The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (44 page)

"Indeed you do, sir!" it said warmly. "This
morning, in fact. I've already instructed the chauffeur and notified your
office."

"Fine! Well, get started on the other things,
Henry."

"Yes, sir," said Henry, and assumed the curious
absent look of a robot talking on its TBR circuits—the "Talk Between
Robots" radio-as it arranged the appointments for its master.

Morey finished his breakfast in silence, pleased with his
own virtue, at peace with the world. It wasn't so hard to be a proper,
industrious consumer if you
worked
at it, he reflected. It was only the
malcontents, the ne'er-do-wells and the incompetents who simply could not
adjust to the world around them. Well, he thought with distant pity, someone
had to suffer; you couldn't break eggs without making an omelet. And his proper
duty was not to be some sort of wild-eyed crank, challenging the social order
and beating his breast about injustice, but to take care of his wife and his
home.

It was too bad he couldn't really get right down to work on
consuming today. But this was his one day a week to hold a
job—
four of
the other six days were devoted to solid consuming—and, besides, he had a group
therapy session scheduled as well. His analysis, Morey told himself, would
certainly take a sharp turn for the better, now that he had faced up to his
problems.

Morey was immersed in a glow of self-righteousness as he
kissed Cherry good-by (she had finally got up, all in a confusion of delight at
the new regime) and walked out the door to his car. He hardly noticed the
little man in enormous floppy hat and garishly ruffled trousers who was
standing almost hidden in the shrubs.

"Hey, Mac." The man's voice was almost a whisper.

"Huh? Oh-what is it?"

The man looked around furtively. "Listen, friend,"
he said rapidly, "you look like an intelligent man who could use a little
help. Times are tough; you help me, I'll help you. Want to make a deal on ration
stamps? Six for one. One of yours for six of mine, the best deal you'll get
anywhere in town. Naturally, my stamps aren't exactly the real McCoy, but
they'll pass, friend, they'll pass—"

Morey blinked at him. "No!" he said violently, and
pushed the man aside. Now it's racketeers, he thought bitterly. Slums and
endless sordid preoccupation with rations weren't enough to inflict on Cherry;
now the neighborhood was becoming a hangout for people on the shady side of the
law. It was not, of course, the first time he had ever been approached by a
counterfeit ration-stamp hoodlum, but never at his own front door!

Morey thought briefly, as he climbed into his car, of
calling the police. But certainly the man would be gone before they could get
there; and, after all, he had handled it pretty well as it was.

Of course, it would be nice to get six stamps for one.

But very far from nice if he got caught.

"Good morning, Mr. Fry," tinkled the robot
receptionist. "Won't you go right in?" With a steel-tipped finger, it
pointed to the door marked
group
therapy.

Someday, Morey vowed to himself as he nodded and complied,
he would be in a position to afford a private analyst of his own. Group therapy
helped relieve the infinite stresses of modern living, and without it he might
find himself as badly off as the hysterical mobs in the ration riots, or as
dangerously anti-social as the counterfeiters. But it lacked the personal
touch. It was, he thought, too public a performance of what should be a private
affair, like trying to live a happy married life with an interfering,
ever-present crowd of robots in the house—

Morey brought himself up in panic. How had
that
thought
crept in? He was shaken visibly as he entered the room and greeted the group to
which he was assigned.

There were eleven of them: four Freudians, two Reichians,
two Jungians, a Gestalter, a shock therapist and the elderly and rather quiet
Sullivanite. Even the members of the majority groups had their own individual
differences in technique and creed, but, despite four years with this
particular group of analysts, Morey hadn't quite been able to keep them
separate in his mind. Their names, though, he knew well enough.

"Morning, Doctors," he said. "What is it
today?"

"Morning," said Semmelweiss morosely. "Today
you come into the room for the first time looking as if something is really
bothering you, and yet the schedule calls for psychodrama. Dr. Fairless,"
he appealed, "can't we change the schedule a little bit? Fry here is
obviously under a strain;
that's
the time to start digging and see what
he can find. We can do your psychodrama next time, can't we?"

Fairless shook his gracefully bald old head. "Sorry,
Doctor. If it were up to me, of course—but you know the rules."

"Rules, rules," jeered Semmelweiss. "Ah,
what's the use? Here's a patient in an acute anxiety state if I ever saw
one—and believe me, I saw plenty—and we ignore it because the
rules
say
ignore it. Is that professional? Is that how to cure a patient?"

Little Blaine said frostily, "If I may say so, Dr.
Semmelweiss, there have been a great many cures made without the necessity of
departing from the rules. I myself, in fact—"

"You yourself!" mimicked Semmelweiss. "You
yourself never handled a patient alone in your life. When you going to get out
of a group, Blaine?"

Blaine said furiously, "Dr. Fairless, I don't think I
have to stand for this sort of personal attack. Just because Semmelweiss has seniority
and a couple of private patients one day a week, he thinks—"

"Gentlemen," said Fairless mildly. "Please,
let's get on with the work. Mr. Fry has come to us for help, not to listen to
us losing our tempers."

"Sorry," said Semmelweiss curtly. "All the
same, I appeal from the arbitrary and mechanistic ruling of the chair."

Fairless inclined his head. "All in favor of the ruling
of the chair? Nine, I count. That leaves only you opposed, Dr. Semmelweiss.
We'll proceed with the psychodrama, if the recorder will read us the notes and
comments of the last session."

The recorder, a pudgy, low-ranking youngster named Sprogue,
flipped back the pages of his notebook and read in a chanting voice,
"Session of twenty-fourth May, subject, Morey Fry; in attendance, Doctors
Fairless, Bileck, Semmelweiss, Carrado, Weber—"

Fairless interrupted kindly, "Just the last page, if
you please, Dr. Sprogue."

"Um—oh, yes. After a ten-minute recess for additional
Rorschachs and an electro-encephalogram, the group convened and conducted
rapid-fire word association. Results were tabulated and compared with standard
deviation patterns, and it was determined that subject's major traumas derived
from, respectively—"

Morey found his attention waning. Therapy was
good;
everybody
knew that, but every once in a while he found it a little dull. If it weren't
for therapy, though, there was no telling what might happen. Certainly, Morey
told himself, he had been helped considerably —at least he hadn't set fire to
his house and shrieked at the fire-robots, hke Newell down the block when his
eldest daughter divorced her husband and came back to live with him, bringing
her ration quota along, of course. Morey hadn't even been
tempted
to do
anything as outrageously, frighteningly immoral as
destroy
things or
waste
them— well, he admitted to himself honestly, perhaps a little tempted, once
in a great while. But never anything important enough to worry about; he was
sound, perfectly sound.

He looked up, startled. All the doctors were staring at him.
"Mr. Fry," Fairless repeated, "will you take your place?"

"Certainly," Morey said hastily.
"Uh-where?"

Semmelweiss guffawed.
"Told
you. Never mind,
Morey; you didn't miss much. We're going to run through one of the big scenes
in your life, the one you told us about last time. Remember? You were fourteen
years old, you said. Christmas time. Your mother had made you a promise."

Morey swallowed. "I remember," he said unhappily.
"Well, all right. Where do I stand?"

"Right here," said Fairless. "You're you,
Carrado is your mother, I'm your father. Will the doctors not participating
mind moving back? Fine. Now, Morey, here we are on Christmas morning. Merry
Christmas, Morey!"

"Merry Christmas," Morey said half-heartedly.
"Uh—Father dear, where's my—uh—my puppy that Mother promised me?"

"Puppy!" said Fairless heartily. "Your mother
and I have something much better than a puppy for you. Just take a look under
the tree there—it's a
robot!
Yes, Morey, your very own robot—a full-size
thirty-eight-tube fully automatic companion robot for you! Go ahead, Morey, go
right up and speak to it. Its name is Henry. Go on, boy."

Morey felt a sudden, incomprehensible tingle inside the
bridge of his nose. He said shakily, "But I—I didn't
want
a
robot."

"Of course you want a robot," Carrado interrupted.
"Go on, child, play with your nice robot."

Morey said violently, "I
hate
robots!" He
looked around him at the doctors, at the gray-paneled consulting room. He added
defiantly, "You hear me, all of you? I
still
hate robots!"

There was a second's pause; then the questions began.

In that half hour, Morey had got over his trembling and lost
his wild, momentary passion, but he had remembered what for thirteen years he
had forgotten.

He hated robots.

The surprising thing was not that young Morey had hated
robots. It was that the Robot Riots, the ultimate violent outbreak of flesh
against metal, the battle to the death between mankind and its machine heirs .
. . never happened. A little boy hated robots, but the man he became worked
with them hand in hand.

And yet, always and always before, the new worker, the
competitor for the job, was at once and inevitably outside the law. The waves
swelled in—the Irish, the Negroes, the Jews, the Italians. They were squeezed
into their ghettoes, where they encysted, seethed and struck out, until the
burgeoning generations became indistinguishable.

For the robots, that genetic relief was not in sight. And
still the conflict never came. The feed-back circuits aimed the anti-aircraft
guns and, reshaped and newly planned, found a place in a new sort of machine,
together with a miraculous trail of cams and levers, an indestructible and
potent power source and a hundred thousand parts and sub-assemblies.

And the first robot clanked off the bench.

Its mission was its own destruction; but from the scavenged
wreck of its pilot body, a hundred better robots drew their inspiration. And
the hundred went to work, and hundreds more, until there were millions upon
untold millions.

And still the riots never happened.

For the robots came bearing a gift and the name of it was
"Plenty."

And by the time the gift had shown its own unguessed ills,
the time for a Robot Riot was past. Plenty is a habit-forming drug. You do not
cut the dosage down. You kick it if you can; you stop the dose entirely. But
the convulsions that follow may wreck the body once and for all.

The addict craves the grainy white powder; he doesn't hate
it, or the runner who sells it to him. And if Morey as a little boy could hate
the robot that had deprived him of his pup, Morey the man was perfectly aware
that the robots were his servants and his friends.

But the little Morey inside the man—
he
had never been
convinced.

Morey ordinarily looked forward to his work. The one day a
week at which he
did
anything was a wonderful change from the dreary
consume, consume, consume grind. He entered the bright-lit drafting room of the
Bradmoor Amusements Company with a feeling of uplift.

But as he was changing from street garb to his drafting
smock, Howland from Procurement came over with a knowing look.
"Wain-wright's been looking for you," Howland whispered. "Better
get right in there."

Morey nervously thanked him and got. Wainwright's office was
the size of a phone booth and as bare as Antarctic ice. Every time Morey saw it,
he felt his insides churn with envy. Think of a desk with nothing on it but
work surface—no calendar-clock, no twelve-color pen rack, no dictating
machines!

He squeezed himself in and sat down while Wainwright
finished a phone call. He mentally reviewed the possible reasons why Wainwright
would want to talk to him in person instead of over the phone, or by dropping a
word to him as he passed through the drafting room.

Very few of them were good.

Wainwright put down the phone and Morey straightened up.
"You sent for me?" he asked.

Wainwright in a chubby world was aristocratically lean. As
General Superintendent of the Design & Development Section of the Bradmoor
Amusements Company, he ranked high in the upper section of the well-to-do. He
rasped, "I certainly did. Fry, just what the hell do you think you're up
to now?"

"I don't know what you m-mean, Mr. Wainwright,"
Morey stammered, crossing off the list of possible reasons for the interview
all of the good ones.

Wainwright snorted, "I guess you don't. Not because you
weren't told, but because you don't want to know. Think back a whole week. What
did I have you on the carpet for then?"

Morey said sickly, "My ration book. Look, Mr.
Wainwright, I know I'm running a little bit behind, but—"

"But nothing! How do you think it looks to the
Committee, Fry?

They got a complaint from the Ration Board about you.
Naturally they passed it on to me. And naturally I'm going to pass it right
along to you. The question is, what are you going to do about it? Good God,
man, look at these figures—textiles, fifty-one per cent; food, sixty-seven per
cent; amusements and entertainment,
thirty
per cent! You haven't come up
to your ration in anything for months!"