added the cheese and parsley, let the cheese melt slightly, folded the whole thing over and slipped it out on a plate. I handed the plate to Mary Lou. “Sit down,” I said, “and I’ll get you a fork.” She sat down.
When I handed her the fork I said, “Was it difficult? Having the baby? And painful?”
“Jesus, yes,” she said. Then she took a bite of the omelette, chewed it slowly, swallowed. “Hey,” she said. “This is delicious! What do you call it?”
“It’s an omelette,” I said. Then I put some water on the other burner for coffee and began making an omelette for myself. “In the ancient days,” I said, “women sometimes died in childbirth.”
“Well, I didn’t,” she said. “And I had Bob to help me.”
“Bob?” I said. “Who’s Bob?”
“Bob Spofforth,” she said. “The robot. And Dean. Your old boss.”
I finished cooking my omelette. Then I poured us both some coffee in cups that Annabel had made and seated myself across the aisle from Mary Lou, on my bed, facing her.
“Did Spofforth help you have the baby?” I said. I pictured that huge robot like William S. Hart in
“Yes,” Mary Lou said. There was something odd, slightly pained in her face as she talked about Spofforth. I felt there was something she wanted to tell me but was not yet ready to tell. “He cut the umbilical cord. Or at least he told me so afterward; I was too spaced out by it all to be sure.” She shook her head. “Strange. The one time in my life I really wanted a pill, and a week after I had Bob stop their distribution.”
“Stop their distribution?” I said. “Of pills?”
“That’s right. There’s going to be some changes.” She smiled. “Some big hangovers.”
I didn’t care about that. “Spaced out?” I said. “I can’t imagine you that way.”
“Not the way it is with drugs. It hurt a lot, but it wasn’t unbearable.”
“And Spofforth helped you?”
“After he took you away he… he watched over my pregnancy. And when the baby came he got milk for me from the Burger Chef and he found an ancient baby bottle in a warehouse somewhere. I think he knows where
I finished my omelette. “I’ve been living alone,” I said. “In a wooden house that I repaired. With the help of some friends.” That word, “friends”; it seemed strange. I had never referred to the Baleens that way before; but it was the right word. “I brought you something,” I said.
I went to the back of the bus and got the dresses and blue jeans and T-shirts I had taken from the store in Maugre for her, and laid them on a seat. “These,” I said. “And a box of candy.” I got a heart-shaped box out of the panel-covered compartment where I kept food supplies, and gave it to her. She looked astonished, holding the box and not knowing what to do with it. I took it from her and opened it. There was a paper on top of the candy and it said, “Be my Valentine.” I read it aloud, strongly. It was a good thing to read.
She looked up at me. “What’s a Valentine?”
“It has to do with love,” I said, and took the paper off.
Underneath the paper there were pieces of candy, each wrapped in a food-preserving transparent plastic cover. I took out a large chocolate one and handed it to her. “You take the covering off with your fingernail. At the bottom—the flat side,” I said.
She looked at it and tried her fingernail. “What do you call this?” she said.
“Candy. You eat it.” I took it from her and got the plastic off. I had become expert at that while learning to eat the various things from Sears over the the past year. I handed the candy to her and she looked at it a moment, turning it over in her fingers. She had probably never seen chocolate before; I never had, before I came to Maugre. “Taste it,” I said.
She bit into it and began chewing. Then she stared up at me, her mouth partly full, with a look of pleasant surprise. “Jesus,” she said through the mouthful. “It’s wonderful!”
Then I gave her the clothes, and she looked at them excitedly. “For me?” she said. And then, “That’s wonderful, Paul. That’s really wonderful.”
We sat there silently for a moment, I with the box of candy in my lap; she with her lap filled with new clothes. I watched her face.
The bus door was open. Suddenly a loud, wailing sound came in, something like a siren, except that it sounded human and angry.
“Oh Lord!” Mary Lou said, getting up quickly, with the clothes in her arms. “The baby!” She ran out of the bus and shouted back at me. “Give me ten minutes. I want to try the clothes on.”
I left the bus, walked back to the fountain, and sat down on its edge. The music, light and airy, and the gentle sound of the water behind me were pleasant. I looked up; the moon was still out and there was no sign of dawn. I felt completely at ease.
Then Mary Lou came out of the House of Reptiles with her arms full. She shut the door smartly behind her with her elbow. She was dressed in the blue jeans and a white T-shirt and sandals and was carrying the baby expertly, cradled in one arm. Over the other arm were the rest of her new clothes and on top of them a pile of diapers. The clothes she was wearing fit her perfectly. Her hair was combed neatly and her face was radiant as she came toward me and the light from the fountain fell on it. The baby had stopped crying and just lay in her arms looking comfortable, pleased. Looking at them both I could hardly breathe for a moment.
Then I let my breath out and said softly, “I can make a baby bed out of one of the bus seats. And we can go away together.”
She looked up at me. “Do you want to leave New York?”
“I want to go to California,” I said. “I want to go as far from New York as we can go. I want to be away from robots, and drugs, and other people. I have my books and my music and you and Jane. That’s enough. I don’t want New York anymore.”
She looked at me a long time before she answered. Then she said, “All right.” She paused. “But there’s something I have to do…”
“For Spofforth?” I said.
Her eyes widened. “Yes,” she said. “It’s for Spofforth. He wants to die. I made a… a bargain with him. To help him.”
“To help him die?”
“Yes. It frightens me.”
I looked at her. “I’ll help you,” I said.
She looked at me, relieved. “I’ll get Jane’s things. I guess it is time to leave New York. Can this bus take us to California?”
“Yes. And I can find food. We’ll get there.”
She looked toward the bus, toward its sturdy, solid shape, and then back toward me. She seemed to study my face for a long time, carefully and with a hint of surprise. Then she said, “I love you, Paul. I really do.”
“I know,” I said. “Let’s get going.”
Spofforth
It looks, by itself, as it did in 1932—an essentially stupid, non-human building, its architecture concerned merely with height and with bravado. It has now, on the third of June, 2467, the same number of stories, one hundred two, that it had then; but now they are all empty even of the furniture of offices. It is one thousand two hundred fifty feet tall. Nearly a quarter mile. And there is no use for it now. It is only a marker, a mute testimony to the human ability to make things that are too big.
The context over which it stands has come to magnify it more than the New York of the twentieth century
