Autofac

to indicate the particular deficiency of the product.

'What'll I check?' Morrison asked. 'Contaminated? Bacterial? Sour? Rancid? Incorrectly labeled? Broken? Crushed? Cracked? Bent? Soiled?'

Thinking rapidly, O'Neill said, 'Don't check any of them. The factory's undoubtedly ready to test and resample. It'll make its own analysis and then ignore us.' His face glowed as frantic inspiration came. 'Write in that blank at the bottom. It's an open space for further data.'

'Write what?'

O'Neill said, 'Write: the product is thoroughly pizzled.'

'What's that?' Ferine demanded, baffled.

'Write it! It's a semantic garble — the factory won't be able to understand it. Maybe we can jam the works.'

With O'Neill's pen, Morrison carefully wrote that the milk was pizzled. Shaking his head, he resealed the cylinder and returned it to the truck. The truck swept up the milk tanks and slammed its railing tidily into place. With a shriek of tires, it hurtled off. From its slot, a final cylinder bounced; the truck hurriedly departed, leaving the cylinder lying in the dust.

O'Neill got it open and held up the paper for the others to see.

A FACTORY REPRESENTATIVE

WILL BE SENT OUT.

BE PREPARED TO SUPPLY COMPLETE DATA

ON PRODUCT DEFICIENCY.

For a moment, the three men were silent. Then Ferine began to giggle. 'We did it. We contacted it. We got across.'

'We sure did,' O'Neill agreed. 'It never heard of a product being pizzled.'

Cut into the base of the mountains lay the vast metallic cube of the Kansas City factory. Its surface was corroded, pitted with radiation pox, cracked and scarred from the five years of war that had swept over it. Most of the factory was buried subsurface, only its entrance stages visible. The truck was a speck rumbling at high speed toward the expanse of black metal. Presently an opening formed in the uniform surface; the truck plunged into it and disappeared inside. The entrance snapped shut.

'Now the big job remains,' O'Neill said. 'Now we have to persuade it to close down operations — to shut itself off.'

II

Judith O'Neill served hot black coffee to the people sitting around the living room. Her husband talked while the others listened. O'Neill was as close to being an authority on the autofac system as could still be found.

In his own area, the Chicago region, he had shorted out the protective fence of the local factory long enough to get away with data tapes stored in its posterior brain. The factory, of course, had immediately reconstructed a better type offence. But he had shown that the factories were not infallible.

'The Institute of Applied Cybernetics,' O'Neill explained, 'had complete control over the network. Blame the war. Blame the big noise along the lines of communication that wiped out the knowledge we need. In any case, the Institute failed to transmit its information to us, so we can't transmit our information to the factories — the news that the war is over and we're ready to resume control of industrial operations.'

'And meanwhile,' Morrison added sourly, 'the damn network expands and consumes more of our natural resources all the time.'

'I get the feeling,' Judith said, 'that if I stamped hard enough, I'd fall right down into a factory tunnel. They must have mines everywhere by now.'

'Isn't there some limiting injunction?' Ferine asked nervously. 'Were they set up to expand indefinitely?'

'Each factory is limited to its own operational area,' O'Neill said, 'but the network itself is unbounded. It can go on scooping up our resources forever. The Institute decided it gets top priority; we mere people come second.'

'Will there be anything left for us?' Morrison wanted to know.

'Not unless we can stop the network's operations. It's already used up half a dozen basic minerals. Its search teams are out all the time, from every factory, looking everywhere for some last scrap to drag home.'

'What would happen if tunnels from two factories crossed each other?'

O'Neill shrugged. 'Normally, that won't happen. Each factory has its own special section of our planet, its own private cut of the pie for its exclusive use.'

'But it could happen.'

'Well, they're raw material-tropic; as long as there's anything left, they'll hunt it down.' O'Neill pondered the idea with growing interest. 'It's something to consider. I suppose as things get scarcer—'

He stopped talking. A figure had come into the room; it stood silently by the door, surveying them all.

In the dull shadows, the figure looked almost human. For a brief moment, O'Neill thought it was a settlement latecomer. Then, as it moved forward, he realized that it was only quasi-human: a functional upright biped chassis, with data-receptors mounted at the top, effectors and proprioceptors mounted in a downward worm that ended in floor-grippers. Its resemblance to a human being was testimony to nature's efficiency; no sentimental imitation was intended.

The factory representative had arrived.

It began without preamble. 'This is a data-collecting machine capable of communicating on an oral basis. It contains both broadcasting and receiving apparatus and can integrate facts relevant to its line of inquiry.'

The voice was pleasant, confident. Obviously it was a tape, recorded by some Institute technician before the war. Coming from the quasi-human shape, it sounded grotesque; O'Neill could vividly imagine the dead young man whose cheerful voice now issued from the mechanical mouth of this upright construction of steel and wiring.

'One word of caution,' the pleasant voice continued. 'It is fruitless to consider this receptor human and to engage it in discussions for which it is not equipped. Although purposeful, it is not capable of conceptual thought; it can only reassemble material already available to it.'

The optimistic voice clicked out and a second voice came on. It resembled the first, but now there were no intonations or personal mannerisms. The machine was utilizing the dead man's phonetic speech-pattern for its own communication.

'Analysis of the rejected product,' it stated, 'shows no foreign elements or noticeable deterioration. The product meets the continual testing-standards employed throughout the network. Rejection is therefore on a basis outside the test area; standards not available to the network are being employed.'

'That's right,' O'Neill agreed. Weighing his words with care, he continued, 'We found the milk substandard. We want nothing to do with it. We insist on more careful output.'

The machine responded presently. 'The semantic content of the term 'pizzled' is unfamiliar to the network. It does not exist in the taped vocabulary. Can you present a factual analysis of the milk in terms of specific elements present or absent?'

'No,' O'Neill said warily; the game he was playing was intricate and dangerous. ' 'Fizzled' is an overall term. It can't be reduced to chemical constituents.'

'What does 'pizzled' signify?' the machine asked. 'Can you define it in terms of alternate semantic symbols?'

O'Neill hesitated. The representative had to be steered from its special inquiry to more general regions, to the ultimate problem of closing down the network. If he could pry it open at any point, get the theoretical discussion started…