"Leinster, Murray - A Logic Named Joe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

At first she looks puzzled, like she was thinking is she getting absent-minded and is this guy somebody she married lately. Then she grabs a sheet and drapes it around herself and beams at me.
"Ducky!" she says. "How marvelous!"
I say something like "Ugmph!" I am sweating.
Shesays:
"I put in a call for you, Ducky, and here you are! Isn't It romantic? Where are you really, Ducky? And when can you come up? You've no idea how often I've thought of you!"
I am probably the only guy she ever knew real well that she has not been married to at some time or another.
I say "Ugmph!" again, and swallow.
"Can you come up instantly?" asks Laurine brightly.
"I'm . . . workin'," I say. "I'll . . . uh . . . call you back."
"I'm terribly lonesome," says Laurine. "Please make it quick, Ducky! PU have a drink waiting for you. Have you ever thought of me?"
"Yeah," I say, feeble. 'Plenty!"
"You darling!" says Laurine."Here's a kiss to go on with until you get here! Hurry, Ducky!"
Then I sweat! I still don't know nothing about Joe, understands or cuss out the guys at the tank because I blame them for this. If Laurine was just another blonde-well-when it comes to ordinary blondes I can leave them alone or leave them alone, either one. A married man gets that way or -else. But Laurine has a look of unquenched enthusiasm that gives a man very strange weak sensations at the back of his knees. And she'd had four husbands and shot one and got acquitted.
So I punch the keys for the tank technical room, fumbling. And the screen says: "What is your name?" but I don't want any more. I punch the name of the old guy who's stock clerk in Maintenance, and the screen gives me some pretty interesting dope-I never woulda thought the old fella had ever had that much pep-and winds up by mentioning a unclaimed deposit now accounting to two hundred eighty credits in the First National Bank, which he should look into. Then it spiels about the new secretarial service and gives me the tank at last..
I start to swear at the guy who looks at me. But he says, tired: "Snap it off, fella. We got troubles and you're just another. What are the logics doin' now?"
I tell him, and he laughs a hollow laugh.
"A light matter, fella," he says. "A very light matter! We just managed to clamp off all the data plates that give information on high explosives. The demand for instructions in counterfeiting is increasing minute by minute. We are also trying to shut off, by main force, the relays that hook in to data plates that just barely might give advice on the fine points of murder. So if people will only keep busy getting the goods on each other for a while, maybe we'll get a chance to stop the circuits that are shifting credit-balances from bank to bank before everybody's bankrupt except the guys who thought of asking how, to get big bank accounts in a hurry."
"Then," I says hoarse, "shut down the tank! Do somethin'!"
"Shut down the tank?" he says, mirthless. "Does it occur to you, fella, that the tank has been doing all the computing for every business office for years? It's been handling the distribution of ninety-four per cent of all telecast programs, has given out all information on weather, plane schedules, special sales, employment opportunities and news; has handled all person-to-person contacts over wires and recorded every business conversation and agreement- Listen, fella! Logics changed civilization. Logics are civilization! If we shut off logics, we go back to a kind of civilization we have forgotten how to run! I'm getting hysterical myself and that's why I'm talkin' like this! If my wife finds out my paycheck is thirty credits a week more than I told her and starts hunting for that redhead..."
He smiles a haggard smile at me and snaps off. And I sit down and put my head in my bands. It's true. If something had happened back in cave days and they'd hadda stop using fire- If they'd hadda stop using steam in the nineteenth century or electricity in the twentieth- It's like that. We got a very simple civilization.
In the nineteen hundreds a man would have to make use of a typewriter, radio, telephone, teletypewriter, newspaper, reference library, encyclopedias, office files, directories, plus messenger service and consulting lawyers, chemists, doctors, dietitians, filing clerks, secretaries-all to put down what he wanted to remember and to tell him what other people had put down that he wanted to know; to report what he said to somebody else and to report to him what they said back. All we have to have is logics. Anything we want to know or see or hear, or anybody we want to talk to, we punch keys on a logic. Shut off logics and everything goes skiddoo. But Laurine...
Something 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 raising was, actual, nothing but stuff we shoulda thought of ourselves. Directive advice, telling us what we wanted to know to solve a problem, wasn't but a slight extension of logical-integrator service. Figuring out a good way to poison a fella's wife was only different in degree from figuring out a cube root or a guy's bank balance. It was getting the answer to a question. But things was going too hot 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 hanging-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 possesively.
"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 . . ."
"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, yelling to somebody I got a emergency call. I'm gonna get out in a Maintenance car and cruise around until it's plausible to go home. Then I'm gonna take the wife and kids and 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 on 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 going hoopla over a strictly personal problem, while civilization was cracking up all around me because other people were having their personal problems solved as fast as they could state them.
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 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 and asked logics service how to get me free and 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! And like it told that kid how to find some buried treasure. Remember? He was happy toting home the gold reserve of the Hтnoverian 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 asking questions with a technical aspect to them, that would be logics' service meat! And fella, I was scared! If you think a be-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 hint! Simultaneous, there's a retired preacher asks how can the human race be cured of concupiscence. Being 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 constructing a sort of broadcasting station to emit a certain wave~pattern and tuming it on. Just that. Nothing more. It's found out afterward, when he is soliciting funds to construct it. Fortunate, he didn't think to ask logics how to finance it, or it woulda told him that, too, and 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 and lived in the woods with the ants and 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 driving aimless, sweating blood over Laurine being after me, the fate of civilization hung in the balance. I ain't kidding. 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 and there, sweating and talking to myself.
"What I oughta do is ask this wacky logics service how to get outta this mess," I says. "But it'd just tell me an 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 having to go through it and lose my chance of living 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 wondering 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 an air bath and being led to think things I gotta take out in thinkin'. I could-" -
Then I groan, rememberin' that my wife, naturally, is gonna blame me for the fact that our private life ain't private any more if anybody has tried to peek into it.
"It was a swell world," I says, homesick for the dear dead days-before-yesterday. "We was playin' happy with our toys like little innocent children until sometbin' happened. Like a guy named Joe come in and squashed all our mud pies."
Then it hit me. I got the whole thing in one flash. There ain't nothing in the tank set-up to start relays choosing. Relays are closed exclusive by logics, to get the information the keys are punched for. Nothing but a logic coulda cooked up the relay patterns that constituted logics service. Humans wouldn't had been able to figure it out! Only a logic could integrate all the stuff that woulda made all the other logics work like this. There was one answer. I drove into a restaurant and went over to a pay-logic and dropped in a coin.
"Can a logic be modified," I spell out, "to co-operate in long-term planning which human brains are too lim ited in scope to do?"