"Frederik Pohl - The Midas Plague" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

the competitor for the job, was at once and inevitably
outside the law. The waves swelled inflie Irish, the
Negroes, the Jews, the Italians. They were squeezed into
their ghettoes, where they encysted, seethed and struck
out, until the burgeoning generations became indistinguish-
able.
For the robots, that genetic relief was not in sight. And
still the conflict never came. The feed-back circuits aimed
the anti-aircraft guns and, reshaped and newly planned,
found a place in a new sort of machinetogether with a
miraculous trail of cams and levers, an indestructible and
potent power source and a hundred thousand parts and
sub-assemblies.
And the first robot clanked off the bench.
Its mission was its own destruction; but from the
scavenged wreck of its pilot body, a hundred better robots
drew their inspiration. And the hundred went to work,
and hundreds more, until there were millions upon untold
millions.
And still the riots never happened.
For the robots came bearing a gift and the name of it
was "Plenty."
And by the time the gift had shown its own unguessed
ills, the time for a Robot Riot was past. Plenty is a habit-
forming drug. You do not cut the dosage down. You kick
it if you can; you stop the dose entirely. But the. convul-
sions that follow may wreck the body once and for all.
The addict craves the grainy white powder; he doesn't
hate it, or the runner who sells it to him. And if Morey
as a little boy could hate the robot that had deprived him
of his pup, Morey the man was perfectly aware that the
robots were his servants and his friends.
But the little Morey inside the manhe had never been
convinced.
Morey ordinarily looked forward to his work. The one
day a week at which he did anything was a wonderful
change from the dreary consume, consume, consume
grind. He entered the bright-lit drafting room of the Brad-
moor Amusements Company with a feeling of uplift.
But as he was changing from street garb to his drafting
smock, Howland from Procurement came over with a
knowing look. "Wainwright's been looking for you," How-
land whispered. "Better get right in there."
Morey nervously thanked him and got. Wainwright's
office was the size of a phone booth and as bare as
Antarctic ice. Every time Morey saw it, he felt his in-
sides churn with envy. Think of a desk with nothing on it
but work surfaceno calendar-clock, no twelve-color pen
rack, no dictating machinesi
He squeezed himself in and sat down while Wainwright