It would not be as though Ash were still there. It could never be like that. But the earth would be rich; the plants and trees would flourish. The cherries, apricots, plums, apples and pears would not be as many or so fine as they had been, nor the corn so even and tall. But they would grow, and her hands would make them grow. Her five-fingered hands.
Ash would not have come for nothing.
SOMETHING INVENTED ME
by R. C. Phelan
1960 was the year for breakthroughs and breakdowns in communications. The most dramatic to my mind (after “Ozma”) was the device called the “People-Machine” built by an outfit called Simulmalics, Inc., the machine is a conventional IBM 704; but programmed with a—sensationally —unconventional “mathematical model of the United States electorate,” distilled from thousands of pollsters’ files. Designed by a Director of Columbia’s Bureau of Applied Social Research and a Yale psychologist, the machine’s first job was for the Democratic campaign committee In the Presidential election.
Meanwhile, Cornell researchers were teaching another electronic brain how to read. The “Perceptron” is designed with “electrical counterparts of eyes, nerve fibers, and nerve cells,” to enable it to read and use ordinary language, instead of mathematical codes. During the same year, the Air Force put a new type of IBM to work translating technical works from Russian into English.
All this might have been happier news had it not coincided with a rash of metal-wig-flipping by Brains already in use: wrong scoring in college tests, for instance, and a hilarious series of goofs in a robotized Providence, R. I., post office. Tends to make one wonder if we may not be “building in” more parallels-with the human brain than we intended?
Tom Trimble and I have been next-door neighbors all our lives, though our houses are six miles apart. We run adjoining ranches in that part of Texas where cedar, prickly pear, and prairie dogs are the chief nuisances and, in a dry year, twenty-five acres of land are needed to support a single cow. When we were boys and our fathers owned the ranches, they were friends, as Tom and I were.
They shared only one thing: the cost of bringing a tutor down from the North each year to teach Tom and me through the winter. One year the tutor stayed at our house, the next year with the Trimbles. The specialties of these young men varied—one was mathematical, one was historical, and several of them were literary.
A ranch is a big and sparsely furnished place, where a boy’s imagination gets a hard workout. A good supply of books is much appreciated and used. For a year or two, in our teens, Tom and I agreed that we would very likely become great writers. Our literary tutors encouraged us.
Because riding twelve miles a day on horseback was a bore, I used to stay for weeks at the Trimbles’ house when the tutor was there, and the next year Tom would stay with us. We kept in touch with our families over the party-line telephone, receiving instructions and reporting on our behavior. We liked this arrangement all the better since, as host and guest, we could get out of more work than we could alone on the separate ranches.
Sometimes we liked to show off before our elders by discussing learned matters with the tutor in a man-to-man way. Or, if we chose, we could easily show off before him by outriding him or speaking border Spanish with the cowhands. Tom and I were completely at home in any level of the ranch society. At sixteen and seventeen we rode high, the masters of every situation. But at eighteen we were sent off to the University of Texas, where we discovered a big, bewildering new world. We went different ways in it, and our friendship melted slowly, like a snowman, keeping its form for a long time but shrinking. Before we were graduated, a wildcatter, drilling three hundred yards south of the Trimbles’ dipping vat, brought in a flowing well of oil. To this day no oil has been discovered on my family’s land.
Tom and I joined different services in the war. Returning with our wives, we settled down on the ranches. My father had died of a heart attack in 1944, and my mother was glad to hand over to me the job of managing the ranch.
Events had made Tom’s problems simpler than mine. His father had been murdered in a political plot. His mother had allowed every drop of crude oil to be pumped out of the Trimble wells and piped away. There remained only some vast empty spaces far beneath the surface of the ranch, and twenty-three million dollars of oil money in San Angelo banks. There had been twenty-four million, but Tom’s mother, a sweet, quiet woman, had returned to Natchez to marry her high-school sweetheart, now a widower in the cotton business. She had taken with her a make-up case containing a million dollars in cash and had left all the rest, along with the ranch, to her son.
But the ranch now had no water. Once the oil wells were pumped out, the water wells had gone dry on their own. Tom merely bought water a hundred miles to the east, and built a pipeline that brought it to his cows and his household plumbing.
On my mother’s ranch we had no oil, but we did have water. Our postwar problems were not much different from those of the 1930’s. In good years we had money in the bank, and in bad years we owed money to the bank, and either way our mode of life was the same. Small cattlemen live like that.
Tom, with his millions, lived differently. His first wife bore him a daughter, built an addition to the ranch house that was twice as big as the original structure, and divorced him. His second wife, a movie star, added a swimming pool and more guest suites to the house, and adopted three children.
His third wife was a sadly smiling, alcoholic beauty six years older than Tom. She stayed the longest, and while she was there they entertained so elaborately that they needed all the facilities the first two wives had installed, plus more housing for the staff. Tom sent his big plane to New York or Hollywood for weekend guests.
In those years the strongest connection between the two ranches was the old party-line telephone, though it was rarely used. Once or twice a year Tom phoned to invite Anne and me to one of his parties. Once or twice we went, and then we gave up going. We had seen the expenditure and had been impressed, and there was nothing else. We were content to sit on our own porch on Sunday evenings and hear, diminished by six miles of Western silence, the throb of engines as planes took off, bearing guests home to Hollywood, New Orleans, or Cuernavaca.
Eventually the decay of her beauty drove the third wife from drink to madness, and she was shut up in a private institution. The parties stopped; Tom lived alone. He trimmed his staff of cooks, gardeners, pilots, mechanics, and maids, until there remained only a few people to care for him and his cattle. And after a year of living in this solitude, Tom published a novel.
It was called Early Noon, and was a study of a Scottish family on a Peruvian plantation in the 1880’s. Many reviewers called it first-rate, and when I read it I agreed with them. It was so thorough, so surely based on a lifetime knowledge of time and place, that it convinced me that Tom was a kind of genius. I wondered if he had got his knowledge from drugged dreams. He was not Scottish and had never been to Peru. He could hardly have bought the novel for cash, as he bought his water, his house, and his guests, because no one who wrote like that would stoop to ghostwriting. I decided that Tom himself had done the work.
One day not long ago my wife called me to the phone. “It’s Tom,” she said.