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Aware of the three men, the truck slowed to a halt, shifted gears and pulled on its emergency brake. A moment passed as relays moved into action; then a portion of the loading surface tilted and a cascade of heavy cartons spilled down onto the roadway. With the objects fluttered a detailed inventory sheet.
“You know what to do,” O’Neill said rapidly. “Hurry up, before it gets out of here.”
Expertly, grimly, the three men grabbed up the deposited cartons and ripped the protective wrappers from them. Objects gleamed: a binocular microscope, a portable radio, heaps of plastic dishes, medical supplies, razor blades, clothing, food. Most of the shipment, as usual, was food. The three men systematically began smashing objects. In a few minutes, there was nothing but a chaos of debris littered around them.
“That’s that,” O’Neill panted, stepping back. He fumbled for his check-sheet. “Now let’s see what it does.”
The truck had begun to move away; abruptly it stopped and backed toward them. Its receptors had taken in the fact that the three men had demolished the dropped-off portion of the load. It spun in a grinding half circle and came around to face its receptor bank in their direction. Up went its ante
A second, identical load was tilted and shoved off the truck.
“We failed,” Ferine groaned as a duplicate inventory sheet fluttered after the new load. “We destroyed all that stuff for nothing.”
“What now?” Morrison asked O’Neill. “What’s the next strategem on our board?”
“Give me a hand.” O’Neill grabbed up a carton and lugged it back to the truck. Sliding the carton onto the platform, he turned for another. The other two men followed clumsily after him. They put the load back onto the truck. As the truck started forward, the last square box was again in place.
The truck hesitated. Its receptors registered the return of its load. From within its works came a low sustained buzzing.
“This may drive it crazy,” O’Neill commented, sweating. “It went through its operation and accomplished nothing.”
The truck made a short, abortive move toward going on. Then it swung purposefully around and, in a blur of speed, again dumped the load onto the road.
“Get them!” O’Neill yelled. The three men grabbed up the cartons and feverishly reloaded them. But as fast as the cartons were shoved back on the horizontal stage, the truck’s grapples tilted them down its far-side ramps and onto the road.
“No use,” Morrison said, breathing hard. “Water through a sieve.”
“We’re licked,” Ferine gasped in wretched agreement, “like always. We humans lose every time.”
The truck regarded them calmly, its receptors blank and impassive. It was doing its job. The planetwide network of automatic factories was smoothly performing the task imposed on it five years before, in the early days of the Total Global Conflict.
“There it goes,” Morrison observed dismally. The truck’s ante
“One last try,” O’Neill said. He swept up one off the cartons and ripped it open. From it he dragged a ten-gallon milk tank and unscrewed the lid. “Silly as it seems.”
“This is absurd,” Ferine protested. Reluctantly, he found a cup among the littered debris and dipped it into the milk. “A kid’s game!”
The truck has paused to observe them.
“Do it,” O’Neill ordered sharply. “Exactly the way we practiced it.”
The three of them drank quickly from the milk tank, visibly allowing the milk to spill down their chins; there had to be no mistaking what they were doing.
As pla
“God’s sake!” he choked.
The other two did the same; stamping and loudly cursing, they kicked over the milk tank and glared accusingly at the truck.
“It’s no good!” Morrison roared.
Curious, the truck came slowly back. Electronic synapses clicked and whirred, responding to the situation; its ante
“I think this is it,” O’Neill said, trembling. As the truck watched, he dragged out a second milk tank, unscrewed its lid and tasted the contents. “The same!” he shouted at the truck. “It’s just as bad!”
From the truck popped a metal cylinder. The cylinder dropped at Morrison’s feet; he quickly snatched it up and tore it open.
The instruction sheets listed rows of possible defects, with neat boxes by each; a punch-stick was included to indicate the particular deficiency of the product.
“What’ll I check?” Morrison asked. “Contaminated? Bacterial? Sour? Rancid? Incorrectly labeled? Broken? Crushed? Cracked? Bent? Soiled?”
Thinking rapidly, O’Neill said, “Don’t check any of them. The factory’s undoubtedly ready to test and resample. It’ll make its own analysis and then ignore us.” His face glowed as frantic inspiration came. “Write in that blank at the bottom. It’s an open space for further data.”
“Write what?”
O’Neill said, “Write: the product is thoroughly pizzled.”
“What’s that?” Ferine demanded, baffled.
“Write it! It’s a semantic garble—the factory won’t be able to understand it. Maybe we can jam the works.”
With O’Neill’s pen, Morrison carefully wrote that the milk was pizzled. Shaking his head, he resealed the cylinder and returned it to the truck. The truck swept up the milk tanks and slammed its railing tidily into place. With a shriek of tires, it hurtled off. From its slot, a final cylinder bounced; the truck hurriedly departed, leaving the cylinder lying in the dust.
O’Neill got it open and held up the paper for the others to see.
For a moment, the three men were silent. Then Ferine began to giggle. “We did it. We contacted it. We got across.”
“We sure did,” O’Neill agreed. “It never heard of a product being pizzled.”
Cut into the base of the mountains lay the vast metallic cube of the Kansas City factory. Its surface was corroded, pitted with radiation pox, cracked and scarred from the five years of war that had swept over it. Most of the factory was buried subsurface, only its entrance stages visible. The truck was a speck rumbling at high speed toward the expanse of black metal. Presently an opening formed in the uniform surface; the truck plunged into it and disappeared inside. The entrance snapped shut.
“Now the big job remains,” O’Neill said. “Now we have to persuade it to close down operations—to shut itself off.”