HERBERT W. FRANKE

THE BUILDING

Day by day automatons are taking our work away from us. After the 48-hour week
came the 40-hour week, and after that will come the 30-hour week, the 20-hour
week, and so on. What will people do in their free time? Something will have to
be devised to keep people busy. Serious social politicians are wracking their
brains to come up with answers.

The blue sun had sunk below the horizon; the red sun climbed triumphantly
upward. Between them formed an enormous violet arch.

Underneath it Fontain marched in a column. Columns came from all directions,
flexible gray rectangles that moved westward, toward the bridge that joined the
city to the island. Police robots controlled traffic.

Fontain was a stone mason. His job was to arrange, one on top of another, the
stones the carriers dragged to him from the fields. With a trowel he spread
plastic mortar on the open surfaces and set the next stone on top.

No one spoke during work. Behind the rows of workers, robot inspectors glided
continually. People spoke to each other about it only in their free time --
about the building they were constructing, how they would live in it, if it ever
got finished, how pleasant everything would be then. Now their housing was
barely sufficient, but once they were finished space would be abundant.

The building extended a long way in all directions. No one had ever seen the
entire island. Although each of them was assigned a different workplace every
day, none of the workers even had any idea what the ground plan for the building
looked like. That was what the robots were for.

Generations had worked on the building, and now it might soon be ready. In ten
years? Twenty? Fontain had once asked a robot inspector. That earned him three
nights in unheated detention.

He stood upon the scaffolding and layered stone upon stone. Where he stood he
could see far, yet he saw only gray walls, here higher, there lower. Everywhere
the workers on their scaffolds were at their jobs. And below, the carriers with
their large baskets hurried back and forth.

Ever since he could remember, he had been here every day, and he had never
thought much about it. But now, as he secretly turned around and looked over the
endless wall, the building suddenly seemed to him as something evil. A criminal
thought shot through his mind: demolish these foundations, level these walls --
and lead a carefree life in the old city. Conscious of guilt, Fontain turned to
his stones and worked twice as hard.

The violet light above the city announced morning -- the last red rays faded,
the blue of the day spread out.

The people who lived in the city found themselves marching east -to the bridge,
to the island, to their workplaces. What lay on the other side of the island,
they didn't know. They didn't care. They didn't have time for that. When they
came home from work in the morning, they were exhausted. They ate the food
produced by the robot kitchens and fell into their beds.

Hassan was a worker. He chiseled stones from the walls. That was tiring labor,
because the stones were mortared together with a substance as hard as glass.
Still, it was better than being a carrier, who had to transport the heavy
materials day in and day out to the rubbish heaps.

Hassan knew that he was doing important work and felt good about it. He didn't
need the robot police who constantly watched the workers. Wherever they had
placed him, he would have done his job, fulfilled his obligation. He squatted
down on his scaffold and hit the chisel with his hammer, making it ring loud and
clear. In his head was a dream, a hope for beautiful times, when the main square
would be free of obstacles and the hydroponic gardens could be laid out. Now
food was just enough to keep people alive, but when the hydroponic gardens were
planted people would have more than enough to eat and drink.

With an effort involving his entire body, Hassan broke loose a stone and lowered
it in a receiving net. Immediately a carrier packed it into his basket.

Hassan wiped the perspiration from his forehead and looked over his wall at the
indented edges of the other walls where his comrades were busy. How high had the
building once been? A random impulse shot through his mind, an absurd idea, a
vision, but it was frighteningly clear:

What if they were to build these walls further, higher and higher, into a
gigantic, powerful, domineering edifice unifying everything and from whose
towers one might view the entire island? Immediately, however, the
ridiculousness of this flash of thought came clear, and Hassan again took up his
chisel, still a little confused but without hesitation--with the certainty of a
person for whom others do the thinking.