The Complete Robot Notes
(Doubleday hardcover)
"A Boy's Best Friend"
- CR,p3: Mr. Anderson
- CR,p3: Jimmy
- CR,p3: Mrs. Anderson
- CR,p3: Jimmy's at the rocket station
- CR,p3: "I haven't really seen one one since I [Mrs. Anderson] left Earth 15 years ago."
- CR,p3: Jimmy's "Moonborn and can't visit Earth."
- CR,p3: "Maintaining Robutt isn't cheap, either..."
- CR,p3: Jimmy: "By Earth Standards, he was spindly, but rather tall for a 10-yr-old. His
arms and legs were long and agile. He looked thicker and stubbier w/ his
spacesuit on, but he could handle the lunar gravity as no Earthborn
human being could. His father couldn't begin to keep up w/ him when
Jimmy stretched his legs and went into the kangaroo hop."
- CR,p3: Lunar City
- CR,p4: "Robutt, who could hear him by radio, squeaked and bounded after. Jimmy,
expert though he was, couldn't outrace Robutt, who didn't need a
spacesuit, and had 4 legs and tendons of steel."
- CR,p4: "...special squeak that meant 'Yes.'"
- CR,p4: "Robutt...bouncing around and squeaking and glowing? Even w/out the glow,
Robutt could tell where he was, and where Jimmy was, by radar. Jimmy
couldn't go wrong while Robutt was around, tripping him when he was too
near a rock, or jumping on him to show how much he loved him, or
circling around and squeaking low and scared when Jimmy hid behind a
rock, when all the time Robutt knew well enough where he was. Once
Jimmy had lain still and pretended he was hurt and Robutt had sounded
the radio alarm and people from Lunar City got there in a hurry. Jimmy's
father had let him hear about that little trick, and Jimmy never tried it
again."
- CR,p4: Jimmy's father's private wavelength
- CR,p4: spacesuit
- CR,p4: "You always had to wash up after coming in from outside. Even Robutt had to be
sprayed, but he loved it."
- CR,p4-5: "He stood there on all fours, his little foot-long body quivering and glowing just a
tiny bit, and his small head, w/ no mouth, w/ 2 large glassed-in eyes, and
w/ a bump where the brain was."
- CR,p5: rocket station
- CR,p5: Scotch terrier puppy, "The 1st dog on the Moon. You don't need Robutt
anymore. We can't keep them both, you know, and some other boy or
girl will have Robutt."
- CR,p5: "...robot-mutt. That's how he got his name...Robutt's just steel and wiring and a
simple positronic brain. It's not alive."
- CR,p5: the dog will need a spacesuit
- CR,p5: Robutt made "...a very low, slow squeak, that seemed frightened."
- CR,p5: "Robutt is just adjusted to act as though it loves you."
- CR,p6: "And the little robot-mutt, which had never been held so tightly in all its existence,
squeaked high and rapid squeaks -- happy squeaks."
"Point of View"
- CR,p37: Roger, his father
- CR,p37: "...it was Sunday, and by rights his father shouldn't have been at work..."
- CR,p37: "...all the people who worked w/ Multivac, the giant computer, lived w/
their families right on the grounds. They made up a little city by
themselves, a city of people that solved all the world's problems."
- CR,p37: "The Sunday receptionist..."
- CR,p37: Corridor L
- CR,p37: Roger's father is Atkins => Roger Atkins
- CR,p37: commissary
- CR,p37: current-pattern analyzer
- CR,p38: "Roger could hear Multivac chuckling and whirring all about."
- CR,p38: hamburger, french fries, soda pop
- CR,p38: Multivac out of order
- CR,p38: "Roger was 13 and he'd been taking computer-programming since the
4th grade...back in the 20th Century, when kids didn't use to take
it..."
- CR,p38: " 'Multivac may have a brain as large as a big factory, but it still isn't as
complicated as the one we have here'...he tapped his head.
'Sometimes, Multivac gives us an answer we couldn't calculate for
ourselves in a thousand yrs, but just the same something clicks
in our brains and we say, Whoa! Something's wrong here!' "
Then they ask again and get a different answer
- CR,p38: "...whatever is wrong is getting worse."
- CR,p39: "...we've made Multivac the wrong smartness...if Multivac were as smart
as a man, we could talk to it and find out what was wrong no
matter how complicated it was. If it were as dumb as a machine,
it would go wrong in simple ways that we could catch easily. The
trouble is, it's half-smart, like an idiot. It's smart enough to go
wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us
find out what's wrong."
- CR,p39: "...Multivac must be in operation every minute of the day and night.
We've got a big back-log of problems."
- CR,p40: Roger uses a homework analogy to come up with: "...why not let Multivac
take an hour or 2 off every day w/ no problem-solving -- just
letting it chuckle and whir by itself any way it wants to."
- CR,p40: "Roger's father looked as if he were thinking very hard. He took out his
pocket-computer and tried some combinations on it. He tried
some more combinations. Then he said, 'You know, Roger, if I
take what you said and turn it into Platt-integrals, it makes a
kind of sense. And 22 hrs we can be sure of is better than 24
that might be all wrong.' "
- CR,p40: "Dad, a kid's got to play, too."
"Robot AL-76 Goes Astray"