We Can Build You (6 page)

“Barrows seems to say he’s completely tied up right now with a pet project of his own, that housing tract called Green Peach Hat.”

“I lived there,” Maury said. “In the late ‘fifties.”

“What’s it like?”

“Louis, it’s hell. The dump ought to be burned to the ground; only a match—nothing else—would help that place.”

“Some do-gooders agree with you.”

Maury said in a low, tense voice, “If they want someone to burn it down I’ll do it personally for them. You can quote me, too. Sam Barrows owns that place.”

“Ah,” I said.

“He’s making a fortune in rentals off it. Slum rentals is one of the biggest rackets in the world today; you get back like five to six hundred percent return on your investment. Well, I suppose we can’t let personal opinion enter into business. Barrows is still a shrewd businessman and the best person to back the simulacra, even if he is a rich fink. But you say this letter is a rejection of the idea?”

“You could phone him and find out. Pris seems to have phoned him.”

Picking up the phone, Maury dialed.

“Wait,” I said.

He glared at me.

“I’ve got an intuition,” I said, “of doom.”

Into the phone, Maury said, “Mr. Barrows.”

I grabbed the phone from him and hung it up.

“You—” He quivered with anger. “What a coward.” Lifting the receiver he once more dialed. “Operator, I was cut off.” He looked around for the letter; it had Barrows’ number on it. I picked up the letter and crumpled it into a ball and tossed it across the room.

Cursing at me he slammed down the receiver.

We faced each other, breathing heavily.

“What’s wrong with you?” Maury said.

“I don’t think we should get tangled up with a man like that.”

“Like what?”

I said, “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad!”

That shook him. “What do you mean?” he mumbled, tipping his head and regarding me bird-like. “You think I’m batty to call, do you? Ought to be at the funny clinic. Maybe so. But anyhow I intend to.” Going past me he fished up the crumpled ball of paper, smoothed it, memorized the number, and returned to the phone. Again he placed the call.

“It’s the end of us,” I said.

An interval passed. “Hello,” Maury said suddenly. “Let me talk to Mr. Barrows, please. This is Maury Rock in Ontario, Oregon.”

Another interval.

“Mr. Barrows! This is Maury Rock.” He got a set grin on his face; he bent over, resting his elbow on his thigh. “I have your letter here, sir, to my daughter, Pris Frauenzimmer … regarding our world-shaking invention, the electronic simulacrum, as personified by the charming, old-time characterization of Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin McMasters Stanton.” A pause in which he gaped at me vacantly. “Are you interested, sir?” Another pause, much longer this time.

You’re not going to make the sale, Maury, I said to myself.

“Mr. Barrows,” Maury said. “Yes, I see what you mean.
That’s true, sir. But let me point this out to you, in case you overlooked it.”

The conversation rambled on for what seemed an endless time. At last Maury thanked Barrows, said goodbye, and hung up.

“No dice,” I said.

He glowered at me wearily. “Wow.”

“What did he say?”

“The same as in the letter. He still doesn’t see it as a commercial venture. He thinks we’re a patriotic organization.” He blinked, shook his head wonderingly, “No dice, like you said.”

“Too bad.”

“Maybe it’s for the better,” Maury said. But he sounded merely resigned; he did not sound as if he believed it. Someday he would try again. He still hoped.

We were as far apart as ever.

During the next two weeks Maury Rock’s predictions as to the decline of the Rosen electronic organ seemed to be borne out. All trucks reported few if any sales of organs. And we noticed that the Hammerstein people had begun to advertise one of their mood organs for less than a thousand dollars. Of course their price did not include shipping charges or the bench. But still—it was bad news for us.

Meanwhile, the Stanton was in and out of our office. Maury had the idea of building a showroom for sidewalk traffic and having the Stanton demonstrate spinets. He got my permission to call in a contractor to remodel the ground floor of the building; the work began, while the Stanton puttered about upstairs, helping Maury with the mail and hearing what it was going to have to do when the showroom had been completed. Maury advanced the suggestion that it shave off its beard, but after an argument between him and the Stanton he withdrew his idea and the Stanton went about as before, with its long white side whiskers.

“Later on,” Maury explained to me when the Stanton was not present, “I’m going to have it demonstrate itself. I’m in
the process of finalizing on a sales pitch to that effect.” He intended, he explained, to feed the pitch into the Stanton’s ruling monad brain in the form of punched instruction tape. That way there would be no arguments, as there had been over the whiskers.

All this time Maury was busy concocting a second simulacrum. It was in MASA’s truck-repair shop, on one of the workbenches, in the process of being assembled. On Thursday the powers that decreed our new direction permitted me to view it for the first time.

“Who’s it going to be?” I asked, studying it with a feeling of gloom. It consisted of no more than a large complex of solenoids, wiring, circuit breakers, and the like, all mounted on aluminum panels. Bundy was busy testing a central monad turret; he had his volt-meter in the midst of the wiring, studying the reading on the dial.

Maury said, ‘This is Abraham Lincoln.”

“You’ve lost control of your reason.”

“Not at all. I want something really big to take to Barrows when I visit him next month.”

“Oh I see,” I said. “You hadn’t told me about that.”

“You think I’m going to give up?”

“No,” I admitted. “I knew you wouldn’t give up; I know you.”

“I’ve got the instinct,” Maury said.

The next afternoon, after some gloomy pondering, I looked up Doctor Horstowski in the phonebook. The office of Pris’s out-patient psychiatrist was in the better residential section of Boise. I telephoned him and asked for an appointment as soon as possible.

“May I ask who recommended you?” his nurse said.

With distaste I said, “Miss Priscilla Frauenzimmer.”

“All right, Mr. Rosen; Doctor Horstowski can see you tomorrow at one-thirty.”

Technically, I was supposed to be out on the road, again, setting up communities to receive our trucks. I was supposed
to be making maps and inserting ads in newspapers. But ever since Maury’s phone call to Sam Barrows something had been the matter with me.

Perhaps it had to do with my father. Since the day he had set eyes on the Stanton—and found out it was a machine built to resemble a man—he had become progressively more feeble. Instead of going down to the factory every morning he often remained at home, generally hunched in a chair before the TV; the times I had seen him he had a troubled expression and his faculties seemed clouded.

I mentioned it to Maury.

“Poor old guy,” Maury said. “Louis, I hate to say this to you, but Jerome is getting frail.”

“I realize that.”

“He can’t compete much longer.”

“What do you suggest I do?”

“Keep him out of the bustle and strife of the marketplace. Consult with your mother and brother; find out what Jerome has always wanted to do hobby-wise. Maybe carve flying model World War One airplanes, such as the Fokker Triplane or the Spad. You should look into that, Louis, for the old man’s sake. Am I right, buddy?”

I nodded.

“It’s partly your fault,” Maury said. “You haven’t cared for him properly. When a man gets his age he needs support. I don’t mean financial; I mean—hell, I mean
spiritual”

The next day I drove to Boise and, at one-twenty, parked before the modern, architect-designed office building of Doctor Horstowski.

When Doctor Horstowski appeared in the hallway to usher me into his office, I found myself facing a man built along the lines of an egg. His body was rounded; his head was rounded; he wore tiny round glasses; there were no straight or broken lines about him, and when he walked he progressed in a flowing smooth motion as if he was rolling. His voice,
too, was soft and smooth. And yet, when I entered his office and seated myself and got a closer look, I saw that there was one feature of him which I had not noticed: he had a tough, harsh-looking nose, as flat and sharp as a parrot’s beak. And now that I noticed that, I could hear in his voice a suppressed tearing edge of great harshness.

He seated himself with a pad of lined paper and a pen, crossed his legs, and began to ask me dull, routine questions.

“What did you wish to see me about?” he asked at last, in a voice barely at the fringe of audibility but at the same time clearly distinct.

“Well, I’m having this problem. I’m a partner in this firm, MASA ASSOCIATES. And I feel that my partner and his daughter are against me and plotting behind my back. Especially I feel they’re out to degrade and destroy my family, in particular my elderly father, Jerome, who isn’t well enough or strong enough anymore to take that sort of thing.”

“What ‘sort of thing’?”

“This deliberate and ruthless destruction of the Rosen spinet and electronic organ factory and our entire retail system. In favor of a mad, grandiose scheme for saving mankind or defeating the Russians or something like that; I can’t make it out what it is, to be honest.”

“Why can’t you ‘make it out’?” His pen scratch-scratched.

“Because it changes from day to day.” I paused. The pen paused, too. “It seems to be designed to reduce me to helplessness. And as a result Maury will take over the business and maybe the factory as well. And they’re mixed up with an incredibly wealthy and powerful sinister figure, Sam K. Barrows of Seattle, whose picture you possibly saw on the cover of
Look
magazine.”

I was silent.

“Go. On.” He enunciated as if he were a speech instructor.

“Well, in addition I feel that my partner’s daughter, who is the prime mover in all this, is a dangerous ex-psychotic who can only be said to be as hard as iron and utterly without
scruples.” I looked at the doctor expectantly, but he said nothing and showed no visible reaction. “Pris Frauenzimmer,” I said.

He nodded.

“What’s your opinion?” I asked.

“Pris,” Doctor Horstowski said, sticking his tongue out and down and staring at his notes, “is a dynamic personality.”

I waited, but that was all.

“You think it’s in my mind?” I demanded.

“What do you think is their
motive
for doing all this?” he asked.

That took me by surprise. “I don’t know. Is it my business to figure that out? Hell, they want to peddle the simulacra to Barrows and make a mint; what else? And get a lot of prestige and power, I guess. They have maniacal dreams.”

“And you stand in their way.”

“Right,” I said.

“You have no such dreams.”

“I’m a realist. Or at least I try to be. As far as I’m concerned that Stanton—have you seen it?”

“Pris came in here once with it. It sat in the waiting room while she had her hour.”

“What did it do?”

“It read
Life
magazine.”

“Didn’t it make your blood crawl?” I asked.

“I don’t think so.”

“You weren’t frightened to think that those two, Maury and Pris, could dream up something unnatural and dangerous like that?”

Doctor Horstowski shrugged.

“Christ,” I said bitterly, “you’re insulated. You’re in here safe in this office. What do you care what goes on in the world?”

Doctor Horstowski gave what seemed to me to be a fleeting but smug smile. That made me furious.

“Doctor,” I said, “I’ll let you in on it. Pris is playing a cruel prank on you. She sent me in here. I’m a simulacrum,
like the Stanton. I wasn’t supposed to give the show away, but I can’t go on with it any longer. I’m just a machine, made out of circuits and relay switches. You see how sinister all this is? She’d do it even to you. What do you say to that?”

Halting in his writing, Doctor Horstowski said, “Did you tell me you’re married? If so, what is your wife’s name, age, and does she have an occupation? And where born?”

“I’m not married. I used to have a girl friend, an Italian girl who sang in a night club. She was tall and had dark hair. Her name was Lucrezia but she asked us to call her Mimi. Later on she died of t.b. That was after we split up. We used to fight.”

The doctor carefully wrote those facts down.

“Aren’t you going to answer my question?” I asked.

It was hopeless. The doctor, if he had a reaction to the simulacrum sitting in his office reading
Life
, was not going to reveal it. Or maybe he didn’t have one; maybe he didn’t care who he found sitting across from him or among his magazines—maybe he had taught himself long ago to accept anyone and anything he found there.

But at least I could get an answer out of him regarding Pris, who I regarded as a worse evil than the simulacra.

“I’ve got my .45 Service revolver and shells,” I said. “That’s all I need; the opportunity will take care of itself. It’s just a question of time before she tries the same cruelty on someone else as she did on me. I consider it my sacred task to rub her out—that’s god’s truth.”

Scrutinizing me, Horstowski said, “Your real problem, as you’ve phrased it—and I believe accurately—is the hostility you feel, a very mute and baffled hostility, seeking an outlet, toward your partner and this eighteen-year-old girl who has difficulties of her own and who is actively seeking solutions in her own way as best she can.”

Put like that, it did not sound so good. It was my own feelings which harried me, not the enemy.
There was no enemy
. There was only my own emotional life, suppressed and denied.

“Well, what can you do for me?” I asked.

“I can’t make your reality-situation palatable to you. But I can help you comprehend it.” He opened a drawer of his desk; I saw boxes and bottles and envelopes of pills, a rat’s nest of physician’s samples, scattered and heaped. After rooting, Horstowski same up with a small bottle, which he opened. “I can give you these. Take two a day, one when you get up and one on retiring. Hubrizine.” He passed me the bottle.