The Junkmakers

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Junkmakers, by Albert R. Teichner

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: The Junkmakers

Author: Albert R. Teichner

Illustrator: West

Release Date: January 16, 2010 [EBook #30988]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE JUNKMAKERS ***

Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Robert Cicconetti, and the

Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from If: Worlds of Science Fiction July 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

THE JUNKMAKERS

BY ALBERT TEICHNER

ERIC WAS THE BEST ROBOT THEY'D EVER HAD—PERFECTLY TRAINED, EVER THOUGHTFUL, A JOY TO OWN. NATURALLY THEY HAD TO DESTROY HIM!

I

endell 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.