Title: Weak on Square Roots
Author: Burton, Russell
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Weak on Square Roots" ***


 _Does your wife call you Pumpkinhead? Well, maybe
 it's _not_ an insult; it might be a pet name.
 Ah--but _whose_ pet name?_


_WEAK_ ON SQUARE ROOTS

_By Russell Burton_

Illustrated by TOM BEECHAM


As his coach sped through dusk-darkened Jersey meadows, Ronald Lovegear,
fourteen years with Allied Electronix, embraced his burden with both
arms, silently cursing the engineer who was deliberately rocking the
train. In his thin chest he nursed the conviction that someday there
would be an intelligent robot at the throttle of the 5:10 to
Philadelphia.

He carefully moved one hand and took a notebook from his pocket. That
would be a good thing to mention at the office next Monday.

Again he congratulated himself for having induced his superiors to let
him take home the company's most highly developed mechanism to date. He
had already forgiven himself for the little white lie that morning.

"Pascal," he had told them, "is a little weak on square roots." That had
done it!

Old Hardwick would never permit an Allied computer to hit the market
that was not the absolute master of square roots. If Lovegear wanted to
work on Pascal on his own time it was fine with the boss.

Ronald Lovegear consulted his watch. He wondered if his wife would be on
time. He had told Corinne twice over the phone to bring the station
wagon to meet him. But she had been so forgetful lately. It was probably
the new house; six rooms to keep up without a maid was quite a chore.
His pale eyes blinked. He had a few ideas along that line too. He smiled
and gave the crate a gentle pat.

       *       *       *       *       *

Corinne was at the station, and she had brought the station wagon.
Lovegear managed to get the crate to the stairs of the coach where he
consented to the assistance of a porter.

[Illustration]

"It's not really heavy," he told Corinne as he and the porter waddled
through the crowd. "Actually only 57 pounds, four ounces. Aluminum
casing, you know ..."

"No, I didn't ..." began Corinne.

"But it's delicate," he continued. "If I should drop this ..." He
shuddered.

After the crate had been placed lengthwise in the rear of the station
wagon, Corinne watched Ronald tuck a blanket around it.

"It's not very cold, Ronald."

"I don't want it to get bounced around," he said. "Now, please, Corinne,
do drive carefully." Not until she had driven half a block did he kiss
her on the cheek. Then he glanced anxiously over his shoulder at the
rear seat. Once he thought Corinne hit a rut that could have been
avoided.

Long after Corinne had retired that night she heard Ronald pounding with
a brass hammer down in his den. At first she had insisted he take the
crate out to his workshop. He looked at her with scientific aloofness
and asked if she had the slightest conception of what "this is worth?"
She hadn't, and she went to bed. It was only another one of his gestures
which was responsible for these weird dreams. That night she dreamed
Ronald brought home a giant octopus which insisted on doing the dishes
for her. In the morning she woke up feeling unwanted.

Downstairs Ronald had already put on the coffee. He was wearing his robe
and the pinched greyness of his face told Corinne he had been up half
the night. He poured coffee for her, smiling wanly. "If I have any
commitments today, Corinne, will you please see that they are taken care
of?"

"But you were supposed to get the wallpaper for the guest room...."

"I know, I know, dear. But time is so short. They might want Pascal
back any day. For the next week or two I shall want to devote most of
my time ..."

"_Pascal?_"

"Yes. The machine--the computer." He smiled at her ignorance. "We
usually name the expensive jobs. You see, a computer of this nature is
really the heart and soul of the mechanical man we will construct."

Corinne didn't see, but in a few minutes she strolled toward the den,
balancing her coffee in both hands. With one elbow she eased the door
open. There it was: an innocent polished cabinet reaching up to her
shoulders. Ronald had removed one of the plates from its side and she
peeped into the section where the heart and soul might be located. She
saw only an unanatomical array of vacuum tubes and electrical relays.

She felt Ronald at her back. "It looks like the inside of a juke box,"
she said.

He beamed. "The same relay systems used in the simple juke box are
incorporated in a computer." He placed one hand lovingly on the top of
the cabinet.

"But, Ronald--it doesn't even resemble a--a mechanical man?"

"That's because it doesn't have any appendages as yet. You know, arms
and legs. That's a relatively simple adjustment." He winked at Corinne
with a great air of complicity. "And I have some excellent ideas along
that line. Now, run along, because I'll be busy most of the day."

       *       *       *       *       *

Corinne ran along. She spent most of the day shopping for week-end
necessities. On an irrational last-minute impulse--perhaps an
unconscious surrender to the machine age--she dug in the grocery deep
freeze and brought out a couple of purple steaks.

That evening she had to call Ronald three times for dinner, and when he
came out of the den she noticed that he closed the door the way one does
upon a small child. He chattered about inconsequential matters all
through dinner. Corinne knew that his work was going smoothly. A few
minutes later she was to know how smoothly.

It started when she began to put on her apron to do the dishes. "Let
that go for now, dear," Ronald said, taking the apron from her. He went
into the den, returning with a small black box covered with push
buttons. "Now observe carefully," he said, his voice pitched high.

He pushed one of the buttons, waited a second with his ear cocked toward
the den, then pushed another.

Corinne heard the turning of metal against metal, and she slowly turned
her head.

"Oh!" She suppressed a shriek, clutching Ronald's arm so tightly he
almost dropped the control box.

Pascal was walking under his own effort, considerably taller now with
the round, aluminum legs Ronald had given him. Two metal arms also hung
at the sides of the cabinet. One of these rose stiffly, as though for
balance. Corinne's mouth opened as she watched the creature jerk
awkwardly across the living room.

"Oh, Ronald! The fishbowl!"

Ronald stabbed knowingly at several buttons.

Pascal pivoted toward them, but not before his right arm swung out and,
almost contemptuously, brushed the fishbowl to the floor.

Corinne closed her eyes at the crash. Then she scooped up several little
golden bodies and rushed for the kitchen. When she returned Ronald was
picking up pieces of glass and dabbing at the pool of water with one of
her bathroom towels. Pascal, magnificently aloof, was standing in the
center of the mess.

"I'm sorry." Ronald looked up. "It was my fault. I got confused on the
buttons."

But Corinne's glances toward the rigid Pascal held no indictment. She
was only mystified. There was something wrong here.

"But Ronald, he's so ugly without a head. I thought that all robots--"

"Oh, no," he explained, "we would put heads on them for display purposes
only. Admittedly that captures the imagination of the public. That
little adapter shaft at the top could be the neck, of course...."

He waved Corinne aside and continued his experiments with the home-made
robot. Pascal moved in controlled spasms around the living room. Once,
he walked just a little too close to the floor-length window--and
Corinne stood up nervously. But Ronald apparently had mastered the
little black box.

With complete confidence Corinne went into the kitchen to do the dishes.
Not until she was elbow deep in suds did she recall her dreams about the
octopus. She looked over her shoulder, and the curious, unwanted feeling
came again.

       *       *       *       *       *

The following afternoon--after Ronald had cancelled their Sunday drive
into the country--Pascal, with constant exhortations by Ronald at the
black box, succeeded in vacuum cleaning the entire living room. Ronald
was ecstatic.

"Now do you understand?" he asked Corinne. "A mechanical servant! Think
of it! Of course mass production may be years away, but ..."

"Everyone will have Thursday nights off," said Corinne--but Ronald was
already jabbing at buttons as Pascal dragged the vacuum cleaner back to
its niche in the closet.

Later, Corinne persuaded Ronald to take her to a movie, but not until
the last moment was she certain that Pascal wasn't going to drag along.

Every afternoon of the following week Ronald Lovegear called from the
laboratory in New York to ask how Pascal was getting along.

"Just fine," Corinne told him on Thursday afternoon. "But he certainly
ruined some of the tomato plants in the garden. He just doesn't seem to
hoe in a straight line. Are you certain it's the green button I push?"

"It's probably one of the pressure regulators," interrupted Ronald.
"I'll check it when I get home." Corinne suspected by his lowered voice
that Mr. Hardwick had walked into the lab.

That night Pascal successfully washed and dried the dishes, cracking
only one cup in the process. Corinne spent the rest of the evening
sitting in the far corner of the living room, thumbing the pages of a
magazine.

On the following afternoon--prompted perhaps by that perverse female
trait which demands completion of all projects once started--Corinne
lingered for several minutes in the vegetable department at the grocery.
She finally picked out a fresh, round and blushing pumpkin.

Later in her kitchen, humming a little tune under her breath, Corinne
deftly maneuvered a paring knife to transform the pumpkin into a very
reasonable facsimile of a man's head. She placed the pumpkin over the
tiny shaft between Pascal's box-shaped shoulders and stepped back.

She smiled at the moon-faced idiot grinning back at her. He was
complete, and not bad-looking! But just before she touched the red
button once and the blue button twice--which sent Pascal stumbling out
to the backyard to finish weeding the circle of pansies before
dinner--she wondered about the gash that was his mouth. She distinctly
remembered carving it so that the ends curved upward into a frozen and
quite harmless smile. But one end of the toothless grin seemed to sag a
little, like the cynical smile of one who knows his powers have been
underestimated.

Corinne would not have had to worry about her husband's reaction to the
new vegetable-topped Pascal. Ronald accepted the transformation
good-naturedly, thinking that a little levity, once in a while, was a
good thing.

"And after all," said Corinne later that evening, "I'm the one who has
to spend all day in the house with ..." She lowered her voice: "With
Pascal."

But Ronald wasn't listening. He retired to his den to finish the plans
for the mass production of competent mechanical men. One for every home
in America.... He fell asleep with the thought.

       *       *       *       *       *

Corinne and Pascal spent the next two weeks going through pretty much
the same routine. He, methodically jolting through the household chores;
she, walking aimlessly from room to room, smoking too many cigarettes.
She began to think of Pascal as a boarder. Strange--at first he had been
responsible for that unwanted feeling. But now his helpfulness around
the house had lightened her burden. And he was so cheerful all the time!
After living with Ronald's preoccupied frown for seven years ...

After luncheon one day, when Pascal neglected to shut off the garden
hose, she caught herself scolding him as if he were human. Was that a
shadow from the curtain waving in the breeze, or did she see a hurt look
flit across the mouth of the pumpkin? Corinne put out her hand and
patted Pascal's cylindrical wrist.

It was warm--_flesh_ warm.

She hurried upstairs and stood breathing heavily with her back to the
door. A little later she thought she heard someone--someone with a heavy
step--moving around downstairs.

"I left the control box down there," she thought. "Of course, it's
absurd...."

At four o'clock she went slowly down the stairs to start Ronald's
dinner. Pascal was standing by the refrigerator, exactly where she had
left him. Not until she had started to peel the potatoes did she notice
the little bouquet of pansies in the center of the table.

Corinne felt she needed a strong cup of tea. She put the water on and
placed a cup on the kitchen table. Not until she was going to sit down
did she decide that perhaps Pascal should be in the other room.

She pressed the red button, the one which should turn him around, and
the blue button, which should make him walk into the living room. She
heard the little buzz of mechanical life as Pascal began to move. But he
did not go into the other room! He was holding a chair for her, and she
sat down rather heavily. A sudden rush of pleasure reddened her cheeks.
_Not since sorority days ..._

Before Pascal's arms moved away she touched his wrist again, softly,
only this time her hand lingered. And his wrist _was_ warm!

       *       *       *       *       *

"When do they want Pascal back at the lab?" she asked Ronald at dinner
that evening, trying to keep her voice casual.

Ronald smiled. "I think I might have him indefinitely, dear. I've got
Hardwick convinced I'm working on something revolutionary." He stopped.
"Oh, Corinne! You've spilled coffee all over yourself."

The following night Ronald was late in getting home from work. It was
raining outside the Newark station and the cabs deliberately evaded him.
He finally caught a bus, which deposited him one block from his house.
He cut through the back alley, hurrying through the rain. Just before he
started up the stairs he glanced through the lighted kitchen window. He
stopped, gripping the railing for support.

In the living room were Pascal and Corinne. Pascal was reclining
leisurely in the fireside chair; Corinne was standing in front of him.
It was the expression on her face which stopped Ronald Lovegear. The
look was a compound of restraint and compulsion, the reflection of some
deep struggle in Corinne's soul. Then she suddenly leaned forward and
pressed her lips to Pascal's full, fleshy pumpkin mouth. Slowly, one of
Pascal's aluminum arms moved up and encircled her waist.

Mr. Lovegear stepped back into the rain. He stood there for several
minutes. The rain curled around the brim of his hat, dropped to his
face, and rolled down his cheeks with the slow agitation of tears.

When, finally, he walked around to the front and stamped heavily up the
stairs, Corinne greeted him with a flush in her cheeks. Ronald told her
that he didn't feel "quite up to dinner. Just coffee, please." When it
was ready he sipped slowly, watching Corinne's figure as she moved
around the room. She avoided looking at the aluminum figure in the
chair.

Ronald put his coffee down, walked over to Pascal, and, gripping him
behind the shoulders, dragged him into the den.

Corinne stood looking at the closed door and listened to the furious
pounding.

       *       *       *       *       *

Ten minutes later Ronald came out and went straight to the phone.

"Yes! Immediately!" he told the man at the freight office. While he sat
there waiting Corinne walked upstairs.

Ronald did not offer to help the freight men drag the box outside. When
they had gone he went into the den and came back with the pumpkin. He
opened the back door and hurled it out into the rain. It cleared the
back fence and rolled down the alley stopping in a small puddle in the
cinders.

After a while the water level reached the mouth and there was a soft
choking sound. The boy who found it the next morning looked at the mouth
and wondered why anyone would carve such a sad Jack-O'-Lantern.


THE END



Transcriber's Note:

    This etext was produced from _If Worlds of Science Fiction_ July
    1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
    copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
    typographical errors have been corrected without note.





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