The Compassion Circuit by John Wyndham Read Free Book Online

Compassion Circuit
    by John Wyndham
    There have been many stories in the past, both fictional and science-fictional, dealing with man’s fear of the machines he has created, but here is one in which his fear seems more than justified… Did you ever stop to think how horrible it would be if there were a machine that wouldn’t permit you to hurt yourself, or to do anything which might hurt you? Give it a moment’s contemplation, and then read this tingler by one of England’s best-known modern science fantasists.

    An A\NN/A Preservation Edition.
    Notes

    BY the time Janet had been five days in the hospital she had become converted to the idea of a domestic robot. It had taken her two days to discover that Nurse James was a robot, one day to get over the surprise, and two more to realize what a comfort an attendant robot could be.
    The conversion was a relief. Practically every house she visited had a domestic robot. It was the family’s second or third most valuable possession, the women tending to rate it slightly higher than the car, the men, slightly lower. Janet had been perfectly well aware for some time that her friends regarded her as a nitwit or worse for wearing herself out with looking after a house which a robot would be able to keep spick and span with a few hours’ work a day.
    She had also known that it irritated George to come home each evening to a wife who had tired herself out by unnecessary work. But the prejudice had been firmly set. It was not the diehard attitude of people who refused to be served by robot waiters, or driven by robot drivers or who disliked to see dresses modeled by robot mannequins.
    It was simply an uneasiness about them, about being left alone with one—and a disinclination to feel such an uneasiness in her own home.
    She herself attributed the feeling largely to the conservatism of her own home which had used no house-robots. Other people, who had been brought up in homes run by robots, even the primitive types available a generation before, never seemed to have such a feeling at all. It irritated her to know that her husband thought she was afraid of them in a childish way. That, she had explained to George a number of times, was not so, and was not the point, either. What she did dislike was the idea of one intruding upon her personal, domestic life, which was what a house-robot was bound to do.
    The robot who was called Nurse James was, then, the first with which she had ever been in close personal contact and she, or it, came as a revelation.
    Janet told the doctor of her enlightenment, and he looked relieved. She also told George when he looked in in the afternoon, and he was delighted. The two of them conferred before he left the hospital.
    “Excellent,” said the doctor. “To tell you the truth I was afraid we were up against a real neurosis there—and very inconveniently, too. Your wife can never have been strong, and in the last few years she’s worn herself out running the house.”
    “I know,” George agreed. “I tried hard to persuade her during the first two years we were married, but it only led to trouble, so I had to drop it. This is really a culmination. She was rather shaken when she found out the reason she’d have to come here was partly because there was no robot at home to look after her.”
    “Well, there’s one thing certain. She can’t go on as she has been doing. If she tries to she’ll be back here inside a couple of months,” the doctor told him.
    “She won’t now. She’s really changed her mind,” George assured him. “Part of the trouble was that she’s never come across a really modern one except in a superficial way. The newest that any of our friends has is ten years old at least, and most of them are older than that. She’d never contemplated the idea of anything as advanced as Nurse James. The question now is what pattern?”
    The doctor thought a moment. “Frankly, Mr. Shand, your wife is going to need a lot of rest and