Walter Tevis - Mockingbird

Sometimes Spofforth would stop and minutely examine the equipment of a store, to see if its computers were working properly, keeping supplies at the proper level, its Make One unloaders ready and able to handle the morning’s trucks, its vending machines in good working order. He might go into a clothing store, slip his special Unlimited credit card into a slot, speak out loud into the Orderphone, saying, “I want a pair of gray trousers that will fit me tightly.” Then he would stand in one of the little booths, just barely being able to fit into it, let himself be measured by sound waves, and step out again to watch the machines that would select the fabric from huge overhead bolts, cut it, and stitch his trousers together before returning his credit card. If something went wrong—and it often did—with the way the zipper was put in or the pockets were made or whatever, he would either repair the machine himself or try to commandeer a technician robot by telephone to repair it. If the telephone was working.

Or he would enter a sewer main and look around him to see what was cracking or jammed or rusting, and do what he could to get that repaired. Without him, New York might have no longer functioned at all. He sometimes wondered how other cities stayed alive, with no Make Nines, and no really effective humans around; he remembered the piles of garbage in the streets of Cleveland, and how poorly everyone had been dressed in St. Louis when he had served, briefly, as mayor of that city. And that had been almost a century before. No one in St. Louis had had pockets for years, and everyone’s shirts had been too big, until Spofforth himself had repaired the sonic measuring equipment and removed a dead cat from the pocket machine of the city’s only clothing store. They were probably not yet naked and starving in St. Louis; but what would happen in twenty blues, when everyone was old and weak, and there were no young people around with sense enough to go out and find a Make Seven to help in an emergency? Had he been able to he would have replicated himself, putting another hundred Make Nines into the world to keep things running in Baltimore and Los Angeles and Philadelphia and New Orleans. Not because he cared that much for humanity, but because he hated to see machinery that worked poorly. He thought of himself as a machine sometimes, and he felt responsible.

But had he been able to produce more Make Nines he would have made certain they would come into the world without the ability to feel. And with the ability to die. With the gift of death.

On this hot August afternoon he did not stop anywhere until he came to a squat old building on Central Park West. He had a particular thing on his mind.

The building was one of the few in the city made of concrete, and it had columns in front of it and big, multi-paned windows and a dark, stained old wooden door. He opened the door, entered a dusty lobby with a glass chandelier hanging from a white ceiling, and walked up to a wooden counter with a scarred, gray plastic top.

Behind the counter a small man was hunched in an armchair, asleep.

Spofforth spoke to him sharply. “Are you the mayor of New York?”

The man opened his eyes sleepily. “Uh-huh,” he said. “I’m the mayor.”

“I want to talk to National Records,” Spofforth said, allowing irritation to show1 in his voice. “I want the population for western America.”

The man had wakened a bit. “Don’t know about that ,” he said. “Nobody just comes in here off the street and talks to the records.” He stood up and stretched, arrogantly. Then he looked at Spofforth more closely. “You a robot ?” he said.

“That’s right,” Spofforth said. “Make Nine.”

The man stared at him for a moment. Then he said, blinking, “Make Nine ?”

“Ask your Control what to do. I want to talk to Government Records.”

The man was peering at him now, with some interest. “They call you Spofforth?” he said. “The one who tells City Council how high to keep the water pressure and when to get the tires for thought buses? Things like that?”

“I’m Spofforth and I can have you fired. Call your Computer Control.”

“Okay,” the man said. “Okay, sir.” Then he flipped a switch on a table beside his armchair. A synthetic female voice from a speaker somewhere said, “This is Government.”

“There’s a Make Nine robot here. Name of Spofforth. Wants to talk to Government Records…”

“I see,” the voice said, a trifle sweetly. “What may I help you with?”

“Does he have access?”

The speaker hummed a moment. Then the artificial voice said, “Of course he has access. If not he, who?”

The man flipped the switch off and then looked toward Spofforth. “Okay, sir,” he said, trying to sound helpful.

“Well,” Spofforth said, “where is the record?”

“The Population Record is… ah…” He began looking around the room. There was nothing in the room to look at, except the chandelier, and for a moment he stared at a distant wall. Then he shrugged, leaned over, and flipped the switch again, and the female voice again said, “This is Government.”

“This is the mayor. Where’s the National Population Record?”

“In New York,” the voice said. “In Government Hall, Central Park West.”

“That’s where I am,” the mayor said. “Where is it in the building?”

“Fifth floor. Second door on the left,” the Government of the United States said.

As the man was turning the switch off again, Spofforth asked him where the elevator was.

“Don’t work, sir. Not since I remember.”

Spofforth looked at him a moment, wondering just how far back a human like that could remember. Probably no more than a blue. “Where are the stairs?” he said.

“All the way back and to the right,” the mayor said. Then he fumbled in his shirt pocket, took out a joint and held it speculatively between his stubby fingers. “Tried to get that elevator fixed a lot of times. But you know how robots are…”

“Yes,” Spofforth said, heading for the stairs, “I know how robots are.”

The Records console was a tarnished metal box about the size of a man’s head, with a switch and a speaker. In front of it sat a metal chair. That was all there was in the room.

He turned the switch to the green “on” position and a rather cocky-sounding male voice said, “This is the record of the population of the world.”

Suddenly, at this final annoyance, Spofforth became furious. “You’re supposed to be for North America. I don’t want the whole goddamn world.”

Instantly the voice said brightly, “The population of the whole goddamn world is nineteen million four hundred thirty thousand seven hundred sixty-nine, as of noon, Greenwich Standard Time. By continent, alphabetically: Africa has approximately three million, ninety-three percent dormitory-trained, four percent freeloaders, and the rest in institutions. Asia has about four and a half million souls, ninety-seven percent dormitory and almost all the others in institutions. Australia has been evacuated and has zero population. Europe is about the same…”

“Shut up !” Spofforth said. “I don’t want to know all that. I want to know about a person from North America. One person…”

The voice interrupted him. “Okay,” it said, “ okay . The goddamn population of North America is two million one hundred seventy-three thousand and twelve, with ninety-two percent dormitory-trained…”

“ I don’t care about that,” Spofforth said. He had run into computers like this one before, but not for a long time. They dated from an era long before his own creation when it had been a fad to give machines “personality,” when the techniques of Random Programming had first been worked out. One thing he didn’t understand about the way the computer had been programmed, and he decided to ask. “Why do you say ‘goddamn’?” he said.