It did not take long for Teeple to find out what was wrong. The baby was learning to talk and had developed a habit of saying, very often, sounds that were very similar to Seven. This was the sound to which the Psychophonic Nurse had been attuned to react by movements resulting in a change of napkins. The baby had learned the sound from the phonograph and was imitating it so perfectly that the machine reacted to it, being unable to tell that it was not the voice from the phonograph, or the electrical stimulus from the wet pad. When Teeple found out what was the trouble, he had to laugh in spite of his serious thoughts. A very simple change in the mechanism blotted out the sound Seven, and cured the baby’s nephritis.
Two weeks later, the inventor introduced his wife to the new male nanny who was to be a father substitute. Machinery had been put into a form about the size of Teeple, the face was rather like his and he wore a blue serge suit that had become second best the previous year.
“This is a very simple machine,” Teeple told his wife. “For the present it will be used only to take the baby out in the new baby-carriage which holds storage batteries and a small phonograph. We’ll put the baby in the carriage and attach Jim Henry to the handles, pointing him down the Country lane, which fortunately is smooth, straight as an arrow, and but little used. We attach the storage batteries to him and to the phonograph, which at once gives the command, ‘Start.’ Then, after a half hour, it will give the command, ‘About Face—Start,’ and in exactly another half hour, when it is exactly in front of the house, it will give the command ‘Halt.’ Then you or the servant will have to come out and put everything away and put the baby back in the crib under the care of the mechanical nanny.
“This will give baby an hour’s exercise and fresh air. Of course she can be given an extra hour if you think it best. If you have an early supper and start the baby and Jim Henry out just as the sun is setting, the neighbors will think that it is really a live father who is pushing the carriage. Rather clever, don’t you think?”
“I think it’s a good idea for the baby to be outdoors every day. The rest of it, having it look like you, seems idiotic. Are you sure the road is safe?”
“Certainly. You know it’s hardly used except by pedestrians and everyone will be careful when they meet a little baby in a carriage. There are no deep gutters, the road is level, there are no houses and no dogs. Jim Henry will take it for an hour’s airing and bring it back safely. You don’t suppose that I’d deliberately advise anything that would harm the child, do you?”
“Oh! I suppose not, but you’re so queer sometimes.”
“I may seem queer, but I assure you I’ve a good reason for everything.”
Anyone watching him closely that summer would have seen that this last statement was true. He insisted on an early supper, five at the latest, and then he always left the house, giving one excuse or another, usually an important engagement at the factory. He made his wife promise that after supper she would at once start Jim Henry out with the baby in the carriage. Mrs. Teeple was glad enough to do this, as it gave her an hour’s uninterrupted period to work in her study. The mechanical man would start briskly down the road and in a few minutes disappear into a clump of willows. Here Teeple sat waiting. He also was dressed in a blue serge suit. He would make the mechanical man lifeless by disconnecting the storage batteries, lay him carefully amid the willows and, taking his place, would happily push the carriage down the road. He would leave a phonograph attached to the battery. When it called “About Face,” he would turn the carriage around and start for home. When he reached the willows, he would attach the mechanical nanny to the carriage and let it take the baby home. Sometimes when it was hot, the baby, the father, and Jim Henry would rest on a blanket, in the shade of the willows. Teeple would read poetry to his child and teach her new words while Jim Henry would lie quietly near them, a look of happy innocence on his unchanging face.
The few neighbors who were in the habit of using that road after supper became accustomed to seeing the little man in the blue serge suit taking care of the baby. They complimented him in conversations with their wives and the ladies lost no time in relaying the compliment to Mrs. Teeple, who smiled in a very knowing way and said in reply, “It certainly is wonderful to have a mechanical husband. Have you read my new book, Happiness in the Home? It’s arousing a great deal of interest in the larger cities.”
She told her husband what they said and he also smiled. Almost all the men he had met during the evening hour were Masons and he knew they could be trusted.
When the baby was a year and a half old, Mrs. Teeple decided it was time to make a serious effort to teach the child to talk. She told her husband that she wanted to do this herself and was willing to take fifteen minutes a day from her literary work for this duty. She asked him if he had any suggestions. If not, she was willing, and able, to assume the entire responsibility. He replied that he had been reading up on this subject and would write out a list of twenty words which were very easy for a baby to learn. He did this, and that night she met him with a very grandiose air and stated that she had taught the baby to say all twenty of the words perfectly in one lesson. She believed she would write an article on the subject. It was very interesting to see how eager the child was to learn. Teeple simply grinned. The list he had given her was composed of words that he and the baby had been working with for some months, not only at night, but also during the evening hour under the willows.
By that fall, Mrs. Teeple was convinced that Watson, in his book, Psychological Care of Infant and Child, was absolutely right when he wrote that every child would be better if it were raised without the harmful influence of mother-love. She wrote him a long personal letter about her experience with the Psychophonic Nurse. He replied that he was delighted, and asked her to write a chapter for the second edition of his book. “I have always known,” he wrote at the end of the letter, “that a mechanical nanny was better than an untrained mother. Your experience proves this to be the truth. I wish you could persuade your husband to put the machine on the market and make it available to millions of mothers who want to do the right thing, but have not the necessary intelligence. Every child is better without a love-life. Your child will grow into an adult free from complexes.”
Mr. Teeple smiled even more broadly when he read that letter.
* * * *
It was a pleasant day in early November. If anything, the day was too warm. There was no wind and the sky over western Kansas was dull and coppery. Teeple asked for a supper earlier than usual and at once left the house, telling his wife that the Masons were having a very special meeting and that he had promised to attend. Thoroughly accustomed to his being away from home in the evening, Mrs. Teeple prepared Jim Henry and started him down the road, pushing the little carriage with the happy baby safely strapped in. Then she went back to her work.
Jim Henry had left the house at five-fifteen. At five-forty-five he would turn around, and at six-fifteen be back with the baby. It was a definite program and she had learned, by experience, that it worked safely one hundred percent of the time. At five-thirty a cold wind began to whine around the house and she closed all the windows. It grew dark and then, without warning, started to snow. By five-forty-five the house was engulfed in the blizzard that was sweeping down from Alaska. The wind tore the electric light poles down and the house was left in darkness.
Susanna Teeple thought of her child in a baby carriage out in the storm in the care of an electrical nanny. Her first impulse was to telephone her husband at the lodge, but she at once found out that the telephone wires had been broken at the same time that the light wires had snapped. She found the servant-girl crying and frightened in the kitchen and realized that she could expect no help from her.
Wrapping a shawl around her shoulders, she opened the front door and started down the road to find her baby. Five minutes later she was back in the house, breathless and hysterical with fright. It took her another five minutes to close and fasten the door. The w
hole house swayed under the impact of the wind. Outside she heard trees snapping and crashing. A crash on top of the house told of the fall of a chimney. She tried to light a lamp, but even in the house the flame could not live. Going to her bedroom, she found an electric torch and, turning it on she put it in the window and started to pray. She had not prayed for years; since early adolescence she had prided herself on the fact that she had learned to live without a creator whose very existence she doubted. Now she was on her knees. Sobbing, she sank to the floor and, stuporous with grief, fell asleep.
As was his nightly custom, Teeple waited in the willows for Jim Henry and the baby carriage. He disconnected the mechanical man and put him under a blanket by the roadside; then he started down the road, singing foolish songs to the baby as they went together into the sunset. He had not gone far when the rising wind warned him of the approaching storm and at once he turned the carriage and started towards home. In five minutes he had all he could do to push the carriage in the teeth of the wind. Then came the snow, and he knew that only by the exercise of all his adult intelligence could he save the life of his child. There was no shelter except the clump of willows. Every effort had to be made to reach those bushy trees, Jim Henry, and the blanket that covered him. One thousand feet lay between the willows and the Teeple home and the man knew that if the storm continued they could easily die, trying to cover that last thousand feet. It was growing dark so fast that it was a serious question if he could even find the clump of willows. He realized that if he once left the road, they were doomed.
He stopped for a few seconds, braced himself against the wind, took off his coat and wrapped it around the crying child. Then he went on, fast as he could, breathing when possible, and praying continuously. There were occasional short lulls in the gale. He finally reached the willows, and instinct helped him find Jim Henry, still covered by the blanket, which was now held to the ground by a foot of snow.
The man wrapped the baby up as well as he could, put the pillow next to Jim Henry, now partly uncovered, laid the baby on the pillow and crawled next to her, pulled the blanket over all three as best he could, and started to sing. The carriage, no longer held, was blown far over the prairie. In a half hour, Teeple felt the weight and the warmth of the blanket of snow. He believed that the baby was asleep. Unable to do anything more, he also fell asleep. In spite of everything, he was happy and told himself it was a wonderful thing to be a father.
During the night the storm passed and the morning came clear, with sunshine on the snow drifts. Mrs. Teeple awoke, built a fire, helped the servant prepare breakfast, and then went for help. The walking was hard, but she finally reached the next house. The woman was alone, her husband having gone to the Masonic lodge the night before. The two of them went on to the next house, and to the next and finally in the distance they found the entire lodge brotherhood breaking their way through the snow-drifts. They had been forced to spend the entire night at the hall, but had had a pleasant time in spite of their anxiety. To Mrs. Teeple’s surprise, her husband was not with them. She told her story and appealed for help. The master of the lodge listened in sympathetic silence.
“Mr. Teeple was not at the lodge last night,” he finally said. “I believe he was with the baby.”
“That’s impossible!” exclaimed the hysterical woman. “The baby was out with the new model Psychophonic Nurse. Mr. Teeple never goes out with the baby. In fact, he knows nothing about the baby. He never notices her in any way.”
The master looked at his senior warden, and they exchanged unspoken words. Then he looked at the members of his lodge. They were all anxious to return to their families, but there were several who were not married. He called these by name, asked them to go to his home with him for coffee, and then join him in the hunt for the baby. Meantime he urged Mrs. Teeple to go home and get the house warm and breakfast ready. She could do no good by staying out in the cold.
The master of the lodge knew Teeple. He had often seen him under the willows talking to the baby. Instinctively he went there first, followed by the young men. Breaking their way through the drifts, they finally arrived at the clump of trees and there found what they were looking for—a peculiar hillock of snow, which, when it was broken into, revealed a blanket, and under the blanket a crying baby, a sick man, and a mechanical nanny. The baby, on the pillow, wrapped up in her father’s coat, and protected on one side by his body and on the other by the padded and clothed Jim Henry, had kept fairly warm. Teeple, on the outside, without a coat and barely covered by the edge of the blanket, had become thoroughly chilled.
* * * *
It was days before he recovered from his pneumonia and weeks before he had much idea of what had happened or of his muttering observations while sick. For once in his life, thoroughly uninhibited, he revealed everything he had been thinking of during the past fifteen months—spoke without reservation or regard for the feelings of his wife—and above all else, he told of his great love for his child and how he had cared for it during the dark hours of the night and the twilight hour after supper.
Stunned, Susanna Teeple heard him talk. Silent by his bedside, she heard him bare his soul and she realized, even though the knowledge tortured her, that her ambition had been the means of estranging her husband and her child, and that to both of them she was practically a stranger. During the first days of her husband’s illness she had placed the entire care of the child in the hands of the nanny. Later it was necessary to hire nurses to care for her husband, and as he grew stronger, there was less and less work for the wife. Restless, she went to the kitchen, but there a competent servant was doing the work: in the sick-room, graduate nurses cared for her husband; in the nursery, her baby was being tended by a machine, and her little one would cry when she came near, protesting the presence of a stranger. The only place where she had work to do and was needed was in her study, and there the orders for magazine articles were accumulating.
She tried her soul. As judge, witness, and prosecutor, she tried her soul and knew that she had failed.
Finally Teeple crawled out of bed and sat in the sunshine. The house was still. One day the nurses were discharged, and his wife brought him his meals on a tray. Soon he was able to walk, and just as soon as he could do so, unobserved by his wife, he visited the nursery. Nanny was gone. The baby, on a blanket, was playing contentedly on the floor. Teeple did not disturb her, but went to his wife’s study. Her desk was free of papers, the typewriter was in its case and on the table lay a copy of Griffith’s book The Care of the Baby. He was much puzzled, so he carried his investigations to the kitchen. His wife was there with a clean white apron on, beating eggs for a cake.
She was singing a bye-low-babykin-bye-low song, and to Teeple came a memory of how she used to sing that song before they were married. He hadn’t heard her sing it since. Thinking quickly, he tried to reason out the absence of the nurses and the nanny and the servant-girl, the empty desk and the closed typewriter, and then it came to him just what it all meant; shyly, he called across the kitchen, “Hullo, Mother!”
She looked at him brightly, even though the tears did glisten in her eyes, as she replied, “Hullo, Daddy, dear.”
And that was the end of the Psychophonic Nurse.
THE LIVING MACHINE
Originally appeared in Wonder Stories, May 1935.
Fortunately the little man was not hurt.
The glancing blow from the recklessly driven automobile had spun him into the gutter, but had injured little except his pride and his clothing. Slightly dazed, he stumbled into the meadow by the road and sat down on the grass, his head in his hands to ease the vertigo.
“And that is just one more reason why the average human being should not be allowed to drive such a powerful machine!” he mused to himself. “It has taken the combined intelligence of all the scientists of modern time to perfect the automobile and yet it is sold to and driven by any moronic fool who is able to gather together the few dollars necessary to buy a sec
ond-handed one. A beautiful machine in the hands of alcoholics, paretics, and fools! A little more thinking! Some additional inventions!! OH! why did I not think of it before?”
Some one has said that a single new thought writes a story, a new idea discovers a continent, a new invention revolutionizes human habits.
John Poorson, inventor, had a single idea; it had been knocked into him. Perhaps for months it had remained in his subconscious but the blow of the automobile had made it a vivid, definite, conscious thought.
He went home and started to work.
A year later he secured an interview with the President of the Universal Auto Construction Company. The U.A.C.C. was not the largest manufacturers of automobiles in the world’s history. There were at least two combines which had a larger yearly output, but in some ways it was the most aggressive and alive of all the companies devoted to the production of speed cars. It was one of the few corporations which refused to enter into the construction of airplanes, believing that the time had not yet come for humanity to leave the ground.
The President of the U.A.C.C. was a busy man. His secretary had arranged for a fifteen minute interview with an unknown man by the name of Poor son. The stranger walked into his office. The rich man pulled out his watch.
“You have fifteen minutes to put your idea over!”
“It is time enough,” replied the inventor, “if you will come out on the street with me. I want to show you something new in the way of an automobile.”
“If it is really new the U.A.C.C. wants it.”
“Come and see.”
“All right! But only fifteen minutes, remember that.”
Soon they were seated in a low sport model car. It was a two passenger U.A.C.C. model 77.
“Nothing new about this,” laughed Babson, scornfully. “One of our best and most familiar models.”
“How about the steering wheel?”
The Twelfth Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK™: David H. Keller, M.D. Page 18