“Good,” the burglar said, and then expanded on that: “Goodbye.”
“Wait!” the drunk shouted as the burglar turned away.
The burglar turned back. “Don’t shout,” he said.
“Well, don’t keep going away,” the drunk told him. “I got a real problem here.”
The burglar sighed through his thick white beard. One of the reasons he’d taken up this line of work in the first place was that you could do it alone. “All right,” he said, hoping this would be short, at least. “What’s the problem?”
“Come on, I’ll show you.” Risking all, the drunk pushed off from the wall and tottered away down the hall. The burglar followed him, and the drunk touched his palm to an apartment door, which clicked and swung open — that was cute — and they went inside. The door swung shut, and the burglar stopped dead and stared.
Jack the burglar had seen a lot of living rooms in his business, but this one was definitely the strangest. Nothing in it looked right. All the furniture, if that’s what it was, consisted of hard and soft shapes from geometry class, in a variety of pastel colors. Tall narrow things that looked like metal plants might have been lamps. Short wide things that crouched could have been chairs. Some of the stuff didn’t seem to be anything in particular at all.
The drunk tottered through this abstract landscape to an inner doorway, then said, “Be right back,” and disappeared.
The burglar made a circuit of the room, and to his surprise found items of interest. A small pale pyramid turned out to be a clock; into his sack it went. Also, this avocado with ears seemed to be a CD player; pop, in it went.
In a far corner, in amazing contrast to everything else, stood a Christmas tree, fat and richly green and hung with a million ornaments, the only normal object in sight. Or, wait a minute. The burglar stared and frowned, and the Christmas tree shimmered over there as though it were about to be beamed up to the starship Enterprise. What was wrong with that tree?
The drunk returned, aglow with happy pride. Waving at the wavering Christmas tree, he said, “Whaddya think?”
“What is it, that’s what I think.”
“A hologram,” the drunk said. “You can walk all around it, see all the sides, and you never have to water it, and it never drops a needle and you can use it next year. Pretty good, huh?”
“It isn’t traditional,” the burglar said. He had his own sense of the fitness of things.
“Tra-dish-unal!” The drunk almost knocked himself over, he rocketed that word out so hard. “I don’t need tradition, I’m an inventor!” Pointing at a whatsit that was just now following him into the room, he said, “See?”
The burglar saw. This whatsit was a metal box, pebbly gray, about four feet tall and a foot square, scattered all over with dials and switches and antennas, plus a smooth dome on the top and little wheels on the bottom that hummed as the thing came straight across the bare gray floor to stop in front of the burglar and go, “Chick-chick, chillick, chillick.”
The burglar didn’t like this artifact at all. He said. “Well what’s this supposed to be?”
“That’s just it,” the drunk said and collapsed backward onto a trapezoid that just possibly could have been a sofa. “I don’t know what the heck it is.”
“I don’t like it,” the burglar said. The thing buzzed and chicked as though it were a supermarket scanner and Jack the burglar were equipped with a bar code. “It’s making me nervous.”
“It makes me nervous,” the drunk said. “I invented the darn thing, and I don’t know what it’s for. Whyn’t you sit down?”
The burglar looked around. “On what?”
“Oh, anything. You want an eggnog?”
Revolted, the burglar said, “Eggnog? No!” And he sat on a nearby rhomboid, which fortunately was more comfortable than it looked.
“I just thought, you know, the uniform,” the drunk said, and sat up straighter on his trapezoid and began to applaud.
What’s he got to applaud about? But here came another whatsit, this one with skinny metal arms and a head shaped like a tray. The drunk told it, “I’ll have the usual.” To the burglar he said, “And what for you?”
“Nothing,” said the burglar. “Not, uh, on duty.”
“OK. Give him a seltzer with a slice of lime,” he told the tray-headed whatsit, and the thing wheeled about and left as the drunk explained, “I don’t like to see anybody without a glass.”
“So you got a lot of these, uh, things, huh? Invented them all?”
“Used to have a lot more,” the drunk said, getting mad, “but a bunch got stolen. Goddamn it, goddamn it!”
“Oh, yeah?”
“If I could get my hands on those burglars!” The drunk tried to demonstrate a pretend choke in midair, but his fingers got all tangled together, and in trying to untangle them he fell over on his side. Lying there on the trapezoid, one eye visible, he glared at the domed whatsit hovering near the burglar and snarled, “I wish they’d steal that thing.”
The burglar said, “How can you invent it and not know what it is?”
“Easy.” The drunk, with a lot of arm and leg movements, pushed himself back to a seated position as the bartender whatsit came rolling back into the room with two drinks on its head/tray. It zipped past the drunk, who grabbed his glass from it on the fly, then paused in front of the burglar on the rhomboid, who accepted the glass of seltzer and suppressed the urge to say “Thanks.”
Tray-head wheeled around the enigmatic whatsit and left. The drunk frowned at the whatsit and said, “Half the things I invent I don’t remember. I just do them. I do the drawing and fax it to my construction people, and then I go think about other things. And after a while, dingdong, United Parcel, and there it is, according to specifikah — speci — plan.”
“Then how do you find out what anything’s for?
“I leave myself a note in the computer when I invent it. When the package shows up, I check back and the screen says, ‘We now have a perfect vacuum cleaner.’ Or, ‘We now have a perfect pocket calculator.’ ”
“How come you didn’t do that this time?”
“I did!” A growl escaped the drunk’s throat and his face reddened with remembered rage. “Somebody stole the computer!”
“Ah,” said the burglar.
“So, here I am,” the drunk went on, pointing with his free hand at himself and the whatsit and his drink and the Christmas tree and various other things, “here I am, I got this thing — for all I know it’s some sorta boon to mankind, a perfect Christmas present to humanity — and I don’t know what it is!”
“But what do you want from me?” the burglar asked, shifting on his rhomboid. “I don’t know about inventions.”
“You know about things,” the drunk told him. “You know about stuff. Nobody in the world knows stuff like Sanity Clause. Electric pencil sharpeners. Jigsaw puzzles. Stuff.”
“Yeah? And? So?”
“So tell me stuff,” the drunk said. “Any kinda stuff that you can think of, and I’ll tell you if I did one yet, and when it’s something I never did we’ll try out some commands on Junior here and see what happens.”
“I don’t know,” the burglar said, as the whatsit at last wheeled away from him and out into the middle of the room. It stopped, as though poised there. “You mean, just say products to you?”
“S’only thing I can think off,” the drunk explained, “that might help.” Then he sat up even more and gaped at the whatsit. “Looka that!”