The motto appeared on their trade-mark showing Aladdin rubbing his lamp and a genie appearing.
Below this was a long list of simple orders-STOP, GO, YES, NO, SLOWER, FASTER, COME HERE, FETCH A NURSE, etc. Then there was a shorter list of tasks common in hospitals, such as back rubs, and including some that I had never heard of. The list closed abruptly with the statement: 'Routines 87 through 242 may be ordered only by hospital staff members and the order phrases are therefore not listed here.'
I had not voice-coded the first Flexible Frank; you had to punch buttons on his control board. It was not because I had not thought of it, but because the analyzer and telephone exchange for the purpose would have weighed and bulked and cost more than all the rest of Frank, Sr., net. I decided that I would have to learn some new wrinkles in miniaturization and simplification before I would be ready to practice engineering here. But I was anxious to get started on it, as I could see from Eager Beaver that it was going to be more fun than ever-lots of new possibilities. Engineering is the art of the practical and depends more on the total state of the art than it does on the individual engineer. When railroading time comes you can railroad-but not before. Look at poor Professor Langley, breaking his heart on a flying machine that should have flown-he had put the necessary genius in it-but he was just a few years too early to enjoy the benefit of collateral art he needed and did not have. Or take the great Leonardo da Vinci, so far out of his time that his most brilliant concepts were utterly unbuildable.
I was going to have fun here-I mean 'now.'
I handed back the instruction card, then got out of bed and looked for the data plate. I had halfway expected to see 'Hired Girl, Inc.' at the bottom of the notice and I wondered if 'Aladdin' was a daughter corporation of the Mannix group. The data plate did not tell me much other than model, serial number, factory, and such, but it did list the patents, about forty of them-.and the earliest, I was very interested to see, was in 1970... almost certainly based on my original model and drawings.
I found a pencil and memo pad on the table and jotted down the number of that first patent, but my interest was purely intellectual. Even if it had been stolen from me (I was sure it had been), it had expired in 1987Äunless they had changed the patent laws-and only those granted later than 1983 would still be valid. But I wanted to know.
A light glowed on the automaton and he announced: 'I am being called. May I leave?'
'Huh? Sure. Run along.' It started to reach for the phrase list; I hastily said, 'Go!'
'Thank you. Good-by.' It detoured around me.
'Thank you.'
'You are welcome.'
Whoever had dictated the gadget's sound responses had a very pleasant baritone voice.
I got back into bed and ate the breakfast I had let get cold-only it turned out not to be cold. Breakfast four- minus was about enough for a medium-sized bird, but I found that it was enough, even though I had been very hungry. I suppose my stomach had shrunk. It wasn't until I had finished that I remembered that this was the first food I had eaten in a generation. I noticed it then because they had included a menu-what I had taken for bacon was listed as 'grilled yeast strips, country style.'
But in spite of a thirty-year fast, my mind was not on food; they had sent a newspaper in with breakfast: the Great Los Angeles Times, for Wednesday, 13 December, 2000.
Newspapers had not changed much, not in format. This one was tabloid size, the paper was glazed instead of rough pulp and the illustrations were either full color, or black-and-white stereo-I couldn't puzzle out the gimmick on that last. There had been stereo pictures you could look at without a viewer since I was a small child; as a kid I had been fascinated by ones used to advertise frozen foods in the `50s. But those had required fairly thick transparent plastic for a grid of tiny prisms; these were simply on thin paper. Yet they had depth.
I gave it up and looked at the rest of the paper. Eager Beaver had arranged it on a reading rack and for a while it seemed as if the front page was all I was going to read, for I could not find out how to open the damned thing. The sheets seemed to have frozen solid.
Finally I accidentally touched the lower right-hand corner of the first sheet; it curled up and out of the way... some surface charge phenomenon, triggered at that point. The other pages got neatly out of the way in succession whenever I touched that spot.
At least half of the paper was so familiar as to make me homesick-'Your Horoscope Today, Mayor Dedicates New Reservoir, Security Restrictions Undermining Freedom of Press Says N. Y. Solon, Giants Take Double-Header, Unseasonable Warmth Perils Winter Sports, Pakistan Warns India'-et cetera, ad tedium. This is where I came in.
Some of the other items were new but explained themselves:
LUNA SHUTTLE STILL SUSPENDED FOR GEMINTDS- Twenty-Four-Hour Station Suffers Two Punctures, No Casualties; FOUR WHITES LYNCHED IN CAPETOWN-UN Action Demanded; HOST-MOTHERS ORGANIZE FOR HIGHER FEES-Demand 'Amateurs' Be Outlawed; MISSISSIPPI PLANTER INDICTED UNDER ANTI-ZOMBIE LAW-His Defense: 'Them Boys Hain't Drugged, They're Just Stupid!'
I was fairly sure that I knew what that last one meant... from experience.
But some of the news items missed me completely. The 'wogglies' were still spreading and three more French towns had been evacuated; the King was considering ordering the area dusted. King? Oh well, French politics might turn up anything, but what was this 'Poudre Sarntaire' they were considering using on the 'wogglies'?-whatever they were. Radioactive, maybe? I hoped they picked a dead calm day... preferably the thirtieth of February. I had had a radiation overdose myself once, through a mistake by a damn-fool WAC technician at Sandia. I had not reached the point-of-no-return vomiting stage, but I don't recommend a diet of curies.
The Laguna Beach division of the Los Angeles police had been equipped with Leycoils and the division chief warned all Teddies to get out of town. 'My men have orders to nark first and subspeck afterward. This has got to stop!'
I made a mental note to keep clear of Laguna Beach until I found out what the score was. I wasn't sure I wanted to be subspecked, or subspected, even afterward.
Those are just samples. There were any number of news stories that started out trippingly, then foundered in what was, to me, double talk.
I started to breeze on past the vital statistics when my eye caught some new subheads. There were the old familiar ones of births, deaths, marriages, and divorces, but now there were 'commitments' and 'withdrawals' as well, listed by sanctuaries. I looked up 'Sawtelle Cons. Sanc.' and found my own name. It gave me a warm feeling of 'belonging.'
But the most intensely interesting things in the paper were the ads. One of the personals stuck in my mind: 'Attractive still young widow with yen to travel wishes to meet mature man similarly inclined. Object: two-year marriage contract.' But it was the display advertising that got me.
Hired Girl and her sisters and her cousins and her aunts were all over the place-and they were still using the trade-mark, a husky girl with a broom, that I had designed originally for our letterhead. I felt a twinge of regret that I had been in such a jumping hurry to get rid of my stock in Hired Girl, Inc.; it looked as if it was worth more than all the rest of my portfolio. No, that was wrong; if I had kept it with me at the time, that pair of thieves would have lifted it and faked an assignment to themselves. As it was, Ricky had gotten it-and if it had made Ricky rich, well, it couldn't happen to a nicer person.
I made a note to track down Ricky first thing, top priority. She was all that was left to me of the world I had known and she loomed very large in my mind. Dear little Ricky! If she had been ten years older I would never have looked at Belle...nd wouldn't have got my fingers burned.
Let's see, how old would she be now? Forty-no, forty-one. It was hard to think of Ricky as forty-one. Still, that wouldn't be old in a woman these days-or even those days. From forty feet you frequently couldn't tell forty- one from eighteen.
If she was rich I'd let her buy me a drink and we would drink to Pete's dear departed funny little soul.
And if something had slipped and she was poor in spite of the stock I had assigned her, then-by damn, I'd marry her! Yes, I would. It didn't matter that she was ten years or so older than I was; in view of my established record for flubbing the dud I needed somebody older to look out for me and tell me no-and Ricky was just the girl who could do it. She had run Miles and Miles's house with serious little-girl efficiency when she was less than ten; at forty she would be just the same, only mellowed.