"Frederick Pohl - Farmer on the Dole" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

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-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 with. You're in a class occupation," he said earnestly, "and you got to live up to your station, right? No subway trains. No counting out the pennies when you get change. You don't take change. Now you don't want to make trouble your first day on the job; so we'll let you go until you've finished a whole week. But then you go back to that bleached-blonde Three-R and we'll get you straightened out," he promised. "Now let's go fence our jewels and stuff and call it a night."
All in all, Zeb was quite pleased with himself. His pockets lined with big bills, he read menus outside fancy restaurants to prepare himself for his new-attachments. He was looking forward to a career at least as distinguished as
Timothy's own.
That was his third night on the Gold Coast.
He never got a chance at a fourth.
His last marks of the evening gave him a little argument about parting with a diamond ring. So, as taught, Zeb backhanded the he and snarled at the she and used a little more force than usual when he ripped the ring off the finger. Two minutes later and three blocks away, he took a quick look at his loot under a streetlight. He recoiled in horror.
There was a drop of blood on the ring.
That victim had not been a robot. She had been a living true human female being, and when he heard all the police sirens in the world coming straight at him, he was not in the least surprised.
"You people," said the rehab instructor, "have been admitted to this program because, a, you have been unemployed for not less than twenty-one months, b, have not fewer than six unexcused absences from your place of training or employment, c, have a conviction for a felony and are currently on parole, or, d, are of a date of manufacture eighteen or more years past, choice of any of the above. That's what the regulations say, and what they mean," she said, warming to her work, "is, you're scum. Scum is hopeless, shiftless, dangerous, a social liability. Do you all understand that much at least?" She gazed angrily around the room at her seven students.
She was short, dumpy, red-haired, with bad skin. Why they let shes like this one off the production line Zeb could not understand. He fidgeted in his seat, craning his neck to see what his six fellow students were like, until her voice crackled at him: "You! With the yellow sweater! Zeb!"
He finched. "Pardon me, madam?"
She said, with gloomy satisfaction, "I know your type. You're a typical recidivist lumpenprole, you are. Can't even pay attention to somebody who's trying to help you when your whole future is at stake. What've I got, seven of you slugs? I can see what's coming. I guarantee two of you will drop out without finishing the course, and I'll ave to expell two more because you skip classes or come in late. And the other three'll be back on the streets or in the slarnmer in ninety days. Why do I do it." She shook her head and then, lifting herself ponderously, went to the blackboard and wrote her three commandments:
1. ON TIME
2. EVERY DAY
3. EVEN WHEN YOU DON'T WANT TO