Uphill Climb

“Service!” Livingstone Kivley lobbed his last tennis ball across the sagging net. At the sidelines, in the shade of the old brownstone office building, stood young Obno. She was thin for a Quintaglio, no more than 400 kilos, a dwarf tyrannosaur with nervous, darting eyes of polished obsidian. Kivley’s opponent was a blue boxlike robot. The little machine swatted the ball with a nylon racquet. Kivley swung, missed, swore. Obno spoke to the robot, using the sub-language her people reserved for talking to beasts and gods. It rolled on rubber treads to the net, lifted it, slipped under, and dutifully collected the balls.

Kivley turned his face up at Obno in what he hoped the alien would read as mock despair. “Oh, the humiliation! I’ve been playing tennis for sixty years and your overgrown milk crate whips the pants off me.” The blue box rolled up to Kivley and deposited three fuzzy spheres at his besneakered feet. Kivley saw the hurt look in the Quintaglio’s eyes. “I’m kidding, Obno. You’ve done a fine job.”

Obno didn’t look much happier. “The robot is capable of many other complex tasks.” She walked over to Kivley, lazy summer sun glinting off the scale vestiges embedded in her leathery hide. “It can work in manufacturing, run errands, look after infants, be a courier.”

“Was it expensive to make?”

“This prototype? Yes. But the design is entirely solid-state, except for the treads and arms. We could sell them for walnuts.”

“Peanuts,” corrected Kivley. He reached a hand up to the alien’s shoulder. “It’s an excellent piece of work.”

Obno slapped her tail against the asphalt. “Not excellent. Not even adequate. True, the robotic software is years beyond what your race has yet produced, but the treads cannot negotiate slopes greater than a rise of one meter in a run of twelve.”

Kivley felt a twinge in his back as he went to his knees and inspected the endless belts of corded rubber under the robot. “That’s what? Five degrees? Good! Entirely sufficient.”

The Quintaglio’s muzzle peeled back in a grimace, showing serrated teeth. “It’s impractical. The machine cannot go up those stairs human architects are so fond of. You must allow me time to develop a more versatile locomotor system.”

“No. Out of the question.” He rose slowly to his feet. “We’ll market them as is.”

“As is?”

“Absolutely. The full energies of the Combinatorics Corporation shall be bent to the task.” He wiped his hands on his tattered tennis shorts. “People will buy any good labor-saving device, no?” Kivley knew that Obno was going to remind him—again!— that the Quintaglios had bestowed a great trust upon him when they gave him the job of supervising the introduction of their technology to Earth. She did not disappoint him. He shrugged. “It’s a living.”

“But Combinatorics was to have been an altruistic undertaking.”

“Altruistic this shall be.”

“Yet I feel that—”

“That we should be providing something more important than electronic gophers?” Kivley hefted his racquet and headed towards the old office building.

“Precisely!” Obno scooped up the robot and tucked it under one rubbery arm. They walked around to the glass-fronted entrance. Obno was up the three stairs in one stride; for Kivley it took a trio of little hops. “So much we could do for humankind,” said Obno.

“One step at a time, my friend. One step at a time.”

Kivley trudged through the snow on his way in from the bus stop. He passed dozens of the little blue robots chugging to and fro on the sidewalk, tiny plows attached to their fronts. Kivley looked up at the sound of Obno kaflumping across the drifts towards him. “I had an idea last night that will improve the robots,” Obno said, lashing her muff-wrapped tail violently to fight the cold. “If we install cleats on pistons, they could climb over small obstacles.”

Kivley continued to walk. “We’ve sold many robots so far, no?”

Obno nodded, an acquired human gesture. “Thousands each month. The fabricators aboard the mothership are having trouble keeping up with the demand.”

“Then let’s leave well enough alone.”

Obno’s sigh was a massive white cloud in the cold air. “I know little of capitalism, but isn’t it bad business to make customers install ramps at great expense?”

“It’s a small price to pay. Our robots can save their owners thousands of dollars.” He nodded. “You can get people to do almost anything if they think they’re saving a buck.”

Kivley stared out of his third-floor office window. Crocuses were blooming along the edge of the sidewalk. He heard a knock and swiveled to see Obno squeezing through the mahogany door frame. “Here!” She slapped a hardcopy sheet on his desk.

“What is it?” asked Kivley, rummaging through the clutter for his reading glasses.

“It’s a letter from IBM. They want to purchase the right to manufacture robots like ours.” Her voice took on an edge. “But with legs.”

“You object to the machines requiring ramps, Obno.” He tried to put a question mark at the end of the sentence, but it didn’t quite make it past his lips.

“I am shamed by the inefficiency. Since we introduced them three years ago, nearly all public buildings in the industrial portions of this planet have had to be modified to accommodate the growing robot population.”

“Very well,” said Kivley, nodding as he gave the letter a quick looldng over. “Sell the patent. Ask whatever seems fair.”

Obno spluttered, a loud, sticky sound. “But you wouldn’t let me—!”

Kivley swiveled around to look out at the street again. He gestured Obno to the window. A pretty woman rolled happily along the sidewalk in her wheelchair and up the gentle ramp into the building.

Obno smiled at last.