First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster Page 3

  Laurine is merely mildly interested, but she punches her hotel-room number and has a drink and takes a nap. Joe sets to work. He has been given an idea.

  My wife calls me at Maintenance and hollers. She is fit to be tied. She says I got to do something. She was gonna make a call to the butcher shop. Instead of the butcher or even the “If you want to do something” flash, she got a new one. The screen says, “Service question: What is your name?” She is kinda puzzled, but she punches it. The screen sputters an’ then says: “Secretarial Service Demonstration! You—” It reels off her name, address, age, sex, coloring, the amounts of all her charge accounts in all the stores, my name as her husband, how much I get a week, the fact that I’ve been pinched three times—twice was traffic stuff, and once for a argument I got in with a guy—and the interestin’ item that once when she was mad with me she left me for three weeks an’ had her address changed to her folks’ home. Then it says, brisk: “Logics Service will hereafter keep your personal accounts, take messages, and locate persons you may wish to get in touch with. This demonstration is to introduce the service.” Then it connects her with the butcher. But she don’t want meat, then. She wants blood. She calls me.

  “If it’ll tell me all about myself,” she says, fairly boilin’, “it’ll tell anybody else who punches my name! You’ve got to stop it!”

  “Now, now, honey!” I says. “I didn’t know about all this! It’s new! But they musta fixed the tank so it won’t give out information except to the Logic where a person lives!”

  “Nothing of the kind!” she tells me, furious. “I tried! And you know that Blossom woman who lives next door! She’s been married three times and she’s forty-two years old and she says she’s only thirty! And Mrs. Hudson’s had her husband arrested four times for non-support and once for beating her up. And—”

  “Hey!” I says. “You mean the Logic told you all this?”

  “Yes!” she wails. “It will tell anybody anything! You’ve got to stop it! How long will it take?”

  “I’ll call up the tank,” I says. “It can’t take long.”

  “Hurry!” she says, desperate, “before somebody punches my name! I’m going to see what it says about that hussy across the street.”

  She snaps off to gather what she can before it’s stopped. So I punch for the tank and I get this new “What is your name?” flash. I got a morbid curiosity and I punch my name, and the screen says: “Were you ever called Ducky?” I blink. I ain’t got no suspicions. I say, “Sure!” And the screen says, “There is a call for you.”

  Bingo! There’s the inside of a hotel room and Laurine is reclinin’ asleep on the bed. She’d been told to leave her Logic turned on an’ she’d done it. It is a hot day and she is trying to be cool. I would say that she oughta not suffer from the heat. Me, being human, I do not stay as cool as she looks. But there ain’t no need to go into that. 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’s 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 damned business conversation and agreement…Listen, fella! Logics changed civilization. Logics are civilization! If we shut off Logics, we go back to a kind of civilization we have forgotten how to run! I’m getting hysterical myself and that’s why I’m talkin’ like this! If my wife finds out my pay-check is thirty credits a week more than I told her and starts hunting for that red-head—”

  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. Where 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, an’ Gawd knows what all—all to put down what he wanted to remember an’ 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 hell 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 on 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!” says Laurine. “Listen, Ducky! Do you remember how much in love we used to be?”

  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 outa 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—”

  Click! That’s my Logic turned off. I turned it off. And I feel faint all over. I got nervous prostration. I got combat fatigue. I got anything you like. I got cold feet.

  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 never 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 careless in his cellar after ceasing to use same.

  Laurine wouldn’t never have found me if it hadn’t been for this new hell-raisin’ Logics Service. But now that it was started—Zowie! She’d shot one husband and got acquitted. Suppose she got impatient because I was still married an’ asked Logics Service how to get me free an’ in a spot where I’d have to marry her by eight thirty P.M.? It woulda told her! Just like it told that woman out in the suburbs how to make sure her husband wouldn’t run around no more. Br-r-r-r! An’ like it told that kid how to find some buried treasure. Remember? He was happy totin’ home the gold reserve of the Hanoverian Bank and Trust Company when they caught onto it. The Logic had told him how to make some kinda machine that nobody has been able to figure how it works even yet, only they guess it dodges around a couple extra dimensions. If Laurine was to start askin’ questions with a technical aspect to them, that would be Logics Service meat! And fella, I was scared! If you think a he-man oughtn’t to be scared of just one blonde—you ain’t met Laurine!

  I’m drivin’ blind when a social-conscious guy asks how to bring about his own particular system of social organization at once. He don’t ask if it’s best or if it’ll work. He just wants to get it started. And the Logic—or Joe—tells him! Simultaneous, there’s a retired preacher asks how can the human race be cured of concupiscence. Bein’ seventy, he’s pretty safe himself, but he wants to remove the peril to the spiritual welfare of the rest of us. He finds out. It involves constructin’ a sort of broadcastin’ station to emit a certain wave-pattern an’ turnin’ it on. Just that. Nothing more. It’s found out afterward, when he is solicitin’ funds to construct it. Fortunate, he didn’t think to ask Logics how to finance it, or it woulda told him that, too, an’ we woulda all been cured of the impulses we maybe regret afterward but never at the time. And there’s another group of serious thinkers who are sure the human race would be a lot better off if everybody went back to nature an’ lived in the woods with the ants an’ poison ivy. They start askin’ questions about how to cause humanity to abandon cities and artificial conditions of living. They practically got the answer in Logics Service!

  Maybe it didn’t strike you serious at the time, but while I was drivin’ aimless, sweatin’ blood over Laurine bein’ after me, the fate of civilization hung in the balance. I ain’t kiddin’. For instance, the Superior Man gang that sneers at the rest of us was quietly asking questions on what kinda weapons could be made by which Superior Men could take over and run things…

  But I drove here an’ there, sweatin’ an’ talkin’ to myself.

  “My Gawd!” I says. “What I oughta do is ask this whacky Logics Service how to get outa this mess. But it’d just tell me a intricate an’ fool-proof way to bump Laurine off. I wanna have peace! I wanna grow comfortably old and brag to other old guys about what a hellion I used to be, without havin’ to go through it an’ lose my chance of livin’ to be a elderly liar.”

  I turn a corner at random, there in the Maintenance car.

  “It was a nice kinda world once,” I says, bitter. “I could go home peaceful and not have belly-cramps wonderin’ if a blonde has called up my wife to announce my engagement to her. I could punch keys on a Logic without gazing into somebody’s bedroom while she is giving her epidermis a air-bath and being led to think things I gotta take out in thinkin’. I could—”

  Then I groan, rememberin’ that my wife, naturally, is gonna blame me for the fact that our private life ain’t private any more if anybody has tried to peek into it.

  “It was a swell world,” I says, homesick for the dear dead days-before-yesterday. “We was playin’ happy with our toys like little innocent children until somethin’ happened. Like a guy named Joe come in and squashed all our mud-pies.”

  Then it hit me. I got the whole thing in one flash. There ain’t nothing in the Tank set-up to start relays closin’. Relays are closed exclusive by Logics, to get the information the keys are punched for. Nothin’ but a Logic coulda cooked up the relay-patterns that constituted Logics Service. Humans wouldn’t ha’ been able to figure it out! Only a Logic could integrate all the stuff that woulda made all the other Logics work like this—

  There was one answer. I drove into a restaurant and went over to a pay-Logic an’ dropped in a coin.

  “Can a Logic be modified,” I spell out, “to cooperate in long-term planning which human brains are too limited in scope to do?”

  The screen sputters. Then it says:

  “Definitely yes.�
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  “How great will the modifications be?” I punch.

  “Microscopically slight. Changes in dimensions,” says the screen. “Even modern precision gauges are not exact enough to check them, however. They can only come about under present manufacturing methods by an extremely improbable accident, which has only happened once.”

  “How can one get hold of that one accident which can do this highly necessary work?” I punch.

  The screen sputters. Sweat broke out on me. I ain’t got it figured out close, yet, but what I’m scared of is that whatever is Joe will be suspicious. But what I’m askin’ is strictly logical. And Logics can’t lie. They gotta be accurate. They can’t help it.

  “A complete Logic capable of the work required,” says the screen, “is now in ordinary family use in—”

  And it gives me the Korlanovitch address and do I go over there! Do I go over there fast! I pull up the Maintenance car in front of the place, and I take the extra Logic outa the back, and I stagger up to the Korlanovitch flat and I ring the bell. A kid answers the door.

  “I’m from Logics Maintenance,” I tell the kid. “A inspection record has shown that your Logic is apt to break down any minute. I come to put in a new one before it does.”

  The kid says, “O.K.!” real bright and runs back to the livin’ room where Joe—I got the habit of callin’ him Joe later, through just meditatin’ about him—is runnin’ somethin’ the kids wanna look at. I hook in the other Logic an’ turn it on, conscientious makin’ sure it works. Then I say:

  “Now kiddies, you punch this one for what you want. I’m gonna take the old one away before it breaks down.”

  And I glance at the screen. The kiddies have apparently said they wanna look at some real cannibals. So the screen is presenting a anthropological-expedition scientific record film of the fertility dance of the Huba-Jouba tribe of West Africa. It is supposed to be restricted to anthropological professors an’ post-graduate medical students. But there ain’t any censor-blocks workin’ any more and it’s on. The kids are much interested. Me, bein’ a old married man, I blush.