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 "The tradition's out of date," Carrie told him crossly, throat lozenges in one hand and anti-acid pills in the other as he gamely tried to recuperate before going to bed, "when half the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.