Carl.
'Jake, they went off with Arthur,' Bruce informed me.
'What! Where?'
'They commenced the inspection. Carl couldn't sleep, and insisted on exploring the place. I am in constant touch with the foreman, and know exactly where they are. They are fine, and Carl is busy using the Product Ideation and Design Facility.'
'The what? Never mind, just tell me how I get to where they are. Damn kids, running off. You should have got me up, Bruce.'
'Jake, I did try. But you were apparently exhausted.'
'What time is it? How long have they been gone?'
'About six hours, Jake.'
'Good God.'
Darla came into the cab, dressed in khakis and one of John's torn Militia surplus shirts. We were all getting short on clothes.
'An attendant is being summoned to conduct you to the Product Ideation and Design Facility.'
'An attendant?'
'I think…'
And there it was, a shining multiarmed robot coasting toward us across the glossy blue floor.
We got out. The contraption pulled up to us and stopped. It was partly a conveyance of some sort, although the seats in the back hadn't been built for humans. Lacking wheels, the thing floated a few centimeters off the floor. It buzzed softly at us.
I said, 'I guess that means `All aboard.''
We climbed into the back of it and perched ourselves on the impossible, mushroom-shaped seats. There weren't any backrests, but there was a crossbar to hang onto.
We were conducted on a very informative and educational tour of the plant. A long one, too, but I was politic enough not to complain. Everything was impressive, but we didn't know what the hell we were looking at. Our guide kept buzzing at us, we kept nodding and smiling pleasantly. Oh, my. Fifty million units produced in one year? How admirable.
But, by God, what a plant. A cool, quiet place of industrial and scientific sculpture. We could appreciate it on that level at least. We soared along high curving ramps looking down on silent gargantuan machines, labyrinths of pipeline, armies of tall bubble-topped cylinders, rack upon rack of instruments, giant antennalike assemblies, huge metal coils, and jungles of transparent tubing. Everything was silent, still. Color was everywhere-blue industrial light glinted off gold and silver spheres, orange and red conduits tangled with each other against overhead domes of bright pink and yellow, green rampways flew through the dry, still, blue-lit air.
Finally, we arrived. The Product Ideation and Design Facility was a large wedge-shaped room stuffed floor to ceiling with instrument panels throbbing with electric life, glittering with lights and luminous screens and flashing dials. Arthur sat on a bench near Carl, who was hunched over what appeared to be some sort of computerized drafting board-a wide flat screen crawling with moving diagrams and charts.
We got out of the robocart and walked over. Lori was lying on the soft carpeted floor, asleep, her head propped up with Carl's bunched jacket. Carl didn't even glance up. He was absorbed in whatever he was doing.
I looked at Arthur. 'What gives?'
Arthur shrugged, grinning. 'He's having a dandy time.'
'How the hell did he figure out how to work the equipment?'
'Oh, it's not as hard as you might expect.' Arthur rose, walked over, and peered over Carl's shoulder. 'In this plant, in its day, engineers were looked upon as artists. They really didn't need to know much about engineering. Here, machine intelligences supply all the data, all the formulae, all the know-how. They do all the dirty work. The only thing that organic brains can supply is creativity. That's what Carl's doing. He's telling the machines what he wants and what he wants it to do, and the machines are helping him design it. And if the design is judged a worthy work of art, they just might build a prototype model.'
'That's really something,' I said. And it was, it was.
'No! Not that way,' Carl said sharply. 'It opens from the left. Yeah.'
'Satisfactory?' a soft voice asked.
'Satisfactory.'
I looked at Arthur, who said, 'I think Bruce is responsible for the plant learning English.'
I nodded.
'Now the engine is all yours, pal,' Carl was saying, eyes still riveted to the drafting board. 'I don't have a clue how that works.'
'Very well. Requires advanced propulsion principle-high efficiency, low maintenance… '
'How about no maintenance? Can you do that? I'll never find someone to fix it.'
'A challenge for time periods longer than quarter revolution of average galaxy.'
'Huh? Quarter revolution of a- That's millions of years. Hey, I'm not going to live anywhere near that long.'
'Then no maintenance is no challenge.'
'All ri-i-ght!'
'Weapons systems?'
This went on for another hour. Carl eventually acknowledged our presence, then insisted that he had to finish. I didn't ask what he was doing. Lori woke out of a troubled sleep, and needed some attention. She had had the dream too. Afterward, we hung about and looked around. We were extremely hungry. At last, Carl was done.
'Very unusual, extremely idiosyncratic,' the design chief pronounced. 'But of surpassing elegance and simplicity. May we go ahead with fabrication of prototype?'
'Sure!' Carl said, getting up. He swayed slightly, and put a hand to his forehead. 'Man, am I bushed. Terrific headache, too. But it was a hell of a lot of fun.'
'Lunch time!' Arthur said.
'Lunch?' I was ready to gnaw on some lab equipment.
A detail of robots brought us lunch. The food was very good, not quite the haute cuisine of Emerald City, but far more than adequate. Bruce had done a good job feeding biochemical information to the plant's protein synthesizers. The flavorings were top-notch. Textures were a little off here and there, especially in the steak. A little too mushy. But the bread was terrific. You'd never know there wasn't one grain of wheat in it.
After lunch, the plant foreman spoke to us. 'We have begun production of prototype. Would you like to observe?' He sounded a lot like the design chief, and I suspected that the latter was merely a subsystem of the former.
Would like to observe, yes.
We all boarded another robocart and swung out into the plant.
The place had come to life. We rode for an hour through the throbbing heart of technological wizardry. What had been hulks of dead machinery now flashed and sparked, whirred and hummed, chimed and beeped and thrummed and sang, while pink and violet electrical discharges leaped between giant coils, translucent tubing glowed and pulsed, luminescent motes swam inside huge transparent spheres, and veils of energy fluttered in the air overhead like aurora] displays. 'Goddamn Frankenstein movie,' was Carl's reaction.
At last we came to a large, quiet empty chamber. We got off and waited. Before long, the far wall retracted, and two robots hauled the prototype out onto the showroom floor.
It was Carl's 1957 Chevrolet Impala, chrome glinting in the track lighting, a lambent sheen soft upon its coat of candy-apple red, metal-flake paint.
'My car!' Carl shouted ecstatically, throwing open the driver's door and hopping in. He sniffed. 'Hey, they got that new car smell just right!'
'Satisfactory?' the plant foreman asked hopefully.
'Satisfactory!' Carl enthused.
There was a note of pride in the foreman's voice. 'May we then begin field testing and evaluation?'
'Uh-yeah. Well, maybe not. I know it's gonna work!'
