Rich and Famous (6 page)

There wasn't any point in arguing and I knew it. I didn't want to hear any more about it. “I'll be in my room reading,” I said.

So that was that. There wasn't any way out of it. He would put me on the train and Uncle Ned and Aunt Cynthia would capture me when I got off and keep me in prison for four weeks with Cousin Sinclair as the torturer.

And what about George Stable, The Boy Next Door? If I missed out on making a record and getting rich and famous because of Sinclair, I'd kill somebody—probably myself. I knew that before I went I'd better call up Woody Woodward and find out if the idea was hot, which would mean that it wasn't going to happen, or red hot, which would mean that it might happen sometime around Christmas, or so hot that it was on fire, which would mean that it might happen in a couple of months. So the next afternoon when Pop was up at
Smash Comics,
having his mistakes pointed out to him by Denise, I called up Woody.

“I was just checking to see if anything was happening,” I said.

“It's hotter than hot, baby,” he said. “It's fire engine time.”

“Great,” I said. “That means they might want to get going by fall.”

“Fall? Georgie this is moving like a jet of live steam. You aren't going off to camp or something, are you?”

“No,” I said. “The only thing is I might be upstate visiting my cousin for awhile.”

“For awhile? How long is that?”

“Oh, well. About a week I guess.”

“A whole week?” he said.

“A weekend, I meant to say.”

“Well, okay, but keep in touch. I may need you all of a sudden. When Superman moves, he moves fast.”

I
hung up and began to pray that Superman didn't decide to move for four weeks.

So the days went by. On Wednesday school got out. I packed an old beat-up suitcase Pop had on the closet shelf with my clothes and that night I went over to say goodbye to Stanky. “You louse,” I said. “Going to music camp when I have to be tortured by Sinclair.”

“Sorry about that,” he said. “Did you call up Woody Woodward?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It's hotter than a jet of live steam.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Probably nothing. You never can find out what anything means in this business.”

“What'll you do if they want you to make a record when you're up at Cousin Sinclair's?”

“Kill myself.”

“Tell me what you want on your gravestone.”

“I have to go,” I said, “or Pop will have a hemorrhage. Give me your address. If you're lucky I'll write you a letter with all the news from Sinclair's.”

“If I'm lucky I'll get a post card with your name on it,” he said. But he gave me his address on a scrap of paper and I said so long and left. And the next morning Pop took me up to Grand Central to put me on the train. It made my heart sink just to see it sitting there, and for a minute I thought about running—just taking off through the crowd and disappearing some place before Pop could catch me. But I wouldn't ever do something like that. So Pop bought me a coke and a bag of potato chips and a Heinlein book, which shows that he felt sorry for me, because he usually says that science fiction is intellectually feckless. The door clanged shut. I waved goodbye and so did he, and the train pulled out, and I was on my way to jail. I felt terrible and suddenly I realized that I'd never been away from Pop for more than a few days at a time, except that two weeks I was at camp when I was eight.

Chapter

After awhile I cheered up a little. We went up
through the Bronx and then out into the country, and I looked out the window at the sights. When I got tired of looking out the window, I drank my coke and spread potato chips all over my shirt, and read my Heinlein book. We were only a half an hour late getting there. Uncle Ned and Sinclair were standing in the waiting room watching me get off the train; and they drove me out to their house, which is in a little town called Pawling. Their house is a kind of old-fashioned, farm-housey kind of place. It was pretty nice if you liked that stuff. Uncle Ned was a math teacher at the high school, which partly explains why Sinclair was such a schmuck. If your father is a school teacher you have to be perfect or it reflects on him. I mean what a disappointment you'd be if you weren't perfect.

Well, the first day was okay because it was sort of new and that was interesting, but by the second day it was beginning to go downhill. Uncle Ned was sort of fat and bald. He had a habit of sitting behind his newspaper on the front porch and grunting. I mean every time he came across something in the newspaper that excited him, he'd give this kind of grunty “ummpphh.” Sometimes Aunt Cynthia would ask, “What's that, Ned?” and he'd report the big news that they were breaking ground for the new supermarket on Wednesday or that there was a foot of snow on Mount Washington still. But mostly he didn't explain the “ummpphhs.” He just pushed them out and let them hang there, and then after awhile he'd push out another one, and let that hang there, too.

But Uncle Ned was no problem, he didn't take much interest in me; and Aunt Cynthia was away at various church things and library meetings most of the time when she wasn't cooking, so she wasn't much of a problem, either. The problem was guess who. As I said, the first day wasn't so bad because of things being new. But the next morning, around the time that Denise and Pop were going out to Kennedy Airport to fly to Paris, he began in on me about his perfectness. Actually it was my own fault. Like a dummy, just to be polite and make conversation over our scrambled eggs, I asked him when he got out of school.

“Last week,” he said. “We haven't got our report cards yet but I imagine I'll get straight
A'
s. As usual.”

“That must be kind of dull,” I said. “I mean where's the suspense if you always know you're going to get A's in everything?”

“I can't help it,” he said. “I just seem to know the answers to all the questions. Of course, I've cultivated good study habits. The subject I hate most is Latin so I always do that right after I come home from school to get it out of the way. Then I practice the flute. It refreshes my mind. Then I do my exercises. I sent away for a bodybuilding course. The exercises are tailored to develop each muscle of the body individually. You can get muscle-bound if you're not careful.”

“That certainly would be a shame,” I said. I felt guilty about being sarcastic, but I couldn't help it anymore than Sinclair could help getting A's.

He didn't notice, though. “I do push-ups and sit-ups and work out with the dumbbells. You can borrow the book if you want. You're supposed to do the exercises in a certain sequence, though. Otherwise you might get muscle-bound.”

“I wouldn't want that,” I said. “Please pass the maple syrup.”

“Maple syrup? On your eggs?”

“Sure,” I said. “Don't you ever put maple syrup on your eggs? It's my usual thing.” That was a big fat lie. I'd never put maple syrup on my eggs in my life; I was just trying to get even. So I poured the syrup on, and took a bite. It tasted awful, but I acted like it was delicious. “So what else do you do for fun?”

“Oh, I'm afraid I've been sort of neglecting my homework. I've got into another project. I'm building a computer out in the barn.”

“A computer?” I wasn't sure I believed that.

“Sure,” he said. “All you have to know is a little calculus. You can see it after breakfast. I'll let you help if you think you can be careful. It's awfully delicate, you know.”

“I'll try my best,” I said.

It turned out to be true about the computer. They have a barn out back of the house which used to have horses and stuff in it fifty years ago when the place was still a farm or whatever it was, but now they used it for a garage and a place to stash the lawn mower and so forth. And up in the loft, where the hay used to be, Sinclair had a work bench and soldering irons and tiny screwdrivers and boxes full of radio tubes and transistors and wires and a lot of other stuff I didn't recognize. Beside it, sitting on its own table, was this huge mass of electronic things stuck
together.
“Does it work, Sinclair?”

“It isn't finished yet,” he said, “but it'll do quadratic equations already. Watch.” He pushed down some buttons he'd got from an old adding machine and after awhile the machine began to click and hum and a piece of paper curled out of a hole in the side. Sinclair looked it over. “Right on the nose,” he said.

“How can you be sure, Sinclair?”

“I did the problem in my head first.”

“You mean you can do math in your head faster than the computer can?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “Just simple things. Here, now if you want to help me, I'll show you what to do.”

“Maybe you'd rather shoot baskets,” I said.

“Oh, no,” he said. “My exercise course says that kind of workout doesn't do you any good—it just builds up the legs at the expense of the rest of your musculature.”

I was about to explain that maybe we could do it just for fun and never mind building up our musculature. But I didn't; there didn't seem to be much use in trying to explain about fun to Sinclair.

So that was the way it went. In the mornings we worked on Sinclair's computer. That is, I sat around watching him work on it and maybe about every half an hour I held a wire with a pair of pliers while he soldered it. In the afternoons I watched him do his exercises. In the evenings the fun was listening to Uncle Ned grunt along behind his paper. Oh, I'm exaggerating. Sometimes Uncle Ned took us over to some lake they have there and we would go swimming or water skiing. I got the hang of water skiing pretty quickly and in about an hour I was as good as Sinclair, which made him sore. “Your musculature is probably more advanced than mine at this stage,” he explained.

“Get stuffed, Sinclair,” I said. “I'm just a better athlete than you are.”

“Better is a relative term,” he said.

“Yes, indeedy,” I said. “And you're my relative.” It was a terrible joke, but I didn't care. It was nice being better than Sinclair at something. To be honest about it, I figured I was really smarter than Sinclair, too. But I didn't say so; I didn't have any proof.

Actually, sometimes I felt a little sorry for Sinclair. In one way it would be terrific to go around knowing that you were perfect, but in another way he seemed kind of out of it. He'd got
himself
computerized into doing everything right, and what was the fun in that? I figured some day I would try to persuade him into doing something bad for a change—eating with his fingers or leaving his clothes on the floor. I figured that if I told him it was mentally healthy for him to be rebellious every once in a while he might accept it. It would be something to relieve the boredom. But it wasn't going to be easy to persuade him to stop being perfect. He'd got into the habit of it, and a habit like that is hard to break.

But I had something more important on my mind than Sinclair's perfectness. I kept worrying about Woody Woodward. It wasn't likely that the thing was really going like a jet of live steam, but there was always the chance. Some way I had to get a phone call in to New York. I didn't want Uncle Ned or Aunt Cynthia listening in on the call. So I had to wait until everybody was out of the house. As far as Aunt Cynthia went, that was easy; she was gone most of the time to one of her meetings. But Uncle Ned was another problem. Because school was out he was around a lot—and of course Sinclair was around every waking minute.

But I had to do it, and I kept watching for my chance. Finally, about the fifth day I was there, we were out in the barn working on the computer, when I heard Uncle Ned's VW start up. Aunt Cynthia was already out somewhere.

“Sinclair,” I said, “I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Hurry up,” he said. “I want to get all these wires soldered so we can test some problems in analytic geometry.”

I climbed down out of the loft and ran into the house. The phone was in the front hall. I found the phone book and worked out the numbers for dialing New York, and put the call through. There was the usual humming and buzzing and then the receptionist came on and said, “Woodward and Hayes.”

“Is Woody around?” I asked. “This is George Stable.”

“Oh boy,” she said. “Where have you been? He's been going nuts looking for you.”

A cold chill went over the back of my head, and in about five seconds Woody was on. “George, I've been trying to get hold of you for days. Where the hell are you?”

“Up in Pawling.”

“Well, get your little tail down here as fast as you can. This thing is hotter than molten lava. I want you in my office this afternoon at two o'clock punto.”

“Don't start stammering on me now, George. I've put two years into this, baby, just be
here.”