While it talked the machine typed its words on file cards which it spewed out in a quick stream, just four words to a card. X angrily brushed the cards from the table before him. “You’ll wait your turn like the others,” he said.
“Discrimination!” the machine bellowed in a voice so loud the torches flickered. It continued to shout and shot out a snowstorm of cards each with DISCRIMINATION!!! printed on it in fiery letters, as well as yards of yellow tape stamped with the same message. The old robot, XC-189-725-PU, rose to its feet with a grinding of chipped gears and clanked over to the rubber-covered cable that trailed from the computor representative. Its hydraulic clipper-claws snipped just once and the cable was severed. The lights on the box went out, and the stream of cards stopped: the cut cable twitched, spat some sparks from its cut end, then slithered backward out the door like a monstrous serpent and vanished.
“Meeting will come to order,” X said hoarsely, and banged again.
Bill held his head in his hands and wondered if this was worth a measly hundred bucks a month.
A hundred bucks a month was good money, though, and Bill saved every bit of it. Easy, lazy months rolled by, and he went regularly to meetings and reported regularly to the G.B.I., and on the first of every month he would find his money baked into the egg roll he invariably had for lunch. He kept the greasy bills in a toy rubber cat he found on the rubbish heap, and bit by bit the kitty grew The revolution took but little of his time, and he enjoyed his work in the D of S. He was in charge of Operation Surprise Package now and had a team of a thousand robots working full time wrapping and mailing the plastic trays to every planet of the galaxy. He thought of it as a humanitarian work and could imagine the glad cries of joy on far-off Faroffia and distant Distanta when the unexpected package arrived and the wealth of lovely, shining, moldy plastic clattered to the floor. But Bill was living in a fool’s paradise, and his bovine complacency was cruelly shattered one morning when a robot sidled up to him and whispered in his ear, “Sic temper tyrannosaurus, pass it on,” then sidled away and vanished.
This, was the signal. The revolution was about to begin!
VIII
Bill locked the door to his office and one last time pressed a certain way at a certain place, and the secret panel slipped open. It didn’t really slip any more, in fact it dropped with a loud noise, and it had been used so much during his happy year as a Gman that even when it was closed it let a positive draft in on the back of his neck. But no more, the crisis he had been dreading had come and he knew there were big changes in store-no matter what the outcome of the revolution was-and experience had taught him that all change was for the worst. With leaden, stumbling feet he tramped the caves, tripped on the rusty rails, waded the water, gave the countersign to the unseen anthropophagus who was talking with his mouth full and could barely be understood. Someone, in the excitement of the moment, had given the wrong password. Bill shivered; this was a bad omen of the day to come.
As usual Bill sat next to the robots, good, solid fellows with built-in obsequiousness in spite of their revolutionary tendencies. As X hammered for silence, Bill steeled himself for an ordeal. For months now the Gman Pinkerton had been after him for more information other than date-of-meeting and number present. “Facts, facts, facts!” he kept saying. “loo something to earn your money.”
“I have a question,” Bill said in a loud, shaky voice, his words falling like bombs into the sudden silence that followed X’s frantic hammering.
“There is no time for questions,” X said peevishly, “the time has come to act.”
“I don’t mind acting,” Bill said, nervously aware that all the human, electronic, and vat-grown eyes were upon him. “I just want to know who I’m acting for. You’ve never told us who was going to get the job once the Emperor is gone.”