by Frederik Pohl

Stretching east to the horizon, a thousand acres, was all soybeans; across the road to the west, another thousand acres, all corn. Zeb kicked the irrigation valve moodily and watched the meter register the change in flow. Damn weather! Why didn’t it rain? He sniffed the air deeply and shook his head, frowning. Eighty-five percent relative humidity. No, closer to eighty-seven. And not a cloud in the sky.

From across the road his neighbor called, “Afternoon Zeb.”

Zeb nodded curtly. He was soy and Wally was corn, and they didn’t have much to talk about, but you had to show some manners. He pulled his bandanna out of his hip pocket and wiped his brow. “Had to rise up the flow,” he offered for politeness’ sake.

“Me, too. Only good thing, COZ’s up. So we’s gettin good carbon metabolizin.”

Zeb grunted and bent down to pick up a clod of earth,

crumbling it in his fingers to test for humus, breaking off a piece, and tasting it. “Cobalt’s a tad low again,” he said meditatively, but Wally wasn’t interested in soil chemistry.

“Zeb? You aint heard anything?”

“Bout what?”

“Bout anything. You know.”

Zeb turned to face him. “You mean aint I heard no crazy talk bout closin down the farms, when everybody knows they can’t never do that, no. I aint heard nothin like that, an if I did, I wouldn’t give it heed.”

“Yeah, Zeb, but they’s sayin-“

“They can say whatever they likes, Wally. I aint listenin, and I got to get back to the lines fore Becky and the kids start worryin. Evenin. Nice talkin to you.” And he turned and marched back toward the cabins.

“Uncle Tin,” Wally called sneeringly, but Zeb wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of noticing. All the same, he pulled out his bandanna and mopped his brow again.

It wasn’t sweat. Zeb never sweated. His arms, his back, his armpits were permanently dry, in any weather, no matter how hard or how long he worked. The glistening film on his forehead was condensed from the air. The insulation around the supercooled Josephson junctions that made up his brain was good, but not perfect. When he was doing more thinking than usual, the refrigeration units worked harder.

And Zeb was doing a lot of thinking. Close down the farms? Why, you’d have to be crazy to believe that! You did your job. You tilled the fields and planted them, or else you cleaned and cooked in Boss’s house, or taught Boss’s children, or drove Miz Boss when she went to visit the other bosses’ wives. That was the way things were on the farm, and it would go on that way forever, wouldn’t it?

Zeb found out the answer the next morning, right after church.

Since Zeb was a Class A robot, with an effective IQ of one hundred thirty-five, though limited in its expression by the built-in constraints of his assigned function, he really should not have been surprised. Especially when he discovered that Reverend Harmswallow had taken his text that morning from Matthew, specifically the Beatitudes, and in particular the one about how the meek would inherit the earth. The reverend was a plump, pink-faced man whose best sermons dwelt on the wages of sin and the certainty of hell-fire. It had always been a disappointment to him that the farmhands who made up his congregation weren’t physically equipped to sin in any interesting ways, but he made up for it by extra emphasis on the importance of being humble. “Even,” he finished, his baby-fine hair flying all around his pink scalp, “when things don’t go the way you think they ought to. Now we’re going to sing `Old One Hundred,’ and then you soy people will meet in the gymnasium and corn people in the second-floor lounge. Your bosses have some news for you.”

So it shouldn’t have been surprising, and as a matter of fact Zeb wasn’t surprised at all. Some part of the cry circuits inside his titanium skull had long noted the portents. Scant rain. Falling levels of soil minerals. Thinning of the topsoil. The beans grew fat, because there was an abundance of carbon in the air for them to metabolize. But no matter how much you irrigated, they dried up fast in the hot breezes. And those were only the physical signs. Boss’s body language said more, sighing when he should have been smiling at the three-legged races behind the big house, not even noticing when one of the cabins needed a new coat of whitewash or the flower patches showed a few weeds. Zeb observed it all and drew the proper conclusions. His constraints did not forbid that; they only prevented him from speaking of them, or even of thinking of them on a conscious level. Zeb was not programmed to worry. It would have interfered with the. happy, smiling face he bore for Boss, and Miz Boss, and the Chillen.

So, when Boss made his announcement, Zeb looked as thunderstruck as all the other hands. “You’ve been really good people,” Boss said generously, his pale, professorial face incongruous under the plantation straw hat. “I really wish things could go on as they always have, but it just isn’t possible. It’s the agricultural support program,” he explained. “Those idiots in Washington have cut it down to the point where it simply isn’t worthwhile to plant here anymore.” His expression brightened. “But it’s not all bad! You’ll be glad to know that they’ve expanded the soil bank program as a consequence. So Miz Boss and the children and I are well provided for. As a matter of fact,” and he beamed. “we’ll be a little better off than before, moneywise.

“Days good!”

“Oh, hebben be praised!”

The doleful expressions broke into grins as the farmhands nudged one another, relieved. But then Zeb spoke up. “Boss? Scuse my askin, but what’s gone happen to us folks? You gonna keep us on?”

Boss looked irritated. “Oh, that’s impossible. We can’t collect the soil-bank money if we plant; so there’s just no sense in having all of you around, don’t you see?”

Silence. Then another farmhand ventured, “How bout Cornpatch Boss? He need some good workers? You know us hates corn, but we could get reprogrammed quick’s anything-“

Boss shook his head. “He’s telling his people the same thing right now. Nobody needs you.”

The farmhands looked at one another. “Preacher, he needs us.” one of them offered. “We’s his whole congregation.”

“I’m, afraid Reverend Harmswallow doesn’t need you anymore.” Boss said kindly, “because he’s been wanting to go into missionary work for some time, and he’s just received his call. No, you’re superfluous; that all.”

“Superfluous?”

“Redundant. Unnecessary. There’s no reason for you to be here.” Boss told them. “So trucks will come in the morning to take you all away. Please be outside your cabins ready to go, by oh-seven-hundred.”

Silence again. Then Zeb: “Where they takes us, Boss?”

Boss shrugged. “There’s probably some place, I think.” Then he grinned. “But I’ve got a surprise for you. Miz Boss and I aren’t going to let you go without having a party. So tonight we’re going to have a good old-fashioned square dance, with new bandannas for the best dancers, and then you’re all going to come back to the Big House and sing spirituals for us. I promise Miz Boss and the children and I are going to be right there to enjoy it!”

The place they were taken to was a grimy white cinderblock 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 he again answered none when they offloaded in front of a chain-link gate, with a sign that read

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 mutttered, “Couldn’ve rained down where we needed it. Has to rain up here, where it don’t 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 O’Neill 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 in Chicago?” Zeb asked doubtfully.

“Jobs? Why, man, who cares bout jobs? That’s Chicago! We’ll 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 carbon dioxide and NO_, than he was used to. What kind of a place was this, where the rain didn’t even taste good? It must be cars, he thought, not sticking to the good old fusion electric power but burning gasoline! So all the optimism had faded by the time signs of activity appeared in the cinderblock building. Cars drove in through another entrance. -Lights went on inside. Then the corrugated-metal doorway slid noisily up and a short, dark robot came out to unlock the chain-link gate. The robot looked the farmers over impassively and 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 R.R.R., or Redundancy Reprogramming Redirector, assigned to him was a blonde, good-looking she-robot who wore a white coat and long crystal earrings like tiny chandeliers. 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. She nodded. “You’ve got a simple profile,” she said cheerfully. “We’ll have you out of here in no time. Open your shirt.” Zeb’s soil-grimed fingers slowly unbuttoned the flannel shirt. Before he got to the last button, she impatiently pushed his hands aside and pulled it wide. The button popped and rolled away. “You’ll have to get new clothes anyway,” she said, sinking long, scarlet nails into four narrow slits on each side of his rib cage. The whole front of his chest came free in her hands. The R.R.R. laid it aside and peered at the hookup inside.

She nodded again, “No problem,” she said, pulling chips out with quick, sure fingers. “Now this will feel funny for a minute and you won’t be able to talk, but hold still.” Funny? It felt to Zeb as if the bare room were swirling into spirals, and not only couldn’t he speak, he couldn’t remember words. Or thoughts! He was nearly sure that just a moment before he had been wondering whether he would ever again see the-The what? He couldn’t remember.

Then he felt a gentle sensation of something within him being united to something else, not so much a click as the feeling of a foot fitting into a shoe, and he was able to

complete the question. The farm. He found he had said the words out loud, and the R.R.R. laughed. “See? You’re half-reoriented already.”

He grinned back. “That’s really astonishing,” he declared. “Can you credit it? I was almost missing that rural existence! As though the charms of bucolic life had any meaning for-Good heavens! Why am I talking like this?”

The she-robot said, “Well, you wouldn’t want to talk like a farmhand when you live in the big city, would you?”

“Oh, granted!” Zeb cried earnestly. “But one must pose the next question: The formalisms of textual grammar, the imagery of poetics, can one deem them appropriate to my putative new career?”

The R.R.R. frowned. “It’s a literary-critic vocabulary store,” she said defensively. “Look, somebody has to use them up!”

“But, one asks, why me?”

“It’s all I’ve got handy, and that’s that. Now. You’ll find there are other changes, too, I’m taking out the quantitative soil-analysis chips and the farm-machinery subroutines. I could leave you the spirituals and the square dancing, if you like.”

“Why retain the shadow when the substance has fled?” he said bitterly.

“Now, Zeb,” she scolded. “You don’t need this specialized stuff. That’s all behind you, and you’ll never miss it, because you don’t know yet what great things you’re getting in exchange.” She snapped his chest back in place and said. “Give me your hands.”

“One could wish for specifics,” he grumbled, watching suspiciously as the R.R.R. fed his hands into a hole in her control console. He felt a tickling sensation.

“Why not? Infrared vision, for one thing,” she said proudly, watching the digital readouts on her console, “so

you can see in the dark. Plus twenty percent hotter circuit breakers in your motor assemblies, so you’ll be stronger and can run faster. Plus the names and addresses and phone numbers of six good bail bondsmen and the public defender!”

She pulled his hands out of the machine and nodded toward them. The grime was scrubbed out of the pores, the soil dug out from under the fingernails, the calluses smoothed away. They were city hands now, the hands of someone who had never-done manual labor in his life.

“And for what destiny is this new armorarium required?” Zeb asked.

“For your new work. It’s the only vacancy we’ve got right now, but it’s good work, and steady. You’re going to be a mugger.”

After his first night on the job Zeb was amused at his own apprehensions. The farm had been nothing like this!

He was assigned to a weasel-faced he-robot named Timothy for on-the-job training, and Timothy took the term literally. “Come on, kid,” he said as soon as Zeb came to the anteroom where he was waiting, and he headed out the door. He didn’t wait to see whether Zeb was following. No chain-link gates now. Zeb had only the vaguest notion of how far Chicago was, or in which direction, but he was pretty sure that it wasn’t something you walked to.

“Are we going to entrust ourselves to the iron horse?” he asked, with a little tingle of anticipation. Trains had. seemed very glamorous as they went by the farm-produce trains, freight trains, passenger trains that set a farmhand to wondering where they might be going and what it might be like to get there. Timothy didn’t answer. He gave Zeb a look that mixed pity and annoyance and contempt

as he planted himself in the street and raised a peremptory hand. A huge green-and-white checkered hovercab dug down its braking wheels and screeched to a stop in front of them. Timothy motioned him in and sat silently next to him while the driver whooshed down Kennedy Expressway. The sights of the suburbs of the city flashed past Zeb’s fascinated eyes. They drew up under the marquee of a splashy, bright hotel, with handsome couples in expensive clothing strolling in and out. When Timothy threw the taxi driver a bill, Zeb observed that he did not wait for change.

Timothy did not seem in enough of a hurry to justify the expense of a cab. He stood rocking on his toes under the marquee for a minute, beaming benignly at the robot tourists. Then he gave Zeb a quick look, turned, and walked away.

Once again Zeb had to be fast to keep up. He turned the corner after Timothy, almost too late to catch the action. The weasel-faced robot had backed a well-dressed couple into the shadows, and he was relieving them of wallet, watches, and rings. When he had everything, he faced them to the wall, kicked each of them expertly behind a knee joint, and, as they fell, turned and ran, soundless in soft-soled shoes, back to the bright lights. He was fast and he was abrupt, but by this time Zeb had begun to recognize some of the elements of his style. He was ready. He was following on Timothy’s heels before the robbed couple had begun to scream. Past the marquee, lost in a crowd in front of a theater, Timothy slowed down and looked at Zeb approvingly. “Good reflexes,” he complimented. “You got the right kind of class, kid. You’ll make out.”

“As a soi-disant common cutpurse?” Zeb asked, somewhat nettled at the other robot’s peremptory manner.

Timothy looked him over carefully. “You talk funny,” he said. “They stick you with one of those surplus vocabularies again? Never mind. You see how it’s done?”

Zeb hesitated, craning his neck to look for pursuit, of which there seemed to be none. “Well, one might venture that that is correct,” he said.

“Okay. Now you do it.” Timothy said cheerfully, and he steered Zeb into the alley for the hotel tourist trap’s stage door.

By midnight Zeb had committed five felonies of his own, had been an accomplice in two more, and had watched the smaller robot commit eight single-handed, and the two muggers were dividing their gains in the darkest corner-not very dark-of an all-night McDonald’s on North Michigan Avenue. “You done good, kid.” Timothy admitted expansively. “For a green kid anyway. Let’s see. Your share comes to six watches, eight pieces of jewelry, counting the fake coral necklace you shouldn’t have bothered with, and looks like six to seven hundred in cash.”

“As well as quite a few credit cards,” Zeb said eagerly.

“Forget the credit cards. You only keep what you can spend or what doesn’t have a name on it. Think you’re ready to go out on your own?”

“One hesitates to assume such responsibility-“

“Because you’re not. So forget it.” The night’s work done, Timothy seemed to have become actually garrulous. “Bet you can’t tell me why I wanted you backing me up those two times.”

“One acknowledges a certain incomprehension,” Zeb confessed. “There is an apparent dichotomy. When there were two victims, or even three, you chose to savage them single-handed. Yet for solitary prey you elected to have an

accomplice.”

“Right! And you know why? You don’t. So I’ll tell you. You get a he and a she, or even two of each, and the he’s going to think about keeping the she from getting hurt; that’s the way the program reads. So no trouble. But those two hes by themselves-hell, if I’d gone up against either of those mothers, he might’ve taken my knife away from me and picked my nose with it. You got to understand robot nature, kid. That’s what the job is all about. Don’t you want a Big Mac or something?”

Zeb shifted uncomfortably. “I should think not, thank you,” he said, but the other robot was looking at him knowingly.

“No food-tract subsystems, right?”

“Well, my dear Timothy, in the agricultural environment I inhabited there was no evident need-“

“You don’t need them now, but you ought to have them. Also liquid-intake tanks, and maybe an air-cycling system, so you can smoke cigars. And get rid of that faggoty vocabulary they stuck you with. You’re in a class occupation,” he said earnestly, “and you got to live up to your station, right? No subway trains. No counting out the pennies when you get change. You don’t take change. Now you don’t want to make trouble your first day on the job; so we’ll let you go until you’ve finished a whole week. But then you go back to that bleached-blonde Three-R and we’ll get you straightened out,” he promised. “Now let’s go fence our jewels and stuff and call it a night.”

All in all, Zeb was quite pleased with himself. His pockets lined with big bills, he read menus outside fancy restaurants to prepare himself for his new-attachments. He was looking forward to a career at least as distinguished as

Timothy’s own.

That was his third night on the Gold Coast.

He never got a chance at a fourth.

His last marks of the evening gave him a little argument about parting with a diamond ring. So, as taught, Zeb backhanded the he and snarled at the she and used a little more force than usual when he ripped the ring off the finger. Two minutes later and three blocks away, he took a quick look at his loot under a streetlight. He recoiled in horror.

There was a drop of blood on the ring.

That victim had not been a robot. She had been a living true human female being, and when he heard all the police sirens in the world coming straight at him, he was not in the least surprised.

“You people,” said the rehab instructor, “have been admitted to this program because, a, you have been unemployed for not less than twenty-one months, b, have not fewer than six unexcused absences from your place of training or employment, c, have a conviction for a felony and are currently on parole, or, d, are of a date of manufacture eighteen or more years past, choice of any of the above. That’s what the regulations say, and what they mean,” she said, warming to her work, “is, you’re scum. Scum is hopeless, shiftless, dangerous, a social liability. Do you all understand that much at least?” She gazed angrily around the room at her seven students.

She was short, dumpy, red-haired, with bad skin. Why they let shes like this one off the production line Zeb could not understand. He fidgeted in his seat, craning his neck to see what his six fellow students were like, until her voice crackled at him: “You! With the yellow sweater! Zeb!”

He finched. “Pardon me, madam?”

She said, with gloomy satisfaction, “I know your type. You’re a typical recidivist lumpenprole, you are. Can’t even pay attention to somebody who’s trying to help you when your whole future is at stake. What’ve I got, seven of you slugs? I can see what’s coming. I guarantee two of you will drop out without finishing the course, and I’ll ave to expell two more because you skip classes or come in late. And the other three’ll be back on the streets or in the slarnmer in ninety days. Why do I do it.” She shook her head and then, lifting herself ponderously, went to the blackboard and wrote her three commandments:

1. ON TIME

2. EVERY DAY