“What I oughta do is ask this wacky logics service how to get outa this mess,” I says. “But it’d just tell me a 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 havin’ to go through it an’ lose my chance of livin’ 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 wonderin’ 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 a 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 somethin’ 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 closin’. Relays are closed exclusive by logics, to get the information the keys are punched for. Nothin’ but a logic coulda cooked up the relay patterns that constituted logics service. Humans wouldn’t ha’ 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 an’ dropped in a coin.
“Can a logic be modified,” I spell out, “to cooperate in long-term planning which human brains are too limited in scope to do?”
The screen sputters. Then it says:
“Definitely yes.”