There was little work left of a routine, mechanical nature. Men’s minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic meter of printed circuits could perform. There were factories that ran for weeks without being visited by a single human being. Men were needed for trouble-shooting, for making decisions, for planning new enterprises. The robots did the rest.
At this point, there flashed briefly through Stenton’s horrified mind the memory of that timeless classic, H. G. Wells’s “The Star.” He had first read it as a small boy, and it had helped to spark his interest in astronomy.
Miss Pringle was not much larger than the handheld personal assistants of his own age, and usually lived, like the Old West’s Colt 45, in a quick-draw holster at his waist.
The sixth member of the crew cared for none of these things, for it was not human. It was the highly advanced HAL 9000 computer, the brain and nervous system of the ship.
She was certain that it was wise to prevent Wilson and Brown from working closely together during sorties inside Rama. Nicole chastised herself for not having raised the issue with Borzov on her own. She realized that her mission portfolio included mental health as well, but somehow she had difficulty thinking of herself as the crew psychiatrist. I avoid it because it’s not an objective process, she thought. We have no sensors yet to measure good or bad mental health.
Yet there was also something slightly spooky about them. Norton could never understand how men with advanced scientific and technical training could possibly believe some of the things he had heard Cosmo Christers state as incontrovertible fact.
Hal’s internal fault predictor could have made a mistake.” “It’s more.
Nothing in this scene will be changed by my death, Nicole thought. There will just be one less pair of eyes to observe its splendor. And one less collection of chemicals risen to consciousness to wonder what it all means.
Curnow had once remarked that Dr. Chandra had the sort of physique that could only be achieved by centuries of starvation.
Long ago it had been decided that, however inconsequential rudeness to robots might appear to be, it should be discouraged. All too easily, it could spread to human relationships as well.
He lifted the telephone receiver and pressed it against the plastic of his helmet. If there had been a dialing sound he could have heard it through the conducting material. But, as he had expected, there was only silence. So – it was all a fake, though a fantastically careful one. And it was clearly not intended to deceive but rather – he hoped – to reassure. That was a very comforting thought; nevertheless he would not remove his suit until he had completed his voyage of exploration.
A feeling of foreboding, and, indeed, of physical as well as psychological discomfort, had come over him. He suddenly recalled – and this did nothing at all to help – a phrase he had once come across: “Someone is walking over your grave.
As to the nature of that drive, one thing was now certain, even though all else was mystery. There were no jets of gas, no beams of ions or plasma thrusting Rama into its new orbit. No one put it better than Sergeant Professor Myron, when he said, in shocked.
Many of the fundamental physical constants-which as far as one could see, God could have given any value He liked-are in fact very precised adjusted, or fine-tuned, to produce the only kind of Universe that makes our existence possible.
The outermost – Jupiter XXVII – moved backwards in an unstable path nineteen million miles from its temporary master. It was the prize in a perpetual tug-of-war between Jupiter and the Sun, for the planet was constantly capturing short-lived moons from the asteroid belt, and losing them again after a few million years. Only the inner satellites were its permanent property; the Sun could never wrest them from its grasp.
I hope you’re right. Apart from that, won’t there be trouble when he discovers what you’re trying to do? Because he will, you know.” “I’ll take that risk. Besides, we understand each other rather well.” The physicist toyed with his pencil and stared into space for a while. “It’s a very pretty problem. I like it,” he said simply. Then he dived into a drawer and produced an enormous writing pad, quite the biggest that Stormgren had ever seen.
How obvious, now, was that mathematical ratio of its sides, the quadratic sequence 1:4:9! And how naive to have imagined that the series ended there, in only three dimensions!
Much had been lost during the centuries, for men seldom bother to preserve the commonplace articles of everyday life.
Hello, Dave,” said Hal presently. “Have you found the trouble?” This.
There was little work left of a routine, mechanical nature. Men’s minds were too valuable to waste on tasks that a few thousand transistors, some photo-electric cells, and a cubic meter of printed circuits could perform.