Platinum Pohl: The Collected Best Stories

by Frederik Pohl

  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?

  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.

  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!”

  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?”

  “Certainly not,” he said inevitably.

  “You really do need a rest—”

  “It’s only a week till the election,” he pointed out reasonably, “and then we’ll rest as much as you like—maybe even back to the Sahara for a few days in the sun. Now, what are you going to do?”

  She stared at him uncertainly. “Do when?”

  “Do now, while I go see the Baptists—it’s a men’s breakfast, you know.”

  For once he had caught Carrie unprepared. Gender-segregated events were so rare that she had simply forgotten about this one. “Martin can drop me off and take you home, if you like,” her husband supplied, “but of course it’s going the wrong way—”

  “No.” She opened the door on her side, kissed her husband’s warm cheek—too warm? she wondered—and got out. “I’ll take a cab. You go ahead.”

  And she watched her husband pull out of one end of the parking lot just as the six-car procession she had seen coming down the far side of the fence entered at the other.

  The mayor.

  It was the old days all over again, the next thing to a circus parade. Six cars! And not just cars, but bright orange vehicles, purpose-built for nothing but campaigning. The first was an open car with half a dozen pretty young she-robots—no! They were human, Carrie was sure!—with pretty girls tossing pink and white carnations to the passersby. There were not many passersby, at that hour of the morning, but the mayor’s parade was pulling out all the stops. Next another open car, with the neat, smiling figure of the mayor bestowing waves and nods on all sides. Next a PA car, with a handsome male singer and a beautiful female alternating to sing all the traditional political campaign numbers, Happy Days Are Here Again and Schiller’s Ode to Joy and God Bless America with an up-tempo beat. And then two more flower-girl cars, surrounding a vehicle that was nothing more than a giant animated electronic display showing the latest and constantly changing poll results and extrapolations. All, of course, favoring the mayor. How gross! And how very effective, Carrie conceded dismally to herself…“You the lady that wants the taxi?” someone called behind her, and she turned to see a cab creeping up toward her. Reliable Martin had sent for it, of course. She sighed and turned to go inside it, and then paused, shaking her head.

  “No, not now. I’ll stay here a while.”

  “Whatever you say, lady,” the driver agreed, gazing past her at the mayor’s procession. He was only a central-intelligence mechanical, but Carrie was sure she saw admiration in his eyes.

  The mayor had not noticed her. Carrie devoted herself to noticing him, as inconspicuously as she could. He was repeating her husband’s tour of the plant—fair enough—but then she saw that it was not fair at all, for the mayor had a built-in advantage. It too was a robot. In her husband’s tour of the plant he had given each worker a minute’s conversation. The mayor gave each worker just as much conversation, but both it and the workers had their communications systems in fast mode. The sound of their voices was like the sonar squeaks of bats. The pumping of arms in the obligatory handshake like the flutter of hummingbird wings, too fast for Carrie’s eyes to follow.

  A voice from behind her said, “I know who you are, Mrs. O’Hare, but would you like a carnation anyhow?”

  It was one of the flower girls—not, however, one of the human ones from the first car, for human girls did not have liquid-crystal readouts across their foreheads that said Vote for Thom!

  There was no guile in its expression, no hidden photographer waiting to sneak a tape of the congressman’s wife accepting a flower from the opponent. It seemed to be simple courtesy, and Carrie O’Hare responded in kind. “Thank you. You’re putting on a really nice show,” she said, her heart envious but her tone, she hoped, only admiring. “Could you tell me something?”

  “Of course, Mrs. O’Hare!”

  Carrie hesitated; it was her instinct to be polite to everyone, robots included—her own programming, of course. How to put what she wanted to know? “I notice,” she said delicately, “that Mayor Thom is spending time even with the old-fashioned mechanicals that don’t have a vote. Can you tell me why?”

  “Certainly, Mrs. O’Hare,” the flower girl said promptly. “There are three reasons. The first is that it looks good, so when he goes to the autonomous-intellect mechanicals they’re disposed in his favor. The second is that the mayor is going to sponsor a bill to give the CIMs a fractional vote, too—did you know that?”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t,” Carried confessed. “But surely they can’t be treated the way humans or Josephson-junction mechanicals are?”

  “Oh, no, not at all,” it agreed, smiling. “That’s why it’s only a fractional vote. You see, each of the CIMs is controlled by a central computer that is quite as intelligent as any of us, perhaps even more so; the central intelligence has no vote at all. So what Mayor Thom proposes is that each of the CIMs will have a fraction of a vote—one one hundred and ninetieth of a vote, in the case of the workers here, since that’s how many of them the plant computer runs. So if they all vote, the central computer will in effect have the chance to cast a ballot on its own—you know the old slogan, Mrs. O’Hare, one intelligence, one vote!”

  Carrie nodded unhappily. It made sense—it was exactly the sort of thing her husband would have done himself, if he had thought of it. But he hadn’t. Maybe he was getting past the point of thinking up the really good political ideas any more. Maybe—“You said there were three reasons.”

  “Well, just the obvious one, Mrs. O’Hare. The same reason as your husband does it. It’s not just for votes with the mayor. It’s love.” The she hesitated, then confided, “I don’t know whether you know this or not, Mrs. O’Hare, but autonomous-intellect mechanicals like Mayor Thom and I have a certain discretion in our behavior patterns. One of the first things we do is study the available modes and install the ones we like best. I happen to have chosen nearly 20 percent you, Mrs. O’Hare. And the mayor—he’s nearly three-quarters your husband.”

  There is a time for all things, thought Carrie O’Hare as she walked over to the mayor’s procession to ask them to call her a cab. There is a time to stay, and a time to go, and maybe the time to stay in office was over for Fiorello Delano Fitzgerald O’Hare. Some of the robots her husband had greeted as they came off the assembly line were standing in a clump, waiting, no doubt, for the arrival of the next truck to bear them away. They waved to Carrie. She responded with a slight decrease of worry—they were sure votes, anyway. Unless—

  She stopped short. What was the mayor doing with them? She gazed incredulously at the scene, like a high-speed film, the mayor thrusting a hand into a pouch, jerking it out, swiftly passing something that shone dully to the robot he was talking to and moving briskly to the next…and then, without willing it, Carrie herself was in high-speed mode, almost running toward the mayor, her face crimson with rage. The mayor looked up as she approached and politely geared down. “Mrs. O’Hare,” it murmured, “how nice to see you here.”

  “I’m shocked!” she cried. “You’re brainwashing them!”

  The mobile robot face registered astonishment and what was almost indignation. “Why, certainly not, Mrs. O’Hare! I assure you I would never do such a thing.”

  “I saw you, Mayor Thorn. You’re reprogramming the robots with data chips!”

  Comprehension broke over the mayor’s face, and it gestured to the she-robot who had given Carrie the flower. “Ah, the chips, yes.
I see.” It pulled a chip out of the pouch and passed it to the she with a burst of high-speed squeaks. “Oh, I beg your pardon, Mrs. O’Hare. Let me repeat what I just said in normal mode. I simply asked Millicent here to display the chip contents for you.”

  “Sure thing, Mayor,” smiled Millicent, tucking the chip under the strap of its halter top. The running message on Millicent’s forehead disappeared, and the legend appeared:

  THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense—

  “Move it on, please,” ordered the mayor. “Search ‘O’Hare.’ Most of it,” it added to Carrie, “is only the basic legislation, the Constitution, the election laws and so on. We don’t get to your husband until—ah, here it is!” And the legend read:

  H.R. 29038, An Act to Propose a Constitutional Amendment to grant equal voting rights and other civil rights to citizens of mechanical origin which satisfy certain requirements as to autonomy of intellect and judgment.

  “The Robot E.R.A.,” Carrie said.

  “That’s right, Mrs. O’Hare, and of course your husband’s name is on it. Then there’s nothing about him until—advance search, please, Millicent—yes. Until we come to his basic biographical information. Birthplace, education, voting record, medical reports and so on—”

  “Medical reports! That’s confidential material!”

  The mayor looked concerned. “Confidential, Mrs. O’Hare? But I assure you, the data on myself is just as complete—”

  “It’s different with human beings! Fiorello’s doctor had no business releasing that data!”

  “Ah, I see,” said the mayor, nodding in comprehension. “Yes, of course, that is true for his present doctor, Mrs. O’Hare. But previously the congressman made use of a CIM practitioner—a robot whose central processing functions took place in the general data systems, and of course all of that is public information. I’m sorry. I assumed you knew that. Display the congressman’s medical history,” it added to the she, and Carrie gazed at the moving line of characters through tear-blurred eyes. It was all there. His mild tachycardia, the arthritis that kicked up every winter, the asthma, even the fact that now and then the congressman suffered from occasional spells of constipation.