General strikes -- Fiction; Robots -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Telepathy -- Fiction
My head was pounding, so I took the time out to brew a pot of coffee
while I finished dressing--at least the coffee can was in plain view
in the kitchen. The brew was black and hot and I suppose not very well
made, but after two cups I felt better. The throb in my head settled
down into a dull ache, and I felt a little more capable of thinking.
Though I didn't have any bright ideas on what had happened--not yet.
My breakfast drunk, I went up on the roof and opened the garage doors.
The Copter was waiting for me, sleek and new; the latest model. I
climbed in and took off, heading west toward the factory, ten minutes
flight-time away.
* * * * *
It was a small plant, but it was all mine. It had been my baby right
along--the Don Morrison Fissionables Inc. I'd designed the androids
myself, plotted out the pile locations, set up the simplified
reactors. And now it was making money. For men to work in a uranium
plant you need yards of shielding, triple-checking, long cooling-off
periods for some of the hotter products. But with lead-bodied,
radio-remote controlled androids, it's easier. And with androids like
the new Morrison 5's, that can reason--at least along atomic
lines--well, I guess I was on my way to becoming a millionaire.
But this morning the plant was shut down. Jack and a half dozen other
men--my human foremen and supervisors--were huddled in a worried bunch
that broke up as soon as they saw me.
"I'm sure glad you're here, Don," Jack said.
"Find out anything?"
"Yeah. Plenty. Our androids are busy, all right. They're out in the
city, every one of them. We've had a dozen police reports already."
"Police reports! What's wrong?"
Jack shook his head. "It's crazy. They're swarming all over Carron
City. They're stopping robots in the streets--household Robs,
commercial Droids, all of them. They just look at them, and then the
others quit work and start off with them. The police sent for us to
come and get ours."
"Why don't the police do something about it?"
"Hah!" barked a voice behind us. I swung around, to face Chief of
Police Dalton of Carron City. He came straight toward me, his purplish
jowls quivering with rage, and his finger jabbed the air in front of
my face.
"You built them, Don Morrison," he said. "You stop them. I can't. Have
you ever tried to shoot a robot? Or use tear gas on one? What can I
do? I can't blow up the whole town!"
Somewhere in my stomach I felt a cold, hard knot. Take stainless steel
alloyed with titanium and plate it with three inches of lead. Take a
brain made up of super-charged magnetic crystals enclosed in a leaden
cranium and shielded by alloy steel. A bullet wouldn't pierce it;
radiations wouldn't derange it; an axe wouldn't break it.
"Let's go to town," I said.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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