PLATINUM POHL (45 page)
Authors: Frederik Pohl
Against all advice, the congressman in his second session was telling the audience about the highlights of their summer photo safari along the Nile. Against Carrie’s expectations, the audience was enjoying it. Even the mayor. As O’Hare described how they had almost, but not quite, seen a living crocodile and the actual place where a hippopotamus had once been sighted, the mayor was chuckling along with everyone else. But while it was chuckling it was reaching for its neat brown attache case; opened it, pulled out a module of data-store microchips, opened what looked like a pocket in the side of its jacket, removed one set of chips and replaced them with another.
It was plugging in a new set of memories! How very unfair! Carrie glanced around the crowded audience to see if any of the audience were as outraged as she, but if they were they didn’t show it. They were intent on the congressman’s words, laughing with him, nodding with interest, clapping when applause was proper. They were a model audience, except that they did not seem to notice, or to care about, the unfairness of the mayor. But why not? They certainly looked normal and decent enough, so friendly and so amiable and—
So neat.
Carrie’s hand flew to her mouth. She gazed beseechingly at her husband, but he was too wily a campaigner to have failed to read the audience. Without a hitch, husbanding his time to spend it where it would do the most good, he swung from the pleasures of the summer holiday to the realities of his political life. “And now,” he said, leaning forward over the lectern to beam at the audience, “it’s back to work, to finish the job you’ve been electing me for. As you know, I was one of the sponsors of the Robot E.R.A. A lot of voters were against that, in the old days. Even my friends in political office advised me to leave that issue alone. They said I was committing political suicide, because the voters felt that if the amendment passed there would be no way anybody could tell the difference between a human and a mechanical anymore, and the country would go to the dogs. Well, it passed—and I say the country’s better off than ever, and I say I’m proud of what I did and anxious to go back and finish the job!” And he beamed triumphantly at his opponent as the applause swelled and he relinquished the floor.
But the mayor was not in the least disconcerted. In fact, he led the clapping. When he reached the podium he cried, “I really thank you, Congressman O’Hare, and I believe that now every voter in the district, organic and mechanical alike, knows just how right you were! That amendment did not only give us mechanicals the vote. It not only purged from all the datastores any reference to the origins of any voter, mechanical or organic, but it also did the one great thing that remained to do. It freed human beings from one more onerous and difficult task—namely, the job of selecting, alone, their elected officials. What remains? Just one thing, I say—the task of carrying this one step further, by
electing mechanicals to the highest offices in the land, so that human life can be pure pleasure!”
electing mechanicals to the highest offices in the land, so that human life can be pure pleasure!”
And the ovation was just as large. The mayor waited it out, smiling gratefully toward O’Hare, and when the applause had died away it went on to supply specifics to back up its stand—all dredged, Carrie was sure, out of the store of chips she had seen it plug in.
On the stage, her husband’s expression did not change, but Carrie saw the eyes narrow again. The relay had popped open once more and reset itself, snick-snick; O’Hare knew that this opponent was a cut above the others. This campaign was not going to be quite like those that had gone before.
And indeed it wasn’t, although for the first few weeks it looked as though it would have the same sure outcome.
By the first of October the congressman was hitting his stride. Three kaffee-klatsches a day, at least one dinner every evening—he had long ago learned how to push the food around his plate to disguise the fact that he wasn’t eating. And all the hundreds of block parties and TV spots and news conferences and just strolling past the voters. The weather turned cooler, but still muggy, and the outdoor appearances every day began to worry Carrie. The congressman’s feet would never give out, or his handshake, or his smile muscles. What was vulnerable was his voice. Up on a streetcorner platform his enemies were the damp wind and the sooty air. Walking along a shopping block, the same—plus the quiches and pitas, the ravioli and the dim sum, the kosher hot dogs and sushi—the whole spectrum of ethnic foods that an ethnic-wooing candidate traditionally had to seem to enjoy. “The tradition’s out of date,” Carrie told him crossly, throat lozenges in one hand and antacid pills in the other as he gamely tried to recuperate before going to bed, “when half the voters are robots!”
Her husband sat on the edge of their bed, rubbing his throat and his feet alternately. “It’s the organics I need, love. The robots know where I stand!”
They also knew, Carrie thought but did not say, that his opponent was one of them … . But robots were programmed to be fair! Poring over the daily polls after her husband had gone to sleep, Carrie almost felt confidence that they were. The congressman’s reliable old polling service was also his driver, Martin, an antique remote-intelligence robot which needed only to query the central computation faculty to get the latest data on election moods. Or, indeed, on anything else; and it was the robot’s custom to lay a printout of the last polling data on Carrie’s dressing table every night. Indeed, the graphs did not look bad. Thirty-eight percent for her husband, only 19 percent for Mayor Thom—
But what they also showed was a whopping 43 percent undecided, and the fly in the ointment was that the “undecideds” were overwhelmingly robots. Carrie understood why this was so; it had been so ever since her husband’s Robot E.R.A. passed and the autonomous-intelligence models got the vote. Robots did not like to hurt anyone’s feelings. When robots were required to make a choice that might displease someone, they postponed it as long as they could. For robots were also programmed to be polite.
And if all that 43 percent came down for Mayor Thom—
Carrie simply would not face that possibility. Her husband was
happy
in his job. The Congress of the United States was an honorable career, and an easy one, too, not a small consideration for a man in his seventies who was now coughing fitfully in his sleep. In
the old days it had been a mankiller. There was always so much to do, worrying about foreign powers, raising taxes, trying to give every citizen a fair share of the nation’s prosperity—when there was any prosperity—at least, trying to give each one enough of a constant and never adequate supply of the available wealth to keep them from rioting in the streets. But since Amadeus’s gift of power, with all the limitless wealth it made available to everyone, a congressman could take pleasure in what he did, and if he chose not to do it for a while—to take a summer off for a photo safari along the Nile, for instance—why, where was the harm?
happy
in his job. The Congress of the United States was an honorable career, and an easy one, too, not a small consideration for a man in his seventies who was now coughing fitfully in his sleep. In
the old days it had been a mankiller. There was always so much to do, worrying about foreign powers, raising taxes, trying to give every citizen a fair share of the nation’s prosperity—when there was any prosperity—at least, trying to give each one enough of a constant and never adequate supply of the available wealth to keep them from rioting in the streets. But since Amadeus’s gift of power, with all the limitless wealth it made available to everyone, a congressman could take pleasure in what he did, and if he chose not to do it for a while—to take a summer off for a photo safari along the Nile, for instance—why, where was the harm?
She slept uneasily that night.
Where the congressman went, Carrie went too, even to a factory district far out of town, even when greeting the early shift meant being there at five-thirty in the morning. The sign over the chain-link fence said:
AMALFI ELECTRIC, INC.
A Division of
Midwest Power & Tool Corp.
A Division of
Midwest Power & Tool Corp.
and as they approached the managing director hurried out to greet them. “Congressman O’Hare!” he fawned. “And, yes, your lovely lady—what an honor!” He was a nervous, rabbity little man, obviously human; his name, Carrie knew from the briefing Marty had provided as they turned into the parking lot, was Robert Meacham. The briefing also said that he was the kind who could keep you talking while the whole shift passed by on the other side of the fence, so Carrie moved forward to engage him even while the congressman was still pumping his hand.
It was no trick for Carrie to find things to talk about while the congressman wooed Meacham’s workers, not with Carrie’s photographic—really more than photographic, almost robotic—memory for the names of wives, children, and pets. By the time she had finished discussing Meacham’s two spaniels, the congressman had finished with his workers and the alert Marty was moving the car in to pick him up. Meacham detained Carrie a moment longer. “Mrs. O’Hare, can I ask you something?”
“Of course, Mr. Meacham,” she said, wishing he wouldn’t.
“Well—I can see why your husband goes after the late-model robots. They’ve got the vote. Besides, it’s not that easy to tell them from real people anyway. But there’s a lot of pre-Josephson models working on our line. They don’t have any individual intelligence—they’re radio-linked to the central computers, you know, like your driver. And they don’t even have a vote!”
“I can see,” said Carrie benignly, trying not to lose his vote but unwilling to refrain from setting him straight, “that you don’t know the congressman very well. He doesn’t do this just for votes. He does it for love.”
And indeed, that was true. And as October dwindled toward Hallowe’en, what dampened the sparkle in the congressman’s eye was the first hint—not really a hint, hardly more than a suspicion—of love unrequited. For the polls were turning, like the autumn leaves, as the “undecideds” began to decide. He began to consult Marty’s datalink reports more and more frequently, and the more he studied them the more a trend was clear. Every day the congressman picked up some small fraction of a percentage point, it was true. But the mayor picked up a larger one.
As Marty drove them to yet another factory, it extruded a hard copy of the latest results from the tiny printer in its chest and passed it back to the congressman wordlessly. O’Hare studied the printout morosely. “I didn’t think it was going to work out this way,” he admitted at last. “It seems—it actually seems as though the enfranchised mechanicals are bloc-voting.”
“You’d think they’d do their bloc-voting for the man who gave them the Robot E.R.A.,” Carrie said bitterly, and bit her tongue. But O’Hare only sighed and stared out at the warm, smoggy air. His wife thought dismally that the congressman was at last beginning to show his age.
That morning’s factory was a robot-robot assembly plant. Robots were the workers, and robots were the product. Some of the production bays were a decade old and more, and the workers were CIMs—Central Intelligence Mechanicals, like their old driver Marty. Their dented old skulls housed sensors and communications circuits, but no thought. The thinking took place in an air-conditioned, vibration-proof, and lightless chamber in the bedrock under the factory floor, where a single giant computer ran a hundred and ninety robots. But if the bulk of the workers were ancient, what they produced was sparkly new. As they drove up, Carrie saw a big flatbed truck hauling away. It was furnished with what looked like pipe racks bolted to the bed, and in each niche in the pipes a shiny new Josephson-junction autonomous-intellect robot had harnessed itself to the rack and lapsed into power-down mode for the trip to the distribution center. There were more than a hundred of them in a single truckload. A hundred votes, Carrie thought longingly, assuming they would all stay in the Twenty-third Congressional District … but she was not surprised, all the same, when she observed that the congressman was not thinking along precisely those strategic lines.
She sighed fondly, watching him as he did what she knew he was going to do. He limped down the line of CIMs, with a word and a smile and a handshake for each … and not a vote in the lot of them. It was not a kindly place for a human being to be, noisy with the zap of welding sparks, hot, dusty. This was where the torsos were assembled and the limbs attached and the effector motors emplaced. The growing, empty robot bodies swung down the line like beeves at a meat packer’s. Fortunately the CIMs had only limited capacity for small talk, and so the congressman was soon enough in the newer, cleaner detailing bays. The finishing touches were applied here. The empty skulls were filled with the Josephson-junction data processors that were their “brains.” The freezer units that kept the cryo-circuits working were installed, and into the vacant torsos went the power units that held hydrogen-fusion reactors contained in a chamber of quarks the size of a thimble. The congressman’s time was not wasted here. Every one of these workers was a voter, an enfranchised robot as new and remarkable as the ones they made. Along that line the robots being finished began to twist and move and emit sounds, as their circuits went through quality-control testing, until at the end of the line they unhooked themselves from the overhead cable, stepped off, blinked, stood silent for a moment while their internal scanners told them who and what they were, and why … .
And the congressman’s eyes gleamed as he perceived them as they perceived themselves. New beings. New voters!
It was the right place for the congressman to be: a greeting for each new voter, a handshake … a vote. Carrie hated to try to pull him away, but Martin was looking worried and the schedule had to be met. “Oh, Carrie,” he whispered as she tugged at his
sleeve, “they’re
imprinting
on me! Just like the ducklings in
King Solomon’s Ring
! I’m the first thing they see, so naturally they’re going to remember me forever!”
sleeve, “they’re
imprinting
on me! Just like the ducklings in
King Solomon’s Ring
! I’m the first thing they see, so naturally they’re going to remember me forever!”
He was not only happy, he was flushed with pleasure. Carrie hoped that was what it was—pleasure, and not something more worrisome. His eyes were feverishly bright, and he talked so rapidly he was tripping over his words. She was adamant; and then, once she got him into the car, less sure. “Dear,” she ventured, as Martin closed the door behind them, “do you suppose you could possibly cancel the Baptist Men’s Prayer Breakfast?”
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