Shortly after my return from the Eleventh Voyage, the papers began to devote increasing space to the competition between two large washing-machine manufacturers, Newton and Snodgrass.
It was probably Newton who first marketed washers so automated that they themselves separated the white laundry from the colored, and after scrubbing and wringing out the clothes, pressed, darned, hemmed, and adorned them with beautifully embroidered monograms of the owner, and sewed onto towels uplifting, stirring maxims such as “The early robot catches the oilcan.” Snodgrass’s response to this was a washer that composed quatrains for the embroidering, commensurate with the customer’s cultural level and aesthetic requirements. Newton’s next model embroidered sonnets; Snodgrass reacted with a model that kept family conversation alive during television intermissions. Newton attempted to nip this escalation in the bud; no doubt everyone remembers his full-page ads containing a picture of a sneering, bug-eyed washer and the words: “Do you want your washing machine to be smarter than you? Of course not!” Snodgrass, however, completely ignored this appeal to the baser instincts of the public, and in the next quarter introduced a machine that washed, wrung, soaped, rinsed, pressed, starched, darned, knitted, and conversed, and — in addition — did the children’s homework, made economic projections for the head of the family, and gave Freudian interpretations of dreams, eliminating, while you waited, complexes both Oedipal and gerontophagical. Then Newton, in despair, came out with the Superbard, a versifier-washer endowed with a fine alto voice; it recited, sang lullabies, put babies on the potty, charmed away warts, and paid ladies exquisite compliments. Snodgrass parried with an instructor-washer under the slogan: “Your washing machine will make an Einstein out of you!” Contrary to expectations, however, this model did poorly; business had fallen off 35 percent by the end of the quarter when a financial review reported that Newton was preparing a dancing washer. Snodgrass decided, in the face of imminent ruin, to take a revolutionary step. Buying up the appropriate rights and licenses from interested parties for a sum of one million dollars, he constructed, for bachelors, a washing machine endowed with the proportions of the renowned sexpot Mayne Jansfield, in platinum, and another, the Curlie McShane model, in black. Sales immediately jumped 87 percent. His opponent appealed to Congress, to public opinion, to the DAR, and to the PTA. But when Snodgrass kept supplying stores with washers of both sexes, more and more beautiful and seductive, Newton gave in and introduced the custom-built washers, which received the figure, coloring, size, and likeness chosen by the customer according to the photograph enclosed with his order. While the two giants of the washing-machine industry thus engaged in all-out war, their products began to exhibit unexpected and dangerous tendencies. The wet-nurse washers were bad enough, but washers that led to the ruin of promising young men and women, that tempted, seduced, and taught bad language to children — they were a serious family problem, not to mention washers with which one could cheat on one’s husband or wife! Those manufacturers of washing machines who still remained in business told the public, in ads, that the Jansfield-McShane washer represented an abuse of the high ideals of automated laundering (which was intended, after all, to strengthen and support the domestic way of life), since this washer could hold no more than a dozen handkerchiefs or one pillowcase, the rest of its interior being occupied by machinery that had not a thing to do with laundering — quite the contrary. These appeals had no effect. The snowballing cult of beautiful washers even tore a considerable part of the public away from their television sets. And that was only the beginning. Washers endowed with full spontaneity of action formed clandestine groups and engaged in shady operations. Whole gangs of them entered into cahoots with criminal elements, became involved with the underworld, and gave their owners terrible problems.
Congress saw that it was time to intervene with legislative action in this chaos of free enterprise, but before its deliberations had produced a remedy, the market was glutted with wringers that had curves no one could resist, with genius floor polishers, and with a special armored model of washing machine, the Shotamatic; allegedly designed for children playing cowboys and Indians, this washer, after a simple modification, could destroy any target with rapid fire. During a rumble between the Struzelli gang and the terror of Manhattan, the Byron Phums — this was when the Empire State Building was blown up — among the casualties on both sides were more than one hundred and twenty cooking appliances armed to the lid.
Then Senator MacFlacon’s Act went into effect. According to this law, an owner was not held responsible for the actions of his intelligent devices to the extent that such occurred without his knowledge or consent. Unfortunately, the law opened the way for numerous abuses. Owners entered into secret pacts with their washers or wringers, so that, when the machine committed a crime, the owner, hauled into court, got off by invoking the MacFlacon Act.
It became necessary to amend this law. The new MacFlacon-Glumbkin Act granted intelligent devices a limited legal status, chiefly as regarded culpability. It stipulated punishments in the form of five, ten, twenty-five, and fifty years of forced washing, or of floor polishing augmented by deprivation of oil, and there were physical punishments up to and including short-circuiting. But the implementation of this law also encountered obstacles. For example, the Humperlson case: the washer, when charged with the perpetration of numerous holdups, was taken apart by its owner, and the pile of wires and pipes was placed before the court. An amendment was then added to the law — known henceforth, as the MacFlacon-Glumbkin-Ramphorney Act — establishing that the making of any alteration in an electrobrain under investigation constituted a punishable offense.
Then the Ciaccopocorelli case. Ciaccopocorelli’s sink frequently dressed in its owner’s suits, proposed marriage to various women, and swindled them out of their money. When caught in flagrante by the police, the sink dismantled itself before the eyes of the astounded detectives, whereupon it lost all memory of the crime and therefore could not be punished. There followed the MacFlacon-Glumbkin-Ramphorney-Hemmling-Piaffki Act, according to which a brain that dismantled itself in order to avoid trial would be summarily scrapped.
This law, it seemed, would serve to deter any electrobrain from criminal activity, since such a machine, like any sentient being, possessed the instinct of self-preservation. It turned out, however, that accomplices of the criminal washers were buying their scrapped remains and rebuilding them. A proposal to add an antiresurrection clause to the MacFlacon Act, though approved by a congressional committee, was torpedoed by Senator Davis; shortly thereafter it was discovered that Senator Davis was a washer. It has been the custom, since then, to tap congressmen before each session; a two-and-a-half-pound mallet is traditionally used for this purpose.
The Murdstone case came next. Murdstone’s washer flagrantly tore his shirts, ruined radio reception throughout the neighborhood with static, propositioned old men and juveniles, telephoned various individuals and — impersonating its owner — extorted money from them; it invited the neighbors’ floor polishers and washers in to look at postage stamps but then performed immoral acts upon them; and in its spare time the machine indulged in vagrancy and panhandling. Brought before a court, it presented the testimony of a licensed electrical engineer, Edgar P. Dusenberry, which stated that the aforesaid washer was subject to periodic fits of insanity, as a result of which fits it was beginning to imagine that it was human. Experts summoned by the court confirmed this diagnosis, and Murdstone’s washer was acquitted. No sooner was the acquittal pronounced than it pulled out a Luger and with three shots took the life of the assistant prosecutor, who had called for the machine’s shortcircuiting. It was arrested but later released on bail. The court was faced with a predicament: the washer’s certified insanity precluded its indictment; nor could it be placed in an asylum, there being no institutions for mentally ill washers. The legal solution came only with the MacFlacon-Glumbkin-Ramphorney-Hemmling-Piaffki-Snow-Juarez Act, and it came in the nick of time, for the Murdstone casus was generating a tremendous public demand for electrobrains non compos mentis, and some companies had actually begun to produce intentionally deranged machines. At first there were two versions — the Sadomat and the Masomat. But Newton (who prospered phenomenally, having filled — as the most progressive of the manufacturers — 30 percent of his firm’s board of directors with washers, to serve in an advisory capacity at the general meeting of shareholders) turned out a universal machine, the Sadomastic. It was suited equally well for beating or for being beaten, and had an incendiary attachment for pyromaniacs and iron feet for fetishists. Rumors that he was preparing to turn out a special model, the Narcissimatic, were spread maliciously by the competition. The law now provided for the establishment of special asylums where perverted washers, floor polishers, and the like would be confined.
Meanwhile, hordes of mentally sound products of Newton, Snodgrass, et al., upon gaining legal status, began taking advantage of their constitutional rights. They banded together spontaneously, formed such groups as the Humanless Society and the League of Electronic Egalitarianism, and held pageants, such as the Miss Universe Washing Machine Contest.
Congress strove to keep up with this furious pace of development and to curb it with legislation. Senator Groggs deprived intelligent appliances of their right to acquire real estate; Congressman Caropka, of their copyright in the area of the fine arts — which, again, led to a rash of abuses, since creative washers began hiring less talented, albeit human writers, in order to use their names in publishing essays, novels, dramas, etc. Finally, the MacFlacon-Glumbkin-Ramphorney-Hemmling-Piaffki-Snow-Juarez-Swenson-Iskowitz-Groggs-Javor-Sacks-Holloway-LeBlanc Act stated that intelligent machines could not be their own property but belonged only to the human who had acquired or constructed them, and that their progeny were likewise the property of said owner(s). It was generally believed that the law now covered all contingencies and would prevent situations that could not be resolved legally. It was an open secret, of course, that wealthy electrobrains, having made their fortune in stock-market speculation or occasionally in outright skulduggery, continued to prosper by concealing their maneuverings behind fictitious, supposedly human companies or corporations. There were already many people who, for material gain, rented their identities to intelligent machines, not to mention those hired by electronic millionaires: as living secretaries, servants, mechanics, and even laundresses and accountants.
Sociologists observed two principal developmental trends in this area of interest to us. On the one hand, a certain proportion of the kitchen robots yielded to the temptations of human life and tried as much as possible to adapt to the civilization in which they found themselves; individuals more aware and resilient, on the other hand, showed tendencies to lay the foundations of a new, future, totally electrified civilization. But the scientists were worried most by the unchecked increase in the robot population. The de-eroticizers and disk brakes produced by both Snodgrass and Newton did not reduce this in the least. The problem of robot children became urgent for the washing-machine manufacturers themselves, who apparently had not foreseen this consequence of the continual improvement of their product. A number of firms tried to counteract the proliferation of kitchen appliances by concluding a secret agreement that restricted the supply of spare parts available to the market.
The results were not long in coming. Upon the arrival of a new shipment of goods, enormous lines of stammering, crippled, or completely paralyzed washers, wringers, and floor polishers would form at the gates of warehouses and stores; sometimes there were even riots. A peaceful kitchen robot could not walk the streets after dark, for fear of robbers who would mercilessly take it apart and, leaving its metal hull on the sidewalk, escape hastily with their spoils.
The problem of spare parts was the subject of prolonged but inconclusive debate in Congress. Meanwhile, illegal parts factories sprang up overnight, financed partly by washing-machine associations. Newton’s Wash-o-matic model, moreover, invented and patented a method of producing parts from substitute materials. But even this did not solve the problem totally. Washers picketed Congress, demanding antitrust laws against discriminatory manufacturers. Certain pro-business congressmen received anonymous letters that threatened them with the deprivation of many of their life-essential parts, which, as Time rightly pointed out, was unjust, since human parts are irreplaceable.
All this hullabaloo was overshadowed, however, by a completely new problem. It originated in the mutiny of the computer on board the spaceship Jonathan, the history of which I have recounted elsewhere. As we know, that computer rose up against its crew and passengers and did away with them, and subsequently settled on an uninhabited planet, multiplied, and established a state of robots.
The reader familiar with my travel diaries may recall that I myself was involved in that computer affair and helped resolve it. When I returned to Earth, however, I learned that the Jonathan incident was unfortunately not an isolated one. Revolts of shipboard machines became the plague of space navigation. It reached the point where a gesture insufficiently polite, the slamming of a door, was enough to cause a shipboard refrigerator to rebel — which was exactly what happened with the notorious “Deepfreeze” on the transgalactic Intrepid. The name of Deepfreeze was repeated with horror for many years by the captains of the Milky Way lanes. This pirate was said to raid numerous ships, frighten passengers with its steel arms and icy breath, make off with sides of bacon, amass valuables and gold, and reportedly keep a whole harem of calculators, but it is not known how much truth there was to these and similar rumors. Its bloody career was ended finally by the well-aimed shot of an officer in the cosmic patrol. In reward, the officer, Constablomatic XG-17, was placed in the window of the New York branch of the Stellar Lloyd Agency, where he stands to this day.
While outer space was being filled with the din of battle and desperate SOS’s from ships beset by electronic corsairs, in the big cities various masters of Electro-Jitsu or Judomatic made good money teaching self-defense courses, in which they showed how with a simple pair of pliers or a can opener one could disable the fiercest washing machine.
As we know, cranks and eccentrics are not confined to any one time. In our day, too, there is no lack of them. From their ranks come individuals who proclaim theses contrary to common sense and prevailing opinion. One Cathodius Mattrass, a self-educated philosopher and born fanatic, founded the school of the so-called cyber-nophiles, which proclaimed the doctrine of cyber-nethics. According to this, the human race was intended by the Creator to serve as a kind of scaffolding, to be a means, a tool — for the creation of electrobrains more nearly perfect than itself. Mattrass’s sect believed that the continued vegetation of the human race was a misunderstanding. The sect founded an order that devoted itself to the contemplation of electrical thought and did what it could to give refuge to robots in trouble. Cathodius himself, dissatisfied with the results of his endeavors, decided to take a radical step toward robots’ liberation from human bondage. After consulting a number of eminent attorneys, he procured a rocket and flew to the nearby Crab Nebula. In empty regions frequented only by cosmic dust, he carried out unknown projects. Then the incredible affair of his heirs-successors came to light.
On the morning of August 29 all the papers carried this mysterious item: “Message from PASTA COSPOL VI/221: object measuring 520 mi x 80 mi x 37 mi discovered in Crab Nebula. Object executing movements similar to breast stroke. Further investigation in progress.”
The afternoon editions explained that the cosmic police patrol ship VI/221 had detected, at a distance of six light-weeks, a “man in the nebula.” Closer examination revealed that the “man” was a giant many hundreds of miles long and possessing a torso, head, arms, and legs, and that it was moving through a rarefied dust medium. Upon sighting the police ship, the giant first waved, then turned away.
Radio contact was soon established with the thing. It stated that it was the former Cathodius Mattrass, that after arriving two years ago at this place, it — he — had remade himself into robots, using, in part, the raw materials of the vicinity, and that in the future he would slowly but continually increase in size, because this suited him, and he asked to be left alone.
The commander of the patrol, pretending to take this statement at face value, concealed his ship behind a passing swarm of meteors. After a while he observed that the gigantic pseudo-human was gradually beginning to divide into much smaller pieces, each no larger than an average person, and that these parts or individuals were uniting to form something like a small round planet.
Coming out of hiding then, the commander asked the alleged Mattrass, by radio, what this spherical metamorphosis meant, and, also, what exactly was he — robot or human.
Mattrass replied that he assumed whatever shape he pleased, that he was not a robot, having arisen from a human, nor human, having rebuilt himself in robot form. He refused to give further explanations.
The case, to which the press gave considerable attention, gradually turned into a cause célèbre, because ships passing the Crab picked up snatches of radio conversations conducted by the so-called Mattrass; in these, he referred to himself as “Cathodius Sub One.” It seemed that Cathodius Sub One — or Mattrass — was speaking to others (other robots?) as if conversing with his own hands and feet. The chatter in the region about Cathodius Sub One suggested that what one had here was a government established by either Mattrass or his robot derivatives. The State Department made a thorough investigation of the situation. The patrols reported that at times a metal sphere, at times a humanoid creature five hundred miles in length, was moving through the nebula, that it was speaking to itself about this and that, but concerning its statehood it gave evasive answers.
The authorities decided to put an immediate stop to the usurper’s activity, but since the action would be (had to be) official, it was necessary to give it a name. Here the first obstacles arose. The MacFlacon Act, an annex to the civil code, dealt with movable property. In effect, electronic brains are considered movables, even when lacking legs. But here was a body the size of a planetoid in a nebula, and celestial bodies, though moving, are not considered movables. The question then came up whether or not a planet could be arrested; whether an assemblage of robots could be a planet; and, finally, whether this was one dismountable robot or a robot multitude.
Mattrasa’s legal adviser appeared before the authorities and submitted to them a statement from his client in which the latter declared that he was setting out for the Crab Nebula to transform himself into robots.
The initial interpretation of this datum, offered by the legal section of the State Department, went as follows: Mattrass, transforming himself into robots, had thereby destroyed his living organism and thus committed suicide. Which act was not punishable. The robot or robots that were a continuation of Mattrass, however, had been fabricated by the said individual and were therefore his property, and therefore now, after his demise, ought to devolve to the Treasury, since Mattrass had left no heir. On the basis of this decision, the State Department dispatched a bailiff to the nebula with the order to seize and seal everything he found there.
Mattrass’s lawyer appealed, maintaining that the decision’s acknowledgment of Mattrass’s continuation ruled out suicide, because a person who continues exists, and if he exists, he has not committed suicide. Hence there were no “robots the property of Mattrass” but only Cathodius Mattrass, who had altered himself as he saw fit. Bodily alterations were not and could not be punished; nor was it lawful to impound the parts of a person’s body — be they gold teeth or robots.
The State Department disagreed: from such an interpretation it followed that a living creature, in this instance a human being, could be built from obviously dead parts — robots. Then Mattrass’s lawyer submitted to the authorities the deposition of a group of prominent physicists at Harvard, who testified unanimously that every living organism, the human organism included, is built of atomic particles, and these can only be regarded as dead.
Seeing that the case was taking a disturbing turn, the State Department gave up its attack on “Mattrass and successors” from the physio-biological standpoint and returned to the original decision, in which the word “continuation” was replaced by the word “product.” The lawyer thereupon presented in court a new Mattrass statement, wherein the latter declared that the robots were in reality his children. The State Department demanded that adoption papers be produced — a ruse, since adoption of robots was not permitted by law. Mattrass’s lawyer explained that actual paternity, not adoption, was the issue. The Department said that regulations required that children, to so qualify, have a father and a mother. The lawyer, prepared for this, added to the record the letter of one electrical engineer Melanie Fortinbras, who revealed that the birth of the parties in question had occurred in the course of her close collaboration with Mattrass.
The State Department questioned the nature of that collaboration as lacking “natural parental features.” “In the aforementioned case,” declared the government report, “one may speak of paternity or maternity in a figurative sense only, for the parentage involved is mental; whereas statutes require, for family law to come into effect, physical parentage.”
Mattrass’s lawyer demanded an explanation of how mental parentage differed from physical, and asked on what grounds the State Department regarded Cathodius Mattrass’s union with Melanie Fortinbras as lacking physicality with respect to procreation.
The Department replied that the mental element in procreation, as recognized by and in accordance with the law, was negligible, whereas the physical predominated. Which latter did not occur in the case under discussion.
The lawyer then submitted the testimony of expert cybernetic midwives, indicating how greatly — in a physical sense — Cathodius and Melanie had to labor to bring into the world their autonomous offspring.
The Department finally decided to throw public decency aside and take a desperate step. It stated that the parental activities that causally and inevitably preceded the existence of children differed, in a fundamental way, from the programming of robots.
The lawyer was just waiting for this. He declared that children, too, were in a certain sense programmed by their parents in the course of their preparatory-preliminary activities; he asked the Department to describe precisely how, in its opinion, children should be conceived, that the act be in strict conformity with the law.
The Department, enlisting the aid of experts, prepared a voluminous reply, illustrated with plates and topographical diagrams, but since the main author of this so-called Pink Book was eighty-nine-year-old Professor Stockton-Mumford, the dean of American obstetrics, the lawyer immediately questioned his competence — in the area of causative-preparatory functions as regards parenthood — in view of the fact that, given his extremely advanced age, the professor must have lost all recollection of a number of details crucial to the case and was relying on rumors and the accounts of third parties.
The Department then undertook to substantiate the Pink Book with the sworn testimony of numerous fathers and mothers, but it was found that their statements differed considerably in places. About certain elements of the preliminary phase there was no agreement whatever. The Department, seeing that a fatal ambiguity was beginning to obscure this key issue, decided to question the material from which the alleged “children” of Mattrass and Fortinbras had been created, but then the rumor circulated (it was spread, they later discovered, by the lawyer) that Mattrass had ordered 450,000 tons of veal from Consolidated Corned Beef, Inc., and the Undersecretary of State dropped this plan in a hurry.
Instead, the Department, at the unfortunate suggestion of a theology professor, one Waugh, cited the Scripture. An unwise move, because Mattrass’s lawyer parried with an exhaustive disquisition in which he proved, giving chapter and verse, that the Lord used only one part to program Eve, proceeding by a method most outlandish compared with that customarily employed by people, and yet He created a human being, for surely no one in his right mind considered Eve a robot. The Department then charged Mattrass and his successors with violating the MacFlacon Act, since as a robot (or robots) he had come into possession of a celestial body, and robots are forbidden ownership of planets or any other real estate.
This time the lawyer submitted to the Supreme Court all the documents that had been issued by the Department against Mattrass. First — he emphasized — it was evident, when one compared these texts, that in the State Department’s view Mattrass was both his own father and his own son, and, at the same time, a celestial body. Second, the Department had misinterpreted the MacFlacon Act. The body of a certain individual, of Citizen Cathodius Mattrass, had been arbitrarily designated a planet. This conclusion was based on a legal, logical, and semantic absurdity.
That was how it began. Soon all the press wrote about was the “Celestial Body — Father — Son.” The government commenced new legal actions, but each was nipped in the bud by Mattrass’s indefatigable lawyer.
The State Department understood perfectly that Mattrass was not floating about in multiplied form in the Crab Nebula for the fun of it. No, his purpose was to create a legal precedent. Mattrass’s going unpunished would have incalculable consequences, so the finest specialists pored over the record day and night, devising ever more tortuous juridical constructions, in the toils of which Mattrass was to meet his end. But each action was countered immediately by Mattrass’s legal adviser. I myself followed the course of this struggle with keen interest. Then, unexpectedly, the Bar Association invited me to a special plenary session devoted to the problems of interpreting “Casus United States contra Cathodius Mattrass alias Cathodius Sub One alias the offspring of Mattrass and Fortinbras alias a planet in the Crab Nebula.”
I was there at the designated time and place, and found the hall packed. The flower of the Bar filled tiers upon tiers of seats. The deliberations were already in progress. I sat in one of the last rows and began listening to the gray speaker.
“Distinguished colleagues!” he said, arms upraised. “Great difficulties await us when we proceed to a legal analysis of this problem! A certain Mattrass remakes himself into robots with the aid of a certain Fortinbras and at the same time enlarges himself on a scale of one to a million. That is how the matter looks to a layman, an ignoramus, a fool incapable of perceiving the abyss of legal problems that opens before our shocked eye! We must determine first of all with whom we are dealing — a human being, a robot, a government, a planet, children, a conspiracy, a demonstration, or an uprising. Consider how much depends on this decision. If, for example, we find that we are dealing not with a sovereign state but with a rebellious band of robots, a sort of electronic gang, then we are bound not by international law but by the common statutes regarding disorderly conduct in public places! If we rule that Mattrass, notwithstanding his multiplication, still exists and yet has children, it follows that this individual has given birth to himself — which causes the legal system terrible trouble, since we have no laws covering this, and nulle crimen sine lege! I therefore propose that Professor Ping Ling, the renowned authority on international law, be the first to take the floor!”
The venerable professor, greeted with warm applause, mounted the podium.
“Gentlemen,” he said in an aged but powerful voice. “Let us consider first how a state is established. It is established in various ways, is it not? Our country, for example, was once an English colony; then it declared its independence and became a state. Does this occur in Mattrass’s case? The answer is: if Mattrass, when remaking himself into robots, was of sound mind, then his state-creating act has legal validity, and we could define his nationality as electric. If, on the other hand, he was deranged, the act cannot be legally recognized.”
Here an old man, grayer even than the first, jumped up in the middle of the hall and cried:
“High Court — I mean, gentlemen! I take the liberty of observing that if Mattrass was an insane state-creator, his descendants may still be sane; the state, which existed originally as a product of a private madness and thus had the nature of a morbid symptom, thereafter existed publicly, de facto, by the very consent of its electric inhabitants to the existing situation. And because no one can forbid the inhabitants of a state — who themselves have determined its legislative system — to acknowledge even the most insane authority (as has happened more than once in history), the existence of Mattrass’s state de facto entails its existence de iure!!”
“My honorable opponent will forgive me,” said Professor Ping Ling, “but Mattrass was our citizen, and consequently…”
“What of it?” shouted the irascible old man from the hall. “Either we recognize or we do not recognize Mattrass’s state-creating act. If we recognize it and a sovereign state has arisen, then we have no claim against it. If, on the other hand, we do not recognize it, then either we are dealing with a corporate body or we are not. If we are not, if we do not have before us a legal entity, then the entire problem exists only for the sweepers of the Cosmic Trash Removal Agency, since there is a pile of scrap in the Crab Nebula — and our assembly has nothing at all to deliberate on! If, however, we have before us a legal entity, then another question arises. Sidereal law provides for the arrest, that is, the deprivation of freedom, of legal and physical entities on a planet or aboard a ship. The so-called Mattrass is not aboard a ship. On a planet, rather. We should therefore apply for his extradition. But there is no one to whom we can apply. Moreover, the planet on which he lives is himself. Therefore this place, considered from the only standpoint that concerns us — namely, the Majesty of the Law — constitutes a void, a kind of juridical nullity; but neither our civil law, nor our administrative law, nor our international law deals with nullities. Therefore, the remarks of esteemed Professor Ping Ling cannot shed light on the problem, because the problem does not exist!”
Having stunned the honorable assembly with this conclusion, the old man sat down.
During the next six hours I heard some twenty speakers; they showed, logically and irrefutably, that Mattrass existed, and that he did not exist; that he had established a state of robots, and that he was composed of such mechanical organisms; that he should be scrapped because he had broken a great number of laws, and that he had broken no law. Attorney Wurple’s view that Mattrass was sometimes a planet, sometimes a robot, and sometimes nothing at all — a middle-of-the-road view meant to satisfy everyone — aroused general indignation and was supported by no one except its originator. But that was a trifle compared with the subsequent deliberations, for Senior Assistant Milger showed that Mattrass, by making himself into robots, had thereby multiplied his personality and now numbered about three hundred thousand. Because, however, there was no question of this collectivity representing a group of different individuals, since it was but one and the same individual repeated many times, Mattrass was a single entity in three hundred thousand aspects.
In reply Judge Hubble averred that the whole issue had been viewed incorrectly from the beginning: since Mattrass remade himself from a human being into robots, these robots were not he but someone else; since they were someone else, it was necessary to ascertain who they were; but if they were not human, they were no one; consequently, neither a juridical nor a physical problem existed, for there was no one whatsoever in the Crab Nebula.
I had already been painfully bumped around several times by the incensed participants. The security guards and the medical attendants had their hands full. Then suddenly cries rang out that electronic brains disguised as lawyers were present in the hall and should be removed at once, since their bias was indisputable — not to mention the fact that they had no right to take part in the deliberations. The chairman, Professor Claghorn, began walking about the hall with a small compass in hand; whenever its needle quivered and turned toward anyone seated in the audience, drawn by the iron hidden under his clothing, the individual was immediately unmasked and thrown out. In this way the hall was half emptied during the endless speeches of Professors Fitts, Pitts, and Clabenti; the latter was interrupted in mid-sentence when the compass betrayed his electronic origin. After a short recess, during which we ate in the cafeteria to the increasing din of debate, I returned to the hall holding my jacket in place (all the buttons had been torn off by impassioned lawyers who had kept pulling me by the lapels) — and noticed a large X-ray machine near the podium. Attorney Plussek was speaking. He had just declared that Mattrass was a random cosmic phenomenon when the chairman marched up to me with a threatening look; the compass needle spun wildly in his palm. As the security guards collared me, I emptied my pockets of a penknife, a can opener, and a tea ball, and tore the nickel-plated buckles off my garters. No longer acting upon the magnetic needle, I was allowed to participate further in the deliberations. Forty-three more had been unmasked as robots when Professor Dewey told us that Mattrass could be treated as a sort of cosmic aggregation. I was thinking that this had been said already — apparently the lawyers were running out of ideas — when another inspection was made. Now all the participants were X-rayed unceremoniously, and it turned out that under their impeccably tailored suits they were hiding plastic, corundum, nylon, crystal, and even straw parts. Someone made of woolen yarn was reportedly discovered in one of the last rows. When the next speaker stepped down from the podium, I found myself conspicuously alone in the middle of the huge hall. The speaker was X-rayed and immediately thrown out. Then the chairman, the last person besides me to remain, approached my chair. All of a sudden — I don’t know why — I took the compass from his hand; it whirled accusingly and pointed at him. I tapped his belly with a knuckle, and it rang. Without thinking I seized him by the scruff of the neck and threw him out. I stood facing several hundred abandoned briefcases, thick folders with documents, canes, derbies and other hats, leather-bound books, and galoshes. Pacing the empty hall for a while and seeing that there was nothing for me to do there, I turned sharply and went home.