“They’re—they’re terribly expensive, aren’t they?” Lorna whispered.
The counsellor leaned back and set his fingertips together.
“As to being out of my mind . . . Well, I’m in good company. It’s customary on every inhabited planet we know of to entrust the raising of the young to Friends programmed by a consensus of opinion among other intelligent races. There was an ancient proverb about not seeing the forest for the trees; it is well established that the best possible advice regarding optimum exploitation of juvenile talent comes from those who can analyse the local society in absolute, rather than committed, terms. And the habit is growing commoner here. Many families, if they can afford to, acquire a Friend from choice, not necessity.
“As to expense—yes, Mrs Patterson, you’re right. Anything which has had to be shipped over interstellar distances can hardly be cheap. But consider: this dog belonging to your neighbours was a show champion with at least one Best-of- Breed certificate, quite apart from being the boon companion of their small daughter. I imagine the courts will award a substantial sum by way of damages . . . Incidentally, did Tim previously advance the excuse that he couldn’t stand the noise it made when it barked?”
“Uh . . .” Jack Patterson licked his lips. “Yes, he did.”
“I suspected it might have been rehearsed. It had that kind of flavour. As did his excuse for breaking the arm of the little boy who was the best batter in your local junior ball team, and the excuse for setting fire to the school’s free-fall gymnasium, and so forth. You have to accept the fact, I’m afraid, that thanks to his condensed-development therapy your son is a total egocentric. The universe has never yet proved sufficiently intractable to progress him out of the emotional stage most infants leave behind about the time they learn to walk. Physically he is ahead of the average for his age. Emotionally, he is concerned about nothing but his own gratification. He’s incapable of empathy, sympathy, worrying about the opinions of others. He is a classic case of arrested personal development.”
“But we’ve done everything we can to—”
“Yes, indeed you have. And it is not enough.” Dr Hend allowed the comment to rankle for a few seconds, then resumed.
“We were talking about expense. Well, let me remind you that it costs a lot of money to maintain Tim in the special school you’ve been compelled to send him to because he made life hell for his classmates at a regular school. The companionship of a Friend is legally equivalent to a formal course of schooling. Maybe you weren’t aware of that.”
“Sure!” Jack snapped. “But—oh, hell! I simply don’t fancy the idea of turning my son over to some ambulating alien artefact!”
“I grant it may seem to you to be a radical step, but juvenile maladjustment is one area where the old saw remains true, about desperate diseases requiring desperate measures. And have you considered the outcome if you don’t adopt a radical solution?”
It was clear from their glum faces that they had, but he spelled it out for them nonetheless.
“By opting for a modified child, you rendered yourselves liable for his maintenance and good behaviour for a minimum period of twenty years, regardless of divorce or other legal interventions. If Tim is adjudged socially incorrigible, you will find yourselves obliged to support him indefinitely in a state institution. At present the annual cost of keeping one patient in such an establishment is thirty thousand dollars. Inflation at the current rate will double that by the twenty-year mark, and in view of the extensive alterations you insisted on having made in Tim’s heredity I think it unlikely that any court would agree to discontinue your liability as early as twelve years from now. I put it to you that the acquisition of a Friend is your only sensible course of action—whatever you may think of the way alien intelligences have evaluated our society. Besides, you don’t have to buy one. You can always rent.”
He glanced at his desk clock. “I see your time is up. Good morning. My bill will be faxed to you this afternoon.”
That night there was shouting from the living-area of the Patterson house. Tim heard it, lying in bed with the door ajar, and grinned from ear to shell-like ear. He was an extremely beautiful child, with curly fair hair, perfectly proportioned features, ideally regular teeth, eyes blue and deep as mountain pools, a sprinkling of freckles as per specification to make him a trifle less angelic, a fraction more boy-like, and—naturally—big for his age. That had been in the specification, too.
Moreover his vocabulary was enormous compared to an unmodified kid’s—as was his IQ, theoretically, though he had never cooperated on a test which might have proved the fact— and he fully understood what was being said.
“You and your goddamned vanity! Insisting on all those special features like wavy golden hair and baby-blue eyes and— and, my God, freckles! And now the little devil is apt to drive us into bankruptcy! Have you seen what it costs to rent a Friend, even a cheap one from Procyon?”
“Oh, stop trying to lay all the blame on me, will you? They warned you that your demand for tallness and extra strength might be incompatible with the rest, and you took not a blind bit of notice—”
“But he’s a boy, dammit, a boy, and if you hadn’t wanted him to look more like a girl—!”
“I did not, I did not! I wanted him to be handsome and you wanted to make him into some kind of crazy beefcake type, loaded down with useless muscles! Just because you never made the college gladiator squad he was condemned before birth to—”
“One more word about what I didn’t do, and I’ll smash your teeth down your ugly throat! How about talking about what I have done for a change? Youngest area manager in the corporation, tipped to be the
