Summary
Download A Bad Day for Sales by Fritz Reuter Leiber for iPhone, iPad, Nook, Android, and Kindle in PDF and all popular eBook reader formats (AZW3, EPUB, MOBI).
Excerpt
Don't wait to "Get 'em while they're hot."
By then, it is too late to get them of all!
The big bright doors of the office building parted with a pneumatic whoosh and Robie glided onto Times Square. The crowd that had been watching the fifty-foot-tall girl on the clothing billboard get dressed, or reading the latest news about the Hot Truce scrawl itself in yard-high script, hurried to look.
Robie was still a novelty. Robie was fun. For a little while yet, he could steal the show. But the attention did not make Robie proud. He had no more emotions than the pink plastic giantess, who dressed and undressed endlessly whether there was a crowd or the street was empty, and who never once blinked her blue mechanical eyes. But she merely drew business while Robie went out after it.
For Robie was the logical conclusion of the development of vending machines. All the earlier ones had stood in one place, on a floor or hanging on a wall, and blankly delivered merchandise in return for coins, whereas Robie searched for customers. He was the demonstration model of a line of sales robots to be manufactured by Shuler Vending Machines, provided the public invested enough in stocks to give the company capital to go into mass production.
The publicity Robie drew stimulated investments handsomely. It was amusing to see the TV and newspaper coverage of Robie selling, but not a fraction as much fun as being approached personally by him. Those who were usually bought anywhere from one to five hundred shares, if they had any money and foresight enough to see that sales robots would eventually be on every street and highway in the country.
Robie radared the crowd, found that it surrounded him solidly, and stopped. With a carefully built-in sense of timing, he waited for the tension and expectation to mount before he began talking.
"Say, Ma, he doesn't look like a robot at all," a child said. "He looks like a turtle."
Which was not completely inaccurate. The lower part of Robie's body was a metal hemisphere hemmed with sponge rubber and not quite touching the sidewalk. The upper was a metal box with black holes in it. The box could swivel and duck.
A chromium-bright hoopskirt with a turret on top.
"Reminds me too much of the Little Joe Paratanks," a legless veteran of the Persian War muttered, and rapidly rolled himself away on wheels rather like Robie's.
His departure made it easier for some of those who knew about Robie to open a path in the crowd. Robie headed straight for the gap. The crowd whooped.
Robie glided very slowly down the path, deftly jogging aside whenever he got too close to ankles in skylon or sockassins. The rubber buffer on his hoopskirt was merely an added safeguard.
The boy who had called Robie a turtle jumped in the middle of the path and stood his ground, grinning foxily.
Robie stopped two feet short of him. The turret ducked. The crowd got quiet.
"Hello, youngster," Robie said in a voice that was smooth as that of a TV star, and was, in fact, a recording of one.
The boy stopped smiling. "Hello," he whispered.
"How old are you?" Robie asked.
"Nine. No, eight."
"That's nice," Robie observed. A metal arm shot down from his neck, stopped just short of the boy.
The boy jerked back.
"For you," Robie said.
The boy gingerly took the red polly-lop from the neatly fashioned blunt metal claws, and began to unwrap it.
"Nothing to say?" asked Robie.
"Uh—thank you."
After a suitable pause, Robie continued. "And how about a nice refreshing drink of Poppy Pop to go with your polly-lop?" The boy lifted his eyes, but didn't stop licking the candy. Robie waggled his claws slightly. "Just give me a quarter and within five seconds—"
A little girl wriggled out of the forest of legs. "Give me a polly-lop, too, Robie," she demanded.
"Rita, come back here!" a woman in the third rank of the crowd called angrily.
Robie scanned the newcomer gravely. His reference silhouettes were not good enough to let him distinguish the sex of children, so he merely repeated, "Hello, youngster."
"Rita!"
"Give me a polly-lop!"
Disregarding both remarks, for a good salesman is single-minded and does not waste bait, Robie said winningly, "I'll bet you read Junior Space Killers. Now I have here—"
"Uh-uh, I'm a girl. He got a polly-lop."
At the word "girl," Robie broke off. Rather ponderously, he said, "I'll bet you read Gee-Gee Jones, Space Stripper. Now I have here the latest issue of that thrilling comic, not yet in the stationary vending machines. Just give me fifty cents and within five—"
"Please let me through. I'm her mother."
A young woman in the front rank drawled over her powder-sprayed shoulder, "I'll get her for you," and slithered out on six-inch platform shoes. "Run away, children," she said nonchalantly. Lifting her arms behind her head, she pirouetted slowly before Robie to show how much she did for her bolero half-jacket and her form-fitting slacks that melted into skylon just above the knees. The little girl glared at her. She ended the pirouette in profile.