Henry Kuttner - Piggy Bank

“You mean giving him armament?”

“Uh-huh. If we started that, we couldn’t stop. We want a mobile unit, not a tank. The robot’s intelligence, based on flight logic, should enable him to make use of whatever he needs, the tools that are at hand. Squirt his brain full of the basic patterns, and he’ll do the rest. I’ll get at it immediately.”

Ballard wiped his lips with a napkin. “Good.”

Gunther got up. “I’m not really signing my death warrant, you know,” he said conversationally. “If you have a theft-proof safe like the robot, you won’t need me to make more diamonds. There’ll be enough on the robot to satisfy all your needs till you die. If you kill me, then, your diamond monopoly’s safe-nobody can make them but me. However, I wouldn’t make that robot without taking precautions. The Patent Office formula isn’t listed under the name of Cain, and it isn’t really a thermodynamic principle.”

“Naturally,” Ballard said. “I checked on that, without telling my investigators exactly what I was after. The patent number is your secret.”

“And I’m safe as long as it remains my secret. It will, until I die. Then it’ll be broadcast, and a lot of people will have their suspicions confirmed. There’s a pretty widespread rumor that your diamonds are artificial, but nobody can prove it. I know one guy who’d like to.”

“Ffoulkes?”

“Barney Ffoulkes, of Mercantile Alloys. He hates your insides as much as you hate his. But you’re a bigger man than he is, just now. Yeah, Ffoulkes would love to smash you, Bruce.”

“Get busy on the robot,” Ballard said, rising. “See if you can finish it before there’s another robbery.”

Gunther’s grin was sardonic. Ballard didn’t smile, but the skin crinkled around his eyes. The two men understood each other thoroughly-which was probably the reason they were both still alive.

“Metalman, eh?” Barney Ffoulkes said to his chief of staff, Dangerfield. “Making a diamond-studded robot for Ballard, eh? Bloody show-off!”

Dangerfield didn’t say anything.

“How big?”

“Seven feet, perhaps.”

“And studded -wonder how thickly? Ballard’s going to tie up a lot of rocks in that sandwich man. Wonder if he’ll have the diamonds spell out, ‘Hurrah for Bruce Ballard’?” Ffoulkes got up from his desk and buzzed around the room like a mosquito, a ginger-haired, partially bald little man with a wrinkled rat-trap face, soured in brine. “Get an offensive ready. Revise it daily. Chart a complete economic front, so we can jump on Ballard from all directions when we get the tip-off.”

Dangerfield still said nothing, but his eyebrows lifted inquiringly in the sallow, blank face.

Ffoulkes scuttled toward him, twitching. “Do I have to make a blueprint? Whenever we’ve had Ballard in a spot before, he’s wriggled out-insurance companies, loan flotations, more diamonds. No insurance company will handle him now. His diamonds can’t be inexhaustible, unless they’re artificial. If they are, he’ll find it harder and harder to float a loan. See?”

Dangerfield nodded dubiously.

“Hm-m-m. He’ll have a lot of gems tied up in this robot. It’ll be stolen, naturally. And that time we’ll strike.”

Dangerfield pursed his lips.

“O.K.,” Ffoulkes said. “So it may not work. It hasn’t worked before. But in this game the whole trick is to keep hammering till the wall’s breached. This time may be the charm. If we can once catch Ballard insolvent, he’ll go under. Anyhow, we’ve got to try. Prepare an offensive. Stocks, bonds, utilities, agricultures, ores-everything. What we want to do is force Ballard to buy on margin when he can’t cover. Meantime, be sure our protection’s paid. Hand the boys a bonus.”

Dangerfield made a circle with thumb and forefinger. Ffoulkes chuckled nastily as his chief of staff went out.

It was a time of booms and panics, of unstable economics and utterly crazy variables. Man hours, as usual, remained the base. But what in theory seemed effective in practice was somewhat different. Man hours, fed into the hopper of the social culture, emerged in fantastic forms. Science had done that-science enslaved.

The strangle hold of the robber barons was still strong. Each one wanted a monopoly, but, because they were all at war, a species of toppling chaos was the result. They tried desperately to keep their own ships afloat while sinking the enemy fleet. Science and government were handicapped by the Powers, which were really industrial empires, completely self-contained if not self-supporting units. Their semanticists and propagandists worked on the people, ladling out soothing sirup. All would be well later-when Ballard, or Ffoulkes, or All-Steel, or Unlimited Power, took over. Meantime-

Meantime the technicians of the robber barons, well subsidized, kept throwing monkey wrenches into the machinery. It was the time preceding the Scientific Revolution, and akin to the Industrial Revolution in its rapid shifting of economic values. All-Steel’s credit was based chiefly on the Hallwell Process. Unlimited Power’s scientists discovered a better, more effective method that scrapped the Hallwell Process. Result, the bottom fell out of All-Steel, and there was a brief period of frantic readjustment, during which All-Steel yanked certain secret patents out into the open and utilized them, playing hell with Ffoulkes, whose Gatun Bond Issue was based on a law of supply and demand which was automatically revised by the new All-Steel patents. Meantime each company was trying to catch the others with their pants down. Each one wanted to be master. When that enviable day arrived, the economic mess would settle, it was hoped, under the central control, and there would be Utopia.

The structure grew like the Tower of Babel. It couldn’t stop-naturally. Crime kept pace with it.

Because crime was a handy weapon. The old protection racket had been revived. All-Steel would pay the Donner gang plenty to keep their hands off All-Steel interests. If the Donner boys happened to concentrate on robberies that would weaken Ffoulkes or Ballard or Unlimited Power-fine! Enough spectacular thefts would lead to a panic during which enemy stocks would drop to the bottom, one asked, nothing bid.

And if a man went down, he was lost. His holdings would go to the wolves, and he himself would be too potentially dangerous ever to be allowed power again. Vae victis!

But diamonds were increasingly rare-and so, till now, Bruce Ballard’s empire had been safe.

The robot was sexless, but gave the impression of masculinity. Neither Ballard nor Gunther ever used the neuter pronoun in reference to the creature. Metalman Products had done their usual satisfactory job, and Gunther improved on it.

So Argus came to the castle, for final conditioning. Rather surprisingly, the robot was not vulgarly ostentatious. He was functional, a towering, symmetrical figure of gold, studded with diamonds, He was patterned on an armored knight, seven feet tall, with a cuirass of bright gold, golden greaves, golden gauntlets that looked clumsy but which contained remarkably sensitive nerve-endings. His eyes had diamond lenses, specially chosen for their refractive powers, and, logically, Ballard called him Argus.

He was blazingly beautiful, a figure out of myth. In a bright light he resembled Apollo more than Argus. He was a god come to Earth, the shower of gold that Danae saw.

Gunther sweated over the conditioning process. He worked in a maze of psychological charts, based on the mentalities of the creatures that lived by flight. Automatic reactions had to have voluntary cut-offs, controlled by logic, when reasoning power took over-reasoning power based on the flight-instinct. Self-preservation was the prime factor. The robot had it in a sufficient amount.