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

They come back at seven o'clock, the kids all happily wore out with their afternoon of fightin' each
other in the car. Their folks put 'em to bed and sat down to rest. They saw Joe's screen flickerin'
meditative from one subject to another an' old man Korlanovitch had had enough excitement for one day.
He turned Joe off.
An' at that instant the pattern of relays that Joe had turned on snapped off, all the offers of directive
service stopped flashin' on logic screens everywhere, an' peace descended on the earth.
For everybody else. But for meтАФLaurine come to town. I have often thanked Gawd fervent that she
didn't marry me when I thought I wanted her to. In the intervenin' years she had progressed. She was
blonde an' fatal to begin with. She had got blonder and fataler an' had had four husbands and one
acquittal for homicide an' had acquired a air of enthusiasm and self-confidence. That's just a sketch of the
background. Laurine was not the kinda former girlfriend you like to have turning up in the same town with
your wife. But she came to town, an' Monday morning she tuned right into the middle of Joe's second
spasm of activity.
The Korlanovitch kids had turned him on again. I got these details later and kinda pieced 'em
together. An' every logic in town was dutifully flashin' a notice, "If you want to do something and don't
know how to do itтАФask your logic!" every time they was turned on for use. More'n that, when people
punched for the morning news, they got a full account of the previous afternoon's doin's. Which put 'em in
a frame of mind to share in the party. One bright fella demands, "How can I make a perpetual motion
machine?" And his logic sputters a while an' then comes up with a set-up usin' the Brownian movement to
turn little wheels. If the wheels ain't bigger'n a eighth of an inch they'll turn, all right, an' practically it's
perpetual motion. Another one asks for the secret of transmuting metals. The logic rakes back in the data
plates an' integrates a strictly practical answer. It does take so much power that you can't make no profit
except on radium, but that pays off good. An' from the fact that for a coupla years to come the police
were turnin' up new and improved jimmies, knob-claws for gettin' at safe-innards, and all-purpose keys
that'd open any known lockтАФwhyтАФthere must have been other inquirers with a strictly practical
viewpoint. Joe done a lot for technical progress!
But he done more in other lines. Educational, say. None of my kids are old enough to be int'rested,
but Joe bypassed all censor-circuits because they hampered the service he figured logics should give
humanity. So the kids an' teen-agers who wanted to know what comes after the bees an' flowers found
out. And there is certain facts which men hope their wives won't do more'n suspect, an' those facts are
just what their wives are really curious about. So when a woman dials: "How can I tell if Oswald is true
to me?" and her logic tells herтАФyou can figure out how many rows got started that night when the men
come home!
All this while Joe goes on buzzin' happy to himself, showin' the Korlanovitch kids the animated
funnies with one circuit while with the others he remote-controls the tank so that all the other logics can
give people what they ask for and thereby raise merry hell.
An' then Laurine gets onto the new service. She turns on the logic in her hotel room, prob'ly to see
the week's style-forecast. But the logic says, dutiful: "If you want to do something and don't know how to
do itтАФask your logic!" So Laurine prob'ly looks enthusiasticтАФshe would!тАФand tries to figure out
something to ask. She already knows all about everything she cares aboutтАФain't she had four husbands
and shot one?тАФso I occur to her. She knows this is the town I live in. So she punches, "How can I find
Ducky?"
O.K., guy! But that is what she used to call me. She gets a service question. "Is Ducky known by
any other name?" So she gives my regular name. And the logic can't find me. Because my logic ain't listed
under my name on account of I am in Maintenance and don't want to be pestered when I'm home, and
there ain't any data plates on code-listed logics, because the codes get changed so oftenтАФlike a guy gets
plastered an' tells a redhead to call him up, an' on gettin' sober hurriedly has the code changed before she
reaches his wife on the screen.
Well! Joe is stumped. That's prob'ly the first question logics service hasn't been able to answer.
"How can I find Ducky?" Quite a problem! So Joe broods over it while showin' the Korlanovitch kids