“But, Doctor Weems, that connection was clear as a phone hook-up. Perhaps tomorrow — ”
“We have established that your talent is erratic. We have no way to train it to dependability. Time is too short to waste, mine and yours.” Lapsing suddenly into English, he added, “No.”
Gilead left.
During his training in other fields Joe was exposed to many things best described as impressive gadgets. There was an integrating pantograph, a factory-in-a — box, which the New Men planned to turn over to ordinary men as soon as the social system was no longer dominated by economic wolves. It could and did reproduce almost any prototype placed on its stage, requiring thereto only materials and power. Its power came from a little nucleonics motor the size of Joe’s thumb; its theory played hob with conventional notions of entropy. One put in “sausage”; one got out “pig.”
Latent in it was the shape of an economic system as different from the current one as the assembly — line economy differed from the family-shop system — and in such a system lay possibilities of human freedom and dignity missing for centuries, if they had ever existed.
In the meantime New Men rarely bought more than one of anything-a pattern. Or they made a pattern.
Another useful but hardly wonderful gadget was a dictaphone-typewriter-printing-press combination. The machine’s analysers recognized each of the thousand-odd phonetic symbols; there was a typebar for each sound. It produced one or many copies. Much of Gilead’s education came from pages printed by this gadget, saving the precious time of others.
The arrangement, classification, and accessibility of knowledge remains in all ages the most pressing problem. With the New Men, complete and organized memory licked most of the problem and rendered record keeping, most reading and writing-and most especially the time-destroying trouble of re — reading-unnecessary. The autoscriber gadget, combined with a “librarian” machine that could “hear” that portion of Speedtalk built into it as a filing system, covered most of the rest of the problem. New Men were not cluttered with endless bits of paper. They never wrote memoranda.
The area under the ranch was crowded with technological wonders, all newer than next week. Incredibly tiny manipulators for micrurgy of all sorts, surgical, chemical, biological manipulation, oddities of cybernetics only less complex than the human brain-the list is too long to describe. Joe did not study all of them; an encyclopedic synthesist is concerned with structured shapes of knowledge; he cannot, even with Speedtalk, study details in every field. Early in his education, when it was clear that he had had the potential to finish the course, plastic surgery was started to give him a new identity and basic appearance. His height was reduced by three inches; his skull was somewhat changed; his complexion was permanently darkened. Gail picked the facial appearance he was given; he did not object. He rather liked it; it seemed to fit his new inner personality.
With a new face, a new brain, and-a new outlook, he was almost in fact a new man. Before he had been a natural genius; now he was a trained genius.
“Joe, how about some riding?”
“Suits.”
“I want to give War Conqueror some gentle exercise. He’s responding to the saddle; I don’t want him to forget.”
“Right with you.”
Kettle Belly and Gilead-Greene rode out from the ranch buildings. Baldwin let the young horse settle to a walk and began to talk. “I figure you are about ready for work, son.” Even in Speedtalk Kettle Belly’s speech retained his own flavor.
“I suppose so, but I still have those mental reservations.”
“Not sure we are on the side of the angels?”
“I’m sure you mean to be. It’s evident that the organization selects for good will and humane intentions quite as carefully as for ability. I wasn’t sure at one time — ”
“Yes?”
“That candidate who came here about six months ago, the one who broke his neck in a riding accident.”
“Oh, yes! Very sad.”
“Very opportune, you mean. Kettle Belly,”
“Damn it, Joe, if a bad apple gets in this far, we can’t let him out.” Baldwin reverted to English for swearing purposes; he maintained that it had “more juice.”