“That’s
all very well,” Edwards said. “Very noble and
stirring. But you’re going to have to earn a
living; you’re
going to have to get a job and support your family.
Without a security clearance you won’t be designing
missiles here or anywhere else. Nobody with a Govern
ment contract will hire you.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing,
too. I’m a little tired of
building
bombs.”
“Monotony
got you?”
“I like to call it awakening
conscience. Some of the things that have happened to me have changed my
ways of thinking. Jarred me out of my rut, as
they say.”
“Oh,
yes,” Edwards said vaguely. “The accident.”
“I’ve seen a lot of aspects of
reality I didn’t realize
existed. I’ve come
out of this with an altered perspec
tive.
Maybe it takes a thing like this to break down the
walls of the groove. If so, it makes the whole
experience
worth it”
Behind
him in the corridor came the sound of sharp,
staccato heel-taps. Marsha, breathless and glowing, hur
ried up and took hold of his arm. “We’re
ready to go,”
she told him
eagerly.
“And the important thing,”
Hamilton said to Colonel T. E. Edwards, “has been settled. Marsha was
telling the truth; that’s what I care about. I can always get another job, but
wives are scarce.”
“What
do you think you’ll do?” Edwards persisted,
as Hamilton and his wife started down the corridor.
“I’ll
drop you a card,” Hamilton said, over his shoul
der. “On Company letterhead.”
“Darling,” Marsha said
excitedly, as they descended the front steps of the California Maintenance Building
and started along the concrete walk, “the trucks are starting to show up
already. They’re beginning to un
load.”
“Fine,” Hamilton said,
gratified. That’ll make a good showing when we go to work on the old bat.”
“Don’t
talk like that,” Marsha said anxiously, squeezing his arm. “I’m
ashamed of you.”
Grinning, Hamilton helped her into
the car. “From now on I’m going to be perfectly honest with everybody,
say exactly what I think, do exactly what I feel
like. Life’s too short for anything else.”
Exasperated,
Marsha complained, “You and Bill—I’m
beginning to wonder where this will wind up.”
“We’ll be rich,” Hamilton
told her gaily, as he drove
out onto the
highway. “Mark my words, sweetheart. You
and Ninny will be lapping
up dishes of cream and
sleeping on silk
pillows.”
Half an hour later, the two of them
stood on a rise of uncleared ground, critically studying the small corrugated-iron
shed that Hamilton and Laws had leased.
Equipment
was heaped up in gigantic plywood cartons;
a string of ponderous-moving
trucks were backed up at
the rear loading
platform.
“One
of these days,” Hamilton said reflectively, “little
shiny square boxes with knobs and dials will be
coming
off that platform. Trucks will be picking up stuff, not
dropping it off.”
Striding toward them, his lean body
hunched against the brisk autumn wind, came Bill Laws, a bent, unlit
cigarette stuck between his thin lips, hands
shoved deep
in his pockets. “Well,” he began wryly, “it
isn’t much, but it’s going to be a lot of fun. We may go down, but we’ll go
down having one hell of a good tune.”
“Jack
just said we were going to be rich,” Marsha said,
disappointed,
lips drawn together in a mocking pout.
“That comes later,” Laws
explained. “That’s when
we’re too old
and broken-down to have any fun.”
“Has Edith Pritchet showed
up?” Hamilton inquired.
“She’s hanging around
somewhere.” Laws gestured
vaguely. I
saw her Cadillac parked up the road apiece.”
“Does
it run?”
“Oh, yes,” Laws asserted.
“It runs very well. We’re
definitely
not in
that
world, any more.”
A small boy, not over eleven, came
scampering excitedly up. “Whatcha gonna build?” he demanded.
“Rockets?”
“No,” Hamilton answered.
“Phonographs. So people
can listen to
music. It’s the coming thing.”
“Gee,”
the boy said, impressed. “Hey, last year I built a one-tube,
battery-operated, headphone-type receiver.”
“That’s a good start”
“And now I’m building a TRF
tuner.”
“Fine,” Hamilton told him.
“Maybe well give you a job. Assuming, of course, that we don’t have to
print
our own money.”
Picking
her way gingerly over the not-yet-landscaped
ground, came Mrs. Edith
Pritchet She was wrapped in
a heavy fur
coat, and an elaborate hat sat on her henna-
rinsed curls. “Now, don’t bother Mr. Laws and Mr. Ham
ilton,”
she instructed her son. “They’ve got a great deal
to worry about”
Sulkily, David Pritchet retired.
“We were discussing
electronics.”
That’s a large amount of equipment
you’ve pur
chased,” Mrs. Pritchet said
doubtfully to the two men.
“It
certainly must have cost a lot of money.”
“We’re going to need it,”
Hamilton said. “We’re not
assembling
amplifiers from standard parts; we’re design
ing and building our own components, from condensers
up to
transformers. Bill has schemata on a new kind of frictionless cartridge. It
should make quite a hit on
the hi-fi market—guaranteed
absolutely no record wear.”
“You
degenerates,” Marsha said, amused. “Catering to the whims of the
leisure class.”
“I think,” Hamilton said,
“that music is here to stay.
The
question is: how do we handle it? Operating a hi-fi
rig is getting to be
an art in itself. These sets we’ll be
turning
out will take as much skill to run as to build.”
“I
can see it now,” Laws said, grinning. “Slender young
men
sitting on the floors of their North Beach apartments, rapturously tuning knobs
and switches, as the
incredibly authentic
roar of freight engines, snow storms,
trucks
unloading scrap iron, and other recorded oddities
thunder out”
“I’m not so sure about
this,” Mrs. Pritchet said du
biously.
“You two seem so—eccentric.”
“This is an eccentric
field,” Hamilton informed her.
“Worse
than fashions. Worse than catering for stag parties. But immensely
rewarding.”
“But
can you be certain,” Mrs. Pritchet persisted, “that
your venture will be a financial success? I don’t
like to
invest unless I’m assured of
a reasonable return.”
“Mrs.
Pritchet,” Hamilton said severely, “it seems to
me I once heard you say you wanted to be a
patroness of the arts.”
“Oh
heavens,” Mrs. Pritchet assured him, “there’s
nothing more vital to society than a firm
sponsorship of
cultural activities.
Life without the great artistic heritage
created by generations of inspired geniuses—”
Then you’re doing the right
thing,” Hamilton told
her. “You’ve
brought your loot to the right place.”
“My
—
”
“Your lute,” Bill Laws
said. “You’ve brought your lute to the right place. We’re in the music
business; with our rigs, the masses are going to hear music like they’ve never
heard before. At hundreds of undistorted watts. At tens of thousands of cycles
flat. It’s a cultural
revolution.”
Putting
his arm around his wife, Hamilton hugged her
enthusiastically against
him. “How does it look to you,
honey?”
“Fine,” Marsha gasped.
“But be careful of me—my
burns,
remember.” “You think it’ll be a success?”
“I
certainly do.”
“That should satisfy anybody,” Hamilton said to Mrs.
Pritchet, as he released his wife.
“Right?”
Still
doubtful, Edith Pritchet fumbled in her volumin
ous purse for her checkbook. “Well, it seems to be a good
cause.”
“It’s
a good cause, all right,” Hamilton agreed. ” ‘Cause
if we don’t get the money, we won’t be able to
operate.”
With a sharp snap, Mrs. Pritchet closed her purse.
“Perhaps I had better not get myself
involved.”
“Don’t pay any attention to
him,” Marsha urged quickly. “Neither of them knows what he’s
saying.”
“All right,” Mrs. Pritchet
agreed, finally convinced. With great care and precision, she made out a check
underwriting their initial expenses. “I expect to get this
back,” she said sternly, as she handed the
check to Laws.
“As per the terms of our agreement”
“You
will,” Laws said. And immediately leaped back
in pain. Clutching
his ankle, he bent angrily down and
crushed
something small and wriggling with his thumb.
“What
is it?” Hamilton demanded.
“An
earwig. Crawled up my sock and bit me.” Grinning
uneasily, Laws added, “Just a
coincidence.”
“We
hope
you’ll get your money back,” Hamilton explained to Mrs.
Pritchet, just to be on the safe side. “We
can’t promise,
naturally. But we’ll do our best”
He waited, but nothing bit or stung
him.
“Thank God,” Marsha
breathed, with a glance at the
check.
Heading
eagerly toward the corrugated-iron shed,
Bill Laws yelled, “What
are we waiting for? Let’s get
to work!”