And so they were married.
The bride and groom made a beautiful couple, she in her twenty-yard frill of immaculate white, he in his formal gray ruffled blouse and pleated pantaloons.
It was a small wedding—the best he could afford. For guests, they had only the immediate family and a few close friends. And when the minister had performed the ceremony, Morey Fry kissed his bride and they drove off to the reception. There were twenty-eight limousines in all (though it is true that twenty of them contained only the caterer’s robots) and three flower cars.
“Bless you both,” said old man Elon sentimentally. “You’ve got a fine girl in our Cherry, Morey.” He blew his nose on a ragged square of cambric.
The old folks behaved very well, Morey thought. At the reception, surrounded by the enormous stacks of wedding gifts, they drank the champagne and ate a great many of the tiny, delicious canapes. They listened politely to the fifteen-piece orchestra, and Cherry’s mother even danced one dance with Morey for sentiment’s sake, though it was clear that dancing was far from the usual pattern of her life. They tried as hard as they could to blend into the gathering, but all the same, the two elderly figures in severely simple and probably rented garments were dismayingly conspicuous in the quarter-acre of tapestries and tinkling fountains that was the main ballroom of Morey’s country home.
When it was time for the guests to go home and let the newlyweds begin their life together Cherry’s father shook Morey by the hand and Cherry’s mother kissed him. But as they drove away in their tiny runabout their faces were full of foreboding.
It was nothing against Morey as a person, of course. But poor people should not marry wealth.
Morey and Cherry loved each other, certainly. That helped. They told each other so, a dozen times an hour, all of the long hours they were together, for all of the first months of their marriage. Morey even took time off to go shopping with his bride, which endeared him to her enormously. They drove their shopping carts through the immense vaulted corridors of the supermarket, Morey checking off the items on the shopping list as Cherry picked out the goods. It was fun.
For a while.
Their first fight started in the supermarket, between Breakfast Foods and Floor Furnishings, just where the new Precious Stones department was being opened.
Morey called off from the list, “Diamond lavaliere, costume rings, earbobs.”
Cherry said rebelliously, “Morey, I have a lavaliere. Please, dear!”
Morey folded back the pages of the list uncertainly. The lavaliere was on there, all right, and no alternative selection was shown.
“How about a bracelet?” he coaxed. “Look, they have some nice ruby ones there. See how beautifully they go with your hair, darling!” He beckoned a robot clerk, who bustled up and handed Cherry the bracelet tray. “Lovely,” Morey exclaimed as Cherry slipped the largest of the lot on her wrist.
“And I don’t have to have a lavaliere?” Cherry asked.
“Of course not.” He peeked at the tag. “Same number of ration points exactly!” Since Cherry looked only dubious, not convinced, he said briskly, “And now we’d better be getting along to the shoe department. I’ve got to pick up some dancing pumps.”
Cherry made no objection, neither then nor throughout the rest of their shopping tour. At the end, while they were sitting in the supermarket’s ground-floor lounge waiting for the robot accountants to tote up their bill and the robot cashiers to stamp their ration books, Morey remembered to have the shipping department save out the bracelet.
“I don’t want that sent with the other stuff, darling,” he explained. “I want you to wear it right now. Honestly, I don’t think I ever saw anything looking so right for you.”
Cherry looked flustered and pleased. Morey was delighted with himself; it wasn’t everybody who knew how to handle these little domestic problems just right!
He stayed self-satisfied all the way home, while Henry, their companion-robot, regaled them with funny stories of the factory in which it had been built and trained. Cherry wasn’t used to Henry by a long shot, but it was hard not to like the robot. Jokes and funny stories when you needed amusement, sympathy when you were depressed, a never-failing supply of news and information on any subject you cared to name—Henry was easy enough to take. Cherry even made a special point of asking Henry to keep them company through dinner, and she laughed as thoroughly as Morey himself at its droll anecdotes.
But later, in the conservatory, when Henry had considerately left them alone, the laughter dried up.
Morey didn’t notice. He was very conscientiously making the rounds: turning on the tri-D, selecting their after-dinner liqueurs, scanning the evening newspapers.
Cherry cleared her throat self-consciously, and Morey stopped what he was doing. “Dear,” she said tentatively, “I’m feeling kind of restless tonight. Could we—I mean do you think we could just sort of stay home and—well, relax?”
Morey looked at her with a touch of concern. She lay back wearily, eyes half closed. “Are you feeling all right?” he asked.
“Perfectly. I just don’t want to go out tonight, dear. I don’t feel up to it.”
He sat down and automatically lit a cigarette. “I see,” he said. The tri-D was beginning a comedy show; he got up to turn it oflf, snapping on the tape-player. Muted strings filled the room.
“We had reservations at the club tonight,” he reminded her.
Cherry shifted uncomfortably. “I know.”
“And we have the opera tickets that I turned last week’s in for. I hate to nag, darling, but we haven’t used any of our opera tickets.”
“We can see them right here on the tri-D,” she said in a small voice.
“That has nothing to do with it, sweetheart. I—I didn’t want to tell you about it, but Wainwright, down at the office, said something to me yesterday. He told me he would be at the circus last night and as much as said he’d be looking to see if we were there, too. Well, we weren’t there. Heaven knows what I’ll tell him next week.”
He waited for Cherry to answer, but she was silent.
He went on reasonably, “So if you could see your way clear to going out tonight—”
He stopped, slack-jawed. Cherry was crying, silently and in quantity.
“Darling!” he said inarticulately.
He hurried to her, but she fended him off. He stood helpless over her, watching her cry.
“Dear, what’s the matter?” he asked.
She turned her head away.
Morey rocked back on his heels. It wasn’t exactly the first time he’d seen Cherry cry—there had been that poignant scene when they Gave Each Other Up, realizing that their backgrounds were too far apart for happiness, before the realization that they had to have each other, no matter what… But it was the first time her tears had made him feel guilty.
And he did feel guilty. He stood there staring at her.
Then he turned his back on her and walked over to the bar. He ignored the ready liqueurs and poured two stiff highballs, brought them back to her. He set one down beside her, took a long drink from the other.
In quite a different tone, he said, “Dear, what’s the matter?”
No answer.
“Come on. What is it?”
She looked up at him and rubbed at her eyes. Almost sullenly, she said, “Sorry.”
“I know you’re sorry. Look, we love each other. Let’s talk this thing out.”
She picked up her drink and held it for a moment, before setting it down untasted. “What’s the use, Morey?”
“Please. Let’s try.”
She shrugged.
He went on remorselessly, “You aren’t happy, are you? And it’s because of—well, all this.” His gesture took in the richly furnished conservatory, the thick-piled carpet, the host of machines and contrivances for their comfort and entertainment that waited for their touch. By implication it took in twenty-six rooms, five cars, nine robots. Morey said, with an effort, “It isn’t what you’re used to, is it?”
“I can’t help it,” Cherry said. “Morey, you know I’ve tried. But back home—”
“Dammit,” he flared, “ this is your home. You don’t live with your father any more in that five-room cottage; you don’t spend your evenings hoeing the garden or playing cards for matchsticks. You live here, with me, your husband! You knew what you were getting into. We talked all this out long before we were married—”
The words stopped, because words were useless. Cherry was crying again, but not silently.
Through her tears, she wailed: “Darling, I’ve tried. You don’t know how I’ve tried! I’ve worn all those silly clothes and I’ve played all those silly games and I’ve gone out with you as much as I possibly could and—I’ve eaten all that terrible food until I’m actually getting fa-fa-ter! I thought I could stand it. But I just can’t go on like this; I’m not used to it. I—I love you, Morey, but I’m going crazy, living like this. I can’t help it, Morey— I’m tired of being poor!”
Eventually the tears dried up, and the quarrel healed, and the lovers kissed and made up. But Morey lay awake that night, listening to his wife’s gentle breathing from the suite next to his own, staring into the darkness as tragically as any pauper before him had ever done.
Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the Earth.
Blessed Morey, heir to more worldly goods than he could possibly consume.
Morey Fry, steeped in grinding poverty, had never gone hungry a day in his life, never lacked for anything his heart could desire in the way of food, or clothing, or a place to sleep. In Morey’s world, no one lacked for these things; no one could.
Malthus was right—for a civilization without machines, automatic factories, hydroponics and food synthesis, nuclear breeder plants, ocean-mining for metals and minerals…
And a vastly increasing supply of labor…
And architecture that rose high in the air and dug deep in the ground and floated far out on the water on piers and pontoons… architecture that could be poured one day and lived in the next…
And robots.
Above all, robots… robots to burrow and haul and smelt and fabricate, to build and farm and weave and sew.
What the land lacked in wealth, the sea was made to yield and the laboratory invented the rest… and the factories became a pipeline of plenty, churning out enough to feed and clothe and house a dozen worlds.
Limitless discovery, infinite power in the atom, tireless labor of humanity and robots, mechanization that drove jungle and swamp and ice off the Earth, and put up office buildings and manufacturing centers and rocket ports in their place…
The pipeline of production spewed out riches that no king in the time of Malthus could have known.
But a pipeline has two ends. The invention and power and labor pouring in at one end must somehow be drained out at the other…
Lucky Morey, blessed economic-consuming unit, drowning in the pipeline’s flood, striving manfully to eat and drink and wear and wear out his share of the ceaseless tide of wealth.
Morey felt far from blessed, for the blessings of the poor are always best appreciated from afar.
Quotas worried his sleep until he awoke at eight o’clock the next morning, red-eyed and haggard, but inwardly resolved. He had reached a decision. He was starting a new life.
There was trouble in the morning mail. Under the letterhead of the National Ration Board, it said:
“We regret to advise you that the following items returned by you in connection with your August quotas as used and no longer serviceable have been inspected and found insufficiently worn.” The list followed—a long one, Morey saw to his sick disappointment. “Credit is hereby disallowed for these and you are therefore given an additional consuming quota for the current month in the amount of 435 points, at least 350 points of which must be in the textile and home-furnishing categories.”
Morey dashed the letter to the floor. The valet picked it up emo-tionlessly, creased it and set it on his desk.
It wasn’t fair! All right, maybe the bathing trunks and beach umbrellas hadn’t been really used very much—though how the devil, he asked himself bitterly, did you go about using up swimming gear when you didn’t have time for such leisurely pursuits as swimming? But certainly the hiking slacks were used! He’d worn them for three whole days and part of a fourth; what did they expect him to do, go around in rags?
Morey looked belligerently at the coffee and toast that the valet-robot had brought in with the mail, and then steeled his resolve. Unfair or not, he had to play the game according to the rules. It was for Cherry, more than for himself, and the way to begin a new way of life was to begin it.
Morey was going to consume for two.
He told the valet-robot, “Take that stuff back. I want cream and sugar with the coffee— lots of cream and sugar. And besides the toast, scrambled eggs, fried potatoes, orange juice—no, make it half a grapefruit. And orange juice, come to think of it.”
“Right away, sir,” said the valet. “You won’t be having breakfast at nine then, will you, sir?”
“I certainly will,” said Morey virtuously. “Double portions!” As the robot was closing the door, he called after it, “Butter and marmalade with the toast!”
He went to the bath; he had a full schedule and no time to waste. In the shower, he carefully sprayed himself with lather three times. When he had rinsed the soap off, he went through the whole assortment of taps in order: three lotions, plain talcum, scented talcum and thirty seconds of ultra-violet. Then he lathered and rinsed again, and dried himself with a towel instead of using the hot-air drying jet. Most of the miscellaneous scents went down the drain with the rinse water, but if the Ration Board accused him of waste, he could claim he was experimenting. The effect, as a matter of fact, wasn’t bad at all.
He stepped out, full of exuberance. Cherry was awake, staring in dismay at the tray the valet had brought. “Good morning, dear,” she said faintly. “Ugh.”
Morey kissed her and patted her hand. “Well!” he said, looking at the tray with a big, hollow smile. “Food!”
“Isn’t that a lot for just the two of us?”
“Two of us?” repeated Morey masterfully. “Nonsense, my dear, I’m going to eat it all by myself!”
“Oh, Morey!” gasped Cherry, and the adoring look she gave him was enough to pay for a dozen such meals.
Which, he thought as he finished his morning exercises with the sparring-robot and sat down to his real breakfast, it just about had to be, day in and day out, for a long, long time.
Still, Morey had made up his mind. As he worked his way through the kippered herring, tea and crumpets, he ran over his plans with Henry. He swallowed a mouthful and said, “I want you to line up some appointments for me right away. Three hours a week in an exercise gym—pick one with lots of reducing equipment, Henry. I think I’m going to need it. And fittings for some new clothes—I’ve had these for weeks. And, let’s see, doctor, dentist—say, Henry, don’t I have a psychiatrist’s date coming up?”
“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!”
Morey stared at the card miserably. “We—that is, my wife and I— just had a long talk about that last night, Mr. Wainwright. And, believe me, we’re going to do better. We’re going to buckle right down and get to work and—uh—do better,” he finished weakly.
Wainwright nodded, and for the first time there was a note of sympathy in his voice. “Your wife. Judge Elon’s daughter, isn’t she? Good family. I’ve met the Judge many times.” Then, gruffly, “Well, nevertheless, Fry, I’m warning you. I don’t care how you straighten this out, but don’t let the Committee mention this to me again”
“No, sir.”
“All right. Finished with the schematics on the new K-50?”
Morey brightened. “Just about, sir! I’m putting the first section on tape today. I’m very pleased with it, Mr. Wainwright, honestly I am. Tve got more than eighteen thousand moving parts in it now, and that’s without—”
“Good. Good.” Wainwright glanced down at his desk. “Get back to it. And straighten out this other thing. You can do it, Fry. Consuming is everybody’s duty. Just keep that in mind.”
Howland followed Morey out of the drafting room, down to the spotless shops. “Bad time?” he inquired solicitously. Morey grunted. It was none of Howland’s business.
Howland looked over his shoulder as he was setting up the programing panel. Morey studied the matrices silently, then got busy reading the summary tapes, checking them back against the schematics, setting up the instructions on the programing board. Howland kept quiet as Morey completed the setup and ran off a test tape. It checked perfectly; Morey stepped back to light a cigarette in celebration before pushing the start button.
Howland said, “Go on, run it. I can’t go until you put it in the works.”
Morey grinned and pushed the button. The board lighted up; within it, a tiny metronomic beep began to pulse. That was all. At the other end of the quarter-mile shed, Morey knew, the automatic sorters and conveyers were fingering through the copper reels and steel ingots, measuring hoppers of plastic powder and colors, setting up an intricate weaving path for the thousands of individual components that would make up Bradmoor’s new K-50 Spin-a-Game. But from where they stood, in the elaborately muraled programing room, nothing showed. Bradmoor was an ultra-modernized plant; in the manufacturing end, even robots had been dispensed with in favor of machines that guided themselves.
Morey glanced at his watch and logged in the starting time while Howland quickly counter-checked Morey’s raw-material flow program.
“Checks out,” Howland said solemnly, slapping him on the back. “Calls for a celebration. Anyway, it’s your first design, isn’t it?”
“Yes. First all by myself, at any rate.”
Howland was already fishing in his private locker for the bottle he kept against emergency needs. He poured with a flourish. “To Morey Fry,” he said, “our most favorite designer, in whom we are much pleased.”
Morey drank. It went down easily enough. Morey had conscientiously used his liquor rations for years, but he had never gone beyond the minimum, so that although liquor was no new experience to him, the single drink immediately warmed him. It warmed his mouth, his throat, the hollows of his chest; and it settled down with a warm glow inside him. Howland, exerting himself to be nice, complimented Morey fatuously on the design and poured another drink. Morey didn’t utter any protest at all.
Howland drained his glass. “You may wonder,” he said formally, “why I am so pleased with you, Morey Fry. I will tell you why this is.”
Morey grinned. “Please do.”
Howland nodded. “I will. It’s because I am pleased with the world, Morey. My wife left me last night.”
Morey was as shocked as only a recent bridegroom can be by the news of a crumbling marriage. “That’s too ba—I mean is that a fact?”
“Yes, she left my beds and board and five robots, and I’m happy to see her go.” He poured another drink for both of them. “Women. Can’t live with them and can’t live without them. First you sigh and pant and chase after ’em—you like poetry?” he demanded suddenly.
Morey said cautiously, “Some poetry.”
Howland quoted: “’How long, my love, shall I behold this wall between our gardens—yours the rose, and mine the swooning lily.’ Like it? I wrote it for Jocelyn—that’s my wife—when we were first going together.”
“It’s beautiful,” said Morey.
“She wouldn’t talk to me for two days.” Howland drained his drink. “Lots of spirit, that girl. Anyway, I hunted her like a tiger. And then I caught her. Wow!”
Morey took a deep drink from his own glass. “What do you mean, wow?” he asked.
“Wow” Howland pointed his finger at Morey. “ Wow, that’s what I mean. We got married and I took her home to the dive I was living in, and wow we had a kid, and wow I got in a little trouble with the Ration Board—nothing serious, of course, but there was a mixup— and wow fights.
“Everything was a fight,” he explained. “She’d start with a little nagging, and naturally I’d say something or other back, and bang we were off. Budget, budget, budget; I hope to die if I ever hear the word ‘budget’ again. Morey, you’re a married man; you know what it’s like. Tell me the truth, weren’t you just about ready to blow your top the first time you caught your wife cheating on the budget?”
“Cheating on the budget?” Morey was startled. “Cheating how?”
“Oh, lots of ways. Making your portions bigger than hers. Sneaking extra shirts for you on her clothing ration. You know.”
“Damn it, I do not know!” cried Morey. “Cherry wouldn’t do anything like that!”
Howland looked at him opaquely for a long second. “Of course not,” he said at last. “Let’s have another drink.”
Ruffled, Morey held out his glass. Cherry wasn’t the type of girl to cheat. Of course she wasn’t. A fine, loving girl like her—a pretty girl, of a good family; she wouldn’t know how to begin.
Howland was saying, in a sort of chant, “No more budget. No more fights. No more ‘Daddy never treated me like this.’ No more nagging. No more extra rations for household allowance. No more—Morey, what do you say we go out and have a few drinks? I know a place where—”
“Sorry, Howland,” Morey said. “I’ve got to get back to the office, you know.”
Howland guffawed. He held out his wristwatch. As Morey, a little unsteadily, bent over it, it tinkled out the hour. It was a matter of minutes before the office closed for the day.
“Oh,” said Morey. “I didn’t realize—Well, anyway, Howland, thanks, but I can’t. My wife will be expecting me.”
“She certainly will,” Howland sniggered. “Won’t catch her eating up your rations and hers tonight.”
Morey said tightly, “Howland!”
“Oh, sorry, sorry.” Howland waved an arm. “Don’t mean to say anything against your wife, of course. Guess maybe Jocelyn soured me on women. But honest, Morey, you’d like this place. Name of Uncle Piggotty’s, down in the Old Town. Crazy bunch hangs out there. You’d like them. Couple nights last week they had—I mean, you understand, Morey, I don’t go there as often as all that, but I just happened to drop in and—”
Morey interrupted firmly. “Thank you, Howland. Must go home. Wife expects it. Decent of you to offer. Good night. Be seeing you.”
He walked out, turned at the door to bow politely, and in turning back cracked the side of his face against the door jamb. A sort of pleasant numbness had taken possession of his entire skin surface, though, and it wasn’t until he perceived Henry chattering at him sympathetically that he noticed a trickle of blood running down the side of his face.
“Mere flesh wound,” he said with dignity. “Nothing to cause you least conshter—consternation, Henry. Now kindly shut your ugly face. Want to think.”
And he slept in the car all the way home.
It was worse than a hangover. The name is “holdover.” You’ve had some drinks; you’ve started to sober up by catching a little sleep. Then you are required to be awake and to function. The consequent state has the worst features of hangover and intoxication; your head thumps and your mouth tastes like the floor of a bear-pit, but you are nowhere near sober.
There is one cure. Morey said thickly, “Let’s have a cocktail, dear.” Cherry was delighted to share a cocktail with him before dinner. Cherry, Morey thought lovingly, was a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful-He found his head nodding in time to his thoughts and the motion made him wince.
Cherry flew to his side and touched his temple. “Is it bothering you, darling?” she asked solicitously. “Where you ran into the door, I mean?”
Morey looked at her sharply, but her expression was open and adoring. He said bravely, “Just a little. Nothing to it, really.”
The butler brought the cocktails and retired. Cherry lifted her glass. Morey raised his, caught a whiff of the liquor and nearly dropped it. He bit down hard on his churning insides and forced himself to swallow.
He was surprised but grateful: It stayed down. In a moment, the curious phenomenon of warmth began to repeat itself. He swallowed the rest of the drink and held out his glass for a refill. He even tried a smile. Oddly enough, his face didn’t fall off.
One more drink did it. Morey felt happy and relaxed, but by no means drunk. They went in to dinner in fine spirits. They chatted cheerfully with each other and Henry, and Morey found time to feel sentimentally sorry for poor Howland, who couldn’t make a go of his marriage, when marriage was obviously such an easy relationship, so beneficial to both sides, so warm and relaxing…
Startled, he said, “What?”
Cherry repeated, “It’s the cleverest scheme I ever heard of. Such a funny little man, dear. All kind of nervous, if you know what I mean. He kept looking at the door as if he was expecting someone, but of course that was silly. None of his friends would have come to our house to see him.”
Morey said tensely, “Cherry, please! What was that you said about ration stamps?”
“But I told you, darling! It was just after you left this morning. This funny little man came to the door; the butler said he wouldn’t give any name. Anyway, I talked to him. I thought he might be a neighbor and I certainly would never be rude to any neighbor who might come to call, even if the neighborhood was—”
“The ration stamps!” Morey begged. “Did I hear you say he was peddling phony ration stamps?”
Cherry said uncertainly, “Well, I suppose that in a way they’re phony. The way he explained it, they weren’t the regular official kind. But it was four for one, dear—four of his stamps for one of ours. So I just took out our household book and steamed off a couple of weeks’ stamps and—”
“How many?” Morey bellowed.
Cherry blinked. “About—about two weeks’ quota,” she said faintly. “Was that wrong, dear?”
Morey closed his eyes dizzily. “A couple of weeks’ stamps,” he repeated. “Four for one—you didn’t even get the regular rate.”
Cherry wailed, “How was I supposed to know? I never had anything like this when I was home! We didn’t have food riots and slums and all these horrible robots and filthy little revolting men coming to the door!”
Morey stared at her woodenly. She was crying again, but it made no impression on the case-hardened armor that was suddenly thrown around his heart.
Henry made a tentative sound that, in a human, would have been a preparatory cough, but Morey froze him with a white-eyed look.
Morey said in a dreary monotone that barely penetrated the sound of Cherry’s tears, “Let me tell you just what it was you did. Assuming, at best, that these stamps you got are at least average good counterfeits, and not so bad that the best thing to do with them is throw them away before we get caught with them in our possession, you have approximately a two-month supply of funny stamps. In case you didn’t know it, those ration books are not merely ornamental. They have to be turned in every month to prove that we have completed our consuming quota for the month.
“When they are turned in, they are spot-checked. Every book is at least glanced at. A big chunk of them are gone over very carefully by the inspectors, and a certain percentage are tested by ultra-violet, infra-red, X-ray, radioisotopes, bleaches, fumes, paper chromatography and every other damned test known to Man.” His voice was rising to an uneven crescendo. “ If we are lucky enough to get away with using any of these stamps at all, we daren’t—we simply dare not—use more than one or two counterfeits to every dozen or more real stamps.
“That means, Cherry, that what you bought is not a two-month supply, but maybe a two-year supply—and since, as you no doubt have never noticed, the things have expiration dates on them, there is probably no chance in the world that we can ever hope to use more than half of them.” He was bellowing by the time he pushed back his chair and towered over her. “Moreover,” he went on, “right now, right as of this minute, we have to make up the stamps you gave away, which means that at the very best we are going to be on double rations for two weeks or so.
“And that says nothing about the one feature of this whole grisly mess that you seem to have thought of least, namely that counterfeit stamps are against the law! I’m poor, Cherry; I live in a slum, and I know it; I’ve got a long way to go before I’m as rich or respected or powerful as your father, about whom I am beginning to get considerably tired of hearing. But poor as I may be, I can tell you this for sure: Up until now, at any rate, I have been honest.”
Cherry’s tears had stopped entirely and she was bowed white-faced and dry-eyed by the time Morey had finished. He had spent himself; there was no violence left in him.
He stared dismally at Cherry for a moment, then turned wordlessly and stamped out of the house.
Marriage! he thought as he left.
He walked for hours, blind to where he was going.
What brought him back to awareness was a sensation he had not felt in a dozen years. It was not, Morey abruptly realized, the dying traces of his hangover that made his stomach feel so queer. He was hungry—actually hungry.
He looked about him. He was in the Old Town, miles from home, jostled by crowds of lower-class people. The block he was on was as atrocious a slum as Morey had ever seen—Chinese pagodas stood next to rococo imitations of the chapels around Versailles; gingerbread marred every facade; no building was without its brilliant signs and flarelights.
He saw a blindingly overdecorated eating establishment called Billie’s Budget Busy Bee and crossed the street toward it, dodging through the unending streams of traflfic. It was a miserable excuse for a restaurant, but Morey was in no mood to care. He found a seat under a potted palm, as far from the tinkling fountains and robot string ensemble as he could manage, and ordered recklessly, paying no attention to the ration prices. As the waiter was gliding noiselessly away, Morey had a sickening realization: He’d come out without his ration book. He groaned out loud; it was too late to leave without causing a disturbance. But then, he thought rebelliously, what difference did one more unrationed meal make, anyhow?
Food made him feel a little better. He finished the last of his profiterole an chocolate, not even leaving on the plate the uneaten one-third that tradition permitted, and paid his check. The robot cashier reached automatically for his ration book. Morey had a moment of grandeur as he said simply, “No ration stamps.”
Robot cashiers are not equipped to display surprise, but this one tried. The man behind Morey in line audibly caught his breath, and less audibly mumbled something about slummers. Morey took it as a compliment and strode outside feeling almost in good humor.
Good enough to go home to Cherry? Morey thought seriously of it for a second; but he wasn’t going to pretend he was wrong and certainly Cherry wasn’t going to be willing to admit that she was at fault.
Besides, Morey told himself grimly, she was undoubtedly asleep. That was an annoying thing about Cherry at best: she never had any trouble getting to sleep. Didn’t even use her quota of sleeping tablets, though Morey had spoken to her about it more than once. Of course, he reminded himself, he had been so polite and tactful about it, as befits a newlywed, that very likely she hadn’t even understood that it was a complaint. Well, that would stop!
Man’s man Morey Fry, wearing no collar ruff but his own, strode determinedly down the streets of the Old Town.
“Hey, Joe, want a good time?”
Morey took one unbelieving look. “You again!” he roared.
The little man stared at him in genuine surprise. Then a faint glimmer of recognition crossed his face. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “This morning, huh?” He clucked commiseratingly. “Too bad you wouldn’t deal with me. Your wife was a lot smarter. Of course, you got me a little sore, Jack, so naturally I had to raise the price a little bit.”
“You skunk, you cheated my poor wife blind! You and I are going to the local station house and talk this over.”
The little man pursed his lips. “We are, huh?”
Morey nodded vigorously. “Damn right! And let me tell you—” He stopped in the middle of a threat as a large hand cupped around his shoulder.
The equally large man who owned the hand said, in a mild and cultured voice, “Is this gentleman disturbing you, Sam?”
“Not so far,” the little man conceded. “He might want to, though, so don’t go away.”
Morey wrenched his shoulder away. “Don’t think you can strong-arm me. I’m taking you to the police.”
Sam shook his head unbelievingly. “You mean you’re going to call the law in on this?”
“I certainly am!”
Sam sighed regretfully. “What do you think of that, Walter? Treating his wife like that. Such a nice lady, too.”
“What are you talking about?” Morey demanded, stung on a peculiarly sensitive spot.
“I’m talking about your wife,” Sam explained. “Of course, I’m not married myself. But it seems to me that if I was, I wouldn’t call the police when my wife was engaged in some kind of criminal activity or other. No, sir, I’d try to settle it myself. Tell you what,” he advised, “why don’t you talk this over with her? Make her see the error of—”
“Wait a minute,” Morey interrupted. “You mean you’d involve my wife in this thing?”
The man spread his hands helplessly. “It’s not me that would involve her, Buster,” he said. “She already involved her own self. It takes two to make a crime, you know. I sell, maybe; I won’t deny it. But after all, I can’t sell unless somebody buys, can I?”
Morey stared at him glumly. He glanced in quick speculation at the large-sized Walter; but Walter was just as big as he’d remembered, so that took care of that. Violence was out; the police were out; that left no really attractive way of capitalizing on the good luck of running into the man again.
Sam said, “Well, I’m glad to see that’s off your mind. Now, returning to my original question, Mac, how would you like a good time? You look like a smart fellow to me; you look like you’d be kind of interested in a place I happen to know of down the block.”
Morey said bitterly, “So you’re a dive-steerer, too. A real talented man.”
“I admit it,” Sam agreed. “Stamp business is slow at night, in my experience. People have their minds more on a good time. And, believe me, a good time is what I can show ’em. Take this place I’m talking about, Uncle Piggotty’s is the name of it, it’s what I would call an unusual kind of place. Wouldn’t you say so, Walter?”
“Oh, I agree with you entirely,” Walter rumbled.
But Morey was hardly listening. He said, “Uncle Piggotty’s, you say?”
“That’s right,” said Sam.
Morey frowned for a moment, digesting an idea. Uncle Piggotty’s sounded like the place Howland had been talking about back at the plant; it might be interesting, at that.
While he was making up his mind, Sam slipped an arm through his on one side and Walter amiably wrapped a big hand around the other. Morey found himself walking.
“You’ll like it,” Sam promised comfortably. “No hard feelings about this morning, sport? Of course not. Once you get a look at Piggotty’s, you’ll get over your mad, anyhow. It’s something special. I swear, on what they pay me for bringing in customers, I wouldn’t do it unless I believed in it.”
“Dance, Jack?” the hostess yelled over the noise at the bar. She stepped back, lifted her flounced skirts to ankle height and executed a tricky nine-step.
“My name is Morey,” Morey yelled back. “And I don’t want to dance, thanks.”
The hostess shrugged, frowned meaningfully at Sam and danced away.
Sam flagged the bartender. “First round’s on us,” he explained to Morey. “Then we won’t bother you any more. Unless you want us to, of course. Like the place?” Morey hesitated, but Sam didn’t wait. “Fine place,” he yelled, and picked up the drink the bartender left him. “See you around.”
He and the big man were gone. Morey stared after them uncertainly, then gave it up. He was here, anyhow; might as well at least have a drink. He ordered and looked around.
Uncle Piggotty’s was a third-rate dive disguised to look, in parts of it at least, like one of the exclusive upper-class country clubs. The bar, for instance, was treated to resemble the clean lines of nailed wood; but underneath the surface treatment, Morey could detect the intricate laminations of plyplastic. What at first glance appeared to be burlap hangings were in actuality elaborately textured synthetics. And all through the bar the motif was carried out.
A floor show of sorts was going on, but nobody seemed to be paying much attention to it. Morey, straining briefly to hear the master of ceremonies, gathered that the unit was on a more than mildly vulgar level. There was a dispirited string of chorus beauties in long ruffled pantaloons and diaphanous tops; one of them, Morey was almost sure, was the hostess who had talked to him just a few moments before.
Next to him a man was declaiming to a middle-aged woman:
Smote I the monstrous rock, yahoot Smote I the turgid tube, Bully Boy! Smote I the cankered hill—
“Why, Morey!” he interrupted himself. “What are you doing here?”
He turned farther around and Morey recognized him. “Hello, How-land,” he said. “I—uh—I happened to be free tonight, so I thought—”
Howland sniggered. “Well, guess your wife is more liberal than mine was. Order a drink, boy.”
“Thanks, I’ve got one,” said Morey.
The woman, with a tigerish look at Morey, said, “Don’t stop, Everett. That was one of your most beautiful things.”
“Oh, Morey’s heard my poetry,” Howland said. “Morey, I’d like you to meet a very lovely and talented young lady, Tanaquil Bigelow. Morey works in the office with me, Tan.”
“Obviously,” said Tanaquil Bigelow in a frozen voice, and Morey hastily withdrew the hand he had begun to put out.
The conversation stuck there, impaled, the woman cold, Howland relaxed and abstracted, Morey wondering if, after all, this had been such a good idea. He caught the eye-cell of the robot bartender and ordered a round of drinks for the three of them, politely putting them on Howland’s ration book. By the time the drinks had come and Morey had just got around to deciding that it wasn’t a very good idea, the woman had all of a sudden become thawed.
She said abruptly, “You look like the kind of man who thinks, Morey, and I like to talk to that kind of man. Frankly, Morey, I just don’t have any patience at all with the stupid, stodgy men who just work in their offices all day and eat all their dinners every night, and gad about and consume like mad and where does it all get them, anyhow? That’s right, I can see you understand. Just one crazy rush of consume, consume from the day you’re born plop to the day you’re buried pop! And who’s to blame if not the robots?”
Faintly, a tinge of worry began to appear on the surface of How-land’s relaxed calm. “Tan,” he chided, “Morey may not be very interested in politics.”
Politics, Morey thought; well, at least that was a clue. He’d had the dizzying feeling, while the woman was talking, that he himself was the ball in the games machine he had designed for the shop earlier that day. Following the woman’s conversation might, at that, give his next design some valuable pointers in swoops, curves and obstacles.
He said, with more than half truth, “No, please go on, Miss Bige-low. I’m very much interested.”
She smiled; then abruptly her face changed to a frightening scowl. Morey flinched, but evidently the scowl wasn’t meant for him. “Robots!” she hissed. “Supposed to work for us, aren’t they? Hah! We’re their slaves, slaves for every moment of every miserable day of our lives. Slaves! Wouldn’t you like to join us and be free, Morey?”
Morey took cover in his drink. He made an expressive gesture with his free hand—expressive of exactly what, he didn’t truly know, for he was lost. But it seemed to satisfy the woman.
She said accusingly, “Did you know that more than three-quarters of the people in this country have had a nervous breakdown in the past five years and four months? That more than half of them are under the constant care of psychiatrists for psychosis—not just plain ordinary neurosis like my husband’s got and Howland here has got and you’ve got, but psychosis. Like I’ve got. Did you know that? Did you know that forty per cent of the population are essentially manic depressive, thirty-one per cent are schizoid, thirty-eight per cent have an assortment of other unfixed psychogenic disturbances and twenty-four—”
“Hold it a minute, Tan,” Howland interrupted critically. “You’ve got too many per cents there. Start over again.”
“Oh, the hell with it,” the woman said moodily. “I wish my husband were here. He expresses it so much better than I do.” She swallowed her drink. “Since you’ve wriggled off the hook,” she said nastily to Morey, “how about setting up another round—on my ration book this time?”
Morey did; it was the simplest thing to do in his confusion. When that was gone, they had another on Howland’s book.
As near as he could figure out, the woman, her husband and quite possibly Howland as well belonged to some kind of anti-robot group. Morey had heard of such things; they had a quasi-legal status, neither approved nor prohibited, but he had never come into contact with them before. Remembering the hatred he had so painfully relived at the psychodrama session, he thought anxiously that perhaps he belonged with them. But, question them though he might, he couldn’t seem to get the principles of the organization firmly in mind.
The woman finally gave up trying to explain it, and went off to find her husband while Morey and Howland had another drink and listened to two drunks squabble over who bought the next round. They were at the Alphonse-Gaston stage of inebriation; they would regret it in the morning; for each was bending over backward to permit the other to pay the ration points. Morey wondered uneasily about his own points; Howland was certainly getting credit for a lot of Morey’s drinking tonight. Served him right for forgetting his book, of course.
When the woman came back, it was with the large man Morey had encountered in the company of Sam, the counterfeiter, steerer and general man about Old Town.
“A remarkably small world, isn’t it?” boomed Walter Bigelow, only slightly crushing Morey’s hand in his. “Well, sir, my wife has told me how interested you are in the basic philosophical drives behind our movement, and I should like to discuss them further with you. To begin with, sir, have you considered the principle of Twoness?”
Morey said, “Why—”
“Very good,” said Bigelow courteously. He cleared his throat and declaimed:
Han-headed Cathay saw it first,
Bright as brightest solar burst;
Whipped it into boy and girl,
The blinding spiral-sliced swirl:
Yang And Yin.
He shrugged deprecatingly. “Just the first stanza,” he said. “I don’t know if you got much out of it.” “Well, no,” Morey admitted. “Second stanza,” Bigelow said firmly:
Hegal saw it, saw it clear;
Jackal Marx drew near, drew near:
O’er his shoulder saw it plain,
Turned it upside down again: