The screen goes blank, and we stare at each other. It's bound to be right. A logic workin' the Carson Circuit can no more make a mistake than any other kinda corn-putting machine. I call the tank in a hurry.
"Hey, you guys!" I yell. "Somethin's happened! Logics are giving detailed instructions for wife-murder! Check your censor-circuits--but quick!"
That was close, I think. But little do I know. At that precise instant, over on Monroe Avenue, a drunk starts to punch for something on a logic. The screen says "Announcing new and improved logics service! If you want to do something and don't know how to do it-ask your logic!" And the drunk says, owlish, "I'll do it!" So he cancels his first punching and fumbles around and says: "How can I keep my wife from finding out I've been drinking?" And the screen says, prompt: "Buy a bottle of Franine hair shampoo. It is harmless but contains a detergent which will neutralize ethyl alcohol immediately. Take one teaspoonful for each jigger of hundredproof you have consumed."
This guy was plenty plastered - just plastered enough to stagger next door and obey instructions. And five minutes later he was cold sober and writing down the information so he. couldn't forget it. It was new, and it was big! He got rich off that memo! He patented "SOBUH, The Drink that Makes Happy Homes!" You can top off any souse with a slug or two of it and go home sober as a judge. The guy's cussing income taxes right now!
You candt kick on stuff like that. But a ambitious young fourteen-year-old wanted to buy some kid stuff and his pop wouldn't fork over. He called up a friend to tell his troubles. And his logic says: "If you want to do something and don't know how to do it-ask your logic!" So this kid punches: "How can I make a lotta. money, fast?"
His logic comes through with the simplest, neatest, and the most efficient counterfeiting device yet known to science. You see, all the data was in the tank. The logic-since Joe had closed some relays here and there in the tank-simply integrated the facts. That's all. The kid got caught up with three days later, havin' already spent two thousand credits and having plenty more on hand. They hadda time telling his counterfeits from the real stuff, and the only way they done it was that he changed his printer, kid fashion, not being able to let something that was working right alone.
Those are what you might call samples. Nobody knows all that Joe done. But there was the bank president who got humorous when his logic flashed that "Ask your logic" spiel on him, and jestingly asked how to rob his own bank. And the logic told him, brief and explicit but good! The bank president hit the ceiling, hollering for cops. There musta been plenty of that sorta thing. There was fifty-four more robberies than usual in the next twenty-four hours, all of them planned astute and perfect. Some of them they never did figure out how they'd been done. Joe, he'd gone exploring in the tank and closed some relays like a logic is supposed to do, but only when required, and blocked all censor-circuits and fixed up this logics service which planned perfect crimes, nourishing and attractive meals, counterfeiting machines, and new industries with a fine impartiality. He musta been plenty happy, Joe must. He was functioning swell, buzzing along to himself while the Korlanovitch kids were off riding with their ma and pa.
They come back at seven o'clock, the kids all happily wore out with their afternoon of fighting each other in the car. Their folks put them to bed and sat down to rest. They saw Joe's screen flickering meditative from one subject to another and old man Korlanovitch had had enough excitement for one day. He turned Joe off.
And at that instant the pattern of relays that Joe had turned on snapped off, all the offers of directive service stopped flashing on logic screens everywhere, and peace descended on the earth.
For everybody else. But for me. Laurine come to town. I have often thanked God fervent that she didn't marry me when I thought I wanted her to. In the intervening years she had progressed. She was blonde and fatal to begin with. She had got blonder and fataler and had had four husbands and one acquittal for homicide and had acquired an air of enthusiasm and self-confidence. That's just a sketch of the background. Laurine was not the kinda former girl-friend you like to have turning up in the same town with your wife. But she came to town, and Monday morning she tuned right into the middle of Joe's second spasm of activity.
The Korlanovitch kids had turned him on again. I got these details later and kinda pieced them together. And every logic in town was dutifully flashing a notice, "If you want to do something and don't know how to do it-ask your logic!" every time they were turned on for use. More'n that, when people punched for the morning news, they got a full account of the previous afternoon's doings. Which put them in a frame of mind to share in the party. One bright fella demands, "How can I make a perpetual motion machine?" And his logic sputters a while, and then comes up with a set-up using the Brownian movement to turn little wheels. If the wheels ain't bigger than an eighth of an inch they'll turn, all right, and practically it's perpetual motion. Another one asks for the secret of transmuting metals.. The logic rakes back in the data plates and integrates a strictly practical answer. It does take so much power that you can make no profit except on radium, but that pays off good. And from the fact that for a couple years to come the police were turning up new and improved jiifimies, knob-claws for getting at safe-innards, and all-purpose keys that'd open any known lock, why there must have been other inquirers with a strictly practical
viewpoint. Joe done a lot for technical progress!
But he done more in other lines. Educational, say. None of my kids are old enough to be interested, but Joe bypassed all censor-circuits because they hampered the service he figured logics should give humanity. So the kids and teenagers who wanted to know what comes after the bees and flowers found out. And there is certain facts which men hope their wives won't do more and suspect, and those facts are just what their wives are really curious about. So when a woman dials: "How can I tell if Oswald is true to me?" and her logic tells her-your can figure out how many rows got started that night when the men come home!
All this while Joe goes on buzzing happy to himself, showing the Korlanovitch kids the animated funnies with one circuit while with the others he remote-controls the tank so that all the other logics can give people what they ask for and thereby raise merry hell.
And then Laurine gets onto the new service. She turn on the logic in her hotel room, probably to see the week's style forecast. But the logic says, dutiful: "If you want to do something and don't know how to do it, ask your logic!" So Laurine probably looks enthusiastics would ! And tries to figure out something to ask. She already knows all about everything she cares about ain't she had four husbands and shot one? So I occ to her. She knows this is the town I live in. So she punches, "How can I find Ducky?"
O.K., guy! But that is what she used to call me. She gets a service question. "Is Ducky known by any other name?" So she gives my regular name. And the logic can't find me. Because my logic ain't, listed under my name on account of I am in Maintenance and don want to be pestered when I'm home, and there ain't an data plates on code-listed logics, because the codes changed so often, like a guy gets plastered and tells redhead to call him up, and on getting sober hurried has the code changed before she reaches his wife on screen.
Well! Joe is stumped. That's probably the first question logics service hasn't been able to answer. "How can I find Ducky?" ! ! Quite a problem! So Joe throw over it while showing the Korlanovitch kids the animated comic about the cute little boy who carries stick of dynamite in his hip pocket and plays practical joke on everybody. Then he gets the trick. Laurine's screen suddenly flashes: "Logics special service will work upon your question. Please punch your logic designation and leave it turned on. You will be called back."
Laurine is merely mildly interested, but she punches her hotel-room number and has a drink and takes a nap. Joe sets to work. He has been given a idea.
My wife calls me at Maintenance and hollers. She is fit to be tied. She says I got to do something. She was gonna make a call to the butcher shop. Instead of the
butcher or even the "If you want to do something" flash, she got a new one. The screen says, "Service question: What is your name?" She is kinda puzzled, but she punches it. The screen sputters and then says: "Secretarial Service Demonstration! You-" It reels off her name, address, age, sex, coloring, the amounts of all her charge accounts in all the stores, my name as her husband, how much I get a week, the fact that I've been pinched three times-twice was traffic stuff, and once for a argument I got in with a guy-and the interesting item that once when she was mad with me she left me for three weeks and had her address changed to her folks' home.
Then it says, brisk: "Logics Service will hereafter keep your personal accounts, take messages, and locate persons you may wish to get in touch with. This demonstration is to introduce the service." Then it connects her with the butcher.
But she don't want meat, then. She wants blood. She calls me.
"If it'll tell me all about myself," she says, fairly boilin', "it'll tell anybody else who punches my name! You've got to stop it!".
"Now, now, honey!" I says. "I didn't know about all this! It's new! But they musta fixed the tank so it won't give out information except to the logic where a person lives!".
"Nothing of the kind!" she tells me, furious. "I tried! And you know that Blossom woman who lives next door! She's been married three times and she's forty-two years old and she says she's only thirty! And Mrs. Hudson's had her husband arrested four times for nonsupport and once for beating her up. And-"
"Hey!" I says. "You mean the logic told you this?"
"Yes!" she walls. "It will tell anybody anything! You've got to stop it! How long will it take?"
"I'll call up the tank;" I says. "It can't take long."
"Hurry!" she says, desperate, "before somebody punches my name! I'm going to see what it says about that hussy across the street."
She snaps off to gather what she can before it's stopped. So I punch for the tank and I get this new "What is your name?" flash. I got a morbid curiosity and I punch my-name, and the screen says: "Were you ever called Ducky?" I blink. I ain't got no suspicions. I say, "Sure!" And the screen says, "There is a call for you."
Bingo! There's the inside of a hotel room and Laurine is rectining asleep on the bed. She'd been told to leave her logic turned on and she'd done it. It is a hot day and she is trying to be cool. I would say that she oughta not suffer from the heat. Me, being human, I do not stay as cool as she looks. But there ain't no need to go into that. After I get my breath I say, "For Heaven's sake!" and she opens her eyes.
At first she looks puzzled, like she was thinking is she getting absent-minded and is this guy somebody she married lately. Then she grabs a sheet and drapes it around herself and beams at me.
"Ducky!" she says. "How marvelous!"
I say something like "Ugmph!" I am sweating.
Shesays:
"I put in a call for you, Ducky, and here you are! Isn't It romantic? Where are you really, Ducky? And when can you come up? You've no idea how often I've thought of you!"
I am probably the only guy she ever knew real well that she has not been married to at some time or another.
I say "Ugmph!" again, and swallow.
"Can you come up instantly?" asks Laurine brightly.
"I'm . . . workin'," I say. "I'll . . . uh . . . call you back."
"I'm terribly lonesome," says Laurine. "Please make it quick, Ducky! PU have a drink waiting for you. Have you ever thought of me?"
"Yeah," I say, feeble. 'Plenty!"
"You darling!" says Laurine."Here's a kiss to go on with until you get here! Hurry, Ducky!"
Then I sweat! I still don't know nothing about Joe, understands or cuss out the guys at the tank because I blame them for this. If Laurine was just another blonde-well-when it comes to ordinary blondes I can leave them alone or leave them alone, either one. A married man gets that way or -else. But Laurine has a look of unquenched enthusiasm that gives a man very strange weak sensations at the back of his knees. And she'd had four husbands and shot one and got acquitted.
So I punch the keys for the tank technical room, fumbling. And the screen says: "What is your name?" but I don't want any more. I punch the name of the old guy who's stock clerk in Maintenance, and the screen gives me some pretty interesting dope-I never woulda thought the old fella had ever had that much pep-and winds up by mentioning a unclaimed deposit now accounting to two hundred eighty credits in the First National Bank, which he should look into. Then it spiels about the new secretarial service and gives me the tank at last..
I start to swear at the guy who looks at me. But he says, tired: "Snap it off, fella. We got troubles and you're just another. What are the logics doin' now?"
I tell him, and he laughs a hollow laugh.
"A light matter, fella," he says. "A very light matter! We just managed to clamp off all the data plates that give information on high explosives. The demand for instructions in counterfeiting is increasing minute by minute. We are also trying to shut off, by main force, the relays that hook in to data plates that just barely might give advice on the fine points of murder. So if people will only keep busy getting the goods on each other for a while, maybe we'll get a chance to stop the circuits that are shifting credit-balances from bank to bank before everybody's bankrupt except the guys who thought of asking how, to get big bank accounts in a hurry."
"Then," I says hoarse, "shut down the tank! Do somethin'!"
"Shut down the tank?" he says, mirthless. "Does it occur to you, fella, that the tank has been doing all the computing for every business office for years? It's been handling the distribution of ninety-four per cent of all telecast programs, has given out all information on weather, plane schedules, special sales, employment opportunities and news; has handled all person-to-person contacts over wires and recorded every business conversation and agreement- Listen, fella! Logics changed civilization. Logics are civilization! If we shut off logics, we go back to a kind of civilization we have forgotten how to run! I'm getting hysterical myself and that's why I'm talkin' like this! If my wife finds out my paycheck is thirty credits a week more than I told her and starts hunting for that redhead..."
He smiles a haggard smile at me and snaps off. And I sit down and put my head in my bands. It's true. If something had happened back in cave days and they'd hadda stop using fire- If they'd hadda stop using steam in the nineteenth century or electricity in the twentieth- It's like that. We got a very simple civilization.
In the nineteen hundreds a man would have to make use of a typewriter, radio, telephone, teletypewriter, newspaper, reference library, encyclopedias, office files, directories, plus messenger service and consulting lawyers, chemists, doctors, dietitians, filing clerks, secretaries-all to put down what he wanted to remember and to tell him what other people had put down that he wanted to know; to report what he said to somebody else and to report to him what they said back. All we have to have is logics. Anything we want to know or see or hear, or anybody we want to talk to, we punch keys on a logic. Shut off logics and everything goes skiddoo. But Laurine...
Something had happened. I still didn't know what it was. Nobody else knows, even yet. What had happened was Joe. What was the matter with him was that he wanted to work good. All this fuss he was raising was, actual, nothing but stuff we shoulda thought of ourselves. Directive advice, telling us what we wanted to know to solve a problem, wasn't but a slight extension of logical-integrator service. Figuring out a good way to poison a fella's wife was only different in degree from figuring out a cube root or a guy's bank balance. It was getting the answer to a question. But things was going too hot because there was too many answers being given to too many questions.
One of the logics in Maintenance lights up. I go over, weary, to answer it. I punch the answer key. Laurine says:
"Ducky!"
It's the same hotel room. There's two glasses on the table with drinks in them. One is for me. Laurine's got on some kinda frothy hanging-around-the-house-with-the-
boy-friend outfit that automatic makes you strain your eyes to see if you actual see what you think. Laurine looks at me enthusiastic.
"Ducky!" says. Laurine. "I'm lonesome! Why haven't you come up?"
"I . . . been busy," I say, strangling slightly.
"Pooh!" says Laurine. "Listen, Ducky! Do you remember how much in love we used to be?"
I gulp.
"Are you doin' anything this evening?" says Laurine.
I gulp again, because she is smiling at me in a way that a single man would maybe get dizzy, but it gives a old married man like me cold chills. When a dame looks at you possesively.
"Ducky!" says Laurine, impulsive. "I was so mean to you! Let's get married!"
Desperation gives me a voice.
"I . . . got married," I tell her, hoarse.
Laurine blinks. Then she says, courageous: "Poor boy! But we'll get you outta that! Only it would be nice if we could be married today. Now we can only be engaged!"
"I "
"I'll call up your wife," says Laurine, happy, "and have a talk with her. You must have a code signal for your logic, darling. I tried to ring your house and noth-"
Click! That's my logic turned off. I turned it off. And I feel faint all over. I got nervous prostration. I got combat fatigue. I got anything you like. I got cold feet. I beat it outta Maintenance, yelling to somebody I got a emergency call. I'm gonna get out in a Maintenance car and cruise around until it's plausible to go home. Then I'm gonna take the wife and kids and beat it for somewheres that Laurine won't ever find me. I don't wanna be fifth in Laurine's series of husbands and maybe the second one she shoots in a moment of boredom. I got experience of blondes. I got experience
of Laurine! And I'm scared to death!
I beat 'it out into traffic in the Maintenance car. There was a disconnected logic on the back, ready to substitute for one that hadda burned-out, coil or something that it was easier to switch and fix back in the Maintenance shop. I drove crazy but automatic. It was kinda ironic, if you think of it. I was going hoopla over a strictly personal problem, while civilization was cracking up all around me because other people were having their personal problems solved as fast as they could state them.
Modern Masterpieces of Science Fiction Page 8
