We Can Build You (18 page)

Maury said, “Aye.”

After a moment of consideration my father said, “I, too.”

“Then the motion has been carried,” the Stanton declared. It sipped its coffee for a moment, and then, putting the cup down on the counter, it said in a stern, confident voice, “The enterprise needs a name, a new name. I propose we call the enterprise R & R ASSOCIATES OF BOISE, IDAHO; is that satisfactory?” It glanced around at us. We were nodding.
“Good.” It patted its mouth with its paper napkin. “Then let us begin at once; Mr. Lincoln, as our solicitor, will you be good enough as to see to it that our legal papers are in order? If necessary, you may obtain a younger lawyer more experienced in the current legalities; I authorize you to do that. We shall begin our work at once; our future is full of honest, active endeavor, and we shall not dwell on the past, on the unpleasantness and setbacks which we have experienced so recently. It is essential, gentlemen, that we look ahead, not back—can we do that, Mr. Rock? Despite all temptation?”

“Yeah,” Maury said. “You’re right, Stanton.” From his coat pocket he got matches; stepping from his stool he went up to the cash register at the counter and fished about in the cigar boxes there. He returned, with two long gold-wrapped cigars, one of which he gave to my dad. “Elconde de Guell,” he said. “Made in the Philippines.” He unwrapped his and lit up; my father did the same.

“We will do well,” my father said, puffing away.

“Right,” Maury said, also puffing.

The others of us finished our coffee.

I had been afraid that Pris’s going over to Barrows would weigh Maury down so much that he would no longer be worth much as a partner. But I was wrong. In fact he seemed to redouble his efforts; he answered letters about organs and spinets, arranged shipments from the factory to every point in the Pacific Northwest and down into California and Nevada and New Mexico and Arizona—and in addition he threw himself into the new task of designing and beginning production of the simulacra babysitters.

Without Bob Bundy we could develop no new circuits; Maury found himself in the position of having to modify the old. Our babysitters would be an evolution—an offspring, so to speak—of the Lincoln.

Years ago in a bus Maury had picked up a science fiction magazine called
Thrilling Wonder Stories
and in it was a story about robot attendants who protected children like huge mechanical dogs; they were called “Nannies,” no doubt after the pooch in
Peter Pan
. Maury liked the name and when our Board of Directors met—Stanton presiding, plus myself, Maury, Jerome and Chester, with our attorney Abraham Lincoln—he advanced the idea of using it.

“Suppose the magazine or the author sues,” I said.

“It was so long ago,” Maury said. ‘The magazine doesn’t exist anymore and probably the author’s dead.”

“Ask our attorney.”

After careful consideration Mr. Lincoln decided that the notion of titling a mechanical children’s attendant Nanny was now public domain. “For I notice,” he pointed out, “that the group of you know without having read the story from whence comes this name.”

So we called our simulacra babysitters Nannies. But the decision cost us several valuable weeks, since, to make his decision, the Lincoln had to read the
Peter Pan
book. He enjoyed it so much that he brought it to board meetings and read it aloud, with many chuckles, particularly the parts which especially amused him. We had no choice; we had to endure the readings.

“I warned you,” the Stanton told us, after one lengthy reading had sent us to the men’s room for a smoke.

“What gets me,” Maury said, “is that it’s a goddam kids’ book; if he has to read aloud, why doesn’t he read something useful like the
New York Times!”

Meanwhile, Maury had subscribed to the Seattle newspapers, hoping to find out about Pris. He was positive that an item would appear shortly. She was there, all right, because a moving van had arrived at the house and picked up the rest of her possessions, and the driver had told Maury that he was instructed to transport it all to Seattle. Obviously Sam K. Barrows was paying the bill; Pris did not have that kind of money.

“You could still get the cops,” I pointed out to Maury.

Gloomily he said, “I have faith in Pris. I know that of her own accord she’ll find the right path and return to me and her mother. And anyhow let’s face it; she’s a ward of the Government—I’m no longer legally her guardian.”

For my part I still hoped that she would
not
return; in her absence I had felt a good deal more relaxed and at good terms with the world. And it seemed to me that despite his
appearance of gloom Maury was getting more out of his work. He no longer had the bundle of worries at home to gnaw at him. And also he did not have Doctor Horstowski’s staggering bill each month.

“You suppose Sam Barrows has found her a better outpatient analyst?” he asked me, one evening. “I wonder how much it’s costing him. Three days a week at forty dollars a visit is a hundred and twenty a week; that’s almost five hundred a month. Just to cure her fouled-up psyche!” He shook his head.

I was reminded of that mental health slogan which the authorities had pasted up in every post office in the U.S., a year or so ago.

LEAD THE WAY TO MENTAL HEALTH—BE THE FIRST IN YOUR
FAMILY TO ENTER A MENTAL HEALTH CLINIC!

And school kids wearing bright badges had rung doorbells in the evenings to collect funds for mental health research; they had overpowered the public, wrung a fortune from them, all for the good cause of our age.

“I feel sorry for Barrows,” Maury said. “I hope for his sake she’s got her back in it, designing a simulacrum body for him, but I doubt it. Without me she’s just a dabbler; she’ll fool around, make pretty drawings. That bathroom mural—that was one of the few things she’s ever brought to completion. And she’s got hundreds of bucks worth of material left over.”

“Wow,” I said, once more congratulating myself and the rest of us on our good luck: that Pris was no longer with us.

“Those creative projects of hers,” Maury said, “she really throws herself into them, at least at the start.” Admonishingly he said, “Don’t ever sell her short, buddy boy. Like look how well she designed the Stanton and Lincoln bodies. You have to admit she’s good.”

“She’s good,” I agreed.

“And who’s going to design the Nanny package for us,
now that Pris is gone? Not you; you don’t have a shred of artistic ability. Not me. Not that thing that crept up out of the ground which you call your brother.”

I was preoccupied. “Listen, Maury,” I said suddenly,
“what about Civil War mechanical babysitters?”

He stared at me uncertainly.

“We already have the design,” I went on. “We’ll make two models, one a babysitter in Yankee blue, the other in Rebel gray. Pickets, doing their duty. What do you say?”

“I say what’s a picket?”

“Like a sentry, only there’re a lot of them.”

After a long pause Maury said, “Yes, the soldier suggests devotion to duty. And it would appeal to the kids. It’d get away from that robot type design; it wouldn’t be cold and impersonal.” He nodded. “It’s a good idea, Louis. Let’s call a meeting of the Board and lay our idea, or rather your idea, right out, so we can start work on it. Okay?” He hurried to the door, full of eagerness. “I’ll call Jerome and Chester and I’ll run downstairs and tell Lincoln and Stanton.” The two simulacra had separate quarters on the bottom floor of Maury’s house; originally he had rented the units out, but now he kept them for this use. “You don’t think they’ll object, do you? Especially Stanton; he’s so hardheaded. Suppose he thinks it’s—blasphemy? Well, we’ll just have to set fire to the idea and push it out in the river.”

“If they object,” I said, “we’ll keep plugging for our idea. In the end we’ll be able to get it because what could there possibly be against it? Except some weird puritanical notion on Stanton’s part.”

And yet, even though it was my own idea, I felt a strange weary sensation, as if in my moment of creativity, my last burst of inspiration, I had defeated us all and everything we were trying for. Why was that? Was it too easy, this idea? After all, it was simply an adaptation of what we—or rather Maury and his daughter—had originally started out with. In the beginning they had dreamed their dream of refighting the entire Civil War, with all the millions of participants; now
we were enthusiastic merely at the notion of a Civil War-type mechanical servant to relieve the housewife of her deadly daily chores. Somewhere along the line we had lost the most valuable portion of our ideas.

Once more we were just a little firm out to make money; we had no grand vision, only a scheme to get rich. We were another Barrows but on a tiny, wretched scale; we had his greed but not his size. We would soon, if possible, commence a schlock Nanny operation; probably we would market our product by some phony sales pitch, some gimmick comparable to the classified “repossession” ad which we had been using.

“No,” I said to Maury. “It’s terrible. Forget it.”

Pausing at the door he yelled, “WHY? It’s terrific.”

“Because,” I said, “it’s—” I could not express it. I felt worn out and despairing—and, even more than that, lonely. For who or what? For Pris Frauenzimmer? For Barrows … for the entire gang of them, Barrows and Blunk and Colleen Nild and Bob Bundy and Pris; what were they doing, right now? What crazy, wild, impractical scheme were they hatching out? I longed to know. We, Maury and I and Jerome and my brother Chester, we had been left behind.

“Say it,” Maury said, dancing about with exasperation. “Why?”

I said, “It’s—corny.”

“Corny! The hell it is.” He glared at me, baffled.

“Forget the idea. What do you suppose Barrows is up to, right this minute? You think they’re building the Edwards family? Or are they stealing our Centennial idea? Or hatching out something entirely new? Maury, we don’t have any vision. That’s what’s wrong. No vision.”

“Sure we do.”

“No,” I said.
“Because we’re not crazy
. We’re sober and sane. We’re not like your daughter, we’re not like Barrows. Isn’t that a fact? You mean you can’t feel it? The lack of that, here in this house? Some lunatic clack-clacking away at some monstrous nutty project until all hours, maybe leaving
it half done right in the middle and going on to something else, something equally nutty?”

“Maybe so,” Maury said. “But god almighty, Louis; we can’t just lie down and die because Pris went over to the other side. Don’t you imagine I’ve had thoughts of this kind? I knew her a lot better than you, buddy, a hell of a lot better. I’ve been tormented every night, thinking about them all together, but we have to go on and do the best we can. This idea of yours; it may not be equal to the electric light or the match, but it’s good. It’s small and it’s salable. It’ll work. And what do we have that’s better? At least it’ll save us money, save us having to hire some outside designer to fly out here and design the body of the Nanny, and an engineer to take Bundy’s place—assuming we could get one. Right, buddy?”

Save us money, I thought. Pris and Barrows wouldn’t have bothered to worry about that; look at them send that van to carry her things all the way from Boise to Seattle. We’re small-time. We’re little.

We’re beetles.

Without Pris—without her.

What did I do? I asked myself. Fall in love with her? A woman with eyes of ice, a calculating, ambitious schizoid type, a ward of the Federal Government’s Mental Health Bureau who will need psychotherapy the rest of her life, an ex-psychotic who engages in catatonic-excitement harebrained projects, who vilifies and attacks everyone in sight who doesn’t give her exactly what she wants when she wants it? What a woman, what a
thing
to fall in love with. What terrible fate is in store for me now?

It was as if Pris, to me, were both life itself—and anti-life, the dead, the cruel, the cutting and rending, and yet also the spirit of existence itself. Movement: she was motion itself. Life in its growing, planning, calculating, harsh, thoughtless actuality. I could not stand having her around me; I could not stand being without her. Without Pris I dwindled away until I became nothing and eventually died like a bug in the
backyard, unnoticed and unimportant; around her I was slashed, goaded, cut to pieces, stepped on—yet somehow I lived: in that, I was real. Did I enjoy suffering? No. It was that it seemed as if suffering was part of life, part of being with Pris. Without Pris there was no suffering, nothing erratic, unfair, unbalanced. But also, there was nothing alive, only small-time schlock schemes, a dusty little office with two or three men scrabbling in the sand …

God knew I didn’t want to suffer at Pris’s hands or at anyone else’s. But suffering was an indication that reality was close by. In a dream there is fright, but not literal, slow, bodily pain, the daily torment that Pris made us endure by her very presence. It was not something which she did to us deliberately; it was a natural outgrowth of what she
was
.

We could evade it only by getting rid of her, and that was what we had done: we had lost her. And with her went reality itself, with all its contradictions and peculiarities; life now would be predictable: we would produce the Civil War Soldier Nannies, we would have a certain amount of money, and so forth. But what did it mean? What did it matter?

“Listen,” Maury was saying to me. “We have to go on.”

I nodded.

“I mean it,” Maury said loudly in my ear. “We can’t give up. We’ll call a meeting of the Board, like we were going to do; you tell them your idea, fight for your idea like you really believed in it. Okay? You promise?” He whacked me on the back. “Come on, goddam you, or I’ll give you a crack in the eye that’ll send you to the hospital. Buddy, come on!”

“Okay,” I said, “but I feel you’re talking to someone on the other side of the grave.”

“Yeah, and you look like it, too. But come on anyhow and let’s get going; you go downstairs and talk Stanton into it; I know Lincoln won’t give us any trouble—all he does is sit there in his room and chuckle over
Winnie the Pooh”