“Benefactor” was first published in 1958—but its first sale was in 1964, to Francesca van der Ling of SSI, who found it in a 1959 issue of the Indian magazine Thought—which had reprinted it from a 1958 U.S. edition of the Socialist Call-where it had been published originally without payment.
Now, James T. Farrell’s place among twentieth-century American authors has long survived both the shocked gasps of the thirties at the “realism” of Studs Lonigan, and the horror of the forties at the “leftist” politics of the thirties.
But this time he had stepped out of character: out of his specialty. Hollywood is not the only American scene where typecasting prevails.
And believe me, Isaac Asimov would have as much trouble selling a realistic novel (no matter how good) about the Chicago Irish as James Farrell had with “Benefactor.”
* * * *
SYNCHROMOCRACY
Hap Cawood
Synchromocracy, the newest concept in Total Democracy, was hailed by the President as “the answer to peace and the pure voice of majority rule” shortly before the chief executive was replaced by an IBM-Computer-Center today.
Synchromocracy was achieved by advances in the computer field along with the discovery of the D-3 solution, the first drug proved to “definitely cause democracy.” D-3 solutions were put in all known world water supplies last week.
In the U.S., IBM-Registers were distributed among the population to relay public opinion to state and national consoles where they are converted instantaneously into policy.
The American governmental machinery has run smoothly, despite difficulties in approaching the first foreign-policy problems. Overseas countries, although 98.4% democratic, are without register-computers and unable to achieve a consensus. Committees could be organized, but individuals are unable to call them without consent of the majority. There is also some question as to how many constitute a majority, but this cannot be answered without a quorum.
Human elements are also incorporated into Synchromocracy. Political corruption is programmed regularly for Thursday nights. Reportedly, some feel this is not a sufficient corruption percentage, but the quotient cannot be altered unless the majority agrees. However, the majority isn’t presently thinking of it and the minority cannot officially raise the issue until the majority does think of it.
The political forecast for tomorrow is mild conservatism in the South with scattered liberalism in the New York area; a light reign through the night in England. Moderate anarchy is scheduled for tomorrow morning along the Great Lakes, dissent at 30% with a high of 34 in some portions.
This is a recorded announcement.
<
* * * *
Hap Cawood is a graduate student at Ohio State University. Has published satires and poetry in University publications and in motive. Spent two years teaching with the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone. Is now completing work for his Master’s in —you guessed it—journalism.
He says what he wrote is a satire. I agree, the style is satirical. But what bothers me is, while everybody’s talking about how “science is catching up with science fiction,” nobody seems to notice how IBM is catching up with satire.
There is an IBM down in Florida that writes love poems. Like:
Darkly the peaceful trees crashed
In the serene sun
While the heart heard
The swift moon stopped silently.
What really hurts is, the 709 had a vocabulary of exactly 78 words when that was written. Presumably it knows more now. At the time that Russell Baker reported on it (but this one was no joke; it was a straight news article), 709 could only do 30 poems a minute, but it was supposed to work up to 500/per shortly.
And then there was this inspirational photograph in the paper the other day—a happy schoolgirl looking up at the beaming broad panel of the teacher. I mean, that one was no joke, either.
Sometime between the spring when I write this, and the winter when it is published, Peter Redgrove (who was represented in the Ninth Annual with a prose-poem short story, “Mr. Waterman”) will have initiated a series of programs on the B.B.C. to show, he hopes, that “poetry and SF are trying to digest the same things.”
“Machines are so much in our lives,” he says. “Why have so few poets tackled this? Is it that they don’t know enough? Is it that they’re so afraid of the machine that all they can make of it is satire . . .?
“Hart Crane saw that one way of making a complete living world-picture was to treat machines as a kind of comrade in evolutionary advance—if you treat them as mere instruments, when of course they’re images of the mind, then you deaden yourself and them. . . .
“We don’t want satire,” he concludes, “we want synthesis.”
* * * *
THE SEARCH
Bruce Simonds
The first robots were pretty shoddy
Back in the Seventies.
They were uncoordinated and clumsy
And they thought too slowly
And they didn’t understand more than a few simple words
And they would wash a dish to a powder
If you didn’t stop them in time.
So in August of 1978
Arthur Chumley called in the Product Development Group
Of Chumley Robot
And in they came
With the latest model.
It clanked over to Arthur Chumley
And said
“Hello (klik) Mister (klik) Chumley (klik).”
And put out its hand.
But before Arthur Chumley could shake the hand
It had knocked over a gilded bust of him
Badly denting the halo.
“This is not good,”
Said Arthur Chumley.
“We must think, we must draw, we must work
“To build the More Perfect Robot.
“Build me a robot
“That does everything our present model does
“But has none of its clumsy, uncoordinated movements.
“And while you’re at it
“Knock its weight down to two hundred kilos.”
And he chased them all out of his office
And he looked at the sales graph
And he poured himself a bourbon-and-water.
Easy on the water.
A year and two months later
In October of 1979
The Product Development Group marched in proudly
With their robot.
It walked smoothly and gracefully over to Arthur Chumley
And said
“Hello (klik) Mister (klik) Chumley (klik),”
And held out its hand
Which Arthur Chumley shook.
“Make me a Chumley Martini,”
Said Arthur Chumley.
But the robot did not make him a Chumley Martini.
Instead, it said
“(Whir) (buzz) (klik) (whir) (klik) (buzz) (paf!)”
And blew a $4.79 pentode tube
Signifying Arthur Chumley had said something beyond its grasp.
Whereupon Arthur Chumley leaned back
And folded his pudgy hands over the convenient ledge
Made by his stomach
And said
“This is not good.
“We must think, we must draw, we must work
“To build the More Perfect Robot.
“Build me a robot
“That does everything our present model does
“And has a complete working vocabulary
“To fit its particular function.
“And while you’re at it
“Get rid of that damn (klik) it makes switching tapes.”
And he chased them all out of his office
And he looked at the sales graph
And he made himself a Chumley Martini:
Three ounces of gin in a cocktail glass
And smiled at the portrait of Martini & Rossi.
Six years and six
months later
In April of 1986
The Product Development Group trooped in
With their robot.
It walked over to Arthur Chumley
And said
“Good morning, Mister Chumley.”
And Arthur Chumley turned to the Product Development Group
And said
“Do you know what’s going to happen if we market this thing?”
And the Group members all quivered
And shook their heads
And the robot said it did not.
“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen if we market this thing,”
Said Arthur Chumley.
“The entire American public is going to laugh at us
“If we market this thing.
“And do you know why?”
And the Group members all quivered
And shook their heads
And the robot said it did not.
“I’ll tell you why.
“Because they have a right to laugh at a company
“That markets a robot
“That says ‘Good morning’ at four-thirty in the afternoon.”
Said Arthur Chumley.
And he sat down at his desk
And put his head in his hands
And said
“This is not good.
“We must think, we must draw, we must work
“To build the More Perfect Robot.
“Build me a robot
“That does everything our present model does
“And can see
“And smell
“And hear
“And taste
“And feel.
“And while you’re at it
“Cover it with a soft, fleshlike substance
“So it looks like a human being.
“And just for the hell of it
“Give it the ability to perceive a person’s emotional state
“From his actions
“And know how to act accordingly.”
And he had a vice-president throw them all out of his office
And he looked at the sales graph
And he went to the liver bank.
Twenty-two years and eleven months later
In March of 1999
The Product Development Group snivelled in
With their robot.
It seated the Group Chairman
Remarking about how cold it had been last night.
Then it walked over to Arthur Chumley
And held out its soft, fleshlike hand
Which Arthur Chumley ignored.
Somewhat disconcerted
The robot said
“How are you, Mister Chumley?”
Whereupon Arthur Chumley replied
“Miserable. My wife had an affair with my best friend
And my servants have run off with my plane
And all my clothes.”
And the robot smiled
And said
“You’re joking, Mister Chumley.”
And Arthur Chumley leaned forward
And said
“You’re right. I’m joking.”
And Arthur Chumley turned to the Product Development Group
And said
“I am proud of you.
“I gave you a very difficult task:
“To build the More Perfect Robot.
“But you did it.
“And now I will give you an even more difficult task:
“To build The Perfect Robot.
“Build me a robot that is a companion.
“Build me a robot that is a friend.
“Build me a robot that can feel emotion
“And can pass for human
“And that, gentlemen, will be The Perfect Robot.”
And he dismissed them from his office
And he looked at the sales graph
And he smiled
For he knew that in a few years
The Group would present him with The Perfect Robot.
And they did
Early in the May of 2039.
Seven years and six months after that
In December of 2046
The people from Beta Centaurus IV came.
They didn’t invade
They just came
And they’re our very best friends now.
They were interested in our technology
And one day
Arthur Chumley was talking to one of them in his office.
They picked up the language rather quickly.
He was telling it
About the time
And money
And effort they had expended
To build a robot
That had smooth, agile movements
And weighed only two hundred kilos
And had a complete working vocabulary
To fit its particular function
And made no damn (klik) switching tapes
And could see
And smell
And hear
And taste
And feel
And was covered with a soft, fleshlike substance
And could perceive a person’s emotional state
And act accordingly
And was a companion and a friend
And could feel emotion
And could pass for human.
Whereupon the Centurian said
“He can’t do much of anything you can’t do.
“Why not just hire people to do the same things?”
And Arthur Chumley chuckled
And leaned back And opened his mouth
To tell the Centurian why not.
And then he closed his mouth
And excused himself
And went downstairs
And hailed a cab
And went home
And dashed off a few notes to his wife and broker
And packed four suitcases with stocks and bonds and money
And closed out all his bank accounts
And went to the spaceport
And chartered a small ship
And disappeared. ...
<
* * * *
Quite in keeping with the other trends in SF, the second largest occupational group represented this year are students-ranging from Bruce Simonds in high school to M. E. White, working for her PhD. The only other groups, by the way, represented with more than one selection, are doctors, editors, and college-level teachers.
Larry Eisenberg is in the last group: “I am a Research Associate in Electronics at Rockefeller Institute, where my duties include teaching and the design of research instrumentation. The ‘Pirokin Effect’ was stimulated by a revival of the Velikovsky controversy which appeared in Science magazine.”
* * * *
THE PIROKIN EFFECT
Larry Eisenberg
On Friday the eleventh of July, 1962, Irving Pirokin, a ham radio operator working his twenty-watt rig out of a restaurant kitchen on lower Second Avenue, picked up a succession of unusual clicks while scanning the forty-megacycle band. Mr. Pirokin’s instinctive reaction was to take down these clicks as a message in International Morse Code, and the letters J T S A L appeared again and again on his note pad. Before Mr. Pirokin could pursue the matter, he was called out to his post as waiter by the owner of the restaurant, an impatient beefy-faced gentleman with a foghorn voice.
When his tour of duty had ended, Mr. Pirokin returned anxiously to his set and monitored the same band of frequencies with great care, but to his intense disappointment, he could detect no signals. However, on the following (and successive) Fridays, he was able to receive the same repetitive series of clicks at about the same time of day. His curiosity piqued by this mystery, he wrote to his cousin, Sam Pirokin, in Philadelphia. Sam, by one of those great coincidences that enrich real life, is also a ham operator working his rig out of a kitchen where he, too, functions as a waiter. He was elated to find that h
e was also able to detect the clicks, almost identical in sequence to those his cousin Irving was receiving in New York.
Baffled but excited by the cryptic JTSAL, Sam, who was then in attendance at a night school in cryptography, showed the “message” to his instructor, Bertram Luftmensch, a man who had steeped himself in the lore of code-cracking for the past twenty years. Although Mr. Luftmensch prepares a daily coded column for a local Philadelphia newspaper wherein the crossing out of certain letters reveals some advice for the reader, he nevertheless took time out of his demanding schedule to work on the problem posed by Sam Pirokin. Although Luftmensch tried every trick of the trade, he could not make sense out of the letter sequence, JTSAL.
And thus the matter languished for several weeks, with Irving and Sam still receiving the clicks but unable to explain their meaning or origin. One Sunday morning, Mr. Luftmensch noticed that his son was using as a bookmark in his high-school Hebrew grammar, the very sheet of paper on which he had worked over the J T S A L sequence. Opening the volume, Mr. Luftmensch took note of the Hebraic alphabet and with sudden inspiration decided to juxtapose the English alphabet alongside the Hebrew.
Using this device, he found that the message JTSAL, read as LASTJ from right to left in the Hebrew manner, became in Hebrew characters, (Israel).
With tremendous excitement, he communicated his findings to Sam Pirokin, who immediately put through a long-distance call to a candy store in New York, which promptly called down his cousin Irving. Irving was at first unbelieving, but when the import of the discovery penetrated his core of disbelief, he reacted with a first-rate suggestion. Irving proposed that he and Sam employ directional antennae to attempt to localize the source of the signals.
Although the finances of these two men are generally unstable, relying as they do primarily on tips and the uncertain tempers of innately hostile diners, they each did manage to procure at considerable expense, a highly directional array of antennae able to focus a beam to within one or two degrees of arc. On the very next Friday, by means of crude triangulation, Sam and Irving determined that the origin of the clicks was not some Israeli source (as they had expected), but appeared to come from a position in the sky, roughly corresponding to the position of the planet, Mars.
The Year's Best Science Fiction 10 - [Anthology] Page 23