He and a delegation of other officials of the Ration Board and men whose names Morey had repeatedly seen in the newspapers took Morey on an inspection tour of the entire plant.
“It’s a closed cycle, you see,” he was told, as they looked over a chamber of industriously plodding consumer-robots working off a shipment of shoes. “Nothing is permanently lost. If you want a car, you get one of the newest and best. If not, your car gets driven by a robot until it’s ready to be turned in and a new one gets built for next year. We don’t lose the metals—they can be salvaged. All we lose is a little power and labor. And the Sun and the atom give us all the power we need, and the robots give us more labor than we can use. Same thing applies, of course, to all products.”
“But what’s in it for the robots?” Morey asked.
“I beg your pardon?” one of the biggest men in the country said uncomprehendingly.
Morey had a difficult moment. His analysis had conditioned him against waste and this decidedly was sheer destruction of goods, no matter how scientific the jargon might be.
“If the consumer is just using up things for the sake of using them up,” he said doggedly, realizing the danger he was inviting, “we could use wear-and-tear machines instead of robots. After all why waste them?”
They looked at each other worriedly.
“But that’s what you were doing,” one pointed out with a faint note of threat.
“Oh, no!” Morey quickly objected. “I built in satisfaction circuits —my training in design, you know. Adjustable circuits, of course.”
“Satisfaction circuits?” he was asked. “Adjustable?”