Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction December 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
joy ride
By MARK MEADOWS
Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS
Men or machines—something had to give—though notnecessarily one or the other. Why not both?
(historian's note: The following statements are extracted fromdepositions taken by the Commission of Formal Inquiry appointed by thePeloric Rehabilitation Council, a body formed as a provisionalgovernment in the third month of the Calamity.)
1
y name is Andrews, third assistant vice president in charge ofmaintenance for Cybernetic Publishers.
It is not generally known that all the periodical publications for theworld were put out by Cybernetics. We did not conceal the monopolydeliberately, but we found that using the names of other publishinghouses helped to give our magazines an impression of variety. Ofcourse, we didn't want too much variety, either; only the tried andtested kind.
Cybernetics gained its monopoly by cutting costs of production. It hadsucceeded in linking electronic calculators to photo-copyingmachines. Through this combination, all kinds of texts andillustrations could be produced automatically.
ormula punch cards, fed to the calculators, produced articles andstories of standard styles and substance. Market analysts in theresearch division designed the formulas for the punch cards. Anediting machine shuffled the cards before giving them to thecalculating machines.
The shuffling produced enough variation in the final product tosuggest novelty to the reader without actually presenting anythingstrange or unexpected.
Once the cards were in the machine, they set off electronic impulseswhich, by a scanning process, projected photographic images of typeand illustrations to a ribbon of paper. This ribbon ran through abattery of xerographic machines to reproduce the exact number ofcopies specified by the market indicator.
Everything worked smoothly without the necessity for thought, which,as you know, is expensive and often wasteful.
In the second week of the Calamity, one machine after another seemedto go put of order. I couldn't tell whether the trouble was in thecards, in the research office, or in the machines.
First, one produced something entitled "A Critique of the BureaucraticCulture Pattern." Then another would give out nothing but lyric poems.A third simply printed obvious gibberish, the letters F-R-E-E-D-O-M.And one of our oldest machines ran off a series of limericks of adecidedly pungent flavor.
I did all I could to straighten them out. Even our cleaning compoundswere analyzed for traces of alcohol. But we weren't able to locate thetrouble. And we didn't dare shut off the power because that would havebacked up our continuous stream of pulp and paper all the way toCanada, Alaska and Scandinavia. There didn't seem to be anything to dobut let the publications go on through to the distributio