Read Ebook: The Romantic Analogue by Skupeldyckle W W Emshwiller Ed Illustrator

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Ebook has 144 lines and 7580 words, and 3 pages

"Yeah. What about it?"

"What about it! You ever see anything like it?"

"Sure. It's a closed loop, like a hysteresis curve."

"Of course, it has harmonics and variables in it. Might be one of those gas-discharge curves, if the gas tube happened to be defective. I've seen some funny...."

"You're crazy. All I can see is a closed loop with some wrinkles in it."

"Why, it's nearly as plain as a photograph! I can't understand...."

"Plain, my eye! If that's the arm hanging down, and this the hand, where are the fingers? That 'hand' is just an oval. You got some imagination if you can get a reclining figure out of that."

"Not a nude of the beer-garden type, I grant you. This is real art. Know what this means? Have you any idea how complex a formula must be to trace a curve like this? Just a plain hyperbola is bad enough. This is a test of the machine. Those Mugu boys have worked out this formula to see if she could break it down and draw the equivalent curve, though I don't see how they did it. Even the larger digitals would find this a tough nut to crack, but our baby is a whiz at curves, see? I wonder how they justified the machine-time on it. Of course it is barely possible that they derived the equation themselves, but it must have taken weeks if they did."

"Maybe it took us long as you say, but I still can't see any reclining figure in that curve. It's just a closed curve with some wiggles and bumps on it."

"In any case, I'm going to send this to Mugu right away. They'll want to know how long it took."

"I wouldn't, if I were you."

"Why not?"

"Maybe trouble developed in the machine. Better run some more cards through it first. But right now I'm going home. We're having a roast tonight. Say, why don't you come to supper with us? Alice would be delighted--she was just wondering what happened to you. I'll phone her...."

"No, no! I have to--look, I got to find out what this means, you see? It isn't that--explain it to Alice, will you? We need this contract, need all the work we can get, you understand?"

"Sure, sure. How about next week? OK? Well, see you in the morning." Charley left, grinning to himself as he closed the door behind him.

Norm didn't see the grin. He was already puzzled enough; ICWEA behaved herself perfectly on the next five cards, and kept her mind on her business. Meanwhile, Norm studied the first curve again. Funny Charley couldn't see it--the figure was puzzling at first, until you got the idea, but then it was so clear. Or was it?

Suddenly, he couldn't see it himself. He turned it upside down and sideways; it was just a funny closed curve, having neither mathematical nor structural significance. Maybe he was going crazy!

He threw the curve down on his desk and, soothed by the whirring of the tracer motor, fell into a brown study. Suddenly, the image of the brunette with the violet eyes appeared. No reclining nude, she; she shook her head in that habitual gesture and her long bob fell perfectly in place. She turned, with demurely downcast lashes and looked up at him with her violet eyes, and Norm came out of his trance with a start.

He removed the last curve--a simple hyperbolic curve, probably a problem in attenuation or decay of some kind--and put in the last punch-card. The machine started up immediately; the curve was elliptical. Then a vertical down-stroke, retraced and with a gentle half-loop added. It was writing! P-r-o-p-i-n-q.... What might this be? He watched, fascinated, as the letters continued. "Propinquity is the mother of love," it said, and stopped.

His trained mathematical logic gave him an immediate solution to the enigma: he was cracking up. It was utterly impossible to derive the equation to write "propinquity" in Spencerian script in less than a hundred man-hours, nor could a mathematical calculator be hired for so frivolous a purpose. It was fantastic, impossible; therefore, it was not so, and he was either dreaming or crazy. Maybe thinking about that little brunette.... Surely not; still, he had been driving himself pretty hard. In the morning he would be fresh and alert. If it were a trick, he'd catch the trickster. And if it turned out to be a perfectly logical curve, he'd see a doctor.

He left the curve in the machine, closed the ventilator in the wall over his desk, and turned on the burglar alarm. This was nothing so crude as a loose board with a switch, but a quite elaborate electronic circuit that produced a field near the door. It wouldn't work on ghosts, but if any material body entered that field, it would trip the alarm and start a regular Mardi Gras. Security required by government contracts hardly demanded so much, but for a small plant it was sufficiently cheap, and Charley had had a lot of fun with it. Charley! Have to keep him out, too; and being its daddy, he'd know how to disable the alarm. Of course, it would really be sufficient to tie a thread across the door which would break if anyone entered. He had no thread, but after a moment's thought, he pulled a three-cent stamp out of his bill-fold, and turned out the office-light. After glancing up and down the hall, he stuck the stamp on the door so that it would tear if the door opened.

In the morning, the stamp was still intact, and it was hard to see, even in broad daylight. The paper in the curve-tracer was perfectly blank, and there was no punch-card in the transmitter head. It might still be an elaborate joke, but the chances were small. He might be cracking up, or may have imagined the whole thing. The best thing to do would be to put it entirely out of his mind.

He succeeded in this until mid-morning, when ICWEA called him a "handsome devil." He jerked the punch-card out of the transmitter and called Vic.

"Hermosa."

That voice! It made chills run up and down his backbone. A man had no right to a voice like that. "Vic? Bring up the calculations for the last batch of punch-cards, will you? I want to check something. The card numbers are F-141 through F-152."

"Right away."

Vic wasn't especially gabby. A good-looking young Latin, who knew as much math as most, they'd probably lose him to the draft any day now. Presently, someone knocked on the door.

"Come in."

It wasn't Vic; it was the girl. She laid the pack of problems and their attached work-sheets on the desk, shook her hair into place--did she even have to comb it in the morning when she got up?--looked him briefly in the eye, and turned to go.

"How is Vic these days?" Norm inquired, whimsically. "Is he able to get about?"

The girl smiled politely at this obvious badinage and left.

He checked the problems against cards as he came to them. He knew the punch code well enough to do this in his head, since the kind of operation indicated was quite obvious. But the problems ended with F-151, and the "handsome devil" card was F-152. He got on the phone again.

"Vic? What's your next card number?"

"F-153." One expected a little guy to have a high voice; this one was quite deep, but soft.

"Are the cards numbered very far ahead?"

"We usually number a couple of dozen cards, and assign the numbers to the problems as they come in, from a scratch sheet."

"Any of the cards been lost?"

"Oh yes, on occasion. So far, we've recovered them all--there are only two rooms where they could be. Up there or down here."

The thing to do was to see Vic face to face. He called the office manager. "Henry? Send Vic Hermosa up there, will you? I want to talk to him."

"Vic Hermosa? He's in the Army. Didn't you know?"

"No, I didn't. Who is the guy that answers the phone in that fruity voice?"

Henry lowered his voice. "Guy? That's Vic's sister Virginia. She took Vic's place when he left. Simplified the security investigation, and she's good, too. About as good as Vic, I'd say."

"You mean to tell me a little girl like her could have a voice that deep?"

"Startling, isn't it? Of course, it's actually a low contralto or tenor, but you expect her to be a lyric soprano. Shall I send her up to see you?"

"No, no. I want to think a bit first. Say, who interviewed her?"

"Charley, I suppose. Just a formality, anyhow; the Hermosas and the Oglethorpes are neighbors, you know."

Wonderful stuff! Esoteric phenomena in a sealed office! His very own calculating machine made calculated love to him; his best friend was evasive, and the junior mathematician he thought he had been talking to every day for a couple of weeks was in the army. He might hammer away at all concerned until all the cards were accounted for, but that would disrupt office routine. Strategy, that was the thing! Be mighty peculiar if he couldn't break up this business, now that he had an idea what was going on.

But what hurt was the girl's being mixed up in it. He could take a rib from Charley, for instance, but the girl was practically a stranger--unfortunately. Women could be cruel, as his mother had often warned him. He thought of his mother's last year in the hospital and winced. She had sacrificed so much for him; and yet, was it really better to be a free bachelor than an old family man like Charley? There wasn't anything the matter with Alice that he could see. Charley loved her; that was plain.

Tonight should solve the thing, once and for all. He left the plant, speaking to everyone he met as he usually did. Then he sneaked back in, with the guard's help, and hid in his own office with the lights out.

His phone rang and he almost answered it before he remembered that he was supposed to be gone. The building was by no means deserted; probably there was someone working overtime in more than one department, though the main business for the day was finished. After a bit, the phone rang again, and he ignored it.

Waiting was hard. He couldn't read, so he let his mind wander: the next modification to ICWEA--what a romantic old thing she was! He needed a haircut: he'd have to get one tomorrow, before the hair grew down over his ears. What a voice that girl had--and those eyes! Would they get further work from Mugu? How could they contact other Government agencies? ICWEA was working out pretty good; would it be better to try to sell ICWEAs to anyone who wanted them, or to keep the old girl busy and work problems for others? Eventually, the former, though for the time being it might be better to continue as they were until the old girl was well known. Under present conditions, that shouldn't take--what was that hissing noise, a radiator?

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