The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (49 page)

But, though Cherry might once in a while have a moment's
curiosity about what the robots were doing, she was not likely to be able to
guess at the facts. Her up-bringing was, for once, on Morey's side —she knew so
little of the grind, grind, grind of consuming that was the lot of the lower
classes that she scarcely noticed that there was less of it.

Morey almost, sometimes, relaxed.

He thought of many ingenious chores for robots, and the
robots politely and emotionlessly obeyed.

Morey was a success.

It wasn't all gravy. There was a nervous moment for Morey
when the quarterly survey report came in the mail. As the day for the Ration
Board to check over the degree of wear on the turned-in discards came due,
Morey began to sweat. The clothing and furniture and household goods the robots
had consumed for him were very nearly in shreds. It had to look plausible, that
was the big thing—no normal person would wear a hole completely through the
knee of a pair of pants, as Henry had done with his dress suit before Morey
stopped him. Would the Board question it?

Worse, was there something about the
way
the robots
consumed the stuff that would give the whole show away? Some special wear point
in the robot anatomy, for instance, that would rub a hole where no human's body
could, or stretch a seam that should normally be under no strain at all?

It was worrisome. But the worry was needless. When the
report of survey came, Morey let out a long-held breath.
Not a single item
disallowed!

Morey was a success—and so was his scheme!

To the successful man come the rewards of success. Morey
arrived home one evening after a hard day's work at the office and was alarmed
to find another car parked in his drive. It was a tiny two-seater, the sort
affected by top officials and the very well-to-do.

Right then and there Morey learned the first half of the
embezzler's lesson: Anything different is dangerous. He came uneasily into his
own home, fearful that some high officer of the Ration Board had come to ask
questions.

But Cherry was glowing. "Mr. Porfirio is a newspaper
feature writer and he wants to write you up for their 'Consumers of
Distinction' page! Morey, I
couldn't
be more proud!"

"Thanks," said Morey glumly. "Hello."

Mr. Porfirio shook Morey's hand warmly. "I'm not
exactly from a newspaper," he corrected. "Trans-video Press is what
it is, actually. We're a news wire service; we supply forty-seven hundred
papers with news and feature material. Every one of them," he added
complacently, "on the required consumption list of Grades One through Six
inclusive. We have a Sunday supplement self-help feature on consuming problems
and we like to—well, give credit where credit is due. You've established an enviable
record, Mr. Fry. We'd like to tell our readers about it."

"Urn," said Morey. "Let's go in the drawing
room."

"Oh, no!" Cherry said firmly. "I want to hear
this. He's so modest, Mr. Porfirio, you'd really never know what kind of a man
he is just to listen to him talk. Why, my goodness, I’m his wife and I swear I
don't know how he does all the consuming he does. He simply—"

"Have a drink, Mr. Porfirio," Morey said, against
all etiquette. "Rye? Scotch? Bourbon? Gin-and-tonic? Brandy Alexander? Dry
Manna—I mean what would you like?" He became conscious that he was
babbling like a fool.

"Anything," said the newsman. "Rye is fine.
Now, Mr. Fry, I notice you've fixed up your place very attractively here and
your wife says that your country home is just as nice. As soon as I came in, I
said to myself, 'Beautiful home. Hardly a stick of furniture that isn't
absolutely necessary. Might be a Grade Six or Seven.' And Mrs. Fry says the
other place is even barer."

"She does, does she?" Morey challenged sharply.
"Well, let me tell you, Mr. Porfirio, that every last scrap of my
furniture allowance is accounted for! I don't know what you're getting at,
but—"

"Oh, I certainly didn't mean to imply anything like
that!
I just want to get some information from you that I can pass on to our
readers. You know, to sort of help them do as well as yourself. How
do
you
do it?"

Morey swallowed. "We—uh—well, we just keep after it.
Hard work, that's all."

Porfirio nodded admiringly. "Hard work," he
repeated, and fished a triple-folded sheet of paper out of his pocket to make
notes on. "Would you say," he went on, "that anyone could do as
well as you simply by devoting himself to it—setting a regular schedule, for
example, and keeping to it very strictly?"

"Oh, yes," said Morey.

"In other words, it's only a matter of doing what you
have to do every day?"

"That's it exactly. I handle the budget in my
house—more experience than my wife, you see—but no reason a woman can't do
it."

"Budgeting," Porfirio recorded approvingly.
"That's our policy, too."

The interview was not the terror it had seemed, not even
when Porfirio tactfully called attention to Cherry's slim waistline ("So
many housewives, Mrs. Fry, find it difficult to keep from being—well, a little
plump") and Morey had to invent endless hours on the exercise machines,
while Cherry looked faintly perplexed, but did not interrupt.

From the interview, however, Morey learned the second half
of the embezzler's lesson. After Porfirio had gone, he leaped in and spoke more
than a little firmly to Cherry. "That business of exercise, dear. We
really have to start doing it. I don't know if you've noticed it, but you
are
beginning to get just a trifle heavier and we don't want that to happen, do
we?"

In the following grim and unnecessary sessions on the mechanical
horses, Morey had plenty of time to reflect on the lesson. Stolen treasures are
less sweet than one would like, when one dare not enjoy them in the open.

But some of Morey's treasures were fairly earned.

The new Bradmoor K-50 Spin-a-Game, for instance, was his
very own. His job was design and creation, and he was a fortunate man in that
his efforts were permitted to be expended along the line of greatest social
utility—namely, to increase consumption.

The Spin-a-Game was a well-nigh perfect machine for the
purpose. "Brilliant," said Wainwright, beaming, when the pilot
machine had been put through its first tests. "Guess they don't call me
the Talent-picker for nothing. I knew you could do it, boy!"

Even Howland was lavish in his praise. He sat munching on a
plate of petits-fours (he was still only a Grade Three) while the tests were
going on, and when they were over, he said enthusiastically, "It's a
beauty, Morey. That series-corrupter—sensational! Never saw a prettier piece of
machinery."

Morey flushed gratefully.

Wainwright left, exuding praise, and Morey patted his pilot
model affectionately and admired its polychrome gleam. The looks of the
machine, as Wainwright had lectured many a time, were as important as its
function: "You have to make them
want
to play it, boy! They won't
play it if they don't
see
it!" And consequently the whole K series
was distinguished by flashing rainbows of light, provocative strains of music,
haunting scents that drifted into the nostrils of the passerby with compelling
effect.

Morey had drawn heavily on all the old masterpieces of
design— the one-arm bandit, the pinball machine, the juke box. You put your
ration book in the hopper. You spun the wheels until you selected the game you
wanted to play against the machine. You punched buttons or spun dials or, in
any of 325 different ways, you pitted your human skill against the
magnetic-taped skills of the machine.

And you lost. You had a chance to win, but the inexorable
statistics of the machine's setting made sure that if you played long enough,
you had to lose.

That is to say, if you risked a ten-point ration
stamp—showing, perhaps, that you had consumed three six-course meals—your
statistic return was eight points. You might hit the jackpot and get a thousand
points back, and thus be exempt from a whole freezerful of steaks and joints
and prepared vegetables; but it seldom happened. Most likely you lost and got
nothing.

Got nothing, that is, in the way of your hazarded ration
stamps. But the beauty of the machine, which was Morey's main contribution, was
that, win or lose, you
always
found a pellet of vitamin-drenched,
sugarcoated antibiotic hormone gum in the hopper. You played your game, won or
lost your stake, popped your hormone gum into your mouth and played another. By
the time that game was ended, the gum was used up, the coating dissolved; you
discarded it and started another.

"That's what the man from the NRB liked," Howland
told Morey confidentially. "He took a set of schematics back with him;
they might install it on
all
new machines. Oh, you're the fair-haired
boy, all right!"

It was the first Morey had heard about a man from the
National Ration Board. It was good news. He excused himself and hurried to
phone Cherry the story of his latest successes. He reached her at her mother's,
where she was spending the evening, and she was properly impressed and
affectionate. He came back to Howland in a glowing humor.

"Drink?" said Howland diffidently.

"Sure," said Morey. He could afford, he thought,
to drink as much of Howland's liquor as he liked; poor guy, sunk in the
consuming quicksands of Class Three. Only fair for somebody a little more
successful to give him a hand once in a while.

And when Howland, learning that Cherry had left Morey a
bachelor for the evening, proposed Uncle Piggotty's again, Morey hardly
hesitated at all.

The Bigelows were delighted to see him. Morey wondered
briefly if they
had
a home; certainly they didn't seem to spend much
time in it.

It turned out they did, because when Morey indicated virtuously
that he'd only stopped in at Piggotty's for a single drink before dinner, and
Howland revealed that he was free for the evening, they captured Morey and bore
him off to their house.

Tanaquil Bigelow was haughtily apologetic. "I don't
suppose this is the kind of place Mr. Fry is used to," she observed to her
husband, right across Morey, who was standing between them. "Still, we
call it home."

Morey made an appropriately polite remark. Actually, the
place nearly turned his stomach. It was an enormous glaringly new mansion,
bigger even than Morey's former house, stuffed to bursting with bulging sofas
and pianos and massive mahogany chairs and tri-D sets and bedrooms and drawing
rooms and breakfast rooms and nurseries.

The nurseries were a shock to Morey; it had never occurred
to him that the Bigelows had children. But they did and, though the
■
children were only five
and eight, they were still up, under the care of a brace of robot nursemaids,
doggedly playing with their overstuffed animals and miniature trains.

"You don't know what a comfort Tony and Dick are,"
Tanaquil Bigelow told Morey. "They consume
so
much more than their
rations. Walter says that every family ought to have at least two or three
children to, you know. Help out. Walter's so intelligent about these things,
it's a pleasure to hear him talk. Have you heard his poem, Morey? The one he
calls
The Twoness of—"

Morey hastily admitted that he had. He reconciled himself to
a glum evening. The Bigelows had been eccentric but fun back at Uncle Piggotty's.
On their own ground, they seemed just as eccentric, but painfully dull.

They had a round of cocktails, and another, and then the
Bigelows no longer seemed so dull. Dinner was ghastly, of course; Morey was
nouveau-riche enough to be a snob about his relatively Spartan table. But he
minded his manners and sampled, with grim concentration, each successive course
of chunky protein and rich marinades. With the help of the endless succession
of table wines and liqueurs, dinner ended without destroying his evening or his
strained digestive system.

And afterward, they were a pleasant company in the Bigelows'
ornate drawing room. Tanaquil Bigelow, in consultation with the children,
checked over their ration books and came up with the announcement that they would
have a brief recital by a pair of robot dancers, followed by string music by a
robot quartet. Morey prepared himself for the worst, but found before the
dancers were through that he was enjoying himself. Strange lesson for Morey:
When you didn't
have
to watch them, the robot entertainers were fun!

"Good night, dears," Tanaquil Bigelow said firmly
to the children when the dancers were done. The boys rebelled, naturally, but
they went. It was only a matter of minutes, though, before one of them was
back, clutching at Morey's sleeve with a pudgy hand.

Morey looked at the boy uneasily, having little experience
with children. He said, "Uh-what is it, Tony?"

"Dick, you mean," the boy said. "Gimme your
autograph." He poked an engraved pad and a vulgarly jeweled pencil at
Morey.

Morey dazedly signed and the child ran off, Morey staring
after him. Tanaquil Bigelow laughed and explained, "He saw your name in
Porfirio's column. Dick
loves
Porfirio, reads him every day. He's such
an intellectual kid, really. He'd always have his nose in a book if I didn't
keep after him to play with his trains and watch tri-D."

"That was quite a nice write-up," Walter Bigelow
commented—a little enviously, Morey thought. "Bet you make Consumer of the
Year. I wish," he signed, "that we could get a little ahead on the
quotas the way you did. But it just never seems to work out. We eat and play
and consume like crazy, and somehow at the end of the month we're always a
little behind in something—everything keeps piling up—and then the Board sends
us a warning, and they call me down and, first thing you know, I've got a
couple of hundred added penalty points and we're worse off than before."