The Door Into Summer (5 page)

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? “Belle, 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 Harrys 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 AT&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.

But to do the multitude of things I wanted him to do, he had to have hands, eyes, ears, and a brain…a good enough brain.

Hands I could order from the atomics-engineering equipment companies who supplied Hired Girl’s hands, only this time I would want the best, with wide-range servos and with the delicate feedback required for microanalysis manipulations and for weighing radioactive isotopes. The same companies could supply eyes—only they could be simpler, since Frank would not have to see and manipulate from behind yards of concrete shielding the way they do in a reactor plant.

The ears I could buy from any of a dozen radio-TV houses—though I might have to do some circuit designing to have his hands controlled simultaneously by sight, sound, and touch feedback the way the human hand is controlled.

But you can do an awful lot in a small space with transistors and printed circuits.

Frank wouldn’t have to use stepladders. I would make his neck stretch like an ostrich and his arms extend like lazy tongs. Should I make him able to go up and down stairs?

Well, there was a powered wheelchair that could. Maybe I should buy one and use it for the chassis, limiting the pilot model to a space no bigger than a wheelchair and no heavier than such a chair could carry—that would give me a set of parameters. I’d tie its power and steering into Frank’s brain.

The brain was the real hitch. You can build a gadget linked like a man’s skeleton or even much better. You can give it a feedback-control system good enough to drive nails, scrub floors, crack eggs—or not crack eggs. But unless it has that stuff between the ears that a man has, it is not a man, it’s not even a corpse.

Fortunately I didn’t need a human brain; I just wanted a docile moron, capable of largely repetitive household jobs.

Here is where the Thorsen memory tubes came in. The intercontinental missiles we had struck back with “thought” with Thorsen tubes, and traffic-control systems in places like Los Angeles used an idiot form of them. No need to go into theory of an electronic tube that even Bell Labs doesn’t understand too well, the point is that you can hook a Thorsen tube into a control circuit, direct the machine through an operation by manual control, and the tube will “remember” what was done and can direct the operation
without
a human supervisor a second time, or any number of times. For an automated machine tool this is enough; for guided missiles and for Flexible Frank you add side circuits that give the machine “judgment.” Actually it isn’t judgment (in my opinion a machine can never have judgment); the side circuit is a hunting circuit, the programming of which says “look for so-and-so within such-and-such limits; when you find it, carry out your basic instruction.” The basic instruction can be as complicated as you can crowd into one Thorsen memory tube—which is a
very
wide limit indeed!—and you can program so that your “judgment” circuits (moronic back-seat drivers, they are) can interrupt the basic instructions anytime the cycle does not match that originally impressed into the Thorsen tube.

This meant that you need cause Flexible Frank to clear the table and scrape the dishes and load them into the dishwasher only once, and from then on he could cope with any dirty dishes he ever encountered. Better still, he could have an electronically duplicated Thorsen tube stuck into his head and could handle dirty dishes the first time he ever encountered them…and never break a dish.

Stick another “memorized” tube alongside the first one and he could change a wet baby first time, and never, never, never stick a pin in the baby.

Frank’s square head could easily hold a hundred Thorsen tubes, each with an electronic “memory” of a different household task. Then throw a guard circuit around all the “judgment” circuits, a circuit which required him to hold still and squawl for help if he ran into something not covered by his instructions—that way you wouldn’t use up babies or dishes.

So I did build Frank on the framework of a powered wheelchair. He looked like a hat rack making love to an octopus…but, boy, how he could polish silverware!

Miles looked over the first Frank, watched him mix a martini and serve it, then go around emptying and polishing ashtrays (never touching ones that were clean), open a window and fasten it open, then go to my bookcase and dust and tidy the books in it. Miles took a sip of his martini and said, “Too much vermouth.”

“It’s the way I like them. But we can tell him to fix yours one way and mine another; he’s got plenty of blank tubes in him. Flexible.”

Miles took another sip. “How soon can he be engineered for production?”

“Uh, I’d like to fiddle with him for about ten years.” Before he could groan I added, “But we ought to be able to put a limited model into production in five.”

“Nonsense! We’ll get you plenty of help and have a Model-T job ready in six months.”

“The devil you will. This is my magnum opus. I’m not going to turn him loose until he is a work of art…about a third that size, everything plug-in replaceable but the Thorsens, and so all-out flexible that he’ll not only wind the cat and wash the baby, he’ll even play ping-pong if the buyer wants to pay for the extra programming.” I looked at him; Frank was quietly dusting my desk and putting every paper back exactly where he found it. “But ping-pong with him wouldn’t be much fun; he’d never miss. No, I suppose we could teach him to miss with a random-choice circuit. Mmm…yes, we could. We will, it would make a nice selling demonstration.”

“One year, Dan, and not a day over. I’m going to hire somebody away from Loewy to help you with the styling.”

I said, “Miles, when are you going to learn that I boss the engineering? Once I turn him over to you, he’s yours…but not a split second before.”

Miles answered, “It’s still too much vermouth.”

I piddled along with the help of the shop mechanics until I had Frank looking less like a three-car crash and more like something you might want to brag about to the neighbors. In the meantime I smoothed a lot of bugs out of his control system. I even taught him to stroke Pete and scratch him under his chin in such a fashion that Pete liked it—and, believe me, that takes negative feedback as exact as anything used in atomics labs. Miles didn’t crowd me, although he came in from time to time and watched the progress. I did most of my work at night, coming back after dinner with Belle and taking her home. Then I would sleep most of the day, arrive late in the afternoon, sign whatever papers Belle had for me, see what the shop had done during the day, then take Belle out to dinner again. I didn’t try to do much before then, because creative work makes a man stink like a goat. After a hard night in the lab shop nobody could stand me but Pete.

Just as we were finishing dinner one day Belle said to me, “Going back to the shop, dear?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Good. Because Miles is going to meet us there.”

“Huh?”

“He wants a stockholders’ meeting.”

“A stockholders’ meeting? Why?”

“It won’t take long. Actually, dear, you haven’t been paying much attention to the firm’s business lately. Miles wants to gather up loose ends and settle some policies.”

“I’ve been sticking close to the engineering. What else am I supposed to do for the firm?”

“Nothing, dear. Miles says it won’t take long.”

“What’s the trouble? Can’t Jake handle the assembly line?”

“Please, dear. Miles didn’t tell me why. Finish your coffee.”

Miles was waiting for us at the plant and shook hands as solemnly as if we had not met in a month. I said, “Miles, what’s this all about?”

He turned to Belle. “Get the agenda, will you?” This alone should have told me that Belle had been lying when she claimed that Miles had not told her what he had in mind. But I did not think of it—hell, I trusted Belle!—and my attention was distracted by something else, for Belle went to the safe, spun the knob, and opened it.

I said, “By the way, dear, I tried to open that last night and couldn’t. Have you changed the combination?”

She was hauling papers out and did not turn. “Didn’t I tell you? The patrol asked me to change it after that burglar scare last week.”

“Oh. You’d better give me the new numbers or some night I’ll have to phone one of you at a ghastly hour.”

“Certainly.” She closed the safe and put a folder on the table we used for conferences.

Miles cleared his throat and said, “Let’s get started.”

I answered, “Okay. Darling, if this is a formal meeting, I guess you had better make pothooks… Uh, Wednesday, November eighteenth, 1970, 9:20
P.M.
, all stockholders present—put our names down—D. B. Davis, chairman of the board and presiding. Any old business?”

There wasn’t any. “Okay, Miles, it’s your show. Any new business?”

Miles cleared his throat. “I want to review the firm’s policies, present a program for the future, and have the board consider a financing proposal.”

“Financing? Don’t be silly. We’re in the black and doing better every month. What’s the matter, Miles? Dissatisfied with your drawing account? We could boost it.”

“We wouldn’t stay in the black under the new program. We need a broader capital structure.”

“What new program?”

“Please, Dan. I’ve gone to the trouble of writing it up in detail. Let Belle read it to us.”

“Well…okay.”

Skipping the gobbledygook—like all lawyers, Miles was fond of polysyllables—Miles wanted to do three things: (a) take Flexible Frank away from me, hand it over to a production-engineering team, and get it on the market without delay; (b)—but I stopped it at that point. “No!”

“Wait a minute, Dan. As president and general manager, I’m certainly entitled to present my ideas in an orderly manner. Save your comments. Let Belle finish reading.”

“Well…all right. But the answer is still ‘no.’ ”

Point (b) was in effect that we should quit frittering around as a one-horse outfit. We had a big thing, as big as the automobile had been, and we were in at the start; therefore we should at once expand and set up organization for nationwide and worldwide selling and distribution, with production to match.