I said, “Aye.”
Maury said, “Aye.”
After a moment of consideration my father said, “I, too.”
“Then the motion has been carried,” the Stanton declared. It sipped its coffee for a moment, and then, putting the cup down on the counter, it said in a stern, confident voice, “The enterprise needs a name, a new name. I propose we call the enterprise R & R ASSOCIATES OF BOISE, IDAHO; is that satisfactory?” It glanced around at us. We were nodding. “Good.” It patted its mouth with its paper napkin. “Then let us begin at once; Mr. Lincoln, as our solicitor, will you be good enough as to see to it that our legal papers are in order? If necessary, you may obtain a younger lawyer more experienced in the current legalities; I authorize you to do that. We shall begin our work at once; our future is full of honest, active endeavor, and we shall not dwell on the past, on the unpleasantness and setbacks which we have experienced so recently. It is essential, gentlemen, that we look ahead, not back–can we do that, Mr. Rock? Despite all temptation?”
“Yeah,” Maury said. “You’re right, Stanton.” From his coat pocket he got matches; stepping from his stool he went up to the cash register at the counter and fished about in the cigar boxes there. He returned, with two long gold-wrapped cigars, one of which he gave to my dad. “Elconde de Guell,” he said. “Made in the Philippines.” He unwrapped his and lit up; my father did the same.
“We will do well,” my father said, puffing away.
“Right,” Maury said, also puffing.
The others of us finished our coffee.
12
I had been afraid that Pris’s going over to Barrows would weigh Maury down so much that he would no longer be worth much as a partner. But I was wrong. In fact he seemed to redouble his efforts; he answered letters about organs and spinets, arranged shipments from the factory to every point in the Pacific Northwest and down into California and Nevada and New Mexico and Arizona–and in addition he threw himself into the new task of designing and beginning production of the simulacra babysitters.
Without Bob Bundy we could develop no new circuits; Maury found himself in the position of having to modify the old. Our babysitters would be an evolution–an offspring, so to speak–of the Lincoln.
Years ago in a bus Maury had picked up a science fiction magazine called _Thrilling Wonder Stories_ and in it was a story about robot attendants who protected children like huge mechanical dogs; they were called “Nannies,” no doubt after the pooch in _Peter Pan_. Maury liked the name and when our Board of Directors met–Stanton presiding, plus myself, Maury, Jerome and Chester, with our attorney Abraham Lincoln–he advanced the idea of using it.
“Suppose the magazine or the author sues,” I said.
“It was so long ago,” Maury said. “The magazine doesn’t exist anymore and probably the author’s dead.”
“Ask our attorney.”
After careful consideration Mr. Lincoln decided that the notion of titling a mechanical children’s attendant Nanny was now public domain. “For I notice,” he pointed out, “that the group of you know without having read the story from whence comes this name.”
So we called our simulacra babysitters Nannies. But the decision cost us several valuable weeks, since, to make his decision, the Lincoln had to read the _Peter Pan_ book. He enjoyed it so much that he brought it to board meetings and read it aloud, with many chuckles, particularly the parts which especially amused him. We had no choice; we had to endure the readings.
“I warned you,” the Stanton told us, after one lengthy reading had sent us to the men’s room for a smoke.
“What gets me,” Maury said, “is that it’s a goddam kids’ book; if he has to read aloud, why doesn’t he read something useful like the _New York Times?_”
Meanwhile, Maury had subscribed to the Seattle newspapers, hoping to find out about Pris. He was positive that an item would appear shortly. She was there, all right, because a moving van had arrived at the house and picked up the rest of her possessions, and the driver had told Maury that he was instructed to transport it all to Seattle. Obviously Sam K. Barrows was paying the bill; Pris did not have that kind of money.
“You could still get the cops,” I pointed out to Maury.
Gloomily he said, “I have faith in Pris. I know that of her own accord she’ll find the right path and return to me and her mother. And anyhow let’s face it; she’s a ward of the Government–I’m no longer legally her guardian.”
For my part I still hoped that she would _not_ return; in her absence I had felt a good deal more relaxed and at good terms with the world. And it seemed to me that despite his appearance of gloom Maury was getting more out of his work. He no longer had the bundle of worries at home to gnaw at him. And also he did not have Doctor Horstowski’s staggering bill each month.
“You suppose Sam Barrows has found her a better outpatient analyst?” he asked me, one evening. “I wonder how much it’s costing him. Three days a week at forty dollars a visit is a hundred and twenty a week; that’s almost five hundred a month. Just to cure her fouled-up psyche!” He shook his head.
I was reminded of that mental health slogan which the authorities had pasted up in every post office in the U.S., a year or so ago.
LEAD THE WAY TO MENTAL HEALTH–BE THE FIRST IN YOUR
FAMILY TO ENTER A MENTAL HEALTH CLINIC!
And school kids wearing bright badges had rung doorbells in the evenings to collect funds for mental health research; they had overpowered the public, wrung a fortune from them, all for the good cause of our age.
“I feel sorry for Barrows,” Maury said. “I hope for his sake she’s got her back in it, designing a simulacrum body for him, but I doubt it. Without me she’s just a dabbler; she’ll fool around, make pretty drawings. That bathroom mural–that was one of the few things she’s ever brought to completion. And she’s got hundreds of bucks worth of material left over.”
“Wow,” I said, once more congratulating myself and the rest of us on our good luck: that Pris was no longer with us.
“Those creative projects of hers,” Maury said, “she really throws herself into them, at least at the start.” Admonishingly he said, “Don’t ever sell her short, buddy boy. Like look how well she designed the Stanton and Lincoln bodies. You have to admit she’s good.”
“She’s good,” I agreed.
“And who’s going to design the Nanny package for us, now that Pris is gone? Not you; you don’t have a shred of artistic ability. Not me. Not that thing that crept up out of the ground which you call your brother.”
I was preoccupied. “Listen, Maury,” I said suddenly, “_what about Civil War mechanical babysitters?_”
He stared at me uncertainly.
“We already have the design,” I went on. “We’ll make two models, one a babysitter in Yankee blue, the other in Rebel gray. Pickets, doing their duty. What do you say?”
“I say what’s a picket?”
“Like a sentry, only there’re a lot of them.”
After a long pause Maury said, “Yes, the soldier suggests devotion to duty. And it would appeal to the kids. It’d get away from that robot type design; it wouldn’t be cold and impersonal.” He nodded. “It’s a good idea, Louis. Let’s call a meeting of the Board and lay our idea, or rather your idea, right out, so we can start work on it. Okay?” He hurried to the door, full of eagerness. “I’ll call Jerome and Chester and I’ll run downstairs and tell Lincoln and Stanton.” The two simulacra had separate quarters on the bottom floor of Maury’s house; originally he had rented the units out, but now he kept them for this use. “You don’t think they’ll object, do you? Especially Stanton; he’s so hardheaded. Suppose he thinks it’s–blasphemy? Well, we’ll just have to set fire to the idea and push it out in the river.”
“If they object,” I said, “we’ll keep plugging for our idea. In the end we’ll be able to get it because what could there possibly be against it? Except some weird puritanical notion on Stanton’s part.”
And yet, even though it was my own idea, I felt a strange weary sensation, as if in my moment of creativity, my last burst of inspiration, I had defeated us all and everything we were trying for. Why was that? Was it too easy, this idea? After all, it was simply an adaptation of what we–or rather Maury and his daughter–had originally started out with. In the beginning they had dreamed their dream of refighting the entire Civil War, with all the millions of participants; now we were enthusiastic merely at the notion of a Civil War– type mechanical servant to relieve the housewife of her deadly daily chores. Somewhere along the line we had lost the most valuable portion of our ideas.