We Can Build You

‘I closed my eyes and touched a volume of the encyclopedia, and it said ROCK TO SUBUD.’

‘You made a mistake,’ I told him. ‘You should have called yourself Maury Subud.’

The downstairs door of our building dates back to 1965 and ought to be replaced, but we just don’t have the funds. I pushed the door open, it’s massive and heavy but swings nicely, and walked to the elevator, one of those old automatic affairs. A minute later I was upstairs stepping out in our offices. The fellows were talking and drinking loudly.

‘Time has passed us by,’ Maury said at once to me. ‘Our electronic organ is obsolete.’

‘You’re wrong.’ I said.‘The trend is actually toward the electronic organ because that’s the way America is going in its space exploration: electronic. In ten years we won’t sell one spinet a day; the spinet will be a relic of the past.’

‘Louis,’ Maury said, ‘please look what our competitors have done. Electronics may be marching forward, but without us. Look at the Hammerstein Mood Organ. Look at the Waldteufel Euphoria. And tell me why anyone would be content like you merely to bang out music.’

Maury is a tall fellow, with the emotional excitability of the hyperthyroid. His hands tend to shake and he digests his food too fast; they’re giving him pills, and if those don’t work he has to take radioactive iodine someday. If he stood up straight he’d be six three. He’s got, or did have once, black hair, very long but thinning, and large eyes, and he always had a sort of disconcerted look, as if things are going all wrong on every side.

‘No good musical instrument becomes obsolete,’ I said. But Maury had a point. What had undone us was the extensive brain-mapping of the mid 1960s and the depth-electrode techniques of Penfield and Jacobson and Olds, especially their discoveries about the mid-brain. The hypothalamus is where the emotions lie, and in developing and marketing our electronic organ we had not taken the hypothalamus into account. The Rosen factory never got in on the transmission of selective-frequency short range shock, which stimulate very specific cells of the mid-brain, and we certainly failed from the start to see how easy – and important – it would be to turn the circuit switches into a keyboard of eighty-eight black and whites.

Like most people, I’ve dabbled at the keys of a Hammerstein Mood Organ, and I enjoy it. But there’s nothing creative about it. True, you can hit on new configurations of brain stimulation, and hence produce entirely new emotions in your head which would never otherwise show up there. You might – theoretically – even hit on the combination that will put you in the state of nirvana. Both the Hammerstein and Waldteufel corporations have a big prize for that. But that’s not music. That’s escape. Who wants it?

‘I want it,’ Maury had said back as early as December of 1978. And he had gone out and hired a cashiered electronics engineer of the Federal Space Agency, hoping he could rig up for us a new version of the hypothalamus-stimulation organ.

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 hominum 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. ‘Even with its six-hundred-thousand possible tone combinations, some never heard by human ears. You’re a bug like the rest of your family for those outer-space voodoo noises your electronic dungheap makes. And you have the nerve to call it a musical instrument. None of you Rosens have an ear. I wouldn’t have a Rosen electronic sixteen-hundred-dollar organ in my home if you gave it to me at cost; I’d rather have a set of vibes.’

‘All right,’ I yelled, ‘you’re a purist. And it isn’t six-hundred-thousand; it’s seven-hundred-thousand.’

‘Those souped-up circuits bloop out one noise and one only,’ Maury said, ‘however much it’s modified – it’s just basically a whistle.’

‘One can compose on it,’ I pointed out.

‘Compose? It’s more like creating remedies for diseases that don’t exist, using that thing. I say either burn down the part of your family’s factory that makes those things or damn it, Louis, convert. Convert to something new and useful that mankind can lean on during its painful ascent upward. Do you hear?’ He swayed back and forth, jabbing his long finger at me. ‘We’re in the sky, now. To the stars. Man’s no longer hidebound. Do you hear?’

‘I hear,’ I said. ‘But I recall that you and Bob Bundy were supposed to be the ones who were hatching up the new and useful solution to our problems. And that was months ago and nothing’s come of it.’

‘We’ve got something,’ Maury said. ‘And when you see it you’ll agree it’s oriented toward the future in no uncertain terms.’

‘Show it to me.’

‘Okay, we’ll take a drive over to the factory. Your dad and your brother Chester should be in on it; it’s only fair, since it’ll be them who produce it.’

Standing with his drink, Bundy grinned at me in his sneaky, indirect fashion. All this inter-personal communication probably made him nervous.

‘You guys are going to bring ruin down on us,’ I told him. ‘I’ve got a feeling.’

‘We face ruin anyhow,’ Maury said, ‘if we stick with your Rosen WOLFGANG MONTEVERDI electronic organ, or whatever the decal is this month your brother Chester’s pasting on it.’

I had no answer. Gloomily, I fixed myself a drink.

2 (#ulink_0739ecbc-de9e-542e-9613-642156dfeefc)

The Mark VII Saloon Model Jaguar is an ancient huge white car, a collector’s item, with fog lights, a grill like the Rolls, and naturally hand-rubbed walnut, leather seats, and many interior lights. Maury kept his priceless old 1954 Mark VII in mint condition and tuned perfectly, but we were able to go no faster than ninety miles an hour on the freeway which connects Ontario with Boise.

The languid pace made me restless. ‘Listen Maury,’ I said, ‘I wish you would begin explaining. Bring the future to me right now, like you can in words.’

Behind the wheel, Maury smoked away at his Corina Sport cigar, leaned back and said, ‘What’s on the mind of America, these days?’

‘Sexuality,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘Dominating the inner planets of the solar system before Russia can, then.’

‘No.’

‘Okay, you tell me.’

‘The Civil War of 1861.’

‘Aw chrissakes,’ I said.

‘It’s the truth, buddy. This nation is obsessed with the War Between the States. I’ll tell you why. It was the only and first national epic in which we Americans participated; that’s why.’ He blew Corina Sport cigar smoke at me. ‘It matured we Americans.’

‘It’s not on my mind,’ I said.

‘I could stop at a busy intersection of any big downtown city in the US and collar ten citizens, and six of those ten, if asked what was on their mind, would say, “The US Civil War of 1861.” And I’ve been working on the implications – the practical side – ever since I figured that out, around six months ago. It has grave meaning for MASA ASSOCIATES, if we want it to, I mean; if we’re alert. You know they had that Centennial a decade or so back; recall?’

‘Yes,’I said. ‘In 1961.’

‘And it was a flop. A few souls got out and refought a few battles, but it was nothing. Look in the back seat.’

I switched on the interior lights of the car and twisting around I saw on the back seat a long newspaper-wrapped carton, shaped like a display window dummy, one of those manikins. From the lack of bulge up around the chest, I concluded it wasn’t a female one.

‘So?’ I said.

‘That’s what I’ve been working on.’

‘While I’ve been setting up areas for the trucks!’