“Walter Winchell, why he was a—Dian’, I don’t think you will believe it but he made a lot of money talking almost entirely about things in what you call the private sphere of action.”
She wrinkled her nose. “How disgusting!”
“People ate it up. But look, how about your friends? Won’t they think it strange?”
“Why should they? It isn’t strange. I’ve entertained lots of them.”
“But we aren’t chaperoned.”
“What’s ‘chaperoned’? Is it something like married?”
“Oh Lord, I give up. Listen, Dian’, just pretend like we never said anything about it. I’ll be most happy to stay if you want me to.”
“Didn’t I say I did?”
They were interrupted by the appearance of a large grey cat who walked out to the middle of the floor, calmly took possession, sat down, curled his tail carefully around him, and mewed loudly. He had only one ear and looked like a hard case. Diana gave him a stern look.
“Where have you been? Do you think this is any time to come home?”
The cat mewed again.
“Oh, so you’ll be fed now? So this is just the place where they keep the fish?”
The cat walked over, jumped on the couch, and commenced bumping his head against Diana’s side while buzzing loudly.
“All right. All right. Come along. Show me where it is.” He jumped down and trotted quickly over toward Demeter, tail straight as a smoke column on a calm day, then sat and looked up expectantly. He mewed again.
“Don’t be impatient.” Diana held a dish of sardines in the air. “Show me where to put it.” The cat trotted over in front of the fire. “All right. Now are you satisfied?” The cat did not answer, being already busy with the fish.
Diana returned to the couch and reached for a cigarette. “That’s Captain Kidd. He’s an old pirate with no manners and no morals. He owns this place.”
“So I gathered. How did he get in?”
“He let himself in. He has a little door of his own that opens up when he mews.”
“For Heaven’s sakes! Is that standard equipment for cats these days?”
“Oh no. It’s just a toy. He can’t let himself in my door. It opens only to my voice. But I made a record of the mew he used to let me know he wanted to come in the house and sent it to be analyzed and a lock set to it. Now that lock opens his own little door. I suppose that doors that open to a voice are somewhat marvelous to you, Perry?”
“Well, yes and no. We had such things but they weren’t commercially in use. I’ve seen them work. In fact I believe that I could design one if I had to.”
Her eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Really? I had no idea that technical advance was so marked in your day.”
“We had a fairly involved technical culture, but unfortunately most of it wasn’t used. People couldn’t afford to pay for the things that the engineers could build, especially luxuries like automatic doors and television and such.”
“Television isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity. How else could one keep in touch? Why I would be helpless without it.”
“Yes, no doubt you feel that way about it. People were beginning to say that about the telephone in my day. But the fact remains while we knew how to accomplish pretty fair television we didn’t because there was no market. People couldn’t afford it.”
“I don’t see why not.”
“I don’t know how to tell you. Perhaps I don’t see either, except in some way I can’t explain. But we did have a lot of unused or only partially used mechanical and technical knowledge. The application of any advance in invention or art was limited by whether or not there were people willing and able to pay for it. I served for a couple of years in one of the big aircraft carriers. There were boys in her—enlisted men—who used the most amazing technical devices—mechanical brains that could solve the most involved ballistic problems, problems in calculus using a round dozen variables, problems that would have taken an experienced mathematician days to solve. The machine solved them in a split second and applied the solutions, yet more than half of those boys came from homes that didn’t have bathtubs or central heating.”
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