“But if it’s in a drawer, then it can’t see, can it?”
“Good man, Mister Bill. That’s right. It can’t. We can run wireless audio out to about fifty meters but video’s harder. This third jack here is for the remote camera, but we don’t have one yet. In fact, that’s one of the things Dad’s working on.”
“So what’s the fourth jack for?”
“Your computer. The box can watch what you’re working on, remember what you put where and answer questions about it. For now, that’s just a plain old cable hookup.”
“Neat.” He turned the box around in his hands and looked into the camera lens. “So what do you want me to do?”
“Just keep it around and let it watch and listen. Every so often I check on it to see what it learned and how it learned it.”
Billy looked puzzled. “You mean you want me to teach it stuff? What do you want me to teach it?”
“Anything you want, really. You don’t have to do anything special, if you don’t want to. Just let it watch and listen.” Jim straightened. “I’m mostly interested in what it decides to remember so I can figure out how it did it.”
Billy set the box on the floor between them. “Anything? I can teach it anything at all?” Jim nodded.
Billy could see the possibilities. Phillips. Bill Phillips. Master spy. Casual, catlike, he walks down the darkened street and crouches at the alley entrance. “Keep your eye out,” he whispers and sets the box down in the corner. He glides quickly to the steel door a hundred feet away. He crouches by the lock, quickly unfastens one lapel mike and holds it to the door. Gracefully, artfully, he touches a slender pick to the lock and whispers, “Tell me when it’s open.” But then, “Commander!” hisses the voice in his earphone, “someone’s coming!” “How much time do I have… um… uh.”
“Does it have a name?”
“Funny you should ask, Mister Bill. Our psych people worked out three different personalities and named them after butlers: Bunter, Lugg, and Jeeves. This one’s loaded up with Bunter.”
“Can I talk to him?”
Dad started back down the stairs with a sour look.
“Sure, but I think we’ll have to do that later, Mister Bill. Right now, it looks like Dad’s got some news about that note.” He put the equipment back on the table. “So what’s the story, Dad?”
Dad sank back into one of the chairs. “About what I expected. She’s on record noting Billy as a disruptive influence. That forces me to acknowledge. I’ll write something back when I cool down; I don’t know whether in protest or appeasement.” He looked at Billy for a long moment. “Billy, this really doesn’t have anything to do with you. You really didn’t do anything wrong and nobody thinks you’re a bad kid. Probably not even Miss Barstow. There are all kinds of things going on at your school that have nothing to do with school.” He leaned forward. “Look. If you get called out again like that, the safest thing to do is just apologize. You know, ‘I’m sorry, Miss Barstow. I don’t understand.’ Then follow her lead and let it go at that.”
Jim glanced at Billy then bit his lip and looked at Dad with lowered brows. Dad ignored him. “Got any homework, Billy?”
“Yeah. Some. Not much.” Dad said it wasn’t a big deal but it sure felt like it was getting to be one, somehow.
“Well, you know the drill. Why don’t you go on upstairs and do it, then you can talk to Jim some more later on.”
“OK.” Billy grabbed his bag and headed for the stairs. “Jim,” he said, “don’t go away. Remember, you said I could talk to, uh, what did you say the name was?”
“Bunter.”
“Bunter. Right. Remember, you said I could talk to Bunter.”
“We’ll be right here, Mister Bill. See you later.”
When Jim felt sure that Billy was in his room and could not hear, he turned to his father. “Dad,” he said, “what got into you? What do you mean apologize? Mister Bill had a great solution to that problem. He just overdid it, that’s all, and that Barstow woman wasn’t bright enough to see it. Why don’t you complain about her to her boss? What’s the kid got to apologize for?”
“It’s not that simple, Jim. If she really thought he was wrong or slow she would have sent an academic notice. There’s no crime attached to that in the Trad schools. The worst that could happen is that Billy would get left back or wind up in remedial. She didn’t do that. She specifically mentioned ‘disruptive behavior.’ In the Trads, that’s a strike, and you never really know what the count is going to be for an out.”
“So protest! The kid didn’t do anything, did he?”
“I doubt it. When Billy gets bored with the reality around him, he just makes up one he likes better in his head. I can’t imagine him disrupting anything, but that’s not the point. She says he did and I would have to prove that he didn’t.”
“Guilty until proven innocent. What is this, old Russia?”
Dad shrugged. “No, it’s America under the Party. That’s more like England under Cromwell than Russia under Stalin. Without the cheap vodka to forget about it all.”
“Come on, Dad. You sound like some kind of sixties hippie radical.”
“Well, I am. Still. Mostly. But don’t you go pointing fingers—who used the word ‘protest’?”
“You know what I mean. She’s picking on him.”
“I don’t think so. She either really thinks he is disruptive, by her lights, or she thinks he might become disruptive and she’s just protecting herself.”
“How do you figure that?”
“It’s the way evaluations and pay are handled these days. Every fall, every teacher is evaluated three ways: by the lead teacher or ‘principal,’ by the outcome of a comprehensive exam of students from the previous year, and by the parents of the students from the previous year. It’s insidious.”
Jim paused. “That doesn’t sound so bad. But I’m trying to think and I don’t remember when that started.”
“About four or five years ago, when you weren’t looking. Neither was anyone else.”
“Maybe I wasn’t paying attention, but it just sounds like performance evaluations. What’s wrong with that? I use them myself.”
“Sure you do. And it makes sense for your business. Let me ask you this. Suppose you get in a bad batch of chips. One of your people catches the problem before the parts get into the system. How do you rate him?”
“Good. He’s doing exactly what he’s supposed to do. He gets rewarded.”
“OK. Now suppose the vendor of those chips is your majority stockholder. He says put them through or lose your job.”
“I would never—some of those machines are—lives depend on some of those machines. I’d sell my own stock and quit first.”
“I guess you would; I raised you better than that. But just suppose. The vendor gets paid, your job’s secure for a while, but you have to override the inspector. There’s the tricky part. If somebody gets hurt and it becomes public, who gets the shaft? You and the vendor shut up and stick together, he fingers one of his inspectors, you finger one of yours, insurance handles a few claims and there you are.”
Jim didn’t take long to consider this. “But that’s illegal. It’s fraud. It could even be racketeering!”
“Says who? Those two inspectors? Sour grapes. They can’t prove anything. Besides, if you’re smart you found them nice featherbeds with some other vendor who owes you or might want you to owe him. If they want to stay in their featherbeds, all they have to say is, ‘Sorry, I made a mistake.’ ”