Aftershocks (71 page)

“Do you know,” Straha said slowly, “that is not the worst idea I have ever heard. Of course, most of the worst ideas I have ever heard have come straight from Atvar’s mouth.”

He meant the joke to soften what he’d said just before. It didn’t do the job. Prevod sprang to her feet. “Whomever you use to help you write your memoirs, I shall not be that female,” she said. “As far as I can see, the Race was right to keep you far away—you fit in better with the Tosevite barbarians than you do with us.” She punctuated that with an emphatic cough. And, before Straha could say anything, she stormed out of his chamber in Shepheard’s Hotel and slammed the door behind her.

“Oh, dear,” Straha said aloud. Then he started to laugh. He went back to the computer and wrote,
Are you still there, Sam Yeager?

No, I am not here,
Yeager replied.
I expect to be back pretty soon, though.

That was, on the face of it, absurd. No male of the Race would have thought to write any such self-contradictory sentences. And yet, as an answer to a rhetorical question, why wasn’t no as good as yes? Straha returned to the keyboard and wrote,
How would you like to help me put my memoirs together?

What happened to the writer you were working with?
the Tosevite asked.

You did,
Straha answered.

This time, the only symbol Sam Yeager sent was the one the Race used as a written equivalent of an interrogative cough.

It is, unfortunately, a truth,
Straha told him.
I made an invidious comparison between her writing ability and yours, and, for some reason or other, she took offense. I now find myself without a collaborator. Are you interested in becoming one? You know the story I aim to tell. You should: you have interrogated me about a good deal of it.

The Big Ugly didn’t reply for some little while. When he did, he wrote,
Sorry for the delay. I had to find out what “invidious” meant. You must be joking, Shiplord.

By no means,
Straha wrote, and used the symbol for an emphatic cough.

Well, if you are not, you ought to be,
Sam Yeager wrote back.
I do not write your language well enough for males and females of the Race to want to read my words. They would be able to tell I am a Big Ugly. Your computers figured out that I was, because I sound as if I am writing English.

Computers do not read. Readers read,
Straha insisted.
Your way of writing is interesting and unusual, whatever makes it so.

I thank you, Shiplord,
Sam Yeager replied.
I thank you very much. You have paid me a great compliment. But I cannot do this. And your chances of getting your memoir published go up if you have a member of the Race writing with you, and go down with me. You cannot say that is not a truth.

If any Tosevite is a hero among the Race, you are that male,
Straha wrote.
Your name would help the memoir, not hurt it.

Maybe—but maybe not, too,
his friend responded.
And having my name on your memoir would not help me here in the United States. I may be a hero to the Race, but many Americans still think I am a traitor.

Straha hadn’t considered that. He realized he should have.
Very well, then,
he wrote.
Farewell for now

Farewell,
Sam Yeager wrote back.
Barbara has just called me to supper. Good luck finding another male or female to work with.

“Good luck,” Straha said mournfully. “I will need more than luck. I will need a miracle. Several miracles, very likely. And I do not believe in miracles. I have been in exile too long to believe in miracles.”

He’d been an exile from the Race, and now he was an exile among the Race. He hadn’t been at home in the United States, and he didn’t feel at home now that he’d managed to return to the society the Race was building on Tosev 3.
I probably would not feel at home if I went into cold sleep and flew back to Home.
If he didn’t fit in among the Race here, how would the smug and stifling society back on the homeworld seem to him?

He went over to the ginger jar Atvar had let him have. He took a big taste. As euphoria filled him, he patted the jar with an affectionate hand. With ginger, if nowhere else, he found himself at home.

David Goldfarb took a last long look at the notes he’d been fooling with for the past few months. The time for fooling was over. Now he had to get to work. He wasn’t going to refine his concept any further on paper. He would have to see what he got when he turned scribbles and sketches into something real.

Part of him was nervous, heart-poundingly nervous. When he started working for real instead of on paper, he might turn out not to be able to make anything worth having. But the rest of him, the larger part, was eager. He’d learned electronics—or what people knew of electronics before the Lizards came—by tinkering. He still sometimes felt he thought better with his hands than with his head.

He got up from his table. “I’m going out for a bit,” he told Hal Walsh. “I need to pick up a couple of things we haven’t got here.”

His boss nodded. “Okay. Bring the receipts back, too, and I’ll reimburse you.”

“Thanks,” Goldfarb said. “I’m not sure you’ll want to when you see what I’ve got, but
. . .
” He shrugged.

“I’m not sure I like the sound of that,” Walsh said, but he was grinning.

Jack Devereaux looked up from the circuit he was soldering. “I’m almost sure I don’t,” he said, which made Walsh laugh. Goldfarb was grinning as he put on his overcoat. Hal was a pretty good chap to work for, no doubt about it.

His grin slipped when he went outside. Edmonton in late November was raw and blustery, with the wind feeling as if there were nothing at all between the North Pole and the street down which he was walking. People seemed to take it in stride. David didn’t think he ever would. The British Isles lay this far north, too, but the Gulf Stream moderated their climate. Nothing Goldfarb had seen moderated the climate here.

Fortunately, the shop he wanted was only a couple of blocks from the Saskatchewan River Widget Works. He bought what he needed and went back to the Widget Works with his purchases in a big paper sack. Before he headed back, though, he made sure he took the receipt out of the sack and stuck it in his pocket. If things went the way he hoped, Hal Walsh
would
pay him back. If they didn’t, his boss would laugh at him.

He shook his head. Hal wouldn’t laugh. Not everything worked out, and Walsh was smart enough to understand as much. But if this didn’t work, it would fail rather more spectacularly than other failed projects at the Widget Works. And, Goldfarb suspected, Jack Devereaux would never let him forget about it, even if his boss did.

Devereaux and Walsh both looked up when David came in carrying the big sack. “Doughnuts?” Devereaux asked hopefully.

“That would be a lot of doughnuts,” Hal Walsh observed. Devereaux nodded, as if to say that the prospect of a lot of doughnuts didn’t bother him a bit.

“Sorry, blokes.” Goldfarb upended the sack on his work table. Four large, fuzzy teddy bears spilled out. One spilled a little too far, and ended on the floor. He picked it up and put it with the others.

In interested tones, Devereaux asked, “Are those for your second childhood or for your children’s first?”

“With a spot of luck, neither,” Goldfarb replied. As if to prove as much, he seized an Exacto knife and slit one of the bears from neck to crotch. He started pulling out stuffing and tossing it in the wastebasket. Devereaux made horrified noises. Goldfarb looked up from his work with what he hoped was a suitably demented grin. “Didn’t know you were working along-side the Ripper, Jack?”

Devereaux made more horrified noises, this time at the pun rather than at the carnage David was inflicting on the defenseless toy. Hal Walsh in-quired, “What
are
you doing besides getting this place ankle-deep in fluff?”

“I hope I’m playing Dr. Frankenstein,” Goldfarb answered, whereupon Jack Devereaux lurched stiff-legged around the office in one of the worst Boris Karloff impressions David had ever seen. Refusing to let the other engineer get his goat, or even his bear, he nodded. “That’s right, Jack. Without the little motors and the little batteries the Lizards have shown us how to make—to say nothing of their compact circuits—I never could have imagined this. As things are—”

“You’ve had the chance to go crazy in a whole different way,” Devereaux said.

David shrugged. “Maybe. I’m going to try to find out.”

“Dr. Frankenstein?” Walsh eyed him. The boss was nobody’s fool. “By God, you’re going to make an animated teddy bear, aren’t you?”

“I’m going to try,” Goldfarb answered. “They used to do this kind of thing with gears and clockwork, but I got to thinking that electronics are a lot more flexible.”

Jack Devereaux’s eyes lit up. “That’s a damn good idea, David. I don’t know if you can make it walk on two legs, but something that moves its arms, moves its eyes, and still stays cute as all get-out .
. .
We, or somebody, could sell a lot of those.”

With another nod, Goldfarb said, “I’m thinking the same thing. And something that talks, too: those sound chips are cheap to make. And maybe . . .” He snapped his fingers in delight at coming up with an idea not in his notes; sure as hell, working with his hands was inspirational. “We could hide a little infrared sensor right on the thing’s nose, so nobody would need to actually flip a switch to turn it on.”

“The more I hear of this, the better I like it,” Walsh said. “I really do. We get the design patent, then license it for manufacture, and we might rake in a very nice piece of change, a very nice piece of change indeed. We need a name for ’em, though. What’ll we call ’em? Fluffies?” He batted at a wisp of teddy-bear stuffing floating in the air. “How’s that sound? Fluffies.” He cocked his head to one side, considering the flavor of the name.

“Not Fluffies,” Goldfarb said. “Furries.”

“David’s right.” Jack Devereaux nodded vigorously. “The fluff’s on the inside, where it won’t show. The fur’s right out there in plain sight.”

After a moment’s thought, Walsh nodded, too. “Okay, Furries it is. We’ve got a name. We’ve got an idea. Now let’s make it real.” He beamed at Goldfarb. “How would you like to be driving a Cadillac by this time next year?”

“I don’t like driving anything here,” David answered. “It still feels like I’m on the wrong side of the bloody road. But if I have to drive anything, a Cadillac wouldn’t be bad. This side of a tank, I couldn’t very well get any more iron around me.”

“This is putting the car before the horse—or before the Furry, I should say,” Devereaux pointed out. “Like Hal said, we need a real one, so we can see if we’ve got anything worth having.”

“If you hadn’t interrupted me at my surgery, I’d be on the way there already.” Goldfarb went over to the parts bin that ran along one wall of the office and started rummaging through them. Though he didn’t know it, his face wore an enormous smile. Tinkering made him happy—yes, indeed.

Once he had the idea and the parts, the Furry presented no enormous technical challenges. The biggest was getting all the components into its belly and still retaining enough stuffing to keep it huggable. A teddy bear that wasn’t soft, he reasoned, would lose half its appeal.

“Now
what are you doing?” Devereaux asked a little later. “Brain surgery?”

Exacto in hand, David nodded. “You might say so. Occurred to me this fellow might have big blinking eyes instead of the glass buttons he came with. But if he’s going to get them, I’ve got to open up his head.”

He used the knife to slice up hollow plastic balls, and colored them with the pens in his shirt pocket. They required another little motor, this one inside the head. Jack Devereaux clicked his tongue between his teeth at the result. “If I saw anything with eyes like that, I’d run like hell.”

“It’s a prototype, dammit,” Goldfarb snapped. “It lets me know what I can do and what I can’t. The next one will be prettier.”

He installed the infrared sensor in the Furry’s nose, and some sound chips and a little speaker behind the mouth. When he aimed an infrared beam at the revamped teddy bear, it spoke in muddy tones: “Here, piss off.”

“Hmm,” Hal Walsh said. “We may have to work on that just a bit.”

Everybody laughed. Then Walsh asked, “Do you suppose you can make it move its lips while it talks, the same way it moves its eyes?”

“Hadn’t thought of that,” Goldfarb answered. “I can try. By the time we’re done with the bloody thing, it’ll do everything but make tea.” He paused. “But maybe that’s not so bad. The more it can do, the longer Junior will take to get bored with it.”

Some more tinkering provided the Furry with plastic lips carved from another ball. They didn’t move in a very lifelike way, but they moved. Walsh nodded. “That’s better—or busier, anyhow.”

“I think he’s ugly as sin, myself,” Jack Devereaux said.

David eyed him. “Some people might say the same about you, old chap. The Furry’s a first try. He’ll improve.” He didn’t spell out the implications. Devereaux made a horrible face at him just the same.

“Mutilate another teddy bear, would you, David?” Hal Walsh said. “See if you can do a neater job on this one. I’m going to get on the phone and talk with a couple of manufacturers I know—and with an advertising agent, too. With something like this, we want to make the biggest splash we possibly can.”

“Right,” Goldfarb said, and got to work. Somewhat belatedly, it occurred to him that he might have made more money had he developed this project on his own, not under the auspices of the Saskatchewan River Widget Works. He shrugged as he slit open the belly of a second plush bear. Walsh hadn’t had to hire him, and had backed him up during his troubles with Basil Roundbush. His boss deserved recompense for that—and, if the Furries did even a quarter as well as the men of the Widget Works dreamt they would, there’d probably be plenty of money to go around.

Walsh said, “I just called Jane, too. She can come by and record some prettier phrases than the one you used there.”