Introductory Comedy

The Characters

HARRY DOMIN, central director of Rossum's Universal Robots. FABRY, engineer, chief technical director of R.U.R. DR GALL, head of the physiological and research department. DR HALLEMEIER, head of the institute for the psychology and education of Robots. CONSUL BUSMAN, commercial director. ALQUIST, builder, head of construction works. HELENA GLORY. NANA, her nurse. MARIUS, a Robot. SULLA, a Robotess. RADIUS, a Robot. DAMON, a Robot. PRIMUS, a Robot. HELENA, a Robotess. A Robot servant; Robots.

In the introductory comedy the Robots are dressed like people. Their movements and speech are spare, their faces without expression, their eyes fixed. In the acts that follow they wear linen blouses belted at the waist and brass numbers on their chests.

The central office of the factory of Rossum's Universal Robots, on a remote island. A large desk; on it, a typewriter, ledgers, telephones. On the walls, posters: "The Cheapest Labour: Rossum's Robots." "Robots for the Tropics. 150 Dollars Apiece." "Every Man His Own Robot!" "Want to Cut the Cost of Your Goods? Order Rossum's Robots." Through a broad window, rows of factory chimneys. DOMIN sits at the desk, dictating. SULLA types.

DOMIN (dictating). "To Friedrichswerke, Hamburg. We regret that we can accept no liability for goods damaged in transit. As soon as the shipment was loaded we pointed out to your captain that his vessel was not fit for carrying Robots. The risk of damage therefore lay with you. For Rossum's Universal Robots." Have you got that?

SULLA. Yes.

DOMIN. Next. "We confirm your order for fifteen thousand Robots." (The bell rings. MARIUS comes in.) What is it?

MARIUS. A lady is outside, sir, asking to see you.

DOMIN. What lady?

MARIUS. I do not know. (He gives him a card.)

DOMIN (reading). President Glory's — Show her in. (MARIUS opens the door.) Sulla, leave the letters. You may go.

HELENA GLORY comes in. MARIUS goes out.

HELENA. Good morning.

DOMIN. Good morning. (He rises.) What can I do for you?

HELENA. You are the central director, Mr Domin?

DOMIN. I am.

HELENA. I have come —

DOMIN. With your father's card. That is enough, Miss Glory.

HELENA. Then you know who I am. I want to see your factory, where people are made.

DOMIN. Robots, Miss Glory. Not people. No one is allowed in, you understand; the process is secret.

HELENA. But you will let me in.

DOMIN. For President Glory's daughter, I will. But you must swear to tell no one what you see.

HELENA. I swear. (She lifts her veil.)

DOMIN. Thank you. Will you not take the veil off altogether? (She does.) How old are you, Miss Glory? Twenty-two?

HELENA. Twenty-one. Why?

DOMIN. Because — please sit down. You know how all this began?

HELENA. No. That is why I came.

DOMIN. In the year 1920 old Rossum, a great philosopher, then still a young scholar, came to this remote island to study the creatures of the sea. While doing so he set out to imitate, by chemical synthesis, the living substance called protoplasm, and he found a substance that behaved exactly like living matter, though it was made of something quite different. That was in 1932, exactly four hundred and forty years after the discovery of America. Ha.

HELENA. You know that by heart.

DOMIN. Yes. Physiology is not my line. May I go on?

HELENA. Please.

DOMIN. And so, among his chemical formulas, he wrote: "Nature has found only one way of organising living matter. But there is another way, simpler, more pliable and quicker, which nature never hit upon. Today I have discovered this other way, by which the evolution of life can be carried on." Picture it, Miss Glory: he wrote those great words over a little dab of colloidal slime that a dog would not have touched. Picture him sitting over his test tube and thinking how a whole tree of life would grow out of it, every animal, from some little beetle all the way up to man. Man of another substance than ours.

HELENA. And then?

DOMIN. Then he had to get life out of the test tube and speed up its growth; to make organs, bones, nerves and who knows what else; and to find what the chemists call catalysts and enzymes. He tried to make an artificial dog. It took him years, and what he got was a sort of stunted calf, which died after a few days. Then he started on a man.

HELENA. On a man.

DOMIN. He wanted to make a man, exactly as we are, with everything in him. He was a godless old fellow; it was a matter of principle with him; he wanted to show that God was quite unnecessary. That was all he cared about. You know some anatomy? He made the whole thing, every gland, every organ, everything — and it took him ten years; and his man lived three days.

HELENA. Three days.

DOMIN. Then young Rossum came out here, his nephew, an engineer, a man of genius. He took one look at the old man's work and said: "This is nonsense. Ten years to make one man! If you can't make him faster than nature does, you might as well give up." And he began to study anatomy himself.

HELENA. That is not what they say in the newspapers.

DOMIN. What the newspapers say is paid advertising, and nonsense at that. They say the old man invented the Robots. The truth is the old man was a crank. He wanted to play at being God. Young Rossum was a modern man. He saw the thing as an engineer, and as a man of business. He said to himself: a man is something that feels joy, plays the violin, wants to go for walks, and wants to do a great many things that are quite unnecessary.

HELENA. Oh!

DOMIN. Wait. Quite unnecessary, when he is to weave cloth or add up figures. Tell me: what is the best worker, from the practical point of view?

HELENA. The best? Perhaps the one who is honest and devoted.

DOMIN. No. The cheapest. The one with the fewest needs. Young Rossum invented the worker with the smallest number of needs. He had to simplify him. He threw out everything that did not serve the work directly. In doing that he threw out the man, and made the Robot. My dear Miss Glory, the Robots are not people. In their workings they surpass us; their intelligence is astonishing; but there is no soul in them. Believe me, what an engineer builds is cleaner work than what nature builds.

HELENA. People say that man is the work of God.

DOMIN. So much the worse. God knew nothing about modern engineering. Young Rossum tried giants, too, Robots three metres tall; but they broke down. Something kept snapping in them, a limb or so. Then he settled on the right size and the right design. And the first Robots he sold went to a village, to work in the fields. Since then the whole world has been ordering them. Come to the window. Do you see that crowd going to the gates?

HELENA. The workers?

DOMIN. Robots. All our workers are Robots. And so are our clerks. You would like to see one close? (He rings. SULLA comes in.) Sulla, show yourself to Miss Glory.

HELENA (rising and going to her). Good morning. Will you shake hands? (SULLA does.) Are you not homesick here, so far from the world? Where were you born?

SULLA. Here, in the factory.

HELENA. Oh. You were born here?

SULLA. Yes, I was made here.

HELENA (to DOMIN). She is joking. You are joking, both of you. She is a girl like me. (To SULLA.) Forgive me. You know what I mean.

DOMIN. Sulla is a Robotess, Miss Glory. She keeps my letters, she types; she speaks four languages. She can tell you the timetables of the ships and the weather on the sea. Sulla, what languages do you speak?

SULLA. English, German, French and Czech.

DOMIN. If you don't believe me, we will have her taken to the dissecting room, and you shall see her opened.

HELENA. No! No! Don't you dare!

DOMIN. Ask her yourself whether she would mind. Sulla, would you be afraid to die?

SULLA. I do not know what that is.

HELENA. Sulla, they would kill you.

SULLA. Then I would not move any more.

DOMIN. You see? Marius, would you be afraid?

MARIUS. No.

DOMIN. They do not cling to life, Miss Glory. They have no reason to. They have no pleasures. They are less than the weeds. Go now, both of you.

SULLA and MARIUS go out.

HELENA. It's horrible.

DOMIN. Horrible? Why?

HELENA. I don't know. It is horrible. Why do you call her Sulla?

DOMIN. Don't you like it? Each Robot gets a name. (The factory whistle sounds for noon.) Noon. The Robots don't know when to stop working; we have to tell them. Shall I tell you how it's done? In the mixing vats the dough is kneaded, a thousand kilos at a time. In another building the livers and the brains are made. Then the bone factory. Then the spinning mill, where nerves and veins are spun, miles of digestive tubes at a go. Then the assembly shop, where it's all put together, like motor cars. Every worker fixes one part, and the thing travels on to the next. And then the drying room, and the stores, where the new ones are set to work.

HELENA. To work? At once?

DOMIN. Well, they learn as they go, like new furniture finding its place. Then they are sent to Hallemeier's school, where they learn to speak, read and write. They memorise anything: give a Robot the encyclopaedia and he will repeat it to you in order. But he will never think of anything new. They would make good university professors. Then they are sorted and shipped.

FABRY, DR GALL, DR HALLEMEIER, CONSUL BUSMAN and ALQUIST come in, one after the other. DOMIN introduces them.

DOMIN. Gentlemen, Miss Helena Glory, the President's daughter.

HELENA (to herself). Oh, they are Robots too. (Aloud, with decision.) Gentlemen, please sit down. I want to speak to you as friends. Have you never thought that you are badly treated here? That your situation is degrading?

FABRY. I beg your pardon?

HELENA. I have come here on behalf of the League of Humanity. We have more than two hundred thousand members. We want to help you.

HALLEMEIER. The League of Humanity! What does it want to do?

HELENA. To protect the Robots, and to see that they are treated decently.

GALL. That is quite right. Machines should be treated decently. I like that very much, Miss Glory. I don't like damaged goods.

HELENA. I'm not talking about goods. I want to free them.

HALLEMEIER. How, may I ask?

HELENA. They should be treated like people. They should be paid wages.

HALLEMEIER. Wages! And what would they do with the money?

HELENA. Buy what they need — what would make them happy.

HALLEMEIER. That's very nice, Miss Glory, but nothing makes Robots happy. Good heavens, what would they buy? Feed them on anything you like, fine fruit or plain straw; it's all one to them. They have no appetite. They take no interest in anything. No one has ever seen a Robot smile.

HELENA. You — you are all so — Why don't you stand up for yourselves? You are people like me!

A silence. Then BUSMAN laughs. The others join in.

DOMIN. Miss Glory, these gentlemen are not Robots. They are the directors of this factory.

HELENA. Oh! (She covers her face.) And you let me — Why did you let me talk like that?

DOMIN. Because you said it so beautifully.

The men gather round her, all of them talking at once to make amends, each in his own field.

FABRY. You see, Miss Glory, one Robot does the work of two and a half men. The human machine was hopelessly imperfect. It had to be done away with sooner or later.

BUSMAN. It was too expensive.

FABRY. It wasted too much. It was not up to modern engineering. And then, from the technical point of view, the whole of childhood is sheer nonsense. Time simply thrown away. An unforgivable waste of time, Miss Glory.

HALLEMEIER. Sometimes a Robot goes wrong. He stops, he throws down whatever he is holding, he stands there gnashing his teeth. We call it Robot's cramp. Then it goes in the stamping mill. It's a fault in the material, that's all.

HELENA. No, no, it's the soul.

HALLEMEIER. You think so? The soul begins with gnashing of teeth?

GALL. We are going to cure that. I am experimenting just now with —

HELENA. With what?

GALL. With pain. I am putting in nerves for pain. A Robot that feels no pain puts his hand into a machine, or breaks his finger, or smashes his head, and it's all the same to him. We must give them pain. It protects them from damage.

HELENA. Will they be happier if they feel pain?

GALL. On the contrary. But they will be better made.

BUSMAN. And that's not all, Miss Glory. You should see the figures. Do you know what a suit of clothes cost a few years ago? And what it costs today? The Robots have brought the price of everything down. Wheat. Cloth. Machines. Everything. And there are still hundreds of thousands of Robots in our stores, waiting for buyers.

HELENA. And people? Those who used to do the work?

DOMIN. They will be out of work, yes. But in ten years Rossum's Robots will produce so much corn, so much cloth, so much of everything, that things will have no price. Everyone will take as much as he needs. There will be no poverty. Nobody will toil any more. Everything will be done by living machines. Man will do only what he loves. He will live only to make himself perfect.

ALQUIST. It sounds like paradise, Domin. But there was something good in serving, and something great in being humble. There was some sort of virtue in labour and in being tired, Harry.

DOMIN. Perhaps there was. But we can't count what is lost when we remake the world for Adam. Adam had to earn his bread in the sweat of his brow; now he will not. He will be master. He will be no slave of matter, no slave of another man, no machine for making things. He will be lord of the earth.

ALQUIST. Amen.

FABRY. So be it.

HALLEMEIER. Well, gentlemen, I think it is time for breakfast.

The directors go out. HELENA and DOMIN are left alone.

DOMIN. Miss Glory.

HELENA. Yes?

DOMIN. Will you marry me?

HELENA. What? Are you out of your mind?

DOMIN. There has not been a woman on this island for ten years. Not one. You come here, young, beautiful — of course I ask you. I would rather ask you before the others do. Each of those five men will ask you before the day is out, Miss Glory, each in his own way. You will have to choose one of us.

HELENA. I won't choose any of you.

DOMIN. Then I ask you now. I'll give you five minutes. (He takes out his watch.)

HELENA. You are mad.

DOMIN. Four minutes. Shall I tell you about my qualities? My income? I have the most beautiful factory in the world.

HELENA. Let go of my hand.

DOMIN. Three minutes. I love you, Helena.

HELENA. You don't know me.

DOMIN. Two. Don't you see? We don't have to wait. One.

HELENA. Let me go! Please —

DOMIN. Helena!

HELENA. Oh, I don't know. I don't know anything.

DOMIN holds her in his arms. The door opens; the directors come back, and see them. They come forward, one after another, to congratulate.

Curtain.