Frederick Pohl - Farmer on the Dole

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file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Frederick%20Pohl%20-%20Farmer%20on%20the%20Dole.txt

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FARMER ON THE DOLE

by Frederik Pohl

Stretching east to the horizon, a thousand acres, was all soybeans; across the road to the west,

another thousand acres, all corn. Zeb kicked the irrigation valve moodily and watched the meter

his head, frowning. Eighty-five percent relative humidity. No, closer to eighty-seven. And not a

cloud in the sky.

From across the road his neighbor called, "Afternoon Zeb."

Zeb nodded curtly. He was soy and Wally was corn, and they didn't have much to talk about, but you

had to show some manners. He pulled his bandanna out of his hip pocket and wiped his brow. "Had to

rise up the flow," he offered for politeness' sake.

"Me, too. Only good thing, COZ's up. So we's gettin good carbon metabolizin."

Zeb grunted and bent down to pick up a clod of earth,

crumbling it in his fingers to test for humus, breaking off a piece, and tasting it. "Cobalt's a

tad low again," he said meditatively, but Wally wasn't interested in soil chemistry.

"Zeb? You aint heard anything?"

"Bout what?"

"Bout anything. You know."

Zeb turned to face him. "You mean aint I heard no crazy talk bout closin down the farms, when

everybody knows they can't never do that, no. I aint heard nothin like that, an if I did, I

wouldn't give it heed."

"Yeah, Zeb, but they's sayin-"

"They can say whatever they likes, Wally. I aint listenin, and I got to get back to the lines fore

Becky and the kids start worryin. Evenin. Nice talkin to you." And he turned and marched back

toward the cabins.

"Uncle Tin," Wally called sneeringly, but Zeb wouldn't give him the satisfaction of noticing. All

the same, he pulled out his bandanna and mopped his brow again.

It wasn't sweat. Zeb never sweated. His arms, his back, his armpits were permanently dry, in any

weather, no matter how hard or how long he worked. The glistening film on his forehead was

condensed from the air. The insulation around the supercooled Josephson junctions that made up his

brain was good, but not perfect. When he was doing more thinking than usual, the refrigeration

units worked harder.

And Zeb was doing a lot of thinking. Close down the farms? Why, you'd have to be crazy to believe

that! You did your job. You tilled the fields and planted them, or else you cleaned and cooked in

Boss's house, or taught Boss's children, or drove Miz Boss when she went to visit the other

bosses' wives. That was the way things were on the farm, and it would go on that way forever,

wouldn't it?

Zeb found out the answer the next morning, right after church.

Since Zeb was a Class A robot, with an effective IQ of one hundred thirty-five, though limited in

its expression by the built-in constraints of his assigned function, he really should not have

been surprised. Especially when he discovered that Reverend Harmswallow had taken his text that

morning from Matthew, specifically the Beatitudes, and in particular the one about how the meek

would inherit the earth. The reverend was a plump, pink-faced man whose best sermons dwelt on the

wages of sin and the certainty of hell-fire. It had always been a disappointment to him that the

farmhands who made up his congregation weren't physically equipped to sin in any interesting ways,

but he made up for it by extra emphasis on the importance of being humble. "Even," he finished,

his baby-fine hair flying all around his pink scalp, "when things don't go the way you think they

ought to. Now we're going to sing `Old One Hundred,' and then you soy people will meet in the

gymnasium and corn people in the second-floor lounge. Your bosses have some news for you."

So it shouldn't have been surprising, and as a matter of fact Zeb wasn't surprised at all. Some

part of the cry circuits inside his titanium skull had long noted the portents. Scant rain.

Falling levels of soil minerals. Thinning of the topsoil. The beans grew fat, because there was an

abundance of carbon in the air for them to metabolize. But no matter how much you irrigated, they

dried up fast in the hot breezes. And those were only the physical signs. Boss's body language

said more, sighing when he should have been smiling at the three-legged races behind the big

house, not even noticing when one of the cabins needed a new coat of whitewash or the flower

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patches showed a few weeds. Zeb observed it all and drew the proper conclusions. His constraints

did not forbid that; they only prevented him from speaking of them, or even of thinking of them on

a conscious level. Zeb was not programmed to worry. It would have interfered with the. happy,

smiling face he bore for Boss, and Miz Boss, and the Chillen.

So, when Boss made his announcement, Zeb looked as thunderstruck as all the other hands. "You've

been really good people," Boss said generously, his pale, professorial face incongruous under the

plantation straw hat. "I really wish things could go on as they always have, but it just isn't

possible. It's the agricultural support program," he explained. "Those idiots in Washington have

cut it down to the point where it simply isn't worthwhile to plant here anymore." His expression

brightened. "But it's not all bad! You'll be glad to know that they've expanded the soil bank

program as a consequence. So Miz Boss and the children and I are well provided for. As a matter of

fact," and he beamed. "we'll be a little better off than before, moneywise.

"Days good!"

"Oh, hebben be praised!"

The doleful expressions broke into grins as the farmhands nudged one another, relieved. But then

Zeb spoke up. "Boss? Scuse my askin, but what's gone happen to us folks? You gonna keep us on?"

Boss looked irritated. "Oh, that's impossible. We can't collect the soil-bank money if we plant;

so there's just no sense in having all of you around, don't you see?"

Silence. Then another farmhand ventured, "How bout Cornpatch Boss? He need some good workers? You

know us hates corn, but we could get reprogrammed quick's anything-"

Boss shook his head. "He's telling his people the same thing right now. Nobody needs you."

The farmhands looked at one another. "Preacher, he needs us." one of them offered. "We's his whole

congregation."

"I'm, afraid Reverend Harmswallow doesn't need you anymore." Boss said kindly, "because he's been

wanting to go into missionary work for some time, and he's just received his call. No, you're

superfluous; that all."

"Superfluous?"

"Redundant. Unnecessary. There's no reason for you to be here." Boss told them. "So trucks will

come in the morning to take you all away. Please be outside your cabins ready to go, by oh-seven-

hundred."

Silence again. Then Zeb: "Where they takes us, Boss?"

Boss shrugged. "There's probably some place, I think." Then he grinned. "But I've got a surprise

for you. Miz Boss and I aren't going to let you go without having a party. So tonight we're going

to have a good old-fashioned square dance, with new bandannas for the best dancers, and then

you're all going to come back to the Big House and sing spirituals for us. I promise Miz Boss and

the children and I are going to be right there to enjoy it!"

The place they were taken to was a grimy white cinderblock building in Des Plaines. The driver of

the truck was a beefy, taciturn robot who wore a visored cap and a leather jacket with the sleeves

cut off. He hadn't answered any of their questions when they loaded onto his truck at the farm,

and he again answered none when they offloaded in front of a chain-link gate, with a sign that

read

RECEIVING.

"Just stand over there," he ordered. "You all out? Okay." And he slapped the tailboard up and

drove off, leaving them in a gritty, misty sprinkle of warm rain.

And they waited. Fourteen prime working robots, hes and shes and three little ones, too dispirited

to talk much. Zeb wiped the moisture off his face and mutttered, "Couldn've rained down where we

needed it. Has to rain up here, where it don't do a body no good a-tall." But not all the moisture

was rain: not Zeb's and not that on the faces of the others, because they were all thinking really

hard. The only one not despairing was Lem, the most recent arrival. Lem had been an estate

gardener in Urbana until his people decided to emigrate to the O'Neill space colonies. He'd been

lucky to catch on at the farm when a turned-over tractor created an unexpected vacancy, but he

still talked wistfully about life in glamorous Champaign Urbana. Now he was excited, "Des Plaines!

Why that's practically Chicago! The big time, friends. State Street! The Loop! The Gold Coast!"

"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

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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-

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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."

"As a soi-disant common cutpurse?" Zeb asked, somewhat nettled at the other robot's peremptory

manner.

Timothy looked him over carefully. "You talk funny," he said. "They stick you with one of those

surplus vocabularies again? Never mind. You see how it's done?"

Zeb hesitated, craning his neck to look for pursuit, of which there seemed to be none. "Well, one

might venture that that is correct," he said.

"Okay. Now you do it." Timothy said cheerfully, and he steered Zeb into the alley for the hotel

tourist trap's stage door.

By midnight Zeb had committed five felonies of his own, had been an accomplice in two more, and

had watched the smaller robot commit eight single-handed, and the two muggers were dividing their

gains in the darkest corner-not very dark-of an all-night McDonald's on North Michigan Avenue.

"You done good, kid." Timothy admitted expansively. "For a green kid anyway. Let's see. Your share

comes to six watches, eight pieces of jewelry, counting the fake coral necklace you shouldn't have

bothered with, and looks like six to seven hundred in cash."

"As well as quite a few credit cards," Zeb said eagerly.

"Forget the credit cards. You only keep what you can spend or what doesn't have a name on it.

Think you're ready to go out on your own?"

"One hesitates to assume such responsibility-"

"Because you're not. So forget it." The night's work done, Timothy seemed to have become actually

garrulous. "Bet you can't tell me why I wanted you backing me up those two times."

"One acknowledges a certain incomprehension," Zeb confessed. "There is an apparent dichotomy. When

there were two victims, or even three, you chose to savage them single-handed. Yet for solitary

prey you elected to have an

accomplice."

"Right! And you know why? You don't. So I'll tell you. You get a he and a she, or even two of

each, and the he's going to think about keeping the she from getting hurt; that's the way the

program reads. So no trouble. But those two hes by themselves-hell, if I'd gone up against either

of those mothers, he might've taken my knife away from me and picked my nose with it. You got to

understand robot nature, kid. That's what the job is all about. Don't you want a Big Mac or

something?"

Zeb shifted uncomfortably. "I should think not, thank you," he said, but the other robot was

looking at him knowingly.

"No food-tract subsystems, right?"

"Well, my dear Timothy, in the agricultural environment I inhabited there was no evident need-"

"You don't need them now, but you ought to have them. Also liquid-intake tanks, and maybe an air-

cycling system, so you can smoke cigars. And get rid of that faggoty vocabulary they stuck you

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