careless in his cellar after ceasing to use same.
Laurine wouldn’t never have found me if it hadn’t been for this new logics service. But now that it was started—Zowie! She’d shot one husband and got acquitted. Suppose she got impatient because I was still married an’ asked logics service how to get me free an’ in a spot where I’d have to marry her by 8:30 p.m.? It woulda told her! Just like it told that woman out in the suburbs how to make sure her husband wouldn’t run around no more.
I’m drivin’ blind when a social-conscious guy asks how to bring about his own particular system of social organization at once. He don’t ask if it’s best or if it’ll work. He just wants to get it started. And the logic—or Joe— tells him! Simultaneous, there’s a retired preacher asks how can the human race be cured of concupiscence. Bein’ seventy, he’s pretty safe himself, but he wants to remove the peril to the spiritual welfare of the rest of us. He finds out. It involves constructin’ a sort of broadcastin’ station to emit a certain wave-pattern an’ turnin’ it on. Just that. Nothing more. It’s found out afterward, when he is solicitin’ funds to construct it. Fortunate, he didn’t think to ask logics how to finance it, or it woulda told him that, too, an’ we woulda all been cured of the impulses we maybe regret afterward but never at the time. And there’s another group of serious thinkers who are sure the human race would be a lot better off if everybody went back to nature an’ lived in the woods with the ants an’ poison ivy. They start askin’ questions about how to cause humanity to abandon cities and artificial conditions of living. They practically got the answer in logics service!
Maybe it didn’t strike you serious at the time, but while I was drivin’ aimless, sweatin’ blood over Laurine bein’ after me, the fate of civilization hung in the balance. I ain’t kiddin’. For instance, the Superior Man gang that sneers at the rest of us was quietly asking questions on what kinda weapons could be made by which Superior Men could take over and run things…
But I drove here an’ there, sweatin’ an’ talkin’ to myself.
“What I oughta do is ask this wacky logics service how to get outa this mess,” I says. “But it’d just tell me a intricate and’ foolproof way to bump Laurine off. I wanna have peace! I wanna grow comfortably old and brag to other old guys about what a hellion I used to be, without havin’ to go through it an’ lose my chance of livin’ to be a elderly liar.”
I turn a corner at random, there in the Maintenance car.
“It was a nice kinda world once,” I says, bitter. “I could go home peaceful and not have belly-cramps wonderin’ if a blonde has called up my wife to announce my engagement to her. I could punch keys on a logic without gazing into somebody’s bedroom while she is giving her epidermis a air bath and being led to think things I gotta take out in thinkin’. I could—”
Then I groan, rememberin’ that my wife, naturally, is gonna blame me for the fact that our private life ain’t private any more if anybody has tried to peek into it.
“It was a swell world,” I says, homesick for the dear dead days-before-yesterday. “We was playin’ happy with our toys like little innocent children until somethin’ happened. Like a guy named Joe come in and squashed all our mud pies.”
Then it hit me. I got the whole thing in one flash. There ain’t nothing in the tank set-up to start relays closin’. Relays are closed exclusive by logics, to get the information the keys are punched for. Nothin’ but a logic coulda cooked up the relay patterns that constituted logics service. Humans wouldn’t ha’ been able to figure it out! Only a logic could integrate all the stuff that woulda made all the other logics work like this…
There was one answer. I drove into a restaurant and went over to a pay-logic an’ dropped in a coin.
“Can a logic be modified,” I spell out, “to cooperate in long-term planning which human brains are too limited in scope to do?”
The screen sputters. Then it says:
“Definitely yes.”
“How great will the modifications be?” I punch.
“Microscopically slight. Changes in dimensions,” says the screen. “Even modern precision gauges are not exact enough to check them, however. They can only come about under present manufacturing methods by an extremely improbable accident, which has only happened once.”
“How can one get hold of that one accident which can do this highly necessary work?” I punch.
The screen sputters. Sweat broke out on me. I ain’t got it figured out close, yet, but what I’m scared of is that whatever is Joe will be suspicious. But what I’m askin’ is strictly logical. And logics can’t lie. They gotta be accurate. They can’t help it.
“A complete logic capable of the work required,” says the screen, “is now in ordinary family use in—”
And it gives me the Korlanovitch address and do I go over there! Do I go over there fast! I pull up the Maintenance car in front of the place, and I take the extra logic outta the back, and I stagger up the Korlanovitch fiat and I ring the bell. A kid answers the door.
“I’m from Logics Maintenance,” I tell the kid. “An inspection record has shown that your logic is apt to break down any minute. I come to put in a new one before it does.”
The kid says “O.K.!” real bright and runs back to the livin’-room where Joe—I got the habit of callin’ him Joe later, through just meditatin’ about him—is runnin’ somethin’ the kids wanna look at. I hook in the other logic an’ turn it on, conscientious making sure it works. Then I say:
“Now kiddies, you punch this one for what you want. I’m gonna take the old one away before it breaks down.”
And I glance at the screen. The kiddies have apparently said they wanna look at some real cannibals. So the screen is presenting a anthropological expedition scientific record film of the fertility dance of the Huba-Jouba tribe of West Africa. It is supposed to be restricted to anthropological professors an’ post-graduate medical students. But there ain’t any censor blocks workin’ any more and it’s on. The kids are much interested. Me, bein’ a old married man, I blush.
I disconnect Joe. Careful. I turn to the other logic and punch keys for Maintenance. I do not get a services flash. I get Maintenance. I feel very good. I report that I am goin’ home because I fell down a flight of steps an’ hurt my leg. I add, inspired:
“An’ say, I was carryin’ the logic I replaced an’ it’s all busted. I left it for the dustman to pick up.”
“If you don’t turn ’em in,” says Stock, “you gotta pay for ’em.”
“Cheap at the price,” I say.
I go home. Laurine ain’t called. I put Joe down in the cellar, careful. If I turned him in, he’d be inspected an’ his parts salvaged even if I busted somethin’ on him. Whatever part was off-normal might be used again and everything start all over. I can’t risk it. I pay for him and leave him be.
That’s what happened. You might say I saved civilization an’ not be far wrong. I know I ain’t goin’ to take a chance on havin’ Joe in action again. Not while Laurine is livin’. An’ there are other reasons. With all the nuts who wanna change the world to their own line o’ thinkin’, an’ the ones that wanna bump people off, an’ generally solve their problems—Yeah! Problems are bad, but I figure I better let sleepin’ problems lie.
But on the other hand, if Joe could be tamed, somehow, and got to work just reasonable—He could make me a coupla million dollars, easy. But even if I got sense enough not to get rich, an’ if I get retired and just loaf around fishin’ an’ lyin’ to other old duffers about what a great guy I used to be—Maybe I’ll like it, but maybe I won’t. And after all, if I get fed up with bein’ old and confined strictly to thinking—why I could hook Joe in long enough to ask: “How can a old guy not stay old?” Joe’ll be able to find out. An’ he’ll tell me.
That couldn’t be allowed out general, of course. You gotta make room for kids to grow up. But it’s a pretty good world, now Joe’s turned off. Maybe I’ll turn him on long enough to learn how to stay in it. But on the other hand, maybe—
