"What have you been thinking?" Manny asked.
"I've been thinking," Alix said slowly, "that we fight man's wars
and pulverate his garbage and dehydrate his sewerage, but we're not
citizens. Why, Manny?"
"We're not human. We're not--orthodox." Manny was watching him closely
as he spoke.
"Not human? They feed us Bach and Brahms and Beethoven and Shakespeare
and Voltaire in our incubation period, don't they? And all the others
I've forced myself to forget. Does this--this _soul_ come from
somewhere outside the system?"
"I guess it does. They don't feed us much religion, but I guess it
comes from God."
"And what's He like?"
"It would depend upon who you ask, I guess," Manny said. "Sort of a
superman. From Him they get their charity and tolerance and justice and
all the rest of their noble attributes." Manny's laugh was bitter. "How
they love themselves."
"They're so sure about everything else," Alix said, "but not very sure
of their God. Is that it?"
"That's about it. I heard one man say He watches when a sparrow falls.
I guess we're less than the sparrows, Alix."
There was a silence, and then Manny put a hand on Alix's shoulder.
"We've got about fifteen minutes, and I've got a million things to say.
Maybe I should have said them earlier."
Alix turned at the gravity of Manny's voice. His lumagel eyes went over
Manny's dark face, absorbing his rigid intensity. Whatever it was that
was coming, it was more important than the fight.
Manny said quietly, "Win this one, and blood will run in the streets,
Alix."
"Human blood?"
"White man's blood. We've got the Negro, and the Jap and the Chinamen
and all the rest of them who got their rights so recently. And what
kind of rights have they got? Civil, not in the people's hearts. You
think those races don't know it? We were talking of their God, Alix.
Well, the robots have one, too. His name is Alix 1340."
"Manny, you've gone crazy."
"Have I? Joe Nettleton's one of us, Alix. This was his scheme, and the
four men who run the switch at the personnel center; they're ours,
too. Top robots. Their I.Q.'s all crowding two hundred. We've got the
brains, Alix, and the man power. We've got the combined venom of a
billion non-whites. And now we've got you."
"A pug. What kind of god would I make? You're off the beam, Manny."
"Am I? Did I ever give you anything but the straight dope? They adore
you, Alix. You've been a model to them. You could be their king, if you
say the word."
"You've been setting this up, you and Joe Nettleton? This fight
tonight's the crisis? You've been building toward tonight."
"But it takes a front man, a symbol. You're the only one who can be
that. You're the only one they'd all back."
Alix looked again at his hands, the hands that had taken him to the
first mixed fight in history, to a title fight. 'Man Versus The
Machine' most of the sports scribes had labeled it, though not Joe
Nettleton. Machine? A machine that had assimilated Voltaire? A machine
that had listened to Brahms?
What differentiates man from his machines? Supremacy? Supremacy would
be established tonight. No, it wasn't physical supremacy. And there
were robots far beyond man's mental powers.
The spark, then, the spark from their God? How did they know they
had it? In all the wrangling mysticism that had gone through so many
directed misinterpretations, where could they find their God?
"Thinking it over?" Manny asked. "Why so quiet, Alix?"