THE IRON JACKASS
Page 3
“Magarac!” shouted Ira in her clear, piercing voice. At once there was a new storm of cheers, louder than before. And it began to die instantly.
Slowly people turned away from the contestants to stare at the entrance. There was a movement among the crowd there. People were falling back to let someone pass. Their faces were tautening with anger.
Wallmeyer hadn’t moved to go and watch the contest; he was too miserable. But just in case, Colville had stayed at his side to hold him down, because he was going to realize any moment what was happening. And he wasn’t going to like it.
For the “someone” coming from the entrance was Joe, the robot.
In an impossible-seeming silence he strode stolidly past Ira, past Paul and Steve and Marghem, and came to the last and biggest of the steel billets. He bent over it. There was a slam and a click of metal on metal as he activated the magnets in his “hands” and placed them on the billet. Then he lifted it up, as easily as a sack of feathers.
“I heard somebody call my name,” he said in his pleasant booming voice. “Joe Magarac, that’s me!”
For a long instant Nagy stared. Suddenly he whooped with incredulous laughter and slapped his hand on his thigh with a sound like a gunshot. As though that was their cue, everyone in the dome began to laugh and laugh and laugh.
“What’s going on?” demanded Wallmeyer. He started to his feet. “Is that my robot there? They’ll bust him to scrap! What the—?”
“Hold it, take it easy,” said Colville, grasping him by the collar. “We just fixed things about your robots, that’s all. There won’t be anymore trouble, and you’ll be able to go home.”
Wallmeyer gave him an unbelieving stare.
“Listen to ‘em laughing!” said Colville happily. “Think they’re going to bust Joe up when they’re laughing like that?”
“But what happened?” pleaded Wallmeyer, staring across the desk at Marghem.
“Better let Ira tell you. It was her idea,” the mayor said.
“You’ll give me a swollen head,” Ira answered. Once again in her ordinary everyday clothes, she didn’t look in the least like a girl who would incite men to quarrel over her. “It’s very simple. You see, the reason why people here call each other magarac—jackass—and mean it as a compliment is because Joe Magarac is the name of a legendary man of steel, who was born inside a mountain and came down in an ore-car to Hunkietown where he won a weight-lifting contest for the hand of a pretty girl but turned her down because he said he had no time to do anything but work and eat. Then he went to work in a steel mill and pretty soon he’d turned out so much steel by working night and day that they had to close down production. Without work to do, he was lost. So he jumped in with the steel in his furnace and was melted down, and the steel they poured with him mixed up in it was the finest steel that was ever seen, and the mill they built with that steel was the finest in the world.”
“So we staged a sort of… uh… show for the people,” said Marghem contentedly. “It was very lucky we’d already decided to nickname him Joe. It didn’t take long to explain to him why he had to call himself Joe Magarac. Believe me, Wallmeyer, if all your robots are as intelligent as Joe turned out to be you won’t be here much longer.”
“I’ve already sent word that they can bring the others out here at once,” Colville put in. “A ‘copter will get in with the first three at about noon today.”
“But the risk you took!” said Wallmeyer prayerfully. “In view of that attitude, they might have smashed Joe to bits!”
“Risk?” countered Marghem. “When the alternative was to leave Joe and his thirty-nine brothers lying about useless?”
Ira coughed gently. “No risk at all,” she said. “At least I don’t think there was a risk. You see, these legends and traditions and old customs—including the tale of Joe Magarac—are the things people rely on to support them while they’re finding their feet in new surroundings. They come to believe them implicitly. Oh, it’s not a case of admitting to believing them—just that no one ever dares to cast doubt on them. So when Joe Magarac in person, steel from top to toe and stronger than any two men in the place, turned up, they had no alternative to accepting him.”
She got up, smiling at them in turn. “Well, if you’ll excuse me… Paul Horkey is coming to noon chow with us at the Nagys’ place. And I want to apologize for getting him into a row with Steve.”
When she had gone, Wallmeyer got to his feet. Staring out of the window, he said, “Light-years from Earth! Intelligent robots the crowning achievement of centuries of technology! And it takes a legend—a damnfool legend who knows how many hundred years old—to unsnarl things for us! I’ll take robots over people any day of the year.”
He looked positively hurt when Marghem and Colville burst out laughing.