But he done more in other lines. Educational, say. None of my kids are old enough to be int’rested, but Joe bypassed all censor-circuits because they hampered the service he figured logics should give humanity. So the kids an’ teen-agers who wanted to know what comes after the bees an’ flowers found out. And there is certain facts which men hope their wives won’t do more’n suspect, an’ those facts are just what their wives are really curious about. So when a woman dials: “How can I tell if Oswald is true to me?” and her logic tells her—you can figure out how many rows got started that night when the men come home!

All this while Joe goes on buzzin’ happy to himself, showin’ the Korlanovitch kids the animated funnies with one circuit while with the others he remote-controls the tank so that all the other logics can give people what they ask for and thereby raise merry hell.

An’ then Laurine gets onto the new service. She turns on the logic in her hotel room, prob’ly to see the week’s style-forecast. But the logic says, dutiful: “If you want to do something and don’t know how to do it—ask your logic!” So Laurine prob’ly looks enthusiastic—she would!—and tries to figure out something to ask. She already knows all about everything she cares about—ain’t she had four husbands and shot one?—so I occur to her. She knows this is the town I live in. So she punches, “How can I find Ducky?”

O.K., guy! But that is what she used to call me. She gets a service question. “Is Ducky known by any other name?” So she gives my regular name. And the logic can’t find me. Because my logic ain’t listed under my name on account of I am in Maintenance and don’t want to be pestered when I’m home, and there ain’t any data plates on code-listed logics, because the codes get changed so often—like a guy gets plastered an’ tells a redhead to call him up, an’ on gettin’ sober hurriedly has the code changed before she reaches his wife on the screen.



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