The Frederik Pohl Omnibus

1

After old man Tighe conquered the country (oh, now, listen. I already told you about that. Don’t pester me for the same story over and over again. You remember about the Great March, from Pung’s Corners to the Pentagon, and how Honest Jack Tighe, the Father of the Second Republic, overcame the massed might of the greatest nation of the world with a shotgun and a .22 rifle. Of course you do.)

Anyway. After old man Tighe conquered the country, things went pretty well for a while.

Oh, it was a pleasant time and a great one! He changed the world, Jack Tighe did. He took a pot of strong black coffee into his room - it was the Lincoln Study, as it was called at the time; now, of course, we know it as Tighe’s Bedchamber - and sat up all one night, writing, and when the servants came wonderingly to him the next morning, there it was: the Bill of Wrongs.

See if you can remember them. Everybody learns them by heart. Surely you did too:

1. THE FIRST WRONG THAT WE MUST ABOLISH IS THE FORCED SALE OF GOODS. IN FUTURE, NO ONE SHALL SELL GOODS. VENDORS MAY ONLY PERMIT THEIR CUSTOMERS TO BUY.

2. THE SECOND WRONG THAT WE MUST ABOLISH IS ADVERTISING. ALL BILLBOARDS ARE TO BE RIPPED DOWN AT ONCE. MAGAZINES AND NEWSPAPERS WILL CONFINE THEIR PAID NOTICES TO ONE QUARTER-INCH PER PAGE, AND THESE MAY NOT HAVE ILLUSTRATIONS.

3. THE THIRD WRONG THAT WE MUST ABOLISH IS THE COMMERCIAL. ANYBODY WHO TRIES TO USE GOD’S FREE AIR FOR PUSHING COMMODITIES OFFERED FOR SALE IS AN ENEMY OF ALL THE PEOPLE, AND HAS TO BE EXILED TO ANTARCTICA. AT LEAST.

Why, it was the very prescription for a Golden Age! That’s the way it was, and the way the people rejoiced was amazing.

Except - well, there was the matter of the factories in the caverns.

For instance, there was a man named Cossett. His first name was Archibald, but you don’t have to bother remembering that part; his wife had a strong stomach, but that was more than she could put up with, and she mostly called him Bill, They had three kids - boys - named Chuck, Dan and Tommy, and Mrs. Cossett considered herself well off.

One morning she told her husband so: ‘Bill, I love the way Honest Jack Tighe has fixed everything up for us! Remember how it was, Bill? Remember? And how, why - well, look. Don’t you notice anything?’

‘Hm?’ inquired Cossett.

‘Your breakfast,’ said Essie Cossett. ‘Don’t you like it?’

Bill Cossett looked palely at his breakfast. Orange juice, toast, coffee. He sighed deeply.

‘Bill! I asked you if you liked it!’

‘I’m eating it, aren’t I? When did I ever have anything different?’

‘Never, honey,’ his wife said gently. ‘You always have the same thing. But don’t you notice that the toast isn’t burned?’

Cossett chewed a piece of it without emotion. ‘That’s nice,’ he said.

‘And the coffee is fit to drink. And so’s the orange juice.’

Cossett said irritably: ‘Essie, it’s great orange juice. It will be remembered.’

Mrs. Cossett flared: ‘Bill, I can’t say a thing to you in the morning without your flying completely off the -’

‘Essie,’ shouted her husband, ‘I had a bad night!’ He glared at her, a good-looking man, still young, fine father and good provider, but at the end of his rope. ‘I didn’t sleep! Not a wink! I was awake all night, tossing and turning, tossing and turning, worrying, worrying, worrying. I’m sorry!’ he cried, daring her to accept the apology.

‘But I only-’

‘Essie!’

Mrs. Cossett was wounded to the quick. Her lip quivered. Her eyes moistened. Her husband, seeing the signs, accepted defeat.

He sank back against his chair as she said meekly: ‘I only wanted to point out that it isn’t ruined. But you’re so touchy, Bill, that - I mean,’ she said hurriedly, ‘do you remember what it was like in the old days, before Jack Tighe freed us all? When every month there was a new pop-up toaster, and sometimes you had to dial each slice separately for Perfect Custom Yumminess, and sometimes a red Magic Ruby Reddy-Eye did it for you? When the coffee maker you bought in June used coarse percolator coffee grind and the one you got to replace it in September took drip?

‘And now,’ she cried radiantly, her momentary anger forgotten, ‘and now I’ve had the same appliances for more than six months! I’ve had time to learn to use them! I can keep them until they wear out! And when they’re gone, if I want I can get the exact same model again! Oh, Bill,’ she wept, quite overcome, ‘how did we get along in the old days, before Jack Tighe?’

Her husband pushed his chair back from the table and sat regarding her without a word for a long moment.

Then he got up, reached for his hat, groaning, ‘Ah, who can eat?’ and rushed out of the house to his place of business.

The sign over his store read:

A. COSSETT & CO.

Authorized Buick Dealer

He sobbed all the way down to the shop.

You mustn’t feel too sorry for old Bill Cossett; there were a lot like him those days. But it was pretty sad, no doubt of it.

When he got to the shop, he wanted to sob some more, but how could he, in front of the staff? One little break from him and all of them would have been wailing.

As it was, his head salesman, Harry Bull, was in a dither. He was lighting one cigarette after another, taking a single abstracted puff and placing each of them neatly, side by side like spokes, along the rim of his big glass ashtray. He didn’t know he was doing it, of course. His eyes were fixed emptily on the ashtray, all right, but what his glazed vision beheld were the smouldering ashes of hellfire.

He looked up when his boss came in.

‘Chief,’ he burst out tragically, ‘they’ve come in! The new models! I had the Springfield office on the phone a dozen times already this morning, I swear. But it’s the same answer every time.’

Cossett took a deep breath. This was a time for manhood. He stuck his chin out proudly and-said, his voice perfectly level: ‘They won’t cancel, then.’

‘They say they can’t,’ said Harry Bull, and stared with a corpse’s eyes at the crowded showroom. ‘They say the caverns are raising all the quotas. Sixteen more cars,’ he whispered dully, ‘and that’s just the Roadmasters, Chief. I didn’t tell you that part. Tomorrow we get the Specials and the Estate Wagons, and -and-

‘Mr. Cossett,’ he wept, ‘the Estate Wagons are eleven inches longer this month! I can’t stand it!’ he cried wildly. ‘We got eighteen hundred and forty-one cars piled up already! The floor’s full. The shop’s full. The top two floors are full. The lot’s full. We hauled all the trade-ins off to the junkyard yesterday and, even so, now we got them double-parked on both sides of the street for six blocks in every direction! You know, Chief, I couldn’t even get to the place this morning? I had to park at the corner of Grand and Sterling and walk the rest of the way, because I couldn’t get through!’

For the first time, Cossett’s expression changed. ‘Grand and Sterling?’ he repeated thoughtfully. ‘Yeah? I’ll have to try coming that way tomorrow.’ Then he laughed, a bitter laugh. ‘One thing, Harry. Be glad we’re handling Buicks and not, you know, one of the Low-Priced Three. I came by Culex Motors yesterday, and -

‘By Godfrey,’ he shouted suddenly, ‘I’m going to go down and talk to Manny Culex. Why not? It isn’t just our problem, Harry - it’s everybody’s. And may be the whole industry ought to get together, just for once. We never did; nobody would start it. But things are getting to a point where somebody’s got to lead the way. Well, it’s going to be me! There just isn’t any sense letting the caverns turn out all these new cars after Jack Tighe has told the whole blasted country that they don’t have to buy them any more. Washington will do something. They’ll have to!’

But all the way over to Manny Culex’s, past the carton-barricaded appliance stores, widely skirting the shambles that surrounded the five and ten, rolling up the windows as he threaded his way past the burst spoiled food cans at the supermarket, Cossett couldn’t put one question out of his mind:

Suppose they couldn’t?

2

Now you mustn’t think Jack Tighe wasn’t right on top of this situation. He knew about it. Oh, yes! Because it wasn’t just Archibald Cossett and Manny Culex - it was every car dealer -and it wasn’t just the car dealers, but every merchant in Rantoul who sold goods to the public; and it wasn’t just Rantoul, but all of Illinois, all of the Middle West, all the country - and, yes, when you come right down to it, all of the world. (I mean all the inhabited world. Naturally there was no problem in, say, Lower Westchester.)

Things were piling up.

It was a matter of automation and salesmanship. In the big war, it had seemed like a good idea to automate the factories. Maybe it was - production was what counted then, all kinds of production. They certainly got the production, sure enough. Then, when the war was over, there was a method for handling the production - a method named advertising. But what did that mean, when you came to think it over? It meant that people had to be hounded into buying what they didn’t really want, with money they hadn’t yet earned. It meant pressure. It meant hypertension and social embarrassment and competition and confusion.

Well, Jack Tighe took care of that part, him and his famous Bill of Wrongs.

Everybody agreed that things had been intolerable before - before, that is, Tighe and his heroic band had marched on the Pentagon and set us all free. The trouble was that now advertising had been abolished and nobody felt he had to buy the new models as they came out of the big automated plants in the underground caverns ... and what were we going to do with the products?

Jack Tighe felt that problem as keenly as any vacuum-cleaner salesman hard-selling a suburban neighbourhood from door to door. He knew what the people wanted. And if he hadn’t, why, he would have found it pretty quickly, because the people, in their delegations and petitions, were taking every conceivable opportunity to let him know.

For instance, there was the Midwest Motor Car Association’s delegation, led by Bill Cossett, his very own self. Cossett hadn’t wanted to be chairman, but he’d been the one to suggest it, and that usually carries a fixed penalty: ‘You thought it up? Okay. You make it go.’

Jack Tighe received them in person. He listened with great courtesy and concern to their prepared speech; and that was unusual, because Tighe wasn’t the relaxed old man who’d fished the Delaware south of Pung’s Corners for so many happy years. No, he was an irritable President now, and delegations were nothing in his life; he faced fifty of them a day. And they all wanted the same thing. Just let us push our product a little, please? Naturally, no other commodity should be privileged to violate the Bill of Wrongs - nobody wants the Age of Advertising back! - but, Mr. President, the jewellery findings game (or shoes, or drugs, or business machines, or frozen food, and so forth) is historically, intrinsically dynamically and pre-eminently different, because...

And, you’d be surprised, they all thought up reasons to follow the ‘because’. Some of the reasons were corkers.

But Jack Tighe didn’t let them get quite as far as the reasons. He listened about a sentence and a half past the ‘nobody wants the Age of Advertising back’ movement and into the broad largo that began the threnody of their unique troubles. And then he said, with a sudden impulse: ‘You there! The young fellow!’

‘Cossett! Good old Bill Cossett!’ cried a dozen eager voices, as they pushed him forward.

‘I’m impressed,’ said Jack Tighe thoughtfully, seizing him by the hand. He had had an idea, and maybe it was time to act on it. ‘I like your looks, Gossop,’ he said, ‘and I’m going to do something for you.’

“You mean you’re going to let us ad -’ began the eager voices.

‘Why, no,’ said Jack Tighe, surprised. ‘Of course not. But I’m setting up a Committee of Activity to deal with this situation, gentlemen. Yes, indeed. You mustn’t think we’ve been idle here in Washington. And I’m going to put Artie Gossop - I mean Hassop - here on the Committee. There!’ he said kindly, but proudly too. ‘And now,’ he added, leaving through his private door, ‘good day to you all.’

It was a signal honour, Bill Cossett thought, or anyway all the eager voices assured him that it was.

But forty-eight hours later, he wasn’t so sure.

The rest of the delegation had gone home. Why wouldn’t they? They had accomplished what they set out to do. The problem was being taken care of.

But as for good old Bill Cossett, why, at that moment he was doing the actual taking care.

And he didn’t like it. It turned out that this Committee of Activity was not merely to study and make recommendations. Oh, no. That wasn’t Jack Tighe’s way. The Committee was to do something. And for that reason, Cossett found himself with a rifle in his hand, in an armoured half track. He was part of a task force of heavy assault troops, staring down the inclined ramp that led to the cavern factory under Farmingdale, Long Island.

Let me tell you about Farmingdale.

National Electro-Mech had its home office there - in the good old days, you know. Came the Cold War. The Board of Directors of National Electro-Mechanical Appliances, Inc., tool a look at its balance sheet, smiled, thought of taxes, wept, and determined to plough a considerable part of its earnings into a new plant.

It was to be not merely a new plant, but a fine plant - wasn’t the government paying for it anyhow, in a way? I mean what didn’t come off taxes as capital expansion came back as pay for proximity-fuse contracts. So they dug themselves a great big hole - a regular underground Levittown of the machine, so to speak - acres and acres of floor surface, and all of it hidden from the light of day. Okay, chuckled the Board of Directors, rubbing its hands, let them shoot their ICBMs! Yah, Yah! Can’t touch me!

That was during the Cold War. Well, then the Cold War hotted up, you know. The missiles flew. The Board got its orders from Washington, hurry-up orders: automate, mechanize, make it faster, boost its size. They took a deep breath and gamely sent the engineers back to the drawing boards.

The orders were to double production and make it independent of the outside world. The engineers whispered among themselves - ‘Are they kidding?’ they asked - but they went to work, and as fast as the designs were approved, the construction machines went back to work to make them real.

The digging machines chugged down into the factory bays again, expanding them, making concealed tunnels; and this time they were followed by concrete- and-armour-plate layers, booby-trap setters, camoufleurs, counter-attack planners.

They hid that plant, friend. They concealed it from infrared, ultra-violet and visual-wave spotting, from radar and sonic echo beams, from everything but the nose of a seeing-eye dog, and maybe even from that They armoured it.

They fixed it so you couldn’t get near it, at least not alive. They armed it - with homing missiles, batteries of rapid-fire weapons, everything they could think of - and they had a lot of people thinking - that would discourage intruders.

They automated it; not only would it make its products, but it would keep on making them as long as the raw materials held out - yes, and change the designs, too, because it is a basic part of industrial technology that planned obsolescence should be built into every unit.

Yes, that was the idea. Without a man anywhere in sight, the cavern factories could build their products, change their designs, retool and bring out new ones.

More than that. They set sales quotas, by direct electronic hook-up with the master computer of the Bureau of the Census in Washington; they wrote on electric typewriters and printed on static-electricity presses all the needed leaflets, brochures, instruction manuals and diagrams.

Tricky problems were met with clever answers. For instance, argued one R&D V.P., ‘Won’t the factory have to have at least a couple of pretty girls to use as models for the leaflets illustrations?’

‘Nah,’ said an engineer bluntly. ‘Look, Boss, here’s what we’ll do.’

He drew a quick and complicated schematic.

‘I see,’ said the V.P., his eyes glazing.

Truthfully, he didn’t understand at all, but then they went ahead and built it and he saw that the thing worked.

A memory-bank selector, informed of the need for a picture of a pretty girl operating, say, an electric egg-cooker, drew upon taped files of action studies of models for the girl they wanted in the pose the computers decreed. Another tape supplied appropriate clothing - anything from a parka to a Bikini (mostly it was Bikinis) - and an electronic patcher dubbed it in. A third file, filmed on the spot, produced the egg-cooker itself, dubbed in as large as life and twice as pretty.

It worked.

And then there was the problem of writing the manuals.

It wasn’t so much the composition of the how-to-do directions. There was nothing hard about that; after all, the whole idea was that the consumer should be told how to operate the thing without his having to know what was under the chromium-plated shell. But - well, what about trade-marked names? Some brain had to coin the likes of Kleen-Heet Auto-Tyme Hardboyler, or Shel-Krak Puncherator.

They tried programming the computer to think that sort of thing up. The computer gulped, clucked and spewed out an assortment. The engineers looked at each other and scratched their heads. Kleen-Krak Boylerator? Eg-Sta-Tik Clocker?

Discouraged, they trailed with their reports to the V.P.

‘Boss,’ they said, ‘maybe we better put this thing back on the drawing boards. These names the machine came up with don’t make sense.’

This time it was the V.P. who said bluntly: ‘Nah, don’t worry. Didn’t you ever hear of Hotpoint Refrigerators?’

So merrily they went on, and the cavern factories were automated.

Then, when the frantically dreaming engineers had them complete, they added one more touch.

Electric percolators need steel, chromium, copper, plastics for the extension cord, plastics for the handle, a different sort of plastic yet for the ornamental knobs and embellishments. So they supplied them - not by stockpiles, no, for stockpiles can be used up, but by telling the vast computers that ran the plant where its raw materials might be found.

They supplied National Electro-Mech with a robot-armed computer that could sniff out its raw materials and direct diggers to the lodes. They added a fusion powerplant that would run as long as its supply of fuel held out (and its fuel was hydrogen, from the water of Long Island Sound or, if that went dry, from the waters bound in the clay, the silicate sand, the very bedrock underneath).

Then they pushed the little red switch to ‘on’, stepped back -and ducked.

Percolators came pouring out by the thousands that first day.

Then the machines began to speed up. Percolators flooded out by the tens of thousands. And then the machines settled down to full production.

‘Ahem,’ coughed one of the engineers. ‘Say,’ he said. ‘I wonder. That little red button. Suppose we wanted to turn it off. Could we?’

Top management frowned. ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ they asked. ‘Production - that’s what counts. Then, when the war is won,’ we can worry about turning the fool thing off. Right now, we can’t take the risk that enemy agents might penetrate our defences and cripple our war effort, so the button only works one way.’

Then the war was won. And, yes, they could worry.

3

On the ramp outside Farmingdale, Major Commaigne rattled into his microphone: ‘Korowicz? Back me up and watch for missiles. You’re air cover for the whole detachment. Bonfils, I want you on the road. Draw fire when the trucks come out, and then retire, Goodpastor, you cover the demolition crews. Gershenow, you’re our reserve. Watch it now. They’ll be coming out in a minute.’ He clicked off his microphone switch and stared, sweating, at the ramp.

Bill Cossett shifted nervously in his seat and looked at the rifle in his hand. It was a stripped-down rough-duty model, made to Jack Tighe’s personal specifications, and the only thing you had to remember was that when you pulled the trigger, it would go off. But rifles weren’t much a part of Cossett’s life. He caught himself thinking wretchedly how nice it would be to be back in Rantoul. Then he remembered those crowded blocks of unsold Buicks.

Behind their halftrack, the four other vehicles of the party rattled into position. This ramp was one of eighteen that led from National Electro-Mech’s plant to the outside world. Along it, at carefully randomed intervals, huge armoured trailer-trucks rumbled up, past six sets of iridium steel gates, out into the open air and onto the highways. No driver manned these trucks. Their orders were stamped into their circuits in the underground loading bays. Each had a destination where its load of percolators and waffle irons was to go, and each had the means of getting it there.

Bill Cossett coughed. ‘Major, why couldn’t we just shoot them up as they come out?’

‘They shoot back,’ said Major Commaigne.

‘Yes, I know, but maybe we could use the same tactics. Automatic weapons. Let them fight it out - our robot guns against the trucks. Then -’

‘Mr. Cossett,’ said the major wearily, ‘I’m glad to see you’re thinking. But believe me, we’ve all had those thoughts.’ He gestured at the approaches to the ramp. ‘Look at those roads. You think there hasn’t been plenty of fighting there?’

Cossett looked at the approaches and felt foolish. There was no doubt of it - every road for a mile around was tank-trenched, Cadmus-toothed, booby-trapped. Those were the first - and most obvious - measures the population had taken, in its early mob panic. But the trailer-trucks had been too smart for anything so simple. They had bridged the trenches, climbed the rows of dragon’s teeth, and exploded the land mines harmlessly against the drum-chains that ceaselessly pounded the roads ahead of them.

‘We had to stop,’ the major brooded, ‘because it just wasn’t safe to live around here. The factories fight back, of course. The tougher we make it for them, the more ingenious their counterattacks and - Stations!’ he blazed, thumbing down the microphone switch. ‘Here they come!’

The scarred outer gate whined open. A monster peered hesitantly out.

No brain - no organic brain, at least, only a maze of copper, tungsten, glass - was in it, but the truck was eerily human as it tested the air, searched its surroundings, peered radar-eyed for possible enemies. The trucks learned. They knew. There was no circuit in their electronic intellects for wondering why, but their job was to get the merchandise delivered, and one of the sub-tasks in the job assignment was to clear the way of obstacles.

The obstacle named Major Commaigne yelled: ‘Hold your fire!’

Silently, their weapons hunted the vulnerable spots of axles and steering linkages on the trucks as they came out, but in each armoured car, the gunners held down the interrupt buttons that kept the guns from going off. The trucks came lumbering out, flailing the roads, turrets wheeling to scan the terrain around. There were eight of them. Then:

‘Fire!’ bawled Major Commaigne, and the battle was on.

Bonfils, down the road, darted out of concealment and blasted the first trucks. There was no confusion, no hesitation, as the trucks regrouped and returned fire; but Bonfils had wasted no time either, and he was out of range in a matter of seconds.

Korowicz added his fire as the first defensive missiles roared up. Gershenow caught two of the trucks trying to execute a flanking movement. It was a fine little fire fight.

But it wasn’t the main show.

‘Demolition teams in!’ roared Commaigne, and Goodpaster’s half track bobbed up out of concealment and landed its mining experts at the lip of the ramp itself. The controlling machines had many circuits for directing simultaneous activities, but the number was not infinite. They had good reason to hope that with the active battle out on the road, the principal guardians of the factory might not be able to repel an attack on the entrance.

Commaigne snapped down his gas helmet and said thickly, through the gagging canvas and plastic: ‘We’re next.’

Bill Cossett nodded, licked his lips and put his own helmet on as their car circled the battle and headed for the ramp. Before they got there, the demolition team had blown off the first of the sets of gates. Then grey-brown smoke still curled out, and already the demolition men were setting their charges for the second gate, twenty yards farther down.

‘Now,’ said Major Commaigne, halting the halftrack and opening the hatch. ‘Be careful!’ he warned, leading the detachment out, but it was hardly necessary. If they were all like himself, Bill Cossett thought, they were going to be careful indeed.

They marched on the heels of the demolition team down into the automated factory.

It was noisy, and it was hot. It was dark, or nearly, except for the lights of the demolition team and what they carried themselves. The blasted gates were clicking and buzzing petulantly, attempting to close themselves, aware that someone was coming through, and resenting it.

Somebody yelled: Watch it!’ and, shwissh-poo, a tongue of liquid butane licked out across the ramp and puffed into flame. Everybody dropped - just in time. A smell of burning wool and a yowl from Major Commaigne showed how barely in time it had been.

One of the enlisted men cried: ‘It’s onto us! Take cover!’

But everybody had already, of course - as much as they could, not knowing just what constituted ‘cover’ in a place that the machine-brain that ran the factory had had a solid decade to study and chart. One of the machine’s built in 37 millimetre auto-aimed guns sniffed the infra-red spectrum for body heat, found it, aimed and fired.

‘I’m coming, I’m coming,’ yammered the shells - Vengo, vengo, vengo - but there were blind spots around the shattered gates, and the invading party crouched in shelter.

Major Commaigne, hardly daring to raise his head, cried: ‘Everybody all right?’

There wasn’t any answer which meant either that everybody was indeed all right ... or dead, and thus exempted from the necessity of answering at all.

Deafened, sweltering, choking inside his anti-gas helmet, Bill Cossett swallowed hard and wished he’d kept his big mouth shut, back in Rantoul. What a committee to volunteer for!

Major Commaigne’s combat boots kicked a pit in his kidneys as a .30 calibre machine-gun opened up, firing by pattern -twenty rounds at forty yards elevation and 270 degrees azimuth, traverse two degrees and fire another burst, traverse again, fire again, endlessly. It was area fire.

And it had one good feature.

‘They’ve lost us!’ Major Commaigne gloated.

The winking electronic brain inside the factory had lost sight of them - perhaps even thought they were disposed of - and was merely putting the finishing sterilizing touches on its disinfecting operation, in its meticulous machine fashion.

But Bill Cossett wasn’t able to read that encouraging message out of the machine-gun fire. He didn’t have the faintest idea what Major Commaigne was talking about; all he was able to tell was that the ramp was suddenly lit with a flickering light of tracer rounds, and the smell of the ammunition stifled him, and the noise of the guns and the heterodyne squee of the ricochets was enough to deafen. Not to mention the fact that, with all that stuff flying around, a person could get hurt.

But Major Commaigne was ready for his sneak punch. He propped himself on an elbow, very cautiously, and peered down the tunnel to where the demolition crews were rigging a larger-than-normal charge.

‘Ready?’ he shouted.

One of the figures waved a hand.

‘Then fire!’ he bawled, and the demolition men thrust down a plunger.

Warroom. A corner of the wall at the remains of the shattered gate flew out and collapsed.

Bill Cossett stared. Down from the surface was clanking a machine - an enemy? But Major Commaigne was waving it on. One of theirs then, but he had never seen it before; never seen anything like it, in fact.

And that was not surprising.

Out of heaven knows what incalulable resources, the Pentagon had produced a Winnie’s Pet. The story was that back in the old days Winston Churchill - yes, that long ago! - was fighting a war against Hitler, and Churchill decided that what he needed was a trench digger of heroic proportions. A big one, he dreamed, big enough so that in Flanders or at Soissons it could have turned the tide of battle.

And so his design staff produced the Winnie’s Pet, a tunnel digger, huge in size. Well, maybe it would have turned the tide in 1917. But what war was ever fought in trenches again after that?

The machine was still around, though, and on the spot, because that was Major Commaigne’s plan. He waved it on, into the breach in the armour-plating of the tunnel that his demolition crew had made. It was set for lateral tunnelling. They gave it its head and followed it into a brand-new and therefore (presumably) unguarded tunnel that would parallel the ramp they were in, clear down to the factory itself.

Bill Cossett got up and ran after Major Commaigne, and the others, unbelieving. It was all too easy! Behind them, the clatter of gunfire dwindled. There were no guns here - how could there be? They were safe.

Then-

‘Ouch!’ yelped Major Commaigne, inadvertently touching the wall, for it was hot. Then he grinned at Cossett, his face shadowed in the light from their helmet lamps and the tunneller. ‘Scared me for a minute,’ he said. ‘But it’s all right. It must be fused - from the digging, you know. But -’

He stopped, thinking.

And it was only right that he should think, because he was wrong. It couldn’t be atomic fusion that heated that wall. Why, Churchill didn’t have atomic fusion to play with back in 1940, when Winnie’s Pet was built!

‘Run!’ shouted Major Commaigne. ‘You, there! Get out of that thing!’

The crew hesitated, then spilled out of the digger, and again just in time.

Because the heat had been atomic, all right, but the atoms were bursting at the command of the computer that ran the factory. Seismographs had detected the vibration of their tunnelling; metal subterrene moles with warheads had been sent after them; as they raced out of the new tunnel at one end, the moles burst through at the other, struck the digger and exploded.

They made it up the ramp and to their waiting half-tracks, but just barely.

And that was the end of Round One. If any referee in the world had been watching, I don’t care who or how biased in favour of the human race, he would have given that round to the machines. It was an easy win, no contest; and the detachment brooded about it all the way back to the Pentagon.

4

Well, they didn’t call him Unlickable Jack Tighe for nothing. In fact, they didn’t call him Unlickable Jack at all then. That didn’t come until later, and that’s another story. But already Tighe was demonstrating the qualities which made him great.

‘There’s got to be a way,’ he declared, and pounded the table. ‘There’s got to.’

The Committee of Activity silently licked its wounds, staring at him.

‘Look, fellows,’ Tighe said reasonably, ‘men built these machines. Men can make them stop!’

Bill Cossett waited for somebody else to speak. Nobody did.

‘How, Mr. Tighe?’ he asked, wishing he didn’t have to be the one to put the question.

Tighe stared fretfully - and unansweringly - out of the Pentagon window.

‘You just tell us how,’ Cossett went on, ‘because we don’t know. We can’t get in - we’ve tried that. We can’t blow up the goods as they come out - we’ve tried that too. We can’t cut off the power, because it’s completely self-contained. What does that leave? The computer has more resources than we have, that’s all.’

‘There’s always a way,’ said obstinate Jack Tighe, and shifted restlessly in his leather chair. It was not that he wasn’t used to positions of responsibility, for hadn’t he been on the Plans Board of Yust & Ruminant? But running a whole country was another matter.

Marlene Groshawk coughed apologetically.

‘Mr. Tighe, sir,’ she said. (You know who Marlene Groshawk is. Everybody does.)

Tighe said irritably: ‘Later, Marlene. Can’t you see this thing’s got me worried?’

‘But that’s what it’s about, Mr. Tighe,’ she said, ‘sir. I mean It’s about this thing.’

She put her glasses on her pretty nose and looked at her notes. She, too, had come a long way from her public-stenographer days at Pung’s Corners, and it wasn’t entirely an upward path. Though no doubt there was honour to being the private secretary of old Jack Tighe.

She said: ‘I’ve got it all down here, Mr. Tighe, sir. You’ve tried brute force and you’ve tried subtlety. Well, what I ask myself is this: What would that wonderful, cute old TV detective Sherlock Holmes do?’

She removed her glasses and stared thoughtfully around the room.

Major Commaigne burst out: ‘We could’ve been killed. But I don’t mind that, Mr. Tighe. What hurts is that we failed.’

Marlene said: ‘So what I would suggest is -’

‘I can’t go home and face my wife,’ Bill Cossett interrupted miserably. ‘Or all those Buicks.’

‘What Sher-’

Jack Tighe growled: “We’ll lick it! Trust me, men. And now, unless somebody else has a suggestion, I suppose we can adjourn this meeting. God knows we’ve accomplished nothing. But maybe sleeping on it will help. Any objections?’

Marlene Groshawk stuck up her hand. ‘Mr. Tighe, sir?’

‘Eh? Marlene? Well, what is it?’

She removed her glasses and looked at him piercingly. ‘Sherlock Holmes,’ she said triumphantly. ‘He would have got in, because he would have disguised himself. There! Clear as the nose on your face, when you think of it, isn’t it?’

Tighe took a deep breath. He shook his head and said, with more than ordinary patience: ‘Marlene, please stick to taking your shorthand. Leave the rest to us.’

‘But really, Mr. Tighe! Sir. I mean raw materials do get in, don’t they?’

‘Well?’

‘So suppose -’ she said, cocking her head prettily, tapping her small white teeth with a pencil in a judgmatical way - ‘suppose you fellows disguised yourselves. As raw materials. And didn’t sneak in, but let the factory come and get you, so to speak. How about that?’

Jack Tighe was a great and wise man, but he had a lot on his mind. He yelled: ‘Marlene, what’s the matter with you? That’s the craziest -’ he hesitated - ‘the craziest thing I ever -’ he coughed - ‘it’s the craziest ... What do you mean, disguise themselves?’

‘I mean disguise themselves,’ Marlene explained earnestly. ‘Like disguise. As raw materials.’

Jack Tighe was silent for a second.

Then he pounded his desk. ‘Love of heaven,’ he cried, ‘I think she’s got it! Captain Margate! Where’s Captain Margate? You, Commaigne! Get out of here on the double and get me Captain Margate!’

Bill Cossett slipped quarters into the slot and waited for his wife in Rantoul to answer her phone.

Her image took form in the screen, hair curlers and the baggy quilted robe she liked to slop around in. But she was still an attractive woman. ‘Bill? That you? But the operator said Farmingdale.’

‘That’s where I am, Essie. We, uh, we’re going to try something.’ How did you say a thing like this without sounding heroic? It was hard, a fine line of distinction, for what he wanted was for his wife to think he was a hero, but not to think that he thought so too. ‘We’re going to, well, sneak into the cavern here.’

‘Sneak in?’ Her voice became piercing. ‘Bill Cossett! Those factories are dangerous. You promised me you wouldn’t get in any trouble when I let you go east!’

‘Now, Essie,’ he soothed. ‘Please, Essie. If s going to be all right. I think.’

‘You think? Bill, tell me exactly what you’re up to!’

‘No I can’t !’ he said, suddenly panicky, staring at the phone as though it were an enemy. ‘They’re all in it together, you see, The machines, I mean. I can’t say over the phone -’

‘Bill!’

‘But they are, Essie. We found that out. National Electro-Mech’s got a deep tunnel that goes clear to General Motors way out in Detroit, for trucks and so on. They get their computer parts from Philco in Philadelphia. How do I know the phone isn’t in on it too? No -’ he interrupted her as she was about to demand the truth - ‘please, Essie. Don’t ask me. How are the kids? Chuck?’

‘Skinned knee. But, Bill, you mustn’t -’

‘And Dan?’

‘The doctor says it’s only a little allergy. But I’m not going to-’

‘And Tommy?’

She frowned. ‘I spanked him fifty times yesterday,’ she said, an exaggeration, certainly, but at least she was diverted from asking questions; she gave a concise catalogue of smashed dishes, spilled milk, unhung jackets and lost shoes; and Bill breathed again.

For what he told her had been the truth; he was suddenly deathly afraid that the automatic long-lines dialling apparatus of the phone company might have been infiltrated by its electronic brethren in the factories. There was no sense in telling the enemy what you were about to do!

He managed to hang up without revealing his secret, and walked out of the booth to Major Commaigne’s command post.

Heroes come in many forms, but it had never before occurred to A. Cossett, Authorized Buick Dealer, that a motor-car franchise holder, like a general, must sometimes offer his life in battle.

The command post was busy, but that was natural enough, for this was a project to which the entire resources of the United States of America could well have been devoted.

And the effort was beginning to show results. Bill Cossett came to a scene of excitement. Major Commaigne was listening to an excited Captain Margate, while the rest of the detachment stood by.

Margate, as Bill Cossett had come to know, was Jack Tighe’s personal expert in raw materials and the like. A good man, Cossett thought. And so was Major Commaigne a can-do kind of guy. And this Marlene Groshawk who was tagging along - well, Essie wouldn’t like that. But it was in line of duty. And, you know, kind of fun.

Hastily, Bill Cossett shifted his thoughts back to the problem of getting into National Electro-Mech.

‘Found it!’ Captain Margate was crying, delighted. ‘We really found it! Geologists thought,’ he said, shaking his head in wonder, ‘that there wasn’t any coal under Long Island, but trust the machines. They knew. We found it.’

‘Coal?’ said Major Commaigne, his brows crinkling.

‘Why, yes, Major,’ nodded the captain. ‘Coal. Raw materials, for your disguise.’

‘Disguise?’ repeated Major Commaigne.

‘That’s right, Major.’

‘As lumps of coal?’

The captain shrugged cheerfully. ‘As organic matter,’ he clarified. ‘The machine, after all, won’t mind. Coal is carbon - hydrocarbons - oh, you’re close enough. The machine won’t mind a few little eccentricities. Why,’ he went on, warming up, ‘The machine would still accept you even if you were a lot more impure than any of you really are.’

Marlene Groshawk stamped her pretty foot. ‘Captain!’

‘I mean in a chemical way. Miss Groshawk,’ the captain said humbly, and began to prepare their disguises.

Bill Cossett tugged at his collar. ‘Captain Margate,’ he said, ‘one thing. Suppose the factory catches us.’

‘It will, Mr. Cossett! That’s the whole idea.’

‘I mean suppose it finds out we’re not coal.’

Captain Margate looked up thoughtfully from his pot of lamp-black and cold cream.

‘That,’ he said meditatively, ‘would be embarrassing. I don’t know what would happen exactly, but -’ He shrugged. ‘Still, it’s not the worst thing that could happen,’ he added without worry. ‘It might be a whole lot worse if it never does find out you’re not raw materials.’

‘You mean -’ gasped Marlene. ‘We’d be-’

Captain Margate nodded. ‘You’d be processed. And,’ he added gallantly, ‘you would make a very nice batch of plastic, Miss Groshawk.’

5

It was a most trying time for all of them, you may be very sure. But they were brave enough.

Major Commaigne let himself be smeared a sooty black without a flicker of his steel-grey eye or a quiver of his iron jaw.

Bill Cossett tried desperately to remember how awful things were back in Rantoul - ‘Yes, yes,’ he whispered frantically to himself, ‘even more awful than this.’

Marlene Groshawk - well, you couldn’t tell much from her expression. But she wrote later, in her memoirs, that she was really anxious about only one thing: How she would ever get all that stuff off?

Sappers had tunnelled them a neat little hole into a bed of brownish gassy coal. ‘Ssh!’ hissed Captain Margate, a finger to his lips. ‘Listen.’

In the silence, there was a distant chomp chomp, chomp, like a great far-off inchworm nibbling his way through armour-plate.

‘The factory,’ the captain whispered. ‘We’ll leave you now. Keep very still. Oh, and there are sandwiches and drinking water in that hamper. I don’t know how long you’ll have to wait.’

And the captain and the sappers withdrew up the shaft.

Seconds later, a small explosive blast dumped the ceiling of the tunnel in, blocking it. The captain had warned them he would have to do that - ‘Don’t want to make the factory suspicious, you know!’ - but it was like that first clod of soil falling on the coffin of the living entombed man, all the same.

Time passed.

They ate the sandwiches and drank the water.

Time passed.

They began to get hungry again, but there wasn’t anything to do about it, not any more. They couldn’t even call the whole thing off now, because there wasn’t any way to accomplish it.

The distant chomp, chomp was closer, true, but the darkness was closing in on them; the enforced silence was getting on their nerves; and the sulphury smell of the low-grade coal was giving Bill Cossett a splitting headache...

And then it happened.

Chomp, chomp. And a rattle, bang. And something broke through the coal shell around them with a splash of violet light. Stainless steel teeth, half a yard long, nibbled a neat circle out of the wall, swallowed, hic-coughed and inched forward.

‘Duck,’ whispered Major Commaigne in the girl’s ear and, ‘Out of the way!’ into Cossett’s, though whispering was hardly needful in the metallic clangour around them. They crouched aside and the teeth gnawed past them, a yard a minute, trenching the floor of their little cavern and spewing the crushed coal onto a wide conveyor belt that followed the questing jaws.

‘Jump!’ murmured Commaigne when the teeth were safely by, and the three of them leaped onto the belt, nestled in shaking beds of coal fragments, borne upwards and back towards the factory itself.

They lay quiet, hardly breathing, against what unknown spy-eyes or listening devices the factory might employ. But if there were such, they missed their mark, or the strategy worked. At a steady crawling pace, they were drawn upward and into the growing din of National Electro-Mech’s main plant. It was as easy as that.

Getting in was. But that was, of course, only the beginning.

When National Electro-Mech put its factory under the sod of Farmingdale, the UERMWA, Local 606, had torn up the old contract and employed its best dreamers to invent a new one.

‘Year-round temperature of 71.5,’ said Clause 14a. ‘Not less than 40 cu. ft. of pure, fresh, filtered air per worker per minute,’ said Paragraph 9. ‘Lighting to be controlled by individual worker at his discretion,’ said Sub-Section XII.

It was underground, right enough, but it was very nice indeed. Why, they even had trouble, serious trouble, with one worker in ten refusing to go home even to sleep, especially during the hay-fever season.

But that was before automation had set in.

Now things were not nice at all, at least by human standards. Machines might have loved it, but -

Well, the lights, to begin with, were hardly the pleasant, glare-free fluorescents that Local 606 had had in mind. Why should they be? Human eyes relish the visible spectrum, but machines see by photo-electric cells, and photocells see as well by red or even infra-red ... which is cheap to generate and produces a satisfactory length of filament life. Consequently National Electro-Mech was now washed with a hideous ochre gloom.

The air - ah, that was a laugh. Whatever air the departing human workers chanced to leave behind was still there, for machines don’t breathe. And the temperature was whatever it happened to be. In the remote ends of the galleries, it was chilly cold; in the area around the cookers, it was appalling.

And the noise!

Cringing, the three invaders gaped deafenedly around as they rode in on the conveyor belt. Bill Cossett stared through the blood-red gloom at a row of enormous stainless-steel spheres. He wondered what they were, and only glanced away in scant time to fling himself off the conveyor belt and yell: ‘Jump!’

The others obeyed just as the lumps of coal they had been travelling with thumped with a roar and suffocating dust into a huge hopper.

Beads of sweat broke out over them all. That coal was ultimately to be polymerized in the huge steel cookers Cossett had been staring at. The factory had not, of course, bothered to sweep away the excess heat with blowers. Why should it? But it wasn’t only the heat that brought out the sweat; they could hear the coal being powdered and whooshed away.

They got out of there, holding hands to keep together, tripping and stumbling in the bloody dusk.

‘Watch it!’ bawled the major in Cossett’s ear, and Cossett ducked one horrifying instant before something huge and glittering swooped by his ear.

This was, after all, an appliance factory, and Cossett couldn’t help thinking that a factory should have certain recognizable features. Aisles, for example, between the machines.

But the cavern factory didn’t need aisles. Most factory traffic is in the changing of the shifts, the to-and-fro traffic of the coffee break, the casual promenade to the powder room or water cooler. None of these phenomena occurred in the manless caverns. Therefore the machine-mind had ended corridors and abolished aisles. It dumped jigs and bobbins where they were most convenient - to a machine, not to a man. The movement of fresh parts and the carting away of finished assemblies was done by overhead trolleys.

As Cossett blinked after the one that had nearly whacked him, he caught glimpse of another shadow out of the corner of his eyes.

‘Watch it!’ he yelled, and grabbed Marlene slipperily by the neck as a pod of toasters swept by.

They all dropped to the littered floor and got up, swearing -except that Marlene didn’t swear. She was much too ladylike; that is, in that way. But she said, ‘We ought to do our job and get out of here.’

They looked at each other, a pathetic trio, smeared with grease and soot. They were lost in a howling, hammering catacomb. They were unarmed and helpless against a smart and powerful factory of machines and weapons.

‘This was a dopy idea from the beginning,’ moaned Cossett ‘We’ll never got out.’

‘Never,’ agreed the major, daunted at last.

‘Never,’ nodded Marlene, and paused, frowning prettily in the gloom. ‘Unless we get thrown up,’ she added.

‘You mean thrown out,’ Cossett corrected.

Marlene shook her head. ‘I mean upchucked,’ she said in a refined manner, ‘like when you have an upset stomach.’

The two men looked at each other.

‘The place does eat, in a way,’ said Cossett.

‘It’s a mistake to be teleological,’ Commaigne objected.

‘But it does eat.’

‘Let’s think it out,’ said Major Commaigne authoritatively, hitting the dirt to avoid a passing coil of extension cords. ‘Suppose,’ he called up to the others, ‘We blow up the conveyor belt and those cookers. This will undoubtedly interfere with the logistics of the command-apparatus, right? It will then certainly try to find out what happened, and will, we must assume, discover that certain alien entities - ourselves, that is - found their way in through the raw-material receptors. Well, then! What is there for the thing to do but close down its receptors? And when it has done so, it will be cut off from the things it needs to continue manufacturing. Consequently, we take as provisionally established, it will be unable - what?’

Bill Cossett, bawling at him from under a parts table where he had taken refuge, repeated: ‘I said, where’s Marlene?’

The Major clambered to his knees. The girl was gone. In the dull, clattering, crashing gloom, strange shapes moved wildly about, but none of them seemed to be Marlene. She was gone and, the major suddenly discovered, something was gone with her - the bag of explosives.

‘Marlene!’ screamed the two men.

And, though it was only chance, she at once appeared. ‘Where have you been?’ the major demanded. ‘What were you doing?’

The girl stood looking down at them for a second.

‘I think we’d better get out of the way,’ she said at last. ‘I took the bombs. I think I’ve given the thing a tummy-ache.’

They had gone less than a dozen yards when the first of the little bombs went off, with a sodium-yellow glare and a firecracker bang; but it knocked a hundred yards of conveyor belt off the track.

And then the fun really began...

Less than an hour later, they were back on the surface, watching plumes of smoke trickle from fifty concealed ventilators scattered across the plain outside Farmingdale.

Jack Tighe was delighted. ‘You clobbered it!’ he gloated. ‘And it let you get out?’

‘Kicked us out,’ exulted the major. ‘We were in the raw-materials area, you know. As far as I can tell, the factory has closed down the raw-materials operation entirely. It swept everything off what was left of the conveyor belt, us included - believe me, we had to step pretty quick to keep from getting hurt! Then it plugged up the belt tunnel, and as we were getting away, I saw a handling machine beginning to put armour-plate over the plug.’

Jack Tighe howled: ‘We’ve licked it! Tell you what,’ he said suddenly, ‘let’s give it a red bellyache. Plant a few more bombs in the coal beds to make sure...’

And they did but, really, it didn’t seem quite necessary; the cavern factory had withdrawn completely within itself. No further attempts were made to get raw materials, then or ever.

In the next few days, while Tighe’s men tried the same tactic on factory after factory, all across the face of the continent - and always with the same success - the armed guards outside National Electro-Mech’s plant had very little to do. The factory wasn’t quite dead, no. Twice the first day, occasionally in the days that followed, a single furtive truck would come dodging out of the exit ramps. But only one truck, where there had been scores; and that one partly loaded, and an easy target for the guards.

It was victory.

There was no doubt about it.

Jack Tighe called for a day of national rejoicing.

6

What a feast it was! What a celebration!

Jack Tighe was glowing with triumph and with joy. He was old and stern and powerful, but his hawk’s face was the face of a delighted boy.

‘Eat, my friends,’ he boomed, his voice rolling through the amplifiers. ‘Enjoy yourselves! A new day has dawned for all of us, and here are the glorious three who made it possible!’

He swept a generous arm towards those who sat beside him on the dais. Applause thundered.

The three heroes were all there. Major Commaigne sat erect, tunic crisp, buttons gleaming, a bright new scarlet ribbon over all the other ribbons on his chest, where Jack Tighe had impulsively created a new decoration on the spot. Marlene Groshawk sat beside him, radiant. Bill Cossett was stiff, grinning uncomfortably as he sat next to his wife (who was staring thoughtfully at Marlene Groshawk).

Jack Tighe bawled: ‘Eat, while the Marine Band plays us a march! And then we will have a few words from the heroes who have saved us all!’

It was a glorious picnic. Hail to the Chief bounced brassily off the bright blue sky. Cossett sat miserably, no longer stiff, wondering what the devil he would find to say, when he noticed that the brassy bugles of the Marine Corps Band faded ringingly away.

A uniformed Officer had dashed breathlessly through the crowd to the rostrum. He was whispering up to Jack Tighe, a look of tense excitement on his face.

After a moment, Tighe stood up, hands raised, a smile on his face.

‘There’s nothing to worry about, friends,’ he called, ‘nothing at all! But there’s a little life in the cavern factory yet. The colonel here tells me that another truck is coming out of the ramp, that’s all. So please just stay where you are and watch our boys knock it off!’

Panic? No, there wasn’t any panic - why should the crowd have panicked? It was a kind of circus, an extra added attraction, as risk-free as the bear-baiting at a Sussex village fair.

Let the obstinate old factory send its trucks out, thought the assembled thousands with a joy of anticipation, it’ll be fun to watch our boys smash them up! And it surely can’t mean anything. The battle is won. The factories can go on plotting underground as long as they like, but you can’t make toasters without copper and steel, and there hasn’t been any of that going in for weeks. No, pure fun, that’s all it is!

And so they took advantage of the spectacle, climbing on chairs to see better, the fathers lifting the youngest to their shoulders. And the truck came whooping out. Rattle, rattle, the machine-guns roared. Wush went the rocket launchers. The truck didn’t have a chance. In convoys, in the old days, a few always got through; but here was only one, and it got clobbered for fair.

Bill Cossett, hand in hand with his wife, went over to look at the smouldering ruins. The crowd fell back respectfully.

Essie Cossett said gladly: ‘Serves them right! Those darn machines, they think they own us. I just wish I could get down there to watch them starving and suffering, like Mr. Tighe said. What are those things, dear?’

Cossett said absently: ‘What things?’ His attention was fixed on what the bazooka charge had done to the truck’s armoured radiator grill, and he was thinking of how handily a rocket launcher belonging to the factory might have done the same to him.

‘Those shiny things.’

‘What shiny - Oh.’ In the yawning flank of the truck, its steel plates sprung by half a dozen shells, a sort of metallic crate hung its edge over the lip of the hole. It was stencilled:

NATIONAL

Electro-Mech Appliances

I ½ Gross Cigarette Lighters

And from a dangling flap of the crate, small, shiny globules were oozing out - dripping out, but it was odd, because the confounded things were dripping up. They squeezed out like water from a leaky tap, bright, striated things, and, plop, they were free and floated away.

‘Funny,’ said Bill Cossett to his wife, vaguely apprehensive. ‘But it can’t be anything to worry about Cigarette lighters! I never saw any like that.’

Wonderingly he took his own cigarette case-and-lighter combination from his pocket.

He opened it.

He held it in his hand to read the name stamped on the bottom, to see if by chance it was a National Electro-Mech.

Pflut. One of the shiny things swooped down on him, danced above the case, came towards his face. He felt a harsh, urgent thrusting at his lips, ducked, coughed, choked, nearly strangled.

Cossett scrambled to his feet, tore the cigarette out of his mouth, looked at it, threw it to the ground.

‘Good God!’ he cried. ‘But how can they? We closed them down!’

And all over the enormous crowd, others were making the same discovery, and the same error of deduction. From a smashed crate labelled Perc-o-Matics, S-Cup, a shimmering series of little globes of light was whisking its way out into the air and around the crowd.

Coffee makers? Yes, they were coffee makers.

‘Help!’ yelled a woman whose jug of icewater was snatched out of her hands; and ‘Stop!’ shrilled another, attempting to open a can of Maxwell House.

Coffee grounds and water swam around in the air, like the jets at Versailles drowning the brown sands of Coney Island. Then the soggy used grounds neatly burrowed into the ground out of sight and the shimmering globe towed a sphere twice larger than itself from cup to cup, dispensing perfect coffee every time.

A four-year-old, watching with his mouth agape, absently let his ham sandwich dangle. ‘Ouch!’ he yelled, rubbing suddenly reddened fingers as another little sphere, this one emerald green, took the bread from his hand, toasted it a golden brown, expertly caught the falling ham and restored it to him before the ham had a chance to touch the ground.

‘Bill!’ shrieked Essie Cossett. ‘What is this? I thought you stopped the factory.’

‘I thought so too,’ muttered her husband blankly, watching the frightened crowd with eyes bright with horror.

‘But didn’t you cut off their raw materials? Isn’t that how you stopped it?’

Bill Cossett sighed. ‘We cut off the raw materials,’ he admitted. ‘But evidently that won’t stop the factories. They’re learning to do without. Force fields, magnetic flux - I don’t know! But that truck was full of appliances that didn’t use any raw materials at all!’

He licked dry lips. ‘And that’s not the worst part of it,’ he said, so softly that his wife could hardly hear. ‘I can face it if the bad old days come back again. I can stand it if every three months a whole new model comes out, and we have to sell, sell, sell and buy, buy, buy. But -

‘But these things,’ he said sickly, ‘don’t look as though they’ll ever wear out. How can they? They aren’t made of matter at all! And when the new models keep coming out - how are we ever going to get rid of the old ones?’