“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.”