“As a soi-disant common cutpurse?” Zeb asked, somewhat nettled at the other robot’s peremptory manner.
Timothy looked him over carefully. “You talk funny,” he said. “They stick you with one of those surplus vocabularies again? Never mind. You see how it’s done?”
Zeb hesitated, craning his neck to look for pursuit, of which there seemed to be none. “Well, one might venture that that is correct,” he said.
“Okay. Now you do it.” Timothy said cheerfully, and he steered Zeb into the alley for the hotel tourist trap’s stage door.
By midnight Zeb had committed five felonies of his own, had been an accomplice in two more, and had watched the smaller robot commit eight single-handed, and the two muggers were dividing their gains in the darkest corner-not very dark-of an all-night McDonald’s on North Michigan Avenue. “You done good, kid.” Timothy admitted expansively. “For a green kid anyway. Let’s see. Your share comes to six watches, eight pieces of jewelry, counting the fake coral necklace you shouldn’t have bothered with, and looks like six to seven hundred in cash.”
“As well as quite a few credit cards,” Zeb said eagerly.
“Forget the credit cards. You only keep what you can spend or what doesn’t have a name on it. Think you’re ready to go out on your own?”
“One hesitates to assume such responsibility-“
“Because you’re not. So forget it.” The night’s work done, Timothy seemed to have become actually garrulous. “Bet you can’t tell me why I wanted you backing me up those two times.”
“One acknowledges a certain incomprehension,” Zeb confessed. “There is an apparent dichotomy. When there were two victims, or even three, you chose to savage them single-handed. Yet for solitary prey you elected to have an accomplice.”
“Right! And you know why? You don’t. So I’ll tell you. You get a he and a she, or even two of each, and the he’s going to think about keeping the she from getting hurt; that’s the way the program reads. So no trouble. But those two hes by themselves-hell, if I’d gone up against either of those mothers, he might’ve taken my knife away from me and picked my nose with it. You got to understand robot nature, kid. That’s what the job is all about. Don’t you want a Big Mac or something?”
Zeb shifted uncomfortably. “I should think not, thank you,” he said, but the other robot was looking at him knowingly.
“No food-tract subsystems, right?”
“Well, my dear Timothy, in the agricultural environment I inhabited there was no evident need-“
“You don’t need them now, but you ought to have them. Also liquid-intake tanks, and maybe an air-cycling system, so you can smoke cigars. And get rid of that faggoty vocabulary they stuck you with. You’re in a class occupation,” he said earnestly, “and you got to live up to your station, right? No subway trains. No counting out the pennies when you get change. You don’t take change. Now you don’t want to make trouble your first day on the job; so we’ll let you go until you’ve finished a whole week. But then you go back to that bleached-blonde Three-R and we’ll get you straightened out,” he promised. “Now let’s go fence our jewels and stuff and call it a night.”
All in all, Zeb was quite pleased with himself. His pockets lined with big bills, he read menus outside fancy restaurants to prepare himself for his new-attachments. He was looking forward to a career at least as distinguished as Timothy’s own.
That was his third night on the Gold Coast.
He never got a chance at a fourth.
His last marks of the evening gave him a little argument about parting with a diamond ring. So, as taught, Zeb backhanded the he and snarled at the she and used a little more force than usual when he ripped the ring off the finger. Two minutes later and three blocks away, he took a quick look at his loot under a streetlight. He recoiled in horror.
There was a drop of blood on the ring.
That victim had not been a robot. She had been a living true human female being, and when he heard all the police sirens in the world coming straight at him, he was not in the least surprised.
“You people,” said the rehab instructor, “have been admitted to this program because, a, you have been unemployed for not less than twenty-one months, b, have not fewer than six unexcused absences from your place of training or employment, c, have a conviction for a felony and are currently on parole, or, d, are of a date of manufacture eighteen or more years past, choice of any of the above. That’s what the regulations say, and what they mean,” she said, warming to her work, “is, you’re scum. Scum is hopeless, shiftless, dangerous, a social liability. Do you all understand that much at least?” She gazed angrily around the room at her seven students.
She was short, dumpy, red-haired, with bad skin. Why they let shes like this one off the production line Zeb could not understand. He fidgeted in his seat, craning his neck to see what his six fellow students were like, until her voice crackled at him: “You! With the yellow sweater! Zeb!”
He finched. “Pardon me, madam?”
She said, with gloomy satisfaction, “I know your type. You’re a typical recidivist lumpenprole, you are. Can’t even pay attention to somebody who’s trying to help you when your whole future is at stake. What’ve I got, seven of you slugs? I can see what’s coming. I guarantee two of you will drop out without finishing the course, and I’ll have to expell two more because you skip classes or come in late. And the other three’ll be back on the streets or in the slammer in ninety days. Why do I do it.” She shook her head and then, lifting herself ponderously, went to the blackboard and wrote her three commandments:
1. ON TIME
2. EVERY DAY
3. EVEN WHEN YOU DON’T WANT TO
She turned around, leaning on the back of her chair. “Those are your Golden Rules, you slugs. You’ll obey them as God’s commandments, and don’t you forget it. You’re here to learn how to be responsible, socially valuable creations, and-what?”
The skinny old he-robot in the seat next to Zeb was raising a trembling hand. It was easy to see how he qualified for the rehabilitation program. He was a thirty-year old model at least, with ball joints in the shoulders and almost no facial mobility at all. He quavered, “What if we just can’t, teacher? I mean, like we’ve got a sudden cryogenic warmup and have to lie down, or haven’t had a lube job, or-“
“You give me a pain,” the instructor told him, nodding to show that pain was exactly what she had expected from the likes of him. “Those are typical excuses, and they’re not going to be accepted in this group. Now if you have something really wrong with you, what you have to do is call up at least two hours before class and get yourself excused. Is that so hard to remember? But you won’t do it when push comes to shove, because you slugs never do.”
The ancient said obstinately, “Two hours is a pretty long time. I can’t always tell that far ahead, teacher. A lot can happen.”
“And don’t call me teacher!” She turned back to the board and wrote:
DR: ELENA MINCUS, B.SC., MA., PH.D.
“YOU CAN CALL ME DR. MINCUS OR YOU CAN CALL ME MA’AM. NOW PAY ATTENTION.”
And Zeb did, because the ten nights in the county jail before he got his hearing and his first offender’s parole had convinced him he didn’t want to go back there again. The noise! The crowding! The brutality of the jailers! There was nothing you could do about that, either, because some of them were human beings. Maybe most of them were. Looked at in a certain way, there probably wouldn’t even have been a jail if some human beings hadn’t wanted to be jail guards. What was the sense of punishing a robot by locking him up?