Martha van Vogel was delighted with "Fifth Day," the anthropoid kindergarten where the little tykes learned to talk and were conditioned to the social patterns necessary to their station in life. They worked at simple tasks such as sorting buttons and digging holes in sand piles, with pieces of candy given as incentives for fast and accurate work.
"Six Day" completed the anthropoids' educations. Each learned the particular sub-trade it would practice, cleaning, digging, and especially agricultural semiskills such as weeding, thinning, and picking. "One Nisei farmer working three neo-chimpanzees can grow as many vegetables as a dozen old-style farm hands," Blakesly asserted. "They really like to work when we get through with them." They admired the almost incredibly heavy tasks done by modified gorillas and stopped to gaze at the little neo-Capuchins doing high picking on prop trees, then moved on toward "Seventh Day."
This building was used for the radioactive mutation of genes and therefore located some distance away from the others. They had to walk, as the sidewalk was being repaired; the detour took them past workers' pens and barracks. Some of the anthropoids crowded up to the wire and began calling to them: "Sigret! Sigretl Preese, Missy! Preese, Boss!
Sigret!" "What are they saying?" Martha van Vogel inquired.
"They are asking for cigarettes," Blakesly answered in annoyed tones. "They know better, but they are like children. Here 111 put a stop to it." He stepped up to the wire and shouted to an elderly male, "Hey Strawboss!" The worker addressed wore, in addition to the usual short canvas Idit, a bedraggled arm band. He turned and shuffled toward the fence. "Strawboss," ordered Blakesly, "get those Joes away from here." "Okay, Boss," the old fellow acknowledged and started cuffing those nearest him. "Scram, you Joes!
Scram!" "But I have some cigarettes," protested Mrs. van
Vogel, "and I would gladly have given them some."
"It doesn't do to pamper them," the Manager told her. "They have been taught that luxuries come only from work. I must apologize for my poor children; those in these pens are getting old and forgetting their manners."
She did not answer but moved further along the fence to where one old neo-chimp was pressed up against the wire, staring at them with soft, tragic eyes, like a child at a bakery window. He had taken no part in the jostling demand for tobacco and had been let alone by the strawboss. "Would you like a cigarette?" she asked him.
"Preese, Missy."
She struck one which he accepted with fumbling grace, took a long, lung-filling drag, let the smoke trickle out his nostrils, and said shyly, "Sankoo, Missy. Me Jerry."
"How do you do. Jerry?"
"Howdy, Missy." He bobbed down, bending his knees, ducking his head, and clasping his hands to his chest, all in one movement.
"Come along, Martha." Her husband and Blakesly had moved in behind her.
"In a moment," she answered. "Brownie, meet my friend Jerry. Doesn't he look just like Uncle Albert? Except that he looks so sad. Why are you unhappy,
Jerry?"
"They don't understand abstract ideas," put in Blakesly.
But Jerry surprised him. "Jerry sad," he announced in tones so doleful that Martha van Vogel did not know whether to laugh or to cry.
"Why, Jerry?" she asked gently. "Why are you so sad?" "No work," he stated. "No sigret. No candy. No work."
"These are all old workers who have passed their usefulness," Blakesly repeated. "Idleness upsets them, but we have nothing for them to do."
"WellI" she said. "Then why don't you have them sort buttons, or something like that, such as the baby ones do?"
"They wouldn't even do that properly," Blakesly answered her. "These workers are senile."
"Jerry isn't senile! You heard him talk."
"Well, perhaps not. Just a moment." He turned to the apeman, who was squatting down in order to scratch Napoleon's head with a long forefinger thrust through the fence. "You, Joe! Come here."
Blakesly felt around the worker's hairy neck and located a thin steel chain to which was attached a small metal tag. He studied it. "You're right," he admitted. "He's not really over age, but his eyes are bad. I remember the lot cataracts as a result of an unfortunate linked mutation." He shrugged.
"But that's no reason to let him grieve his heart out in idleness."
"Really, Mrs. van Vogel, you should not upset yourself about it. They don't stay in these pens long only a few days at the most."
"Oh," she answered, somewhat mollified, "you have some other place to retire them to, then. Do you give them something to do there? You should Jerry wants to work. Don't you. Jerry?"
The neo-chimp had been struggling to follow the conversation. He caught the last idea and grinned. "Jerry work! Sure Mike! Good worker." He flexed his fingers, then made fists, displaying fully opposed thumbs.
MrBlakesly seemed somewhat nonplused. "Really, Mrs. van Vogel, there is no need. You see " He stopped.
Van Vogel had been listening irritably. His wife's enthusiasms annoyed him, unless they were also his own. Furthermore he was beginning to blame Blakesly for his own recent extravagance and had a premonition that his wife would find some way to make him pay, very sweetly, for his indulgence.
Being annoyed with both of them, he chucked in the perfect wrong remark. "Don't be silly, Martha. They don't retire them; they liquidate them."
It took a little time for the idea to soak in, but when it did she was furious. "Why ... why I never heard of such a thingi You ought to be ashamed. You ... you would shoot your own grandmother."
"Mrs. van Vogel please!"
"Don't 'Mrs, van Vogel' me! It's got to stop you hear me?" She looked around at the death pens, at the milling hundreds of old workers therein. "It's horrible. You work them until they can't work anymore, then you take away their little comforts, and you dispose of them. I wonder you don't eat them!"
"They do," her husband said brutally. "Dog food."
"What! Well, we'll put a stop to that!"
"Mrs. van Vogel," Blakesly pleaded. "Let me explain."
"Hummph! Go ahead. It had better be good."
"Well, it's like this " His eye fell on Jerry, standing with worried expression at the fence. "Scram, Joe!" Jerry shuffled away.
"Wait, Jerry!" Mrs. van Vogel called out. Jerry paused uncertainly. "Tell him to come back,' she ordered Blakesly.
The Manager bit his lip, then called out, "Come back here."
He was beginning definitely to dislike Mrs. van Vogel, despite his automatic tendency to genuflect in the presence of a high credit rating. To be told how to run his own business well, now, indeed! "Mrs. van Vogel, I admire your humanitarian spirit but you don't understand the situation. We understand our workers and do what is best for them. They die painlessly before their disabilities can trouble them. They live happy lives, happier than yours or mine. We trim off the bad part of their lives, nothing more. And don't forget, these poor beasts would never have been born had we not arranged it."
She shook her head. "Fiddlesticksl You'll be quoting the Bible at me next. There will be no more of it, Mr. Blakesly. I shall hold you personally responsible."
Blakesly looked bleak. "My responsibilities are to the directors,"
"You think so?" She opened her purse and snatched out her telephone. So great was her agitation that she did not bother to call through, but signalled the local relay operator instead. "Phoenix? Get me Great New York Murray Hill 9Q-4004, Mr. Haskell. Priority star subscriber 777. Make it quick." She stood there, tapping her foot and glaring, until her business manager answered. "Haskell? This is Martha van Vogel. How much Workers, Incorporated, common do I own? No, no, never mind that what percent? ... so? Well, it's not enough. I want 51% by tomorrow morning ... all right, get proxies for the rest but get it ... I didn't ask you what it would cost; I said to get it. Get busy." She disconnected abruptly and turned to her husband. "We're leaving, Brownie, and we are taking Jerry with us. Mr. Blakesly, will you kindly have him taken out of that pen? Give him a check for the amount. Brownie."