Robert Heinlein - Waldo

‘I'm never in a hurry,' Grimes commented, ‘and don't call Waldo's house "Wheelchair" - not to his face.

‘I'll remember,' Stevens promised. He fumbled, apparently in empty air; the hull suddenly became dead black, concealing them. It changed as suddenly to mirror bright; the car quiv­ered, then shot up out of sight

Waldo F. Jones seemed to be floating in thin air at the centre of a spherical room. The appearance was caused by the fact that he was indeed floating in air. His house lay in a free orbit, with a period of just over twenty-four hours. No spin had been impressed on his home; the pseudo gravity of centri­fugal force was the thing he wanted least. He had left Earth to get away from its gravitational field; he had not been down to the surface once in the seventeen years since his house was built and towed into her orbit; he never intended to do so for any purpose whatsoever

Here, floating free in space in his own air-conditioned shell, he was almost free of the unbearable lifelong slavery to his impotent muscles. What little strength he had he could spend economically, in movement, rather than in fighting against the tearing, tiring weight of the Earth's thick field

Waldo had been acutely interested in space flight since early boyhood, not from any desire to explore the depths, but be­cause his boyish, overtrained mind had seen the enormous ad­vantage, to him, in weightlessness. While still in his teens he had helped the early experimenters in space flight over a hump by supplying them with a control system which a pilot could handle delicately while under the strain of two or three gravi­ties

Such an invention was no trouble at all to him; he had simply adapted manipulating devices which he himself used in combating the overpowering weight of one gravity. The first successful and safe rocket ship contained relays which had once aided Waldo in moving himself from bed to wheelchair

The deceleration tanks, which are now standard equipment for the lunar mail ships, traced their parentage to a flotation tank in which Waldo habitually had eaten and slept up to the time when he left the home of his parents for his present, somewhat unique home. Most of his basic inventions had originally been conceived for his personal convenience, and only later adapted for commercial exploitation. Even the ubi­quitous and grotesquely humanoid gadgets known universally as ‘waldocs' - Waldo F. Jones's Synchronous Reduplicating Pantograph, Pat #296,001,437,new series, et al - passed through several generations of development and private use in Waldo's machine shop before he redesigned them for mass production. The first of them, a primitive gadget compared with the waldoes now to be found in every shop, factory, plant, and warehouse in the country, had been designed to enable Waldo to operate a metal lathe

Waldo had resented the nickname the public had fastened on them-.I It struck him as overly familiar, but he had coldly recognized the business advantage to himself in having the public identify him verbally with a gadget so useful and im­portant

When the newscasters tagged his spacehouse ‘Wheelchair', one might have expected him to regard it as more useful pub­licity. That he did not so regard it, that he resented it and tried to put a stop to it, arose from another and peculiarly Waldo-ish fact: Waldo did not think of himself as a cripple

He saw himself not as a crippled human being, but as some­thing higher than human, the next step up, a being so superior as not to need the coarse, brutal strength of the smooth apes. Hairy apes, smooth apes, then Waldo - so the progression ran in his mind. A chimpanzee, with muscles that hardly bulge at all, can tug as high as fifteen hundred pounds with one hand. This Waldo had proved by obtaining one and patiently enrag­ing it into full effort. A well- developed man can grip one hundred and fifty pounds with one hand. Waldo's own grip, straining until the sweat sprang out, had never reached fifteen pounds

Whether the obvious inference were fallacious or true, Waldo believed in it, evaluated by it. Men were overmuscled canaille, smooth chimps. He felt himself at least ten times superior to them

He had much to go on

Though floating in air, he was busy, quite busy. Although be never went to the surface of the Earth his business was there. Aside from managing his many properties he was in regular practice as a consulting engineer, specializing in motion analy­sis. Hanging close to him in the room were the paraphernalia necessary to the practice of his profession. Facing him was a four-by-five colour-stereo television receptor. Two sets of co­ordinates, rectilinear and polar, crosshatched it. Another smaller receptor hung above it and to the right. Both receptors were fully recording, by means of parallel circuits conveni­ently out of the way in another compartment

The smaller receptor showed the faces of two men watching him. The larger showed a scene inside a large shop, hangar-like in its proportions. In the immediate foreground, almost full size, was a grinder in which was being machined a large casting of some sort. A workman stood beside it, a look of controlled exasperation on his face

‘He's the best you've got,' Waldo stated to the two men in the smaller screen. ‘To be sure, he is clumsy and does not have the touch for fine work, but he is superior to the other morons you call machinists.

The workman looked around, as if trying to locate the voice. It was evident that he could hear Waldo, but that no vision receptor had been provided for him. ‘Did you mean that crack for me?' he said harshly

‘You misunderstand me, my good man,' Waldo said sweetly. ‘I was complimenting you. I actually have hopes of being able to teach you the rudiments of precision work. Then we shall expect you to teach those butter-brained oafs around you. The gloves, please.

Near the man, mounted on the usual stand, were a pair of primary waldoes, elbow length and human digited. They were floating on the line, in parallel with a similar pair physically in front of Waldo. The secondary waldoes, whose actions could be controlled by Waldo himself by means of his primaries, were mounted in front of the power tool in the position of the operator

Waldo's remark had referred to the primaries near the work­man. The machinist glanced at them, but made no move to insert his arms in them. ‘I don't take no orders from nobody I can't see,' he said flatly. He looked sideways out of the scene as he spoke

‘Now, Jenkins,' commenced one of the two men in the smaller screen

Waldo sighed. ‘I really haven't the time or the inclination to solve your problems of shop discipline. Gentlemen, please turn your pickup, so that our petulant friend may see me.

The change was accomplished; the workman's face appeared in the background of the smaller of Waldo's screens, as well as in the larger. ‘There - is that better?' Waldo said gently. The workman grunted

‘Now....our name, please?

‘Alexander Jenkins.

‘Very well, friend Alec - the gloves.

Jenkins thrust his arms into the waldoes and waited. Waldo put his arms into the primary pair before him; all three pairs, including the secondary pair mounted before the machine, came to life. Jenkins bit his lip, as if he found unpleasant the sensation of having his fingers manipulated by the gauntlets he wore

Waldo flexed and extended his fingers gently; the two pairs of waldoes in the screen followed in exact, simultaneous paral -lelism. ‘Feel it, my dear Alec,' Waldo advised. ‘Gently, gently- the sensitive touch. Make your muscles work for you.' He then started hand movements of definite pattern; the waldoes at the power tool reached up, switched on the power, and began gently, gracefully, to continue the machining of the cast­ing. A mechanical hand reached down, adjusting a vernier, while the other increased the flow of oil cooling the cutting edge. ‘Rhythm, Alec, rhythm. No jerkiness, no unnecessary movement. Try to get in time with me.