“Dear Aunt Maggie,” he began writing feverishly. “Your ties made the most beautiful gift of my Christmas. My only regret is—”
My only regret is that I have but one life to give for my Christmas present. Who could have gone to such fantastic lengths for a practical joke? Lew Knight? Even Lew must have some reverence in his insensitive body for the institution of Christmas. And Lew didn’t have the brains or the patience for a job so involved.
Tina? Tina had the fine talent for complication, all right. But Tina, while possessing a delightful abundance of all other physical attributes, was sadly lacking in funnybone.
Sam drew the leather envelope forth and caressed it. Tina’s perfume seemed to cling to the surface and move the world back into focus.
The metallic greeting card glinted at him from the floor. Maybe the reverse side contained the sender’s name. He picked it up, turned it over.
Nothing but blank gold surface. He was sure of the gold; his father had been a jeweler. The very value of the sheet was rebuttal to the possibility of a practical joke. Besides, again, what was the point?
“Merry Christmas, 2153.” Where would humanity be in two hundred years? Traveling to the stars, or beyond—to unimaginable destinations? Using little mannikins to perform the work of machines and robots? Providing children with—
There might be another card or note inside the box. Weber bent down to remove its contents. His eye noted a large grayish jar and the label etched into its surface: Dehydrated Neurone Preparation, for human construction only.
He backed away and glared. “Close!”
The thing melted shut. Weber sighed his relief at it and decided to go to bed.
He regretted while undressing that he hadn’t thought to ask the messenger the name of his firm. Knowing the delivery service involved would be useful in tracing the origin of this gruesome gift.
“But then,” he repeated as he fell asleep, “it’s not the gift—it’s the principle! Merry Christmas, me.”
The next morning when Lew Knight breezed in with his “Good morning, counselor,” Sam waited for the first sly ribbing to start. Lew wasn’t the man to hide his humor behind a bushel. But Lew buried his nose in “The New York State Supplement” and kept it there all morning. The other five young lawyers in the communal office appeared either too bored or too busy to have Bild-A-Man sets on their conscience. There were no sly grins, no covert glances, no leading questions.
Tina walked in at ten o’clock, looking like a pin-up girl caught with her clothes on.
“Good morning, counselors,” she said.
Each in his own way, according to the peculiar gland secretions he was enjoying at the moment, beamed, drooled or nodded a reply. Lew Knight drooled. Sam Weber beamed.
Tina took it all in and analyzed the situation while she fluffed her hair about. Her conclusions evidently involved leaning markedly against Lew Knight’s desk and asking what he had for her to do this morning.
Sam bit savagely into Hackleworth “On Torts.” Theoretically, Tina was employed by all seven of them as secretary, switchboard operator and receptionist. Actually, the most faithful performance of her duties entailed nothing more daily than the typing and addressing of two envelopes with an occasional letter to be sealed inside. Once a week there might be a wistful little brief which was never to attain judicial scrutiny. Tina therefore had a fair library of fashion magazines in the first drawer of her desk and a complete cosmetics laboratory in the other two; she spent one third of her working day in the ladies’ room swapping stocking prices and sources with other secretaries; she devoted the other two thirds religiously to that one of her employers who as of her arrival seemed to be in the most masculine mood. Her pay was small but her life was full.
Just before lunch, she approached casually with the morning’s mail. “Didn’t think we’d be too busy this morning, counselor—” she began.
“You thought incorrectly, Miss Hill,” he informed her with a brisk irritation that he hoped became him well; “I’ve been waiting for you to terminate your social engagements so that we could get down to what occasionally passes for business.”
She was as startled as an uncushioned kitten. “But—this isn’t Monday. Somerset & Ojack only send you stuff on Mondays.”
Sam winced at the reminder that if it weren’t for the legal drudgework he received once a week from Somerset & Ojack he would be a lawyer in name only, if not in spirit only. “I have a letter, Miss Hill,” he replied steadily. “Whenever you assemble the necessary materials, we can get on with it.”
Tina returned in a head-shaking moment with stenographic pad and pencils.
“Regular heading, today’s date,” Sam began. “Address it to Chamber of Commerce, Glunt City, Ohio. Gentlemen: Would you inform me if you have registered currently with you a firm bearing the name of the Bild-A-Man Company or a firm with any name at all similar? I am also interested in whether a firm bearing the above or related name has recently made known its intention of joining your community. This inquiry is being made informally on behalf of a client who is interested in a product of this organization whose address he has mislaid. Signature and then this P.S.—My client is also curious as to the business possibilities of a street known as Diagonal Avenue or Diagonal Level. Any data on this address and the organizations presently located there will be greatly appreciated.”
Tina batted wide blue eyes at him. “Oh, Sam,” she breathed, ignoring the formality he had introduced, “Oh, Sam, you have another client. I’m so glad. He looked a little sinister, but in such a distinguished manner that I was certain—”
“Who? Who looked a little sinister?”
“Why your new cli-ent.” Sam had the uncomfortable feeling that she had almost added “stu-pid.” “When I came in this morning, there was this terribly tall old man in a long black overcoat talking to the elevator operator. He turned to me—the elevator operator, I mean—and said, ‘This is Mr. Weber’s secretary. She’ll be able to tell you anything you want to know.’ Then he sort of winked which I thought was sort of impolite, you know, considering. Then this old man looked at me hard and I felt distinctly uncomfortable and he walked away muttering, ‘Either disjointed or predatory personalities. Never normal. Never balanced.’ Which I didn’t think was very polite, either, I’ll have you know, if he is your new client!” She sat back and began breathing again.
Tall, sinister old men in long, black overcoats pumping the elevator operator about him. Hardly a matter of business. He had no skeletons in his personal closet. Could it be connected with his unusual Christmas present? Sam hmmmed mentally.
“—but she is my favorite aunt, you know,” Tina was saying. “And she came in so unexpectedly.”
The girl was explaining about their Christmas date. Sam felt a rush of affection for her as she leaned forward.
“Don’t bother,” he told her. “I knew you couldn’t help breaking the date. I was a little sore when you called me, but I got over it; never-hold-a-grudge-against-a-pretty-girl-Sam, I’m known as. How about lunch?”
“Lunch?” She flew distress signals. “I promised Lew, Mr. Knight, that is—But he wouldn’t mind if you came along.”
“Fine. Let’s go.” This would be helping Lew to a spoonful of his own annoying medicine.
Lew Knight took the business of having a crowd instead of a party for lunch as badly as Sam hoped he would. Unfortunately, Lew was able to describe details of his forthcoming case, the probable fees and possible distinction to be reaped thereof. After one or two attempts to bring an interesting will he was rephrasing for Somerset & Ojack into the conversation, Sam subsided into daydreams. Lew immediately dropped Rosenthal vs. Rosenthal and leered at Tina conversationally.
Outside the restaurant, snow discolored into slush. Most of the stores were removing Christmas displays. Sam noticed construction sets for children, haloed by tinsel and glittering with artificial snow. Build a radio, a skyscraper, an airplane. But “Only with a Bild-A-Man can you—”
“I’m going home,” he announced suddenly… “Something important I just remembered. If anything comes up, call me there.”
He was leaving Lew a clear field, he told himself, as he found a seat on the subway. But the bitter truth was that the field was almost as clear when he was around as when he wasn’t. Lupine Lew Knight, he had been called in Law School; since the day when he had noticed that Tina had the correct proportions of dress-filling substance, Sam’s chances had been worth a crowbar at Fort Knox.
Tina hadn’t been wearing his brooch today. Her little finger, right hand, however, had sported an unfamiliar and garish little ring. “Some got it,” Sam philosophized. “Some don’t got it. I don’t got it.”
But it would have been nice, with Tina, to have “got it.”
As he unlocked the door of his room he was surprised by an unmade bed telling with rumpled stoicism of a chambermaid who’d never come. This hadn’t happened before—Of course! He’d never locked his room before. The girl must have thought he wanted privacy.
Maybe he had.
Aunt Maggie’s ties glittered obscenely at the foot of the bed. He chucked them into the closet as he removed his hat and coat. Then he went over to the washstand and washed his hands, slowly. He turned around.
This was it. At last the great cubical bulk that had been lurking quietly in the corner of his vision was squarely before him. It was there and it undoubtedly contained all the outlandish collection he remembered.
“Open,” he said, and the box opened.
The book, still open to the metallic table of contents, was lying at the bottom of the box. Part of it had slipped into the chamber of a strange piece of apparatus. Sam picked both out gingerly.
He slipped the book out and noticed the apparatus consisted mostly of some sort of binoculars, supported by a coil and tube arrangement and bearing on a flat green plate. He turned it over. The underside was lettered in the same streaky way as the book. “Combination Electron Microscope and Workbench.”
Very carefully he placed it on the floor. One by one, he removed the others, from the “Junior Biocalibrator” to the “Jiffy Vitalizer.” Very respectfully he ranged against the box in five multi-colored rows the phials of lymph and the jars of basic cartilage. The walls of the chest were lined with indescribably thin and wrinkled sheets; a slight pressure along their edges expanded them into three-dimensional outlines of human organs whose shape and size could be varied with pinching any part of their surface—most indubitably molds.
Quite an assortment. If there was anything solidly scientific to it, that box might mean unimaginable wealth. Or some very useful publicity. Or—well, it should mean something!
If there was anything solidly scientific to it.
Sam flopped down to the bed and opened to “A Child’s Garden Of Biochemistry.”
At nine that night he squatted next to the Combination Electron Microscope and Workbench and began opening certain small bottles. At nine forty-seven Sam Weber made his first simple living thing.
It wasn’t much, if you used the first chapter of Genesis as your standard. Just a primitive brown mold that, in the field of the microscope, fed diffidently on a piece of pretzel, put forth a few spores and died in about twenty minutes. But he had made it. He had constructed a specific life-form to feed on the constituents of a specific pretzel; it could survive nowhere else.
He went out to supper with every intention of getting drunk. After just a little alcohol, however, the deiish feeling returned and he scurried back to his room.
Never again that evening did he recapture the exultation of the brown mold, though he constructed a giant protein molecule and a whole slew of filterable viruses.
He called the office in the little corner drugstore which was his breakfast nook. “I’ll be home all day,” he told Tina.
She was a little puzzled. So was Lew Knight who grabbed the phone. “Hey, counselor, you building up a neighborhood practice? Kid Blackstone is missing out on a lot of cases. Two ambulances have already clanged past the building.”
“Yeah,” said Sam. “I’ll tell him when he comes in.”
The week end was almost upon him, so he decided to take the next day off as well. He wouldn’t have any real work till Monday when the Somerset & Ojack basket would produce his lone egg.
Before he returned to his room, he purchased a copy of an advanced bacteriology. It was amusing to construct—with improvements!—uni-cellular creatures whose very place in the scheme of classification was a matter for argument among scientists of his own day. The Bild-A-Man manual, of course, merely gave a few examples and general rules; but with the descriptions in the bacteriology, the world was his oyster.
Which was an idea: he made a few oysters. The shells weren’t hard enough, and he couldn’t quite screw his courage up to the eating point, but they were most undeniably bivalves. If he cared to perfect his technique, his food problem would be solved.
The manual was fairly easy to follow and profusely illustrated with pictures that expanded into solidity as the page was opened. Very little was taken for granted; involved explanations followed simpler ones. Only the allusions were occasionally obscure—“This is the principle used in the phanphophlink toys,” “When your teeth are next yokekkled or demortoned, think of the Bacterium cyanogenum and the humble part it plays,” “If you have a rubicular mannikin around the house, you needn’t bother with the chapter on mannikins.”
After a brief search had convinced Sam that whatever else he now had in his apartment he didn’t have a rubicular mannikin, he felt justified in turning to the chapter on mannikins. He had conquered completely this feeling of being Pop playing with Junior’s toy train: already he had done more than the world’s top biologists ever dreamed of for the next generation and what might not lie ahead—what problems might he not yet solve?
“Never forget that mannikins are constructed for one purpose and one purpose only.” I won’t, Sam promised. “Whether they are sanitary mannikins, tailoring mannikins, printing mannikins or even sunevviarry mannikins, they are each constructed with one operation of a given process in view. When you make a mannikin that is capable of more than one function, you are committing a crime so serious as to be punishable by public admonition.”
“To construct an elementary mannikin—”
It was very difficult. Three times he tore down developing monstrosities and began anew. It wasn’t till Sunday afternoon that the mannikin was complete—or rather, incomplete.
Long arms it had—although by an error, one was slightly longer than the other—a faceless head and a trunk. No legs. No eyes or ears, no organs of reproduction. It lay on his bed and gurgled out of the red rim of a mouth that was supposed to serve both for ingress and excretion of food. It waved the long arms, designed for some one simple operation not yet invented, in slow circles.
Sam, watching it, decided that life could be as ugly as an open field latrine in midsummer.
He had to disassemble it. Its length—three feet from almost boneless fingers to tapering, sealed-off trunk—precluded the use of the tiny disassembleator with which he had taken apart the oysters and miscellaneous small creations. There was a bright yellow notice on the large disassembleator, however—“To be used only under the direct supervision of a Census Keeper. Call formula A76 or unstable your id.”
“Formula A76” meant about as much as “sunevviarry,” and Sam decided his id was already sufficiently unstabled, thank you. He’d have to make out without a Census Keeper. The big disassembleator probably used the same general principles as the small one.
He clamped it to a bedpost and adjusted the focus. He snapped the switch set in the smooth underside.
Five minutes later the mannikin was a bright, gooey mess on his bed.
The large disassembleator, Sam was convinced as he tidied his room, did require the supervision of a Census Keeper. Some sort of keeper anyway. He rescued as many of the legless creature’s constituents as he could, alt
hough he doubted he’d be using the set for the next fifty years or so. He certainly wouldn’t ever use the disassembleator again; much less spectacular and disagreeable to shove the whole thing into a meat grinder and crank the handle as it squashed inside.
As he locked the door behind him on his way to a gentle binge, he made a mental note to purchase some fresh sheets the next morning. He’d have to sleep on the floor tonight.
Wrist-deep in Somerset & Ojack minutiae, Sam was conscious of Lew Knight’s stares and Tina’s puzzled glances. If they only knew, he exulted! But Tina would probably just think it “marr-vell-ouss!” and Lew Knight might make some crack like “Hey! Kid Frankenstein himself!” Come to think of it though Lew would probably have worked out some method of duplicating, to a limited extent, the contents of the Bild-A-Man set and marketing it commercially. Whereas he—well, there were other things you could do with the gadget. Plenty of other things.
“Hey, counselor,” Lew Knight was perched on the corner of his desk, “what are these long week ends we’re taking? You might not make as much money in the law, but does it look right for an associate of mine to sell magazine subscriptions on the side?”
Sam stuffed his ears mentally against the emery-wheel voice. “I’ve been writing a book.”
“A law book? Weber ‘On Bankruptcy’?”
“No, a juvenile. ‘Lew Knight, The Neanderthal Nitwit.’”
“Won’t sell. The title lacks punch. Something like ‘Knights, Knaves and Knobheads’ is what the public goes for these days. By the way, Tina tells me you two had some sort of understanding about New Year’s Eve and she doesn’t think you’d mind if I took her out instead. I don’t think you’d mind either, but I may be prejudiced. Especially since I have a table reservation at Cigale’s where there’s usually less of a crowd of a New Year’s Eve than at the automat.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Good,” said Knight approvingly as he moved away. “By the way, I won that case. Nice juicy fee, too. Thanks for asking.”
The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology Page 45