After I get my breath I say, “For Heaven’s sake!” and she opens her eyes.
At first she looks puzzled, like she was thinking is she getting absent-minded and is this guy somebody she married lately. Then she grabs a sheet and drapes it around herself and beams at me.
“Ducky!” she says. “How marvelous!”
I say something like “Ugmph!” I am sweating.
She says: “I put in a call for you, Ducky, and here you are! Isn’t it romantic? Where are you really, Ducky? And when can you come up? You’ve no idea how often I’ve thought of you!”
I am probably the only guy she ever knew real well that she has not been married to at some time or another.
I say “Ugmph!” again, and swallow.
“Can you come up instantly?” asks Laurine brightly.
“I’m… workin’,” I say. “I’ll… uh… call you back.”
“I’m terribly lonesome,” says Laurine. “Please make it quick, Ducky! I’ll have a drink waiting for you. Have you ever thought of me?”
“Yeah,” I say, feeble. “Plenty!”
“You darling!” says Laurine. “Here’s a kiss to go on with until you get here! Hurry, Ducky!”
Then I sweat! I still don’t know nothing about Joe, understand. I cuss out the guys at the tank because I blame them for this. If Laurine was just another blonde—well—when it comes to ordinary blondes I can leave ’em alone or leave ’em alone, either one. A married man gets that way or else. But Laurine has a look of unquenched enthusiasm that gives a man very strange weak sensations at the back of his knees. And she’d had four husbands and shot one and got acquitted.
So I punch the keys for the tank technical room, fumbling. And the screen says: “What is your name?” but I don’t want any more. I punch the name of the old guy who’s stock clerk in Maintenance. And the screen gives me some pretty interestin’ dope—I never woulda thought the old fella had ever had that much pep—and winds up by mentionin’ a unclaimed deposit now amountin’ to two hundred eighty credits in the First National Bank, which he should look into. Then it spiels about the new secretarial service and gives me the tank at last.
I start to swear at the guy who looks at me. But he says, tired:
“Snap it off, fella. We got troubles an’ you’re just another. What are the logics doin’ now?”
I tell him, and he laughs a hollow laugh.
“A light matter, fella,” he says. “A very light matter! We just managed to clamp off all the data plates that give information on high explosives. The demand for instructions in counterfeiting is increasing minute by minute. We are also trying to shut off, by main force, the relays that hook in to data plates that just barely might give advice on the fine points of murder. So if people will only keep busy getting the goods on each other for a while, maybe we’ll get a chance to stop the circuits that are shifting credit-balances from bank to bank before everybody’s bankrupt except the guys who thought of askin’ how to get big bank accounts in a hurry.”
“Then,” I says hoarse, “shut down the tank! Do somethin’!”
“Shut down the tank?” he says, mirthless. “Does it occur to you, fella, that the tank has been doin’ all the computin’ for every business office for years? It’s been handlin’ the distribution of ninety-four per cent of all telecast programs, has given out all information on weather, plane schedules, special sales, employment opportunities and news; has handled all person-to-person contacts over wires and recorded every business conversation and agreement—Listen, fella! Logics changed civilization. Logics
He smiles a haggard smile at me and snaps off. And I sit down and put my head in my hands. It’s true. If something had happened back in cave days and they’d hadda stop usin’ fire—If they’d hadda stop usin’ steam in the nineteenth century or electricity in the twentieth—It’s like that. We got a very simple civilization. In the nineteen hundreds a man would have to make use of a typewriter, radio, telephone, teletypewriter, newspaper, reference library, encyclopedias, office files, directories, plus messenger service and consulting lawyers, chemists, doctors, dieticians, filing clerks, secretaries—all to put down what he wanted to remember an’ to tell him what other people had put down that he wanted to know; to report what he said to somebody else and to report to him what they said back. All we have to have is logics. Anything we want to know or see or hear, or anybody we want to talk to, we punch keys on a logic. Shut off logics and everything goes skiddoo. But Laurine—
Somethin’ had happened. I still didn’t know what it was. Nobody else knows, even yet. What had happened was Joe. What was the matter with him was that he wanted to work good. All this fuss he was raisin’ was, actual, nothin’ but stuff we shoulda thought of ourselves. Directive advice, tellin’ us what we wanted to know to solve a problem, wasn’t but a slight extension of logical-integrator service. Figurin’ out a good way to poison a fella’s wife was only different in degree from figurin’ out a cube root or a guy’s bank balance. It was gettin’ the answer to a question. But things was goin’ to pot because there was too many answers being given to too many questions.
One of the logics in Maintenance lights up. I go over, weary, to answer it. I punch the answer key. Laurine says:
“Ducky!”
It’s the same hotel room. There’s two glasses on the table with drinks in them. One is for me. Laurine’s got on some kinda frothy hangin’-around-the-house-with-the-boy-friend outfit that automatic makes you strain your eyes to see if you actual see what you think. Laurine looks at me enthusiastic.
“Ducky!” says Laurine. “I’m lonesome! Why haven’t you come up?”
“I… been busy,” I say, strangling slightly.
“Pooh!
I gulp.
“Are you doin’ anything this evening?” says Laurine.
I gulp again, because she is smiling at me in a way that a single man would maybe get dizzy, but it gives a old married man like me cold chills. When a dame looks at you possessive—
“Ducky!” says Laurine, impulsive. “I was so mean to you! Let’s get married!”
Desperation gives me a voice.
“I… got married,” I tell her, hoarse.
Laurine blinks. Then she says, courageous:
“Poor boy! But we’ll get you outta that! Only it would be nice if we could be married today. Now we can only be engaged!”
“I… can’t—”
“I’ll call up your wife,” says Laurine, happy, “and have a talk with her. You must have a code signal for your logic, darling. I tried to ring your house and noth—”
I beat it outta Maintenance, yellin’ to somebody I got a emergency call. I’m gonna get out in a Maintenance car an’ cruise around until it’s plausible to go home. Then I’m gonna take the wife an’ kids an’ beat it for somewheres that Laurine won’t ever find me. I don’t wanna be’ fifth in Laurine’s series of husbands and maybe the second one she shoots in a moment of boredom. I got experience of blondes. I got experience of Laurine! And I’m scared to death!
I beat it out into traffic in the Maintenance car. There was a disconnected logic in the back, ready to substitute for one that hadda burned-out coil or something that it was easier to switch and fix back in the Maintenance shop. I drove crazy but automatic. It was kinda ironic, if you think of it. I was goin’ hoopla over a strictly personal problem, while civilization was crackin’ up all around me because other people were havin’ their personal problems solved as fast as they could state ’em. It is a matter of record that part of the Mid-Western Electric research guys had been workin’ on cold electron-emission for thirty years, to make vacuum tubes that wouldn’t need a power source to heat the filament. And one of those fellas was intrigued by the “Ask your logic” flash. He asked how to get cold emission of electrons. And the logic integrates a few squintillion facts on the physics data plates and tells him. Just as casual as it told somebody over in the Fourth Ward how to serve left-over soup in a new attractive way, and somebody else on Mason Street how to dispose of a torso that somebody had left
