“Do you want a public defender? If you do you can be locked up until one can handle your case. I understand they are running about six days late right now...but it’s your privilege.”
“Uh, I still don’t know. Maybe what I want is a labor-company parole, though I’m not sure what it is. What I really want is some advice from the Court, if the Court pleases.”
The judge said to the bailiff, “Take the others out.” He turned back to me. “Spill it. But I’ll warrant you won’t like my advice. I’ve been on this job long enough to have heard every phony story and to have acquired a deep disgust toward most of them.”
“Yes, sir. Mine isn’t phony; it’s easily checked. You see, I just got out of the Long Sleep yesterday and—”
But he did look disgusted. “One of those, eh? I’ve often wondered what made our grandparents think they could dump their riffraff on us. The last thing on earth this city needs is more people...especially ones who couldn’t get along in their own time. I wish I could boot you back to whatever year you came from with a message to everybody there that the future they’re dreaming about is not, repeat not, paved with gold.” He sighed. “But it wouldn’t do any good, I’m sure. Well, what do you expect me to do? Give you another chance? Then have you pop up here again a week from now?”
“Judge, I don’t think I’m likely to. I’ve got enough money to live until I find a job and—”
“Eh? If you’ve got money, what were you doing barracking?”
“Judge, I don’t even know what that word means.” This time he let me explain. When I came to how I had been swindled by Master Insurance Company his whole manner changed.
“Those swine! My mother got taken by them after she had paid premiums for twenty years. Why didn’t you tell me this in the first place?” He took out a card, wrote something on it, and said, “Take this to the hiring office at the Surplus & Salvage Authority. If you don’t get a job come back and see me this afternoon. But no more barracking. Not only does it breed crime and vice, but you yourself are running a terrible risk of meeting up with a zombie recruiter.”
That’s how I got a job smashing up brand-new ground cars. But I still think I made no mistake in logic in deciding to job-hunt first. Anywhere is home to the man with a fat bank account—the cops leave him alone.
I found a decent room, too, within my budget, in a part of West Los Angeles which had not yet been changed over to New Plan. I think it had formerly been a coat closet.
I WOULD NOT want anyone to think I disliked the year 2000, as compared with 1970. I liked it and I liked 2001 when it rolled around a couple of weeks after they wakened me. In spite of recurrent spasms of almost unbearable homesickness, I thought that Great Los Angeles at the dawn of the Third Millennium was odds-on the most wonderful place I had ever seen. It was fast and clean and very exciting, even if it was too crowded...and even that was being coped with on a mammoth, venturesome scale. The New Plan parts of town were a joy to an engineer’s heart. If the city government had had the sovereign power to stop immigration for ten years, they could have licked the housing problem. Since they did not have that power, they just had to do their best with the swarms that kept rolling over the Sierras—and their best was spectacular beyond belief and even the failures were colossal.
It was worth sleeping thirty years just to wake up in a time when they had licked the common cold and nobody had a postnasal drip. That meant more to me than the research colony on Venus.
Two things impressed me most, one big, one little. The big one was NullGrav, of course. Back in 1970 I had known about the Babson Institute gravitation research but I had not expected anything to come of it—and nothing had; the basic field theory on which NullGrav is based was developed at the University of Edinburgh. But I had been taught in school that gravitation was something that nobody could ever do anything about, because it was inherent in the very shape of space.
So they changed the shape of space, naturally. Only temporarily and locally, to be sure, but that’s all that’s needed in moving a heavy object. It still has to stay in field relation with Mother Terra, so it’s useless for spaceships—or it is in 2001; I’ve quit making bets about the future. I learned that to make a lift it was still necessary to expend power to overcome the gravity potential, and conversely, to lower something you had to have a power pack to store all those foot-pounds in, or something would go Phzzt!-Spung! But just to transport something horizontally, say from San Francisco to Great Los Angeles, just lift it once, then float along, no power at all, like an ice skater riding a long edge.
Lovely!
I tried to study the theory of it, but the math starts in where tensor calculus leaves off; it’s not for me. But an engineer is rarely a mathematical physicist and he does not have to be; he simply has to savvy the skinny of a thing well enough to know what it can do in practical applications—know the working parameters. I could learn those.
The “little thing” I mentioned was the changes in female styles made possible by the Sticktite fabrics. I was not startled by mere skin on bathing beaches; you could see that coming in 1970. But the weird things that the ladies could do with Sticktite made my jaw sag.
My grandpappy was born in 1890; I suppose that some of the sights in 1970 would have affected him the same way.
But I liked the fast new world and would have been happy in it if I had not been so bitterly lonely so much of the time. I was out of joint. There were times (in the middle of the night, usually) when I would gladly have swapped it all for one beat-up tomcat, or for a chance to spend an afternoon taking little Ricky to the zoo...or for the comradeship Miles and I had shared when all we had was hard work and hope.
It was still early in 2001 and I wasn’t halfway caught up on my homework, when I began to itch to leave my featherbedded job and get back to the old drawing board. There were so many, many things possible under current art which had been impossible in 1970; I wanted to get busy and design a few dozen.
For example I had expected that there would be automatic secretaries in use—I mean a machine you could dictate to and get back a business letter, spelling, punctuation, and format all perfect, without a human being in the sequence. But there weren’t any. Oh, somebody had invented a machine which could type, but it was suited only to a phonetic language like Esperanto and was useless in a language in which you could say: “Though the tough cough and hiccough plough him through.”
People won’t give up the illogicalities of English to suit the convenience of an inventor. Mohammed must go to the mountain.
If a high-school girl could sort out the cockeyed spelling of English and usually type the right word, how could a machine be taught to do it?
“Impossible” was the usual answer. It was supposed to require human judgment and understanding.
But an invention is something that was “impossible” up to then—that’s why governments grant patents.
With memory tubes and the miniaturization now possible—I had been right about the importance of gold as an engineering material—with those two things it would be easy to pack a hundred thousand sound codes into a cubic foot...in other words, to sound-key every word in a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. But that was unnecessary; ten thousand would be ample. Who expects a stenographer to field a word like “kourbash” or “pyrophyllite”? You spell such words for her if you must use them. Okay, we code the machine to accept spelling when necessary. We sound-code for punctuation...and for various formats...and to look up addresses in a file...and for how many copies...and routing...and provide at least a thousand blank word-codings for special vocabulary used in a business or profession—and make it so that the owner-client could put those special words in himself, spell a word like “stenobenthic” with the memory key depressed and never have to spell it again.
All simple. Just a matter of hooking together gadgets already on the market, then smoothing it into a production model.
The real hitch was homonyms. Dictation Daisy wouldn’t
even slow up over that “tough cough and hiccough” sentence because each of those words carries a different sound. But choices like “they’re” and “their,” “right” and “write” would give her trouble.
Did the L. A. Public Library have a dictionary of English homonyms? It did...and I began counting the unavoidable homonym pairs and trying to figure how many of these could be handled by information theory through context statistics and how many would require special coding.
I began to get jittery with frustration. Not only was I wasting thirty hours a week on an utterly useless job, but also I could not do real engineering in a public library. I needed a drafting room, a shop where I could smooth out the bugs, trade catalogues, professional journals, calculating machines, and all the rest.
I decided that I would just have to get at least a subprofessional job. I wasn’t silly enough to think that I was an engineer again; there was too much art I had not yet soaked up—repeatedly I had thought of ways to do something, using something new that I had learned, only to find out at the library that somebody had solved the same problem, neater, better, and cheaper than my own first stab at it and ten or fifteen years earlier.
I needed to get into an engineering office and let these new things soak in through my skin. I had hopes that I could land a job as a junior draftsman.
I knew that they were using powered semiautomatic drafting machines now; I had seen pictures of them even though I had not had one under my hands. But I had a hunch that I could learn to play one in twenty minutes, given the chance, for they were remarkably like an idea I had once had myself: a machine that bore the same relation to the old-fashioned drawing-board-and-T-square method that a typewriter did to writing in longhand. I had worked it all out in my head, how you could put straight lines or curves anywhere on an easel just by punching keys.
However, in this case I was just as sure that my idea had not been stolen as I was certain that Flexible Frank had been stolen, because my drafting machine had never existed except in my head. Somebody had had the same idea and had developed it logically the same way. When it’s time to railroad, people start railroading.
The Aladdin people, the same firm that made Eager Beaver, made one of the best drawing machines, Drafting Dan. I dipped into my savings, bought a better suit of clothes and a second-hand briefcase, stuffed the latter with newspapers, and presented myself at the Aladdin salesrooms with a view to “buying” one. I asked for a demonstration.
Then, when I got close to a model of Drafting Dan, I had a most upsetting experience. Déjà vu, the psychologists call it—“I have been here before.” The damned thing had been developed in precisely the fashion in which I would have developed it, had I had time to do so...instead of being kidnapped into the Long Sleep.
Don’t ask me exactly why I felt that way. A man knows his own style of work. An art critic will say that a painting is a Rubens or a Rembrandt by the brushwork, the treatment of light, the composition, the choice of pigment, a dozen things. Engineering is not science, it is an art, and there is always a wide range of choices in how to solve engineering problems. An engineering designer “signs” his work by those choices just as surely as a painter does.
Drafting Dan had the flavor of my own technique so strongly that I was quite disturbed by it. I began to wonder if there wasn’t something to telepathy after all.
I was careful to get the number of its first patent. In the state I was in I wasn’t surprised to see that the date on the first one was 1970. I resolved to find out who had invented it. It might have been one of my own teachers, from whom I had picked up some of my style. Or it might be an engineer with whom I had once worked.
The inventor might still be alive. If so, I’d look him up someday...get acquainted with this man whose mind worked just like mine.
But I managed to pull myself together and let the salesman show me how to work it. He hardly need have bothered; Drafting Dan and I were made for each other. In ten minutes I could play it better than he could. At last I reluctantly quit making pretty pictures with it, got list price, discounts, service arrangements, and so forth, then left saying that I would call him, just as he was ready to get my signature on the dotted line. It was a dirty trick, but all I cost him was an hour’s time.
From there I went to the Hired Girl main factory and applied for a job.
I knew that Belle and Miles were no longer with Hired Girl, Inc. In what time I could spare between my job and the compelling necessity to catch up in engineering I had been searching for Belle and Miles and most especially for Ricky. None of the three was listed in the Great Los Angeles telephone system, nor for that matter anywhere in the United States, for I had paid to have an “information” search made at the national office in Cleveland. A quadruple fee, it was, as I had had Belle searched for under both “Gentry” and “Darkin.”
I had the same luck with the Register of Voters for Los Angeles County.
Hired Girl, Inc., in a letter from a seventeenth vice-president in charge of foolish questions, admitted cautiously that they had once had officers by those names thirty years ago but they were unable to help me now.
Picking up a trail thirty years cold is no job for an amateur with little time and less money. I did not have their fingerprints, or I might have tried the FBI. I didn’t know their social-security numbers. My Country ’Tis of Thee had never succumbed to police-state nonsense, so there was no bureau certain to have a dossier on each citizen, nor was I in a position to tap such a file even if there had been.
Perhaps a detective agency, lavishly subsidized, could have dug through utilities records, newspaper files, and God knows what, and traced them down. But I didn’t have the lavish subsidy, nor the talent and time to do it myself.
I finally gave up on Miles and Belle while promising myself that I would, as quickly as I could afford it, put professionals to tracing Ricky. I had already determined that she held no Hired Girl stock and I had written to the Bank of America to see if they held, or ever had held, a trust for her. I got back a form letter informing me that such things were confidential, so I had written again, saying that I was a Sleeper and she was my only surviving relative. That time I got a nice letter, signed by one of the trust officers and saying that he regretted that information concerning trust beneficiaries could not be divulged even to one in my exceptional circumstances, but he felt justified in giving me the negative information that the bank had not at any time through any of its branches held a trust in favor of one Frederica Virginia Gentry.
That seemed to settle one thing. Somehow those birds had managed to get the stock away from little Ricky. My assignment of the stock would have had to go through the Bank of America, the way I had written it. But it had not. Poor Ricky! We had both been robbed.
I made one more stab at it. The records office of the Superintendent of Instruction in Mojave did have record of a grade-school pupil named Frederica Virginia Gentry...but the named pupil had taken a withdrawal transcript in 1971. Further deponent sayeth not.
It was some consolation to know that somebody somewhere admitted that Ricky had ever existed. But she might have taken that transcript to any of many, many thousand public schools in the United States. How long would it take to write to each of them? And were their records so arranged as to permit them to answer, even supposing they were willing?
In a quarter of a billion people one little girl can drop out of sight like a pebble in the ocean.
BUT THE FAILURE of my search did leave me free to seek a job with Hired Girl, Inc., now that I knew Miles and Belle were not running it. I could have tried any of a hundred automation firms, but Hired Girl and Aladdin were the big names in appliance automatons, as important in their own field as Ford and General Motors had been in the heyday of the ground automobile. I picked Hired Girl partly for sentimental reasons; I wanted to see what my old outfit had grown into.
On Monday, 5 March 2001, I went to their employment office, got into the line for white-collar help, fil
led out a dozen forms having nothing to do with engineering and one that did...and was told don’t-call-us- we’ll-call-you.
I hung around and managed to bull myself in to see an assistant hiring flunky. He reluctantly looked over the one form that meant anything and told me that my engineering degree meant nothing, since there had been a thirty-year lapse when I had not used my skill.
I pointed out that I had been a Sleeper.
“That makes it even worse. In any case, we don’t hire people over forty-five.”
“But I’m not forty-five. I’m only thirty.”
“You were born in 1940. Sorry.”
“What am I supposed to do? Shoot myself ?”
He shrugged. “If I were you, I’d apply for an old-age pension.”
I got out quickly before I gave him some advice. Then I walked three quarters of a mile around to the front entrance and went in. The general manager’s name was Curtis; I asked for him.
I got past the first two layers simply by insisting that I had business with him. Hired Girl, Inc., did not use their own automatons as receptionists; they used real flesh and blood. Eventually I reached a place several stories up and (I judged) about two doors from the boss, and here I encountered a firm pass-gauge type who insisted on knowing my business.
I looked around. It was a largish office with about forty real people in it, as well as a lot of machines. She said sharply, “Well? State your business and I’ll check with Mr. Curtis’ appointment secretary.”
I said loudly, making sure that everybody heard it, “I want to know what he’s going to do about my wife!”
Sixty seconds later I was in his private office. He looked up. “Well? What the devil is this nonsense?”
It took half an hour and some old records to convince him that I did not have a wife and that I actually was the founder of the firm. Then things got chummy over drinks and cigars and I met the sales manager and the chief engineer and other heads of departments. “We thought you were dead,” Curtis told me. “In fact, the company’s official history says that you are.”