The Midas Plague Read online

  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.