Гарри Гаррисон - 50 in 50

"What do you want?"

"You told me you wanted to see me, Mr. Martin."

"Yeah, yeah," Martin mumbled half to himself. He scratched flakes of dandruff loose from the back of his head with the chewed end of a pencil, and rocked from side to side in his chair.

"Business is business, Pachs, you know that, and expenses go up all the time. Paper — you know how much it costs a ton? So we gotta cut corners…"

"If you're thinking of cutting my salary again, Mr. Martin, I don't think I could. . well, maybe not much…"

"I'm gonna have to let you go, Pachs. I've bought a Mark IX to cut expenses and I already hired some kid to run it."

"You don't have to do that, Mr. Martin," Pachs said hurriedly, aware that his words were tumbling one over the other and that he was pleading, but not caring. "I could run the machine I'm sure, just give me a few days to catch on…"

"Outta the question. In the first place I'm paying the kid beans because she's just a kid and that's the starting salary, and in the other place she's been to school about this thing and can really grind the stuff out. You know I'm no bastard, Pachs, but business is business. And I'll tell you what, this is only Tuesday and I'll pay you for the rest of the week. How's that? And you can take off right now."

"Very generous, particularly after eight years," Pachs said, forcing his voice to be calm.

"That's all right, it's the least I could do." Martin was congenitally immunje to sarcasm.

The lost feeling hit Pachs then, a dropping away of his stomach, a sensation that everything was over. Martin was back on the phone again and there was really nothing that Pachs could say. He walked out of the office, walking very straight, and behind him he heard the banging of Miss Fink's machine halt for a instant. He did not want to see her, to face those tender and damp eyes, not now. Instead of turning to go back to the studio, where he would have to pass her desk, he opened the hall door and stepped out. He closed it slowly behind him and stood with his back to it for an instant, until he realized it was frosted glass and she could see his figure from the inside: he moved hurriedly away.

There was a cheap bar around the corner where he had a beer every payday, and he went there now. "Good morning and top of the morning to you. . Mr. Pachs," the robot bartender greeted him with recorded Celtic charm, hesitating slightly between the stock phrase and the search of the customer-tapes for his name. "And will you be having the usual?"

"No I will not be having the usual, you plastic and gaspipe imitation of a cheap stage Irishman, I'll be having a double whiskey."

"Sure and you are the card, sir," the electronically affable bartender nodded, horsehair spitcurl bobbing, as it produced a glass and bottle and poured a carefully measured drink.

Pachs drank it in a gulp and the unaccustomed warmth burned through the core of cold indifference that he had been holding on to. Christ, it was all over, all over. They would get him now with their Senior Citizens' Home and all the rest, he was good as dead.

There are some things that don't bear thinking about. This was one. Another double whiskey followed the first, the money for this was no longer important because he would be earning no more after this week. And the unusual dose of alcohol blurred some of the pain. Now, before he started thinking about it too much, he had to get back to the office. Clean his personal junk out of the taboret and pick up his paycheck from Miss Fink. It would be ready, he knew that; when Martin was through with you he liked to get you out of the way, quickly.

"Floor please?" the voice questioned from the top of the elevator.

"Go straight to hell!" he blurted out. He had never before realized how many robots there were around: Oh how he hated them today. "I'm sorry, that firm is not in this building, have you consulted the registry?"

"Twenty-three," he said and his voice quavered, and he was glad he was alone in the elevator. The doors closed.

There was a hall entrance to the studio and this door was standing open. He was halfway through the door before he realized why — then it was too late to turn back. The Mark VIII that he had nursed along and used for so many years lay on its side in the corner, uprooted and very dusty on the side that had stood against the wall.

Good, he thought to himself, and at the same time knew it was stupid to hate a machine, but still relishing the thought that it was being discarded too. In its place stood a columnar apparatus in a gray-crackle cabinet. It reached almost to the ceiling and appeared as ponderous as a safe.

"It's all hooked up now, Mr. Martin, ready to go with a hundred-percent lifetime guarantee, as you know. But I'll just sort of pre-flight it for you and give you an idea just how versatile this versatile machine is."

The speaker was dressed in gray coveralls of the exact same color as the machine's finish, and was pointing at it with a gleaming screwdriver. Martin watched, frowning, and Miss Fink fluttered in the background. There was someone else there, a thin young girl in a pink sweater who bovinely chewed at a cud of gum.

"Let's give Mark IX here a real assignment, Mr. Martin. A cover for one of your magazines, something I bet you never thought a machine could tackle before, and normal machines can't…"

"Fink!" Martin barked and she rambled over with a sheet of illustration board and a small color sketch.

"We got just one cover in the house to do, Mr. Martin," she said weakly. "You okayed it for Mr. Pachs to do…"

"The hell with all that," Martin growled, pulling it from her hand and looking at it closely. "This is for our best book, do you understand that, and we can't have no hack horsing around with rubber stamps. Not on the cover of Fighting Real War Battle Aces."

"You need not have the slightest worry, I assure you," the man in the overalls said, gently lifting the sketch from Martin's fingers. "I'm going to show you the versatility of the Mark IX, something that you might find it impossible to believe until you see it in action. A trained operator can cut a Mark IX tape from a sketch or a description. And the results are always dramatic to say the least." He seated himself at a console with typewriter keys that projected from the side of the machine, and while he typed a ribbon of punched tape collected in the basket at one side.

"Your new operator knows the machine code and breaks down any art concept into standard symbols, cut on tape. The tape can be examined or corrected, stored or modified and used over again if need be. There — I've recorded the essence of your sketch. Now I have one more question to ask you — in what style would you like it to be done?"

Martin |nade a porcine interrogative sound.

"Startled aren't you, sir — well I thought you would be. The Mark IX contains style tapes of all the great masters of the Golden Age. You can have Kubert or Caniff, Giunta or Barry. For figure work you can use Raymond, for your romances, capture the spirit of Drake."

"How's about Pachs?"

"I'm sorry, I'm afraid I don't know of—"

"A joke. Let's get going. Caniff, that's what I want to see."

Pachs felt himself go warm all over, then suddenly cold. Miss Fink looked over and caught his eyes, and looked down, away. He clenched his fists and shifted his feet to leave, but listened instead. He could not leave, not yet.

"… and the tape is fed into the machine, the illustration board centered on the impression table and the cycle button depressed. So simple, once a tape has been cut, that a child of three could operate it. A press on the button and just stand back. Within this genius of a machine the orders are being analyzed and a picture built up. Inside the memory circuits are bits and pieces of every object that man has ever imagined or seen and drawn for his own edification. These are assembled in the correct manner in the correct proportions and assembled on the collator's screen. When the final picture is complete the all-clear light flashes — there it goes — and we can examine the completed picture on the screen here."