We Can Build You

‘The conversation rambled on for what seemed an endless time. At last Maury thanked Barrows, said goodbye, and hung up.

‘No dice,’ I said.

He glowered at me wearily. ‘Wow.’

‘What did he say?’

‘The same as in the letter. He still doesn’t see it as a commercial venture. He thinks we’re a patriotic organization.’ He blinked, shook his head wonderingly, ‘No dice, like you said.’

‘Too bad.’

‘Maybe it’s for the better,’ Maury said. But he sounded merely resigned; he did not sound as if he believed it. Someday he would try again. He still hoped.

We were as far apart as ever.

5

During the next two weeks Maury Rock’s predictions as to the decline of the Rosen electronic organ seemed to be borne out. All trucks reported few if any sales of organs. And we noticed that the Hammerstein people had begun to advertise one of their mood organs for less than a thousand dollars. Of course their price did not include shipping charges or the bench. But still – it was bad news for us.

Meanwhile, the Stanton was in and out of our office. Maury had the idea of building a showroom for sidewalk traffic and having the Stanton demonstrate spinets. He got my permission to call in a contractor to remodel the ground floor of the building; the work began, while the Stanton puttered about upstairs, helping Maury with the mail and hearing what it was going to have to do when the showroom had been completed. Maury advanced the suggestion that it shave off its beard, but after an argument between him and the Stanton he withdrew his idea and the Stanton went about as before, with its long white side whiskers.

‘Later on,’ Maury explained to me when the Stanton was not present, ‘I’m going to have it demonstrate itself. I’m in the process of finalizing on a sales pitch to that effect.’ He intended, he explained, to feed the pitch into the Stanton’s ruling monad brain in the form of punched instruction tape. That way there would be no arguments, as there had been over the whiskers.

All this time Maury was busy concocting a second simulacrum. It was in MASA’s truck-repair shop, on one of the workbenches, in the process of being assembled. On Thursday the powers that decreed our new direction permitted me to view it for the first time.

‘Who’s it going to be?’ I asked, studying it with a feeling of gloom. It consisted of no more than a large complex of selenoids, wiring, circuit breakers, and the like, all mounted on aluminum panels. Bundy was busy testing a central monad turret; he had his volt-meter in the midst of the wiring, studying the reading on the dial.

Maury said, ‘This is Abraham Lincoln.’

‘You’ve lost control of your reason.’

‘Not at all. I want something really big to take to Barrows when I visit him next month.’

‘Oh I see,’ I said. ‘You hadn’t told me about that.’

‘You think I’m going to give up?’

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘I knew you wouldn’t give up; I know you.’

‘I’ve got the instinct,’ Maury said.

The next afternoon, after some gloomy pondering, I looked up Doctor Horstowski in the phonebook. The office of Pris’ out-patient psychiatrist was in the better residential section of Boise. I telephoned him and asked for an appointment as soon as possible.

‘May I ask who recommended you?’ his nurse said.

With distaste I said, ‘Miss Priscilla Frauenzimmer.’

‘All right, Mr Rosen; Doctor Horstowski can see you tomorrow at one-thirty.’

Technically, I was supposed to be out on the road, again, setting up communities to receive our trucks. I was supposed to be making maps and inserting ads in newspapers. But ever since Maury’s phonecall to Sam Barrows something had been the matter with me.

Perhaps it had to do with my father. Since the day he had set eyes on the Stanton – and found out it was a machine built to resemble a man – he had become progressively more feeble. Instead of going down to the factory every morning he often remained at home, generally hunched in a chair before the TV; the times I had seen him he had a troubled expression and his faculties seemed clouded.

I mentioned it to Maury.

‘Poor old guy,’ Maury said. ‘Louis, I hate to say this to you, but Jerome is getting frail.’

‘I realize that.’

‘He can’t compete much longer.’

‘What do you suggest I do?’

‘Keep him out of the bustle and strife of the market place. Consult with your mother and brother; find out what Jerome has always wanted to do hobby-wise. Maybe carve flying model World War One airplanes, such as the Fokker Triplane or the Spad. You should look into that, Louis, for the old man’s sake. Am I right, buddy?’

I nodded.

‘It’s partly your fault,’ Maury said. ‘You haven’t cared for him properly. When a man gets his age he needs support. I don’t mean financial; I mean – hell, I mean spiritual.’

The next day I drove to Boise and, at one-twenty parked before the modern, architect-designed office building of Doctor Horstowski.

When Doctor Horstowski appeared in the hallway to usher me into his office, I found myself facing a man built along the lines of an egg. His body was rounded; his head was rounded; he wore tiny round glasses; there were no straight or broken lines about him, and when he walked he progressed in a flowing smooth motion as if he was rolling. His voice, too, was soft and smooth. And yet, when I entered his office and seated myself and got a closer look, I saw that there was one feature of him which I had not noticed: he had a tough, harsh-looking nose, as flat and sharp as a parrot’s beak. And now that I noticed that, I could hear in his voice a suppressed tearing edge of great harshness.

He seated himself with a pad of lined paper and a pen, crossed his legs, and began to ask me dull, routine questions.

‘What did you wish to see me about?’ he asked at last, in a voice barely at the fringe of audibility but at the same time clearly distinct.

‘Well, I’m having this problem. I’m a partner in this firm, MASA ASSOCIATES. And I feel that my partner and his daughter are against me and plotting behind my back. Especially I feel they’re out to degrade and destroy my family, in particular my elderly father, Jerome, who isn’t well enough or strong enough anymore to take that sort of thing.’

‘What “sort of thing”?’

‘This deliberate and ruthless destruction of the Rosen spinet and electronic organ factory and our entire retail system. In favor of a mad, grandiose scheme for saving mankind or defeating the Russians or something like that; I can’t make out what it is, to be honest.’

‘Why can’t you “make it out”?’ His pen scratch-scratched.

‘Because it changes from day to day.’ I paused. The pen paused, too. ‘It seems to be designed to reduce me to helplessness. And as a result Maury will take over the business and maybe the factory as well. And they’re mixed up with an incredibly wealthy and powerful sinister figure, Sam K. Barrows of Seattle, whose picture you possibly saw on the cover of Look magazine.’

I was silent.

‘Go. On.’ He enunciated as if he were a speech instructor.

‘Well, in addition I feel that my partner’s daughter, who is the prime mover in all this, is a dangerous ex-psychotic who can only be said to be as hard as iron and utterly without scruples.’ I looked at the doctor expectantly, but he said nothing, and showed no visible reaction. ‘Pris Frauenzimmer,’ I said.

He nodded.

‘What’s your opinion?’ I asked.

‘Pris,’ Doctor Horstowski said, sticking his tongue out and down and staring at his notes, ‘is a dynamic personality.’

I waited, but that was all.

‘You think it’s in my mind?’ I demanded.

‘What do you think is their motive for doing all this?’ he asked.

That took me by surprise. ‘I don’t know. Is it my business to figure that out? Hell, they want to peddle the simulacra to Barrows and make a mint; what else? And get a lot of prestige and power, I guess. They have maniacal dreams.’

‘And you stand in their way?’

‘Right,’ I said.

‘You have no such dreams.’

‘I’m a realist. Or at least I try to be. As far as I’m concerned that Stanton – have you seen it?’

‘Pris came in here once with it. It sat in the waiting room while she had her hour.’

‘What did it do?’

‘It read Life magazine.’

‘Didn’t it make your blood crawl?’ I asked.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You weren’t frightened to think that those two, Maury and Pris, could dream up something unnatural and dangerous like that?’

Doctor Horstowski shrugged.

‘Christ,’ I said bitterly, ‘you’re insulated. You’re in here safe in this office. What do you care what goes on in the world?’

Doctor Horstowski gave what seemed to me to be a fleeting but smug smile. That made me furious.

‘Doctor,’ I said, ‘I’ll let you in on it. Pris is playing a cruel prank on you. She sent me in here. I’m a simulacrum, like the Stanton. I wasn’t supposed to give the show away, but I can’t go on with it any longer. I’m just a machine, made out of circuits and relay switches. You see how sinister all this is? She’d do it even to you. What do you say to that?’

Halting in his writing. Doctor Horstowski said, ‘Did you tell me you’re married? If so, what is your wife’s name, age, and does she have an occupation? And where born?’

‘I’m not married. I used to have a girl friend, an Italian girl who sang in a night club. She was tall and had dark hair. Her name was Lucrezia but she asked us to call her Mimi. Later on she died of t.b. That was after we split up. We used to fight.’

The doctor carefully wrote those facts down.

‘Aren’t you going to answer my question?’ I asked.

It was hopeless. The doctor, if he had a reaction to the simulacrum sitting in his office reading Life,was not going to reveal it. Or maybe he didn’t have one; maybe he didn’t care who he found sitting across from him or among his magazines – maybe he had taught himself long ago to accept anyone and anything he found there.

But at least I could get an answer out of him regarding Pris, who I regarded as a worse evil than the simulacra.

‘I’ve got my .45 Service revolver and shells,’ I said. ‘That’s all I need; the opportunity will take care of itself. It’s just a question of time before she tries the same cruelty on someone else as she did on me. I consider it my sacred task to rub her out – that’s god’s truth.’

Scrutinizing me, Horstowski said, ‘Your real problem, as you’ve phrased it – and I believe accurately – is the hostility you feel, a very mute and baffled hostility, seeking an outlet, toward your partner and this eighteen-year-old girl, who has difficulties of her own and who is actively seeking solutions in her own way as best she can.’

Put like that, it did not sound so good. It was my own feelings which harried me, not the enemy. There was no enemy. There was only my own emotional life, suppressed and denied.

‘Well, what can you do for me?’ I asked.

‘I can’t make your reality-situation palatable to you. But I can help you comprehend it.’ He opened a drawer of his desk; I saw boxes and bottles and envelopes of pills, a rat’s nest of physician’s samples, scattered and heaped. After rooting, Horstowski came up with a small bottle, which he opened. ‘I can give you these. Take two a day, one when you get up and one on retiring. Hubrizine.’ He passed me the bottle.

‘What’s it do?’ I put the bottle away in my inside pocket.

‘I can explain it to you because you are professionally familiar with the Mood Organ. Hubrizine stimulates the anterior portion of the spetal region of the brain. Stimulation in that area, Mr Rosen, will bring about greater alertness, plus cheerfulness and a belief that events will work out all right on their own. It compares to this setting on the Hammerstein Mood Organ.’ He passed me a small glossy folded printed piece of paper; I saw Hammerstein stop-setting indications on it. ‘But the effect of the drug is much more intense; as you know, the amplitude of affect-shock produced by the Mood Organ is severely limited by law.’

I read the setting critically. By god, when translated into notes it was close to the opening of the Beethoven Sixteenth Quartet. What a vindication for enthusiasta of the Beethoven Third Period, I said to myself. Just looked at, the stop-setting numbers made me feel better.

‘I can almost hum this drug,’ I said. ‘Want me to try?’

‘No thank you. Now, you understand that if drug therapy does not avail in your case we can always attempt brain-slicing in the region of the temporal lobes – based, of course, on extensive brain-mapping which would have to be conducted at U.C. Hospital in San Francisco or Mount Zion; we have no facilities here. I prefer to avoid that myself if possible, since it often develops that the section of the temporal lobes involved can’t be spared. The Government has abandoned that at its clinics, you know.’

‘I’d rather not be sliced,’ I agreed. ‘I’ve had friends who’ve had that done … but personally it gives me the shivers. Let me ask you this. Do you by any chance have a drug whose setting in terms of the Mood Organ corresponds to portions of the Choral Movement of the Beethoven Ninth?’

‘I’ve never looked into it,’ Horstowski said.

‘On a Mood Organ I’m particularly affected when I play the part where the choir sings, “Mus’ ein Lieber Vater wohnen,” and then very high up, like angels, the violins and the soprano part of the choir sing as an answer, “Ubrem Sternenzelt.”’

I’m not familiar with it to that extent,’ Horstowski admitted.

‘They’re asking whether a Heavenly Father exists, and then very high up they answer, yes, above the realm of stars. That part – if you could find the correspondence in terms of pharmacology, I might benefit enormously.’

Doctor Horstowski got out a massive loose-leaf binder and began to thumb through it. ‘I’m afraid I can’t locate a pill corresponding to that. You might consult with the Hammerstein engineers, however.’

‘Good idea,’ I said.

Now, as to your dealings with Pris. I think you’re a little strong in your view of her as a menace. After all, you are free not to associate with her at all, aren’t you?’ He eyed me slyly.

‘I guess so.’

‘Pris has challenged you. She’s a provocative personality … most people who know her, I’d imagine, get to feeling as you do. That’s Pris’ way of stirring them up, making them react. It is probably allied to her scientific bent … it’s a form of curiosity; she wants to see what makes people tick.’ He smiled.

in this case,’ I said, ‘she almost killed the specimen while trying to investigate it.’

‘Pardon?’ He cupped his ear. ‘Yes, a specimen. She perceives other people sometimes in that aspect. But I wouldn’t let that throw me. We live in a society where detachment is almost essential.’

While he was saying this, Doctor Horstowski was writing in his appointment book.

‘What do you think of,’ he murmured, ‘when you think of Pris.’

‘Milk,’ I said.

‘Milk!’ His eyes opened wide, interesting. Milk ...’

‘I’m not coming back here,’ I told him. ‘It’s no use giving me that card.’ However, I accepted the appointment card. ‘Our time is up for today, is it?’

‘Regrettably,’ Doctor Horstowski said, ‘it is.’

‘I was not kidding when I told you I’m one of Pris’ simulacra. There used to be a Louis Rosen, but no more. Now there’s only me. And if anything happens to me, Pris and Maury have the instructional tapes to create another. Pris makes the body out of bathroom tile. It’s pretty good, isn’t it? It fooled you and my brother Chester and almost my father. That’s the actual reason he’s so unhappy; he guessed the truth.’ Having said that I nodded goodbye and walked from the office, along the hall and through the waiting room, to the street.

But you, I said to myself. You’ll never guess, Doctor Horstowski, not in a million years. I’m good enough to fool you and all the rest of them like you.

Getting into my Chevrolet Magic Fire, I drove slowly back to the office.

6

After having told Doctor Horstowski that I was a simulacrum I could not get the idea out of my mind. Once there had been a real Louis Rosen but now he was gone and I stood in this spot, fooling almost everyone, including myself.

This idea persisted for the next week, growing a little dimmer each day but not quite fading out.

And yet on another level I knew it was a preposterous idea, just a lot of drivel I had come up with because of my resentment toward Doctor Horstowski.

The immediate effect of the idea was to cause me to look up the Edwin M. Stanton simulacrum; when I got back to the office from my visit to the doctor I asked Maury where the thing could be found.

‘Bundy’s feeding a new tape to it,’ Maury said. ‘Pris came across a biography of Stanton that had some new material.’ He returned to his letter-reading.

I found Bundy in the shop with the Stanton; having finished, he was putting it back together. Now he was asking it questions.

‘Andrew Johnson betrayed the Union by his inability to conceive the rebellious states as –’ Seeing me, Bundy broke off. ‘Hi, Rosen.’

‘I want to talk to the thing. Okay?’

Bundy departed, leaving me alone with the Stanton. It was seated in a brown, cloth-covered armchair, with a book open on its lap; it regarded me sternly.

‘Sir,’ I said, ‘do you recall me?’

‘Yes sir, I do. You are Mr Louis Rosen of Boise, Idaho. I recall a pleasant overnight stay with your father. Is he well?’

‘Not as well as I wish he was.’

‘A pity.’

‘Sir, I’d like to ask you a question. Doesn’t it seem odd to you that although you were born around 1800 you are still alive in 1982? And doesn’t it seem odd to you to be shut off every now and then? And what about your being made out of transistors and relays? You didn’t used to be, because in 1800 they didn’t have transistors and relays.’ I paused, waiting.

‘Yes,’ the Stanton agreed, ‘those are oddities. I have here a volume –’ He held up his book. ‘Which deals with the new science of cybernetics and this science has shed light on my perplexity.’

That excited me. ‘Your perplexity!’

‘Yes sir. During my stay with your father I discussed puzzling matters of this nature with him. When I consider the brief span of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and behind it, the small space that I fill, or even see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces which I know not, and which know not me, I am afraid.’

‘I should think so,’ I said.

‘I am afraid, sir, and wonder to see myself here rather than there. For there is no reason why I should be here rather than there, now rather than then.’

‘Did you come to any conclusion?’

The Stanton cleared its throat, then got out a folded linen handkerchief and carefully blew its nose,‘it seems to me that time must move in strange jumps, passing over intervening epochs. But why it would do that, or even how, I do not know. At a certain point the mind cannot fathom anything further.’

‘You want to hear my theory?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘I claim there is no Edwin M. Stanton or Louis Rosen anymore. There was once, but they’re dead. We’re machines.’

The Stanton regarded me, its round, wrinkled face twisted up. ‘There may be some truth in that,’ it said finally.

‘And,’ I said, ‘Maury Rock and Pris Frauenzimmer designed us and Bob Bundy built us. And right now they’re working on an Abe Lincoln simulacrum.’

The round, wrinkled face darkened. ‘Mr Lincoln is dead.’

‘I know.’

‘You mean they are going to bring him back?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘To impress Mr Barrows.’

‘Who is Mr Barrows?’ The old man’s voice grated.

‘A multi-millionaire who lives in Seattle, Washington. It was his influence that got sub-dividers started on the Moon.’

‘Sir, have you ever heard of Artemus Ward?’

‘No,’ I admitted.

‘If Mr Lincoln is revived you will be subjected to endless humorous selections from the writings of Mr Ward.’ Scowling, the Stanton picked up its book and once more read. Its face was red and its hands shook.

Obviously I had said the wrong thing.

There was really not much that I knew about Edwin M. Stanton. Since everybody today looks up to Abraham Lincoln it hadn’t occurred to me that the Stanton would feel otherwise. But you live and learn. After all, the simulacrum’s attitude was formed well over a century ago. and there’s not much you can do to change an attitude that old.

I excused myself – the Stanton barely glanced up and nodded – and set off down the street to the library. Fifteen minutes later I had the Britannica out and laid flat on a table; I looked up both Lincoln and Stanton and then the Civil War itself.

The article on Stanton was short but interesting. Stanton had started out hating Lincoln; the old man had been a Democrat, and he both hated and distrusted the new Republican Party. It described Stanton as being harsh, which I had already noticed, and it told of many squabbles with generals, especially Sherman. But, the article said, the old man was good in his job under Lincoln; he booted out fraudulent contractors and kept the troops well-equipped. And at the end of hostilities he was able to demobilize 800,000 men, no mean feat after a bloody Civil War.

The trouble hadn’t started until Lincoln’s death. It had really been hot-going there for a while, between Stanton and President Johnson; in fact it looked as if the Congress were going to take over and be the sole governing body. As I read the article I began to get a pretty good idea of the old man. He was a real tiger. He had a violent temper and a sharp tongue. He almost got Johnson out and himself in as a military dictator.

But the Britannica added, too, that Stanton was thoroughly honest and a genuine patriot.

The article on Johnson stated bluntly that Stanton was disloyal to his chief and in league with his enemies. It called Stanton obnoxious. It was a miracle that Johnson got the old man out.

When I put the volumes of the Britannica back on the shelf I breathed a sigh of relief; just in those little articles you could catch the atmosphere of pure poison which reigned in those days, the intrigues and hates, like something out of Medieval Russia. In fact all the plotting at the end of Stalin’s lifetime – it was much like that.

As I walked slowly back to the office I thought, Kindly old gentleman hell. The Rock-Frauenzimmer combine, in their greed, had reawakened more than a man; they had reawakened what had been an awesome and awful force in this country’s history. Better they should have made a Zachary Taylor simulacrum. No doubt it was Pris and her perverse, nihilistic mind that had conceived this great joker in the deck, this choice out of all the possible thousands, even millions. Why not Socrates? Or Gandhi?

And so now they expected calmly and happily to bring to life a second simulacrum: someone whom Edwin M. Stanton had a good deal of animosity toward. Idiots!

I entered our shop once more and found the Stanton reading as before. It had almost finished its cybernetics book.

There, not more than ten feet away, on the largest of MASA’s workbenches, lay the mass of half-completed circuits which would one day be the Abraham Lincoln. Had the Stanton made it out? Had it connected this electronic confusion with what I had said? I stole a glance at the new simulacrum. It did not look as if anyone – or anything – had meddled inappropriately. Bundy’s careful work could be seen, nothing else. Surely if the Stanton had gone at it in my absence, there would be a few broken or burned segments … I saw nothing like that.

Pris, I decided, was probably at home these days, putting the final life-like colors into the sunken cheeks of the Abe Lincoln shell which would house all these parts. That in itself was a full-time job. The beard, the big hands, skinny legs, the sad eyes. A field for her creativity, her artistic soul, to run and howl rampant. She would not show up until she had done a top-notch job.