Clifford D Simak by A Choice of Gods

Author:A Choice of Gods
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-04-03T22:21:38+00:00

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(Excerpt from journal of Sept. 18, 2185) … Sometime after we had started our ambitious expeditions to get together a comprehensive library and to acquire at least a sampling of the arts, four robots came to see me. I did not recognize them—after all, there are few distinguishing marks by which a robot can be recognized. They may have been working about the farm for years or they may just then have wandered in. I am somewhat surprised, now that I write of it, that I did not question them more closely, but my best memory now is that I did not ask them about their origins, either then or since. It may have been that I was so astonished—and in a sense, upset —by what they had to ask that I was delinquent in my investigation of them.

They told me that their names were Hezekiah, Nicodemus, Jonathon and Ebenezer, and that if I had no objection they would like to occupy the monastery buildings down the road and devote their entire time to a study of Christianity. They seemed to have gotten the idea that man had stopped far short of the point he should have reached in his study of religion and that they, as objective students, might press the matter much beyond man’s short-range venture into it I could detect about them no sign of religious fervor, although I greatly fear if they continue at it (they have been at it, at the time of this writing, almost thirty years) they will not be able to maintain an objective attitude and may develop unthinking religious fanaticism. I am not even now convinced (perhaps now less convinced than I was then) that I was right in raising no objections to their project. It may not have been right or wise to turn a group of robots loose upon so sensitive a subject. I suppose fanatics have their proper niche in all societies, but the thought of fanatic robots (fanatic on any subject, and religion somehow seems to breed fanatics) does not particularly enchant me. The entire business suggests a situation that can be really frightening. With the most of mankind gone and all the robots left, the robots in time may move to fill the vacuum thus created. They were made to serve us and they cannot, by the very nature of them, be idle. One wonders if, lacking men to serve, in time they will not somehow contrive to serve themselves. If that should be the case, what sort of motives might they have and what kind of purpose? Surely not human and for that, I would suppose, one might be duly grateful. But it is with what I tell myself is pardonable apprehension that one must view the rise of a new philosophy and a setting of new values by creatures that were created in their final form little more than a century ago, having no evolutionary period in which they could develop by the same

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