was disappointed at that, since at the back of my mind I had planned to take them with me—or with us—wherever I might go in my thought bus.
Still sitting on my old bed-and-desk was the artificial fruit that Mary Lou had picked for me at the zoo.
I took the fruit and stuffed it into the side pocket of my jeans. I looked around the room. There was nothing else in it that I wanted. I left, slamming the door shut behind me. I had decided where to go.
While I was replacing the wires in the thought bus by the light from a streetlamp outside, I looked up to see a fat, balding man staring at me. He must have come up while I was working, without my seeing him. His face was puffy and characterless, with a stoned inwardness that was, for a moment, shocking to see. I realized after a moment that it was not really different from hundreds of faces I had seen before, but that there were two things different now about my way of looking at him: I was no longer concerned with Privacy, and consequently I examined him more closely than I might have a year before; and I was used to being close to the Baleens and, although they took drugs too, their faces did not have the arrogant stupidity about them that most ordinary people had.
After I had stared at him a moment he lowered his eyes and began looking at his feet. I turned back to the wires I was reattaching to the bus’s servo, and I heard him speaking in a gravelly voice. “That’s illegal,” he was saying. “Tampering with Government Property.”
I did not even look back at him. “What government?” I said.
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “That’s
I turned around and looked at him. I was holding a wrench in my right hand, and I was sweating a bit. I looked right in his eyes, and at his idiotic, mindless, pasty face. “If you don’t get away from me right now,” I said, “I’ll kill you.”
His jaw went slack and he stared at me.
“Move, you fool,” I said. “Right now.”
He turned and walked away. I saw him reach in his pocket and pull out some pills and begin swallowing them, holding his head back. I felt like throwing the wrench at him.
I finished refastening the wires and then got into the bus and told it to take me to the Burger Chef on Fifth Avenue.
She was not in the Burger Chef; but I had not really expected her to be. The place looked different to me somehow, and then I realized that it was the booths. Two of them had been taken out altogether and almost all of the rest were badly charred. There must have been several immolations since I had last been there.
I went to the counter and told the female Make Two to give me two algaeburgers and a glass of tea from the samovar. She got them, a bit slowly, and set them down on the counter, waiting. Suddenly I realized what she was waiting for: my credit card. And I didn’t have one, had forgotten all about them.
“I don’t have a credit card,” I said to her.
She looked at me with that stupid robot look—the same look the guards at the prison always had on their faces—and then she picked up the tray again, turned, and began carrying it over toward a trash bin.
I shouted at her, “Stop! Bring that back!”
She stopped, turned slightly, then turned back again toward the trash bin. She began moving toward it again, more slowly.
“Stop, you idiot!” I shouted. Then, hardly thinking about it, I climbed over the counter, walked quickly over to her, and put my hand on her shoulder. I turned her around facing me, and took the tray from her. She merely looked at me stupidly for a moment, and then somewhere in the ceiling of the room an alarm bell began to ring furiously.
I climbed quickly back over the counter and started to leave, when I saw a big heavy moron robot in a green uniform coming toward me from a back room somewhere. He was like the one at the zoo, and he began to say, “You are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent…”
“Bug off, robot,” I told him. “Get back in the kitchen and leave the customers alone.”
“You are under arrest,” he said, but more weakly this time. He had stopped moving.
I walked up to him and looked into his empty, nonhuman eyes. I had never looked at a robot that closely before, having been brought up to fear and respect them. And I became aware, looking at his stupid, manufactured face, that I was seeing for the first time what the significance of this dumb parody of humanity really was: nothing, nothing at all. Robots were something invented once out a blind love for the technology that could allow them to be invented. They had been made and given to the world of men as the weapons that nearly destroyed the world had once been given, as a “necessity.” And, deeper still, underneath that blank and empty face, identical to all the thousands of faces of its make, I could sense contempt—contempt for the ordinary life of men and women that the human technicians who had fashioned it had felt. They had given robots to the world with the lie that they would save us from labor or relieve us from drudgery so that we could grow and develop inwardly. Someone must have hated human life to have made such a thing—such an abomination in the sight of the Lord.
This time I spoke to him—to
And the robot turned and walked away from me.
I looked over at the four or five people who were sitting, each in his own booth, in the Burger Chef. Every one of them had his shoulders drawn up and his eyes closed, in complete Privacy Withdrawal.
I left quickly and was relieved to be back in my thought bus. I told it silently to take me to the Bronx Zoo, to the House of Reptiles. “Gladly,” it said.
All of the lights were out at the zoo. The moon had begun to rise. I had my kerosene lantern lit when the bus pulled up in front of the door of the House of Reptiles. The air was cool on my skin, but I did not put on a jacket.
The door was not locked. When I opened it and came into the room I could hardly recognize my surroundings. That was partly because of the eeriness of the weak kerosene light in the place but also because of the fact that there were white cloths or some kind of towels hanging over the tops of the cases on the back wall.
I looked on the bench where Mary Lou had slept. She was not there. There was an odd smell in the room— warm and sweet. And the room itself was warm and stuffy, as though the temperature had been turned up. I stood still for a while, trying to accustom myself to the altered place in the dim light. I could not see any reptiles in the cases; but the light was poor. The python case looked strange, and there was something humped in the middle of it.
I found a switch on the wall, turned the lights on, and stood there blinking at the brightness.
And then a voice came from in front of me: “What the hell…?”
It was Mary Lou. The hump in the floor of the case had rearranged itself and I saw that it was Mary Lou. Her hair was matted and her eyes were squinted half shut. She looked the way she had on that night long before when my agitation had driven me out here and I had waked her and we had talked.
I opened my mouth to speak, but then said nothing. She was sitting now, in the case, with her legs hanging over the side. There was no glass in the case anymore—and certainly no python—and she had put a mattress in it to make a bed; that was what she was sitting on now, rubbing her eyes and trying to focus them on me.
Finally I spoke. “Mary Lou,” I said.
She stopped rubbing her eyes and stared. “That’s you, Paul,” she said softly. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said.
She eased herself down to the floor and started walking slowly toward me. She was wearing a long white nightshirt that was very wrinkled, and her face was puffy from sleep. Her feet were bare; they padded on the floor as she walked. And when she came close to me and stopped, looking up at me from under her matted hair, sleepily, yet with that same old intense look, I felt something catch in my throat and I did not try to speak.
She looked me up and down like that, closely. And then she said, “Jesus, Paul. You’ve changed.”
I said nothing, but nodded.
She shook her head wonderingly. “You look… you look ready for anything.”
Suddenly I found words. “That’s right,” I said. And then I stepped forward and put my arms around her and pulled her to me, very hard. And in a moment I felt her arms around my back, pulling me even tighter. My heart
