Free Asimov's Future History Volume 1 by Isaac Asimov Page A

being acquainted with events, paused only to make sure that her husband’s insurance policy was safe, and to make a few pithy remarks concerning her foolishness in not having had him take out double the amount, before breaking out into as prolonged and heart-wringing a wail of grief as ever became a respectable widow.
     
    It was some hours later that Randolph Payne – unaware of his horrible mutilation and death – viewed the completed negatives of his snapshots with satisfaction. As a series of portraits of a robot at work, they left nothing to the imagination. They might have been labeled: “Robot Gazing Thoughtfully at Vacuum Tube,” “Robot Splicing Two Wires,” “Robot Wielding Screwdriver,” “Robot Taking Refrigerator Apart with Great Violence,” and so on.
    As there now remained only the routine of making the prints themselves, he stepped out from beyond the curtain of the improvised darkroom for a bit of a smoke and a chat with AL-76.
    In doing so, he was blissfully unaware that the neighboring woods were verminous with nervous farmers armed with anything from an old colonial relic of a blunderbuss to the portable machine gun carried by the sheriff himself. Nor, for that matter, had he any inkling of the fact that half a dozen roboticists, under the leadership of Sam Tobe, were smoking down the highway from Petersboro at better than a hundred and twenty miles an hour for the sole purpose of having the pleasure and honor of his acquaintance.
    So while things were jittering toward a climax, Randolph Payne sighed with self-satisfaction, lighted a match upon the seat of his pants, puffed away at his pipe, and looked at AL-76 with amusement.
    It had been apparent for quite some time that the robot was more than slightly lunatic. Randolph Payne was himself an expert at homemade contraptions, having built several that could not have been exposed to daylight without searing the eyeballs of all beholders; but he had never even conceived of anything approaching the monstrosity that AL-76 was concocting.
    It would have made the Rube Goldbergs of the day die in convulsions of envy. It would have made Picasso (if he could have lived to witness it) quit art in the sheer knowledge that he had been hopelessly surpassed. It would have soured the milk in the udders of any cow within half a mile.
    In fact, it was gruesome!
    From a rusty and massive iron base that faintly resembled something Payne had once seen attached to a secondhand tractor, it rose upward in rakish, drunken swerves through a bewildering mess of wires, wheels, tubes, and nameless horrors without number, ending in a megaphone arrangement that looked decidedly sinister.
    Payne had the impulse to peek in the megaphone part, but refrained. He had seen far more sensible machines explode suddenly and with violence.
    He said, “Hey, Al.”
    The robot looked up. He had been lying flat on his stomach, teasing a thin sliver of metal into place. “What do you want, Payne?”
    “What is this?” He asked it in the tone of one referring to something foul and decomposing, held gingerly between two ten-foot poles.
    “It’s the Disinto I’m making – so I can start to work. It’s an improvement on the standard model.” The robot rose, dusted his knees clankingly, and looked at it proudly.
    Payne shuddered. An “improvement”! No wonder they hid the original in caverns on the moon. Poor satellite! Poor dead satellite! He had always wanted to know what a fate worse than death was. Now he knew.
    “Will it work?” he asked.
    “Sure.”
    “How do you know?”
    “It’s got to. I made it, didn’t I? I only need one thing now. Got a flashlight?”
    “Somewhere, I guess.” Payne vanished into the shack and returned almost immediately.
    The robot unscrewed the bottom and set to work. In five minutes he had finished. He stepped back and said, “All set. Now I get to work. You may watch if you want to.”
    A pause, while Payne tried to appreciate the