To the men, the destruction of the robots was fast becoming urgent. Early on, the men had given way in order to placate the women. Now, before it was too late, they insisted in revolting utterly and completely against Martian dominance. The robots capitulated without even a struggle, probably because a careful calculation showed they couldn’t win at that time. There was no Horatio-at-the-Bridge attitude about them, no “face” to save, no problem of “morale” to worry about. If the battle couldn’t be won, there was no point in fighting it.
Only a small percentage of the men understood the critical point, that the robots weren’t the real Martians. It had been said often enough, of course, that the real Martians were still on Mars, underneath their protective glaciers. But this was too remote and abstract for the average man. Nobody had dug up the glaciers and looked underneath, had they? So how could you be sure? It was hard not to credit a machine with intelligence, not when it showed intelligence. It may be understood, then, how it was that most men took great pleasure in the destruction of the robots. They cooked the jolly communication chaps by throwing them into a furnace, where they soon melted into “juice.” The business-robots, after dismemberment, were left outdoors to oxidize, slowly. For the policemen-robots they reserved special compactors, built after the pattern of machines used for compacting automobiles. The robots were fed in as robots at one end. They emerged at the other end as neat cubes, jousting ball and all. Before they were impelled into the compactor, the robots were shown the emerging cubes. It was always a disappointment that, while every robot continued to display an intelligent interest in what was going on, this demonstration never put a single robot in the least out of countenance. No robot was ever known to emit the smallest Petrushka-like cheep.
The bottom fell out of the birth rate, right down to zero. All along, this was what the women had said would happen. The birth rate didn’t get off the floor until the men started to build robots again. Wearisomely, the pattern was repeated, first the communication chaps, then the business tycoons, then the policemen-robots to keep everything neat and tidy. Inevitably, there was a second revolt. Inevitably, the birth rate zeroed. Inevitably, the pattern was repeated, and repeated again.
This was all part of the plan. The Martians wanted the human population down, not down to nothing at all, but to manageable proportions. This meant a reduction by a very big factor. Without establishing fantastic slaughterhouses, it was clearly necessary to wait forty or fifty years for the existing population to die off in peace and prosperity. Replacements were kept at a low level, only about one hundred thousand a year for the whole species. Even this meager yield had to be worked hard for. It became an all-out effort for the men. The Martians were clever enough not to arrange one hundred thousand pregnancies per annum, regardless. More subtly, they worked on the basis of one pregnancy per N copulations, with N adjustable to give the required annual crop of one hundred thousand babies. In the early days, N was kept fixed, so that everybody then got it firmly into their heads that the more sex, the more babies. With this belief established, the Martians increased N more and more, as manufacturers used to do in their old time-and-motion studies. Like the old manufacturers, the Martians never reduced N. Once they discovered the sexwise capability of the human species, they kept them to it.
The men were actually reduced to making a complaint, through the agency of the jolly communication chaps, when at one time things really had gone a bit far. The Martians replied in the following terms:
(1) A survey of the entertainment enjoyed by the human species throughout the second half of the twentieth century shows that sex served as the major item of human attention, pleasure, and happiness.
(2) The pursuit of happiness is the declared intent of the human species.
(3) Present policy provides for (2).
(4) The subject is closed.
The sheer physical strain of maintaining what turned out to be a stable population of some three million reduced the men to a state in which they no longer had the necessary determination to suppress the robots. A critical point was passed, separating the time when the robots might once again have been consigned to the furnace and to the compactor from the final era in which this was no longer possible. The jousting ball was now ultimate law. The human species was powerless, not only biologically, but also physically. The Martians had won the final battle, and without striking a single physical blow, if one excepts the biochemical analysis of the four unfortunate scientist-explorers sent to them at such enormous expense by NASA. Humans had themselves looked after the physical aspects of the matter, even to the extent of building the robots which now held them in bondage. It only remained for the Martians to have the robots herd the whole human species together into a reasonably spacious compound. Earth could then be cleaned up, cleaned of its horrible green slime, and at last made fit for a Martian to live in.
So it came about that the entire human species came to live in greater Los Angeles, and that true Martians arrived here to take up an abode beneath the polar icecaps. Ample water was pumped in to the humans, who kept their little patch of Earth forever verdant. There were just a few who hankered after the strident old days, but they never got much of a hearing. Life on the whole was very pleasant. Indeed, there came a time when the species attained a considerable cachet. Rather to their own surprise, the Martians found humans a distinctly exportable item. Nobody throughout the Galaxy could at first believe it possible for such astonishing creatures to exist. Nobody had ever conceived of chemical life. As far as was known, the creatures were quite unique.
Shortsighted
The spring of 1966 brought startling news to the British bird-watching world. A pair of Baird’s Oreales were nesting in the park of an estate near Bury Saint Edmunds.
Hugh McAlan was an improbable bird-watcher. Seriously shortsighted, he was a convert to the eye-exercise school. Bird-watching had been recommended to him as likely to sharpen his acuity. It did so, but not for the reason McAlan imagined. There was no improvement at all in the optics of the eye. What bird-watching did was to make him more consciously aware of the information that was passing in any case from eye to brain, information which he had previously ignored. It simply directed certain things to his attention, things that had been there anyway.
McAlan applied to the Ornithological Trust for a permit to visit the estate near Bury Saint Edmunds. He wasn’t too hopeful about his application, because it was plainly impossible for the Trust to grant permits to more than a small fraction of the many ornithologists of the Greater London area. Hugh McAlan was one of the lucky ones as it turned out, however. He was given a permit for eleven a.m. Sunday, which was much the best day of the week for him, and pretty well the best time of day, too.
So one morning in late April, McAlan headed his Austin Mini out of London onto the Newmarket–Bury road. By his side were binoculars and a luncheon satchel, in the boot of the car his faithful waders.
The ornithological party, when fully assembled, turned out to be about fifty strong. With so many people, the warden who conducted them through the estate was understandably reluctant to approach the Oreales closely. At all costs, the birds must not be frightened from the park.