The cab came to territory he recognized, and he stopped it at an all-night restaurant. Coffee might help. While he was waiting for it, he invested a dime in a call to his office; you never could tell, maybe someone had called.
Someone had. The Sleepless Secretary hooted and groaned and came across with the record of a familiar, scared voice: “Mr. Mundin, uh, this is Norvell Bligh. Can you come and get me out of jail?”
Chapter Eight
norvie woke up with a start. They were joggling him, with identical, contemptuous smiles. Even hi the fog of sleep he felt a little stab of pride at Virginia’s beauty, a twitch of unhappiness at the same bony beauty smothered beneath the fat of her daughter.
“What’s the matter?” he croaked.
His voice sounded odd, and he realized he wasn’t wearing his hearing aid. He groped for it beside the bed. It wasn’t there. He sat up.
He yelled at Alexandra, his voice thin and strange to him as it was sustained through the bones and cavities of his body rather than the neat chain of the auditory apparatus: “Where is it? If you’ve hidden it again 111 break your neck!”
Alexandra looked smugly shocked. She mouthed at him, “Goodness, Norvell, you know I wouldn’t do that” The exaggerated mouthing was a mockery of consideration; he had repeatedly told her that exaggeration only distorted the lips.
Virginia tapped him on the shoulder and said something, stiff-lipped. He caught an “eep” and a “larm.”
He clenched his fists and said, “What?”
She mouthed at him, “I said, you must have come in too drunk to set the alarm before you went to sleep. Get up. You’re an hour late for work now.”
He leaped from bed, anguish spearing his heart, Oh, God! An hour late on this day, of all days!
He found the hearing aid—on the floor in the entrance hall,
where h6 couldn’t possibly Tiave left it, any more than he could possibly have failed to set the alarm. But he didn’t have time for that minor point. He depilated in ten seconds, bathed in five, dressed in fifteen and shot out of the house. ‘
Fortunately Candella wasn’t in.
Norvie sent Miss Dali to round up his staff and began the tooling-up job for the integrator keyboard, while the production men busied themselves with their circuits and their matrices, and the job began. This was the part of Nome’s work that made him, he confessed secretly to himself, feel most like God. He fed the directions to Stimmens, Stimmens fumblingly set up the punch cards, the engineers translated the cards into phase fields and interferer circuits. . . . And a World That Norvie Made appeared in miniature.
He had once tried to explain his feelings to Arnie. Arnie had snarled something about the presumptuous conceit of a mere pushbutton. All Norvie did, Arnie explained over many glasses of beer, was to decide what forms and images he wanted to see. It was The Engineers who, in Then1 wisdom, transmuted empty visions into patterns of light and color that magically took the form and movement of tiny fighters and wrestlers and spear-carriers. The original thought, Arnie explained severely, was nothing. It was the tremendous technical skill that transformed the thought into visual reality in the table-top model previewer that was important.
And Norvie humbly agreed. Even now he was deferential to the production men, those geniuses so well skilled in the arts of connecting Circuit A to Terminal IV, for they were Engineers. But his deference extended only to the technical crew. “Stimmens, you butterfingers,” he snarled, “hurry it up! Mr. Candella will be here any minute!”
“Yessir,” said Stimmens, hopelessly shuffling the stacks of notes out of Norvell’s hands.
Stimmens was coming along well, Norvie thought. A touch of the whip was good for him.
It took twenty minutes and a bit more, and then Norvell’s whole design for a Field Day was on punch cards. While Stimmens was correcting his last batch of cards, the production men began the highspeed run-through. The little punched cards went through the scanners; the packed circuits measured
voltages and spat electrons; and in the miniature mockup of the Stadium, tiny figures of light appeared and moved and slew each other and left.