Midas World by Frederik Pohl

Author:Frederik Pohl [Pohl, Frederik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci Fi & Fantasy
Publisher: New English Library
Published: 1985-08-27T23:00:00+00:00

The place they were taken to was a grimy white cinder-block building in Des Plaines. The driver of the truck was a beefy, taciturn robot who wore a visored cap and a leather jacket with the sleeves cut off; he hadn’t answered any of their questions when they loaded onto his truck at the farm, and answered none when they offloaded in front of a steel-link gate with a sign that said receiving. “Just stand over there,” he ordered. “You all out? Okay.” And he slapped the tailboard up and drove off, leaving them in a gritty, misty sprinkle of warm rain.

And they waited, fourteen prime working robots, hes and shes and three little ones, too dispirited to talk much. Zeb wiped the moisture off his face and muttered, “Couldn’ve rained down where we needed it. Has to rain up here when it doan do a body no good a-tall.” But not all the moisture was rain; not Zeb’s and not that on the faces of the others, because they were all thinking really hard. The only one not despairing was Lem, the most recent arrival. Lem had been an estate gardener in Urbana until his people decided to emigrate to the oneill space colonies. He’d been lucky to catch on at the farm when a turned-over tractor created an unexpected vacancy, but he still talked wistfully about life in glamorous Champaign-Urbana. Now he was excited. “Des Plaines! Why, that’s practically Chicago! The big time, friends. State Street! The loop! The Gold Coast!”

“They gone have jobs for us’n in Chicago?” Zeb asked doubtfully.

“Jobs? Why, man, who cares ’bout jobs? That’s Chicago! We’ll just have a ball!”

Zeb nodded thoughtfully. Although he was not convinced, he was willing to be hopeful—that was part of his programming, too. He opened his mouth and tasted the drizzle. He made a face: sour, high in particulate matter, a lot more sulfur dioxide and N02 than he was used to; what kind of a place was this, where even the rain didn’t taste good? So all the optimism had faded by the time signs of activity appeared in the cinder-block building. Cars drove in through another entrance. Lights went on inside. And, after a while, the corrugated-metal doorway slid noisily up and a short, dark robot came out to unlock the chain-link gate. He looked the farmers over impassively, then opened the gate. “Come on, you redundancies,” he said. “Let’s get you reprogrammed.”

When it came Zeb’s turn he was allowed into a white-walled room with an ominous sort of plastic-topped cot along the wall. The RRR, or redundancy reprogramming redirector, assigned to him was a blond, good-looking she-robot who wore crystal earrings like tiny chandeliers, long enough to brush against the collar of her white coat. She sat Zeb on the edge of the cot, motioned him to lean forward and quickly inserted the red-painted fingernail of her right forefinger into his left ear. He quivered as the read-only memory emptied itself into her own internal scanners, though it didn’t hurt.

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