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-gas-pipe 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 spit curl 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 of them. Another double whiskey followed the first; the money for this was no longer important because he would be earning no more after this week. 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 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 relished 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 preflight it for you and give you an idea just how versatile this machine is."
The speaker, dressed in gray coveralls of the exact same color as the machine's finish, 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 Nine 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 finish, 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 Nine, something that you might find it impossible to believe until you see it in action. A trained operator can cut a Mark Nine 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 and now I have one more question to ask you. In what style would you like it to be drawn?"
Martin made a porcine interrogative sound.
"Startled aren't you, sir — well I thought you would be. The Mark Nine 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 eye, 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." Martin bent over and looked in through the hooded opening.
"Just perfect, isn't it? But if for any reason the operator is dissatisfied the image can be changed now in any manner desired by manipulation of the editorial controls. And when satisfied the print button is depressed, the image is printed in a single stroke onto the paper below."
A pneumatic groan echoed theatrically from the bowels of the machine as a rectangular box crept down on a shining plunger and pressed against the paper. It hissed and a trickle of vapor oozed out. The machine rose back to position and the man in the coveralls held up the paper, smiling.
"Now isn't that a fine piece of art?"
Martin grunted.
Pachs looked at it and couldn't take his eyes away: he was afraid he was going to be sick. The cover was not only good, it was good Caniff, just as the master might have drawn it himself. Yet the most horrible part was that it was Pachs's own cover, his own layout. Improved. He had never been what might be called a tremendous artist, but he wasn't a bad artist. He did all right in comics, and during the good years he was on top of the pack. But the field kept shrinking, and when the machines came in everything went bust and there was almost no spot for an artist, just a job here and there as sort of layout boy and machine minder. He had taken that — how many years now? — because old and dated as his work was, he was still better than any machine that drew heads with a rubber stamp.
Not any more. He could not even pretend to himself any more that he was needed, or even useful.
The machine was better.
He realized then that he had been clenching his fists so tight that his nails had sunk into the flesh of his palms. He opened and rubbed them together and they were shaking badly. The Mark IX was turned off and they were all gone: he could hear Miss Fink's machine takking away in the outer office. The young girl was telling Martin about the special supplies she would need to buy to operate the machine. When Pachs closed the connecting door he cut off the grumbling reply about extra expenses not being mentioned. Pachs warmed his fingers in his armpits until the worst of the tremors stopped. Then he carefully pinned a sheet of paper onto his drawing board and adjusted the light so it would not be in his eyes. With measured strokes he ruled out a standard comic page and separated it into six panels, making the sixth panel a big one, stretching the width of the page. He worked steadily at the penciling, stopping only once to stretch his back and walk over to the window and look out. Then he went back to the board and as the afternoon light faded he finished the inking. Very carefully he washed off his battered but still favorite Windsor & Newton brush and slipped it back into the spring holder.