There’s nothing new under the Sun, is there? But this is the heart of the S.P.G.” The youngster proudly swung open the door of an electronic device in the wall of the portrait booth. Tubes winked sullenly at Halvorsen.
“The esthetikon?” he asked indifferently. He did not feel indifferent, but it would be absurd to show anger, no matter how much he felt it, against a mindless aggregation of circuits that could calculate layouts, criticize and correct pictures for a desired effect—and that had put the artist of design out of a job.
“Yes. The lenses take sixteen profiles, you know, and we set the esthetikon for whatever we want—cute, rugged, sexy, spiritual, brainy, or a combination. It fairs curves from profile to profile to give us just what we want, distorts the profiles themselves within limits if it has to, and there’s your portrait stored in the memory tank waiting to be taped. You set your ratio for any enlargement or reduction you want and play it back. I wish we were reproducing today; it’s fascinating to watch. You just pour in your cold-set plastic, the nozzles ooze out a core and start crawling over to scan—a drop here, a worm there, and it begins to take shape.
“We mostly do portrait busts here, the Avenue trade, but Wilgus, the foreman, used to work in a monument shop in Brooklyn. He did that heroic-size war memorial on the East River Drive—hired Garda Bouchette, the TV girl, for the central figure. And what a figure! He told me he set the esthetikon plates for three-quarter sexy, one-quarter spiritual. Here’s something interesting—standing figurine of Orin Ryerson, the banker. He ordered twelve. Figurines are coming in. The girls like them because they can show their shapes. You’d be surprised at some of the poses they want to try—”
Somehow, Halvorsen got out with the ten dollars, walked to Sixth Avenue and sat down hard in a cheap restaurant. He had coffee and dozed a little, waking with a guilty start at a racket across the street. There was a building going up. For a while he watched the great machines pour walls and floors, the workmen rolling here and there on their little chariots to weld on a wall panel, stripe on an electric circuit of conductive ink, or spray plastic finish over the “wired” wall, all without leaving the saddles of their little mechanical chariots.
Halvorsen felt more determined. He bought a paper from a vending machine by the restaurant door, drew another cup of coffee and turned to the help-wanted ads.
The tricky trade-school ads urged him to learn construction work and make big money. Be a plumbing-machine setup man. Be a house-wiring machine tender. Be a servotruck driver. Be a lumber-stacker operator. Learn pouring-machine maintenance.
Make big money!
A sort of panic overcame him. He ran to the phone booth and dialed a Passaic number. He heard the ring-ring-ring and strained to hear old Mr. Krehbeil’s stumping footsteps growing louder as he neared the phone, even though he knew he would hear nothing until the receiver was picked up.
Ring—ring—ring. ”Hello?” grunted the old man’s voice, and his face appeared on the little screen. “Hello, Mr. Halvorsen. What can I do for you?”
Halvorsen was tongue-tied. He couldn’t possibly say: I just wanted to see if you were still there. I was afraid you weren’t there any more. He choked and improvised: “Hello, Mr. Krehbeil. It’s about the banister on the stairs in my place. I noticed it’s pretty shaky. Could you come over sometime and fix it for me?”
Krehbeil peered suspiciously out of the screen. “I could do that,” he said slowly. “I don’t have much work nowadays. But you can carpenter as good as me, Mr. Halvorsen, and frankly you’re very slow pay and I like cabinet work better. I’m not a young man and climbing around on ladders takes it out of me. If you can’t find anybody else, I’ll take the work, but I got to have some of the money first, just for the materials. It isn’t easy to get good wood any more.”
“All right,” said Halvorsen. “Thanks, Mr. Krehbeil. I’ll call you if I can’t get anybody else.”
He hung up and went back to his table and newspaper. His face was burning with anger at the old man’s reluctance and his own foolish panic. Krehbeil didn’t realize they were both in the same leaky boat. Krehbeil, who didn’t get a job in a month, still thought with senile pride that he was a journeyman carpenter and cabinetmaker who could make his solid way anywhere with his tool-box and his skill, and that he could afford to look down on anything as disreputable as an artist—even an artist who could carpenter as well as he did himself.
Labuerre had made Halvorsen learn carpentry, and Labuerre had been right. You build a scaffold so you can sculp up high, not so it will collapse and you break a leg. You build your platforms so they hold the rock steady, not so it wobbles and chatters at every blow of the chisel. You build your armatures so they hold the plasticine you slam onto them.
But the help-wanted ads wanted no builders of scaffolds, platforms and armatures. The factories were calling for setup men and maintenance men for the production and assembly machines.
From upstate, General Vegetables had sent a recruiting team for farm help—harvest setup and maintenance men, a few openings for experienced operators of tank-caulking machinery. Under “office and professional” the demand was heavy for computer men, for girls who could run the I.B.M. Letteriter, esp. familiar sales and collections corresp., for office machinery maintenance and repair men. A job printing house wanted an esthetikon operator for letterhead layouts and the like. A.T. & T. wanted trainees to earn while learning telephone maintenance. A direct-mail advertising outfit wanted an artist—no, they wanted a sales-executive who could scrawl picture-ideas that would be subjected to the criticism and correction of the esthetikon.
Halvorsen leafed tiredly through the rest of the paper. He knew he wouldn’t get a job, and if he did he wouldn’t hold it. He knew it was a terrible thing to admit to yourself that you might starve to death because you were bored by anything except art, but he admitted it.
It had happened often enough in the past—artists undergoing preposterous hardships, not, as people thought, because they were devoted to art, but because nothing else was interesting. If there were only some impressive, sonorous word that summed up the aching, oppressive futility that overcame him when he tried to get out of art—only there wasn’t.
He thought he could tell which of the photos in the tabloid had been corrected by the esthetikon.
There was a shot of Jink Bitsy, who was to star in a remake of Peter Pan. Her ears had been made to look not pointed but pointy, her upper lip had been lengthened a trifle, her nose had been pugged a little and tilted quite a lot, her freckles were cuter than cute, her brows were innocently arched, and her lower lip and eyes were nothing less than pornography.
There was a shot, apparently uncorrected, of the last Venus ship coming in at La Guardia and the average-looking explorers grinning. Caption: “Austin Malone and crew smile relief on safe arrival. Malone says Venus colonies need men, machines. See story p. 2.”
Petulantly, Halvorsen threw the paper under the table and walked out. What had space travel to do with him? Vacations on the Moon and expeditions to Venus and Mars were part of the deadly encroachment on his livelihood and no more.
II
He took the subway to Passaic and walked down a long-still traffic beltway to his studio, almost the only building alive in the slums near the rusting railroad freightyard.
A sign that had once said “F. Labuerre, Sculptor—Portraits and Architectural Commissions” now said “Roald Halvorsen; Art Classes—Reasonable Fees.” It was a grimy two-story frame building with a shopfront in which were mounted some of his students’
