Well! Joe is stumped. That’s prob’ly the first question logics service hasn’t been able to answer. “How can I find Ducky?” Quite a problem! So Joe broods over it while showin’ the Korlanovitch kids the animated comic about the cute little boy who carries sticks of dynamite in his hip pocket an’ plays practical jokes on everybody. Then he gets the trick. Laurine’s screen suddenly flashes:
“Logics special service will work upon your question. Please punch your logic designation and leave it turned on. You will be called back.”
Laurine is merely mildly interested, but she punches her hotel-room number and has a drink and takes a nap. Joe sets to work. He has been given a idea.
My wife calls me at Maintenance and hollers. She is fit to be tied. She says I got to do something. She was gonna make a call to the butcher shop. Instead of the butcher or even the “If you want to do something” flash, she got a new one. The screen says, “Service question: What is your name?” She is kinda puzzled, but she punches it. The screen sputters an’ then says: “Secretarial Service Demonstration! You—” It reels off her name, address, age, sex, coloring, the amounts of all her charge accounts in all the stores, my name as her husband, how much I get a week, the fact that I’ve been pinched three times—twice was traffic stuff, and once for a argument I got in with a guy—and the interestin’ item that once when she was mad with me she left me for three weeks an’ had her address changed to her folks’ home. Then it says, brisk: “Logics Service will hereafter keep your personal accounts, take messages, and locate persons you may wish to get in touch with. This demonstration is to introduce the service.” Then it connects her with the butcher.
But she don’t want meat, then. She wants blood. She calls me.
“If it’ll tell me all about myself,” she says, fairly boilin’, “it’ll tell anybody else who punches my name! You’ve got to stop it!”
“Now, now, honey!” I says. “I didn’t know about all this! It’s new! But they musta fixed the tank so it won’t give out information except to the logic where a person lives!”
“Nothing of the kind!” she tells me, furious. “I tried! And you know that Blossom woman who lives next door! She’s been married three times and she’s forty-two years old and she says she’s only thirty! And Mrs. Hudson’s had her husband arrested four times for nonsupport and once for beating her up. And—”
“Hey!” I says. “You mean the logic told you this?”
“Yes!” she wails. “It will tell anybody anything! You’ve got to stop it! How long will it take?”
“I’ll call up the tank,” I says. “It can’t take long.”
“Hurry!” she says, desperate, “before somebody punches my name! I’m going to see what it says about that hussy across the street.”
She snaps off to gather what she can before it’s stopped. So I punch for the tank and I get this new “What is your name?” flash. I got a morbid curiosity and I punch my name, and the screen says: “Were you ever called Ducky?” I blink. I ain’t got no suspicions. I say, “Sure!” And the screen says, “There is a call for you.”
Bingo! There’s the inside of a hotel room and Laurine is reclinin’ asleep on the bed. She’d been told to leave her logic turned on an’ she done it. It is a hot day and she is trying to be cool. I would say that she oughta not suffer from the heat. Me, being human, I do not stay as cool as she looks. But there ain’t no need to go into that. After I get my breath I say, “For Heaven’s sake!” and she opens her eyes.
At first she looks puzzled, like she was thinking is she getting absent-minded and is this guy somebody she married lately. Then she grabs a sheet and drapes it around herself and beams at me.
“Ducky!” she says. “How marvelous!”
I say something like “Ugmph!” I am sweating.
She says: “I put in a call for you, Ducky, and here you are! Isn’t it romantic? Where are you really, Ducky? And when can you come up? You’ve no idea how often I’ve thought of you!”
I am probably the only guy she ever knew real well that she has not been married to at some time or another.
I say “Ugmph!” again, and swallow.
“Can you come up instantly?” asks Laurine brightly.
“I’m… workin’,” I say. “I’ll… uh… call you back.”
“I’m terribly lonesome,” says Laurine. “Please make it quick, Ducky! I’ll have a drink waiting for you. Have you ever thought of me?”
“Yeah,” I say, feeble. “Plenty!”
“You darling!” says Laurine. “Here’s a kiss to go on with until you get here! Hurry, Ducky!”
Then I sweat! I still don’t know nothing about Joe, understand. I cuss out the guys at the tank because I blame them for this. If Laurine was just another blonde—well—when it comes to ordinary blondes I can leave ’em alone or leave ’em alone, either one. A married man gets that way or else. But Laurine has a look of unquenched enthusiasm that gives a man very strange weak sensations at the back of his knees. And she’d had four husbands and shot one and got acquitted.
So I punch the keys for the tank technical room, fumbling. And the screen says: “What is your name?” but I don’t want any more. I punch the name of the old guy who’s stock clerk in Maintenance. And the screen gives me some pretty interestin’ dope—I never woulda thought the old fella had ever had that much pep—and winds up by mentionin’ a unclaimed deposit now amountin’ to two hundred eighty credits in the First National Bank, which he should look into. Then it spiels about the new secretarial service and gives me the tank at last.
I start to swear at the guy who looks at me. But he says, tired:
“Snap it off, fella. We got troubles an’ you’re just another. What are the logics doin’ now?”
I tell him, and he laughs a hollow laugh.
“A light matter, fella,” he says. “A very light matter! We just managed to clamp off all the data plates that give information on high explosives. The demand for instructions in counterfeiting is increasing minute by minute. We are also trying to shut off, by main force, the relays that hook in to data plates that just barely might give advice on the fine points of murder. So if people will only keep busy getting the goods on each other for a while, maybe we’ll get a chance to stop the circuits that are shifting credit-balances from bank to bank before everybody’s bankrupt except the guys who thought of askin’ how to get big bank accounts in a hurry.”
“Then,” I says hoarse, “shut down the tank! Do somethin’!”
“Shut down the tank?” he says, mirthless. “Does it occur to you, fella, that the tank has been doin’ all the computin’ for every business office for years? It’s been handlin’ the distribution of ninety-four per cent of all telecast programs, has given out all information on weather, plane schedules, special sales, employment opportunities and news; has handled all person-to-person contacts over wires and recorded every business conversation and agreement—Listen, fella! Logics changed civilization. Logics are civilization! If we shut off logics, we go back to a kind of civilization we have forgotten how to run! I’m getting hysterical myself and that’s why I’m talkin’ like this! If my wife finds out my paycheck is thirty credits a week more than I told her and starts hunting for that redhead—”
He smiles a haggard smile at me and snaps off. And I sit down and put my head in my hands. It’s true. If something had happened back in cave days and they’d hadda stop usin’ fire—If they’d hadda stop usin’ steam in the nineteenth century or electricity in the twentieth—It’s like that. We got a very simple civilization. In the nineteen hundreds a man would have to make use of a typewriter, radio, telephone, teletypewriter, newspaper, reference library, encyclopedias, office files, directories, plus messenger service and consulting lawyers, chemists, doctors, dieticians, filing clerks, secretaries—all to put down what he wanted to remember an’ to tell him what other people had put down that he wanted to know; to report what he said to somebody else and to report to him what they said back. All we have to have is logics. Anything we want to know or see or hear, or anybody we want to talk to, we punch keys on a logic. Shut off logics and everything goes skiddoo. But Laurine—