Somethin’ had happened. I still didn’t know what it was. Nobody else knows, even yet. What had happened was Joe. What was the matter with him was that he wanted to work good. All this fuss he was raisin’ was, actual, nothin’ but stuff we shoulda thought of ourselves. Directive advice, tellin’ us what we wanted to know to solve a problem, wasn’t but a slight extension of logical-integrator service. Figurin’ out a good way to poison a fella’s wife was only different in degree from figurin’ out a cube root or a guy’s bank balance. It was gettin’ the answer to a question. But things was goin’ to pot because there was too many answers being given to too many questions.
One of the logics in Maintenance lights up. I go over, weary, to answer it. I punch the answer key. Laurine says:
“Ducky!”
It’s the same hotel room. There’s two glasses on the table with drinks in them. One is for me. Laurine’s got on some kinda frothy hangin’-around-the-house-with-the-boy-friend outfit that automatic makes you strain your eyes to see if you actual see what you think. Laurine looks at me enthusiastic.
“Ducky!” says Laurine. “I’m lonesome! Why haven’t you come up?”
“I… been busy,” I say, strangling slightly.
“Pooh!” says Laurine. “Listen, Ducky! Do you remember how much in love we used to be?”
I gulp.
“Are you doin’ anything this evening?” says Laurine.
I gulp again, because she is smiling at me in a way that a single man would maybe get dizzy, but it gives a old married man like me cold chills. When a dame looks at you possessive—
“Ducky!” says Laurine, impulsive. “I was so mean to you! Let’s get married!”
Desperation gives me a voice.
“I… got married,” I tell her, hoarse.
Laurine blinks. Then she says, courageous:
“Poor boy! But we’ll get you outta that! Only it would be nice if we could be married today. Now we can only be engaged!”
“I… can’t—”
“I’ll call up your wife,” says Laurine, happy, “and have a talk with her. You must have a code signal for your logic, darling. I tried to ring your house and noth—”
Click! That’s my logic turned off. I turned it off. And I feel faint all over. I got nervous prostration. I got combat fatigue. I got anything you like. I got cold feet.
I beat it outta Maintenance, yellin’ to somebody I got a emergency call. I’m gonna get out in a Maintenance car an’ cruise around until it’s plausible to go home. Then I’m gonna take the wife an’ kids an’ beat it for somewheres that Laurine won’t ever find me. I don’t wanna be’ fifth in Laurine’s series of husbands and maybe the second one she shoots in a moment of boredom. I got experience of blondes. I got experience of Laurine! And I’m scared to death!
I beat it out into traffic in the Maintenance car. There was a disconnected logic in the back, ready to substitute for one that hadda burned-out coil or something that it was easier to switch and fix back in the Maintenance shop. I drove crazy but automatic. It was kinda ironic, if you think of it. I was goin’ hoopla over a strictly personal problem, while civilization was crackin’ up all around me because other people were havin’ their personal problems solved as fast as they could state ’em. It is a matter of record that part of the Mid-Western Electric research guys had been workin’ on cold electron-emission for thirty years, to make vacuum tubes that wouldn’t need a power source to heat the filament. And one of those fellas was intrigued by the “Ask your logic” flash. He asked how to get cold emission of electrons. And the logic integrates a few squintillion facts on the physics data plates and tells him. Just as casual as it told somebody over in the Fourth Ward how to serve left-over soup in a new attractive way, and somebody else on Mason Street how to dispose of a torso that somebody had left careless in his cellar after ceasing to use same.
Laurine wouldn’t never have found me if it hadn’t been for this new logics service. But now that it was started—Zowie! She’d shot one husband and got acquitted. Suppose she got impatient because I was still married an’ asked logics service how to get me free an’ in a spot where I’d have to marry her by 8:30 p.m.? It woulda told her! Just like it told that woman out in the suburbs how to make sure her husband wouldn’t run around no more. Br-r-r-r! An’ like it told that kid how to find some buried treasure. Remember? He was happy totin’ home the gold reserve of the Hanoverian Bank and Trust Company when they caught on to it. The logic had told him how to make some kinda machine that nobody has been able to figure how it works even yet, only they guess it dodges around a couple extra dimensions. If Laurine was to start askin’ questions with a technical aspect to them, that would be logics’ service meat! And fella, I was scared! If you think a he-man oughtn’t to be scared of just one blonde—you ain’t met Laurine!
I’m drivin’ blind when a social-conscious guy asks how to bring about his own particular system of social organization at once. He don’t ask if it’s best or if it’ll work. He just wants to get it started. And the logic—or Joe—tells him! Simultaneous, there’s a retired preacher asks how can the human race be cured of concupiscence. Bein’ seventy, he’s pretty safe himself, but he wants to remove the peril to the spiritual welfare of the rest of us. He finds out. It involves constructin’ a sort of broadcastin’ station to emit a certain wave-pattern an’ turnin’ it on. Just that. Nothing more. It’s found out afterward, when he is solicitin’ funds to construct it. Fortunate, he didn’t think to ask logics how to finance it, or it woulda told him that, too, an’ we woulda all been cured of the impulses we maybe regret afterward but never at the time. And there’s another group of serious thinkers who are sure the human race would be a lot better off if everybody went back to nature an’ lived in the woods with the ants an’ poison ivy. They start askin’ questions about how to cause humanity to abandon cities and artificial conditions of living. They practically got the answer in logics service!
Maybe it didn’t strike you serious at the time, but while I was drivin’ aimless, sweatin’ blood over Laurine bein’ after me, the fate of civilization hung in the balance. I ain’t kiddin’. For instance, the Superior Man gang that sneers at the rest of us was quietly asking questions on what kinda weapons could be made by which Superior Men could take over and run things…
But I drove here an’ there, sweatin’ an’ talkin’ to myself.
“What I oughta do is ask this wacky logics service how to get outa this mess,” I says. “But it’d just tell me a intricate and’ foolproof way to bump Laurine off. I wanna have peace! I wanna grow comfortably old and brag to other old guys about what a hellion I used to be, without havin’ to go through it an’ lose my chance of livin’ to be a elderly liar.”
I turn a corner at random, there in the Maintenance car.
“It was a nice kinda world once,” I says, bitter. “I could go home peaceful and not have belly-cramps wonderin’ if a blonde has called up my wife to announce my engagement to her. I could punch keys on a logic without gazing into somebody’s bedroom while she is giving her epidermis a air bath and being led to think things I gotta take out in thinkin’. I could—”