50 in 50

"You are under arrest for theft.” the officer told him in a calm voice.

The shock stopped him in his tracks and he almost wished it had stopped his heart the same way. He had never planned to be caught and never considered the consequences. Fear and shame made him stumble as the policeman led him to the waiting car. The crowd watched in fascinated amazement.

When the evidence had been produced at his trial he found out, a little late, what his mistake had been. Because of the wiring and conduits in the corridor it was equipped with infrared thermocouples. The heat of his torch had activated the alarm and an observer at Fire Central had looked through one of their video pickups in the tunnel. He had expected to see a short circuit and had been quite surprised to see Carl removing the money. His surprise had not prevented him from notifying the police. Carl had cursed fate, under his breath.

The grating voice of the speaker cut through Carl's bad-tasting memories.

"1730 hours. It is time for you to leave for your employment."

Wearily, Carl pulled on his shoes, checked the address, and left for his new job. It took him almost the full half hour to walk there. He wasn't surprised in the slightest when the address turned out to be the Department of Sanitation.

"You'll catch on fast," the elderly and worn supervisor told him. "Just go through this list and kind of get acquainted with it. Your truck will be along in a moment."

The list was in reality a thick volume of lists, of all kinds of waste materials. Apparently everything in the world that could be discarded was in the book. And each item was followed by a key number. These numbers ran from one to thirteen and seemed to be the entire purpose of the volume. While Carl was puzzling over their meaning there was a sudden roar of a heavy motor. A giant robot-operated truck pulled up the ramp and ground to a stop near them.

"Garbage truck," the supervisor said wearily. "She's all yours." Carl had always known there were garbage trucks, but of course he had never seen one. It was a bulky, shining cylinder over twenty meters long. A robot driver was built into the cab. Thirty other robots stood on footsteps along the sides. The supervisor led the way to the rear of the truck and pointed to the gaping mouth of the receiving bin.

"Robots pick up the garbage and junk and load it in there.” he said, "then they press one of these here thirteen buttons keying whatever they have dumped into one of the thirteen bins, inside the truck. They're just plain lifting robots and not too brainy, but good enough to recognize most things they pick up. But not all the time. That's where you come in, riding along right there."

The grimy thumb was now aiming at a transparent-walled cubicle that also projected from the back of the truck. There was a padded seat inside, facing a shelf set with thirteen buttons.

"You sit there, just as cozy as a bug in a rug I might say, ready to do your duty at any given moment. Which is whenever one of the robots finds something it can't identify straight off. So it puts whatever it is into the hopper outside your window. You give it a good look, check the list for the proper category if you're not sure, then press the right button and in she goes. It may sound difficult at first but you'll soon catch onto the ropes."

"Oh, it sounds complicated all right," Carl said, with a dull feeling in his gut as he climbed into his turret, "but I'll try and get used to it."

The weight of his body closed a hidden switch in the chair, and the truck growled forward. Carl scowled down unhappily at the roadway streaming out slowly from behind the wheels, as he rode into the darkness, sitting in his transparent boil on the backside of the truck.

It was dull beyond imagining. The garbage truck followed a programmed route that led through the commercial and freightways of the city. There were few other trucks moving at that hour of the night, and they were all robot-driven. Carl saw no other human being. He was snug as a bug. A human flea being whirled around inside the complex machine of the city. Every few minutes the truck would stop, the robots clatter off, then return with their loads. The containers dumped the robots leaped back to their footplates, and the truck was off once more.

An hour passed before he had his first decision to make. A robot stopped in mid-dump, ground its gears a moment, then dropped a dead cat into Carl's hopper. Carl stared at it with horror. The cat stared back with wide, sightless eyes, its lips drawn back in a fierce grin. It was the first corpse Carl had ever seen. Something heavy had dropped on the cat, reducing the lower part of its body to paper-thinness. With an effort he wrenched his eyes away and jerked the book open.