Herman and the Professor
Herman and the Professor
Who the hell was Herman, wondered Mr. Fredericks, a rather impatient patent attorney. As if in answer to his silent question, the old man said, "Herman was the janitor in the Medical Arts Building. He was as helpful as could be." The old man smiled wistfully across Mr. Frederick's desk. "He and I used to sit together in my office and drink coffee. He was very useful in life, and he turned out to be even more useful after he had passed away."
Mr. Fredericks wished he could get rid of the old man. He wished he was rid of Herman, too. Retired college professors, he was beginning to see, had as much time as energetic housewives to spend on contrivances.
"Herman was a very large man, and a very strong one. He would have died much sooner if he hadn't been so strong. I don't know where I would have gotten a brain large enough if he had died before I convinced him to will his body to the Medical Arts Center."
Mr. Fredericks formed the opinion that the old man's brain, large or small, had slipped off the old fashioned cog railway on which it was accustomed to ride. He was here to look at time-saving, money-making devices, and felt that dead janitors were quite out of his realm.
"I remember the time I gave him 100 milligrams of Bufofenin. He hopped around the room, and then he ran into the little bathroom in back of my office and did something which I thought was very unusual. Then he ran back into my office and started rolling on the floor (it was good he had just scrubbed it, or he would have gotten all dirty). In a few minutes he ran into the bathroom again and did---it---again. He ran into my office to say something to me, but then he had to do---it---once more. When he didn't come out of the bathroom in a few minutes, I went in and found him on the floor. He was lucky there was no one else around. He would have found it very difficult to explain his actions. He could have gotten into trouble. I learned a lot about the effect of Bufofenin that way."
Mr. Fredericks played with his automatic pencil sharpener. It was battery operated, but a long electrical cord stretched from it to a socket in the wall. The old man went on, "I remember once I thought I had found a cure for corns." He shook his head sadly. "Poor Herman wasn't able to walk for six days. Then I thought I had a cure for hemorrhoids---"
Mr. Fredericks said something that wasn't very kind, but since the old man was used to unkindnesses from the younger generation, he didn't take it to heart.
"After Herman died, I sawed off the top of his skull---"
Mr. Fredericks waved the old man to continue talking. He had found that waving to silence him hadn't worked. Mr. Fredericks sharpened two more pencils that had been needle-sharp to start with.
"---no trouble with the medulla oblongata, since I had no interest in the cardiac, vasomotor, or respiratory centers which---"
Mr. Fredericks interrupted the old man: "Did you leave your electrical device in the outer office?"
The old man brought his hand to his face. "Oh, my, no. It's much too big. You'll have to come to see it, I suppose." Mr. Fredericks frowned as the old man kept talking. He wasn't angry because the old man wanted him to visit the machine (that was unthinkable in any case), but because his false wall outlet could not be used to silence the old man. Few in the past had stayed long after their wonder failed to work from the same outlet the pencil sharpener seemed to work from so well.
Mr. Fredericks wasn't listening, but he fell into the rhythm of the old man's speech. It was just like listening to his wife at the dinner table. He heard what he hoped were catch phrases, and repeated them: "Of COURSE, you must have been lonely."
He didn't like telling these foolish people their inventions were useless. He had rigged little devices, like the false wall socket, to discourage their crazy contraptions.
"---contacts small enough. You have no idea now small---"
Mr. Fredericks tapped the small switch under his desk which turned on the powerful electromagnet in his desk drawer. That could be relied upon to demoralize any inventor of a gadget which couldn't "benefit from" his phony outlet.
He put "a five-hundred power microscope, imagine that" where it would sound good, and blew an inconspicuous stack of emery dust off his desk. That sometimes came in handy, too.
The second hand on the clock rotated a few dozen more times when Mr. Fredericks looked up to see the old man panting in memory of moving so many cartons of vacuum tubes into his laboratory. "I couldn't afford transistors, you see?" And the old man wandered on in his maze of rheostats, crossed wires, and small flashlight bulbs.
Mr. Fredericks found his mouth suddenly dry, and thirsted mightily for his noon Manhattan. "But what did you DO with it?" he asked in despair, when he heard his inquisitor detailing the trouble of locating points on whatever it was he was locating points on.
"I localized sections of input and output and used the normal channels of the brain to process the problem."
Mr. Fredericks could hardly be blamed for thinking the old fellow had been wasting his time. "So you've invented another Frankenstein by trying to create life from the brain of an idiot? You've filled your cellar with junk all leading into a dead hunk of gray material? Next you'll be telling me that it talks to you and tells you what to do next."
"But I told you I tried to save the glossopharyngeal nerve only for the purpose---"
"I don't care what you did with your glossy fingeral nerve."
"Glossopharyngeal," murmured the old man.
"I should report you to the ASPCA, or whatever agency takes care of dead janitors. Stop wasting my time."
The old man sighed and said, "Good afternoon, then, Mr. Fredericks, I'm sorry we can't do business." He slipped a remarkable smooth hand into Mr. Fredericks', and walked out of the room. Slowly he walked home and unlocked the door. Without taking his coat off he followed the familiar path to the cellar door and walked down the stairs. The sounds of the air conditioning system filled the room, and small winks and blinks slid over the arrays of flashlight bulbs. What looked like an elaborate phonograph amplifier was propped up in the corner. The impact of his steps on the wooded stairs seemed to jostle the mechanism and a small hum came from the speaker.
"Why wouldn't Mr. Fredericks believe me? I've talked to two people already. The first one laughed at me, and the second one got angry. What should I do now?"
One by one, ammeter needles began to arc across the dial while small pulses of electricity traveled as fast as thought from the microphone to the interpreter to the translator to the disassembler to the lump of protoplasm to the assembler to the power pack, through the glossopharynx to the loudspeaker: "De third time am de charm, boss."