The Reproductive System (Gollancz SF Library) (2 page)

‘Stuff them, I know,’ said Grandison wearily. ‘I know, I know, I know.’ He stared, bleary-eyed, at the doll walking away from him.

It had huge blue eyes and gold, stiff sausage curls. It wore a red-white-and-blue pleated dress with silver spangles, and a tiny pillbox hat. Its pink dimpled knees were barely visible between the silver fringe of the skirt and the thick white boots with silver tassels.

‘Mew, mew, mew, mew, mew,’ it said.

‘Looks swell to me, Pop,’ said Louie loyally. He had caught his fist inside the jar of Sooper Proteen tablets. It had not occurred to Louie not to reach into a jar with the spring grip developer in his hand. ‘I think it’s a neat little product.’

‘But it isn’t wanted, son. Little girls don’t want Wompler’s Walking Babies any more. They want Barby dolls. Dolls they can dress up in fashions.’ His voice grew thick with fury, and he flushed purple beneath his sunburn. ‘Dolls that can’t walk a single step !’

‘Gee, Pop, that’s keen ! Why don’t
we
build a doll they can dress up?’

‘Because we don’t know the first thing about fashion, that’s why. Mrs Lumsey’s seamstresses can’t sew anything but spangles and pleats.’

‘And canteen covers,’ cracked Dill, shooting his cuffs.

No one was smiling. Grandison stared at the walking doll, looking as if he wanted to cry, but was just too strong. Louie was staring, mystified, at his entrapped hand. Moley, the chairman, was sliding down in his chair, preparing to sleep.

‘Send this company to camp !’ ventured Dill. No response. ‘Ah well,’ he sighed. ‘Let’s put on our thinking caps.’

The doll, still mewing, walked off the end of the table. There came the crack of a gutta percha face against the floor.

‘The end of a great era,’ the president muttered hoarsely.

They thought. Louie had a hard time concentrating. He wanted to be outside, doing some road-work, or just getting a tan. He wanted to study up on his karate. He wanted to get home to see if that book had come in the mail :
Seventeen
New
Ways to Kill a Man with Your Bare Hands
. And the book on Sumo wrassling.

The trouble with books was, they didn’t give a guy the
feel
of killing with his bare hands. That was the trouble with living in Millford, too. There was nowhere a guy could go to learn from an instructor. Louie wanted to learn all those Jap systems of self-defence. He wanted to learn how to kill a man with Zen—without even touching him, they say. Then there was Kabuki,

and there was deadliest Origami. Man !

He continued staring out the window for inspiration, until a car, air-force blue, whizzed by. It reminded him of isometric exercises. Then, somewhere in Louie’s rudimentary forebrain, a tiny circuit completed itself.

‘I got it !’ he shouted. ‘I got an idea !’

Dill groaned. ‘Not another idea,’ he said. ‘We haven’t even finished paying for that coffee machine yet.’

Louie’s last brain-storm had been to sell the workers coffee from a machine he’d bought and installed in the cafeteria, at 25 cents a cup. To increase profits on the machine, he ran the grounds through again and again. The machine would thus, he reasoned, pay for itself. The workers agreed. The machine should pay for itself.

‘No, this is a real keen idea. Listen. Why don’t we get some money from the govermint?’

‘Why don’t we …’ his father repeated uncomprehendingly.

‘I think he has something, Granny !’ shouted Dill. ‘Why
don’t
we get some money from the government?’

‘Oh, yes, indeed,’ said Moley, sitting up and opening his eyes a little. ‘He does have something. Why don’t we—’

‘Why don’t we get some money from the govermint?’ said Louie excitedly, and strained to complete the thought. His hand, encased in glass, waved impatiently. ‘From the govermint—for research !’

Bald heads nodded. ‘For research, yes !’

‘But wouldn’t we have to be making some product the government needs?’ Grandison asked, puzzled. ‘Something vital to the defence of our nation? Something important to its welfare? The government doesn’t just throw its money around, does it?’

When the others had finished laughing, Dill placed a bird-claw hand on Grandison’s sleeve. ‘You’re an old-fashioned, unpractical dreamer, Granny,’ he croaked, chuckling. ‘Maybe I am, too. We got to look to the boy here for
real
ideas. Times have changed since WPA, y’know. This here’s the age of the astronaut. In the old days, I’ll admit, you had to build a battleship or a municipal swimming pool—something useful. But tell me : practically speaking, of what use is it to have a man on the moon?’

‘Well, I guess …’

‘None ! No
earthly
use at all,’ cackled Dill. ‘But seriously, the government spends millions,
zillions
, to put one man on the

moon. On the other hand, if you have some real, some practical idea to sell them, forget it.’

‘That’s right !’ shouted Louie, jumping up and pacing about the room. ‘Remember the time I tried to sell them my idea for invisible ink? Milk, it was, plain milk. Spies could write messages in it, like invisible ink. Then you heat it up and the writing appears, as if by magic. I wrote to the Pentagon, remember, Pop?’ He threw himself into his chair again. ‘They never answered,’ he added, in a more subdued tone.

‘The fact is,’ Dill went on, tapping his sere hand on the table, ‘if we can show the government a project that is utterly, hopelessly useless, they’ll give us a grant for pure research.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘I know it as sure as I know that the head of the Industrial Spending Committee is Senator Dill—my cousin, get it?’

Grandison was not yet used to the idea. ‘But—but what could we do research upon? We have no facilities.’

‘They provide all that stuff, don’t worry,’ smiled Dill. ‘Concrete labs, bomb shelters, marine guards, you name it. All we have to do is figure out a project.’

‘How about a robot?’ suggested Louie.

‘No money in it,’ Dill snapped. ‘We need something which
sounds
easier, so that the rest of the committee can’t object to it, but which is so hard in practice that we can spend years on it. Like a bigger, faster plane.’

‘How about a robot, though?’ Louie put forth.

Ignoring the frantic waving of the jar under his nose, Moley said, ‘Now, why don’t we build a machine that can reproduce itself? I was reading about an idea like that in
Life
, just the other day. A self-reproducing machine—sure sounds hard enough, don’t it?’

‘But what is it good for?’ Grandison asked. ‘Besides making duplicates of itself, what is its function?’

‘A robot,’ declared Louie softly, ‘could instruct me in hand-to-hand Kabuki.’

‘You still don’t understand, Granny,’ Dill said, with a patronizing shake of his head. ‘It isn’t good for anything. That’s exactly what the government wants. What
we
want.’

‘I suppose you’re right,’ said Grandison. He sighed. ‘It seems so dishonest.’

‘We’ll be creating thousands of new jobs—for scientists, marine guards, government clerks who keep us on file.’

‘I know, I know, but will
we
make money?’ the president snapped.

‘Millions.’

They voted at once. The vote was ‘aye’ all around the table, to Louie.

‘Aye, I guess,’ he muttered. ‘But hey, Pop, how about a robot, though? Huh, how about—’

Grandison reached over and cracked the jar with his gavel. The spring grip device leapt out, scattering glass and brown pills, and releasing the thick fingers of Louie the Womp from captivity.

‘Motion carried.’

‘$u¢¢e$$!’

Sign on wall at Wompler Research Laboratories

‘I, too, am a failure,’ murmured Cal, staring at the jellyfish thing in the tank. It was supposed to be bright pink and right-side up. ‘This is the end for me too, old
Plagyodus
. I’ve ruined my last experiment.’

He did not deem it necessary to add that it was his first experiment at Wompler Research, or that he had only been hired through the wonderful mistake of an IBM machine. The grey, deflated mass in the tank did not seem to be listening, anyway. A twisted rope of multicoloured wires rose from it to a panel of dials. The dials were all at zero.

Sighing, Cal began to write on the chart hanging next to the tank, ‘Biomech. arrgt. 173b aborted 1750 hours’.

It was more than a job he would be losing; it was a chance to do work leading to a doctorate.
Everything I touchy
, he thought,
turns to failure
. As if bearing out his words, the ballpoint pen ran dry.

Experimenting, he found that it would write on his hand perfectly, but not on the wall chart. He covered his palm with blue scrawls and trial signatures : ‘Calvin Codman Potter, Ph.D’.

‘It’s the angle,’ said Hamuro Hita, the project statistician. ‘It

won’t feed ink uphill.’

Cal blushed, corrected the angle of the pen and signed the chart. ‘Thanks. I guess I’m not very observant for an experimenter. In fact, I’ve just ruined this experiment. I suppose you won’t be seeing much of me around here from now on.’

‘Oh, I don’t think they’ll can you for one mistake. What happened, anyway?’ Hita spoke without pausing in his work, summing figures on an adding machine.

‘I forgot to put the temperature control on automatic last night.’ Ripping loose the wires from their instruments, Cal hauled up the grey, dripping lump. ‘It—it poached, or something.’ Lifting the lid of a garbage can, he plumped in the jellyfish and stuffed in the bright stiff wires after it. Hita nodded at a chair by his desk, and Cal flopped into it.

‘That’s what’ll happen to me, when they find out all about me,’ he said, indicating the garbage can. ‘The way they saw it, I was a bright, promising lad, having graduated at the top of my class at MIT. They expected me to set the world on fire. Whereas—’

‘Whereas—?’

‘I guess I’d rather not talk about it after all. Let’s say I was hired by mistake, and I’m scared that any minute they’ll realize it.’

Hita nodded, and the two men lapsed into moody silence. Finishing his addition, the mathematician began cleaning his briar pipe with one blade of a pair of black-handled scissors. Cal stared about the lab, unable to conquer the feeling that he was saying goodbye to it all. Goodbye, QUIDNAC modular computer; goodbye, maze for phototropic ‘rats’; goodbye, solution in which grew a green crystalline tree, every branch of which formed part of an electronic circuit; goodbye, miniature automatic forge. He did not forget a goodbye to the main entrance, guarded by a stiff, humourless adolescent in the uniform of the Marine Corps.

‘We’re all flying under false colours here,’ said Hita, sliding a paperback book out of his desk drawer. ‘Do you know why the Womplers hired me? Because Louie wanted to learn Origami. The way he saw it, I’m Japanese,
ergo
…’

‘I don’t believe it !’

‘But you’ve only been here a week. You hardly know the Womplers, father and son. You haven’t even met the project head, Dr. Smilax. I assume your main dealings have been with

them
.’

‘Meaning the Mackintosh brothers?’

Hita smiled. ‘Or as some of us call them, the brothers Frankenstein.’

‘But what were you telling me about Origami?’

‘Officially, I’m a mathematician. In fact, my duties include teaching Louie Origami. I’ve had to study up on it myself, of course. Luckily, I found this book at the drugstore.’ He riffled the pages of the paperback. ‘It’s a good job, all the same. I can make enough money at this to start my own statistical lab soon, and I only need to be silly for a half-hour a day.’

‘But how have you fooled them, if you don’t even know–—?’

‘It’s easy. You see, Louie thought Origami was a kind of Japanese self-defence. I’ve been able to make up my own rules, mostly, as we go along (I told him I was ‘black scissors’, and he was properly impressed).

‘As for Grandison Wompler, he seems to think I ought to speak Spanish, for some reason. I rather like the two of them. There are even days when I can stand the brothers F. The only person around here who gives me the creeps is Dr. Smilax himself.’

‘Have you met him? What’s he like?’ asked Cal.

‘No, I haven’t met him, and neither has anyone else I know of, except the twins; that’s the odd thing about him. No one even seems to know anything about him except that he’s a surgeon and a biochemist. You’d think the head of a research team would at least want to meet his subordinates, but he’s so inaccessible—’

Cal nudged him and pointed to the entrance, above which a red bulb had begun glowing. The marine guard drew his automatic and covered the two persons entering, until they showed him the red badges of Kurt and Karl Mackintosh.

Kurt skipped to get into step with his twin, and they strode on across the lab rapidly.

Their immense, bulging foreheads, exaggerated by advanced baldness and invisibly pale eyebrows, loomed over tiny, pouting faces to give them the look of kewpies or dimestore cherubs. They were plump and sexless creatures, these two, and it was hard to believe them the best cybernetics engineers this side of the Iron Curtain. The only features they possessed that were not of idiot quality were their eyes. Restless, flickering, intelligent, they were the colour of bluebottle flies.