The Door Into Summer (14 page)

Where to live had been somewhat of a problem. Since Los Angeles had not been treated to the one-second slum-clearance plan in the Six Weeks War, an amazing number of refugees had gone there (I suppose I was one of them, although I hadn’t thought of myself as such at the time) and apparently none of them had ever gone home, even those that had homes left to go back to. The city—if you can call Great Los Angeles a city; it is more of a condition—had been choked when I went to sleep; now it was as jammed as a lady’s purse. It may have been a mistake to get rid of the smog; back in the ’60s a few people used to leave each year because of sinusitis.

Now apparently nobody left, ever.

The day I checked out of the sanctuary I had had several things on my mind, principally (1) find a job, (2) find a place to sleep, (3) catch up in engineering, (4) find Ricky, (5) get back into engineering—on my own if humanly possible, (6) find Belle and Miles and settle their hash—without going to jail for it, and (7) a slug of things, like looking up the original patent on Eager Beaver and checking my strong hunch that it was really Flexible Frank (not that it mattered now, just curiosity), and looking up the corporate history of Hired Girl, Inc., etc., etc.

I have listed the above in order of priority, as I had found out years ago (through almost flunking my freshman year in engineering) that if you didn’t use priorities, when the music stopped you were left standing. Some of these priorities ran concurrently, of course; I expected to search out Ricky and probably Belle & Co. as well, while I was boning engineering. But first things first and second things second; finding a job came even ahead of hunting for a sack because dollars are the key to everything else…when you haven’t got them.

After getting turned down six times in town I had chased an ad clear out to San Bernardino Borough, only to get there ten minutes too late. I should have rented a flop at once; instead I played it real smart and went back downtown, intending to find a room, then get up very early and be first in line for some job listed in the early edition.

How was I to know? I got my name on four rooming-house waiting lists and wound up in the park. I stayed there, walking to keep warm, until almost midnight, then gave up—Great Los Angeles winters are subtropical only if you accent the “sub.” I then took refuge in a station of Wilshire Ways…and about two in the morning they rounded me up with the rest of the vagrants.

Jails have improved. This one was warm and I think they required the cockroaches to wipe their feet.

I was charged with barracking. The judge was a young fellow who didn’t even look up from his newspaper but simply said, “These all first offenders?”

“Yes, your honor.”

“Thirty days, or take a labor-company parole. Next.” They started to march us out but I didn’t budge. “Just a minute, Judge.”

“Eh? Something troubling you? Are you guilty or not guilty?”

“Uh, I really don’t know because I don’t know what it is I have done. You see—”

“Do you want a public defender? If you do you can be locked up until one can handle your case. I understand they are running about six days late right now…but it’s your privilege.”

“Uh, I still don’t know. Maybe what I want is a labor-company parole, though I’m not sure what it is. What I really want is some advice from the Court, if the Court pleases.”

The judge said to the bailiff, “Take the others out.” He turned back to me. “Spill it. But I’ll warrant you won’t like my advice. I’ve been on this job long enough to have heard every phony story and to have acquired a deep disgust toward most of them.”

“Yes, sir. Mine isn’t phony; it’s easily checked. You see, I just got out of the Long Sleep yesterday and—”

But he did look disgusted. “One of those, eh? I’ve often wondered what made our grandparents think they could dump their riffraff on us. The last thing on earth this city needs is more people…especially ones who couldn’t get along in their own time. I wish I could boot you back to whatever year you came from with a message to everybody there that the future they’re dreaming about is not, repeat
not
, paved with gold.” He sighed. “But it wouldn’t do any good, I’m sure. Well, what do you expect me to do? Give you another chance? Then have you pop up here again a week from now?”

“Judge, I don’t think I’m likely to. I’ve got enough money to live until I find a job and—”

“Eh? If you’ve got money, what were you doing barracking?”

“Judge, I don’t even know what that word means.” This time he let me explain. When I came to how I had been swindled by Master Insurance Company his whole manner changed.

“Those swine! My mother got taken by them after she had paid premiums for twenty years. Why didn’t you tell me this in the first place?” He took out a card, wrote something on it, and said, “Take this to the hiring office at the Surplus & Salvage Authority. If you don’t get a job come back and see me this afternoon. But no more barracking. Not only does it breed crime and vice, but you yourself are running a terrible risk of meeting up with a zombie recruiter.”

That’s how I got a job smashing up brand-new ground cars. But I still think I made no mistake in logic in deciding to job-hunt first. Anywhere is home to the man with a fat bank account—the cops leave him alone.

I found a decent room, too, within my budget, in a part of West Los Angeles which had not yet been changed over to New Plan. I think it had formerly been a coat closet.

I would not want anyone to think I disliked the year 2000, as compared with 1970. I liked it and I liked 2001 when it rolled around a couple of weeks after they wakened me. In spite of recurrent spasms of almost unbearable homesickness, I thought that Great Los Angeles at the dawn of the Third Millennium was odds-on the most wonderful place I had ever seen. It was fast and clean and very exciting, even if it was too crowded…and even that was being coped with on a mammoth, venturesome scale. The New Plan parts of town were a joy to an engineer’s heart. If the city government had had the sovereign power to stop immigration for ten years, they could have licked the housing problem. Since they did not have that power, they just had to do their best with the swarms that kept rolling over the Sierras—and their best was spectacular beyond belief and even the failures were colossal.

It was worth sleeping thirty years just to wake up in a time when they had licked the common cold and nobody had a postnasal drip. That meant more to me than the research colony on Venus.

Two things impressed me most, one big, one little. The big one was NullGrav, of course. Back in 1970 I had known about the Babson Institute gravitation research but I had not expected anything to come of it—and nothing had; the basic field theory on which NullGrav is based was developed at the University of Edinburgh. But I had been taught in school that gravitation was something that nobody could ever do anything about, because it was inherent in the very shape of space.

So they changed the shape of space, naturally. Only temporarily and locally, to be sure, but that’s all that’s needed in moving a heavy object. It still has to stay in field relation with Mother Terra, so it’s useless for spaceships—or it is in 2001; I’ve quit making bets about the future. I learned that to make a lift it was still necessary to expend power to overcome the gravity potential, and conversely, to lower something you had to have a power pack to store all those foot-pounds in, or something would go Phzzt!-
Spung!
But just to transport something horizontally, say from San Francisco to Great Los Angeles, just lift it once, then float along, no power at all, like an ice skater riding a long edge.

Lovely!

I tried to study the theory of it, but the math starts in where tensor calculus leaves off; it’s not for me. But an engineer is rarely a mathematical physicist and he does not have to be; he simply has to savvy the skinny of a thing well enough to know what it can do in practical applications—know the working parameters. I could learn those.

The “little thing” I mentioned was the changes in female styles made possible by the Sticktite fabrics. I was not startled by mere skin on bathing beaches; you could see that coming in 1970. But the weird things that the ladies could do with Sticktite made my jaw sag.

My grandpappy was born in 1890; I suppose that some of the sights in 1970 would have affected him the same way.

But I liked the fast new world and would have been happy in it if I had not been so bitterly lonely so much of the time. I was out of joint. There were times (in the middle of the night, usually) when I would gladly have swapped it all for one beat-up tomcat, or for a chance to spend an afternoon taking little Ricky to the zoo…or for the comradeship Miles and I had shared when all we had was hard work and hope.

It was still early in 2001 and I wasn’t halfway caught up on my homework, when I began to itch to leave my featherbedded job and get back to the old drawing board. There were so many, many things possible under current art which had been impossible in 1970; I wanted to get busy and design a few dozen.

For example I had expected that there would be automatic secretaries in use—I mean a machine you could dictate to and get back a business letter, spelling, punctuation, and format all perfect, without a human being in the sequence. But there weren’t any. Oh, somebody had invented a machine which could type, but it was suited only to a phonetic language like Esperanto and was useless in a language in which you could say: “Though the tough cough and hiccough plough him through.”

People won’t give up the illogicalities of English to suit the convenience of an inventor. Mohammed must go to the mountain.

If a high-school girl could sort out the cockeyed spelling of English and usually type the right word, how could a machine be taught to do it?

“Impossible” was the usual answer. It was supposed to require human judgment and understanding.

But an invention is something that was “impossible” up to then—that’s why governments grant patents.

With memory tubes and the miniaturization now possible—I had been right about the importance of gold as an engineering material—with those two things it would be easy to pack a hundred thousand sound codes into a cubic foot…in other words, to sound-key every word in a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. But that was unnecessary; ten thousand would be ample. Who expects a stenographer to field a word like “kourbash” or “pyrophyllite”? You spell such words for her if you must use them. Okay, we code the machine to accept spelling when necessary. We sound-code for punctuation…and for various formats…and to look up addresses in a file…and for how many copies…and routing…and provide at least a thousand blank word-codings for special vocabulary used in a business or profession—and make it so that the owner-client could put those special words in himself, spell a word like “stenobenthic” with the memory key depressed and never have to spell it again.

All simple. Just a matter of hooking together gadgets already on the market, then smoothing it into a production model.

The real hitch was homonyms. Dictation Daisy wouldn’t even slow up over that “tough cough and hiccough” sentence because each of those words carries a different sound. But choices like “they’re” and “their,” “right” and “write” would give her trouble.

Did the L. A. Public Library have a dictionary of English homonyms? It did…and I began counting the unavoidable homonym pairs and trying to figure how many of these could be handled by information theory through context statistics and how many would require special coding.

I began to get jittery with frustration. Not only was I wasting thirty hours a week on an utterly useless job, but also I could not do real engineering in a public library. I needed a drafting room, a shop where I could smooth out the bugs, trade catalogues, professional journals, calculating machines, and all the rest.

I decided that I would just have to get at least a subprofessional job. I wasn’t silly enough to think that I was an engineer again; there was too much art I had not yet soaked up—repeatedly I had thought of ways to do something, using something new that I had learned, only to find out at the library that somebody had solved the same problem, neater, better, and cheaper than my own first stab at it and ten or fifteen years earlier.

I needed to get into an engineering office and let these new things soak in through my skin. I had hopes that I could land a job as a junior draftsman.

I knew that they were using powered semiautomatic drafting machines now; I had seen pictures of them even though I had not had one under my hands. But I had a hunch that I could learn to play one in twenty minutes, given the chance, for they were remarkably like an idea I had once had myself: a machine that bore the same relation to the old-fashioned drawing-board-and-T-square method that a typewriter did to writing in longhand. I had worked it all out in my head, how you could put straight lines or curves anywhere on an easel just by punching keys.

However, in this case I was just as sure that my idea had not been stolen as I was certain that Flexible Frank had been stolen, because my drafting machine had never existed except in my head. Somebody had had the same idea and had developed it logically the same way. When it’s time to railroad, people start railroading.

The Aladdin people, the same firm that made Eager Beaver, made one of the best drawing machines, Drafting Dan. I dipped into my savings, bought a better suit of clothes and a second-hand briefcase, stuffed the latter with newspapers, and presented myself at the Aladdin salesrooms with a view to “buying” one. I asked for a demonstration.

Then, when I got close to a model of Drafting Dan, I had a most upsetting experience.
Déjà vu
, the psychologists call it—“I have been here before.” The damned thing had been developed in precisely the fashion in which I would have developed it, had I had time to do so…instead of being kidnapped into the Long Sleep.

Don’t ask me exactly why I felt that way. A man knows his own style of work. An art critic will say that a painting is a Rubens or a Rembrandt by the brushwork, the treatment of light, the composition, the choice of pigment, a dozen things. Engineering is not science, it is an art, and there is always a wide range of choices in how to solve engineering problems. An engineering designer “signs” his work by those choices just as surely as a painter does.