Two tiny yellow finches, playing and fighting in the air, swept up against the hood of my car; I heard and felt nothing but I knew by their disappearance and the sudden silence that they had gone into the radiator grill. Cooked and dead in an instant, I said to myself, slowing the car. And sure enough, at the next service station the attendant found them. Bright yellow, caught in the grill. Wrapping them in Kleenex I carried them to the edge of the highway and dropped them into the litter of plastic beer cans and moldering paper cartons there.
Ahead lay Mount Shasta and the border station of California. I did not feel like going on. That night I slept in a motel at Klamath Falls and the next day I started back up the coast the way I had come.
It was only seven-thirty in the morning and there was little traffic on the road. Overhead I saw something which caused me to pull off onto the shoulder and watch. I had seen such sights before and they always made me feel deeply humble and at the same time buoyed up. An enormous ship, on its way back from Luna or one of the planets, was passing slowly by, to its landing somewhere in the Nevada desert. A number of Air Force jets were accompanying it. Near it they looked no larger than black dots.
What few other cars there were on the highway had also stopped to watch. People had gotten out and one man was taking a snapshot. A woman and a small child waved. The great rocketship passed on, shaking the ground with its stupendous retro-blasts. Its hull, I could see, was pitted, scarred and burned from its re-entry into the atmosphere.
There goes our hope, I said to myself, shielding my eyes against the sun to follow its course. What’s it got aboard? Soil samples? The first non-terrestrial life to be found? Broken pots discovered in the ash of an extinct volcano–evidence of some ancient civilized race?
More likely just a flock of bureaucrats. Federal officials, Congressmen, technicians, military observers, rocket scientists coming back, possibly some _Life_ and _Look_ reporters and photographers and maybe crews from NBC and CBS television. But even so it was impressive. I waved, like the woman with the small boy.
As I got back into my car I thought, Someday there’ll be little neat houses in rows up there on the Lunar surface. TV antennae, maybe Rosen spinet pianos in living rooms. .
Maybe I’ll be putting repossession ads in newspapers on other worlds, in another decade or so.
Isn’t that heroic? Doesn’t that tie our business to the stars? But we had a much more direct tie. Yes, I could catch a glimpse of the passion dominating Pris, this obsession about Barrows. He was the link, moral, physical and spiritual, between us mere mortals and the sidereal universe. He spanned both realms, one foot on Luna, the other in real estate in Seattle, Washington, and Oakland, California. Without Barrows it was all a mere dream; he made it tangible. I had to admire him as a man, too. He wasn’t awed by the idea of settling people on the Moon; to him, it was one more–one more very vast–business opportunity. A chance for high returns on an investment, higher even than on slum rentals.
So back to Ontario, I said to myself. And face the simulacra, our new and enticing product, designed to lure out Mr. Barrows, to make us perceptible to him. To make us a part of the new world. To make us _alive_.
When I got back to Ontario I went directly to MASA ASSOCIATES. As I drove up the street, searching for a place to park, I saw a crowd gathered at our office building. They were looking into the new showroom which Maury had built. Ah so, I said to myself with a deep fatalism.
As soon as I had parked I hurried on foot to join the crowd.
There, inside the showroom, sat the tall, bearded, hunched, twilight figure of Abraham Lincoln. He sat at an old-fashioned rolltop walnut desk, a familiar desk; it belonged to my father. They had removed it from the factory in Boise to here for the Lincoln simulacrum to make use of it.
It angered me. Yet I had to admit it was apropos. The simulacrum, wearing much the same sort of clothing as the Stanton, was busy writing a letter with a quill pen. I was amazed at the realistic appearance which the simulacrum gave; if I had not known better I would have assumed that it was Lincoln reincarnated in some unnatural fashion. And, after all, wasn’t that precisely what it was? Wasn’t Pris right after all?
Presently I noticed a sign in the window; professionally lettered, it explained to the crowd what was going on.
THIS IS AN AUTHENTIC RECONSTRUCT OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN,
SIXTEENTH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. IT WAS MAN-
UFACTURED BY MASA ASSOCIATES IN CONJUNCTION WITH
THE ROSEN ELECTRONIC ORGAN FACTORY OF BOISE, IDAHO.
IT IS THE FIRST OF ITS KIND. THE ENTIRE MEMORY AND
NEURAL SYSTEM OF OUR GREAT CWIL WAR PRESIDENT HAS
BEEN FAITHFULLY REPRODUCED IN THE RULING MONAD
STRUCTURE OF THIS MACHINE, AND IT IS CAPABLE OF
RENDERING ALL ACTIONS, SPEECH AND DECISIONS OF
THE SIXTEENTH PRESIDENT TO A STATISTICALLY PERFECT
DEGREE.
INQUIRIES INVITED.
The corny phrasing gave it away as Maury’s work. Infuriated, I pushed through the crowd and rattled the showroom door; it was locked, but having a key I unlocked it and passed on inside.
There in the corner on a newly-purchased couch sat Maury, Bob Bundy and my father. They were quietly watching the Lincoln.
“Hi, buddy boy,” Maury said to me.
“Made your cost back yet?” I asked him.
“No. We’re not charging anybody for anything. We’re just demonstrating.”
“You dreamed up that sixth-grader type sign, didn’t you? I know you did. What sort of sidewalk traffic did you expect to make an inquiry? Why don’t you have the thing sell cans of auto wax or dishwasher soap? Why just have it sit and write? Or is it entering some breakfast-food contest?”
Maury said, “It’s going over its regular correspondence.” He and my dad and Bundy all seemed sobered.
“Where’s your daughter?”
“She’ll be back.”
To my dad I said, “You mind it using your desk?”
“No, mein Kind,” he answered. “Go speak with it; it maintains a calmness when interrupted that astonishes me. This I could well learn.”
I had never seen my father so chastened.
“Okay,” I said, and walked over to the rolltop desk and the writing figure. Outside the showroom window the crowd gawked.
“Mr. President,” I murmured. My throat felt dry. “Sir, I hate to bother you.” I felt nervous, and yet at the same time I knew perfectly well that this was a machine I was facing. My going up to it and speaking to it this way put me into the fiction, the drama, as an actor like the machine itself; nobody had fed me an instruction tape–they didn’t have to. I was acting out my part of the foolishness voluntarily. And yet I couldn’t help myself. Why not say to it, “Mr. Simulacrum”? After all that was the truth.
The truthl What did that mean? Like a kid going up to the department store Santa; to know the truth was to drop dead. Did I want to do that? In a situation like this, to face the truth would mean the end of everything, of me before all. The simulacrum wouldn’t have suffered. Maury, Bob Bundy and my dad wouldn’t even have noticed. So I went on, because it was myself I was protecting; and I knew it, better than anyone else in the room, including the crowd outside gawking in.
Glancing up, the Lincoln put aside its quill pen and said in a rather high-pitched, pleasant voice, “Good afternoon. I take it you are Mr. Louis Rosen.”
“Yes sir,” I said.
And then the room blew up in my face. The rolltop desk flew into a million pieces; they burst up at me, flying slowly, and I shut my eyes and fell forward, flat on the floor; I did not even put out my hands. I felt it hit me; I smashed into bits against it, and darkness covered me up.
I had fainted. It was too much for me. I had passed out cold.
Next I knew I was upstairs in the office, propped up in a corner. Maury Rock sat beside me, smoking one of his Corina Larks, glaring at me and holding a bottle of household ammonia under my nose.
“Christ,” he said, when he realized I had come to. “You got a bump on your forehead and a split lip.”
I put up my hand and felt the bump; it seemed to be as big as a lemon. And I could taste the shreds of my lip. “I passed out,” I said.