Cal by Isaac Asimov

Author:Isaac Asimov
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 1990-01-15T01:57:49+00:00

This time, after I became aware of everything again, I was quite weak for a long time. I had difficulty standing, and my speech was slurred.

I thought that Mr. Northrop looked at me with a worried expression. Perhaps he felt guilty at how he had treated me—he should feel guilty—or perhaps he was just worried at the possibility of having lost a great deal of money.

As my sense of balance returned and my speech became clear, an odd thing happened. I suddenly understood how silly human beings were. They had no laws governing their actions. They had to make up their own, and even when they did, nothing forced them to obey.

Human beings were simply confused; one had to laugh at them. I understood laughter now and could even make the sound, but naturally I didn’t laugh out loud. That would have been impolite and offensive. I laughed inside myself, and I began to think of a story in which human beings did have laws governing their actions but they hated them and couldn’t stick to them.

I also thought of the technician and decided to put him into the story, too. Mr. Northrop kept going to the technician and asking him to do things to me, harder and harder things. Now he had given me a sense of the ridiculous.

So suppose I wrote a story about ridiculous human beings, with no robots present, because, of course, robots aren’t ridiculous and their presence would simply spoil the humour. And suppose I put in a person who was a technician of human beings. It might be some creature with strange powers who could alter human behavior as my technician could alter robot behavior. What would happen in that case?

It might show clearly how human beings were not sensible.

I spent days thinking about the story and getting happier and happier about it. I would start with two men having dinner, and one of them would own a technician—well, have a technician of some sort—and I would place the setting in the twentieth century so as not to offend Mr. Northrop and the other people of the twenty-first.

I read books to learn about human beings. Mr. Northrop let me do this and he hardly ever gave me any tasks to do. Nor did he try to hurry me to write. Maybe he still felt guilty about the risk he had taken doing me hard.

I finally started the story, and here it is:

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