Joy Ride

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.
Men or machines—something had to give—though not necessarily one or the other. Why not both?
(historian's note: The following statements are extracted from depositions taken by the Commission of Formal Inquiry appointed by the Peloric Rehabilitation Council, a body formed as a provisional government in the third month of the Calamity .)
y name is Andrews, third assistant vice president in charge of maintenance for Cybernetic Publishers.
It is not generally known that all the periodical publications for the world were put out by Cybernetics. We did not conceal the monopoly deliberately, but we found that using the names of other publishing houses helped to give our magazines an impression of variety. Of course, we didn't want too much variety, either; only the tried and tested kind.
Cybernetics gained its monopoly by cutting costs of production. It had succeeded in linking electronic calculators to photo-copying machines. Through this combination, all kinds of texts and illustrations could be produced automatically.
ormula punch cards, fed to the calculators, produced articles and stories of standard styles and substance. Market analysts in the research division designed the formulas for the punch cards. An editing machine shuffled the cards before giving them to the calculating machines.
The shuffling produced enough variation in the final product to suggest novelty to the reader without actually presenting anything strange or unexpected.
Once the cards were in the machine, they set off electronic impulses which, by a scanning process, projected photographic images of type and illustrations to a ribbon of paper. This ribbon ran through a battery of xerographic machines to reproduce the exact number of copies specified by the market indicator.