English, asked by nmodhi6967, 11 months ago

Write a short story in which a doctor and a mechanic play a pivotal role

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Answered by PiyushSinghRajput1
3

Stephen Byerley is severely injured in a car accident. After a slow recovery he becomes a successful district attorney, and runs for mayor of a major American city. His opponent Francis Quinn's political machine claims that the real Stephen Byerley was permanently disfigured and crippled by the accident. The Byerley who appears in public is a humanoid robot, Quinn says, created by the real Byerley who is now the robot's mysterious unseen "teacher", now away doing unspecified scientific work.

Most voters do not believe Quinn but if he is correct Byerley's campaign will end, as only humans can legally run for office. Quinn approaches U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men corporation, the world's only supplier of positronic robot brains, for proof that Byerley must be a robot. No one has ever seen Byerley eat or sleep, Quinn reports.

All attempts to prove or disprove Byerley's humanity fail, but Quinn's smear campaign slowly persuades voters until it becomes the only issue in the campaign. Alfred Lanning and Dr. Susan Calvin, the Chief Robopsychologist of U.S. Robots, visit Byerley. She offers him an apple; Byerley takes a bite, but he may have been designed with a stomach. Quinn attempts to take clandestine X-ray photographs, but Byerley wears a device which fogs the camera; he says that he is upholding his civil rights, as he would do for others if he is elected. His opponents claim that as a robot he has no civil rights, but Byerley replies that they must first prove that he is a robot before they can deny his rights as a human, including his right not to submit to physical examination.

Calvin observes that if Byerley is a robot, he must obey the Three Laws of Robotics. Were he to violate one of the Laws he would clearly be a human, since no robot can contradict its basic programming. The district attorney never seeks the death penalty and boasts that he has never prosecuted an innocent man, but if he obeys the Laws it still does not prove that Byerley is a robot, since the Laws are based on human morality; "He may simply be a very good man", Calvin says. To prove himself to be a human being, Byerley must demonstrate that he can harm a human, which would violate the First Law.

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