But Pete didn’t come back in, not then, and I never showed her. Belle didn’t touch him after that. She spoke to him and acted as if she liked him, but she kept her distance and he kept his. I put it out of my mind; I couldn’t let so trivial a thing make me doubt the woman who was more to me than anything in life.
But the subject of Pete almost reached a crisis later. Belle and I were discussing where we were going to live. She still wouldn’t set the date, but we spent a lot of time on such details. I wanted a ranchette near the plant; she favored a flat in town until we could afford a Bel-Air estate.
I said, “Darling, it’s not practical; I’ve got to be near the plant. Besides, did you ever try to take care of a tomcat in a city apartment?”
“Oh, that! Look, darling, I’m glad you mentioned it. I’ve been studying up on cats, I really have. We’ll have him altered. Then he’ll be much gentler and perfectly happy in a flat.”
I stared at her, unable to believe my ears. Make a eunuch of that old warrior? Change him into a fireside decoration? “Bell; you don’t know what you’re saying!”
She tut-tutted me with the old familiar “Mother knows best,” giving the stock arguments of people who mistake cats for property . . . how it wouldn’t hurt him, that it was really for his own good, how she knew how much I valued him and she would never think of depriving me of him, how it was really very simple and quite safe and better for everybody.
I cut in on her. “Why don’t you arrange it for both of us?”
“What, dear?”
“Me, too. I’d be much more docile and I’d stay home nights and I’d never argue with you. As you pointed out, it doesn’t hurt and I’d probably be a lot happier.”
She turned red. “You’re being preposterous.”
“So are you!”
She never mentioned it again. Belle never let a difference of opinion degenerate into a row; she shut up and bided her time. But she never gave up, either. In some ways she had a lot of cat in her. . . which may have been why I couldn’t resist her.
I was glad to drop the matter. I was up to here in Flexible Frank. Willie and Hired Girl were bound to make us lots of money, but I had a bee in my bonnet about the perfect, all-work household automaton, the general-purpose servant. All right, call it a robot, though that is a much-abused word and I had no notion of building a mechanical man.
I wanted a gadget which could do anything inside the home-cleaning and cooking, of course, but also really hard jobs, like changing a baby’s diaper, or replacing a typewriter ribbon. Instead of a stable of Hired Girls and Window Willies and Nursemaid Nans and Houseboy Harries and Gardener Guses I wanted a man and wife to be able to buy one machine for, oh, say about the price of a good automobile, which would be the equal of the Chinese servant you read about but no one in my generation had ever seen.
If I could do that it would be the Second Emancipation Proclamation, freeing women from their age-old slavery. I wanted to abolish the old saw about how “women’s work is never done.” Housekeeping is repetitious and unnecessary drudgery; as an engineer it offended me.
For the problem to be within the scope of one engineer, almost all of Flexible Frank had to be standard parts and must not involve any new principles. Basic research is no job for one man alone; this had to be development from former art or I couldn’t do it
Fortunately there was an awful lot of former art in engineering and I had not wasted my time while under a “Q” clearance. What I wanted wasn’t as complicated as the things a guided missile was required to do.
Just what did I want Flexible Frank to do? Answer: any work a human being does around a house. He didn’t have to play cards, make love, eat, or sleep, but he did have to clean up after the card game, cook, make beds, and tend babies-at least he had to keep track of a baby’s breathing and call someone if it changed. I decided he did not have to answer telephone calls, as A.T.&T. was already renting a gadget for that. There was no need for him to answer the door either, as most new houses were being equipped with door answerers.