We Can Build You (12 page)

Now here came Barrows to the bottom of the ramp, his eyes invisible behind his dark glasses, his head down slightly so as to keep an eye on what his feet were doing. He was listening to the attorney. As he started out onto the field Maury stepped forward.

“Mr. Barrows!”

Turning and halting, moving out of the way so those behind him could step from the ramp, Barrows in one movement of his body lithely swiveled and held out his hand. “Mr. Rock?”

“Yes sir,” Maury said, shaking hands. Colleen Nild and the attorney clustered around; so did I and Pris. “This is Pris Frauenzimmer. And this is my partner, Louis Rosen.”

“Happy, Mr. Rosen,” Barrows shook hands with me. “This is Mrs. Nild, my secretary. This gentleman is Mr. Blunk, my counsel.” We all shook hands around. “Cold out here on the field, isn’t it?” Barrows started for the entrance of the building. He moved so swiftly that we all had to gallop after him like a flock of big awkward animals. Mr. Blunk’s short legs pumped away as in a speeded-up old movie; he did not seem to mind, however; he continued to radiate cheerfulness.

“Boise,” he declared, gazing around him. “Boise, Idaho. What will they think of next?”

Colleen Nild, falling in beside me, greeted me. “Nice to see you again, Mr. Rosen. We found the Stanton creature quite delightful.”

“A fabulous construct,” Blunk boomed back at us; we were lagging behind. “We thought it was from the Bureau of Internal Revenue.” He gave me a hearty personal smile.

Up front walked Barrows and Maury; Pris had dropped back because the concourse door was so narrow. Barrows and Maury passed on inside and Pris followed next, then Mr. Blunk, then Colleen Nild and I taking up the rear. By the time we had passed through the building and outside again onto the street entrance where the taxis waited, Barrows and Maury had already located the limousine; the uniformed driver was holding one of the rear doors open and Barrows and Maury were crawling inside.

“Luggage?” I said to Mrs. Nild.

“No luggage. Too time-consuming to wait for it. We’re only going to be here a few hours and then we’re flying back. Probably late tonight. If we should stay over we’ll buy what we need.”

“Um,” I said, impressed.

The rest of us also crawled into the limousine; the driver hopped around, and soon we were out in traffic, on our way into Boise proper.

“I don’t see how the Stanton can set up a law office in Seattle,” Maury was saying to Barrows. “It’s not licensed to practice law in the State of Washington.”

“Yes, I think you’ll be seeing it again one of these days.” Barrows offered Maury, then me, a cigarette from his case.

Summing it up I decided that Barrows differed from the rest of us in that he looked as if he had grown his gray English wool suit the way an animal grows its fur; it was simply part of him, like his nails and his teeth. He was utterly unconscious of it, as well as of his tie, his shoes, his cigarette case—he was unconscious of everything about his appearance.

So that’s how it is to be a multi-millionaire, I decided.

A long jump from the bottom rung like myself, where the preoccupation is, I wonder if my fly is unzipped. That’s the dregs, people like me, stealing swift covert glances down. Sam K. Barrows never stole a covert look at his fly in his life. If it was unzipped he’d simply zip it up. I wish I was rich, I said to myself.

I felt depressed. My condition was hopeless. I had not even gotten to the stage of worrying about the knot of my necktie, like other men. I probably never would.

And in addition Barrows was a really good-looking guy, sort of Robert Montgomery-shaped. Not handsome like Montgomery; for now Barrows had removed his dark glasses and I saw that he had puffy wrinkled skin beneath his eyes. But he’s got that athletic build, probably from playing handball in a five thousand dollar private handball court. And he’s got a top-notch doctor who doesn’t let him swill cheap
liquor or beer of any kind; he never eats in drive-ins … probably never eats any cut of pork, and only those eye lambchops, and only steak and roast type cuts of beef.

Naturally he hasn’t got an ounce of extra flab on him, with a diet like that. It depressed me even more.

Now I could see how those bowls of stewed prunes at six o’clock in the morning and those four-mile jogs through the deserted early dawn streets at five a.m. fitted in. The eccentric young millionaire whose picture appeared in
Look
was not going to drop dead at forty from heart trouble; he intended to live and enjoy his wealth. No widow would inherit it, contrary to the national pattern.

Eccentric, hell.

Smart
.

The time was a little after seven in the evening as our limousine entered Boise itself, and Mr. Barrows and his two companions announced that they had not eaten dinner. Did we know of a good restaurant in Boise?

There is no good restaurant in Boise.

“Just a place where we can get fried prawns,” Barrows said. “A light supper of that sort. We had a few drinks on the plane but none of us ate; we were too busy yakking.”

We found a passable restaurant. The head waiter led us to a leather horseshoe-shaped booth in the rear; we took off our coats and seated ourselves.

We ordered drinks.

“Did you really make your first pile playing poker in the Service?” I asked Barrows.

“No, craps it was. A six-month floating crapgame. Poker takes skill; I have luck.”

Pris said, “It wasn’t luck that got you into real estate.”

“No, it was because my mother used to rent out rooms in our old place in L.A.” Barrows eyed her.

“Nor,” Pris said in the same tense voice, “was it luck that has made you the Don Quixote who successfully tilted the Supreme Court of the United States into ruling against the
Space Agency and its greedy monopolizing of entire moons and planets.”

Barrows nodded at her. “You’re generous in your description. I had in my possession what I believed to be valid title to parcels on Luna, and wanted to test the validity of those titles in such a way that they’d never be challenged again. Say, I’ve met you.”

“Yes,” Pris said, bright-eyed.

“Can’t place you, though.”

“It was only for a moment. In your office. I don’t blame you for not remembering. I remember you, however.” She had not taken her eyes from the man.

“You’re Rock’s daughter?”

“Yes, Mr. Barrows.”

She looked a lot better, tonight. Her hair had been done, and she wore enough make-up to hide her paleness, but not so much as to give her the garish mask-like appearance which I had noticed in the past. Now that she had taken off her coat I saw that she wore an attractive fluffy jersey sweater, short-sleeved, with one piece of gold jewelry—a pin shaped like a snake—over her right breast. By god, I decided, she had a bra on, too, the kind that created bulk where there was no bulk. For this extraordinary occasion Pris had obtained a bosom. And, when she rose to hang up her coat, I saw that in her high, very thin heels she appeared to have nice legs. So, when the occasion demanded, she could fix herself up more than correctly.

“Let me take that,” Blunk said, sweeping her coat away from her and bouncing over to the rack to hang it on a hanger. He returned, bowed, smiled merrily at her and reseated himself. “Are you sure,” he boomed, “that this dirty old man—” He indicated Maury. “Is actually your father? Or is it not the case that you’re committing a sin, the sin of statutory rape, sir?” He pointed his finger in a mock-epic manner at Maury. “Shame, sir!” He smiled at us all.

“You just want her for yourself,” Barrows said, biting off
the fantail of a prawn and laying it aside. “How do you know she’s not another of those simulacrum things, like the Stanton one?”

“I’ll take a dozen gross!” Blunk cried, his eyes shining.

Maury said, “She really is my daughter. She’s been away at school.” He looked uncomfortable.

“And come back—” Blunk lowered his voice. In an exaggerated aside he whispered hoarsely to Maury, “/”
the family way
, is that it?”

Maury grinned uneasily.

Changing the subject I said, “It’s nice to see you again, Mrs. Nild.”

“Thank you.”

“That Stanton robot scared the slats out of us,” Barrows said to Maury and me, his elbows resting on the table, arms folded. He had finished his prawns and he looked well-fed and sleek. For a man who started out on stewed prunes he seemed to enjoy his food to the hilt. I had to approve of that, personally; it seemed to me to be an encouraging sign.

“You people are to be congratulated!” Blunk said. “You produced a monster!” He laughed loudly, enjoying himself. “I say kill the thing! Get a mob with torches! Onward!”

We all had to laugh at that.

“How did the Frankenstein monster finally die?” Colleen asked.

“Ice,” Maury said. “The castle burned down and they sprayed hoses on it and the water became ice.”

“But the monster was found frozen in the ice in the next movie,” I said. “And they revived him.”

“He disappeared into a pit of bubbling lava,” Blunk said. “I was there. I kept a button from his coat.” From his coat pocket he produced a button which he displayed to each of us in turn. “Off the world-famous Frankenstein monster.”

Colleen said, “It’s off your vest, David.”

“What!” Blunk glanced down, scowling. “So it is! It’s my own button!” Again he laughed.

Barrows, investigating his teeth with the edge of his thumbnail, said to Maury and me, “How much did it set you back to put together the Stanton robot?”

“Around five thousand,” Maury said.

“And how much can it be produced in quantity for? Say, if several hundred thousand are run off.”

“Hell,” Maury said quickly. “I would say around six hundred dollars. That assumes they’re identical, have the same ruling monads and are fed the same tapes.”

“What it is,” Barrows said to him, “is a life-size version of the talking dolls that were so popular in the past; correct—”

“No,” Maury said, “not exactly.”

“Well, it talks and walks around,” Barrows said. “It took a bus to Seattle. Isn’t that the automaton principle made a little more complex?” Before Maury could answer he continued. “What I’m getting at is, there really isn’t anything
new
here, is there?”

Silence.

“Sure,” Maury said. He did not look very merry, now. And I noticed that Pris, too, seemed abruptly humorless.

“Well, would you spell it out, please,” Barrows said, still with his pleasant tone, his informality. Picking up his glass of Green Hungarian he sipped. “Go ahead, Rock.”

“It’s not an automaton at all,” Maury said. “You know the work of Grey Walter in England? The turtles? It’s what’s called a homeostatic system. It’s cut off from its environment; it produces its own responses. It’s like the fully automated factory which repairs itself. Do you know what ‘feedback’ refers to? In electrical systems there—”

Dave Blunk put his hand on Maury’s shoulder. “What Mr. Barrows wants to know has to do with the patentability, if I may use such an unwieldly term, of your Stanton and Lincoln robots.”

Pris spoke up in a low, controlled voice. “We’re fully covered at the patent office. We have expert legal representation.”

‘That’s good to hear,” Barrows said, smiling at her as he picked his teeth. “Because otherwise there’s nothing to buy.”

“Many new principles are involved,” Maury said. “The Stanton electronic simulacrum represents work developed over a period of years by many research teams in and out of Government and if I may say so myself we’re all abundantly pleased, even amazed, at the terrific results … as you saw yourself when the Stanton got off the Greyhound bus at Seattle and took a taxi to your office.”

“It walked,” Barrows said.

“Pardon?”

“I say, it walked to my office from the Greyhound bus station.”

“In any case,” Maury said, “what we’ve achieved here has no precedent in the electronics trade.”

After dinner we drove to Ontario, arriving at the office of MASA ASSOCIATES at ten o’clock.

“Funny little town,” Dave Blunk said, surveying the empty streets. “Everybody in bed.”

“Wait until you see the Lincoln,” Maury said as we got out from the car.

They had stopped at the showroom window and were reading the sign that had to do with the Lincoln.

“I’ll be a son of a gun,” Barrows said. He put his face to the glass, peering in. “No sign of it right now, though. What does it do, sleep at night? Or do you have it assassinated every evening around five, when sidewalk traffic is heaviest?”

Maury said, “The Lincoln is probably down in the shop. We’ll go down there.” He unlocked the door and stood aside to let us enter.

Presently we were standing at the entrance to the dark repairshop as Maury groped for the light switch. At last he found it.

There, seated in meditation, was the Lincoln. It had been sitting quietly in the darkness.

Barrows said at once, “Mr. President.” I saw him nudge
Colleen Nild. Blunk grinned, looking enthusiastic, with the greedy, good-humored warmth of a hungry but confident cat. Clearly, he was getting enormous enjoyment out of all this. Mrs. Nild craned her neck, gasped faintly, obviously impressed. Barrows, of course, walked on into the repairshop without hesitation, knowing exactly what to do. He did not hold his hand out to the Lincoln; he halted a few paces from it, showing respect.

Turning his head the Lincoln regarded him with a melancholy expression. I had never seen such despair on a face before, and I shrank back; so did Maury. Pris did not react at all; she merely remained standing in the doorway. The Lincoln rose to its feet, hesitated, and then by degrees the expression of pain faded from its face; it said in a broken, reedy voice—completely at contrast to its tall frame, “Yes sir.” It inspected Barrows from its height, with kindliness and interest, its eyes twinkling a little.

“My name is Sam Barrows,” Barrows said. “It’s a great honor to meet you, Mr. President.”

“Thank you, Mr. Barrows,” the Lincoln said. “Won’t you and your friends enter and accommodate yourselves?”

To me Dave Blunk gave a wide-eyed silent whistle of astonishment and awe. He clapped me on the back. “Wheee,” he said softly.