Fred Hoyle - Element 79

Nobody liked the policemen-robots, yet in some ways they turned out better than the jolly little communication chaps. As soon as plots began to hatch against the new order, the communication chaps, with their stumpy legs and big heads, showed themselves to have a real genius for sniffing out what you were up to. They were never unpleasant about it, of course, for it was apparently not their place to usurp the functions of the policemen-robots.

The policemen-robots were always pretty fair. Once they had broken a thing up, once the conspirators were scattered, the ruckus was instantly forgotten. Ringleaders were never sorted out as examples. Your past record was never held against you. There were no blacklists. To a policeman-robot there was just one single issue, whether you obeyed the current instruction or you did not. So far as anyone could tell, the policemen-robots never troubled to remember you, they simply served to distinguish obedience from disobedience. This made them surprisingly easy to take. You had no feeling of losing face when you obeyed, no feeling of the robot getting any satisfaction from your obedience. To a robot it was just as unemotional as deciding whether or not one hundred is greater than ninety-nine. If it was, okay. If it wasn’t, wham. There was indeed a curiously restful quality about the policemen-robots. In place of the appalling psychological complexities of humans, you knew exactly where you were with these big ten-foot chaps standing over you. It took you back to childhood, as if Daddy was still looking down on you.

It was in any case rather like religion. You did what the priest told you to do under pain of hell-fire. Here you did it under pain of the big black jousting ball. Like a priest, these robots had an intense devotion to right and wrong. There was no doubt about their having a vocation.

As the robots gained power, serious dissension broke out between the sexes. To women, sterility was bad enough, even on an individual basis. On a worldwide scale, it was an appalling and obscene horror, not to be contemplated if any alternative were possible. Women everywhere were wholeheartedly in favor of accepting the rule of the Martians. Nobody was being hurt by it. In any case, the men had brought it all on themselves by their incessant yap-yapping about power and progress, by their sheer smugness, in fact.

The men were not even able to diagnose their complaint, let alone cure it. The advance of technology had already made it more and more difficult to give satisfactory expression to the inherent apelike demands of the dominant male. The male ape attempts the suppression of every ape of its own kind within sight or smell. It attempts the suppression of every male ape by physical violence and intimidation, of every female ape by physical violence and sex. From the nineteenth century onward, it was known that man is an ape. Everybody knew this was so, but nobody believed it was so. It was true but it wasn’t really true. In a sufficiently primitive technological state, humans will separate themselves into groups, the size of the group being exactly determined by the criterion that the dominant male of the moment shall be able to assert his dominance in person directly over every other member of the clan. Forced by technology into larger units, the dominant male, now the king, will perforce be obliged to delegate a considerable fraction of his over-apeness to certain immediate under-apes, known as barons. This aristocracy will pass on the king’s dominance at second-hand to still lower under-apes. Second-hand is second-best, the over-ape loses satisfaction from this delegation of his dominance. To make good his losses, he engages now in violent demonstrations of his superiority, by orgies, by torture, by gladiatorial combats, by executions, and by war.

Under-apes are surprisingly happy. They can easily understand the psychology of the over-ape. Even in the interval between blows they have time to realize that they themselves would gladly wield the whip if things were the other way round. Down in the breast of even the humblest there is always the irrational hope that he too may one day become an over-ape.

With the development of industrial techniques, the basic cravings of the male were forced deeper underground. They were forced into pallid politics, and into a chase after power that was not really power. With the rise of the Martian robots, the cravings of the male were at last wholly suppressed. The robots were taking comparatively little away from the women. From the men they were taking everything of real importance. True, the men had lost nothing economically, quite the reverse, but they had lost the last shams of political power, the last shreds of boardroom—and even bedroom—dominance.

To the men, the destruction of the robots was fast becoming urgent. Early on, the men had given way in order to placate the women. Now, before it was too late, they insisted in revolting utterly and completely against Martian dominance. The robots capitulated without even a struggle, probably because a careful calculation showed they couldn’t win at that time. There was no Horatio-at-the-Bridge attitude about them, no “face” to save, no problem of “morale” to worry about. If the battle couldn’t be won, there was no point in fighting it.

Only a small percentage of the men understood the critical point, that the robots weren’t the real Martians. It had been said often enough, of course, that the real Martians were still on Mars, underneath their protective glaciers. But this was too remote and abstract for the average man. Nobody had dug up the glaciers and looked underneath, had they? So how could you be sure? It was hard not to credit a machine with intelligence, not when it showed intelligence. It may be understood, then, how it was that most men took great pleasure in the destruction of the robots. They cooked the jolly communication chaps by throwing them into a furnace, where they soon melted into “juice.” The business-robots, after dismemberment, were left outdoors to oxidize, slowly. For the policemen-robots they reserved special compactors, built after the pattern of machines used for compacting automobiles. The robots were fed in as robots at one end. They emerged at the other end as neat cubes, jousting ball and all. Before they were impelled into the compactor, the robots were shown the emerging cubes. It was always a disappointment that, while every robot continued to display an intelligent interest in what was going on, this demonstration never put a single robot in the least out of countenance. No robot was ever known to emit the smallest Petrushka-like cheep.

The bottom fell out of the birth rate, right down to zero. All along, this was what the women had said would happen. The birth rate didn’t get off the floor until the men started to build robots again. Wearisomely, the pattern was repeated, first the communication chaps, then the business tycoons, then the policemen-robots to keep everything neat and tidy. Inevitably, there was a second revolt. Inevitably, the birth rate zeroed. Inevitably, the pattern was repeated, and repeated again.

This was all part of the plan. The Martians wanted the human population down, not down to nothing at all, but to manageable proportions. This meant a reduction by a very big factor. Without establishing fantastic slaughterhouses, it was clearly necessary to wait forty or fifty years for the existing population to die off in peace and prosperity. Replacements were kept at a low level, only about one hundred thousand a year for the whole species. Even this meager yield had to be worked hard for. It became an all-out effort for the men. The Martians were clever enough not to arrange one hundred thousand pregnancies per annum, regardless. More subtly, they worked on the basis of one pregnancy per N copulations, with N adjustable to give the required annual crop of one hundred thousand babies. In the early days, N was kept fixed, so that everybody then got it firmly into their heads that the more sex, the more babies. With this belief established, the Martians increased N more and more, as manufacturers used to do in their old time-and-motion studies. Like the old manufacturers, the Martians never reduced N. Once they discovered the sexwise capability of the human species, they kept them to it.