Got just the right man to take over the neuro lab—Goldweiser, my assistant. I weighed the thing from every angle before I made up my mind, since his being Jewish makes the situation very touchy: some people will be snide enough to say I picked him to be a potential scapegoat. Well, Goldweiser, no matter what his origins may be, is the best neuro man I know.
Of course, personally—although my personal feelings don’t enter into the picture at all—I am just a bit leary of the fellow. Have been ever since that first log-cutting expedition, when he began to talk in such a peculiar way about needing to relax and then laughed so hard at Len’s jokes. That sort of talk always indicates to me a lack of reverence for your job: if a thing’s worth doing at all, etc.
Of course, I don’t mean that Goldweiser’s cynical attitude has anything to do with his being Jewish; Len’s got the same attitude and he’s not Jewish. Still, this afternoon, when I told Goldweiser he’s going to head up the N-Pro lab, he sort of bowed and said, "That’s quite a promotion. I always did want to be God."
I didn’t like that remark at all. If I’d had another neuro man as good as he is, I’d have withdrawn the promotion immediately. It’s his luck that I’m tolerant, that’s all.
Lunch with Len today, at my invitation. Bought him several martinis, then brought up Lundy’s name and asked who he was, he sounded interesting.
"Steve?" Len said. "I roomed with him my first year in New York."
I asked what Steve did, exactly.
"Reads, mostly. He got into the habit back in the 30s, when he was studying philosophy at the University of Chicago. When the Civil War broke out in Spain, he signed up with the Lincoln Brigade and went over there to fight, but it turned out to be a bad mistake. His reading got him in a lot of trouble, you see; he’d gotten used to asking all sorts of questions, so when the Moscow Trials came along, he asked about them. Then the N.K.V.D. began to pop up all over Spain, and he asked about it.
"His comrades, he discovered, didn’t like guys who kept asking questions. In fact, a couple of Steve’s friends who had also had an inquiring streak were found dead at the front, shot in the back, and Steve got the idea that he was slated for the same treatment. It seemed that people who asked questions were called saboteurs, Trotskyite-Fascists or something, and they kept dying at an alarming rate."
I ordered another martini for Len and asked how Steve had managed to save himself.
"He beat it across the mountains into France," Len explained. "Since then he’s steered clear of causes. He goes to sea once in a while to make a few bucks, drinks a lot, reads a lot, asks some of the shrewdest questions I know. If he’s anything you can put a label on, I’d say he was a touch of Rousseau, a touch of Tolstoi, plenty of Voltaire. Come to think of it, a touch of Norbert Wiener too. Wiener, you may remember, used to ask some damned iconoclastic questions for a cyberneticist. Steve knows Wiener’s books by heart."
Steve sounded like a very colorful fellow, I suggested.
"Yep," Len said. "Marilyn used to think so." I don’t think I moved a muscle when he said it; the smile didn’t leave my face. "Ollie," Len went on, "I’ve been meaning to speak to you about Marilyn. Now that the subject’s come up—"
"I’ve forgotten all about it," I assured him.
"I still want to set you straight," he insisted. "It must have looked funny, me moving down to New York after commencement and Marilyn giving up her job in the lab and following two days later. But never mind how it looked. I never made a pass at her all that time in Boston, Ollie. That’s the truth. But she was a screwy, scatterbrained dame and she decided she was stuck on me because I dabbled in poetry and hung around with artists and such in the Village, and she thought it was all so glamorous. I didn’t have anything to do with her chasing down to New York, no kidding. You two were sort of engaged, weren’t you?"
"It really doesn’t matter," I said. "You don’t have to explain." I finished my drink. "You say she knew Lundy?"
"Sure, she knew Lundy. She also knew Kram, Rossard, Broyold, Boster, De Kroot and Hayre. She knew a whole lot of guys before she was through."
"She always was sociable."
"You don’t get my meaning," Len said. "I am not talking about Marilyn’s gregarious impulses. Listen. First she threw herself at me, but I got tired of her. Then she threw herself at Steve and he got tired of her. Damn near the whole male population of the Village got tired of her in the next couple years."
"Those were troubled times. The war and all."
"They were troubled times," Len agreed, "and she was the source of a fair amount of the trouble. You were well rid of her, Ollie, take my word for it. God save us from the intense Boston female who goes bohemian—the icicle parading as the torch."
"Just as a matter of academic curiosity," I said as we were leaving, "what became of her?"
"I don’t know for sure. During her Village phase she decided her creative urge was hampered by compasses and T-squares, and in between men she tried to do a bit of painting—very abstract, very imitative-original, very hammy. I heard later that she finally gave up the self-expression kick, moved up to the East Seventies somewhere. If I remember, she got a job doing circuit designing on some project for I.B.M."
"She’s probably doing well at it," I said. "She certainly knew her drafting. You know, she helped lay out the circuits for the first robot bedbug I ever built."
Big step forward, if it isn’t unseemly to use a phrase like that in connection with Pro research. This afternoon we completed the first two experimental models of my self-propelled solenoid legs, made of transparent plastic so everything is visible—solenoids, batteries, motors, thyratron tubes and transistors.
Kujack was waiting in the fitting room to give them their first tryout, but when I got there I found Len sitting with him. There were several empty beer cans on the floor and they were gabbing away a mile a minute.
Len knows how I hate to see people drinking during working hours. When I put the pros down and began to rig them for fitting, he said conspiratorially, "Shall we tell him?"
Kujack was pretty crocked, too. "Let’s tell him," he whispered back. Strange thing about Kujack, he hardly ever says a word to me, but he never closes his mouth when Len’s around.
"All right," Len said. "You tell him. Tell him how we’re going to bring peace on Earth and good will toward bedbugs."
"We just figured it out," Kujack said. "What’s wrong with war. It’s a steamroller."
"Steamrollers are very undemocratic," Len added. "Never consult people on how they like to be flattened before flattening them. They just go rolling along."
"Just go rolling, they go on rolling along," Kujack said. "Like Old Man River."
"What’s the upshot?" Len demanded. "People get upshot, shot up. In all countries, all of them without exception, they emerge from the war spiritually flattened, a little closer to the insects—like the hero in that Kafka story who wakes up one morning to find he’s a bedbug, I mean beetle. All because they’ve been steamrolled. Nobody consulted them."
"Take the case of an amputee," Kujack said. "Before the land mine exploded, it didn’t stop and say, ‘Look, friend, I’ve got to go off; that’s my job. Choose which part you’d prefer to have blown off—arm, leg, ear, nose, or what-have-you. Or is there somebody else around who would relish being clipped more than you would? If so, just send him along. I’ve got to do some clipping, you see, but it doesn’t matter much which part of which guy I clip, so long as I make my quota.’ Did the land mine say that? No! The victim wasn’t consulted. Consequently he can feel victimized, full of self-pity. We just worked it out."