“I understand that everything stays in the M&H files, and what you really get is a copy.”
“My! You really do know us. Yes—look, I’ll show you.” She touched the board, manipulated the jewel at her throat and a ten-by-twelve section of the board became a projection of a business letter. “That’s for inspection,” she explained, “just to be sure it’s the one you want before you reproduce it. If it is, you just …” and she touched the board at the right place and in five seconds a sheet of paper emerged from a slot—an exact duplicate of the letter.
“Really amazing. But where does the VIP system come in?”
“Oh, I had to show you the old way first.” She beamed. “Would you like to see that letter again, or another?”
“Let’s try another one.”
At that moment, a young man came in with a small package. Almost simultaneously, it seemed, a startlingly pretty young girl emerged from an inner door, took and signed for the package while the young man ogled her and Miss Kuhli, his head moving like that of an aficionado of table tennis, Miss Kuhli the while asking after his sick mother. And while this was going on the image of another letter appeared on the small screen. Miss Kuhli caught Merrihew’s nod, touched her control and by the time the young man and the secretary were gone the new letter was in his hands.
“I feel foolish,” said Merrihew, “like the audience of a magic act. How did you do that? I mean, when?”
Clearly she was enjoying herself. “Between the time I said hello to him and the time I asked after his mother. While he was handing the package to Sue.”
“You never touched your throat mike.”
“I used it, though. I switched here—” she showed him “—to activate the VIP, and then I simple told it the code/number of the letter I wanted.”
“Subvocally.”
“Yes, it seemed the best way at the time. But I didn’t have to. Oh, Mr. Stamm’s lunch—unfinished business. I can show you with that. Now, what I must do is call the restaurant. Let’s say I don’t know the number. I could look it up. Or I could—” she fingered the throat jewel “—call Information. Or I could use VIP. Like this—” and she touched a spot on the board. “VIP, what’s the number of the Blue Corner Restaurant?”
Before the words were out of her mouth the telephone number appeared in brightline numerals. “But I can do better than that.” She canceled her board, keyed VIP, and demanded: “Get me the Blue Corner.” Instantly the holoscreen lit up and they were looking at a young man in a blue apron, with all the surprising dimensionality of the M&H holoscreen. “Blue Corner. Oh,” said the young man, lighting up much as the screen had done. “Miss Kuhli! How are you, Miss Kuhli?”
“Fine, Ronnie. Ronnie, Mr. Stamm’s eating in today. Will you send over the usual, a quarter to one?”
Devoutly, Ronnie vowed he would, waited for and got a Kuhli smile and rang off. “Marvelous,” said Merrihew, and could think only to repeat the jaded word. “Marvelous. What you’ve done here at long last is to perfect the old impossible idea one finds in those silly science-fiction stories—the computer you can talk to, the robot that acts on spoken command.”
“Mr. Miroshi says we have never perfected anything,” said Miss Kuhli, “We merely produce the best. We’re really a long way from the computer one can talk to, the way I’m talking to you. And as you see, we still have to acquaint the computer with a certain person—” she touched the jewel at her throat “—before it can be expected to respond reliably. VIP has to know a person’s way of phrasing, the, diction, the normal vocabulary and what to accept in variations of emphasis. Poor VIP can’t spell at all, you know. We still have to write our own letters, but he does make it a lot easier. Let me show you.”
She brought out her typewriter, an act that consisted of pulling out from the edge of the console a fingerboard no, more than half an inch thick and pushing it inward again, which, with a click, made it assume the slight slant of the conventional keyboard and apparently complete rigidity. “It can afford to be as thin as this,” she explained. “It’s all electrostatic switches. The other parts are all in the computer.” She touched the ON point, which lit up, along with the same screen on which he had seen the files. “Now we get some help from VIP,” she said. She activated the system and said “Letterhead and date, please.”
They appeared on the screen.
“To?”
“Mr. Handel. From me.”
“To Mr. Handel, VIP.” Neatly, in three lines properly spaced, there appeared on the screen Mr. Handel’s name and title, room number, street address and zip code. A triple space and then: Dear Mr. Handel:
“Wow,” said Merrihew, impressed yet again. He then began to dictate. Miss Kuhli’s fingers flew. In a way it was eerie, for the typewriter made not the slightest sound, and there was no carriage, no paper, nothing but the shining words appearing on the screen one by one as he spoke. They were:
I have confirmed, and in a matter of minutes will prove to your satisfaction, that the source of the difficulty we discussed yesterday is in my present location.
No one is perfect, Mr. Handel, and the closest you can get to perfection is, as your partner remarked, to achieve the best there is at any moment. I concede that you have done this.
What I think you have overlooked is that your VIP system is set up for a perfect input. No person is perfect because no person is anyone single thing. Mood and pressure can turn one facet or another of a person to the front, despite the determination of that person not to let that happen. How easily it happens depends upon the person, but for everyone there is a point, a degree of pressure, at which the turn will occur and another “person” will present itself. But not quite another person, you see. To a computer finely tuned to one individual this must present a perplexing development. It can then only do what any of us do when perplexed—that is, make a good guess.
There is a common denominator in the two documents you showed me—the medical report delivered to your Math section and the treatise on aggression and hostility. Unless I am seriously in error—and I am not—Math was looking for a certain regular series of figures, probably daily, in the preparation of a graph of some sort. VIP was asked for “abcissas” and came up with “abscesses.” In the other case a request for information on the antipodes got a response which concerned antipathies. There is only one place in the world where each of these couples is pronounced almost identically, and that is in the part of New York City known as the West Bronx.
“Why—I was born in the West Bronx!” exclaimed Miss Kuhli.
“Think of that,” said Merrihew. “Shall we go on?”
They went on.
One of the many facets of the human being capable of being turned to the front under stress is the blind spot, Mr. Handel. The fact that every one of the troublesome events you listed occurred on the same shift, with the same operator, completely escaped you and everyone else who saw the list. Doubtless it would have escaped me as well had I met Miss Kuhli before I saw it instead of afterward. As I dictate this it also becomes clear that in spite of the distress this matter has caused you, and the thoroughness of your investigation, no one to this moment has checked with her. No one, least of all Miss Kuhli, would even begin to believe she could do any wrong.
“Now let’s hold it right there, Mister,” said Agnes Kuhli harshly. “I work hard and I do the best I know how, so what kind of con is this ‘do any wrong’?”
“Miss Kuhli,” said Merrihew gently, “your West Bronx is showing.” She glared at him hotly for a long moment. He held her gaze and radiated as much calm as he could. Merrihew could, when he cared to, radiate a great deal of it. She subsided from fury to sullenness and took her eyes away to scan down the words on the screen. “Never in life,” she growled—it was a real growl—“could I get so uptight that I’d make such a stupid—” Her voice trailed off as she fixed her brilliant eyes on a word. “ ‘Antipodes.’ Oh. Oh, that was the time he—” Surprisingly, delightfully, she colored to the
earlobes.
“You don’t have to tell me or anyone about it. But you were under stress, right? And VIP took your antipodes as antipathies and gave Marketing a psychiatric lecture instead of a trade report.”
“And the other time, the abscissas. That was when he threatened me that if I didn’t—”
“Shh,” he interrupted. “I don’t have to know as long as you do.” He waved a hand. “Type.”
Office efficiency dictates that an office chair be designed to avoid low back pains. The comfort and well-being of the employee is important, of course, but the truly basic thrust is the accommodation of the whole human being to the office environment. VIP is so sophisticated that such a simple basic can be overlooked. Unless and until VIP can be programmed to respond unfailingly to its operator in any mood—laughing, furious, frightened, weary—it should be used only in periods of complete calm. Unless VIP can accommodate all the facets of a human being—the irrational child, the bigot, the daydreamer, the wishful thinker, the spring-feverish, as well as it does the carefully schooled office presence, I recommend that it go back to the drawing boards until it can.
You’ll get my bill in the morning. Right now I’m taking Miss Kuhli to lunch.
MERRIHEW
Ingenious Aylmer
Ejler Edgar Aylmer (nobody has a name like Ejler Edgar Aylmer) had this inheritance and this basement workshop. They had come to him in that order and both were enormous. I dropped in one day to borrow a turret lathe and there he was, fiddling with the controls of a Z-shaped console. I had to thump him before he could answer me, because of the helmet. “Oh, hi,” he said. “It’s my reorganizer.”
“What’s it do?”
“I’ll show you.” Replacing the helmet, he punched rapidly on a terminal keyboard. Then he pulled a knobbed stick marked REORG, and it was lights-out for the machine. He took off the helmet and looked around. “How about that!” he said, mighty pleased.
“How about what?” I said, which made him roar with glee. He then asked me how many hours there are in a day. I looked down at my fingers and said, “Fourteen.”
“Okay. And who rules the United States?”
“The Royal Council, of course,” I said, correctly bobbing from the knees.
“And if I told you that when you walked in here you had eight fingers and two thumbs, and General Superfudd was Our Leader?”
I counted my fingers. “You better explain that to me, Ejler Edgar.”
“Well, I can’t, not really. But I can give you an analogy. Consider the whole universe a kind of computer bank. The computer can make every bit of information in it consistent with every other bit, by rearranging them. When you come up with an impossible bit—pigs with wings, say—it is ordinarily rejected as impossible nonsense. But if you put it into this terminal, the universe has to accept it no matter what, and will reorganize the whole universe, if necessary, to make it a fact. Pull the handle, and you’ll be living with real winged pigs.”
I looked at the machine and didn’t believe it. “Try it yourself,” said Ejler Edgar. “But put on the helmet, otherwise you won’t be able to remember how the universe was before you reorganized it.”
I put on the helmet, thought a moment, then typed out on the console the most impossible thing I could think of: MIRRORS REVERSE IMAGES RIGHT TO LEFT BUT NOT UP TO DOWN. At his nod, I pulled the big handle.
Everything kind of blinked, and I was standing in an empty cellar wearing that stupid helmet. I looked at my hands, I still had eight fingers and two thumbs, but now they’re on two hands, for God’s sake, and there are 24 hours in a day, and what’s-his-name’s in the White House, and every time I look in a mirror it reverses everything right to left, but not up to down. Try it yourself.
And there’s nobody to explain it to me. As I said, nobody has a name like Ejler Edgar Aylmer. Nobody.
The Sheriff of Chayute
The town came out of its houses, the propped-up weathered ones and the ones with the newly planted white pickets, out of the mercantile and the livery and even the Bat’s Wing, and stood in the wide flat dusty street to watch the cloud in the southeast. They’d known for a week it would come, but it should have come yesterday, and they couldn’t understand that. Billy Willow, who ran the mercantile, said so to the sheriff.
Ev Charger was the sheriff of Chayute, a gangly, ice-eyed man with the knack of keeping his heartbeat slow. He contemplated the cloud and couldn’t understand either why it was a day late. “But anyhow, no use hopin’ they won’t come,” he said, and with those words set himself like a clock, knowing what the message would have to be as the hours went by.
A lady stopped and called out from the duckboards: “You, Ev Charger, mind you keep a sharp eye on those—those ruffians. Chayute isn’t what it was, and they’d best learn that. We will not tolerate—”
“Yes ma’am,” the sheriff said evenly. From between Mrs. Finnan’s bright china teeth, and out of her dried-apricot face, had come the same public speech a week ago, and this would be the eleventh time since. Billy said sharply, “Now, Martha, when the sheriff comes into your place an’ tells you how much a yard to sell dimity, you’ve a right to tell him how to run his business. Did he do that yet?”
Mrs. Finnan sniffed and did not respond to that, but said, “A blessing when the railroad goes through,” and walked on. Charger wondered about that. The railroad wouldn’t come within forty miles of Chayute, and the word had been around for years now that more and more cattle were riding to market, arriving rested and soft. It would mean the end of the big drives for sure. Chayute would survive with farms and maybe the mine but it would be a very different breed of town. Well it already was. Billy was saying, “I’d be a devil’s damfool to call that a blessing.” A cattle drive meant a lot to the mercantile and the saloon and a couple other kinds of places, though a lot of the rest would keep their doors open only out of a sort of defiance. And given their druthers, half the houses in Chayute would like to have boarded up their shutters or gophered clear underground. Then “Priss,” snapped Billy Willow, “you come here.”
The prettiest girl in town, yes and prettier than anything in the next four towns north and three east, stepped off the duckboards and came to her daddy. Billy was a laughter-beaten, weather-wrinkled little hickory stick of a man, and for all his endless good nature, his kids obeyed him in a way that would be the envy of a colonel in the cavalry. Ev Charger was going to ask Billy one day how that was done. “Yes, Daddy.”
Billy peered into the glowing face. Priss Willow had skin smooth as a new-blown magnolia and there’s a western tree called jacaranda which blooms a unique blue with lavender in it: Priss Willow’s eyes. “You got color on, girl?”
She got some then. “Oh no, Daddy.”
Billy peered close again. “Well good then. Go help your maw.”
“Yes, Daddy.” She smiled shyly at the sheriff, which made him want to blink his eyes, and they watched her move away—a pleasure. She’d a way of moving unlike other folk, who just have to move up and down a little with each step. She did not.
Ev Charger thought to ask then and there, “How do you get your kids to mind you so, Billy? For sure it wasn’t with a willow switch.”
“Oh, I been known to wave one,” said Billy, and laughed. Then he saw it was a straight question. Younguns grow yeast in their veins at a certain time, and the bubbles come in a lot of ways, not all of them good. The town had had its fair share of this in recent days as cattle became less to it and crops and the mine more, and they had to put a third room on the schoolhouse and those neat little pickets began to show along the street. Some of this yeasting became sheriff’s business, and what to do was forever a puzzler.
Billy said, “No kid’s a bad kid, whatever they say about blood. If you believe that, they know it and don’t get bad. Only other thing you got to do is give ’em something that says ‘thus far you can go, an’ no farther.’ It really don’t make no difference what it is, you know. There’s got to be a wall aroun
d ’em somewhere. Somepin for ’em to kick against. They call it a wall but they know it’s a shelter.” He came closer to talk privately, laughed again and said, “I don’t give a hoot owl’s holler if Priss powders up a bit, leastwise not more’n her maw does, but she don’t know that.”
They stood together watching the loom of the dust cloud over the late-lit southwest hills. Charger knew from the talk that they were both thinking the same thing, talking about the same thing—in the middle of that cloud was a hard-jawed kid name of Hank Shadd, yes and the old man who had made him what he was. Nobody ever built a wall around Hank, unless it was all those things that go to make a man out of a boy. And it was Olman Shadd’s idea of what makes a man—that is, to know what you want and go for it in straight lines. Two years ago they’d driven through here and Hank had first seen Priss Willow. Last year he had first seen her: a sizable difference; and she certainly saw him at the same time, which was why the color on her face just now, whether or not it was rouge pot or yeast.
Ev Charger knew the Shadds well and from way back. Olman Shadd was only a loose handful of years older than Charger, but even when Charger was a wet-eared calfling they were calling Olman Shadd “the Old Man.” Like a lot of other lawmen of the time, Charger had cows in his history. His first drive, and that was a long while back, had been under Olman Shadd—and Shadd had already bossed four of them, handling a crew of rannies older, and some bigger than he was. You did what he said because he never gave an order that didn’t make sense; he knew his country and his cows and his men. If you couldn’t figure out the sense you did it anyway, and right now, because he was a man who would back up an order with fists or feet or bullets if need be, no matter what, even “please pass the salt.” Ev Charger never ran afoul with him but once, and that was on his first drive, when he had maybe more enthusiasm than knowledge or care, and one night tiredly hobbled his roan with a granny knot. It took him forty daylight minutes to catch his mount the next morning, and the Old Man waved him up from where he had been riding flank—a real kindness to an apprentice. “Ride drag,” was all the Old Man said, and young Ev dropped back and for five days drank dust with his nostrils and chewed it with his eyelids and spat it out in gritty tears, wading through cowflop the whole time, and contemplating the craft of carefulness.
Case and the Dreamer Page 9