In interested tones, Devereaux asked, “Are those for your second childhood or for your children’s first?”
“With a spot of luck, neither,” Goldfarb replied. As if to prove as much, he seized an Exacto knife and slit one of the bears from neck to crotch. He started pulling out stuffing and tossing it in the wastebasket. Devereaux made horrified noises. Goldfarb looked up from his work with what he hoped was a suitably demented grin. “Didn’t know you were working along-side the Ripper, Jack?”
Devereaux made more horrified noises, this time at the pun rather than at the carnage David was inflicting on the defenseless toy. Hal Walsh in-quired, “What are you doing besides getting this place ankle-deep in fluff?”
“I hope I’m playing Dr. Frankenstein,” Goldfarb answered, whereupon Jack Devereaux lurched stiff-legged around the office in one of the worst Boris Karloff impressions David had ever seen. Refusing to let the other engineer get his goat, or even his bear, he nodded. “That’s right, Jack. Without the little motors and the little batteries the Lizards have shown us how to make-to say nothing of their compact circuits-I never could have imagined this. As things are-”
“You’ve had the chance to go crazy in a whole different way,” Devereaux said.
David shrugged. “Maybe. I’m going to try to find out.”
“Dr. Frankenstein?” Walsh eyed him. The boss was nobody’s fool. “By God, you’re going to make an animated teddy bear, aren’t you?”
“I’m going to try,” Goldfarb answered. “They used to do this kind of thing with gears and clockwork, but I got to thinking that electronics are a lot more flexible.”
Jack Devereaux’s eyes lit up. “That’s a damn good idea, David. I don’t know if you can make it walk on two legs, but something that moves its arms, moves its eyes, and still stays cute as all get-out…We, or somebody, could sell a lot of those.”
With another nod, Goldfarb said, “I’m thinking the same thing. And something that talks, too: those sound chips are cheap to make. And maybe…” He snapped his fingers in delight at coming up with an idea not in his notes; sure as hell, working with his hands was inspirational. “We could hide a little infrared sensor right on the thing’s nose, so nobody would need to actually flip a switch to turn it on.”
“The more I hear of this, the better I like it,” Walsh said. “I really do. We get the design patent, then license it for manufacture, and we might rake in a very nice piece of change, a very nice piece of change indeed. We need a name for ’em, though. What’ll we call ’em? Fluffies?” He batted at a wisp of teddy-bear stuffing floating in the air. “How’s that sound? Fluffies.” He cocked his head to one side, considering the flavor of the name.
“Not Fluffies,” Goldfarb said. “Furries.”
“David’s right.” Jack Devereaux nodded vigorously. “The fluff’s on the inside, where it won’t show. The fur’s right out there in plain sight.”
After a moment’s thought, Walsh nodded, too. “Okay, Furries it is. We’ve got a name. We’ve got an idea. Now let’s make it real.” He beamed at Goldfarb. “How would you like to be driving a Cadillac by this time next year?”
“I don’t like driving anything here,” David answered. “It still feels like I’m on the wrong side of the bloody road. But if I have to drive anything, a Cadillac wouldn’t be bad. This side of a tank, I couldn’t very well get any more iron around me.”
“This is putting the car before the horse-or before the Furry, I should say,” Devereaux pointed out. “Like Hal said, we need a real one, so we can see if we’ve got anything worth having.”
“If you hadn’t interrupted me at my surgery, I’d be on the way there already.” Goldfarb went over to the parts bin that ran along one wall of the office and started rummaging through them. Though he didn’t know it, his face wore an enormous smile. Tinkering made him happy-yes, indeed.
Once he had the idea and the parts, the Furry presented no enormous technical challenges. The biggest was getting all the components into its belly and still retaining enough stuffing to keep it huggable. A teddy bear that wasn’t soft, he reasoned, would lose half its appeal.
“Now what are you doing?” Devereaux asked a little later. “Brain surgery?”
Exacto in hand, David nodded. “You might say so. Occurred to me this fellow might have big blinking eyes instead of the glass buttons he came with. But if he’s going to get them, I’ve got to open up his head.”
He used the knife to slice up hollow plastic balls, and colored them with the pens in his shirt pocket. They required another little motor, this one inside the head. Jack Devereaux clicked his tongue between his teeth at the result. “If I saw anything with eyes like that, I’d run like hell.”
“It’s a prototype, dammit,” Goldfarb snapped. “It lets me know what I can do and what I can’t. The next one will be prettier.”
He installed the infrared sensor in the Furry’s nose, and some sound chips and a little speaker behind the mouth. When he aimed an infrared beam at the revamped teddy bear, it spoke in muddy tones: “Here, piss off.”
“Hmm,” Hal Walsh said. “We may have to work on that just a bit.”
Everybody laughed. Then Walsh asked, “Do you suppose you can make it move its lips while it talks, the same way it moves its eyes?”
“Hadn’t thought of that,” Goldfarb answered. “I can try. By the time we’re done with the bloody thing, it’ll do everything but make tea.” He paused. “But maybe that’s not so bad. The more it can do, the longer Junior will take to get bored with it.”
Some more tinkering provided the Furry with plastic lips carved from another ball. They didn’t move in a very lifelike way, but they moved. Walsh nodded. “That’s better-or busier, anyhow.”
“I think he’s ugly as sin, myself,” Jack Devereaux said.
David eyed him. “Some people might say the same about you, old chap. The Furry’s a first try. He’ll improve.” He didn’t spell out the implications. Devereaux made a horrible face at him just the same.
“Mutilate another teddy bear, would you, David?” Hal Walsh said. “See if you can do a neater job on this one. I’m going to get on the phone and talk with a couple of manufacturers I know-and with an advertising agent, too. With something like this, we want to make the biggest splash we possibly can.”
“Right,” Goldfarb said, and got to work. Somewhat belatedly, it occurred to him that he might have made more money had he developed this project on his own, not under the auspices of the Saskatchewan River Widget Works. He shrugged as he slit open the belly of a second plush bear. Walsh hadn’t had to hire him, and had backed him up during his troubles with Basil Roundbush. His boss deserved recompense for that-and, if the Furries did even a quarter as well as the men of the Widget Works dreamt they would, there’d probably be plenty of money to go around.
Walsh said, “I just called Jane, too. She can come by and record some prettier phrases than the one you used there.”
“Fair enough,” David answered. Jane Archibald’s voice wasn’t so smashing as her looks, but it was an improvement over his lower middle class, East End London accent.
He was just affixing the second set of plastic lips when Hal Walsh’s fiancee came in. The men from the Widget Works put both prototype Furries through their paces. Jane’s eyes went wide. “Every little girl in the world will want one,” she breathed, and then, “If you have them saying things in a man’s voice-and maybe if they were different colors-you could sell a lot to boys, too, I think.”
“I like that,” Goldfarb said, and scribbled a note.
The toy jobber who came to the Widget Works the next day also liked it. He stared in astonished fascination at the second prototype Furry-by then, the first one was safely out of sight. “Oh, yes,” he said once he’d seen it put through its paces. “Oh, yes, indeed. I think we’ll be able to move a great many of these, provided the manufacturing costs aren’t too high.”