THE IRON JACKASS by John Brunner Read online

  “I don’t mean that kind of resources,” Colville said patiently.

  Nagy pressed his lips together and shrugged.

  Still, an hour was long enough for a first session. Marghem felt a rumbling in his empty stomach and seized a break in the discussion between Nagy and Colville to voice a suggestion he thought everyone found welcome.

  “Say, it’s close to chowtime,” he said. “Nagy, I didn’t give our guests a chance to do anything—settle in, show ‘em their rooms. Just came straight here.”

  Ira was looking at Nagy again. He squared his shoulders and got op with a kind of half-bow.

  “Wouldn’t do anything to inconvenience a lady,” he rambled. “I’d rather try and pour a little more sense into your head”—he glared at Colville—“but like the mayor says, it’s chowtime an’ the old woman’s expectin’ me.”

  They all got to their feet. Now that he’d remembered the problem of rooms, Marghem realized it was a problem. He said, “Accommodation’s are pretty limited around here, of course—we have no hotels or anything. Wallmeyer, d’you think I could bunk Colville in with you? I only have one free room in my shack, and I guess Ira had better have that.”

  For obvious reasons. Oh well… He saw Wallmeyer looking astonishingly unenthusiastic, and Colville looking tempted to match the roboticist’s expression. Nonetheless, that was how it was going to be. As mayor, he put up with plenty. Giving up the nightly privacy of his own room he would not endure!

  Unexpectedly Nagy cleared his throat. He said, “Uh… Mayor Marghem, if you got accommodation trouble, maybe I could fix it. You know I have that room for my boy when he gets his metallurgy degree back home and joins the family—nobody’s in it right now.”

  “Thanks, Nagy,” Marghem said, relieved. Now the only problem was, which of these two, Wallmeyer and Colville, would cause less disruption in the Nagy household.

  “Well, I think that’s wonderful!” Ira said, briskly gathering her mask and goggles. “Thank you very much, Mr. Nagy. It’d be ideal. I don’t have anything to do with this robot problem—I’m just doing some folklore research, and…”

  The door closed on her and Nagy. Her bright voice was still raised in cheerful explanation of her business at Eisenberg when it faded beyond hearing.

  “Thank goodness,” said Marghem when he caught up again with what had happened.

  Wallmeyer looked at him in annoyance, and then back at the blank panel of the door. Colville cleared his throat.

  “Ah… is that a good idea?”

  “On several counts,” said Marghem cheerfully. “One: it means that we can get on with the business in hand and not be distracted all the time. Two: it’ll sweeten Nagy’s temper—”

  “Didn’t he say he was married?” Colville cut in. “Sweeten his temper it may do; how about his wife’s?”

  “Mrs. Nagy only weighs ninety-five pounds or so, but she’s kept her husband tame for twenty years without trouble—which reminds me: next month they celebrate the twentieth anniversary of their wedding and I promised to appropriate some beer and extra provisions.” He scribbled a note to himself on a scratch-pad on the desk.

  “Ah… like I was saying, it’ll keep Ira out of our hair. Colville, I know it must have been pretty hard to resist her wheedling, but why in space didn’t you? Round here the girls come buxom; by the time they get old enough to be worth taking an interest in, they’re married and starting a family! Which is the only reason I have to think it may not be an ideal solution for her to go and room with the Nagy family. We have a surplus of bachelors right now. Ah, nuts! Let’s just pray that having her around puts ‘em on their best behavior rather than making ‘em quarrel.”

  “Three weeks,” said Colville, and thrust his fingers through his already untidy hair, staring out of the big window towards the town. “To be quite honest, Marghem, when I was sent here I was given the impression that you were siding with the townsfolk and not feeding them all the right dope about the situation. Now I’ve come to see what you’re up against.”

  “Thanks,” said Marghem. “It doesn’t make me any happier.”

  “Trouble is,” Colville frowned, “their objections aren’t rational. They’re rooted in a subconscious reflex due to fear of being automated out of the only thing they care for—their steel mills and their mines. I quite agree with you: they’re admirable people, and New Earth could do with more of them—if they weren’t so stubborn!”

  “They aren’t all that way, you know,” Marghem said.

  “No, so I’ve discovered. I mean, I’ve talked to scores of them individually, and they don’t seem to bear me any grudge for what I’m trying to do, and they’re mostly quite willing to agree that New Earth needs more steel than they can supply, and that a GP robot is a different proposition from conventional automation— And we get nowhere. Marghem, I hate to make a suggestion like that but could we solve the problem of getting rid of Nagy somehow?”

  “No,” said Marghem shortly.

  “Why not? He seems to be the only obstacle—he’s the only person who consistently says no to the idea, and he’s the self-appointed leader among the workers.”

  “You’ve got the wrong end of the billet,” said Marghem. “Point’s that I’m the mayor here. I’m a government appointee, an administrator. I know the right from the wrong end of a blooming mill, I know high-grade from low-grade ore. That doesn’t make me a steel man or a member of this community. I get on pretty well with them. But I’m an outsider.

  “Nagy, on the other hand, is the actual leader, the boss. Not self-appointed! Urged to the top because he’s got all the virtues they admire. He’s tremendously strong; he knows steel from ore to finished billet and plate. He talks. He can hold his liquor. He’s brought up a family who are going on in the steel business. All that makes him inevitably a leader they’ll look to.

  “But getting rid of him would solve nothing. You couldn’t shift him voluntarily; shifting him any other way would turn the entire community sour against us. Look!”

  He got to his feet and pointed to a whaleback shape newly risen beyond the edge of the town. “That’s the measure of how much they admire him, Colville! A dome for his twentieth anniversary party four hundred feet across, so they can help him celebrate all together and without getting dust on the food or in the beer. Knocked up in their spare time during a week or so, for the sake of a party lasting six hours, and requiring very nearly as long to take apart again afterwards. No. Nagy is neither the cause of the problem, nor a key to it.”

  “Then who… or what… is the key to it?” snapped Colville.

  “Maybe there isn’t one,” said Marghem. “Maybe we’re just going to have to resign ourselves to going without our own ‘copter factory until things straighten out of their own accord.”

  “We can’t!” said Colville, raising haunted eyes. Marghem knew exactly how he felt.

  He was about to speak again when there was a sharp exclamation from the anteroom: Wallmeyer’s voice.

  “Hey! What do you think you’re doing?”

  Marghem strode to the door and slid it back. In the anteroom he found Wallmeyer—just peeling off his mask and goggles—facing Ira Bell, who was rising to her feet from the packing case alongside the robot, Joe. The moment Marghem appeared, Wallmeyer raised angry eyes to him.

  “Did you tell her she could be in here with my robot?” he demanded.

  Marghem shook his head. He gave Ira a puzzled look.

  “I came over to give Joe his daily reflex check—he’s not standing up so well to this long period without work.” Wallmeyer hefted a kit of electronic equipment he was carrying. “And I find her in here, talking to him.”

  “Talking to him?” Marghem raised his eyebrows.

  With perfect self-possession, Ira nodded. “I came to see if you were free, Mayor Marghem,” she said. “Only I could hear you were having an argument with Harry. You said I was never to interrupt you, so I decided to wait, and then the robot started to ask me some questions, so I answered them.”

  “What sort of questions?” Wallmeyer barked.

  “Why… what the people are like outside, and when they’re going to let him start work eventually, and so on.”

  Wallmeyer’s face went purple. “Ira, a robot is infinitely more delicate than a human being—misleading information can lead to a snarl-up in his mental circuits that may cost millions to have overhauled, especially if he has to be sent back to Earth for it!”

  “Boss,” said Joe anxiously, “the lady was very polite to answer my questions, you know. Don’t go on at her like that.”

  “Thanks, Joe,” said Ira with a smile that ought to have melted the robot’s heart if he had had one.

  “That’s as may be,” said Wallmeyer shortly. “Marghem, get her out of my way, will you, while I check him over? Joe, you sit down and calm yourself, and we’ll see how you are.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Ira when the door of the office closed. Her composure had faded a little. “I didn’t mean to upset him like that.”

  “Maybe you didn’t,” said Marghem comfortingly. Ira had kept her word and hardly bothered him at all in the whole three weeks of her stay; he felt much more kindly disposed towards her than he had when she arrived.

  “Oh, goodness!” She gave a little chuckle. “I meant Wallmeyer, not the robot. I haven’t upset Joe in the least; in fact I’ve done him a lot of good. GP robots are always programmed for one specific purpose, the way people are educated in some specialty rather than another, but they have just as much curiosity about how their job fits into the pattern of their universe as you or I have.”

  She smiled at Harry Colville and sat down.

  “You speak very knowledgeably,” Marghem said, also resuming his seat. “How come?”

/>   “Mechanical men are a very ancient part of legend and myth,” Ira shrugged. “The golem; the brazen men Daedalus created for Minos of Crete; Frankenstein’s monster, which passed into folklore from the novel where he was created. So I once did some research on mechanical men in reality as well as legend, and it turned out so well I’m going to use it in my doctorate thesis.”

  Marghem gave her a look in which surprise and respect were equally mingled. “You don’t say!” he muttered. “Well, what can I do for you anyway? How are you getting on with the Nagy family and everyone else?”

  Ira managed to change what might have been a giggle into an adult-sounding chuckle just in time. How old was this kid, anyway? Marghem hadn’t wondered before.

  “I’m doing fine!” she said. “Every eligible bachelor in Eisenberg seemed to have started calling on the Nagys. I’ve been invited into more than sixty homes, and managed to get around to nearly thirty of them; I’ve talked with people whose ancestors come from the Monongahela Valley and from Czechoslovakia and from Scranton and from Poland and from Gary and from Hungary and from all over!”

  “And is this helping your work?” Marghem found it a relief to be able to talk about something other than the robot question for a change. Maybe he oughtn’t to have been so dogmatic about keeping Ira away. He sighed and repressed temptation.

  “Oh, wonderfully. Courtship customs, for instance. I’m in the best possible place to observe those, because I’m being courted wholesale. Bat not just that. This big party tomorrow, for example—it’s just tike a peasant party in Central Europe, like a christening or wedding feast, crossed with a celebration in the old days in the steel communities of America. There’s a tremendously strong substructure of folk tradition binding these people together, which even bringing them off Earth hasn’t weakened. In fact, it’s strengthened by their having left home, because it’s what they most rely on to keep their communal identity.”

  She hesitated. “By the way, I think the answer to this problem of Joe and the other robots—”

  Colville looked at the ceiling, as if to say, What in the name of all that’s holy can she know about it? Marghem ignored him.

  “Go on,” he encouraged Ira. After all, he and Colville had drained themselves of ideas. Anything, no matter how wild, was better than nothing.

  “Well, I mentioned that folklore contains many legends of mechanical men. One of them—”

  Under the dome everything was as festive as it could possibly be on New Earth, in Eisenberg. All the families in town had turned out their store of rags and scraps, hoarded as such things had always been hoarded, and chosen the most colorful odds and ends to make into flags and streamers. Red, yellow, blue, green, they looped in festoons above the tables, some of which were groaning under the weight of the carefully prepared delicacies because they were ordinary tables people had brought from home, others of which couldn’t because they were lengths of rail or even unfinished billets brought from the mills where they were awaiting shipment.

  Barrels of beer and tanks of prunejack were racked around the wall of the dome behind the tables. Through amplifiers at the highest point of the dome poured music from tapes that had been made at home on Earth—a kind of last souvenir before departure. The music was wild and gypsylike. In the center of the floor the young people were dancing equally wildly, shrieking with laughter and sometimes yelling the words of the songs which came over the amplifier.

  In a place of honor facing the dance floor sat Nagy, looming tremendously over his little wife, who blushed like a girl every time one of the dancers paused in passing to cry congratulations and thanks for the party. On the other side of her husband from her, Ira Bell sat—and indeed Nagy seemed as proud of having her there—as though she were his daughter. She wore a very old but magnificently preserved traditional dress which belonged to Mrs. Nagy, elaborately embroidered, with a short stiff skirt standing out above white stockings and black boots.

  Marghem, sitting with Colville and Wallmeyer on the other side of the Nagys, saw young man after young man come up and bow formally to ask Nagy’s permission to dance with Ira. One in particular kept coming back time and time again: Paul Horkey was the name, Marghem knew. He was probably very much as Nagy himself had been twenty-odd years ago, very strong, very handsome—in himself, he was one of the reasons why the surplus of bachelors was as big as it was, for most of the unmarried girls were turning down their suitors in the hope that they might be the lucky one who secured Paul Horkey.

  Paul Horkey had a rival, though. A little anxiously Marghem watched to see whether this rival—what was the name? Ah, yes—whether this Steve Masaryk was otherwise occupied. He was, dancing with one of the local girls. Fair enough.

  Marghem relaxed and turned to Wallmeyer, whose face was as long as a comet’s tail. He jabbed him in the ribs.

  “Say, aren’t you enjoying the party?”

  “How can I?” mourned Wallmeyer. “Here they are having themselves a ball, and they don’t care that I’m stuck here when I’d rather be back home, they don’t care that; my robots are lying useless or sitting around waiting to break down—”

  A thought struck Marghem. “Have you checked Joe again today? You said he was all right yesterday, in spite of what you were afraid Ira might have done to him.”

  “Oh, she didn’t do him any harm. In fact, he seems in quite good shape, better than I’d have expected after such a long time not working. I wish I could turn him off, but then I’d have to go back to the capital and spend a week at least overhauling him—it’s like the shock of concussion, you see.”

  Colville tapped Marghem’s arm. “Say, look!” he said under his breath.

  It had finally happened. Paul Horkey and his chief rival Steve Masaryk had arrived at the same time to ask Ira to dance. Laughing, Ira agreed to partner Paul Horkey.

  Marghem got up and began to work his way towards the dais.

  Presumably Steve was objecting on the ground that Ira had already danced several times with Paul and not with him. Presumably Ira was taking no notice. For by the time Marghem came close they were on the verge of blows.

  Everyone stopped dancing. A fight was better than a dance any day.

  “Hold it!” barked Marghem into a moment of silence. He apologised to Nagy, who grinned, being plainly full of prunejack and goodwill towards the world.

  “Let’s settle this the proper way!” Marghem went on. “Instead of fighting about it, let’s decide who’s the stronger of you two.” He looked Paul and Steve up and down, and had to repress a pang of envy, because they were certainly both very muscular and very good-looking. He felt like a dwarf between them.

  “Ira?” he demanded, turning to her. “What do you say?”

  “Right!” she said, clapping her hands and looking properly pleased that there was to be a contest with her as the prize. “Well, that’s easy. There are all sizes of heavy things to lift around here—all these billets of steel! Let’s see who can lift the biggest one, and I’ll dance with him the rest of the evening. Is that fair?”

  By now most of the people in the dome had crowded round. They gave a roar of approval, and that left little choice for Paul and Steve, though Marghem knew from their expressions that neither of them was sure of the outcome. He appointed himself a sort of referee, getting husky men to stagger into the middle of the dome with billets of graduated sizes from about two hundred pounds on up to one which probably weighed the best part of half a ton, New Earth gravity.

  Everyone settled down to watch. In a tense silence Steve Masaryk approached the row of billets. Scornfully he passed by the first and smallest, and bent over the next. Taking a careful purchase he braced himself to heave.

  Marghem was probably the only person under the dome who saw a movement by the entrance.

  Steve straightened, and the steel billet came easily off the ground. There was a bellow of applause.

  Equally scornful, Paul now marched forward and took the billet next beyond the one his rival had chosen. Everyone was tense and doubtful. He bent, braced himself, heaved—and the billet came away from the ground.