The condemned man ate a hearty breakfast.
He had to. That morning, as Morey awoke, he had the sick certainty that he was going to be consuming triple nations for a long, long time to come.
He kissed Cherry good-by and took the long ride to the Ration Board in silence. He even left Henry behind.
At the Board, he stammered at a series of receptionist robots and was finally brought into the presence of a mildly supercilious young man named Hachette.
"My name," he started, "is Morey Fry. I-I've come to-talk over something I've been doing with-"
"Certainly, Mn. Fry," said Hachette. "I'll take you in to Mn. Newman right away."
"Don't you want to know what I did?" demanded Morey.
Hachette smiled. "What makes you think we don't know?" he said, and left.
That was Surprise Number One.
Newman explained it. He grinned at Morey and ruefully shook his head. "All the time we get this," he complained. "People just don't take the trouble to learn anything about the world around them. Son," he demanded, "what do you think a robot is?'~
Morey said, "Huh?"
"I mean how do you think it operates? Do you think it's just a kind of a man with a tin skin and wine nerves?"
"Why, no. It's a machine, of course. It isn't human."
Newman beamed. "Fine!" he said. "It's a machine. It hasn't got flesh on blood or intestines-on a brain. Oh-" he held up a hand- "robots are smart enough. I don't mean that. But an electronic thinking machine, Mn. Fry, takes about as much space as the house you're living in. It has to. Robots don't carry brains around with them; brains are too heavy and much too bulky."
"Then how do they think?"
"With their brains, of course."
"But you just said-"
"I said they didn't carry them. Each robot is in constant radio communication with the Master Control on its TBR circuit-the 'Talk Between Robots' radio. Master Control gives the answer, the robot acts."
"I see," said Morey. "Well, that's very interesting, but-"
"But you still don't see," said Newman. "Figure it out. If the robot gets information from Master Control, do you see that Master Control in return necessarily gets information from the robot?"
"Oh," said Morey. Then, louder, "Oh! You mean that all my robots have been-" The words wouldn't come.
Newman nodded in satisfaction. "Every bit of information of that sort comes to us as a matter of course. Why, Mr. Fry, if you hadn't come in today, we would have been sending for you within a very short time."
That was the second surprise. Morey bore up under it bravely. After all, it changed nothing, he reminded himself.
He said, "Well, be that as it may, sir, here I am. I came in of my own free will. I've been using my robots to consume my ration quotas-"
"Indeed you have," said Newman.
"-and I'm willing to sign a statement to that effect any time you like. I don't know what the penalty is, but I'll take it. I'm guilty; I admit my guilt."
Newman's eyes were wide. "Guilty?" he repeated. "Penalty?"
Morey was startled. "Why, yes," he said. "I'm not denying anything."
"Penalties," repeated Newman musingly. Then he began to laugh. He laughed, Morey thought, to considerable excess; Morey saw nothing he could laugh at, himself, in the situation. But the situation, Morey was forced to admit, was rapidly getting completely incomprehensible.
"Sorry," said Newman at last, wiping his eyes, "but I couldn't help it. Penalties! Well, Mn. Fry, let me set your mind at rest. I wouldn't worry about the penalties if I were you. As soon as the reports began coming through on what you had done with your robots, we naturally assigned a special team to keep observing you, and we forwarded a report to the national headquarters. We made certain-ah-recommendations in it and-well, to make a long story short, the answers came back yesterday.
"Mr. Fry, the National Ration Board is delighted to know of your contribution toward improving our distribution problem. Pending a further study, a tentative program has been adopted for setting up consuming-robot units all over the country based on your scheme. Penalties? Mn. Fry, you're a hero!"
A hero has responsibilities. Morey's were quickly made clean to him. He was allowed time for a brief reassuring visit to Cherry, a triumphal tour of his old office, and then he was rushed off to Washington to be quizzed. He found the National Ration Board in a frenzy of work.
"The most important job we've ever done," one of the high officers told him. "I wouldn't be surprised if it's the last one we ever have! Yes, sir, we're trying to put ourselves out of business for good and we don't want a single thing to go wrong."
"Anything I can do to help-" Morey began diffidently.
"You've done fine, Mr. Fry. Gave us just the push we've been needing. It was there all the time for us to see, but we were too close to the forest to see the trees, if you get what I mean. Look, I'm not much on rhetoric and this is the biggest step mankind has taken in centuries and I can't put it into words. Let me show you what we've been doing."
He and a delegation of other officials of the Ration Board and men whose names Morey had repeatedly seen in the newspapers took Morey on an inspection tour of the entire plant.
"It's a closed cycle, you see," he was told, as they looked over a chamber of industriously plodding consumer-robots working off a shipment of shoes. "Nothing is permanently lost. If you want a car, you get one of the newest and best. If not, your car gets driven by a robot until it's ready to be turned in and a new one gets built for next year. We don't lose the metals-they can be salvaged. All we lose is a little power and labor. And the Sun and the atom give us all the power we need, and the robots give us more labor than we can use. Same thing applies, of course, to all products."
"But what's in it for the robots?" Morey asked.
"I beg your pardon?" one of the biggest men in the country said uncomprehendingly.
Morey had a difficult moment. His analysis had conditioned him against waste and this decidedly was sheer destruction of goods, no matter how scientific the jargon might be.
"If the consumer is just using up things for the sake of using them up," he said doggedly, realizing the danger he was inviting, "we could use wear-and-tear machines instead of robots. After all why waste them?"
They looked at each other worriedly.
"But that's what you were doing," one pointed out with a faint note of threat.
"Oh, no!" Morey quickly objected. "I built in satisfaction circuits
-my training in design, you know. Adjustable circuits, of course."
"Satisfaction circuits?" he was asked. "Adjustable?"
"Well, sure. If the robot gets no satisfaction out of using up things-"
"Don't talk nonsense," growled the Ration Board official. "Robots aren't human. How do you make them feel satisfaction? And adjustable satisfaction at that!"
Morey explained. It was a highly technical explanation, involving the use of great sheets of paper and elaborate diagrams. But there were trained men in the group and they became even more excited than before.
"Beautiful!" one cried in scientific rapture. "Why, it takes care of every possible moral, legal and psychological argument!"
"What does?" the Ration Board official demanded. "How?"
"You tell him, Mr. Fry."
Morey tried and couldn't. But he could show how his principle operated. The Ration Board lab was turned over to him, complete with more assistants than he knew how to give orders to, and they built satisfaction circuits for a squad of robots working in a hat factory.
Then Morey gave his demonstration. The robots manufactured hats of all sorts. He adjusted the circuits at the end of the day and the robots began trying on the hats, squabbling over them, each coming away triumphantly with a huge and diverse selection. Their metallic features were incapable of showing pride or pleasure, but both were evident in the way they wore their hats, their fierce possessiveness . . . and their faster, neater, more intensive, more dedicated work to produce a still greater quantity of hats . . . which they also were allowed to own.