they had waived their right to be physically present in the courtroom and had filed the usual electronic briefs.
The positions of the intervenors were set forth first. There were no surprises in them.
The spokesman for the Regional Labor Federation did not place much explicit stress on the prospect for greater competition between humans and robots for jobs, if Andrew were granted his freedom. He took a broader, loftier way of raising the issue:
"Throughout all of history, since the first ape-like men chipped the edges of pebbles into the chisels and scrapers and hammers that were the first tools, we have realized that we are a species whose destiny it is to control our environment and to enhance our control of it through mechanical means. But gradually, as the complexity and capability of our tools have increased, we have surrendered much of our own independence-have become dependent on our own tools, that is, in a way that has weakened our power to cope with circumstances without them. And now, finally, we have invented a tool so capable, so adept at so many functions, that it seems to have an almost human intelligence. I speak of the robot, of course. Certainly we admire the ingenuity of our roboticists, we applaud the astonishing versatility of their products. But today we are confronted with a new and frightening possibility, which is that we have actually created our own successors, that we have built a machine that does not know it is a machine, that demands to be recognized as an autonomous individual with the rights and privileges of a human beingand which, by virtue of its inherent mechanical superiority, its physical durability and strength, its cunningly designed positronic brain, its bodily near-immortality, might indeed, once it has attained those rights and privileges, begin to regard itself as our master! How ironic! To have built a tool so good that it takes command of its builders! To be supplanted by our own machinery-to be made obsolete by it, to be relegated to the scrapheap of evolution-"
And so on and on, one resonant clichй after another.
"The Frankenstein complex allover again," Little Miss murmured in disgust. "The Golem paranoia. The whole set of ignorant anti-science anti-machine anti-progress terrors dragged forth one more time."
Still, even she had to admit that it was an eloquent statement of the position. As Andrew sat watching the screen, listening to the lawyer for the Labor Federation pour forth his stream of horrors, he found himself wondering why anyone thought robots would want to supplant human beings or to relegate them to any sort of scrapheap.
Robots were here to serve. It was their purpose. It was their pleasure, one might almost say. But even