That’s the way Henson wanted it, and that’s the way he had it—up to a point.
He burst into the room around quarter after eight and found the two of them waiting for him. There was Lita, and there was the Adjustor’s surrogate. The surrogate had been well-instructed; it looked surprised and startled. Lita needed no instruction; hers was an agony of shame.
Henson had the pocket-blast in his hand, cocked at the ready. He aimed.
Unfortunately, he was just a little late. The surrogate sat up gracefully and slid one hand under the pillow. The hand came up with another pocket-blast aimed and fired all in one motion.
Henson teetered, tottered, and fell. The whole left side of his face sheared away as he went down.
Lita screamed.
Then the surrogate put his arms around her and whispered, "It’s all over, darling. All over. We did it! He really thought I was a robot, that I’d go through with his aberrated notion of dramatizing his revenge."
The Adjustor smiled and lifted her face to his. "From now on you and I will always be together. We’ll have our child, lots of children if you wish. There’s nothing to come between us now."
"But you killed him," Lita whispered. "What will they do to you?"
"Nothing. It was self-defense. Don’t forget, I’m an Adjustor. From the moment he came into my office, everything he did or said was recorded during our interviews. The evidence will show that I tried to humor him, that I indicated his mental unbalance and allowed him to work out his own therapy.
"This last interview, today, will not be a part of the record. I’ve already destroyed it. So as far as the law is concerned, he had no grounds for jealousy or suspicion. I happened to stop in here to visit this evening and found him trying to kill you—the actual you. And when he turned on me, I blasted him in self-defense."
"Will you get away with it?"
"Of course I’ll get away with it. The man was aberrated, and the record will show it."
The Adjustor stood up. "I’m going to call Authority now," he said.
Lita rose and put her hand on his shoulders. "Kiss me first," she whispered. "A real kiss. I like real things."
"Real things," said the Adjustor. She snuggled against him, but he made no move to take her in his arms. He was staring down at Henson.
Lita followed his gaze.
Both of them saw it at the same time, then—both of them saw the torn hole in the left side of Henson’s head, and the thin strands of wire protruding from the opening.
"He didn’t come," the Adjustor murmured. "He must have suspected, and he sent his robot instead."
Lita began to shake. "You were to send your robot, but you didn’t. He was to come himself, but he sent his robot. Each of you double-crossed the other, and now—"
And now the door opened very quickly.
Henson came into the room.
He looked at his surrogate lying on the floor. He looked at Lita. He looked at the Adjustor. Then he grinned. There was no madness in his grin, only deliberation.
There was deliberation in the way he raised the pocket-blast. He aimed well and carefully, fired only once, but both the Adjustor and Lita crumpled in the burst.
Henson bent over the bodies, inspecting them carefully to make sure that they were real. He was beginning to appreciate Lita’s philosophy now. He liked real things.
For that matter, the Adjustor had some good ideas, too. This business of dramatizing aggressions really seemed to work. He didn’t feel at all angry or upset any more, just perfectly calm and at peace with the world.
Henson rose, smiled, and walked towards the door. For the first time in years he felt completely adjusted.
(1955)
A LOGIC NAMED JOE
Murray Leinster
The inventor and writer William F. Jenkins (1896–1975) lived in Gloucester, Virginia, for most of his adult life and had four children. His work appeared frequently in Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, and other mass-circulation magazines of the 1940s and 1950s, but it was his science fiction, written under the pen-name Murray Leinster, that has secured Jenkins’s reputation. His first story, "The Runaway Skyscraper", was published in Argosy in 1919. "First Contact", the first and arguably the best story of humanity’s first deep-space encounter with intelligent aliens, was published in Astounding in 1945. "A Logic Named Joe", published a year later, predicts, in unnerving detail, today’s digital landscape: social media, fake news, information bubbles and all. Jenkins won a Hugo at the age of sixty (three years after the award was instituted) and continued writing into the 1960s. His obituary in the New York Times called him "The Dean of Science Fiction".
It was on the third day of August that Joe come off the assembly line, and on the fifth Laurine come into town, an’ that afternoon I saved civilization. That’s what I figure, anyhow. Laurine is a blonde that I was crazy about once—and crazy is the word—and Joe is a logic that I have stored away down in the cellar right now. I had to pay for him because I said I busted him, and sometimes I think about turning him on and sometimes I think about taking an ax to him. Sooner or later I’m gonna do one or the other. I kinda hope it’s the ax. I could use a coupla million dollars—sure!—an’ Joe’d tell me how to get or make ’em. He can do plenty! But so far I’ve been scared to take a chance. After all, I figure I really saved civilization by turnin’ him off.
The way Laurine fits in is that she makes cold shivers run up an’ down my spine when I think about her. You see, I’ve got a wife which I acquired after I had parted from Laurine with much romantic despair. She is a reasonable good wife, and I have some kids which are hell-cats but I value ’em. If I have sense enough to leave well enough alone, sooner or later I will retire on a pension an’ Social Security an’ spend the rest of my life fishin’ contented an’ lyin’ about what a great guy I used to be. But there’s Joe. I’m worried about Joe.
I’m a maintenance man for the Logics Company. My job is servicing logics, and I admit modestly that I am pretty good. I was servicing televisions before that guy Carson invented his trick circuit that will select any of ’steenteen million other circuits—in theory there ain’t no limit—and before the Logics Company hooked it into the tank-and-integrator set-up they were usin’ ’em as business-machine service. They added a vision screen for speed—an’ they found out they’d made logics. They were surprised an’ pleased. They’re still findin’ out what logics will do, but everybody’s got ’em.
I got Joe, after Laurine nearly got me. You know the logics setup. You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it’s got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get. It’s hooked in to the tank, which has the Carson Circuit all fixed up with relays. Say you punch "Station SNAFU" on your logic. Relays in the tank take over an’ whatever vision-program SNAFU is telecastin’ comes on your logic’s screen. Or you punch "Sally Hancock’s Phone" an’ the screen blinks an’ sputters an’ you’re hooked up with the logic in her house an’ if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast or who won today’s race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House durin’ Garfield’s administration or what is PDQ and R sellin’ for today, that comes on the screen too. The relays in the tank do it. The tank is a big buildin’ full of all the facts in creation an’ all the recorded telecasts that ever was made—an’ it’s hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country—an’ everything you wanna know or see or hear, you punch for it an’ you get it. Very convenient. Also it does math for you, an’ keeps books, an’ acts as consultin’ chemist, physicist, astronomer, an’ tea-leaf reader, with a "Advice to the Lovelorn" thrown in. The only thing it won’t do is tell you exactly what your wife meant when she said, "Oh, you think so, do you?" in that peculiar kinda voice. Logics don’t work good on women. Only on things that make sense.