IT WAS on a July Monday that Little Sister was under his window, very early, with a big box in her arms. The vapor cover that day was pink, as indeed it would be for all of July, as set by the Central Vapor Shield Control and the Vapor Light Saving people. The temperature was controlled to a pleasant 70 degrees F. inside and outside, and he, as usual, was working on a formula.
“My little playmate came,” she shouted, “my little sister! Come see.”
He, plastic-legged and iron-x “replaced,” arose from his hip-snuggie chair and went to the edge of his door. “What’s the nonsense?” he asked, metal-fogged and weary. “Why aren’t you napping? Or behaving with Mox?” Mox was her iron man who looked after her needs like a mother, in the red plastic hut where she lived apart from other folk while awaiting the age of “replacements.”
“It’s my little companion!” Little Sister shrieked. “I sent for her. She came today, in the mail.”
He rubbed his eyes with the backs of his gold-seal hands. He tried to think across the metal fields. A man of Advanced Times, he had submitted to many iron-x, and a few gold-seal “replacements” since coming up from Olderan, in a move toward durability, in a move to conquer immortality for the corporeal self. But sometimes this metal self, that was fast becoming his main self, dominated the flesh-strips to such an extent that he found it difficult to force thoughts to track the petty paths of everyday. Across the pathless fields of the high dimensions he was a keen hot hound on the scent of formulae. With what was left of his family, Little Sister, he sometimes found it hard going even to converse on plain terms. “Tell me slowly,” he pleaded.
She took a deep breath. Her good full chest swelled in a triumph of flesh and bone. Her brown eyes were sparkle-bright when she said, “I mustn’t grow up alone, even if I am the last little girl. As I await the age of ‘replacement’ I must have a companion, which same just came in the mail, Daddy. And you will put her together, Daddy, so we can play. I have named her already—Little Slots.”
Slots was a box full of slotted metal, a few wires, some power wafers, many tapes, a head, various curved pieces of white plastic, certain parts that were almost flesh and the printed sheet of directions. Slots was a pile of junk and a headache confronting a man dedicated to solitude, eternity and calm, companionless thinking on universal deep problems. Slots as she was, unassembled, had cost five hundred thousand dollars cash—by gift certificate from the Organization for the Entertainment of Little Flesh People.
There was a clatter in his joints, of metal scraping on metal and the wincing of the flesh-strips, as he knelt to one knee there on the gray bare yard and took up the box that contained Slots. He opened the box and saw a wax-warm face smirking up at him, an enigmatic face that could have been a nine-year-old girl’s face, or a much older girl’s face, made of plastic and wreathed in real hair. The mechanical mouth tumbled open and beautifully formed white teeth gleamed out of the rubbery lips. “I’ll bite your big feet off if you aren’t good to me,” the beautiful flirtatious head threatened right away, mechanically and pleasantly enough. Then a clamor started up, “Change the tape, change the tape . . .”
He jumped like a bucket full of the sun had just come high-boiling down through all those miles, through all the pink vapor shield, to spill on a jot of his flesh. When he jumped, pieces of Slots and the box in which she had been mailed scattered fanwise across the gray yard. But the head sitting smiling in the middle of the scattered pieces had a tape for the situation. “Butterfingery old cold widower and a half-wit moron girl,” it said. Then it spent about five minutes bouncing up and down on the plastic yard sheet and screaming, “Shame, shame . . . foul, foul . . . save me, save me!” After that the head, very businesslike, rolled about picking up its parts and slotting everything together until a pleasingly tall and slim fair girl of metal and white plastic stood smiling in the cool rose glow of the pink vapor shield of July. “Well, and where’s the bogs?” She deftly stooped to tear out the white nylo-wov lining of the box in which she had been mailed. She wrapped the long piece of snowy cloth about her in such a way that it was tastefully full and loose in places and taut across other places to enhance her fine plastic curves. “Always pays to please the bogs.”
“The bogs?” said Little Sister, bewildered and still somewhat dazed by the performance she had just seen. “What do you mean, bogs?”
“The oggosite rex. Like the meg for the wogen . . . Damn! faulty tape.” She made a sour face. Then she said with a throaty voice and a new clear tape, “I mean where are the boys? The opposite sex. Like the men for the women. I’m a girl!” She smiled.
“You’re to be my little playmate until I’m ready for ‘replacements,’ ” said Little Sister, simply and with a heart full of love for the warm metal and plastic thing towering over her. “I’ve got ever so many card-wov cut-out dollies. You can have one. And two changes of clothes for her. Today!” Little Sister’s face shone beatific from the beautiful gesture and the open-hearted strain of such hard giving. “And I’ll let you color a little with my ray spray, if you’ll promise, cross your heart, not to bust it.”
Slots was coldly eyeing Little Sister, distaste and boredom and pitying amusement in every stare. “Aw go grow up!” She was gritty voiced with the tape for the occasion. “I’m here to play with your dad. I think.” Little Sister was near to tears.
But Father, eager as ever, he thought, to get the silly diversion over with, get Little Sister back to her place and himself in his hip-snuggie chair for more formula thinking, had been scientifically and purposefully reading the directions, after he had recovered from the initial shock of hearing Slots talk and seeing her put herself together. He remembered that the first of these dolls was at least ten years old now, and the idea for them was much much older, and all this helped him regain his confidence in the all-rightness of things. When he came to the CAUTION part of the instructions, he just slipped over quickly, caught Slots firmly by an arm, took the long sections out of her legs and proceeded to secure her range-change to the place calibrated LITTLE-GIRL-PLAYMATE-COMPANION. “We ship them from our factory on BIG-GIRL-LOVEMATE-DIVERSION,” the directions stated, “the calibration of widest versatility and greatest demand. But they function quite as well on LITTLE-GIRL-PLAYMATE-COMPANION, if wired to it securely after first being relieved of the long sections of the legs.” And Slots, down to Little Sister size now, was busily rewinding her dress to make up for her new status in stature. Then she said, a little dully it seemed, with the tape for the occasion, “Let’s go play cut-outs. And really, I’d love to use your ray-spray coloring thing, if I may.”
So Little Sister and Little Slots went arm-in-arm off across the gray plastic yard toward Little Sister’s red hut, and Father, with the long sections of legs tucked firmly under one arm, hastened fast as he could back to his hip-snuggie chair and his big desk for thinking. But just as he feared might be the case, he found that he was not now thinking clean on universal deep problems. YES! he had this other problem now that would have to be solved before he could get his heart out of the bumps and jumps and back to universal cool-gear smoothness. Oh, why did these things have to happen? Why couldn’t Little Sister have just behaved with Mox, her iron man, instead of ordering this silly doll playmate? But Father, like the dogged fighter he had always been, did not dodge the issue; he got right to grips with the problem, even if his heart was not yet quite as smooth and reliable as it should have been. Then too he had to work with a mind that was really not much good now at pertinent flesh-type questions, but he would decide. YES! Should he order a doll of his own, or just change the legs back and forth on this one when Little Sister was sleeping?