The Midas Plague Read online

  “Well, no. I just haven’t seen them around. Get me a drink.”

  It hesitated. “Scotch, sir?”

  “Before dinner? Get me a Manhattan.”

  “We’re all out of Vermouth, sir.”

  “All out? Would you mind telling me how?”

  “It’s all used up, sir.”

  “Now that’s just ridiculous,” Morey snapped. “We have never run out of liquor in our whole lives and you know it. Good heavens, we just got our allotment in the other day and I certainly—”

  He checked himself. There was a sudden flicker of horror in his eyes as he stared at Henry.

  “You certainly what, sir?” the robot prompted.

  Morey swallowed. “Henry, did I—did I do something I shouldn’t have?”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t know, sir. It isn’t up to me to say what you should and shouldn’t do.”

  “Of course not,” Morey agreed grayly.

  He sat rigid, staring hopelessly into space, remembering. What he remembered was no pleasure to him at all.

  “Henry,” he said. “Come along, we’re going belowstairs. Right now!”

  It had been Tanaquil Bigelow’s remark about the robots. Too many robots—make too much of everything.

  That had implanted the idea; it germinated in Morey’s home. More than a little drunk, less than ordinarily inhibited, he had found the problem clear and the answer obvious.

  He stared around him in dismal worry. His own robots, following his own orders, given weeks before…

  Henry said, “It’s just what you told us to do, sir.”

  Morey groaned. He was watching a scene of unparalleled activity, and it sent shivers up and down his spine.

  There was the butler-robot, hard at work, his copper face expressionless. Dressed in Morey’s own sports knickers and golfing shoes, the robot solemnly hit a ball against the wall, picked it up and teed it, hit it again, over and again, with Morey’s own clubs. Until the ball wore ragged and was replaced; and the shafts of the clubs leaned out of true; and the close-stitched seams in the clothing began to stretch and abrade.

  “My God!” said Morey hollowly.

  There were the maid-robots, exquisitely dressed in Cherry’s best, walking up and down in the delicate, slim shoes, sitting and rising and bending and turning. The cook-robots and the serving-robots were preparing dionysian meals.

  Morey swallowed. “You—you’ve been doing this right along,” he said to Henry. “That’s why the quotas have been filled.”

  “Oh, yes, sir. Just as you told us.”

  Morey had to sit down. One of the serving-robots politely scurried over with a chair, brought from upstairs for their new chores.

  Waste.

  Morey tasted the word between his lips.

  Waste.

  You never wasted things. You used them. If necessary, you drove yourself to the edge of breakdown to use them; you made every breath a burden and every hour a torment to use them, until through diligent consuming and/or occupational merit, you were promoted to the next higher class, and were allowed to consume less frantically. But you didn’t wantonly destroy or throw out. You consumed.

  Morey thought fearfully: When the Board finds out about this…

  Still, he reminded himself, the Board hadn’t found out. It might take some time before they did, for humans, after all, never entered robot quarters. There was no law against it, not even a sacrosanct custom. But there was no reason to. When breaks occurred, which was infrequently, maintenance robots or repair squads came in and put them back in order. Usually the humans involved didn’t even know it had happened, because the robots used their own TBR radio circuits and the process was next thing to automatic.

  Morey said reprovingly, “Henry, you should have told—well, I mean reminded me about this.”

  “But, sir!” Henry protested. “’Don’t tell a living soul,’ you said. You made it a direct order.”

  “Umph. Well, keep it that way. I—uh—I have to go back upstairs. Better get the rest of the robots started on dinner.”

  Morey left, not comfortably.

  The dinner to celebrate Morey’s promotion was difficult. Morey liked Cherry’s parents. Old Elon, after the premarriage inquisition that father must inevitably give to daughter’s suitor, had buckled right down to the job of adjustment. The old folks were good about not interfering, good about keeping their superior social status to themselves, good about helping out on the budget—at least once a week, they could be relied on to come over for a hearty meal, and Mrs. Elon had more than once remade some of Cherry’s new dresses to fit herself, even to the extent of wearing all the high-point ornamentation.

  And they had been wonderful about the wedding gifts, when Morey and their daughter got married. The most any member of Morey’s family had been willing to take was a silver set or a few crystal table pieces. The Elons had come through with a dazzling promise to accept a car, a birdbath for their garden and a complete set of living-room furniture! Of course, they could afford it—they had to consume so little that it wasn’t much strain for them even to take gifts of that magnitude. But without their help, Morey knew, the first few months of matrimony would have been even tougher consuming than they were.

  But on this particular night it was hard for Morey to like anyone. He responded with monosyllables; he barely grunted when Elon proposed a toast to his promotion and his brilliant future. He was preoccupied.

  Rightly so. Morey, in his deepest, bravest searching, could find no clue in his memory as to just what the punishment might be for what he had done. But he had a sick certainty that trouble lay ahead.

  Morey went over his problem so many times that an anesthesia set in. By the time dinner was ended and he and his father-in-law were in the den with their brandy, he was more or less functioning again.

  Elon, for the first time since Morey had known him, offered him one of his cigars. “You’re Grade Five—can afford to smoke somebody else’s now, hey?”

  “Yeah,” Morey said glumly.

  There was a moment of silence. Then Elon, as punctilious as any companion-robot, coughed and tried again. “Remember being peaked till I hit Grade Five,” he reminisced meaningfully. “Consuming keeps a man on the go, all right. Things piled up at the law office, couldn’t be taken care of while ration points piled up, too. And consuming comes first, of course—that’s a citizen’s prime duty. Mother and I had our share of grief over that, but a couple that wants to make a go of marriage and citizenship just pitches in and does the job, hey?”

  Morey repressed a shudder and managed to nod.

  “Best thing about upgrading,” Elon went on, as if he had elicited a satisfactory answer, “don’t have to spend so much time consuming, give more attention to work. Greatest luxury in the world, work. Wish I had as much stamina as you young fellows. Five days a week in court are about all I can manage. Hit six for a while, relaxed first time in my life, but my doctor made me cut down. Said we can’t overdo pleasures. You’ll be working two days a week now, hey?”

  Morey produced another nod.

  Elon drew deeply on his cigar, his eyes bright as they watched Morey. He was visibly puzzled, and Morey, even in his half-daze, could recognize the exact moment at which Elon drew the wrong inference. “Ah, everything okay with you and Cherry?” he asked diplomatically.

  “Fine!” Morey exclaimed. “Couldn’t be better!”

  “Good. Good.” Elon changed the subject with almost an audible wrench. “Speaking of court, had an interesting case the other day. Young fellow—year or two younger than you, I guess—came in with a Section Ninety-seven on him. Know what that is? Breaking and entering!”

  “Breaking and entering,” Morey repeated wonderingly, interested in spite of himself. “Breaking and entering what?”

  “Houses. Old term; law’s full of them. Originally applied to stealing things. Still does, I discovered.”

  “You mean he stole something?” Morey asked in bewilderment.
r />   “Exactly! He stole. Strangest thing I ever came across. Talked it over with one of his bunch of lawyers later; new one on him, too. Seems this kid had a girl friend, nice kid but a little, you know, plump. She got interested in art.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that,” Morey said.

  “Nothing wrong with her, either. She didn’t do anything. She didn’t like him too much, though. Wouldn’t marry him. Kid got to thinking about how he could get her to change her mind and—well, you know that big Mondrian in the Museum?”

  “I’ve never been there,” Morey said, somewhat embarrassed.

  “Um. Ought to try it someday, boy. Anyway, comes closing time at the Museum the other day, this kid sneaks in. He steals the painting. That’s right—steals it. Takes it to give to the girl.”

  Morey shook his head blankly. “I never heard of anything like that in my life.”

  “Not many have. Girl wouldn’t take it, by the way. Got scared when he brought it to her. She must’ve tipped off the police, I guess. Somebody did. Took ’em three hours to find it, even when they knew it was hanging on a wall. Pretty poor kid. Forty-two room house.”

  “And there was a law against it?” Morey asked. “I mean it’s like making a law against breathing.”

  “Certainly was. Old law, of course. Kid got set back two grades. Would have been more but, my God, he was only a Grade Three as it was.”

  “Yeah,” said Morey, wetting his lips. “Say, Dad—”

  “Um?”

  Morey cleared his throat. “Uh—I wonder—I mean what’s the penalty, for instance, for things like—well, misusing rations or anything like that?”

  Elon’s eyebrows went high. “Misusing rations?”

  “Say you had a liquor ration, it might be, and instead of drinking it, you—well, flushed it down the drain or something…”

  His voice trailed off. Elon was frowning. He said, “Funny thing, seems I’m not as broadminded as I thought I was. For some reason, I don’t find that amusing.”

  “Sorry,” Morey croaked.

  And he certainly was.

  It might be dishonest, but it was doing him a lot of good, for days went by and no one seemed to have penetrated his secret. Cherry was happy. Wainwright found occasion after occasion to pat Morey’s back. The wages of sin were turning out to be prosperity and happiness.

  There was a bad moment when Morey came home to find Cherry in the middle of supervising a team of packing-robots; the new house, suitable to his higher grade, was ready, and they were expected to move in the next day. But Cherry hadn’t been belowstairs, and Morey had his household robots clean up the evidences of what they had been doing before the packers got that far.

  The new house was, by Morey’s standards, pure luxury.

  It was only fifteen rooms. Morey had shrewdly retained one more robot than was required for a Class Five, and had been allowed a compensating deduction in the size of his house.

  The robot quarters were less secluded than in the old house, though, and that was a disadvantage. More than once Cherry had snuggled up to him in the delightful intimacy of their one bed in their single bedroom and said, with faint curiosity, “I wish they’d stop that noise.” And Morey had promised to speak to Henry about it in the morning. But there was nothing he could say to Henry, of course, unless he ordered Henry to stop the tireless consuming through each of the day’s twenty-four hours that kept them always ahead, but never quite far enough ahead, of the inexorable weekly increment of ration quotas.

  But, though Cherry might once in a while have a moment’s curiosity about what the robots were doing, she was not likely to be able to guess at the facts. Her up-bringing was, for once, on Morey’s side —she knew so little of the grind, grind, grind of consuming that was the lot of the lower classes that she scarcely noticed that there was less of it.

  Morey almost, sometimes, relaxed.

  He thought of many ingenious chores for robots, and the robots politely and emotionlessly obeyed.

  Morey was a success.

  It wasn’t all gravy. There was a nervous moment for Morey when the quarterly survey report came in the mail. As the day for the Ration Board to check over the degree of wear on the turned-in discards came due, Morey began to sweat. The clothing and furniture and household goods the robots had consumed for him were very nearly in shreds. It had to look plausible, that was the big thing—no normal person would wear a hole completely through the knee of a pair of pants, as Henry had done with his dress suit before Morey stopped him. Would the Board question it?

  Worse, was there something about the way the robots consumed the stuff that would give the whole show away? Some special wear point in the robot anatomy, for instance, that would rub a hole where no human’s body could, or stretch a seam that should normally be under no strain at all?

  It was worrisome. But the worry was needless. When the report of survey came, Morey let out a long-held breath. Not a single item disallowed!

  Morey was a success—and so was his scheme!

  To the successful man come the rewards of success. Morey arrived home one evening after a hard day’s work at the office and was alarmed to find another car parked in his drive. It was a tiny two-seater, the sort affected by top officials and the very well-to-do.

  Right then and there Morey learned the first half of the embezzler’s lesson: Anything different is dangerous. He came uneasily into his own home, fearful that some high officer of the Ration Board had come to ask questions.

  But Cherry was glowing. “Mr. Porfirio is a newspaper feature writer and he wants to write you up for their ‘Consumers of Distinction’ page! Morey, I couldn’t be more proud!”

  “Thanks,” said Morey glumly. “Hello.”

  Mr. Porfirio shook Morey’s hand warmly. “I’m not exactly from a newspaper,” he corrected. “Trans-video Press is what it is, actually. We’re a news wire service; we supply forty-seven hundred papers with news and feature material. Every one of them,” he added complacently, “on the required consumption list of Grades One through Six inclusive. We have a Sunday supplement self-help feature on consuming problems and we like to—well, give credit where credit is due. You’ve established an enviable record, Mr. Fry. We’d like to tell our readers about it.”

  “Urn,” said Morey. “Let’s go in the drawing room.”

  “Oh, no!” Cherry said firmly. “I want to hear this. He’s so modest, Mr. Porfirio, you’d really never know what kind of a man he is just to listen to him talk. Why, my goodness, I’m his wife and I swear I don’t know how he does all the consuming he does. He simply—”

  “Have a drink, Mr. Porfirio,” Morey said, against all etiquette. “Rye? Scotch? Bourbon? Gin-and-tonic? Brandy Alexander? Dry Manna—I mean what would you like?” He became conscious that he was babbling like a fool.

  “Anything,” said the newsman. “Rye is fine. Now, Mr. Fry, I notice you’ve fixed up your place very attractively here and your wife says that your country home is just as nice. As soon as I came in, I said to myself, ‘Beautiful home. Hardly a stick of furniture that isn’t absolutely necessary. Might be a Grade Six or Seven.’ And Mrs. Fry says the other place is even barer.”

  “She does, does she?” Morey challenged sharply. “Well, let me tell you, Mr. Porfirio, that every last scrap of my furniture allowance is accounted for! I don’t know what you’re getting at, but—”

  “Oh, I certainly didn’t mean to imply anything like that! I just want to get some information from you that I can pass on to our readers. You know, to sort of help them do as well as yourself. How do you do it?”

  Morey swallowed. “We—uh—well, we just keep after it. Hard work, that’s all.”

  Porfirio nodded admiringly. “Hard work,” he repeated, and fished a triple-folded sheet of paper out of his pocket to make notes on. “Would you say,” he went on, “that anyone could do as well as you simply by devoting himself to it—setting a regular schedule, for example, and keeping to it very strictly?”


  “Oh, yes,” said Morey.

  “In other words, it’s only a matter of doing what you have to do every day?”

  “That’s it exactly. I handle the budget in my house—more experience than my wife, you see—but no reason a woman can’t do it.”

  “Budgeting,” Porfirio recorded approvingly. “That’s our policy, too.”

  The interview was not the terror it had seemed, not even when Porfirio tactfully called attention to Cherry’s slim waistline (“So many housewives, Mrs. Fry, find it difficult to keep from being—well, a little plump”) and Morey had to invent endless hours on the exercise machines, while Cherry looked faintly perplexed, but did not interrupt.

  From the interview, however, Morey learned the second half of the embezzler’s lesson. After Porfirio had gone, he leaped in and spoke more than a little firmly to Cherry. “That business of exercise, dear. We really have to start doing it. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but you are beginning to get just a trifle heavier and we don’t want that to happen, do we?”

  In the following grim and unnecessary sessions on the mechanical horses, Morey had plenty of time to reflect on the lesson. Stolen treasures are less sweet than one would like, when one dare not enjoy them in the open.

  But some of Morey’s treasures were fairly earned.

  The new Bradmoor K-50 Spin-a-Game, for instance, was his very own. His job was design and creation, and he was a fortunate man in that his efforts were permitted to be expended along the line of greatest social utility—namely, to increase consumption.

  The Spin-a-Game was a well-nigh perfect machine for the purpose. “Brilliant,” said Wainwright, beaming, when the pilot machine had been put through its first tests. “Guess they don’t call me the Talent-picker for nothing. I knew you could do it, boy!”

  Even Howland was lavish in his praise. He sat munching on a plate of petits-fours (he was still only a Grade Three) while the tests were going on, and when they were over, he said enthusiastically, “It’s a beauty, Morey. That series-corrupter—sensational! Never saw a prettier piece of machinery.”