Player Piano (3 page)

Winded after a quarter-mile run through the length of the building, Paul caught the sweeper just as it reached a chute. It gagged, and spat the cat down the chute and into a freight car outside. When Paul got outside, the cat had scrambled up the side of the freight car, tumbled to the ground, and was desperately clawing her way up a fence.

“No, kitty, no!” cried Paul.

The cat hit the alarm wire on the fence, and sirens screamed from the gate house. In the next second the cat hit the charged wires atop the fence. A pop, a green flash, and the cat sailed high over the top strand as though thrown. She dropped to the asphalt—dead and smoking, but outside.

An armored car, its turret nervously jerking its brace of machine guns this way and that, grumbled to a stop by the small corpse. The turret hatch clanged open, and a plant guard cautiously raised his head. “Everything all right, sir?”

“Turn off the sirens. Nothing but a cat on the fence.” Paul knelt, and looked at the cat through the mesh of the fence, frightfully upset. “Pick up the cat and take her to my office.”

“Beg your pardon, sir?”

“The cat—I want her taken to my office.”

“She’s dead, sir.”

“You heard me.”

“Yessir.”

Paul was in the depths again as he climbed into his car in front of Building 58. There was nothing in sight to divert him, nothing but asphalt, a perspective of blank, numbered façades, and wisps of cold cirrus clouds in a strip of blue sky. Paul glimpsed the only life visible through a narrow canyon between Buildings 57 and 59, a canyon that opened onto the
river and revealed a bank of gray porches in Homestead. On the topmost porch an old man rocked in a patch of sunlight. A child leaned over the railing and launched a square of paper in a lazy, oscillating course to the river’s edge. The youngster looked up from the paper to meet Paul’s gaze. The old man stopped rocking and looked, too, at the curiosity, a living thing in the Ilium Works.

As Paul passed Katharine Finch’s desk on his way into his office, she held out his typewritten speech. “That’s very good, what you said about the Second Industrial Revolution,” she said.

“Old, old stuff.”

“It seemed very fresh to me—I mean that part where you say how the First Industrial Revolution devalued muscle work, then the second one devalued routine mental work. I was fascinated.”

“Norbert Wiener, a mathematician, said all that way back in the nineteen-forties. It’s fresh to you because you’re too young to know anything but the way things are now.”

“Actually, it is kind of incredible that things were ever any other way, isn’t it? It was so ridiculous to have people stuck in one place all day, just using their senses, then a reflex, using their senses, then a reflex, and not really thinking at all.”

“Expensive,” said Paul, “and about as reliable as a putty ruler. You can imagine what the scrap heap looked like, and what hell it was to be a service manager in those days. Hangovers, family squabbles, resentments against the boss, debts, the war—every kind of human trouble was likely to show up in a product one way or another.” He smiled. “And happiness, too. I can remember when we had to allow for holidays, especially around Christmas. There wasn’t anything to do but take it. The reject rate would start climbing around the fifth of December, and up and up it’d go until Christmas. Then the holiday, then a horrible reject rate; then New Year’s, then a ghastly reject level. Then things would taper down to normal—
which was plenty bad enough—by January fifteenth or so. We used to have to figure in things like that in pricing a product.”

“Do you suppose there’ll be a Third Industrial Revolution?”

Paul paused in his office doorway. “A third one? What would that be like?”

“I don’t know exactly. The first and second ones must have been sort of inconceivable at one time.”

“To the people who were going to be replaced by machines, maybe. A third one, eh? In a way, I guess the third one’s been going on for some time, if you mean thinking machines. That would be the third revolution, I guess—machines that devaluate human thinking. Some of the big computers like EPICAC do that all right, in specialized fields.”

“Uh-huh,” said Katharine thoughtfully. She rattled a pencil between her teeth. “First the muscle work, then the routine work, then, maybe, the real brainwork.”

“I hope I’m not around long enough to see that final step. Speaking of industrial revolutions, where’s Bud?”

“A barge was coming in, so he had to get back to work. He left this for you.” She handed him a crumpled laundry slip with Bud’s name on it.

Paul turned the slip over and found, as he had expected, a circuit diagram for a mouse detector and alarm system that might very well work. “Astonishing mind, Katharine.”

She nodded uncertainly.

Paul closed his door, locked it silently, and got a bottle from under papers in a bottom drawer. He blacked out for an instant under the gloriously hot impact of a gulp of whisky. He hid the bottle again, his eyes watering.

“Doctor Proteus, your wife is on the phone,” said Katharine on the intercom.

“Proteus speaking.” He started to sit, and was distressed to find a small wicker basket in his chair, containing a dead black cat.

“This is me, darling, Anita.”

“Hello, hello, hello.” He set the basket on the floor gently, and sank into his chair. “How are you, sweetheart?” he said absently. His mind was still on the cat.

“All set to have a good time tonight?” It was a theatrical contralto, knowing and passionate: Ilium’s Lady of the Manor speaking.

“Been jumpy all day about the talk.”

“Then you’ll do it brilliantly, darling. You’ll get to Pittsburgh yet. I haven’t the slightest doubt about that, Paul, not the slightest. Just wait until Kroner and Baer hear you tonight.”

“Kroner and Baer accepted, did they?” These two were manager and chief engineer, respectively, of the entire Eastern Division, of which the Ilium Works was one small part. It was Kroner and Baer who would decide who was to get the most important job in their division, a job left vacant two weeks ago by death—the managership of the Pittsburgh Works. “How gay can a party get?”

“Well, if you don’t like that, I have some news you will like. There’s going to be another very special guest.”

“Hi ho.”

“And you have to go to Homestead for some Irish whisky for him. The club hasn’t got any.”

“Finnerty! Ed Finnerty!”

“Yes, Finnerty. He called this afternoon and was very specific about your getting some Irish for him. He’s on his way from Washington to Chicago, and he’s going to stop off here.”

“How long has it been, Anita? Five, six years?”

“Not since before you got to be manager.
That
long.” She was hale, enthusiastic about Finnerty’s coming. It annoyed Paul, because he knew very well that she didn’t care for Finnerty. She was crowing, not because she was fond of Finnerty but because she enjoyed the ritual attitudes of friendships, of which she had none. Also, since he’d left Ilium,
Ed Finnerty had become a man of consequence, a member of the National Industrial Planning Board; and this fact no doubt dulled her recollections of contretemps with Finnerty in the past.

“You’re right about that being good news, Anita. It’s wonderful. Takes the edge off Kroner and Baer.”

“Now, you’re going to be nice to them, too.”

“Oh yes. Pittsburgh, here we come.”

“If I tell you something for your own good, promise not to get mad?”

“No.”

“All right, I’ll tell you anyway. Amy Halporn said this morning she’d heard something about you and Pittsburgh. Her husband was with Kroner today, and Kroner had the impression that you didn’t
want
to go to Pittsburgh.”

“How does he want me to tell him—in Esperanto? I’ve told him I wanted the job a dozen different ways in English.”

“Apparently Kroner doesn’t feel you really mean it. You’ve been too subtle and modest, darling.”

“Kroner’s a bright one, all right.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean he’s got more insight into me than I do.”

“You mean you don’t want the Pittsburgh job?”

“I’m not sure. He apparently knew that before I did.”

“You’re tired, darling.”

“I guess.”

“You need a drink. Come home early.”

“All right.”

“I love you, Paul.”

“I love
you
, Anita. Goodbye.”

Anita had the mechanics of marriage down pat, even to the subtlest conventions. If her approach was disturbingly rational, systematic, she was thorough enough to turn out a creditable counterfeit of warmth. Paul could only suspect that her feelings were shallow—and perhaps that suspicion was part of what he was beginning to think of as his sickness.

His head was down, his eyes closed, when he hung up. When he opened his eyes, he was looking at the dead cat in the basket.

“Katharine!”

“Yessir.”

“Will you have somebody bury this cat.”

“We wondered what you wanted to do with it.”

“God knows what I had in mind.” He looked at the corpse and shook his head. “God knows. Maybe a Christian burial; maybe I hoped she’d come around. Get rid of it right away, would you?”

He stopped by Katharine’s desk on his way home and told her not to worry about the glowing jewel on the seventh meter from the bottom, fifth row from the left, on the east wall.

“Beyond help,” he said. Lathe group three, Building 58, had been good in its day, but was showing wear and becoming a misfit in the slick, streamlined setup, where there was no place for erratic behavior. “Basically, it wasn’t built for the job it’s doing anyway. I look for the buzzer to go off any day now, and that’ll be the end.”

In each meter box, in addition to the instrument, the jewel, and the warning lamp, was a buzzer. The buzzer was the signal for a unit’s complete breakdown.

T
HE
S
HAH OF
B
RATPUHR
, spiritual leader of 6,000,000 members of the Kolhouri sect, wizened and wise and dark as cocoa, encrusted with gold brocade and constellations of twinkling gems, sank deep into the royal-blue cushions of the limousine—like a priceless brooch in its gift box.

On the other side of the limousine’s rear seat sat Doctor Ewing J. Halyard, of the United States Department of State, a heavy, florid, urbane gentleman of forty. He wore a flowing sandy mustache, a colored shirt, a boutonniere, and a waistcoat contrasting with his dark suit, and wore them with such poise that one was sure he’d just come from a distinguished company where everyone dressed in this manner. The fact was that only Doctor Halyard did. And he got away with it beautifully.

Between them, nervous, grinning, young, and forever apologetic for his own lack of éclat or power, was Khashdrahr Miasma, the interpreter, and nephew of the Shah, who had learned English from a tutor, but had never before been outside of the Shah’s palace.

“Khabu?”
said the Shah in his high, frail voice.

Halyard had been with the Shah for three days now and was able to understand, without Khashdrahr’s help, five of the Shah’s expressions.
“Khabu”
meant “where?”
“Siki”
meant “what?”
“Akka sahn”
meant “why?”
“Brahous brahouna, houna saki”
was a combination of blessing and thanks, and
Sumklish
was the sacred Kolhouri drink which Khashdrahr carried in a hip flask for the Shah.

The Shah had left his military and spiritual fastness in the mountains to see what he could learn in the most powerful
nation on earth for the good of his people. Doctor Halyard was his guide and host.

“Khabu?”
said the Shah again, peering out at the city.

“The Shah wishes to know, please, where we are now,” said Khashdrahr.

“I know,” said Halyard, smiling wanly. It had been
khabu
and
siki
and
akka sahn
until he was half out of his mind. He leaned forward. “Ilium, New York, your highness. We are about to cross the Iroquois River, which divides the town in two. Over there on the opposite bank is the Ilium Works.”

The limousine came to a halt by the end of the bridge, where a large work crew was filling a small chuckhole. The crew had opened a lane for an old Plymouth with a broken headlight, which was coming through from the north side of the river. The limousine waited for the Plymouth to get through, and then proceeded.

The Shah turned to stare at the group through the back window, and then spoke at length.

Doctor Halyard smiled and nodded appreciatively, and awaited a translation.

“The Shah,” said Khashdrahr, “he would like, please, to know who owns these slaves we see all the way up from New York City.”

“Not slaves,” said Halyard, chuckling patronizingly. “Citizens, employed by government. They have same rights as other citizens—free speech, freedom of worship, the right to vote. Before the war, they worked in the Ilium Works, controlling machines, but now machines control themselves much better.”

“Aha!” said the Shah, after Khashdrahr had translated.

“Less waste, much better products, cheaper products with automatic control.”