“Free food?” asked Angela.
“Yeah. Don’t it beat you, though. Here we are, honorable and respected craftsmen, and every one of us will break a leg to grab himself a sandwich and a drink.”
“Times are tough,” said Hart.
“Not with me,” said Jasper. “I keep working all the time.”
“But work doesn’t solve the main problem.”
Jasper regarded him thoughtfully, tugging at his chin.
“What else is there?” he demanded. “Inspiration? Dedication? Genius? Go ahead and name it. We are rnechanics, man. We got machines and tapes. We went into top production two hundred years ago. We mechanized so we could go into top production so that people could turn out books and stories even if they had no talent at all. We got a job to do. We got to turn out tons of drivel for the whole damn galaxy. We got to keep them drooling over what is going to happen next to sloe-eyed Annie, queen of the far-flung spaceways. And we got to shoot up the lad with her and patch him up and shoot him up and patch him up and…”
He reached for an evening paper, opened it to a certain page and thumped his fist upon it.
“Did you see this?” he asked. “The Classic, they call it. Guaranteed to turn out nothing but a classic.”
Hart snatched the paper from him and there it was, the wondrous yarner he had seen that morning, confronting him in all its glory from the center of a full-page
“Pretty soon,” said Jasper, “all you’ll need to write is have a lot of money. You can go out and buy a machine like that and say turn out a story and press a button or flip a switch or maybe simply kick it and it’ll cough out a story complete to the final exclamation point.
“It used to be that you could buy an old beat-up machine for, say, a hundred dollars and you could turn out any quantity of stuff – not good, but salable. Today you got to have a high-priced machine and an expensive camera and a lot of special tape and film. Someday,” he said, “the human race will outwit itself. Someday it will mechanize to the point where there won’t be room for humans, but only for machines.”
“You do all right,” said Angela.
“That’s because I keep dinging my machine up all the time. It don’t give me no rest. That place of mine is half study and half machine shop and I know as much about electronics as I do about narration.”
Blake came shuffling over.
“What’ll it be?” he growled.
“I’ve eaten,” Angela told him. “All I want is a glass of beer.”
He turned to Hart. “How about you” he demanded.
“Give me some of that stuff Jasper has – without the wine.
“No cuff,” said Blake.
“Damn it, who said anything about cuff? Do you expect me to pay you before you bring it?”
“No,” said Blake. “But immediately, after I bring it.”
He turned and shuffled off.
“Some day,” said Jasper, “there has to be a limit to it. There must be a limit to it and we must be reaching it. You can only mechanize so far. You can assign only so many human activities and duties to intelligent machines. Who, two hundred years ago, would have said that the writing of fiction could have been reduced to a matter of mechanics?”
“Who, two hundred years ago,” said Hart, “could have guessed that Earth could gear itself to a literary culture? But that is precisely what we have today. Sure, there are factories that build the machines we need and lumbermen who cut the trees for pulp and farmers who grow the food, and all the other trades and skills which are necessary to keep a culture operative. But by and large Earth today is principally devoted to the production of a solid stream of fiction for the alien trade.”
“It all goes back to one peculiar trait,” said Jasper. “A most unlikely trait to work – as it does – to our great advantage. We just happen to be the galaxy’s only liars. In a mass of stars where truth is accepted as a universal constant, we are the one exception.”
“You make it sound so horrible,” protested Angela.
“I suppose I do, but that’s the way it is. We could have become great traders and skinned all and sundry until they got wise to us. We could have turned our talent for the untruth into many different channels and maybe even avoided getting our heads bashed in. But instead we drifted into the one safe course. Our lying became an easy virtue. Now we can lie to our hearts’ content and they lap it up. No one, nowhere, except right here on Earth, ever even tried to spin a yarn for simple entertainment, or to point a moral or for any other reason. They never attempted it because it would have been a lie, and we are the only liars in the universe of stars.”
Blake brought the beer for Angela and the pig knuckles for Hart. Hart paid him out of hand.
“I’ve still got a quarter left,” he said. “Have you any pie?”
“Apple.”
“Here,” said Hart, “I’ll pay you in advance.”
“First,” went on Jasper, “it was told by mouth. Then it was writ by hand and now it’s fabricated by machine.
But surely that’s not the end of it. There must be something else. There must be another way, a better way. There must be another step.”
“I would settle for anything,” said Hart. “Any way at all. I’d even write by hand if I thought I could go on selling.”
“You can’t!” Angela told him, sharply. “Why, its positively indecent to even joke about it. You can say it as a joke just among the three of us, but if I ever hear you – ”
Hart waved his hand. “Let it go. I’m sorry that I said it.”
“Of course,” said Jasper, “it’s a great testimonial to the cleverness of Man, to the adaptability and resourcefulness of the human race. It is a somewhat ludicrous application of big business methods to what had always been considered a personal profession. But it works. Some day, I have no doubt, we may see the writing business run on production lines, with fiction factories running double shifts.”
“No,” Angela said. “No, you’re wrong there, Jasper. Even with the mechanization, it’s still the loneliest business on Earth.”
“It is,” agreed Jasper. “But I don’t regret the loneliness part. Maybe I should, but I don’t.”
“It’s a lousy way to make a living,” said Angela, with a strange half-bitterness in her voice. “What are we contributing?”
“You are making people happy – if you can call some of our readers people. You are supplying entertainment.”
“And the noble ideas?”
“There are even a few of those.”
“It’s more than that,” said Hart. “More than entertainment, more than great ideas. It’s the most innocent and the deadliest propaganda in all of human history. The old writers, before the first space flight, glorified far wandering and galactic conquest and I thing that they were justified. But they missed the most important development completely. They couldn’t possibly foresee the way we would do it – with books, not battleships. We’re softening up the galaxy with a constant stream of human thought. Our words are reaching farther than our spaceships ever could.”
“That’s the point I want to make,” Jasper said, triumphantly. “You hit the point exactly. But if we are to tell the galaxy a story it must be a _human_ story. If we sell them a bill of goods it must be a human bill of goods. And how can we keep it human if we relegate its telling to machines?”
“But they’re human machines,” objected Angela.
“A machine can’t be purely human. Basically a machine is universal. It could be Caphian as well as human, or Aldebaran or Draconian or any other race. And that’s not all. We let the machine set the norm. The one virtue of mechanics is that it sets a pattern. And a pattern is deadly in literary matters. It never changes. It keeps on using the same old limp plots in many different guises.
“Maybe at the moment it makes no difference to the races who are reading us, for as yet they have not developed anything approaching a critical faculty. But it should make some difference to us. It should make some difference in the light of a certain pride of workmanship we are supposed to have. And that is the trouble with machines. They are destroying the pride in us. Once writing was an art. But it is an art no longer. It’s machine-produced, like a factory chair. A good chair, certainly. Good enough to sit on, but not a thing of beauty or of craftsmanship or – “