THE SERVANT OF THE PEOPLE

Frederik Pohl

There were things that robots could do as well as people. But there were also, Congressman Fiorello Delano Fitzgerald O’Hare believed with pride, things that required the special human touch. One of them was sitting in the House of Representatives. For him, every election year, the campaign started on the Tuesday after Labor Day. It was a tradition. It was traditional for the Congressman, anyway, feisty little seventy-plus-year-old who liked his own traditions and didn’t much care what anyone else’s were. The summer was his own and his lady wife’s, and when he started to press the flesh and hunt the votes was at the League of Women Voters televised debate and not a minute before. So at six o’clock on the evening of the eighth of September there was Carrie O’Hare one more time, straightening the fidgeting Congressman’s tie, dabbing a blob of the Congressman’s shaving cream off the lobe of the Congressman’s fuzzy pink ear and reassuring the Congressman that he was wiser, juster and, above all, far more beloved by his constituents than that brash new interloper of an opponent, the Mayor of Elk City, could ever hope to be. “Quit fussing,” said the Congressman, with his famous impudent elf’s smile. “The voters don’t mind if a candidate looks a little messy.”

“Hold still a minute, hon.”

“What for? It all has to come off again for the doctor, maybe.”

“Or maybe he’ll just take your pulse, so hold still. And listen. Please don’t tell them about game-hunting in the Sahara tonight.”

“Now, Carrie”—twinkling grin—”we leave the speeches to me and everything else to you, right? They’re going to want to know what their Congressman did over the summer, aren’t they?”

Carrie sighed and released him. It had been a successful safari—the Congressman had photographed dozens of mules, and even one actual live camel—but what did it have to do with the Congressman’s qualifications for one more term in the United States House of Representatives? “Hold it a minute,” she said as an afterthought, sent one of the household robots for a fresh pocket handkerchief, repinned the American flag button in his lapel and let it go at that. She needed all the rest of the time available on the larger task of herself. Voters might forgive a Congressman for looking rumpled, true enough, but a Congressman’s wife never.

She sat before her mirror and reviewed all the things she had to do. There were plenty, not made easier by the little knot of worry in her stomach. Well, not worry. Normal nervousness, maybe, but not real worry. The Congressman was a winner and always had been. Fiorello Delano Fitzgerald O’Hare, servant of the people for half a century plus one year, eight months and a week, might have been custom-built for politics, as well designed as any robot, and with the further advantage (she thought guiltily that you shouldn’t call it an “advantage”) of being human. He had the name for it. He had the friendly and trustworthy look, with enough leprechaun mischief to make him interesting. He had the manner that caused each of thirty thousand voters to think himself personally known to the Congressman, and above all he had the disposition. He actually enjoyed such things as eating rubber chicken at a dinner for the B’nai B’rtih, square-dancing at fireman’s fair, joining the Policemen’s Benevolent Association for a communion breakfast. He even liked getting up at five A.M. to get to a factory gate to shake the hands of nine hundred workers on the early shift. All of these things were a lot less enjoyable for the Congressman’s wife, but what she unfailingly enjoyed was the Congressman himself. For he was a sweet man.

Carrie Madeleine O’Hare was quite a sweet woman, too. You could tell that by the way she spoke to the maid tidying up behind her. Carrie had had that same maid since her marriage, forty years before. The Congressman had been thirty-five years old, Carrie herself twenty-two and the maid a wedding present, fresh off the assembly line, an old-style robot with all its brains in some central computation facility—no personality, no feelings to hurt. But Carrie treated the robot just as she would a human being—or one of the new Josephson-junction machines, so close to human that they even had voting rights… for which they had to thank in very large part the Congressman himself and damn well, Carrie thought, better remember it come November.

Carrie’s preparations only went as far as makeup, hair and underwear—there was no point in putting on the dress until they were ready to go, and the Congressman’s doctor hadn’t even arrived yet for his traditional last-minute medical check. So she pulled on a robe and descended the back stairs to the big screened porch for a breath of air. The house was ancient and three stories high. It stood on a little hill in the bend of the river, water on two sides. It would have been a fine house to raise children in—but there hadn’t been any children—and it was a first-rate house for a Congressman even without children. All through the years when small was status, the Congressman had stuck to his sixteen rooms because they were so fine for parties, so fine for entertaining delegations of voters and putting up visiting political VIPs and all the other functions of political power. Carrie sat on the porch swing, and found herself shivering. It wasn’t the temperature. That had to be at least seventy-five degrees, in the old Fahrenheit system Carrie still used inside her head. It was still summer. But the wind made her feel cold. And that was strange, when you came to think of it. When had the TV weathermen started talking about wind-chill factors even in July and September? Why was it always so windy these days? Was it just because of the simple fact that, without ever willing it to happen, Carrie herself had somehow become sixty-two years old?

And then her husband’s angry bellow from inside the house: “Carrie! Where are you? What’s this damn thing doing here?”

Carrie ran inside the house. There was her husband, flushed and angry, with that ruffled-sparrow look he got when he was excited, facing down a stranger. The doctor had arrived when she wasn’t looking, and it was a new model.

If you looked at the doctor what you saw was a sandy-haired man of youthful maturity, with little laugh wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and the expression of smiling competence that doctors cultivated. If you touched him, his handshake was firm and warm. If you listened to his voice, that was also warm—it was only if you went so far as to sniff him that you could notice a possible lack. There was no human scent of body and sweat. That meant a very recent shower, a foolproof deodorant—or a robot.

And, of course, a robot was what it was. “Oh, come on, Fee,” she coaxed, anxiously good-humored, “you know it’s just a doctor come to check your blood pressure and so on.”

“It’s not my regular doctor!” roared the Congressman, standing as tall and strong as possible for a man who, after all, was a shade shorter than Carrie herself. “I want my doctor! I’ve had the same doctor for thirty-five years, and that’s the one I want now!”

It was so bad for him to get upset right before the kickoff debate! “Now, Fee,” Carrie scolded humorously, trying to soothe him down, “you know that old dented wreck was due for the scrap heap. I’m sure that Dr.— uh—” She looked at the new robot for a name, and it supplied it, smilingly self-assured.

“I am Dr. William,” it said. “I am a fully programmed Josephson-junction autonomous-intellect model robot, Mr. Congressman, with core storage for diagnostics, first aid and general internal medicine, and of course I carry data-chip memory for most surgical procedures and test functions.”

The Congressman’s cheeks had faded from red to pink; he was not generally an irascible man. “All the same,” he began, but the robot was still talking.

“I’m truly sorry if I’ve caused you any concern, Mr. Congressman. Not only for professional reasons,” it added warmly, “but because I happen to be one of your strongest supporters. I haven’t yet had the privilege of voting in a congressional election, I’m sorry to say, because I was only activated last week, but I certainly intend to vote for you when I do.”

“Huh,” said O’Hare, looking from the robot to his wife. And then the reflexes of half a century took over. “Well, your time’s valuable, Dr. William,” he said, “so why don’t we just get on with this examination? And we can talk about the problems of this district while we do. As I guess you know, I’ve always been a leader in the fight for robot rights—” And Carrie slipped gratefully away.

Fiorello O’Hare’s vote-getting skills had been tested in more than two dozen elections, from his first runs for the school board and then the county commission—a decade before Carrie had been old enough to vote—through twenty-two terms in the Congress of the United States. Twenty-two terms: from the old days when a congressman actually had to get in a plane or a car and go to Washington, D.C., to do his job, instead of the interactive-electronics sessions that had made the job attractive again. And against twenty-two opponents. The opponents had come in all shapes and sizes, pompous old has-beens when O’Hare was a crusading youth, upstart kids as he grew older. Male or female, black or white, peaceniks and pro-lifers, spenders and budget-balancers—O’Hare had beaten them all. He had, at least, beaten every one of them who dared contest the Twenty-Third Congressional District, anyway. He had not done as well the time he made the mistake of trying for Governor (fortunately in an off year, so his House seat was safe), and not well at all the time when he had hopes for the Senate, even once for the vice-presidency. The primaries had ended one of those dreams. The national convention slew the other. O’Hare learned his lesson. If he stayed in Congress he was safe, and so were his committee chairmanships and his powerful seniority.

After all these years, Caroline O’Hare could no longer remember all the opponents her husband had faced by name. If she could dredge them out of her recollections at all, it was by a single mnemonic trait. This one was Mean. That one was Hairy. There was a Big and a Scared and a Dangerous. Classified in those terms, Carrie thought as they swept into the underground garage of the Shriner’s Auditorium, this year’s opponent was a Neat. He wore a neat brown suit with a neatly tied brown scarf and neatly shined brown shoes. He was chatting, neatly, with a small and self-assured group of his supporters as the O’Hares got out of their car and approached the elevator, and when he saw O’Hare he gave his opponent a neat, restrained smile of welcome.

The neat opponent was riding on a record of six years as the very successful mayor of a small city in the district. Mayor had been quite a vote-getter in the home town, according to the data-file printout Carrie had ordered. Her husband disdained such things—”I’m a personal man, Carrie, and I deal with the voters personally, and I don’t want to hit key issues or play to the demographics; I want them to know me.” But he must have retained a little bit of the data, for, when he saw the other group, he hurried over, smile flashing, speech ready on his lips. “A great pleasure to see you here, Mr. Mayor,” he cried, pumping the Mayor’s hand, “and to congratulate you again on the fine job you’ve been doing in Elk City!”

“You’re very kind.” Mayor smiled, nodding politely to Carrie—neat nod, neat smile, neat and pleasant voice.

“Only truthful,” O’Hare insisted as the elevator door opened for them. “Well, it’s time to do battle, I guess, and may the best man win!”

“Oh, I hope not,” the Mayor said politely. “For in that case, as I am mechanical, it would surely be you.”

O’Hare blinked, then grinned ruefully at his wife. Cordiality toward his opponents was an O’Hare trademark. It cost nothing, and who knew but what it might soften them up? Not many opponents had played that back to O’Hare. Carrie saw him pat the Mayor’s arm, stand courteously aside as they reached the auditorium floor and bow the other party out. But his expression had suddenly become firm. He was like a current breaker that had felt a surge of unexpected and dangerous power. It had opened unaware, but now it had reset itself. It would be ready for the next surge.

*

But actually, when the surge came, O’Hare wasn’t.

The first rounds of the debate went normally. It wasn’t really a true debate, of course. It was more like a virtuoso-piece ballet, with two prima ballerinas each showing off her own finest bits. A couple of perfect entrechats matched by a string of double fouettés, a marvelous grand jeté countered by a superb pas en l’air. O’Hare went first. His greatest strengths were the battles he had won, the fights he had led, the famous figures he had worked with. Not just politicians. O’Hare had been the intimate of ambassadors and corporation tycoons and scientists—he had even known Amalfi Amadeus himself, the man whose hydrogen fusion power had made the modern Utopia possible. O’Hare got an ovation after his first seven-minute performance. But so did his opponent. The Mayor was a modest and appealing figure; how handsome they made robots these days! The Mayor, talking about its triumphs in Elk City, had every name right, every figure detailed; how precise they made them! What O’Hare offered in glamour, the Mayor made up in encyclopedic competence… and then Carrie saw how the trick was done.

Against all advice, the Congressman in his second session was telling the audience about the highlights of their summer photo safari along the Nile. Against Carrie’s expectations, the audience was enjoying it. Even the Mayor. As O’Hare described how they had almost, but not quite, seen a living crocodile and the actual place where a hippopotamus had once been sighted, the Mayor was chuckling along with everyone else. But while it was chuckling it was reaching for its neat brown attache case; opened it, pulled out a module of data-store microchips, opened what looked like a pocket in the side of its jacket, removed one set of chips and replaced them with another.

It was plugging in a new set of memories! How very unfair. Carrie glanced around the crowded audience to see if any of the audience were as outraged as she, but if they were they didn’t show it. They were intent on the Congressman’s words, laughing with him, nodding with interest, clapping when applause was proper. They were a model audience, except that they did not seem to notice, or to care about, the unfairness of the Mayor. But why not? They certainly looked normal and decent enough, so friendly and so amiable and—

So neat.

Carrie’s hand flew to her mouth. She gazed beseechingly at her husband, but he was too wily a campaigner to have failed to read the audience. Without a hitch, husbanding his time to spend it where it would do the most good, he swung from the pleasures of the summer holiday to the realities of his political life. “And now,” he said, leaning forward over the lectern to beam at the audience, “it’s back to work, to finish the job you’ve been electing me for. As you know, I was one of the sponsors of the Robot ERA. A lot of voters were against that, in the old days. Even my friends in political office advised me to leave that issue alone. They said I was committing political suicide, because the voters felt that if the amendment passed there would be no way anybody could tell the difference between a human and a mechanical any more, and the country would go to the dogs. Well, it passed— and I say the country’s better off than ever, and I say I’m proud of what I did and anxious to go back and finish the job!” And he beamed triumphantly at his opponent as the applause swelled and he relinquished the floor.

But the Mayor was not in the least disconcerted. In fact, it led the clapping. When it reached the podium it cried, “I really thank you, Congressman O’Hare, and I believe that now every voter in the district, organic and mechanical alike, knows just how right you were! That amendment did not only give us mechanicals the vote. It not only purged from all the data stores any reference to the origins of any voter, mechanical or organic, but it also did the one great thing that remained to do. It freed human beings from one more onerous and difficult task—namely, the job of selecting their elected officials. What remains? Just one thing, I say—the task of carrying this one step further, by electing mechanicals to the highest offices in the land, so that human life can be pure pleasure!”

And the ovation was just as large. The Mayor waited it out, smiling gratefully toward O’Hare, and when the applause had died away it went on to supply specifics to back up its stand, all dredged, Carrie was sure, out of the store of chips she had seen it plug in.

On the stage, her husband’s expression did not change, but Carrie saw the eyes narrow again. The relay had popped open once more and reset itself, snick-snick; O’Hare knew that this opponent was a cut above the others. This campaign was not going to be quite like those that had gone before.

And indeed it wasn’t, although for the first few weeks it looked as though it would have the same sure outcome. By the first of October the Congressman was hitting his stride. Three kaffeeklatsches a day, at least one dinner every evening—he had long ago learned how to push the food around his plate to disguise the fact that he wasn’t eating. And all the hundreds of block parties and TV spots and news conferences and just strolling past the voters. The weather turned cooler, but it was still muggy, and the outdoor appearances every day began to worry Carrie. The Congressman’s feet would never give out, or his handshake, or his smile muscles. What was vulnerable was his voice. Up on a street-corner platform her enemies were the damp wind and the sooty air. Walking along a shopping block, the same—plus the quiches and pitas, the ravioli and the dim sum, the kosher hot dogs and the sushi—the whole spectrum of ethnic foods that an ethnic-wooing candidate traditionally had to seem to enjoy. “The tradition’s out of date,” Carrie told him crossly, throat lozenges in one hand and anti-acid pills in the other as he gamely tried to recuperate before going to bed, “when half the voters are robots anyway!”

Her husband sat on the edge of their bed, rubbing his throat and his feet alternately. “It’s the organics I need, love. The robots know where I stand!”

They also knew, Carrie thought but did not say, that his opponent was one of them… But robots were programmed to be fair! Poring over the daily polls after her husband had gone to sleep, Carrie almost felt confidence that they were. The Congressman’s reliable old polling service was also his driver, Martin, an antique remote-intelligence robot that needed only to query the central computation faculty to get the latest data on elections moods. Or indeed on anything else; and it was the robot’s custom to lay a printout of the last polling data on Carrie’s dressing table every night. Indeed the graphs did not look bad: 38 per cent for her husband, only 19 per cent for Mayor Thom—

But what they also showed was a whopping 43 per cent undecided, and the fly in the ointment was that the “undecideds” were overwhelmingly robots. Carrie understood why this was so; it had been so ever since her husband’s Robot ERA passed and the autonomous-intelligence models got the vote. Robots did not like to hurt anyone’s feelings. When robots were required to make a choice that might displease someone, they postponed it as long as they could. For robots were also programmed to be polite.

And if all that forty-three per cent came down for Mayor Thom—

Carrie simply would not face that possibility. Her husband was happy in his job. The Congress of the United States was an honorable career, and an easy one, too, not a small consideration for a man in his seventies who was now coughing fitfully in his sleep. In the old days it had , been a mankiller. There was always so much to do, worrying about foreign powers, raising taxes, trying to give every citizen a fair share of the nation’s prosperity—when there was any prosperity—at least, trying to give each one enough of a constant and never adequate supply of the available wealth to keep them from rioting in the streets. But since Amadeus’ gift of power, with all the limitless wealth it made available to everyone, a Congressman could take pleasure in what he did, and if he chose not to do it for a while—to take a summer off for a photo safari along the Nile, for instance—why, where was the harm? She slept uneasily that night.

Where the Congressman went, Carrie went too, even to a factory district far out of town, even when greeting the early shift meant being there at five-thirty in the morning. The sign over the chain-link fence said:

AMALFI ELECTRIC, INC.

A DIVISION OF MIDWEST POWER & TOOL CORP.

And as they approached, the managing director hurried out to greet them. “Congressman O’Hare!” he fawned. “And, yes, your lovely lady—what an honor!” He was a nervous, rabbity little man, obviously human; his name, Carrie knew from the briefing Marty had provided as they turned into the parking lot, was Robert Meacham. The briefing also said that he was the kind who could keep you talking while the whole shift passed by on the other side of the fence, so Carrie moved forward to distract him even while the Congressman was still pumping his hand. It was no trick for Carrie to find things to talk about while the Congressman wooed Meacham’s workers, not with Carrie’s photographic—really more than photographic, almost robotic—memory for the names of wives, children and pets. By the time she had finished discussing Meacham’s two spaniels, the Congressman had finished with his workers and the alert Marty was moving the car in to pick them up. Meacham detained Carrie a moment longer. “Mrs. O’Hare, can I ask you something?”

“Of course, Mr. Meacham,” she said, wishing he wouldn’t.

“Well—I can see why your husband goes after the late-model robots. They’ve got the vote. Besides, it’s not that easy to tell them from real people anyway. But there’s a lot of pre-Josephson models working on our line. They don’t have any individual intelligence—they’re radio-linked to the central computers, you know, like your driver. And they don’t even have a vote!”

“I can see,” said Carrie benignly, trying not to lose his vote but unwilling to refrain from setting him straight, “that you don’t know the Congressman very well. He doesn’t do this just for votes. He does it for love.”

And indeed that was true. And as October dwindled toward Halloween what dampened the sparkle in the Congressman’s eye was the first hint—not really a hint, hardly more than a suspicion—of love unrequited. For the polls were turning, like the autumn leaves, as the “undecideds” began to decide. He began to consult Marty’s data-link reports more and more frequently, and the more he studied them, the more a trend was clear. Every day the Congressman picked up some small fraction of a percentage point, it was true. But the Mayor picked up a larger one.

As Marty drove them to yet another factory it extruded a hard-copy of the latest results from the tiny printer in its chest and passed it back to the Congressman wordlessly. O’Hare studied the printout morosely. “I didn’t think it was going to work out this way,” he admitted at last. “It seems—it actually seems as though the enfranchised mechanicals are bloc-voting.”

“You’d think they’d do their bloc-voting for the man who gave them the Robot ERA,” Carrie said bitterly, and bit her tongue. But O’Hare only sighed and stared out at the warm, smoggy air. His wife thought dismally that the Congressman was at last beginning to show his age.

That morning’s factory was a robot robot-assembly plant. Robots were the workers, and robots were the products. Some of the production bays were a decade old and more, and the workers were CIMs—central intelligence mechanicals, like their old driver Marty. Their dented old skulls housed sensors and communications circuits, but no thought. The thinking took place in an air-conditioned, vibration-proof and lightless chamber in the bedrock under the factory floor, where a single giant computer ran a hundred and ninety robots. But if the bulk of the workers were ancient, what they produced was sparkling new. As the car drove up Carrie saw a big flatbed truck hauling away. It was furnished with what looked like pipe racks bolted to the bed, and in each niche in the pipes a shiny new Josephson-junction autonomous-intellect robot had harnessed itself to the rack and lapsed into power-down mode for the trip to the distribution center. There were more than a hundred of them in a single truckload. A hundred votes, Carrie thought longingly, assuming they would all stay in the Twenty-Third Congressional District… but she was not surprised, all the same, when she observed that the Congressman was not thinking along precisely those strategic lines.

She sighed fondly, watching him as he did what she knew he was going to do. He limped down the line of CIMs, with a word and a smile and a handshake for each… and not a vote in the lot of them. It was not a kindly place for a human being to be, noisy with the zap of welding sparks, hot, dusty. This was where the torsos were assembled and the limbs attached and the effector motors emplaced. The growing, empty robot bodies swung down the line like beefs at a meat-packer’s. Fortunately, the CIMs had only limited capacity for small talk, and so the Congressman was soon enough in the newer, cleaner detailing bays. The finishing touches were applied here. The empty skulls were filled with the Josephson-junction data processors that were their “brains.” The freezer units that kept the cryo-circuits working were installed, and into the vacant torsos went the power units that held hydrogen-fusion reactors contained in a nest of monopoles the size of a thimble. The Congressman’s time was not wasted here. All these workers were voters, enfranchised robots as new and remarkable as the ones they made. Along that line the robots being finished began to twist and move and emit sounds, as their circuits went through quality-control testing, until at the end of the line they unhooked themselves from the overhead cable, stepped off, blinked, stood silent for a moment while their internal scanners told them who and what they were, and why…

And the Congressman’s eyes gleamed, as he perceived them the way they perceived themselves. New beings. New voters!

It was the right place for the Congressman to be, a greeting for each new voter, a handshake… a vote. Carrie hated to try to pull him away, but Martin was looking worried and the schedule had to be met. “Oh, Carrie,” he whispered as she tugged at his sleeve, “they’re imprinting on me! Just like the ducklings in King Solomon’s Ring! I’m the first thing they see, so naturally they’re going to remember me forever!”

He was not only happy, he was flushed with pleasure. Carrie hoped that was what it was—pleasure, and not something more worrisome. His eyes were feverishly bright, and he talked so rapidly he was tripping over his words. She was adamant; and then, once she got him into the car, less sure. “Dear,” she ventured, as Martin closed the door behind them, “do you suppose you could possibly cancel the Baptist Men’s Prayer Breakfast?”

“Certainly not,” he said inevitably.

“You really do need a rest—”

“It’s only a week till the election,” he pointed out reasonably, “and then we’ll rest as much as you like—maybe even back to the Sahara for a few days in the sun. Now, what are you going to do?”

She stared at him uncertainly. “Do when?”

“Do now, while I go see the Baptists—it’s a men’s breakfast, you know.”

For once he had caught Carrie unprepared. Gender-segregated events were so rare that she had simply forgotten about this one. “Martin can drop me off and take you home, if you like,” her husband supplied, “but of course it’s going the wrong way—”

“No.” She opened the door on her side, kissed her husband’s warm cheek—too warm? she wondered—and got out. “I’ll take a cab. You go ahead.”

And she watched her husband pull out of one end of the parking lot just as the six-car procession she had seen coming down the far side of the fence entered at the other.

The Mayor.

It was the old days all over again, the next thing to a circus parade. Six cars! And not just cars, but bright-orange vehicles, purpose-built for nothing but campaigning. The first was an open car with half a dozen pretty young she-robots—no! They were human, Carrie was sure!—with pretty girls tossing pink and white carnations to the passersby. There were not many passersby, at that hour of the morning, but the Mayor’s parade was pulling out all the stops. Next another open car, with the neat, smiling figure of the Mayor bestowing waves and nods on all sides. Next a PA car, with a handsome male singer and a beautiful female alternating to sing all the traditional political campaign numbers, “Happy Days Are Here Again” and Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” and “God Bless America” with an up-tempo beat. And then two more flower-girl cars, surrounding a vehicle that was nothing more than a giant animated electronic display showing the latest and constantly changing poll results and extrapolations. All, of course, favoring the Mayor. How gross! And how very effective, Carrie conceded dismally to herself… “You the lady that wants the taxi?” someone called behind her, and she turned to see a cab creeping up toward her. Reliable Martin had sent for it, of course. She sighed and turned to go inside it, and then paused, shaking her head.

“No, not now. I’ll stay here a while.”

“Whatever you say, lady,” the driver agreed, gazing past her at the Mayor’s procession. It was only a central-intelligence mechanical, but Carrie was sure she saw admiration in its eyes.

The Mayor had not noticed her. Carrie devoted herself to noticing it, as inconspicuously as she could. It was repeating her husband’s tour of the plant—fair enough—but then she saw that it was not fair at all, for the Mayor had a built-in advantage. It too was a robot. In her husband’s tour of the plant he had given each worker a minute’s conversation. The Mayor gave each worker just as much conversation, but both it and the workers had their communications systems in fast mode. The sound of their voices was like the sonar squeaks of bats, the pumping of arms in the obligatory handshake like the flutter of hummingbird wings, too fast for Carrie’s eyes to follow.

A voice from behind her said, “I know who you are, Mrs. O’Hare, but would you like a carnation anyhow?”

It was one of the flower girls—not, however, one of the human ones from the first car, for human girls did not have liquid-crystal readouts across their foreheads that said Vote for Thom!

There was no guile in its expression, no hidden photographer waiting to sneak a tape of the Congressman’s wife accepting a flower from the opponent. It seemed to be simple courtesy, and Carrie O’Hare responded in kind. “Thank you. You’re putting on a really nice show,” she said, her heart envious but her tone, she hoped, only admiring. “Could you tell me something?”

“Of course, Mrs. O’Hare!”

Carrie hesitated; it was her instinct to be polite to everyone, robots included—her own programming, of course. How to put what she wanted to know? “I notice,” she said delicately, “that Mayor Thom is spending time even with the old-fashioned mechanicals that don’t have a vote. Can you tell me why?”

“Certainly, Mrs. O’Hare,” the flower girl said promptly. “There are three reasons. The first is that it looks good, so when he goes to the autonomous-intellect mechanicals they’re disposed in his favor. The second is that the Mayor is going to sponsor a bill to give the CIMs a fractional vote, too—did you know that?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t,” Carrie confessed. “But surely they can’t be treated the way humans or Josephson-junction mechanicals are?”

“Oh, no, not at all,” it agreed, smiling. “That’s why it’s only a fractional vote. You see, each of the CIMs is controlled by a central computer that is quite as intelligent as any of us, perhaps even more so; the central intelligence has no vote at all. So what Mayor Thom proposes is that each of the CIMs will have a fraction of a vote—one one-hundred-and-ninetieth of a vote, in the case of the workers here, since that’s how many of them the plant computer runs. So if they all vote, the central computer will in effect have the chance to cast a ballot on its own—you know the old slogan, Mrs. O’Hare: One intelligence, one vote!”

Carrie nodded unhappily. It made sense—it was exactly the sort of thing her husband would have done himself, if he had thought of it. But he hadn’t. Maybe he was getting past the point of thinking up the really good political ideas. Maybe— “You said there were three reasons.”

“Well, just the obvious one, Mrs. O’Hare. The same reason as your husband does it. It’s not just for votes with the Mayor. It’s love.” Then she hesitated, then confided, “I don’t know whether you know this or not, Mrs. O’Hare, but autonomous-intellect mechanicals like Mayor Thom and I have a certain discretion in our behavior patterns. One of the first things we do is study the available modes and install the ones we like best. I happen to have chosen nearly twenty per cent you, Mrs. O’Hare. And the Mayor—he’s nearly three-quarters your husband.”

There is a time for all things, thought Carrie O’Hare as she walked over to the Mayor’s procession to ask them to call her a cab. There is a time to stay, and a time to go, and maybe the time to stay in office was over for Fiorello Delano Fitzgerald O’Hare. Some of the robots her husband had greeted as they came off the assembly line were standing in a clump, waiting, no doubt, for the arrival of the next truck to bear them away. They waved to Carrie. She responded with a slight decrease of worry—they were sure votes, anyway. Unless—

She stopped short. What was the Mayor doing with them? She gazed incredulously at the scene, like a highspeed film, the Mayor thrusting a hand into a pouch, jerking it out, swiftly passing something that shone dully to the robot it was talking to and moving briskly to the next… And then, without willing it, Carrie herself was in highspeed mode, almost running toward the Mayor, her face crimson with rage. The Mayor looked up as she approached and politely geared down. “Mrs. O’Hare,” it murmured, “how nice to see you here.”

“I’m shocked!” she cried. “You’re brainwashing them!”

The mobile robot face registered astonishment and what was almost indignation. “Why, certainly not, Mrs. O’Hare! I assure you I would never do such a thing.”

“I saw you, Mayor Thom. You’re reprogramming the robots with data chips!”

Comprehension broke over the Mayor’s face, and it gestured to the she-robot who had given Carrie the flower. “Ah, the chips, yes. I see.” It pulled a chip out of the pouch and passed it to the she with a burst of highspeed squeaks—”Oh, I beg your pardon, Mrs. O’Hare. Let me repeat what I just said in normal mode. I simply asked Millicent here to display the chip contents for you.”

“Sure thing, Mayor.” Millicent smiled, tucking the chip under the strap of its halter top. The running message on Millicent’s forehead disappeared, and the legend appeared:

The Constitution of the United States of America

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense—

“Move it on, please,” ordered the Mayor. “Search ‘O’Hare.’ Most of it,” he added to Carrie, “is only the basic legislation, the Constitution, the election laws and so on. We don’t get to your husband until—ah, here it is!” And the legend read:

H.R. 29038. An Act to Propose a Constitutional Amendment to grant equal voting rights and other civil rights to citizens of mechanical origin which satisfy certain requirements as to autonomy of intellect and judgment.

“The Robot ERA,” Carrie said.

“That’s right, Mrs. O’Hare, and of course your husband’s name is on it. Then there’s nothing about him until—advance search, please, Millicent—yes. Until we come to his basic biographical information. Birth place, education, voting record, medical reports and so on—”

“Medical reports! That’s confidential material!”

The Mayor looked concerned. “Confidential, Mrs. O’Hare? But I assure you, the data on myself is just as complete—”

“It’s different with human beings! Fiorello’s doctor had no business releasing that data!”

“Ah, I see,” said the Mayor, nodding in comprehension. “Yes, of course, that is true for his present doctor, Mrs. O’Hare. But previously the Congressman made use of a CIM practitioner—a robot whose central processing functions took place in the general data systems, and of course all of that is public information. I’m sorry. I assumed you knew that. Display the Congressman’s medical history,” it added to the she, and Carrie gazed at the moving line of characters through tear-blurred eyes. It was all there. His mild tachycardia, the arthritis that kicked up every winter, the asthma, even the fact that now and then the Congressman suffered from occasional spells of constipation. “It’s disgusting to use his illnesses against him, Mayor Thom! Half of his sickness was on behalf of you robots!”

“Why, that’s true, yes.” The Mayor nodded. “It is largely tension-induced, and much of it undoubtedly occurred during the struggle for robot rights. If you’ll look at the detailed record—datum seventy-eight, line four, please, Millicent—you’ll see that his hemorrhoidectomy was definitely stress-linked, and moreover occurred just after the Robot ERA debate.” The expression on the Mayor’s face was no longer neat and self-assured, it was beginning to be worried. “I don’t understand why you are upset, Mrs. O’Hare,” Thom added defensively.

“It’s a filthy trick, that’s why!” Carrie could feel by the dampness on her cheeks that she was actually weeping now, and mostly out of helpless frustration. It was the one political argument her husband could never answer. It was obvious that the strain of the Robot ERA had cost Congressman O’Hare physical damage. The robots would understand that, and would behave as programmed. They served human beings. They spared them drudgery and pain. They would, therefore, remove him from a task that might harm him—not out of dislike, but out of love. “Don’t you see it’s not like that any more?” she blazed. “There’s no strain to being in Congress any more—no tax bills to pass, no foreign nations to arm against, no subversives to control—why, if you look at the record you’ll see that his doctor urged Fiorello to run again!”

“Ah, yes.” The Mayor nodded. “But one never knows what may come up in the future—”

“One damn well does,” she snapped. “One knows that it’ll break Fee’s heart to lose this election!”

The Mayor glanced at the she-robot, then returned to Carrie. Its neat, concerned face was perplexed and it was silent for a moment in thought.

Then it spoke in the bat-squeak triple time to the she, which pulled the chip out of its scanning slot, handed it to the Mayor and departed on a trot for the van with the poll displays. “One moment, please, Mrs. O’Hare,” said the Mayor, tucking the chip into its own scanner. “I’ve asked Millicent to get me a data chip on human psychogenic medicine. I must study this.” And it closed its eyes for a moment, opening them only to receive and insert the second chip from the she.

When the Mayor opened its eyes its expression was— regret? Apology? Neither of those, Carrie decided. Possibly compassion. It said, “Mrs. O’Hare, my deepest apologies. You’re quite right. It would cause the Congressman great pain to be defeated by me, and I will make sure that every voting mechanical in the district knows this by this time tomorrow morning.”

There had to be right words to say, but Carrie O’Hare couldn’t find them. She contented herself with “Thank you,” and then realized that those had been the right words after all… but was unable to leave it at that. “Mayor Thom? Can I ask you something?”

“Of course, Mrs. O’Hare.”

“It’s just—well, I’m sure you realize that you people could easily beat my husband if you stuck together. You could probably do that in nearly every election in the country. You could rule the nation—and yet you don’t seem to go after that power.”

The Mayor frowned. “Power, Mrs. O’Hare? You mean the chance to make laws and compel others to do what you want them to? Why, good heavens, Mrs. O’Hare, who in his right mind would want that?” He paused for a moment, looking into space. “Still,” he said thoughtfully, “given the right circumstances, I suppose we could learn.”

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