But Bob Bundy, for all his electronics genius, had no experience with organs. He had designed simulacra circuits for the Government. Simulacra are the synthetic humans which I always thought of as robots; they're used for Lunar exploration, sent up from time to time from the Cape.

Bundy's reasons for leaving the Cape are obscure. He drinks, but that doesn't dim his powers. He wenches. But so do we all. Probably he was dropped because he's a bad security risk; not a Communist--Bundy could never have doped out even the existence of political ideas--but a bad risk in that he appears to have a touch of hebephrenia. In other words, he tends to wander off without notice. His clothes are dirty, his hair uncombed, his chin unshaved, and he won't look you in the eye. He grins inanely. He's what the Federal Bureau of Mental Health psychiatrists call _dilapidated_. If someone asks him a question he can't figure out how to answer it; he has speech blockage. But with his hands--he's damn fine. He can do his job, and well. So the McHeston Act doesn't apply to him.

However, in the many months Bundy had worked for us, I had seen nothing invented. Maury in particular kept busy with him, since I'm out on the road.

"The only reason you stick up for that electric keyboard Hawaiian guitar," Maury said to me, "is because your dad and brother make the things. That's why you can't face the truth."

I answered, "You're using an ad hominem agreement."

"Talmud scholarism," Maury retorted. Obviously, he--all of them, in fact--were well-loaded; they had been sopping up the Ancient Age bourbon while I was out on the road driving the long hard haul.

"You want to break up the partnership?" I said. And I was willing to, at that moment, because of Maury's drunken slur at my father and brother and the entire Rosen Electronic Organ Factory at Boise with its seventeen full-time employees.

"I say the news from Vallejo and environs spells the death of our principal product," Maury said.