Runaround

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Cover art for I, Robot, depicting a scene from Runaround

This article is about the short story 'Runaround'. For the unrelated television show of the same name, see Runaround (game show). For the Taylor Hicks song, see The Runaround.

Runaround is a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. It was written in October 1941 and first published in the March 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

Many of Asimov's robot stories explore the implications of the Three Laws of Robotics, although in "Runaround" the robot is actually following the Laws as they were intended. In others, ambiguities in the language are employed to achieve the desired effect: that the robot does what it was told, but not what was intended.

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

In 2015, Powell and Donovan and Robot SPD-13 (nicknamed "Speedy") are sent to restart operations at a mining station on Mercury that was abandoned ten years before. The photo-cell banks on their spaceship are broken and the only thing that can fix them is selenium. The nearest selenium pool is seventeen miles away, and since Speedy can withstand Mercury’s harsh temperature, Donovan sends him to get it. The astronauts become worried when they realize that Speedy has not returned after five hours. They use a more primitive robot to go to retrieve Speedy and try to analyze what happened to it. When they find Speedy, they "notice that Speedy’s gait included a peculiar rolling stagger, a noticeable side-to-side lurch" (Asimov 49). When the astronauts ask Speedy to come back with the selenium, Speedy starts saying things like, "Hot dog, let’s play games. You catch me and I catch you; no love can cut our knife in two" (Asimov 49) and quoting Gilbert and Sullivan. Speedy continues to show symptoms that, if he were a human, would be interpreted as drunkenness.

After a while, the astronauts figure out the cause of Speedy’s odd behavior. Powell realizes that the selenium source contains some sort of unexpected danger. Under normal circumstances, Speedy would observe Rule 2 ("a robot must obey orders"), but, because Speedy was so expensive to manufacture and "[i]t’s not a thing to be lightly destroyed ... Rule 3 has been strengthened ... so that his allergy to danger is unusually high" (Asimov 51). Speedy cannot decide whether to obey Rule 2 or the now-equal-priority Rule 3, and has thus started acting inebriated.

Of course, the only thing that trumps both Rules 2 and 3 is Rule 1 ("a robot must not allow its human masters to come to harm"). Therefore, Powell decides to risk his life by going out in the heat; hopefully Rule 1 will force Speedy to save him and snap out of his drunken state. After some suspense, Speedy does so, and the team is able to fix the photo-cell banks.