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    Junkmakers
    Junkmakers
    Junkmakers
    Ebook35 pages28 minutes

    Junkmakers

    By Albert Teichner

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Eric was the best robot they'd ever had--perfectly trained, ever thoughtful, a joy to own. Naturally they had to destroy him!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStart Classics
    Release dateMar 28, 2014
    ISBN9781609775636
    Junkmakers

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      Book preview

      Junkmakers - Albert Teichner

      I

      Wendell Hart had drifted, rather than plunged, into the underground movement. Later, discussing it with other members of the Savers' Conspiracy, he found they had experienced the same slow, almost casual awakening. His own, though, had come at a more appropriate time, just a few weeks before the Great Ritual Sacrifice.

      The Sacrifice took place only once a decade, on High Holy Day at dawn of the spring equinox. For days prior to it joyous throngs of workers helped assemble old vehicles, machine tools and computers in the public squares, crowning each pile with used, disconnected robots. In the evening of the Day they proudly made their private heaps on the neat green lawns of their homes. These traditionally consisted of household utensils, electric heaters, air conditioners and the family servant.

      The wealthiest--considered particularly blessed--even had two or three automatic servants beyond the public contribution, which they destroyed in private. Their more average neighbors crowded into their gardens for the awesome festivities. The next morning everyone could return to work, renewed by the knowledge that the Festival of Acute Shortages would be with them for months.

      Like everyone else, Wendell had felt his sluggish pulse gaining new life as the time drew nearer.

      A cybernetics engineer and machine tender, he was down to ten hours a week of work. Many others in the luxury-gorged economy had even smaller shares of the purposeful activities that remained. At night he dreamed of the slagger moving from house to house as it burned, melted and then evaporated each group of junked labor-blocking devices. He even had glorious daydreams about it. Walking down the park side of his home block, he was liable to lose all contact with the outside world and peer through the mind's eye alone at the climactic destruction.

      Why, he sometimes wondered, are all these things so necessary to our resurrection?

      Marie had the right answer for him, the one she had learned by rote in early childhood: All life moves in cycles. Creation and progress must be preceded by destruction. In ancient times that meant we had to destroy each other; but for the past century our inherent need for negative moments has been sublimated--that's the word the news broadcasts use--into proper destruction. His wife smiled. I'm only giving the moral reason, of course. The practical one's obvious.

      Obvious it was,

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