Anson closed the door and mopped his brow.
So far, so good. But what would happen when the robot reached the manager? He’d open his walking cash register and discover Anson’s six ten-token disks. Being human, he’d recognized them for what they were—counterfeit.
Dr. Anson shuddered. To think that it had come to this, a reputable psychiatrist committing a crime!
He considered the irony. In a world totally devoid of antisocial activity, there were no antisocial tendencies which required the services of psychiatry. And that was why he, as the last living psychiatrist, had to resort to antisocial activity in order to survive.
Probably it was only his knowledge of antisocial behavior, in the abstract, which enabled him to depart from the norm and indulge in such actions in the concrete.
Well, he was in the concrete now and it would harden fast—unless something happened. At best, his deception would give him a few days’ grace. After that, he could face only disgrace.
Anson shook his head and sat down behind the desk. Maybe this was the beginning, he told himself. First counterfeiting and fraud, then robbery and embezzlement, then rape and murder. Who could say where it would all end?
“Physician, heal thyself,” he murmured and glanced with distaste at the dust-covered couch, where no patient reposed; where, indeed, no patient had ever reposed since he’d opened his office almost a year ago.
It had been a mistake, he realized. A big mistake ever to listen to his father and—
The visio lit up and the audio hummed. Anson turned and confronted a gigantic face. The gigantic face let out a gigantic roar, almost shattering the screen.
“I’m on my way up, Doctor!” the face bellowed. “Don’t try to sneak out! I’m going to break your neck with my bare hands!”
For a few seconds Anson sat there in his chair, too numb to move. Then the full import of what he had seen and heard reached him. The manager was coming to kill him!
“Hooray!” he said under his breath and smiled. It was almost too good to be true. After all this time, at last, somebody was breaking loose. A badly disturbed personality, a potential killer, was on his way up—he was finally going to get himself a patient. If he could treat him before being murdered, that is.
Tingling with excitement, Anson fumbled around in his files. Now where in thunder was that equipment for the Rorschach test? Yes, and the Porteus Maze and—
The manager strode into the room without knocking. Anson looked up, ready to counter the first blast of aggression with a steely professional stare.
But the manager was smiling.
“Sorry I blew up that way,” he said. “Guess I owe you an apology.”
“When I found those counterfeit tokens, something just seemed to snap for a moment,” the manager explained. “You know how it is.”
“Yes, I do,” said Anson eagerly. “I understand quite well. And it’s nothing to be ashamed of. I’m sure that with your co-operation, we can get to the roots of the trauma. Now if you’ll just relax on the couch over there—”
The red-faced little man continued to smile, but his voice was brusque. “Nonsense! I don’t need any of that. Before I came up here, I stopped in at Dr. Peabody’s office, down on the sixth floor. Great little endocrinologist, that guy. Gave me some kind of a shot that fixed me up in a trice. That’s three times faster than a jiffy, you know.”
“I don’t know,” Anson answered vaguely. “Endocrinology isn’t my field.”
“Well, it should be. It’s the only field in medicine that really amounts to anything nowadays. Except for diagnosis and surgery, of course. Those gland-handers can do anything. Shots for when you feel depressed, shots for when you’re afraid, shots for when you get excited, or mad, the way I was. Boy, I feel great now. At peace with the world!”
“But it won’t last. Sooner or later, you’ll get angry again.”
“So I’ll get another shot,” the manager replied. “Everybody does.”
“That’s not a solution. You’re merely treating the symptom, not the basic cause.” Anson rose and stepped forward. “You’re under a great deal of tension. I suspect it goes back to early childhood. Did you suffer from enuresis?”
“It’s my turn to ask questions. What about those fake tokens you tried to palm off on me?”
“Why, it was all a joke. I thought if you could give me a few more days to dig up—”
“I’m giving you just five minutes to dig down,” the manager said, smiling pleasantly, but firmly. “You ought to know that you can’t pull a trick like that with a cash collector; these new models have automatic tabulators and detectors. The moment that robot came back to my office, it spat up the counterfeits. It couldn’t stomach them. And neither can I.”
“Stomach?” asked Anson hopefully. “Are you ever troubled with gastric disturbances? Ulcers? Psychosomatic pain in the—”
The manager thrust out his jaw. “Look here, Anson, you’re not a bad sort, really. It’s just that you’re confused. Why don’t you clever up and look at the big picture? This witch-doctor racket of yours, it’s atomized. Nobody’s got any use for it today. You’re like the guys who used to manufacture buggy whips; they sat around telling themselves that the automobile would never replace the horse, when any street-cleaner could see what was happening to business.
“Why don’t you admit you’re licked? The gland-handers have taken over. Why, a man would have to be crazy to go to a psychiatrist nowadays and you know there aren’t any crazy people any more. So forget about all this. Take a course or something. You can be an End-Doc yourself. Then open up a real office and make yourself some big tokens.”
Anson shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “Not interested.”
The manager spread his hands. “All right. I gave you a chance. Now there’s nothing left to do but call in the ejectors.”
He walked over and opened the door. Apparently he had been prepared for Anson’s decision, because two ejectors were waiting. They rolled into the room and, without bothering to focus their beams on Anson, commenced to scoop books from the shelves and deposit them in their big open belly-hampers.
“Wait!” Anson cried, but the ejector robots continued inexorably and alphabetically: there went Adler, Brill, Carmichael, Dunbar, Ellis, Freud, Gresell, Homey, Isaacs, Jung, Kardiner, Lindner, Moll—
“Darling, what’s the matter?”
Sue Porter was in the room. Then she was in his arms and Dr. Anson had a difficult time remembering what the matter was. The girl affected him that way.
But a look at the manager’s drugged smile served as a reminder. Anson’s face reddened, due to a combination of embarrassment and lipstick smudges, as he told Sue what had happened.
Sue laughed. “Well, if that’s all it is, what are you so upset about?” Without waiting for a reply, she advanced upon the manager, her hand digging into her middle bra-cup. “Here’s your tokens,” she said. “Now call off the ejectors.”
The manager accepted the disks with a smile of pure euphoria, then strode over to the robots and punched buttons. The ejectors halted their labors between Reich and Stekel, then reversed operations. Quickly and efficiently, they replaced all the books on the shelves.
In less than a minute, Anson faced the girl in privacy. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said severely.
“But, darling, I wanted to. After all, what are a few tokens more or less?”
“A few tokens?” Anson scowled. “In the past year, I’ve borrowed over two thousand from you. This can’t go on.”
“Of course not,” the girl agreed. “That’s what I’ve been telling you. Let’s get a Permanent and then Daddy will give you a nice fat job and—”
“There you go again! How often must I warn you about the Elektra situation? This unnatural dependency on the father image is dangerous. If only you’d let me get you down on the couch—”
“Why, of course, darling!”
“No, no!” Anson cried. “I want to analyze you!”
; “Not now,” Sue answered. “We’ll be late for dinner. Daddy expects you.”
“Damn dinner and damn Daddy, too,” Anson said. But he took the girl’s arm and left the office, contenting himself by slamming the door.
“Aren’t you going to put up that ‘Doctor Will Return in Two Hours’ sign?” the girl asked, glancing back at the door.
“No,” Anson told her. “I’m not coming back in two hours. Or ever.”
Sue gave him a puzzled look, but her eyes were smiling.
Dr. Howard Anson’s eyes weren’t smiling as he and Sue took off from the roof. He kept them closed, so that he didn’t have to watch the launching robots, or note the ’copter’s progress as it soared above the city. He didn’t want to gaze down at the metallic tangle of conveyors moving between the factories or the stiffly striding figures which supervised their progress on the ramps and loading platforms. The air about them was filled with ’copters, homeward bound from offices and recreation areas, but no human figures moved in the streets. Ground level was almost entirely mechanized.
“What’s the matter now?” Sue’s voice made him look at her. Her eyes held genuine concern.
“The sins of the fathers,” Anson said. “Yours and mine.” He watched the girl as she set the ’copter on autopilot for the journey across the river. “Of course it really wasn’t my father’s fault that he steered me into psychiatry. After all, it’s been a family tradition for a hundred and fifty years. All my paternal ancestors were psychiatrists, with the exception of one or two renegade Behaviorists. When he encouraged my interest in the profession, I never stopped to question him. He trained me—and I was the last student to take up the specialty at medical school. The last, mind you!
“I should have known then that it was useless. But he kept insisting this state of affairs couldn’t last, that things were sure to change. ‘Cheer up,’ he used to tell me, whenever I got discouraged. ‘The pendulum is bound to swing in the other direction.’ And then he’d tell me about the good old days when he was a boy and the world was still full of fetishism and hebephrenia and pyromania and mixoscopic zoophilia. ‘It will come again,’ he kept telling me. ‘Just you wait and see! We’ll have frottage and nympholepsy and compulsive exhibitionism—everything your little heart desires.’
“Well, he was wrong. He died knowing that he had set me up in a dead-end profession. I’m an anachronism, like the factory worker or the farmer or the miner or the soldier. We don’t have any need for them in our society any more; robots have replaced them all. And the End-Docs have replaced the psychiatrists and neuro-surgeons. With robots to ease the physical and economic burden and gland-handers to relieve mental tension, there’s nothing left for me. The last psychiatrist should have disappeared along with the last advertising man. Come to think of it, they probably belong together. My father was wrong, Sue, I know that now. But most of the real blame belongs to your father.”
“Daddy?” she exclaimed. “How can you possibly blame him?”
Anson laughed shortly. “Your family has been pioneering in robotics almost as long as mine has worked in psychiatry. One of your ancestors took out the first basic patent. If it weren’t for him and those endocrine shots, everything would still be normal—lots of incest and scoptophilia, plenty of voyeurism for everybody—”
“Why, darling, what a thing to say! You know as well as I do what robots have done for the world. You said it yourself. We don’t have any more manual or menial labor. There’s no war, plenty of everything for everybody. And Daddy isn’t stopping there.”
“I suppose not,” Anson said bitterly. “What is the old devil dreaming up now?”
Sue flushed. “You wouldn’t talk like that if you knew just how hard he’s been working. He and Mr. Mullet, the engineering chief. They’re just about ready to bring out the new pilot models they’ve developed for space travel.”
“I’ve heard that one before. They’ve been announcing those models for ten years.”
“They keep running into bugs, I guess. But sooner or later, they’ll find a way to handle things. Nothing is perfect, you know. Every once in a while, there’s still some trouble with the more complicated models.”
“But they keep trying for perfection. Don’t you see where all this leads to, Sue? Human beings will become obsolescent. First the workers, now the psychiatrists and other professions. But it won’t end there. Inside of another generation or two, we won’t need anyone any more. Your father, or somebody like him, will produce the ultimate robot—the robot that’s capable of building other robots and directing them. Come to think of it, he’s already done the first job; your factories are self-perpetuating. All we need now is a robot that can take the place of a few key figures like your father. Then that’s the end of the human race. Oh, maybe they’ll keep a few men and women around for pets, but that’s all. And thank God I won’t be here to see it.”
“So why worry?” Sue replied. “Enjoy yourself while you can. We’ll apply for a Permanent and Daddy will give you a job like he promised me—”
“Job? What kind of job?”
“Oh, maybe he’ll make you a vice-president or something. They don’t have to do anything.”
“Fine! A wonderful future!”
“I don’t see anything wrong with it. You ought to consider yourself lucky.”
“Listen, Sue.” He turned to her earnestly. “You just don’t understand the way I feel. I’ve spent eighteen years of my life in school, six of it in training for my profession. That’s all I know and I know it well. And what have I to show for it? I’m a psychiatrist who’s never had a patient, a neuro-surgeon who’s never performed anything but an experimental topectomy or lobotomy. That’s my work, my life, and I want a chance to function. I don’t intend to sit around on a fat sinecure, raising children whose only future is oblivion. I don’t want a Permanent with you under those conditions.”
She sniffed petulantly. “A Permanent with me isn’t good enough, is that it? I suppose you’d rather have a lot of repression and guilt complexes and all that other stuff you’re always talking about.”
“It isn’t that,” Anson insisted. “I don’t really want the world to revert to neurotic or psychotic behavior just so I can have a practice. But damn it, I can’t stand to see the way things are going. We’ve done away with stress and privation and tension and superstition and intolerance, and that’s great. But we’ve also done away with ourselves in the process. We’re getting to the point where we, as human beings, no longer have a function to perform. We’re not needed.”
The girl gave him an angry glance. “What you’re trying to say is that you don’t need me, is that it?”
“I do need you. But not on these terms. I’m not going to lead a useless existence, or bring children into a world where they’ll be useless. And if your father brings up that vice-president deal at dinner tonight, I’m going to tell him to take his job and—”
“Never mind!” Sue flipped the switch from auto-pilot back to manual and the ’copter turned. “You needn’t bother about dinner. I’ll take you back to your office now. You can put yourself down on the couch and do a little practicing on your own mind. You need it! Of all the stupid, pig-headed—”
The sound of the crash reached them even at flying level. Sue Porter broke off abruptly and glanced down at the river front below. Anson stared with her.
“What was that?” he asked.
“I don’t know—can’t make it out from here.” She spun the controls, guiding the ’copter down until it hovered over a scene of accelerating confusion.
A huge loading barge was moored against one of the docks. Had been moored, rather; as they watched, it swung erratically into the current, then banged back against the pier. Huge piles of machinery, only partially lashed to the deck, now tumbled and broke free. Some of the cranes splashed into the water and others rolled across the flat surface of the barge.
“Accident,” Sue gasped. “The cable must have broken.”
Anson’s eyes focused on the metallic figures which dotted the deck and stood stolidly on the dock. “Look at the robots!”
“What about them?” asked Sue.
“Aren’t they supposed to be doing something? That one with the antenna—isn’t it designed to send out a warning signal when something goes wrong?”
“You’re right. They beam Emergency in a case like this. The expediters should be out by now.”
“Some of them look as if they’re paralyzed,” Anson noted, observing a half-dozen of the metallic figures aboard the barge. They were rigid, unmoving. Even as he watched, a round steel bell bowled across the deck. None of the robots moved—the sphere stuck them like a ball hitting the pins and hurtled them into the water.
On the pier, the immobilized watchers gave no indication of reaction.
“Paralyzed,” Anson repeated.
“Not that one!”
Sue pointed excitedly as the ’copter hovered over the deck. Anson looked and found the cause of her consternation.
A large, fully articulated robot with the humanoid face of a controller clattered along in a silvery blur of motion. From one of its four upper appendages dangled a broad-bladed axe.
It bumped squarely against an armless receptacle-type robot in its loading compartment. There was a crash as the victim collapsed.
And the controller robot sped on, striking at random, in a series of sped-up motions almost impossible to follow—but not impossible to understand.
“That’s the answer!” said Anson. “It must have cut the cable with the axe. And attacked the others, to immobilize them. Come on, let’s land this thing.”
“But we can’t go down there! It’s dangerous! Somebody will send out the alarm. The expediters will handle it—”
“Land!” Anson commanded. He began to rummage around in the rear compartment of the ’copter.
“What are you looking for?” Sue asked as she maneuvered the machine to a clear space alongside a shed next to the dock.
“The rope ladder.”
“But we won’t need it. We’re on the ground.”