“Twelve!” the girl crowed. “I bet you forgot the robot again.”
“Maybe I did. You and me, Tunt. Four boys. Three girls. A grown-up. A Martian . . . and the robot. Yeah, twelve.”
“You mean a Martian like Heinzlichen what’s-his-name?”
“Oh, no, Charles! Heinzie’s a dope, but he’s people. This is one of the big green ones with four arms.”
Forrester did a double take, then said, “You mean like in Edgar Rice Burroughs? But—but I didn’t think those were real.”
The boy looked politely interested. “Yes? What about it?”
“What do you mean by ‘real,’ Charles?” asked the girl.
In the old days, before Forrester died, he had been a science-lover. It had always seemed to him wonderful and exciting that he should be living in an age when electricity came from wall sockets and living pictures from a box on a bench. He had thought sometimes, with irony and pity, of how laughably incompetent some great mind of the past, a Newton or an Archimedes, would have been to follow his own six-year-old’s instructions about tuning a television set or operating his electric trains. So here I am, he thought wryly, the bushman in Times Square. It’s not much fun.
But by careful and single-minded questioning he got some glimpse of what the children were talking about. Their playmates were not “real,” but they were a lot realer than, say, a Betsy-Wetsy doll. They were analogues, simulacra; the children, when pressed, called them “simulogs.” The little girl said proudly that they were very good at developing interpersonal relationships. “Got that much,” said Charles, “or, anyway, I think I do. So what does Taiko have to do with it?”
“Oh, him!”
“He doesn’t like anything that’s fun.”
“He says we’re losing the will to cope with—with what you said, Charles. Reality.”
“And all that sweat,” added the girl. “Say! Would you like to hear him?”
She glanced toward the view-wall, now showing a placid background scene of woody glades and small furry animals. “You mean on the television?” Forrester asked.
“The what, Charles?”
“On that.”
“That’s right, Charles.”
“Well,” said Forrester. . . .
And thought that, after all, he might as well. If worst came to worst, he could take up Taiko’s offer of a job, assuming it was still open; and before he came to that worst he would be better off knowing something about it. “Display away,” he said. “What have I got to lose?”
The viewing wall, obedient to the little girl’s orders, washed out the forest glade and replaced it with a stage. On it a man in a fright wig was bounding about and howling.
With difficulty Forrester recognized the blond, crew-cut visitor he had so unceremoniously got rid of—when? Was it only a couple of days ago? Taiko was doing a sort of ceremonial step dance: a couple of paces in one direction and a stomp, a couple of paces away and another stomp. And what he was shouting seemed like gibberish to Forrester.
“Lud, lords, led nobly!”(Stomp!) “Let Lud lead, lords,”(stomp!) “lest lone, lorn lads lapse loosely”(stomp!) “into limbo!”(Stomp!) He faced forward and threw his arms wide. The camera zoomed in on his impassioned, tortured face. “Jeez, kids! You want to get your goddamn brains scrambled? You want to be a juiceless jellyfish? If you don’t, then—let Lud lead!”’(Stomps!) “Let Lud lead!”(Stomp!) “Let Lud lead—”
The boy cried over the noise from the view-walls, “Now he’s going to ask for comments from the viewers. This is where we usually send in things to make him mad, like ‘Go back in the freezer, you old icy cube’ and ‘Taiko’s a dirty old Utopian!’ Of course, we don’t give our names.”
“Today I was going to send in, ‘If it was up to people like you we’d still be swinging from our tails like apes,’ ” said the girl thoughtfully, “but it probably wouldn’t make him very mad.”
Forrester coughed. “Actually, I’d just as soon not make him mad. I may have to go to work for him.”
The children stared at him, dismayed. The boy extinguished Taiko’s image on the view-wall and cried, “Please, Charles, don’t do that! Mim said you turned him down.”
“I did, but I may have to reconsider; I have to get some kind of a job. Matter of fact, that’s why I’m here.”
“Oh, good,” said the girl. “Mim’ll get you a job. Won’t she, Tunt?”
“If she can,” the boy said uncertainly. “Say, what can you do, Charles?”
“That’s one of my problems. But there has to be something; I’m running out of money.”
They did not respond to that, merely looked at him wide-eyed. They not only looked astonished, they looked embarrassed.
At length the little girl sighed and said, “Charles, you’re so sweaty ignorant I could freeze. I never heard of anybody being out of money, ‘cept the Forgotten Men. Don’t you know how to get a job?”
“Not very well.”
“You use the joymaker,” the boy said patiently.
“Sure. I tried that.”
The boy looked excited. “You mean— Look, Charles, you want me to help you? Cause I will. I mean, we had that last year in Phase Five. All you have to do is—”
