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 getting good carbon metabolizm.”
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 ain't heard anything?”
“Bout what?”
“Bout anything. You know.”
Zeb turned to face him. “You mean ain't I heard no crazy talk bout closin' down the farms, when everybody knows they can’t never do that, no. I ain't 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 ain't 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? S'cuse 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 muttered, “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!”