THE OLD SHILL GAME, by H.B. Fyfe

Originally published in Analog Science Fiction, January 1967. Copyright © 1967 by H.B. Fyfe

Vendor Number Twelve stood silent and motionless on its small foot wheels, barely living on a stand-by current while Joe Olson extracted tapes of the previous day’s sales.

The shortish, spare man brushed a wisp of faded blond hair from his eyes, then gnawed a thumbnail as he studied the totals. Grimacing guiltily, he paused to open a chest hatch and remove a square of flavored gum.

The business of unwrapping this provided a moment for consideration. He swung the hatch wider to examine the various small packets remaining. Finding that the stock more or less checked with the records, indicating no malfunction, he chomped disgustedly on his gum and peered along the narrow shop. The robovendor stared stolidly ahead.

“Neil!” called the man. “Come over here an’ look at old ‘Dozen’ a minute, hey! We gotta think of a new line for ’im, or maybe a new beat.”

From the end of a row of twenty-odd machines, where he had been tinkering with a newer vendor, Neil Dyer looked back. A beefy youth with close-cropped reddish hair, he amiably tucked his wrench into a breast pocket of his coveralls. These, to match the vendors, were sky-blue with maroon trim. The robots were much cleaner.

“What now, Joe?” he demanded, strolling along the line. Large white teeth gleamed amid a spatter of freckles. “Somebody jimmy the coin stack?”

“Of what?” groaned Olson. “There’s hardly anythin’ to steal. Makin’ a lousy dime gets tougher an’ tougher!”

“Nobody’s even minted a dime for years and years. With nico-gum, shoe zippers and Relaxies a buck apiece, we’re lucky they coin a two-centimeter dollar.”

“I know, Neil, I know. It’s just an old sayin’.”

“It must be our fault if he isn’t selling. Old Dozen can’t actually think, after all—he just goes where we send him.”

The robovendor suffered this lukewarm defense in silence except for the nearly inaudible hum that indicated he was recharged and ready for business.

“Yeah…there must be some way—”

They glanced back as a door opened fifteen feet behind Olson. A trim little brunette, her shimmering raincape fluttering about her, charged in from the hall toward the tiny, plastic-enclosed office at the rear of the shop.

“‘Morning, Boss… Neil!”

“Hello, Dora,” answered Olson.

He examined his watch.

“Ninety seconds,” he predicted.

“Till she sheds her cape and that thing that’s meant to be a hat,” agreed Neil.

They waited patiently. In just under two minutes, Dora stamped out of the office. Being short, she favored heels of a height that made her stride do a lot for the snug azure business slacks and blouse she wore.

“Neil!” she cried. “You didn’t leave the tapes again! How can I keep the books up and order new stock if you don’t—”

“Right away, Dora! They’re on the way,” promised Olson, prodding Neil.

They hastily snatched out the sales records of machines not serviced the previous evening and stacked them in Dora’s outstretched hands.

Neil watched fondly as she pounded back into the office. Then, returning to the matter at hand, he raised his fingers to the light to check for traces of oil.

“Well, if it’s merchandising, it’s your baby,” he said. “I’m just the robotech here. You tell me what you want him to do, and I’ll work out the circuits.”

“Now, Neil! Two heads…an’ all that! I know you boys have a great union, an’ you draw compensation of eighty percent durin’ layoffs.”

“Which usually aren’t long.”

“…But ain’t it more interestin’ to make the other twenty percent by outthinkin’ the competition?”

“Naw…it’s more interesting to make it by doping out a new program.”

Olson shrugged and gave it up.

Neil regarded him with amiable sympathy. He said, “You know, no matter how we set these vendors, the real problem is having too many against us. We have Dozen working the Mars Avenue Concourse between the monorails and the subway. How many other robovendors are on the same beat?”

“Too damn’ many!” growled Olson. “Five or six other companies go in there. A poor human runnin’ between escalators don’t know which one to… Hey!”

He stared silently at the blank wall.

From the office echoed the subdued clacking of an automatic typewriter reproducing a list of items Dora was dictating into its microphone.

Olson continued to gaze past Dozen’s head. The robot, still switched to “inactive,” stared glassily back at him with its pseudohuman face mask presenting a permanent, polite little smile.

“You had an idea—I heard your top gears shift to power,” Neil grinned. “What now? Ads on their backs again? Free commercials with the musitapes?”

“No, no…wait a minute!” Olson glanced down the line of vendors awaiting servicing and reloading. “What draws people faster than anythin’ else?”

“A cute blond model with no— Oh, all right…what?”

“Other people. A crowd. Right? You ever see it start on the street or a busy subway concourse? Somebody drops a dollar coin, the fellow with ’im stoops to help look, another walks into him an’ yells, an’ pretty soon you got twenty stretchin’ their necks to see what’s goin’ on.”

Neil scratched his freckled nose gently and waited.

“So here in the shop we got a ready-made crowd…if you could just program them right. Real cloaks an’ hats for the humanoid models. Then have ’em line up to buy paper combs an’ nico-gum!”

Neil’s reddish eyebrows crept upward. His toothy grin began to dawn.

“Shills!” he exclaimed. “That’s what they used to call people who worked that trick. Why not? Let’s try it and see how it works!”

* * * *

Still early that day, Dozen invaded the Mars Avenue subway complex to begin his vending beat. The main crowds of the morning had not yet coagulated into the usual frenzied mass, but a constant trickle of human traffic flowed there at any hour of the twenty-four. Later, when the monorails and helicopters delivered waves of commuters, the broad passage would become a bottleneck.

At the moment, however, the average human on the scene plodded along in too subdued a mood to admire the cheerfully luminous ceiling or the beautiful mosaics of street scenes between the posters. He was a poor prospect for nicotine gum, news tapes, or notions. Following arrows on the plastic flooring was enough.

Dozen rolled slowly along one wall of the concourse, facing the walkers enroute from an express subway station to the escalators, elevators, and moving walkways that would bear them to other subways, sub-surface building entrances, or even to an open street, or heliport far above.

He unfurled a sign over his chest to announce song tapes at special prices. Presently, a human paused to study the list. Dozen halted politely.

“Musitapes—‘Space Song’ and ‘Deep as Love’!” said the customer.

Dozen extended his left hand, registered the fact that two-dollar coins had been inserted into the palm-slot, and internally released a pair of foil packets containing the self-playing tapes. These slid out of a small hatch where his navel might have been and onto a projection meant to resemble a serving tray. The hatch snapped shut like a camera shutter. The man scooped up the tapes and departed.

Several minutes later, a petite girl stopped him with an order for a pair of stockings. Dozen’s built-in procedures caused him to inquire the size after the ten-dollar “eagle” had activated his circuits. He next took in a dollar for nico-gum. A small man stopped him for a miniature glue-stick, the standard repair for a paper shirt. Then there was a lull until a larger man bought two musitapes.

Dozen was no thinker, but this last gentleman registered upon his scanners with exactly the same pattern as his first customer of the morning.

In a short while, he detected another duplication, the small girl. This time, she purchased a lip brush loaded with “Aldabaran Red.” The slight man who had been the fourth customer registered his pattern again. The first pattern returned for a sports newstape. A human not in the series was sold a packet of Zooms because Dozen’s scanners defined him as an adult. The tape man came back.

This time, the shorter man and the girl accompanied him, and he reached for a covered switch on Dozen’s shoulder.

“That’ll be enough, Boy,” he said. “We’ll go home now.”

Dozen’s urge to vend damped out. He pivoted and followed the human as directed.

“Watch it!” objected the smaller man as they approached an escalator. “That’s for humans only. We gotta take ’im in a freight elevator.”

“Aw, the cops are mostly robots, too.”

“Not the sergeant in charge of the concourse. It’d be just my luck to get a restriction slapped on our vendin’ license!”

“He worries too much, Dora,” said the large man cheerfully.

Nevertheless, he led the way to an elevator. Dozen followed, listened stolidly as the humans gave a level number to that machine, and trailed them out of the car when it stopped. A moving walkway eventually deposited them at a corridor leading to the inner door of the shop.

Dozen was halted just inside. The large man switched him to “inactive.”

“Don’t know why you quit so soon, Joe,” he complained. “Sure—there wasn’t much life in folks at this hour, but a few took the bait.”

“Maybe it’ud work, Neil. Maybe they were already watchin’ for a vendor. Anyways, we can’t all three of us go scootin’ around from vendor to vendor. We’d wear our feet to the ankle bones!”

“Mine feel that way already,” announced Dora. “Do you mind if I go back to the books and shift my weight?”

“Go ahead,” said Olson, “but first look up some costume shops and see where we can rent some cloaks an’ hats. We might as well try it for real.”

“I’ll get the main crew rolling,” said Neil, thoughtfully observing Dora’s retreat, “and then see what I can work out.”

He moved down the line, switching on restocked machines and dispatching them directly onto the concourse through the large door at his end of the shop…

At about the same time the following morning, with a somewhat altered ego, Dozen rolled along the concourse. Now, when a figure stopped to scan the list of musitapes, he scanned back in a more sophisticated manner than heretofore. Neil had programmed him to know a robot from a human in spite of a flexible face mask and human clothing.

Therefore, when the robovendor electronically “felt” two one-dollar coins click into his palm, he dropped into his tray foil envelopes of dummy tapes.

A passerby glanced fleetingly at the little wheels detectable beneath the soles of the “customer’s” shoes, but another figure had already replaced the patron.

Again, Dozen detected metal. He “sold” a square of fake nico-gum.

The third robot-shill was forestalled by a legitimate human, who apparently had been reminded by sight of the previous transactions that he had left home in a disheveled state. Dozen sold him a legitimate hard-paper comb, and scanned two competing robovendors who stood unheeded in the vicinity.

A flurry of commuters swirled past—cloaks flying and sandals squeaking on the plastic walkway—and left a momentary lull. Dozen moved a few yards toward the nearest escalator, placing himself well ahead of the other vendors.

Choosing a spot where a handsome mural of a park many levels above had been permitted to peep between advertising posters, but some distance from the possible distraction of a primitive, immobile coffee server mounted inside the wall, he broadcast the “beep” that sent his assigned robot shills into their program.

This time, he worked them through it twice before a passing human proved suggestible, but the first real customer was followed by four more. Dozen retailed notions, sportapes, and nico-gum—always a good seller in the subways, though requiring a quick scan for childish outlines before the sale—as fast as he could accept coins through the slot in his left hand.

The flow of human traffic presently changed. Instead of little groups spurting past, a swelling tide flowed from the express and monorail exits.

Other robovendors arrived by various routes. Some, wastefully programmed to travel from out-of-the-way shops, appeared from the direction of the local subways. A few descended from street level via escalators, and one was electronically ticketed by a robocop for getting in the way of humans. A good many stationary shoe shiners and servers of food or drink merely slid open wall panels and lit up.

Dozen paid no attention to these last. They were immobile installations with no semblance of human form except for representations of faces flaunting what their proprietors fondly hoped would look like jolly expressions.

The humanoids, however—the movers, the competitors—they attracted his attention. One of his scanning devices took note of every one that approached within a fifty-foot radius, and Dozen automatically moved to place himself between the newcomer and fresh prospects. He was programmed to compete, too.

“Hey!” exclaimed one of a pair of huffing customers who had paused in their rush toward an escalator. “Who…what’s that in line—another robot?”

Neil had foreseen that contingency despite the human suits, cloaks and hats obtained by Dora. Dozen beamed another signal to his shills, who immediately decamped. He activated his voice tape, selected an appropriate phrase to forestall loss of a sale, and inquired, “What is your desire, sir?”

“Pen refill, purple, an’ a three-pack o’ nico-gum!” ordered the patron, gazing after the retreating robots in a vain effort to detect whether their humanly striding feet were actually rolling on small wheels.

The crowd was too thick. As he craned, he missed Dozen’s left hand with his coin. It rattled down the robovendor’s casing toward the trampled floor.

The vendor scanned it all the way down. At the correct instant, he projected metal-mesh net from his shin. His motors hummed as the net positioned the coin magnetically and neatly flipped it upward into his waiting palm. Only then did his built-in instructions permit him to discharge the desired products and the correct change. The customer clawed up his purchases almost before the vendor’s right hand had deposited the change on the tray. As he rushed off, glaring at his watch, another took his place.

When the flurry had ended with a tall girl who bought a two-second spray of Sublime Orgy, Dozen’s cheaper scent, he moved onward. His scanners had detected several competitors gradually converging upon his active location.

For two hours, the peak of the rush, Dozen more or less repeated the sequence. He opened fresh territory with the precedent of his shills, sold all he could before the opposition caught up, then moved to another spot.

* * * *

Olson was amazed when he returned to the shop for restocking well before noon.

“Dora!” he yelled. “What else have we got that we could push?”

“Hold on!” objected Neil as the petite bookkeeper bustled out of the office. “There are just so many cubic centimeters inside that casing. We’ve already got him selling paper combs, shoe zippers, musitapes, sportapes, cosmetics, perfume, Relaxies and Zooms, nico-gum for those that don’t smoke and cough-gum for those who do, ball points for pens, glue-sticks for shirts—”

“All right, Neil, all right! Without you addin’ that bulge in back that’s just inside the regs on humanoid shape, we wouldn’t get in as much as we do. Maybe add a few of them Skin-Wate girdles in the little tube…this is a big change for us!”

“Well…uh…

“Well, ain’t it?”

“Pretty soon,” Neil said slowly, “the other boys will smell something wrong. Somebody will catch on. That’s the day we should plan for.”

“So then it’ll be all even again. Meanwhile, we beat their brains out!”

“Maybe not quite even. Let me think about it a little more. What we’ll have to do is set Dozen up ahead of time to handle the competition.”

“The other robovendors?”

“Yeah. Uh…if you were running those outfits, and caught on to what we’re doing…well, what would you try first?”

Olson frowned at his sandals. He wagged his head thoughtfully.

“Block him some way. Set a few machines to crowd him aside?”

“They’d take up your license for that!”

“Yeah. So I’d put out shills of my own…lessee…an’ some to jam the line by Dozen so no humans could buy from ’im. I’d sell the stuff later myself.”

“If it were salable.”

Olson began to grin.

“Dora!” he called. “Dora, how many gallons we stuck with of that rotten perfume? The Corona Cloud?”

“Plenty!” said the girl, appearing at the door of her cubbyhole. “I told you not to buy that essence de skunk, but you said it was cheap—”

“We’ll sell it yet! Listen, Neil—can you fix him so if a robot comes up that ain’t ours, it gets a squirt in its scanner, no matter what it pays for?”

Dora wandered over as Neil nodded slowly, a speculative glaze in his eyes.

“Just make sure he doesn’t have an accident around here!” she warned.

Neil flashed his big white teeth, then shrugged away whatever vision had crossed his mind. He left the girl reminding Olson of other clinkers in the inventory and strolled toward the far end of the shop, fumbling through his coveralls for paper and ballpoint as he went.

As it turned out, the additional profits flowed for more than two weeks before Olson, on one of his hurried inspection trips, recognized a rival proprietor and two of his staff loitering on the concourse.

Not only were the three observing Dozen with intent hostility, but one was also making notes, as if counting and classifying the vendor’s customers.

“Any day now!” he warned Neil upon returning to the shop.

“I’m about ready,” said the robotech. “I’ve stuffed in a bellyful of new procedure tapes and enough printed circuits to play poker with.”

“Switch them in tomorrow, an’ he can handle them, huh?”

“I think so. In fact, I’m working on the next step: what can he do with all the extra weight of coinage he’ll take in? I think he should be set to unload it somewhere, without taking time to come back here to the concourse limit.”

“He can always go to a change booth,” suggested Olson airily.

Neil smirked.

“Confidentially, our vendors are already set to do that when they run out of change. Trouble is we can’t make the robochangers take dollars and give hundreds.”

“Oh,” said Olson. He scratched his head and added, “Maybe I oughta open another account at the bank. Well, think about it while I check the receipts!”

He wore the look of a man reveling in the unaccustomed luxury of putting such trivialities out of mind while he labored to comprehend the extent of his affluence. The cure of the difficulty was up to Neil.

* * * *

The actual effecting of the program lay with Dozen a few days later. By then, Olson’s rivals had begun to strike back.

The robovendor, laden with large coins but only half sold out because of heavy patronage by certain nonhuman shoppers, was moved by various nuances of internal balance to home upon a robochanger.

To a human, it might have appeared that the opposition shills had been programmed to present eagles and even hundreds in payment for minor purchases. Mostly set to demand one unimaginative item—nico-gum and Zooms being most popular—they had by now become so fragrant that humans pointedly avoided them.

Their combined efforts, however, had an effect. The relative weights of coin columns within Dozen’s arms warned that he was overloaded with eagles and silver hundreds, but short of copper fives, dollars, and half-dollars.

His scanners automatically oriented him according to certain landmarks of the concourse. Pivoting on his small foot-wheels, he rolled toward a point in the broad walkway opposite a subway escalator.

He had to brake several times to permit humans to cross his path. Once, he was halted by an individual on whom other humans might have detected evidence of a hangover. To him Dozen sold a packet of Zooms.

At length, he reached his goal: a square booth of stainless steel about seven feet high. Large yellow letters glowed above the panel he approached, proclaiming, “Change!”

At about the center of the panel, above a small opening, a number of lenses stared out. Some designer afflicted with a bad case of the cutes had incorporated them—as eyes and other features—into a simpering face enameled on the panel. Beneath the “chin” was a counter recess about a foot high, the same deep, and two feet wide with a trough-like shelf projecting from the bottom.

Three humans were in line there as Dozen rolled to a stop. The first scooped up several coins and hurried off. The next tossed a ten-dollar eagle into the opening. A light flashed briefly, the coin was tilted into the bowels of the mechanism by the flick of a little trapdoor, and a quantity of smaller coins rattled into the trough from a chute at the left.

Dozen waited until the humans had obtained change for their fares, moved aside for another who arrived behind him, then confronted the panel.

As if making change, he released an eagle from his right hand. It was engorged with a blink of light. Down the chute poured eight dollars and four half-dollars. With a meticulous clumsiness that hinted of shop-improvised alterations, he flipped the coins one-by-one into his left palm.

At the fifth such transaction, the robochanger hesitated noticeably. The seventh time, it rattled another eagle back at him. A screen lit where a mouth belonged in the picture. In glowing red letters, it proclaimed, “No change!”

Dozen withdrew and circled around to the adjacent face of the booth, which flaunted the same simpering expression. He put down an eagle.

This panel obediently began to eject the customary eight-and-four, until some internal connection made good after the fourth operation. Then, it scanned him, buzzed and clicked irritably, and flashed another sign.

“A maximum of one hundred dollars is required to be changed.” Dozen patiently wheeled away to approach the rear of the booth, where he was confronted by an identical smile and array of lenses. Here, he changed two more eagles before provoking the statement, “Service for patrons only!”

Dozen backed off, scanning the surrounding concourse. His shills waited a short distance away and a few humans were passing, but there seemed no direct cause for the changer to warn him out of the way of possible human patrons. He rolled up to the fourth face and clinked down a hundred.

Ten eagles slid down the chute. Something about the silence that ensued definitely suggested a suspension of operations. The sign here flashed, “You are cautioned against illegal transactions!”

Accepting the officialese as normal, Dozen rolled away on a fifty-foot radius, scanning an approaching robocop as he did so. He succeeded in placing the booth between them by the time the next human stopped for change. The man obtained his coins and walked off, doggedly trailed by the robocop. Dozen returned to his vending…

* * * *

During the following week, Neil Dyer ran the number of vendor-and-shill teams in action up to five. Olson began to speculate aloud about buying more machines. Although the sales of each team tapered off after an initial peak, as his rivals discovered them, his profits climbed higher and higher.

Neil took to trying new ideas on Dozen as a matter of course. He felt somehow that he did better when building upon his first success. Some tricks that worked immediately with Dozen failed in other machines, or required several bouts of trial and error adjustments.

“It’s funny,” he told Olson one day, “how often we dream up the latest wrinkle from something he does or needs to be able to do.”

“Ah, if I had a hundred like him!” murmured Olson. “Well, now, how you gonna set him to use that new account I opened?”

“Here’s the identity card,” said Neil, returning to practical matters. “I bonded it to a magnetized metal plate that will clamp itself to his chest. Back plain—it’ll look like a patch. When the banking window speaks, he’ll reach up for this.”

“Shows the scanners the number, an’ we get credited with the deposit?”

“Right. He’ll hold out his right hand, one of the places where his serial number shows. I just added a variation to the standard response to a demand for identification, only now the card number will show instead.”

“Great!” chuckled Olson. “Now he’ll be operating all the time he’s out. He’ll sell, get change when he needs it, deposit the receipts—Neil, you got him so close to thinkin’ that we hardly have to come to the shop at all!”

It was almost true, except for loading stock into the vendor’s casings.

Dozen continued to attract a number of customers by the suggestive use of his shills, and he usually kept a few minutes ahead of the competition. Sometimes, the shills “happened” to get in the way of other vendors. Most of the imitations now invading the concourse were outmatched. One day, Dozen permitted one of them to purchase ten shots of rank perfume in a row.

Having fleeced the poor machine to the limit of its cash, he rolled away that much richer. Something inside him performed a sort of calculation which in a human might have been termed an analysis…an estimate…a guess.

He must do something about his internal imbalance: he could stop at a robochanger…he could stop at a banking window…the nearest banking window was closer than the nearest robochanger.

He zigzagged through the crowd to a wall of the concourse, along which he led his shills until he reached the banking window. This was situated between a cheery coffee panel and a mosaic of soaring buildings behind which the stars seemed to shift with the viewer’s approach.

“May I help you?” inquired a friendly voice as the window recess lit up.

Dozen removed from his chest the magnetic tag with the number of Olson’s account, identifiable from any window of the bank that served the concourse, and presented it to the scanner for the necessary split-second. He reversed the motion and it became again a patch on his casing.

The amenities concluded, he extended both hands and poured coins onto the counter. The banking window ingested them with efficient rapidity, informed him the sum was already credited to his account, and invited him to call again.

Having handled the first item, Dozen set out to find a robochanger booth. He was now completely empty of coins, a minor problem with his new sophistication.

At the first panel, he broadcast the inaudible beep used to control his shills. As he had learned recently, it operated more or less the same with a robochanger. Coins rattled down the chute. Dozen swept them into his palm slot. More slid down…and more…and more.

Red letters flashed rapidly from one pre-taped sign to another as Dozen gained weight at the changer’s expense. Finally, the cascade of coins ran dry and the admission, “Out of order!” flashed on.

Dozen moved to the next panel.

This jolly face could no more withstand him than the first. Somewhere inside, however, a humble, little-used protective circuit took action. As Dozen rolled around to the third panel, he was confronted by a robocop which had just arrived.

The minion of the law flashed a signal which, could it have been slowed down and translated into distinct bits, would have been understood by a human in terms of an order to cease and desist from trespassing upon the human prerogative of patronizing a change booth.

It further instructed him to produce identification and added that his number would be recorded at the central files. Notice of the fine, payable in ten days, would be forwarded to his owner.

Dozen detached the metal patch from his chest and presented it to the robocop’s scanners. The ordinary procedure was for the cop to scan the serial number from his hand and beam a signal instructing the robot to lower the hand again. In the present instance, lowering the hand as ordered resulted in the magnetic tag attaching itself to Dozen’s leg as the hand came down.

The final instruction was the robotical equivalent of the age-old order, “And now get the hell out of here!”

Dozen rolled away. His shills picked up his trail. The robocop headed toward a disturbance in the opposite direction…and the change booth remained unhappily in place, buzzing and clicking sulkily as it counted and recounted its sums but failed to balance.

At the first banking window along the wall, roughly opposite the one he had last patronized, Dozen was greeted by the same friendly voice. He tapped his chest and presented his empty hand to the winking light before depositing all the coins wrung from the robochanger. The organ of commerce recorded his serial number and accepted the money.

Having completed that business, Dozen left to transact more.

* * * *

After another hour, he had disposed of the bulk of his stock and was headed home. About then, his sensors took note that his route was being dogged by a dark green vendor.

Dozen paused to analyze their relative positions in respect to the density of potential customers. An ill-clothed figure headed for the other vendor.

Olson’s machine scanned the imitation human approaching his competitor. His own programming urged him to roll between them to intercept the “purchaser.”

“Nico-gum!” ordered the voice tape of the thing facing him.

Dozen extended his left palm. It was crossed by a coin from the right hand of the disguised robot. As soon as the metal registered inside his arm, Dozen released a squirt of Corona Cloud.

The shill hesitated, not because of the perfume but because the pattern it scanned was not that of the dark green vendor from its own shop. Dozen beamed the supersonic beep that urged it to action. It transferred another coin to him and instantly received another baptism of Corona Cloud.

The green vendor inquired, “What is your desire, sir?” and tried to roll around Dozen’s left side.

Olson’s vendor edged slightly to the left, emitted another beep, collected another coin, and spat in the shill’s face yet again.

The green robovendor tried the right flank, but was smoothly blocked in that direction, too. Meanwhile, a stream of coins flowed in a silvery blur from the shill to Dozen and the surrounding air took on the aroma of a swamp in bloom.

“What is your desire, sir?” insisted the green vendor.

Dozen engorged the last of the shill’s coins and turned upon its leader.

Beep!

The green one extended its change hand and slipped a coin into Dozen’s left palm. It suffered a squirt of Corona Cloud.

Beep! Beep! Beep!

The green vendor produced coins faster and faster. Each tribute purchased another snappy jet of perfume. Another beep…another coin…another squirt…

By the time Dozen ran out of Corona Cloud, an area for fifty feet around the three robots had become and remained completely clear of humans. By the time the green vendor ran out of money, Dozen was loaded beyond Olson’s wildest hopes. His motors labored audibly as he rolled off, scanning about for a banking window.

The green robovendor held its territory for some little time thereafter, querulously demanding, “What is your desire, sir?” Its shill retained enough of its programming in an unshocked state to repeat the gesture of proffering a coin, and the vendor continued to meet the hand with his own left palm.

Since neither money nor stock changed hands, a passing hobbyist was moved to haul out a pocket camera and shoot six inches of minitape, with which he conclusively proved that evening that robots could argue among themselves.

Finally, the vendor rolled away, on whatever route would lead it back to its own shop for restocking. The shill experienced trouble in following when its drive wheels slipped in the puddle of Corona Cloud that had trickled down its casing.

Discreetly followed by his shill team, Dozen headed in the general direction of home base. At the next banking window he passed, he paused to deposit the fruits of his latest extortions. Then, reacting to the condition of being without stock of any kind, he continued on his return journey.

Occasionally, a competing robovendor crossed his path, and it was now an automatic reaction for Dozen to beep it into standing and delivering.

The fourth time this occurred, an uproar ensued.

A short, round, very red-faced human dropped his cup beside a coffee server and charged across the concourse, shouting expressions that for the most part did not register in Dozen’s memory bank. Some resembled a cease-and-desist command. There was also an implication of extensive repair, or perhaps total dismantling.

One loudly repeated phrase, echoing along the concourse, produced the sound of a politely modulated siren: a robocop on the way at full speed.

Dozen headed for the far side of the concourse. The round man scuttled into his path, forcing him to turn away, whereupon he bumped into the vendor he had just halted. Dozen maneuvered around that machine but came mask-to-face with the human again. The bellowing man, even redder, jiggled up and down in a frenzy. The siren sounded very close. Other humans were turning to stare.

Dozen wheeled away and beamed a full-power beep at the other vendor.

A shower of coins rained from that machine’s palms to clink upon the plastic floor and roll in all directions. One or two humans stooped to retrieve them.

“What is the complaint here?” inquired the robocop, braking to an abrupt stop barely in time to avoid butting the broad posterior of one stooper.

The red-faced man began to shout at it. Dozen signaled his shills and made for an escalator. About two dozen humans were now scrambling after the spinning coins. The robocop swung from one to another, demanding to hear a complaint.

Dozen rolled onto the escalator with his shills behind him. The last scan he directed to the rear revealed the robocop completely entangled in a crowd of jostling humans. The red-faced man had both arms wrapped around his robovendor, which he seemed to be trying to drag from the melee.

Reaching the lower level, Dozen and each of his retinue were electronically ticketed by another robocop for riding a human escalator. Immediately upon release, he resumed the journey, and went as far as possible before the detection of certain programmed landmarks caused him to chance using an “up” escalator. Something seemed to have jarred his setting; he molested no more vendors on the way.

* * * *

It was only a few days later that Olson showed Neil an advertisement. The robotech was servicing number Twenty, a specialty vendor that dealt profitably in sympathy tapes. Perhaps it was the vast impersonality of the city that made so many people seek cheering up via an understanding, intimate voice which soothingly assured them that their true worth was not appreciated, that they were much better than they realized, that tomorrow might be their big day…and so on.

Neil had just sampled one of the self-playing tapes as a spot check. It had driven him to valve a mug of sudsy liquid from a two-foot cubical contraption he kept mounted on the wall.

He sang softly to himself:

“Oh, Dozen helps Neil in the workshop,

Brewing the synthetic beer—

Twenty sells love for a dollar,

Oh, Lord, we’ll get rich around here!”

“Hah!” grunted Olson, walking up. “We are already. Draw me one, too!”

He obliged. Olson took his beer and waved some papers at the other.

“Dunno how, but Dora’s figures say we take in even more than we thought. I ain’t complainin’, but it don’t add up.”

“I have the others making direct bank deposits now,” Neil reminded him. “True, sometimes I find an identity card stuck to the wrong part of a casing, but the new bank account must be growing.”

“Yeah,” mused Olson. “Well, anyway, we got about enough.”

He flourished another paper.

“I was already lookin’ around when this ad came in the mail. There are three or four local robovendor outfits for sale at quite a bargain.”

Neil reached for the circular. It had been sent by a business-exchange agency to Olson’s account number in care of the bank.

“Find you everywhere, don’t they?” he murmured. “Some of the machines brought these back from the banking windows, too. I meant to give them to you.”

“They must hit every big account. But that’s O.K.—just what I want!”

“What for?”

“To sell out!” Olson grinned, running a hand through his sandy hair. “Don’t worry, Neil. We’re gonna do it again, but bigger an’ better. Who’s got the only vendor service in this corner of the city that’s makin’ money?”

“Why…I guess you have.”

“An’ here’s a list of companies that’re losin’, an’ discouraged, an’ ready to sell out cheap. But they might go good—with the right management!”

Neil’s toothy grin emerged slowly. He wiped his oily hands on the chest of his coveralls as he considered the possibilities.

“If you take more than one, I’ll have to have some help,” he said.

“You watch!” said Olson. “With a good price for this outfit, I’ll get three or four, an’ you an’ Dora can have whatever help you want.”

In the end, after much correspondence and many visiphone calls to the bank, Olson accomplished what he promised. The buyer found by the business-exchange agency demanded a confidential transaction, which Olson suspected meant the offer came from a chain operator, but the price was more than satisfactory. The money enabled Olson to close deals with four near-bankrupt competitors.

The only disappointment developed when the purchaser insisted that someone familiar with the shop be allowed to remain. Olson salved his conscience by getting the business exchange to promise a large salary increase for Dora.

Then he and Neil set about inspecting and modifying the operations of Olson’s new combined resources.

They immediately began to make money, by the ton.

Then they made it by the handful.

In a month, they were breaking even.

After that, they began to lose, no matter how they scrambled. Olson had to lay off some of Neil’s help.

He found the robotech one day with three of the green robovendors all but eviscerated, parts strewn over his new workbench. Neil wiped a smear of oil from his forehead with the back of his hand.

“These are still programmed the way they tried to match us,” he reported. “I can do better now.”

“I wish you could,” said Olson gloomily.

“Sure I can. I’ve already got seven vendor-and-shill teams operating. Just give me a chance to catch up to the rest of these. Then I can get at the Tru-Blu Company lineup, and—”

“An’ they won’t work any better’n what we got out now,” said Olson.

“Huh?”

“All the greens just came in empty, just like the models you ain’t touched.”

“But they couldn’t! I don’t think I—”

Olson held up a hand.

“It ain’t your fault, Neil. Nobody could do what you done. But the sale was on condition that nothin’ would be changed. Whatever Dozen an’ the others were doin’, I guess they still are…somehow.”

“But they can’t! I set these machines to match our old ones, except maybe Dozen, and he can’t be everywhere!”

Olson sat himself carefully on an empty crate, and stared blankly at the floor.

Neil scratched his head with the screwdriver he had been using.

“Who’s running the old outfit now?” he asked. “Did you ever find out?”

“Naw. I phoned Dora a few times. Her instructions come by the fax machine, the goods get loaded by a coupla kids she was told to hire, an’ the money gets deposited by the robots. You can bet some of it’s our money, if only we knew how!”

“And she doesn’t know how?”

“She don’t know how. You don’t know how. I don’t know how. But I know one thing—we’re pushin’ these babies here into another beat instead of the concourse, even if they have to take trains somewhere!”

Neil leaned against his workbench, brow furrowed.

“You know, there’ll be somebody already operating in any other territory,” he reminded Olson. “It might be tough to break in.”

His boss looked up at him.

“How to break in I know just fine,” he told Neil. “We do a swell job of that. What I can’t figure is how to keep from bein’ broke in on.”

“There must be some way,” mused Neil. “If we could just figure out who’s doing this to us, maybe we could—”

“Don’t think about it,” Olson advised him grimly.

He rose from his crate and ambled toward the door.

“I thought about it all night, an’ maybe I got the answer. It’d give you heartburn, too, an’ you prob’ly wouldn’t believe it anyway.”

He opened the door and peered out with a haunted look.

“But—”

“Just don’t!” Olson repeated.

He shut the door gently behind him.