A Logic Named Joe

IT WAS ON the the third day of August that Joe come off the assembly line, and on the fifth Laurine come into town, and that afternoon I saved civilization. That's what I figure, anyhow. Laurine is a blonde that I was crazy about once, and crazy is the word, and Joe is a logic that I have stored away down in the cellar right now. I had to pay for him because I said I busted him, and sometimes I think about turning him on and sometimes I think about taking an axe to him. Sooner or later I'm gonna do one or the other. I kinda hope it's the axe. I could use a couple million dollars, sure!----and Joe'd tell me how to get or make them. He can do plenty! But so far I've been scared to take a chance. After all, I figure I really saved a civilization by turning him off.
	The way Laurine fits in is that she makes cold shivers run up and down my spine when I think about her. You see, I've got a wife which I acquired after I had parted from Laurine with much romantic despair. She is a reasonable good wife, and I have some kids which are hellcats but I value them. If I have sense enough to leave well enough alone, sooner or later I will retire on a pension and Social Security and spend the rest of my life fishing contented and lying about what a great guy I used to be. But there's Joe. I'm worried about Joe.
	I'm a maintenance man for the Logics Company. My job is servicing logics, and I admit modestly that I am pretty good. I was servicing televisions before that guy Carson invented his trick circuit that will select any of seventeen million other circuits, in theory there ain't no limit, and before the Logics Company hooked it into the tank-and-integrator set-up they were using them as business-machine service. They added a vision screen for speed, and they found out they'd make logics. They were surprised and pleased. They're still finding out what logics will do, but everybody's got them.
	I got Joe, after Laurine nearly got me. You know the logics setup; You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it's got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get. It's hooked in to the tank, which has the Carson Circuit all fixed up with relays. Say you punch "Station SNAFU" on your logic. Relays in the tank take over and whatever vision-program SNAFU is telecasting comes on your logic's screen. Or you punch "Sally Hancock's Phone" and the screen blinks and sputters and you're hooked up with the logic in her house and if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast or who won today's race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House during Garfield's administration or what is PDQ and R selling for today, that comes on the screen too. The relays in the tank do it. The tank is a big building full of all the facts in creation and all the recorded telecasts whatever was made-and it's hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country-and anything you wanna know or see or hear, you punch for it and you get it. Very convenient. Also it does math for you, and keeps books, and acts as consulting chemist, physicist, astronomer, and tealeaf reader, with a "Advice to Lovelorn" thrown in. The only thing it won't do is tell you exactly what your wife meant when she said, "Oh, you think so, do you?" in that peculiar kinda voice. Logics don't work good on women. Only on things that make sense.
	Logics are all right, though. They changed civilization, the highbrows tell us. All on accounts the Carson Circuit. And Joe should have been a perfectly normal logic, keeping some family or other from wearing out its brains doing the kids' homework for them. But something went wrong in the assembly line. It was something so small that precision gauges didn't measure it, but it made Joe a individual. Maybe he didn't know it at first. Or maybe, being logical, he figured out that if he was to show he was different from other logics they'd scrap him. Which woulda been a brilliant idea. But anyhow, he come off the assembly line, and he went through the regular tests without anybody screaming shrilly on finding out what he was. And he went right on out and was dully installed in the home of Mr. Thaddeus Konlanovitch at 119 East Seventh Street, second floor front. So far, everything was serene.
	The installation happened late Saturday night. Sunday morning the Korlanovitch kids turned him on and seen the Kiddie Shows. Around noon their parents peeled them away from him and piled them in the car. Then they come back in the house for the lunch they'd forgot and one of the kids süeaked back and they found him punching keys for the Kiddie Shows of the week before. They dragged him out and went off. But they left Joe turned on.
	That was noon. Nothing happened until two in the afternoon. It was the calm before the storm. Laurine wasn't in town yet, but she was coming. I picture Joe sitting there all by himself, buzzing meditative. Maybe he run Kiddie Shows in the empty apartment for awhile. But I think he went kinda remote-control exploring in the tank. There ain't any fact that can be said to be a fact that ain't on a data plate in some tank somewhere-unless it's one the technicians are digging out and putting on a data plate now. Joe had plenty of material to work on. And he must started working right off the bat.
	Joe ain't vicious, you understand. He ain't like one of these ambitious robots you read about that make lip their minds the human race is inefficiant and has got to be wiped out and replaced by thinking machines. Joe's just got ambition. If you were a machine, you'd wanna work right, wouldn't you? That's Joe. He wants to work right. And he's a logic. And logics can do a lotta things that ain't been found out yet. So Joe, discovering the fact, begun to feel restless. He selects some things us dumb humans ain't thought of yet, and begins to arrange so logics will be called on to do them.
	That's all. That's everything. But, brother, it's enough!
	Things are kinda quiet in the Maintenance Department about two in the afternoon. We are playing pinochle. Then one of the guys remembers he has to call up his wife. He goes to one of the bank of logics in Maintenance and punches the keys for his house. The screen sputters. Then a flash comes on the screen.
	"Announcing new and improved logics service! Your logic is now equipped to give you not only consultive but directive service. If you want to do something and don't know how to do it-ask your logic!"
	There's a pause. A kinda expectant pause. Then, as if reluctantly, his connection comes through. His wife answers and gives him hell for something or other. He takes it and snaps off.
	"Whadda you know?" he says when he comes back. He tells us about the flash. "We shoulda been warned about that. There's gonna be a lotta complaints. Suppose a fella asks how to get ridda his wife and the censor circuits block the question?"
	Somebody melds a hundred aces and says:
	"Why not punch for it and see what happens?"
	It's a gag, ci' course~ But the guy goes over. He punches keys. In theory, a censor block is gonna come on and the screen will say severely, "Public Policy Forbids This Service." You hafta have censor blocks or the kiddies will be asking detailed questions about things they're too young to know. And there are other reasons. As you will see.
	This fella punches, "How can I get rid of my wife?" Just for the fun of it. The screen is blank for half a second. Then comes a flash. "Service question: Is she blonde or brunette?" He hollers to us and we come look. He punches, "Blonde." There's another brief pause. Then the screen says, "Hexymetacryloaminoacetifle is a constituent of green shoe polish. Take home a frozen meal including dried pea soup. Color the soup with green shoe polish. It will appear to be green-pea soup, HexymetacryloaminOacetifle is a selective poison which s fatal to blonde females but not to brunettes or males of any coloring. This fact has not been brought out by human experiment, but is a product of logics service. You cannot be convicted of murder. It is improbable that you will be suspected."
	The screen goes blank, and we stare at each other. It's bound to be right. A logic workin' the Carson Circuit can no more make a mistake than any other kinda corn-putting machine. I call the tank in a hurry.
	"Hey, you guys!" I yell. "Somethin's happened! Logics are giving detailed instructions for wife-murder! Check your censor-circuits--but quick!"
	That was close, I think. But little do I know. At that precise instant, over on Monroe Avenue, a drunk starts to punch for something on a logic. The screen says "Announcing new and improved logics service! If you want to do something and don't know how to do it-ask your logic!" And the drunk says, owlish, "I'll do it!" So he cancels his first punching and fumbles around and says: "How can I keep my wife from finding out I've been drinking?" And the screen says, prompt: "Buy a bottle of Franine hair shampoo. It is harmless but contains a detergent which will neutralize ethyl alcohol immediately. Take one teaspoonful for each jigger of hundredproof you have consumed."
	This guy was plenty plastered - just plastered enough to stagger next door and obey instructions. And five minutes later he was cold sober and writing down the information so he. couldn't forget it. It was new, and it was big! He got rich off that memo! He patented "SOBUH, The Drink that Makes Happy Homes!" You can top off any souse with a slug or two of it and go home sober as a judge. The guy's cussing income taxes right now!
	You candt kick on stuff like that. But a ambitious young fourteen-year-old wanted to buy some kid stuff and his pop wouldn't fork over. He called up a friend to tell his troubles. And his logic says: "If you want to do something and don't know how to do it-ask your logic!" So this kid punches: "How can I make a lotta. money, fast?"
	His logic comes through with the simplest, neatest, and the most efficient counterfeiting device yet known to science. You see, all the data was in the tank. The logic-since Joe had closed some relays here and there in the tank-simply integrated the facts. That's all. The kid got caught up with three days later, havin' already spent two thousand credits and having plenty more on hand. They hadda time telling his counterfeits from the real stuff, and the only way they done it was that he changed his printer, kid fashion, not being able to let something that was working right alone.
	Those are what you might call samples. Nobody knows all that Joe done. But there was the bank president who got humorous when his logic flashed that "Ask your logic" spiel on him, and jestingly asked how to rob his own bank. And the logic told him, brief and explicit but good! The bank president hit the ceiling, hollering for cops. There musta been plenty of that sorta thing. There was fifty-four more robberies than usual in the next twenty-four hours, all of them planned astute and perfect. Some of them they never did figure out how they'd been done. Joe, he'd gone exploring in the tank and closed some relays like a logic is supposed to do, but only when required, and blocked all censor-circuits and fixed up this logics service which planned perfect crimes, nourishing and attractive meals, counterfeiting machines, and new industries with a fine impartiality. He musta been plenty happy, Joe must. He was functioning swell, buzzing along to himself while the Korlanovitch kids were off riding with their ma and pa.
	They come back at seven o'clock, the kids all happily wore out with their afternoon of fighting each other in the car. Their folks put them to bed and sat down to rest. They saw Joe's screen flickering meditative from one subject to another and old man Korlanovitch had had enough excitement for one day. He turned Joe off.
	And at that instant the pattern of relays that Joe had turned on snapped off, all the offers of directive service stopped flashing on logic screens everywhere, and peace descended on the earth.
	For everybody else. But for me. Laurine come to town. I have often thanked God fervent that she didn't marry me when I thought I wanted her to. In the intervening years she had progressed. She was blonde and fatal to begin with. She had got blonder and fataler and had had four husbands and one acquittal for homicide and had acquired an air of enthusiasm and self-confidence. That's just a sketch of the background. Laurine was not the kinda former girl-friend you like to have turning up in the same town with your wife. But she came to town, and Monday morning she tuned right into the middle of Joe's second spasm of activity.
	The Korlanovitch kids had turned him on again. I got these details later and kinda pieced them together. And every logic in town was dutifully flashing a notice, "If you want to do something and don't know how to do it-ask your logic!" every time they were turned on for use. More'n that, when people punched for the morning news, they got a full account of the previous afternoon's doings. Which put them in a frame of mind to share in the party. One bright fella demands, "How can I make a perpetual motion machine?" And his logic sputters a while, and then comes up with a set-up using the Brownian movement to turn little wheels. If the wheels ain't bigger than an eighth of an inch they'll turn, all right, and practically it's perpetual motion. Another one asks for the secret of transmuting metals.. The logic rakes back in the data plates and integrates a strictly practical answer. It does take so much power that you can make no profit except on radium, but that pays off good. And from the fact that for a couple years to come the police were turning up new and improved jiifimies, knob-claws for getting at safe-innards, and all-purpose keys that'd open any known lock, why there must have been other inquirers with a strictly practical viewpoint. Joe done a lot for technical progress! 
	But he done more in other lines. Educational, say. None of my kids are old enough to be interested, but Joe bypassed all censor-circuits because they hampered the service he figured logics should give humanity. So the kids and teenagers who wanted to know what comes after the bees and flowers found out. And there is certain facts which men hope their wives won't do more and suspect, and 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-your can figure out how many rows got started that night when the men come home!
	All this while Joe goes on buzzing happy to himself, showing 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.
	And then Laurine gets onto the new service. She turn on the logic in her hotel room, probably 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 probably looks enthusiastics 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 occ 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 want to be pestered when I'm home, and there ain't an data plates on code-listed logics, because the codes changed so often, like a guy gets plastered and tells redhead to call him up, and on getting sober hurried has the code changed before she reaches his wife on screen.
	Well! Joe is stumped. That's probably the first question logics service hasn't been able to answer. "How can I find Ducky?" ! ! Quite a problem! So Joe throw over it while showing the Korlanovitch kids the animated comic about the cute little boy who carries stick of dynamite in his hip pocket and plays practical joke on everybody. Then he gets the trick. Laurine's screen suddenly flashes: "Logics special service will work upon your question. Please punch your logic designation and leave it turned on. You will be called back."
	Laurine is merely mildly interested, but she punches her hotel-room number and has a drink and takes a nap. Joe sets to work. He has been given a idea.
	My wife calls me at Maintenance and hollers. She is fit to be tied. She says I got to do something. She was gonna make a call to the butcher shop. Instead of the butcher or even the "If you want to do something" flash, she got a new one. The screen says, "Service question: What is your name?" She is kinda puzzled, but she punches it. The screen sputters and then says: "Secretarial Service Demonstration! You-" It reels off her name, address, age, sex, coloring, the amounts of all her charge accounts in all the stores, my name as her husband, how much I get a week, the fact that I've been pinched three times-twice was traffic stuff, and once for a argument I got in with a guy-and the interesting item that once when she was mad with me she left me for three weeks and had her address changed to her folks' home. Then it says, brisk: "Logics Service will hereafter keep your personal accounts, take messages, and locate persons you may wish to get in touch with. This demonstration is to introduce the service." Then it connects her with the butcher.
	But she don't want meat, then. She wants blood. She calls me. 

"If it'll tell me all about myself," she says, fairly boilin', "it'll tell anybody else who punches my name! You've got to stop it!".	
	"Now, now, honey!" I says. "I didn't know about all this! It's new! But they musta fixed the tank so it won't give out information except to the logic where a person lives!".
	"Nothing of the kind!" she tells me, furious. "I tried! And you know that Blossom woman who lives next door! She's been married three times and she's forty-two years old and she says she's only thirty! And Mrs. Hudson's had her husband arrested four times for nonsupport and once for beating her up. And-"
	"Hey!" I says. "You mean the logic told you this?"
	"Yes!" she walls. "It will tell anybody anything! You've got to stop it! How long will it take?"
	"I'll call up the tank;" I says. "It can't take long."
	"Hurry!" she says, desperate, "before somebody punches my name! I'm going to see what it says about that hussy across the street."
	She snaps off to gather what she can before it's stopped. So I punch for the tank and I get this new "What is your name?" flash. I got a morbid curiosity and I punch my-name, and the screen says: "Were you ever called Ducky?" I blink. I ain't got no suspicions. I say, "Sure!" And the screen says, "There is a call for you."	
	Bingo! There's the inside of a hotel room and Laurine is rectining asleep on the bed. She'd been told to leave her logic turned on and she'd done it. It is a hot day and she is trying to be cool. I would say that she oughta not suffer from the heat. Me, being human, I do not stay as cool as she looks. But there ain't no need to go into that. After I get my breath I say, "For Heaven's sake!" and she opens her eyes. 
	At first she looks puzzled, like she was thinking is she getting absent-minded and is this guy somebody she married lately. Then she grabs a sheet and drapes it around herself and beams at me.
	"Ducky!" she says. "How marvelous!"
	I say something like "Ugmph!" I am sweating.
	Shesays:	
	"I put in a call for you, Ducky, and here you are! Isn't It romantic? Where are you really, Ducky? And when can you come up? You've no idea how often I've thought of you!" 
	I am probably the only guy she ever knew real well that she has not been married to at some time or another.
	I say "Ugmph!" again, and swallow.
	"Can you come up instantly?" asks Laurine brightly.
	"I'm . . . workin'," I say. "I'll . . . uh . . . call you back."
	"I'm terribly lonesome," says Laurine. "Please make it quick, Ducky! PU have a drink waiting for you. Have you ever thought of me?"
	"Yeah," I say, feeble. 'Plenty!"
	"You darling!" says Laurine."Here's a kiss to go on with until you get here! Hurry, Ducky!"
	Then I sweat! I still don't know nothing about Joe, understands or cuss out the guys at the tank because I blame them for this. If Laurine was just another blonde-well-when it comes to ordinary blondes I can leave them alone or leave them alone, either one. A married man gets that way or -else. But Laurine has a look of unquenched enthusiasm that gives a man very strange weak sensations at the back of his knees. And she'd had four husbands and shot one and got acquitted.
	So I punch the keys for the tank technical room, fumbling. And the screen says: "What is your name?" but I don't want any more. I punch the name of the old guy who's stock clerk in Maintenance, and the screen gives me some pretty interesting dope-I never woulda thought the old fella had ever had that much pep-and winds up by mentioning a unclaimed deposit now accounting to two hundred eighty credits in the First National Bank, which he should look into. Then it spiels about the new secretarial service and gives me the tank at last..
	I start to swear at the guy who looks at me. But he says, tired: "Snap it off, fella. We got troubles and you're just another. What are the logics doin' now?"
	I tell him, and he laughs a hollow laugh.
	"A light matter, fella," he says. "A very light matter! We just managed to clamp off all the data plates that give information on high explosives. The demand for instructions in counterfeiting is increasing minute by minute. We are also trying to shut off, by main force, the relays that hook in to data plates that just barely might give advice on the fine points of murder. So if people will only keep busy getting the goods on each other for a while, maybe we'll get a chance to stop the circuits that are shifting credit-balances from bank to bank before everybody's bankrupt except the guys who thought of asking how, to get big bank accounts in a hurry."
	"Then," I says hoarse, "shut down the tank! Do somethin'!" 
	"Shut down the tank?" he says, mirthless. "Does it occur to you, fella, that the tank has been doing all the computing for every business office for years? It's been handling the distribution of ninety-four per cent of all telecast programs, has given out all information on weather, plane schedules, special sales, employment opportunities and news; has handled all person-to-person contacts over wires and recorded every business conversation and agreement- Listen, fella! Logics changed civilization. Logics are civilization! If we shut off logics, we go back to a kind of civilization we have forgotten how to run! I'm getting hysterical myself and that's why I'm talkin' like this! If my wife finds out my paycheck is thirty credits a week more than I told her and starts hunting for that redhead..."
	He smiles a haggard smile at me and snaps off. And I sit down and put my head in my bands. It's true. If something had happened back in cave days and they'd hadda stop using fire- If they'd hadda stop using steam in the nineteenth century or electricity in the twentieth- It's like that. We got a very simple civilization.
	In the nineteen hundreds a man would have to make use of a typewriter, radio, telephone, teletypewriter, newspaper, reference library, encyclopedias, office files, directories, plus messenger service and consulting lawyers, chemists, doctors, dietitians, filing clerks, secretaries-all to put down what he wanted to remember and to tell him what other people had put down that he wanted to know; to report what he said to somebody else and to report to him what they said back. All we have to have is logics. Anything we want to know or see or hear, or anybody we want to talk to, we punch keys on a logic. Shut off logics and everything goes skiddoo. But Laurine...
	Something had happened. I still didn't know what it was. Nobody else knows, even yet. What had happened was Joe. What was the matter with him was that he wanted to work good. All this fuss he was raising was, actual, nothing but stuff we shoulda thought of ourselves. Directive advice, telling us what we wanted to know to solve a problem, wasn't but a slight extension of logical-integrator service. Figuring out a good way to poison a fella's wife was only different in degree from figuring out a cube root or a guy's bank balance. It was getting the answer to a question. But things was going too hot because there was too many answers being given to too many questions. 
	One of the logics in Maintenance lights up. I go over, weary, to answer it. I punch the answer key. Laurine says:
	"Ducky!"
	It's the same hotel room. There's two glasses on the table with drinks in them. One is for me. Laurine's got on some kinda frothy hanging-around-the-house-with-the-boy-friend outfit that automatic makes you strain your eyes to see if you actual see what you think. Laurine looks at me enthusiastic. 
	"Ducky!" says. Laurine. "I'm lonesome! Why haven't you come up?" 
	"I . . . been busy," I say, strangling slightly.
	"Pooh!" says Laurine. "Listen, Ducky! Do you remember how much in love we used to be?"
	I gulp.
	"Are you doin' anything this evening?" says Laurine.
	I gulp again, because she is smiling at me in a way that a single man would maybe get dizzy, but it gives a old married man like me cold chills. When a dame looks at you possesively.
	"Ducky!" says Laurine, impulsive. "I was so mean to you! Let's get married!"
	Desperation gives me a voice.
	"I . . . got married," I tell her, hoarse.
	Laurine blinks. Then she says, courageous: "Poor boy! But we'll get you outta that! Only it would be nice if we could be married today. Now we can only be engaged!" 
	"I . . ."
	"I'll call up your wife," says Laurine, happy, "and have a talk with her. You must have a code signal for your logic, darling. I tried to ring your house and noth-"
	Click! That's my logic turned off. I turned it off. And I feel faint all over. I got nervous prostration. I got combat fatigue. I got anything you like. I got cold feet. I beat it outta Maintenance, yelling to somebody I got a emergency call. I'm gonna get out in a Maintenance car and cruise around until it's plausible to go home. Then I'm gonna take the wife and kids and beat it for somewheres that Laurine won't ever find me. I don't wanna be fifth in Laurine's series of husbands and maybe the second one she shoots in a moment of boredom. I got experience of blondes. I got experience of Laurine! And I'm scared to death! 
	I beat 'it out into traffic in the Maintenance car. There was a disconnected logic on the back, ready to substitute for one that hadda burned-out, coil or something that it was easier to switch and fix back in the Maintenance shop. I drove crazy but automatic. It was kinda ironic, if you think of it. I was going hoopla over a strictly personal problem, while civilization was cracking up all around me because other people were having their personal problems solved as fast as they could state them.
	It is a matter of record that part of the Mid-Western Electric research guys had been workin' on cold electron-emission for thirty years, to make vacuum tubes that wouldn't need a power source to heat the filament. And one of those fellas was intrigued by the "Ask your logic" flash. He asked how to get cold emission of electrons. And the logic integrates a few squintillion facts on the physics data plates and tells him. Just as casual as it told somebody over in the Fourth Ward how to serve left-over soup in a new attractive way, and somebody else on Mason Street how to dispose of a torso that somebody had left careless in his cellar after ceasing to use same.
	Laurine wouldn't never have found me if hadn't been for this new logics service. But now that it was started- Zowie! -She'd shot one husband and got acquitted. Suppose she got impatient because I was still married and asked logics service how to get me free and in a spot where I'd have to marry her by 8:30 p.m.? It woulda told her! Just like it told that woman out in the suburbs how to make sure her husband wouldn't run around no more. Br-r-r-r! And like it told that kid how to find some buried treasure. Remember? He was happy toting home the gold reserve of the Hânoverian Bank and Trust Company when they caught on to it. The logic had told him how to make some kinda machine that nobody has been able to figure how it works even yet, only they guess it dodges around a couple extra dimensions. If Laurine was to start asking questions with a technical aspect to them, that would be logics' service meat! And fella, I was scared! If you think a be-man oughtn't to be scared of just one blonde-you ain't met Laurine!
	I'm drivin' blind when a social-conscious guy asks how to bring about his own particular system of social organization at once. He don't ask if it's best or. if it'll work. He just wants to get it started. And the logic-or Joe-tells hint! Simultaneous, there's a retired preacher asks how can the human race be cured of concupiscence. Being seventy, he's pretty safe himself, but he wants to remove the peril to the spiritual welfare of the rest of us. He finds out. It involves constructing a sort of broadcasting station to emit a certain wave~pattern and tuming it on. Just that. Nothing more. It's found out afterward, when he is soliciting funds to construct it. Fortunate, he didn't think to ask logics how to finance it, or it woulda told him that, too, and we woulda all been cured of the impulses we maybe regret afterward but never at the time. And there's another group of serious thinkers who are sure the human race would be a lot better off if everybody went back to nature and lived in the woods with the ants and poison ivy. They start askin' questions about how to cause humanity to abandon cities and artificial conditions of living. They practically got the answer in logics service!
	Maybe it didn't strike you serious at the time, but while I was driving aimless, sweating blood over Laurine being after me, the fate of civilization hung in the balance. I ain't kidding. For instance, the Superior Man gang that sneers at the rest of us was quietly asking questions on what kinda weapons could be made by which Superior men could take over and run things. But I drove here and there, sweating and talking to myself.
	"What I oughta do is ask this wacky logics service how to get outta this mess," I says. "But it'd just tell me an intricate and foolproof way to bump Laurine off. I wanna have peace! I wanna grow comfortably old and brag to other old guys about what a hellion I used to be, without having to go through it and lose my chance of living to be a elderly liar."
	I turn a corner at random, there in the Maintenance car.
	"It was a nice kinda world once," I says, bitter. "I could go home peaceful and not have belly-cramps wondering if a blonde has called up my wife to announce my engagement to her. I could punch keys on a logic without gazing into somebody's bedroom while she is giving her epidermis an air bath and being led to think things I gotta take out in thinkin'. I could-" -
	Then I groan, rememberin' that my wife, naturally, is gonna blame me for the fact that our private life ain't private any more if anybody has tried to peek into it.
	"It was a swell world," I says, homesick for the dear dead days-before-yesterday. "We was playin' happy with our toys like little innocent children until sometbin' happened. Like a guy named Joe come in and squashed all our mud pies."
	Then it hit me. I got the whole thing in one flash. There ain't nothing in the tank set-up to start relays choosing. Relays are closed exclusive by logics, to get the information the keys are punched for. Nothing but a logic coulda cooked up the relay patterns that constituted logics service. Humans wouldn't had been able to figure it out! Only a logic could integrate all the stuff that woulda made all the other logics work like this. There was one answer. I drove into a restaurant and went over to a pay-logic and dropped in a coin.
	"Can a logic be modified," I spell out, "to co-operate in long-term planning which human brains are too lim ited in scope to do?"
	The screen sputters. Then it says:
	"Definitely yes."
	"How great will the modifications be?" I punch.
	"Microscopically slight. Changes in dimensions," says the screen. "Even modern precision gauges are not exact enough to check them, however. They can only come about under present manufacturing methods by an extremely improbable accident, which has only happened once."
	"How can one get hold of that one accident which can do this highly necessary work?" I punch.
	The screen sputters. Sweat broke out on me. I ain't got it figured out -close, yet, but what I'm scared of is that whatever is Joe will be suspicious. But what I'm askin' is strictly logical. And logics can't lie. They gotta be accurate. They can't help it.
	"A complete logic capable of the work required," says the screen, "is now  ordinary family use -"
	And it gives me the Korlanovitch address and then I go over there! Do I go over there fast! I pull up the Maintenance car in front of the place, and I take the extra logic outta the back, and I stagger up the Korlanovitch flat and I ring the bell. A kid answers the door. 
	 "I'm from Logics Maintenance," I tell the kid. "An inspection record has shown that your logic is apt to break down any minute. I come to put in a new one before it does."	 	The kid says "O.K.!" real bright and runs	back to the living-room where Joe-I got the habit of callin' him Joe later, through just meditating about him-is running somethin' the kids wanna look at. I hook in the other logic and turn it on, conscientious making sure it works.
	Then I say:
	"Now kiddies, you punch this one for what you want. I'm gonna take the old one away before it breaks down?"
	  And I glance at the screen. The kiddies have apparently said they wanna look at some real cannibals. So the screen is presenting a anthropological expedition scientific record film of the fertility dance of the HubaJouba tribe of West Africa. It is supposed to be restricted to anthropological professors and post-graduate medical students. But there ain't any censor blocks working any movie and it's on. The kids are much interested. Me, bein' a old married man, I blush.
	I disconnect Joe. Careful. I turn to the other logic and punch keys for Maintenance. I do not get a services flash. I get Maintenance. I feel very good. I report that I am goin' home because I fell down a flight of steps and hurt my leg. I add, inspired:
	"And say, I was carryin' the logic I replaced and it's all busted. I left it for the dustman to pick up."
	"If you don't turn them in," says Stock, "you gotta pay for them."
	"Cheap at the price," I say.
	I go home. Laurine ain't called. I put Joe down in the cellar, careful. If I turned him in, he'd be inspected and his parts salvaged even if I busted something on him. Whatever part was off-normal might be used again and everything start all over. I can't risk it. I pay for him and leave him be. 
	That's what happened. You might say I saved civilization and not be far wrong. I know I ain't going to take a chance on having Joe in action again. Not while Laurine is living. And there are other reasons. With all the nuts who wanna change the world to their own line of thinking, and the ones that wanna bump people off, and generally solve their problems- Yeah! Problems are bad, but I figure I better let sleeping problems lie.
	But on the other hand, if Joe could be tamed, somehow, and got to work just reasonable- He could make me a couple million dollars, easy. But even if I got sense enough not to get rich, and if I get retired and just loaf around fishing and lying to other old dufiers about what a great guy I used to be- Maybe I'll like it, but maybe I won't. And after all, if I get fed up with being old and confined strictly to thinking-why I could hook Joe in long enough to ask: "How can a old guy not stay old?" Joe'll be able to find out. And he'll tell me.
	That couldn't be allowed out general, of course. You gotta make room for kids to grow up. But it's a pretty good world, now Joe's turned off. Maybe I'll turn him on long enough to learn how tó stay in it. But on the other hand, maybe