Lone said, ‘Well suppose you got to use it there, then what?’
‘You ‘spect me to go on askin’ him silly questions all night? ’
‘All right, he can’t answer like you said.’
‘He can too!’ Her facts impugned, Janie went to the task with a will. The next answer was, ‘Put great big wide wheels on it.’
‘Suppose you ain’t got money nor time nor tools for that?’
This time it was, ‘ Make it real heavy where the ground is hard and real light where the ground is soft and anything in between.’
Janie very nearly went on strike when Lone demanded to know how this could be accomplished and reached something of a peak of impatience when Lone rejected the suggestion of loading and unloading rocks. She complained that not only was this silly, but that Baby was matching every fact she fed him with every other fact he had been fed previously and was giving correct but unsolicited answers to situational sums of tyres plus weight plus soup plus bird’s nests, and babies plus soft dirt plus wheel diameters plus straw. Lone doggedly clung to his basic question and the day’s impasse was reached when it was determined that there was such a way but it could not be expressed except by facts not in Lone’s or Janie’s possession. Janie said it sounded to her like radio tubes and with only that to go on, Lone proceeded by entering the next night a radio service shop and stealing a heavy armload of literature. He bulled along unswerving, unstoppable, until at last Janie relinquished her opposition because she had not energy for it and for the research as well. For days she scanned elementary electricity and radio texts which meant nothing to her but which apparently Baby could absorb faster than she scanned.
And at last the specifications were met: something which Lone could make himself, which would involve only a small knob you pushed to make the truck heavier and pulled to make it lighter, as well as an equally simple attachment to add power to the front wheels—according to Baby a sine qua non.
In the half-cave, half-cabin, with the fire smoking in the centre of the room and the meat turning slowly in the up-draft, with the help of two tongue-tied infants, a mongoloid baby and a sharp-tongued child who seemed to despise him but never failed him, Lone built the device. He did it, not because he was particularly interested in the thing for itself, nor because he wished to understand its principles (which were and would always be beyond him), but only because an old man who had taught him something he could not name was mad with bereavement and needed to work and could not afford a horse.
He walked most of the night with it and installed it in the dim early hours of the morning. The idea of ‘pleasant surprise’ was far too whimsical a thing for Lone but it amounted to the same thing. He wanted it ready for the day’s work, without any time lost by the old man prancing around asking questions that he couldn’t answer.