The Midas Plague

Cherry and her mother had long passed the point where they could say anything at all; they were seated side by side on a couch across the room, listening with expressions of strain and incredulity.

Elon said abruptly, “Excuse me. Phone call to make.” He left the room to make a brief call and returned. He said over his shoulder to his wife, “Coffee. We’ll need it. Got a problem here.”

Morey said, “Do you think—I mean what should I do?”

Elon shrugged, then, surprisingly, grinned. “What can you do?” he demanded cheerfully. “Done plenty already, I’d say. Drink some coffee. Call I made,” he explained, “was to Jim, my law clerk. He’ll be here in a minute. Get some dope from Jim, then we’ll know better.”

Cherry came over to Morey and sat beside him. All she said was, “Don’t worry,” but to Morey it conveyed all the meaning in the world. He returned the pressure of her hand with a feeling of deepest relief. Hell, he said to himself, why should I worry? Worst they can do to me is drop me a couple of grades and what’s so bad about that?

He grimaced involuntarily. He had remembered his own early struggles as a Class One and what was so bad about that.

The law clerk arrived, a smallish robot with a battered stainless-steel hide and dull coppery features. Elon took the robot aside for a terse conversation before he came back to Morey.

“As I thought,” he said in satisfaction. “No precedent. No laws prohibiting. Therefore no crime.”

“Thank heaven!” Morey said in ecstatic relief.

Elon shook his head. “They’ll probably give you a reconditioning and you can’t expect to keep your Grade Five. Probably call it antisocial behavior. Is, isn’t it?”

Dashed, Morey said, “Oh.” He frowned briefly, then looked up. “All right, Dad, if I’ve got it coming to me, I’ll take my medicine.”

“Way to talk,” Elon said approvingly. “Now go home. Get a good night’s sleep. First thing in the morning, go to the Ration Board. Tell ’em the whole story, beginning to end. They’ll be easy on you.” Elon hesitated. “Well, fairly easy,” he amended. “I hope.”

The condemned man ate a hearty breakfast.

He had to. That morning, as Morey awoke, he had the sick certainty that he was going to be consuming triple rations for a long, long time to come.

He kissed Cherry good-by and took the long ride to the Ration Board in silence. He even left Henry behind.

At the Board, he stammered at a series of receptionist robots and was finally brought into the presence of a mildly supercilious young man named Hachette.

“My name,” he started, “is Morey Fry. I—I’ve come to—talk over something I’ve been doing with—”

“Certainly, Mr. Fry,” said Hachette. “I’ll take you in to Mr. Newman right away.”

“Don’t you want to know what I did?” demanded Morey.

Hachette smiled. “What makes you think we don’t know?” he said, and left.

That was Surprise Number One.

Newman explained it. He grinned at Morey and ruefully shook his head. “All the time we get this,” he complained. “People just don’t take the trouble to learn anything about the world around them. Son,” he demanded, “what do you think a robot is?”

Morey said, “Huh?”

“I mean how do you think it operates? Do you think it’s just a kind of a man with a tin skin and wire nerves?”

“Why, no. It’s a machine, of course. It isn’t human.”

Newman beamed. “Fine!” he said. “It’s a machine. It hasn’t got flesh or blood or intestines—or a brain. Oh”—he held up a hand—“robots are smart enough. I don’t mean that. But an electronic thinking machine, Mr. Fry, takes about as much space as the house you’re living in. It has to. Robots don’t carry brains around with them; brains are too heavy and much too bulky.”

“Then how do they think?”

“With their brains, of course.”

“But you just said—”

“I said they didn’t carry them. Each robot is in constant radio communication with the Master Control on its TBR circuit—the ‘Talk Between Robots’ radio. Master Control gives the answer, the robot acts.”

“I see,” said Morey. “Well, that’s very interesting, but—”

“But you still don’t see,” said Newman. “Figure it out. If the robot gets information from Master Control, do you see that Master Control in return necessarily gets information from the robot?”

“Oh,” said Morey. Then, louder, “Oh! You mean that all my robots have been—” The words wouldn’t come.

Newman nodded in satisfaction. “Every bit of information of that sort comes to us as a matter of course. Why, Mr. Fry, if you hadn’t come in today, we would have been sending for you within a very short time.”

That was the second surprise. Morey bore up under it bravely. After all, it changed nothing, he reminded himself.

He said, “Well, be that as it may, sir, here I am. I came in of my own free will. I’ve been using my robots to consume my ration quotas—”

“Indeed you have,” said Newman.

“—and I’m willing to sign a statement to that effect any time you like. I don’t know what the penalty is, but I’ll take it. I’m guilty; I admit my guilt.”

Newman’s eyes were wide. “Guilty?” he repeated. “Penalty?”

Morey was startled. “Why, yes,” he said. “I’m not denying anything.”

“Penalties,” repeated Newman musingly. Then he began to laugh. He laughed, Morey thought, to considerable excess; Morey saw nothing he could laugh at, himself, in the situation. But the situation, Morey was forced to admit, was rapidly getting completely incomprehensible.

“Sorry,” said Newman at last, wiping his eyes, “but I couldn’t help it. Penalties! Well, Mr. Fry, let me set your mind at rest. I wouldn’t worry about the penalties if I were you. As soon as the reports began coming through on what you had done with your robots, we naturally assigned a special team to keep observing you, and we forwarded a report to the national headquarters. We made certain—ah—recommendations in it and—well, to make a long story short, the answers came back yesterday.

“Mr. Fry, the National Ration Board is delighted to know of your contribution toward improving our distribution problem. Pending a further study, a tentative program has been adopted for setting up consuming-robot units all over the country based on your scheme. Penalties? Mr. Fry, you’re a hero!”

A hero has responsibilities. Morey’s were quickly made clear to him. He was allowed time for a brief reassuring visit to Cherry, a triumphal tour of his old office, and then he was rushed off to Washington to be quizzed. He found the National Ration Board in a frenzy of work.

“The most important job we’ve ever done,” one of the high officers told him. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the last one we ever have! Yes, sir, we’re trying to put ourselves out of business for good and we don’t want a single thing to go wrong.”

“Anything I can do to help—” Morey began diffidently.

“You’ve done fine, Mr. Fry. Gave us just the push we’ve been needing. It was there all the time for us to see, but we were too close to the forest to see the trees, if you get what I mean. Look, I’m not much on rhetoric and this is the biggest step mankind has taken in centuries and I can’t put it into words. Let me show you what we’ve been doing.”

He and a delegation of other officials of the Ration Board and men whose names Morey had repeatedly seen in the newspapers took Morey on an inspection tour of the entire plant.

“It’s a closed cycle, you see,” he was told, as they looked over a chamber of industriously plodding consumer-robots working off a shipment of shoes. “Nothing is permanently lost. If you want a car, you get one of the newest and best. If not, your car gets driven by a robot until it’s ready to be turned in and a new one gets built for next year. We don’t lose the metals—they can be salvaged. All we lose is a little power and labor. And the Sun and the atom give us all the power we need, and the robots give us more labor than we can use. Same thing