Free Second Ending by James White

never obtruded itself. Here again the theme was always the same, with no very subtle variations, and such that he woke up hating his cold white room with its untidy piles of books and Beethoven scowling at him. After a dream like that he would gulp his breakfast and go storming up to the surface or to the first-level library and work even harder, and sometimes he would be able to forget it.
     
    Now he was not allowed to work at all. Now he had no way of forgetting Alice, or the beach, or the small park — not very well tended — on the inland side of the hill, or the hospital as it had been. Except when he lost his temper and threw Sister's selected light reading back in the place where her face should have been. Sometimes that would start an argument, bad language and a furious silence on his part, at others an exchange in which he tried to make Sister feel as confused as possible while she tried to reassure him.
     
    Sister was much smarter these days, and had absorbed several textbooks on psychology.
     
       
     
       
     
    After one particularly hot session on the twelfth day of what Ross considered his imprisonment, he asked suddenly, "Do you know what is meant by telling a lie, or doing a kindness, or making a pun?"
     
    Sister had been spouting Freud and sex urges at him as if she had used them all her life, and Ross had grown annoyed because the robot knew so much more psychology than he did that he couldn't even make a fight of it. This was his way of putting Sister in her place.
     
    "I have no data on puns or their methods of construction," Sister replied briskly. "Doing a kindness means to render assistance, and telling a lie is, I have read, the transmission as true of data which is incomplete or false."
     
    Ross said, "I take it, then, that you would do me a kindness but you would not tell me a lie."
     
    "Of course, Mr. Ross."
     
    "But suppose, in order to render assistance, you had to tell a lie," Ross went on. "For the sake of argument, let's suppose a man is devoting considerable time and effort to a project which you know will fail, you being in possession of more data on the subject. You also know that to inform him of this fact, which it is your duty to do, would cause him extreme mental distress, insanity and eventually death. Would you tell a lie then?"
     
    "It is against our basic programming to give false or incomplete data," Sister replied. "I would require guidance by another human before making such a decision —"
     
    "Stop ducking the question," said Ross sharply. "Our supposition calls for there being only one human, the one you have to he to." Then, in a quieter, more serious voice, he added, "I am trying to teach you the difference between giving assistance and being kind. If I can get the idea across to you, you may begin to think a little more like a human being."
     
    "A human mind possesses free will, initiative," Sister protested. "No robot could —"
     
    "Exercise initiative. But you did it when you awakened me without a brace of Cleaners sitting on my chest And since then there have been improvements. The robots have given way to steamships." He laughed awkwardly and added, "That was a pun."
     
    Sister said, "From my reading I know that steam-driven vessels were a later development than those propelled by oars, just as you have caused us to develop since your awakening. But I cannot understand why you used the word 'robots' when you should have said 'row-boats,' unless the accidental similarity of sounds…"
     
    That particular discussion lasted for nearly three hours and broke off only because it was time for the lights to go out. To Sister the division between waking and sleeping periods was sharp. In the middle of a sentence she stopped speaking, paused, then finished, "It is time to go to sleep, Mr. Ross. Is there anything you want before I go into low alert?"
     
    It was always the same formula and Ross had become tired of hearing it. Bitterly he said, "Yes, there is. I