The Best of Fritz Leiber Part 24

Mr. Scott thought sleepily of what a neat little electricity cult Mr. Leverett could set up, every bit as good as Science of Mind or Krishna Venta or the Rosicrucians. He could imagine the patio full of earnest seekers while Krishna Leverett-or maybe High Electro Leverett-dispensed wisdom from his rocker, interpreting the words of the humming wires. Better not suggest it, though-in Southern California such things had a way of coming true.

Mr. Scott felt quite easy at heart as he went down the hill, though he did make a point of telling Bobby not to bother Mr. Leverett any more.

But the prohibition didn't apply to himself. During the next months Mr. Scott made a point of dropping in at Peak House from time to time for a dose of "electric wisdom." He came to look forward to these restful, amusingly screwy breaks in the hectic round. Mr. Leverett appeared to do nothing whatever except sit in his rocker on the patio, yet stayed happy and serene. There was a lesson for anybody in that, if you thought about it.

Occasionally Mr. Scott spotted amusing side effects of Mr. Leverett's eccentricity. For instance, although he sometimes let the gas and water bills go, he always paid up phone and electricity on the dot.

And the newspapers eventually did report short but severe electric breakdowns in Chicago and San Francisco. Smiling a little frowningly at the coincidences, Mr. Scott decided he could add fortune-telling to the electricity cult he'd imagined for Mr. Leverett. "Your life's story foretold in the wires!"-more novel, anyway, than crystal b.a.l.l.s or Talking with G.o.d.

Only once did the touch of the gruesome, that had troubled Mr. Scott hi his first conversation with Mr. Leverett, come briefly back, when the old man chuckled and observed, "Recall what I told you about whipping a copper wire up there? I've thought of a simpler way, just squirt the hose at those H-T lines in a hard stream, gripping the metal nozzle. Might be best to use the hot water and throw a box of salt hi the heater first." When Mr. Scott heard that he was glad that he'd warned Bobby against coming around.

But for the most part Mr. Leverett maintained his mood of happy serenity.

When the break in that mood came, it did so suddenly, though afterwards Mr. Scott realized there had been one warning note sounded when Mr. Leverett had added onto a rambling discourse, "By the way, I've learned that power electricity goes all over the world, just like the ghost electricity in radios and phones. It travels to foreign sh.o.r.es in batteries and condensers. Roams the lines in Europe and Asia. Some of it even slips over into Soviet territory. Wants to keep tabs on the Communists, I guess. Electric freedom-fighters."

On his next visit Mr. Scott found a great change. Mr. Leverett had deserted his rocking chair to pace the patio on the side away from the pole, though every now and then he would give a quick funny look up over his shoulder at the dark muttering wires.

"Glad to see you, Mr. Scott. I'm real shook up. Reckon I better tell someone about it so if something happens to me they'll be able to tell the FBI. Though I don't know what tfzey'll be able to do.

"Electricity just told me this morning it's got a world government -it had the nerve to call it that-and that it doesn't care a snap for either us or the Soviets and that there's Russian electricity in our wires and American electricity in theirs-it s.h.i.+fts back and forth with never a quiver of shame.

"When I heard that you could have knocked me down with a paper dart.

"What's more, electricity's determined to stop any big war that may come, no matter how rightful that war be or how much hi defense of America. If the b.u.t.tons are pushed for the atomic missiles, electricity's going to freeze and refuse to budge. And it'll flash out and kill anybody who tries to set them off another way.

"I pleaded with electricity, I told it I'd always thought of it as American and true-reminded it of Franklin and Edison-finally I commanded it to change its ways and behave decent, but it just chuckled at me with never a spark of love or loyalty.

"Then it threatened me back! It told me if I tried to stop it, if I revealed its plans it would summon down its savage brothers from the mountains and with their help it would seek me out and kill me! Mr. Scott, I'm all alone up here with electricity on my window silL What am I going to do?"

Mr. Scott had considerable difficulty soothing Mr. Leverett enough to make his escape. In the end he had to promise to come back in the morning bright and early-silently vowing to himself that he'd be d.a.m.ned if he would.

His task was not made easier when the electricity overhead, which had been especially noisy this day, rose in a growl and Mr. Leverett turned and said harshly, "Yes, I hear!"

That night the Los Angeles area had one of its very rare thunderstorms, accompanied by gales of wind and torrents of rain. Palms and pines and eucalyptus were torn down, earth cliffs crumbled and sloshed, and the great square concrete spillways ran brimful from the hills to the sea.

The lightning was especially fierce. Several score Angelinos, to whom such a display was a novelty, phoned civil defense numbers to report or inquire fearfully about atomic attack.

Numerous freak accidents occurred. To the scene of one of these Mr. Scott was summoned next morning bright and early by the police -because it had occurred on a property he rented and because he was the only person known to be acquainted with the deceased.

The previous night Mr. Scott had awakened at the height of the storm when the lightning had been blinding as a photoflash and the thunder had cracked like a mile-long whip just above the roof. At that time he had remembered vividly what Mr. Leverett had said about electricity threatening to summon its wild giant brothers from the hills. But now, in the bright morning, he decided not to tell the police about that or say anything to them at all about Mr. Leverett's electricity mania-it would only complicate things to no purpose and perhaps make the fear at his heart more crazily real.

Mr. Scott saw the scene of the freak accident before anything was moved, even the body-except there was now, of course, no power in the heavy corroded wire wrapped tight as a bullwhip around the skinny shanks with only the browned and blackened fabric of cotton pyjamas between.

The police, and the power-and-light men reconstructed the accident this way: At the height of the storm one of the high-tension lines had snapped a hundred feet away from the house and the end, whipped by the wind and its own tension, had struck back freakishly through the open bedroom window of Peak House and curled once around the legs of Mr. Leverett, who had likely been on his feet at the time, killing frirri instantly.

One had to strain that reconstruction, though, to explain the additional freakish elements in the accident -the facts that the high-tension wire had struck not only through the bedroom window, but then through the bedroom door to catch the old man in the hall, and that the black s.h.i.+ny cord of the phone was wrapped like a vine twice around the old man's right arm, as if to hold him back from escaping until the big wire had struck.

The Good New Days

"THEY DON'T BUILD slums like they used to," Whitey Edwards told me, reaching up for a loose corner of the flexo and pulling it down to prove his point. It domed springily over our dreg-bottomed coffee cups, revealing in the hidden s.p.a.ce behind it the limp multicolored spaghetti of the utilities piping: gas, water, metered syntho-milk, sewage, coaxed TV, med-mist, Musik, robo-talk, robo-juice, tele, vele, elec, gelec, and such. Few of them running fat with their peculiar contributions to the good life, I judged.

"That may be so," I answered, slapping aside the dodderer's hands and thumbing the blue elastic panel back in place with a fast rub along its adhesive edge. Again it decently covered the flaccid tangle of what looked like rainbow-hued sheep's gut and rubber unmentionables. "But they built Ma like a bull and she'll gore and trample you if she finds you tearing down her kitchen. It's bad enough what the giant centipedes are doing."

The jumbo TV, jammed between sink and fridge, flickered weak and ghostly. A gaggle of five-job wives and eight-job men were having a closed-end discussion of everything in creation on the executive patio edge of a swimming pool big enough to hide a s.p.a.ce-to-seabottom cruiser. Their sweet eldritch cackle was unintelligible, but their state of undress was a slight counter-irritant to boredom.

Whitey Edwards sighed, not looking at these suburban G.o.ddesses, but squinting his rheumy eyes against the Monday sun coming up like doom over the dusty flats between Beatsville and the Henleys' happy if fragile little family castle. Earth's spotted, spitting, seething star shot its angry rays under the great awning rigged in front of our windows and door.

"Once," the old boy said, shaking the head-topping that gave him his name, "they built slums solid with steel beams and heavy lath and great b.l.o.o.d.y pipes of iron and tile and lead that made 'em think twice before they tore 'em down. But now..." He sighed his wheezy grief. Whitey'd used to be a con-anddestruction worker decades back, before the robots took that over, before I was born.

The TV zoomered in on a taut little job in bolero jacket and loincloth. The sound cleared for her fast, happy words "... caring for this pool put my husband and I in the pool-counselor raquette..." and died.

I started to tell Whitey I had even more current job sorrows than his. Since Thursday I'd been terminated from my street-smiler's job for competing with the psychiatrists, robot and human, and for all I know with the giant centipedes. Just then my brother d.i.c.k erupted from the bed-closets, throwing clothes over his sallow nakedness like a Gypsy escaping from a n.a.z.i gas chamber-or as if he were a sprint-in-thegutter one-jobber. And with that job only since Friday night after being three weeks on probationary relief.

I called sweetly at him, "Are you scared a customer will put a gush of quarters into one of your metal bandits with her own little pinkies if you're a minute late?"

d.i.c.k scowled, gyrating around a stubborn trouser leg. "Don't you worry, d.i.c.kie," I kept on. "All the women I illicitly psyched were as nervous of machinery as s.e.x; they wanted a man to do it for them."

Society, graciously, used to let people work vending and other coin-operated machines, like laundromats. But now, like laundromats too, you have to pay an attendant to do it for you-because machines are temperamental and individual enterprise is almost as holy as money and anyway, there aren't enough jobs to go around more than two or three times.

d.i.c.k groggled something at me and got the door open, all set for a spring-heel takeoff. But there in his way was a tiny man, dressed like a respectable beetle, with dimpled fist raised to knock. He had gla.s.ses with zoomer lenses; silver antennae quivered out of his gray hat; a flat black belly-box was his ventral carapace. He looked around, especially at the cluttered floor, as if we were a touch unsavory, but he held his ground.

As d.i.c.k paused at this coleopterous apparition, Ma came charging out of the bed-closets, red in the face and black was the rest of her. She grappled d.i.c.k around the elbows and roared, "Stop! No son of mine is going out to give battle to the 21st Century on an empty stomach." Grabbing a quarter orange she shoved it between his teeth like a boxer's mouthpiece and then s.n.a.t.c.hing this way and that she slammed a sandwich in his one hand and a cup in the other and on the next time around poured it steaming full.

No one can deny that Ma stands squarely in back of her four sons, like the manager of a quartet of fistic champions, conscious of our genius and determined that it get recognition in the form of seven-or eight-job careers. Though at the moment d.i.c.k was the only one of us with any job at all, except for Tom, who lives away with his wife and two kids. But obstructions and setbacks never daunt Ma. It's not the money she's after, mostly, it's the glory of the House of Henley pitted against the whole b.l.o.o.d.y world.

p.r.i.c.ked by tender filial warmth, I eyed her-a murderous son-punis.h.i.+ng behemoth but my blessed mother-while Whitey gave her an unseen wave. He's an old admirer she tolerates ever since Pa recognized her superior nuclear power and died.

d.i.c.k bit out and swallowed the meat of the orange and tongued aside the peel so as to yell that the coffee was burning his hand and what would it do to his throat? Ma ripped the fridge open against the pull of the great spring I'd fixed outside to keep it shut since the latch broke. She whisked out an ice-cube and tucked it in d.i.c.k's cup. The fridge door thudded shut and the spring whirred like a rattlesnake about to jump loose and strike, but it didn't.

Then d.i.c.k gulped his coffee while Ma held him and screeched in his ear about using lunch hour to scout for a second job and not stalk girls. When he'd finished his drink, she gagged him with his sandwich and let him go.

The beetle-man dodged aside. d.i.c.k took off with a straight-line velocity that would have broken his neck and scattered his bones if we'd still been living on the twentieth floor and not in this ground-level flat they tricked us into exchanging for.

The TV blinked and-presto-there was a soldierly file of eight-job men (tabbed for that by the digit on their left shoulder) single-footing with pleasant monotony past the golden plastic statue of a twelve-jobber. Each as he reached screen-center turned head and shouted an inaudible but optimistic something at me and bared all his perfectly tended teeth in a dazzling grin.

I breathed a happy sigh and got set for a spell of quiet-at least until the centipedes decided to start scuttling-but just then the beetle-man poked his head in and piped politely at Ma. "Good morning. Mrs. Henley, I'm your area med statistician, come to take your blood-pressure and photo-snap your insides and all for posterity, like we arranged for a week ago."

Ma slowly turned her head and glared at him like a bull that spots the matador, or, more likely, a peanut-vendor strolling across the ring. The red in her face went purple and she slowly reached for the bubbling coffee flask and slowly lifted it. The beetle-man innocently watched the lethal globe ascend with its tip-tilting seething brown hemicore, as if all this were a job-indoctrination demonstration in astrophysics.

Whitey started up, but I pushed him back in his chair, saying rapidly, "Not you. Even being an old friend of the family wouldn't save you from the horns at this moment."

Then I rasped loud as ambulance-brakes at Ma, "Hold your hand, you murdering old frump!"

She turned at once, as I'd known she would. I cited her and she charged me with the coffee flask high, very much like a small Miura, but armed in a fas.h.i.+on to have made Manolete himself turn pale. But I slipped her with a half veronica and as she went past I kissed her low on the back of the neck, just at the spot where the matador's sword goes in. I whisked my arms around her beloved thick waist, and the next instant she and Whitey and I were as happy as tin larks together flitting through a sparkling star cl.u.s.ter, and she was pouring fresh coffee for us.

But the beetle-man, never dreaming the deadly peril he'd been in, advanced another step into the kitchen and called, "Mrs. Henley, it's very needful you have your medical inspection. You're distorting area med statistics and there are drastic penalties for evading med census. No need for you to undress, just hold still now-"

I pushed the coffee flask back against the wall and I stroked Ma as I held her tight, so she didn't go quite as purple as she howled at hun, "You filthy med-spy!-do you think I'll submit to your peep-ings and be stuff for your filthy pictures when I'm not granted decent human med service if I do sicken? Here I have four grand sons, supermen ah1-Meaghan here, who's a master mind doctor, and Harry who's still in bed, the greatest poet in the world, and d.i.c.k the Prince of Personalities, whom you saw speeding to work and I need not comment on, and Tom, who's a b.l.o.o.d.y wonder-and the filthy world takes so little note of them that if I go to the clinic it's only robot doctors who'll see me and never a flesh-and-blood physician!"

Whatever the topic of her rant, Ma always gets in a commercial for her boys.

The beetle-man quivered back a little at all that, but not very far, and piped soothingly, "Mrs. Henley, there's nothing vulgar or inferior about robo-med. The Secretary of Mental Health himself prefers-" He started to take another step into the room.

"That old sham!" Ma roared, palpitating hi my grasp and purpling dark. "He's the same one whose minions are forever sentencing my genius son Harry to the clutches of the remedial psychiatrists."

"But Mrs. Henley," the little fellow went on with rash courage, "I can see with my own eyes you're not in the best of health. An immediate med-check-"

That gave me my opening and I shoved Ma into Whitey's arms and advanced on the beetle-man quickly, waving my finger like a sword between his bug eyes. "You watch yourself, lad," I cried, "or they'll be terminating you for making diagnoses who are only census-taker. That's what the licensed psychers did to me for adding only a few words of insight and wisdom to my street-smiling."

At that very moment a ghostly pattering began and swiftly grew louder. It seemed to come from everywhere.

"What's that?" the little chap asked wonderingly.

"The giant centipedes," I told him.

He paled and his zoomered eyes searched the shadows under table and sink as he scuttled backwards, and just at that moment, perhaps from the floor being swayed by our movements, the great spring on the fridge came loose and went klis.h.i.+ng across the floor very close to his feet-a twenty-inch coil of gray wire. He leaped for the lintel of the doorway to hoist himself out of reach of the venomous monster of his imagination, but he missed and fell and went leaping off as if old Fu Manchu's whole blessed menagerie were at his heels. In pure pity I followed him under the great awning, polka-dotted now by the shadows showing through of the stuff pattering down on it, and caught up with him just beyond the mounting flake-drift.

"Don't be frightened," I told him, grappling him gently and forcing him to lift his zoomers to the ragged-topped wall behind, now only four to six stories high instead of the thirty it had been a week ago. Along its roller coaster margin two sinuous many-legged great silver beasties scampered, chomping great bites out of it and raining the digested fragments down from their rear ends in concrete cornflakes.

"Those are the giant centipedes," I explained. "Demolishment robots, only."

I was thinking of how Harry might make a shuddery poem of them -glittery cosmic crawlers nibbling the gray rim of infinity, eating their way in toward us from the ends of the universe-when at that instant a weightier chunk, rejected by one of the creature's delicate digestive apparatus, no doubt, came thunking down like a meteor not four feet from us, denting the hard ground and raising a geyser of dust. The beetle-man darted off a dozen more steps while I ducked back under the awning, calling to him, "Now be off with you, little official, and trouble Ma no more. She's too much for you, but let that not cast you down. Look on her as a revenant from a hardier, crueler age- a d.u.c.h.ess out of place."

I'd no sooner got back in the kitchen, where Ma and Whitey were chatting over their coffee, than Ellie, d.i.c.k's wife, came out of the bed-closets full-dressed with bright suitcases in her hands and a dirty dark look in her eyes. She was saying, "Listen all of you, for I'll not tell it twice: I'm leaving that one-job no-good and going back to my last husband, who's still got the three jobs I left him with when I thought to better myself by entering this house of mad pride and sloth and poets snoring," and she brushed past me, the silver spring twinging again as she chanced to kick it.

"Meaghan, let her go, who can't appreciate the Prince of Personalities," Ma said to me loftily, her color down to ladylike bright pink again, but I still would have followed and argued with Ellie-d.i.c.k didn't deserve to be deserted when he'd just got a toe on the bottom rung of the ladder, which of course was why she was leaving him though she didn't know it, a jealous no-job little wifey-except that just then who should appear in the doorway but my eldest brother, Tom, filling it with his big grin and his great shoulders and his aura of three-job success-or would it be four now?-and saying, "Hi, Ma. Ellie leaving d.i.c.k again? Who's the tiny one hanging around outside? Housing official come to coax you once more from this death trap? h.e.l.lo, Whitey. No, no coffee, Ma, I want to talk to Mea-ghan here. I've got something for the lad!"

I knew what that meant, of course, and I was already hunched on my hands and knees, starting to fix the spring to the fridge again- a job that might easily take the rest of the day, I decided-when I felt Ma's kindly talons on my shoulder, lifting me up, and she saying, "Whitey'U fix that, Meaghan," and then her beloved claws were propelling me to a seat at the table flush against the blue flexo, with my cup in front of me and beyond that Tom's great face as full of a smile of eager elder-brother benignity as my cup was of steaming coffee -Ma having poured again and dropped in a pinch of dexy (I saw her) to give me spirit.

All the while I was thinking chiefly, What job's he found now that's so bad he won't take it himself but offer it to me? It'd have to be pretty bad, for at last count Tom's three jobs were grinding mirrors for leisure-time astronomers who hadn't time to grind their own -that's one-and selling retailers a brand of all-cornsilk cancer-free cigarets with the genuine coal-tar taste and the nicotine life-that's two-and answering for a robot answering service whenever the decibel-rating of the caller's voice began to indicate extreme rage. He still had the third job, at any rate, by the phone-rig hanging around his neck.

"Meaghan," he beamed, "next to an all-girl squad of revivalist angels, there's naught so wondrous as brother-love. I got something great for you. By the by, I have Number Four myself now-I travel in ladies' glow-in-the-dark underthings."

As Ma raised a cheer at that, I looked around for escape, but Whitey was squatting at the fridge and blocking the door to the outer world, as happy with his tinkering as a great-grandfather c.o.c.kroach (one of which was walking up his leg) while Ma, cheering still but with a policeman's eye on me, was taking a cup of coffee big and smoking as a volcano into the bed-closets-to fire Harry's poetic genius, no doubt, or in lieu of that toss him on his lazy feet.

"Meaghan-" Tom began, but just then his neck phone rang and he twitched it on and I could hear a voice like angry wasps. Tom listened and his face grew pink-he takes after Ma hi that-and he said, "Certainly, madam. However-" and then his face grew purple and he began to bubble his mouth like a fish.

I leaned across the table and put my lips to the mouthpiece and shouted, "I love you dearly, unknown, indeed I do. I love you dearly, madam, brood upon that," and I twitched the thing off.

"That won't satisfy her," Tom said when he got his right color back and his breath.

"It will for twenty minutes," I told him, "and what in this world is good for any longer?" And then I added, reckless in my light-heartedness, "You were saying... ?"

"Meaghan," Tom began again, "I know you had this trifling street-smiler's job-"

"Not so trifling or little," I defended, though I hadn't intended to. "The sociologists decided people looked too tense and glum going back and forth to work and shopping and so on, so they hired folk like myself to mingle among 'em and strike up talk, casual-like, to cheer 'em up. Not quite the worst idea in the world, either."

"Yes, but you went too far," Tom reminded me. "You pried into people's minds to find their real troubles and set 'em straight. That's psychers' work, my lad, and you can't blame that august profession for resenting your compet.i.tion and having you terminated."

"I helped the people I talked to," I countered stubbornly. '1 couldn't have talked to them at all, Tom, if I hadn't something solid to say."

"I love you dearly, madam, brood upon that," Tom said. "Solid!"

"I don't worry 'em or push any of their desperation b.u.t.tons, though I glimpsed banks of those," I protested on. "I just encouraged 'em to widen their minds and feelings a little and get some of the comic side-wash of others' troubles and cheer up naturally."

"There you've hit the nub of it," Tom a.s.serted, wagging a ringer in my face. "You tried to deliver more than your job called for, instead of learning to do it with a minimum of effort and finding another job to go with it, to swell your income-and then another after that."

He gave a quick look around-to make sure Ma hadn't come back, I soon realized-and then, leaning forward, said with a confidential hush, "Oh, Meaghan, my boy, I've learned so much of the world since I got away from here and Ma's no longer firing me with resentments and wild ambitions. The world's a very tidy comfortable place if only you'll remember there are three billion other lunatic climbers in it- and do no more than you're told and watch the smiles and frowns of your superiors and keep your eyes open and your nostrils flared for flicker or scent of another chance to make money. Step fast, keep adding one little job to the next like beads on a necklace, and forget Ma and her wild dreams. Oh, and did I tell you my Katie's got two jobs herself now too?-and never a one she'd have had with Ma around to hold her down."

"Ma's all right," I told him sharply. "She's got more courage and determination and vision than the four of us'll ever have together. And such a fierce self-punis.h.i.+ng drive I wonder she's still alive. How would you ever have got out of here to a place of your own without Ma booting you?"

"True, true," he agreed. "Nevertheless, Ma's a hopeless romantic. She wants her four sons to be Dukes of the World, lording it over all."

I couldn't help chuckling at that. "When I was still street-smiling," I confided, "a little man, who thought he was a great romantic, opened his mind to me wanting only to escape from the prison of his life and aim a flas.h.i.+ng sword at other men and capture with love their women-and corral all the single girls going around loose, too. After we both looked at this stirring picture a while, we realized that what he really wanted was to have all women mother him and puff him up and lead him through life like a great bobbing red balloon."

"That's the way with all romantics, including Ma," Tom said, taking advantage of me straightway. "She wants her sons to be princes and kings, or board chairmen at all events, not realizing there's a billion others starting up the success ladder with them-and not one with a genuine ion drive. Not realizing that the compet.i.tion's too stiff for any man to dream of being more than an eight-job statistic with his peers. Or ten at most."

The TV now was sailing over a great pile of gently crumpled bedclothes, which struck me as most pleasant and unlikely. Then I realized it was...o...b..ting the Earth high above the clouds and there low in the foreground were the backs of beautifully barbered heads and now a sign flas.h.i.+ng across the clouds: "Vacation Jaunts through s.p.a.ce for Nine-Job Heroes of Democracy."

"You're right about the compet.i.tion," I agreed quickly with Tom. "I'm no enemy of democracy, I'm one of its darlingest friends, but there's no question it's upped the compet.i.tion more than ever it was in Earth's history. We've got more machines, more health, more freedom of movement, more education, more leisure, more time for making money in our spare time, more almost equal people, and more incentives, more quick showy rewards for the quickly successful-with the result that the compet.i.tion burns us out fast enough to equalize all the longevity created by medical advance."

"It doesn't seem to be burning you out," Tom observed.

"Now listen here, Tom my boy," I continued, warming to my subject. "Isn't there something altogether crazy about a world that wants to turn everyone into merchants no matter what their natural psychological cla.s.s-a world that's turned even scientists and poets and adventurers and soldiers and priests into merchants busy selling themselves-a world that's feared so much that the machine would take away all jobs that it's gone ape creating jobs and financial ventures by the billions. With each reduction in working hours paralleled by an equal or greater increase hi tune spent on a part-tune and sideline jobs-a world that's so money-conscious that a man who takes his eyes off the dollar for a month or a day or even ten seconds-"

"Your eyes don't look red with squinting at silver," Tom observed like a lemon. "Besides, you're deafening me."

Just then Ma came lumbering daintily in again and asked Tom, "What's this wondrous job you've got for Meaghan? I can't wait any longer to hear." Just as if she hadn't been hearing every word and writhing at my negativisms.

I groaned as if on the verge of defeat. Tom laughed and said, "I was forgetting about that. What with Mea talking of billions of jobs, my one got lost hi the stampede. Well, it seems that the repair robots are getting unpredictable everywhere, spending too much time on some jobs and not enough on others, and pa.s.sing up still others altogether. One repaired a leak so well it built an armor wall six feet thick around the leak and himself- Fortunata, they called that one. Another found a leak and did nothing but start making identical leaks in all the pipes he followed-until thousands of them were squirting behind him. A demolition robot started shooting rocks at a new-risen glastic building. Yet the circuits of these robots are in perfect order and they always behave properly under factory tests. So what must be done is to have a man follow each metal trouble-shooter and note every move he makes, watch his behavior day after day-taking weeks if necessary so the robot will get used to his presence and not vary his behavior to please or confuse or harm the watcher. Oh, it's a fine sort of job-no work at all-sort of like what they called Sidewalk Inspecting back in the depths of history."

I said, "I suppose the robots they're having the most trouble with are the ones that repair heat-tunnels and sewers and other delightful underground conduits."

"How did you know that?" Tom asked me very quickly. "Old sunken spillways and aqueducts and chimneys too, though-some of the last poking thousands of feet high into the clear heady air. A most healthful job, my boyo-a regular mountain-climbing and spelunking vacation."

I said softly, "I think I'd rather drown parboiled in this coffee cup than play psychiatric aide to a manic genius robot with a breakneck wander-urge who's waiting for his metal consciousness to brighten with its first jeweled unhuman pictures and electricity-loving impulses. The machines are coming awake, did you know that, Tom? All the machines-"