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5
During the next two weeks Maury Rock’s predictions as to the decline of the Rosen electronic organ seemed to be borne out. All trucks reported few if any sales of organs. And we noticed that the Hammerstein people had begun to advertise one of their mood organs for less than a thousand dollars. Of course their price did not include shipping charges or the bench. But still – it was bad news for us.
Meanwhile, the Stanton was in and out of our office. Maury had the idea of building a showroom for sidewalk traffic and having the Stanton demonstrate spinets. He got my permission to call in a contractor to remodel the ground floor of the building; the work began, while the Stanton puttered about upstairs, helping Maury with the mail and hearing what it was going to have to do when the showroom had been completed. Maury advanced the suggestion that it shave off its beard, but after an argument between him and the Stanton he withdrew his idea and the Stanton went about as before, with its long white side whiskers.
‘Later on,’ Maury explained to me when the Stanton was not present, ‘I’m going to have it demonstrate itself. I’m in the process of finalizing on a sales pitch to that effect.’ He intended, he explained, to feed the pitch into the Stanton’s ruling monad brain in the form of punched instruction tape. That way there would be no arguments, as there had been over the whiskers.
All this time Maury was busy concocting a second simulacrum. It was in MASA’s truck-repair shop, on one of the workbenches, in the process of being assembled. On Thursday the powers that decreed our new direction permitted me to view it for the first time.
‘Who’s it going to be?’ I asked, studying it with a feeling of gloom. It consisted of no more than a large complex of selenoids, wiring, circuit breakers, and the like, all mounted on aluminum panels. Bundy was busy testing a central monad turret; he had his volt-meter in the midst of the wiring, studying the reading on the dial.
Maury said, ‘This is Abraham Lincoln.’
‘You’ve lost control of your reason.’
‘Not at all. I want something really big to take to Barrows when I visit him next month.’
‘Oh I see,’ I said. ‘You hadn’t told me about that.’
‘You think I’m going to give up?’
‘No,’ I admitted. ‘I knew you wouldn’t give up; I know you.’
‘I’ve got the instinct,’ Maury said.
The next afternoon, after some gloomy pondering, I looked up Doctor Horstowski in the phonebook. The office of Pris’ out-patient psychiatrist was in the better residential section of Boise. I telephoned him and asked for an appointment as soon as possible.
‘May I ask who recommended you?’ his nurse said.
With distaste I said, ‘Miss Priscilla Frauenzimmer.’
‘All right, Mr Rosen; Doctor Horstowski can see you tomorrow at one-thirty.’
Technically, I was supposed to be out on the road, again, setting up communities to receive our trucks. I was supposed to be making maps and inserting ads in newspapers. But ever since Maury’s phonecall to Sam Barrows something had been the matter with me.
Perhaps it had to do with my father. Since the day he had set eyes on the Stanton – and found out it was a machine built to resemble a man – he had become progressively more feeble. Instead of going down to the factory every morning he often remained at home, generally hunched in a chair before the TV; the times I had seen him he had a troubled expression and his faculties seemed clouded.
I mentioned it to Maury.
‘Poor old guy,’ Maury said. ‘Louis, I hate to say this to you, but Jerome is getting frail.’
‘I realize that.’
‘He can’t compete much longer.’
‘What do you suggest I do?’
‘Keep him out of the bustle and strife of the market place. Consult with your mother and brother; find out what Jerome has always wanted to do hobby-wise. Maybe carve flying model World War One airplanes, such as the Fokker Triplane or the Spad. You should look into that, Louis, for the old man’s sake. Am I right, buddy?’
I nodded.
‘It’s partly your fault,’ Maury said. ‘You haven’t cared for him properly. When a man gets his age he needs support. I don’t mean financial; I mean – hell, I mean spiritual.’
The next day I drove to Boise and, at one-twenty parked before the modern, architect-designed office building of Doctor Horstowski.
When Doctor Horstowski appeared in the hallway to usher me into his office, I found myself facing a man built along the lines of an egg. His body was rounded; his head was rounded; he wore tiny round glasses; there were no straight or broken lines about him, and when he walked he progressed in a flowing smooth motion as if he was rolling. His voice, too, was soft and smooth. And yet, when I entered his office and seated myself and got a closer look, I saw that there was one feature of him which I had not noticed: he had a tough, harsh-looking nose, as flat and sharp as a parrot’s beak. And now that I noticed that, I could hear in his voice a suppressed tearing edge of great harshness.
He seated himself with a pad of lined paper and a pen, crossed his legs, and began to ask me dull, routine questions.
‘What did you wish to see me about?’ he asked at last, in a voice barely at the fringe of audibility but at the same time clearly distinct.
‘Well, I’m having this problem. I’m a partner in this firm, MASA ASSOCIATES. And I feel that my partner and his daughter are against me and plotting behind my back. Especially I feel they’re out to degrade and destroy my family, in particular my elderly father, Jerome, who isn’t well enough or strong enough anymore to take that sort of thing.’
‘What “sort of thing”?’
‘This deliberate and ruthless destruction of the Rosen spinet and electronic organ factory and our entire retail system. In favor of a mad, grandiose scheme for saving mankind or defeating the Russians or something like that; I can’t make out what it is, to be honest.’
‘Why can’t you “make it out”?’ His pen scratch-scratched.
‘Because it changes from day to day.’ I paused. The pen paused, too. ‘It seems to be designed to reduce me to helplessness. And as a result Maury will take over the business and maybe the factory as well. And they’re mixed up with an incredibly wealthy and powerful sinister figure, Sam K. Barrows of Seattle, whose picture you possibly saw on the cover of Look magazine.’
I was silent.
‘Go. On.’ He enunciated as if he were a speech instructor.
‘Well, in addition I feel that my partner’s daughter, who is the prime mover in all this, is a dangerous ex-psychotic who can only be said to be as hard as iron and utterly without scruples.’ I looked at the doctor expectantly, but he said nothing, and showed no visible reaction. ‘Pris Frauenzimmer,’ I said.
He
