Pohl Frederik - The Midas Plague

And they had been wonderful about the wedding gifts, when Morey and their daughter got married. The most any member of Morey’s family had been willing to take was a silver set or a few crystal table pieces. The Elons had come through with a dazzling promise to accept a car, a birdbath for their garden and a complete set of living-room furniture! Of course, they could afford it—they had to consume so little that it wasn’t much strain for them even to take gifts of that magnitude. But without their help, Morey knew, the first few months of matrimony would have been even tougher consuming than they were.

But on this particular night it was hard for Morey to like anyone. He responded with monosyllables; he barely grunted when Elon proposed a toast to his promotion and his brilliant future. He was preoccupied.

Rightly so. Morey, in his deepest, bravest searching, could find no clue in his memory as to just what the punishment might be for what he had done. But he had a sick certainty that trouble lay ahead.

Morey went over his problem so many times that an anesthesia set in. By the time dinner was ended and he and his father-in-law were in the den with their brandy, he was more or less functioning again.

Elon, for the first time since Morey had known him, offered him one of his cigars. “You’re Grade Five—can afford to smoke somebody else’s now, hey?”

“Yeah,” Morey said glumly.

There was a moment of silence. Then Elon, as punctilious as any companion-robot, coughed and tried again. “Remember being peaked till I hit Grade Five,” he reminisced meaningfully. “Consuming keeps a man on the go, all right. Things piled up at the law office, couldn’t be taken care of while ration points piled up, too. And consuming comes first, of course—that’s a citizen’s prime duty. Mother and I had our share of grief over that, but a couple that wants to make a go of marriage and citizenship just pitches in and does the job, hey?”

Morey repressed a shudder and managed to nod.

“Best thing about upgrading,” Elon went on, as if he had elicited a satisfactory answer, “don’t have to spend so much time consuming, give more attention to work. Greatest luxury in the world, work. Wish I had as much stamina as you young fellows. Five days a week in court are about all I can manage. Hit six for a while, relaxed first time in my life, but my doctor made me cut down. Said we can’t overdo pleasures. You’ll be working two days a week now, hey?”

Morey produced another nod.

Elon drew deeply on his cigar, his eyes bright as they watched Morey. He was visibly puzzled, and Morey, even in his half-daze, could recognize the exact moment at which Elon drew the wrong inference. “Ah, everything okay with you and Cherry?” he asked diplomatically.

“Fine!” Morey exclaimed. “Couldn’t be better!”

“Good. Good.” Elon changed the subject with almost an audible wrench. “Speaking of court, had an interesting case the other day. Young fellow—year or two younger than you, I guess—came in with a Section Ninety-seven on him. Know what that is? Breaking and entering!”

“Breaking and entering,” Morey repeated wonderingly, interested in spite of himself. “Breaking and entering what?”

“Houses. Old term; law’s full of them. Originally applied to stealing things. Still does, I discovered.”

“You mean he stole something?” Morey asked in bewilderment.

“Exactly! He stole. Strangest thing I ever came across. Talked it over with one of his bunch of lawyers later; new one on him, too. Seems this kid had a girl friend, nice kid but a little, you know, plump. She got interested in art.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Morey said.

“Nothing wrong with her, either. She didn’t do anything. She didn’t like him too much, though. Wouldn’t marry him. Kid got to thinking about how he could get her to change her mind and—well, you know that big Mondrian in the Museum?”

“I’ve never been there,” Morey said, somewhat embarrassed.

“Um. Ought to try it someday, boy. Anyway, comes closing time at the Museum the other day, this kid sneaks in. He steals the painting. That’s right— steals it. Takes it to give to the girl.”

Morey shook his head blankly. “I never heard of anything like that in my life.”

“Not many have. Girl wouldn’t take it, by the way. Got scared when he brought it to her. She must’ve tipped off the police, I guess. Somebody did. Took ’em three hours to find it, even when they knew it was hanging on a wall. Pretty poor kid. Forty-two room house.”

“And there was a law against it?” Morey asked. “I mean it’s like making a law against breathing.”

“Certainly was. Old law, of course. Kid got set back two grades. Would have been more but, my God, he was only a Grade Three as it was.”

“Yeah,” said Morey, wetting his lips. “Say, Dad—”

“Um?”

Morey cleared his throat. “Uh—I wonder—I mean what’s the penalty, for instance, for things like—well, misusing rations or anything like that?”

Elon’s eyebrows went high. “Misusing rations?”

“Say you had a liquor ration, it might be, and instead of drinking it, you—well, flushed it down the drain or something…”

His voice trailed off. Elon was frowning. He said, “Funny thing, seems I’m not as broadminded as I thought I was. For some reason, I don’t find that amusing.”

“Sorry,” Morey croaked.

And he certainly was.

It might be dishonest, but it was doing him a lot of good, for days went by and no one seemed to have penetrated his secret. Cherry was happy. Wainwright found occasion after occasion to pat Morey’s back. The wages of sin were turning out to be prosperity and happiness.

There was a bad moment when Morey came home to find Cherry in the middle of supervising a team of packing-robots; the new house, suitable to his higher grade, was ready, and they were expected to move in the next day. But Cherry hadn’t been belowstairs, and Morey had his household robots clean up the evidences of what they had been doing before the packers got that far.

The new house was, by Morey’s standards, pure luxury.

It was only fifteen rooms. Morey had shrewdly retained one more robot than was required for a Class Five, and had been allowed a compensating deduction in the size of his house.

The robot quarters were less secluded than in the old house, though, and that was a disadvantage. More than once Cherry had snuggled up to him in the delightful intimacy of their one bed in their single bedroom and said, with faint curiosity, “I wish they’d stop that noise.” And Morey had promised to speak to Henry about it in the morning. But there was nothing he could say to Henry, of course, unless he ordered Henry to stop the tireless consuming through each of the day’s twenty-four hours that kept them always ahead, but never quite far enough ahead, of the inexorable weekly increment of ration quotas.

But, though Cherry might once in a while have a moment’s curiosity about what the robots were doing, she was not likely to be able to guess at the facts. Her up-bringing was, for once, on Morey’s side —she knew so little of the grind, grind, grind of consuming that was the lot of the lower classes that she scarcely noticed that there was less of it.

Morey almost, sometimes, relaxed.

He thought of many ingenious chores for robots, and the robots politely and emotionlessly obeyed.

Morey was a success.

It wasn’t all gravy. There was a nervous moment for Morey when the quarterly survey report came in the mail. As the day for the Ration Board to check over the degree of wear on the turned-in discards came due, Morey began to sweat. The clothing and furniture and household goods the robots had consumed for him were very nearly in shreds. It had to look plausible, that was the big thing—no normal person would wear a hole completely through the knee of a pair of pants, as Henry had done with his dress suit before Morey stopped him. Would the Board question it?