talking about back at the plant; it might be interesting, at that.
While he was making up his mind, Sam slipped an arm through his on one side and Walter amiably wrapped a big hand around the other. Morey found himself walking.
“You’ll like it,” Sam promised comfortably. “No hard feelings about this morning, sport? Of course not. Once you get a look at Piggotty’s, you’ll get over your mad, anyhow. It’s something special. I swear, on what they pay me for bringing in customers, I wouldn’t do it unless I
“Dance, Jack?” the hostess yelled over the noise at the bar. She stepped back, lifted her flounced skirts to ankle height and executed a tricky nine-step.
“My name is Morey,” Morey yelled back. “And I don’t want to dance, thanks.”
The hostess shrugged, frowned meaningfully at Sam and danced away.
Sam flagged the bartender. “First round’s on us,” he explained to Morey. “Then we won’t bother you any more. Unless you want us to, of course. Like the place?” Morey hesitated, but Sam didn’t wait. “Fine place,” he yelled, and picked up the drink the bartender left him. “See you around.”
He and the big man were gone. Morey stared after them uncertainly, then gave it up. He was here, anyhow; might as well at least have a drink. He ordered and looked around.
Uncle Piggotty’s was a third-rate dive disguised to look, in parts of it at least, like one of the exclusive upper-class country clubs. The bar, for instance, was treated to resemble the clean lines of nailed wood; but underneath the surface treatment, Morey could detect the intricate laminations of plyplastic. What at first glance appeared to be burlap hangings were in actuality elaborately textured synthetics. And all through the bar the motif was carried out.
A floor show of sorts was going on, but nobody seemed to be paying much attention to it. Morey, straining briefly to hear the master of ceremonies, gathered that the unit was on a more than mildly vulgar level. There was a dispirited string of chorus beauties in long ruffled pantaloons and diaphanous tops; one of them, Morey was almost sure, was the hostess who had talked to him just a few moments before.
Next to him a man was declaiming to a middle-aged woman:
“Why, Morey!” he interrupted himself. “What are you doing here?”
He turned farther around and Morey recognized him. “Hello, How-land,” he said. “I—uh—I happened to be free tonight, so I thought—”
Howland sniggered. “Well, guess your wife is more liberal than mine was. Order a drink, boy.”
“Thanks, I’ve got one,” said Morey.
The woman, with a tigerish look at Morey, said, “Don’t stop, Everett. That was one of your most beautiful things.”
“Oh, Morey’s heard my poetry,” Howland said. “Morey, I’d like you to meet a very lovely and talented young lady, Tanaquil Bigelow. Morey works in the office with me, Tan.”
“Obviously,” said Tanaquil Bigelow in a frozen voice, and Morey hastily withdrew the hand he had begun to put out.
The conversation stuck there, impaled, the woman cold, Howland relaxed and abstracted, Morey wondering if, after all, this had been such a good idea. He caught the eye-cell of the robot bartender and ordered a round of drinks for the three of them, politely putting them on Howland’s ration book. By the time the drinks had come and Morey had just got around to deciding that it wasn’t a very good idea, the woman had all of a sudden become thawed.
She said abruptly, “You look like the kind of man who
Faintly, a tinge of worry began to appear on the surface of How-land’s relaxed calm. “Tan,” he chided, “Morey may not be very interested in politics.”
Politics, Morey thought; well, at least that was a clue. He’d had the dizzying feeling, while the woman was talking, that he himself was the ball in the games machine he had designed for the shop earlier that day. Following the woman’s conversation might, at that, give his next design some valuable pointers in swoops, curves and obstacles.
He said, with more than half truth, “No, please go on, Miss Bige-low. I’m very much interested.”
She smiled; then abruptly her face changed to a frightening scowl. Morey flinched, but evidently the scowl wasn’t meant for him. “Robots!” she hissed. “Supposed to work for us, aren’t they? Hah! We’re their slaves, slaves for every moment of every miserable day of our lives. Slaves! Wouldn’t you like to join us and be free, Morey?”
Morey took cover in his drink. He made an expressive gesture with his free hand—expressive of exactly what, he didn’t truly know, for he was lost. But it seemed to satisfy the woman.
She said accusingly, “Did you know that more than three-quarters of the people in this country have had a nervous breakdown in the past five years and four months? That more than half of them are under the constant care of psychiatrists for psychosis—not just plain ordinary neurosis like my husband’s got and Howland here has got and you’ve got, but psychosis. Like I’ve got. Did you know that? Did you know that forty per cent of the population are essentially manic depressive, thirty-one per cent are schizoid, thirty-eight per cent have an assortment of other unfixed psychogenic disturbances and twenty-four—”
“Hold it a minute, Tan,” Howland interrupted critically. “You’ve got too many per cents there. Start over again.”
“Oh, the hell with it,” the woman said moodily. “I wish my husband were here. He expresses it so much better than I do.” She swallowed her drink. “Since you’ve wriggled off the hook,” she said nastily to Morey, “how about setting up another round—on my ration book this time?”
Morey did; it was the simplest thing to do in his confusion. When that was gone, they had another on Howland’s book.
As near as he could figure out, the woman, her husband and quite possibly Howland as well belonged to some kind of anti-robot group. Morey had heard of such things; they had a quasi-legal status, neither approved nor prohibited, but he had never come into contact with them before. Remembering the hatred he had so painfully relived at the psychodrama session, he thought anxiously that perhaps he belonged with them. But, question them though he might, he couldn’t seem to get the principles of the organization firmly in mind.
The woman finally gave up trying to explain it, and went off to find her husband while Morey and Howland had another drink and listened to two drunks squabble over who bought the next round. They were at the Alphonse-Gaston stage of inebriation; they would regret it in the morning; for each was bending over backward to permit the other to pay the ration points. Morey wondered uneasily about his own points; Howland was certainly getting credit for a lot of Morey’s drinking tonight. Served him right for forgetting his book, of course.
When the woman came back, it was with the large man Morey had encountered in the company of Sam, the counterfeiter, steerer and general man about Old Town.
“A remarkably small world, isn’t it?” boomed Walter Bigelow, only slightly crushing Morey’s hand in his. “Well, sir, my wife has told me how interested you are in the basic philosophical drives behind our movement, and I should like to discuss them further with you. To begin with, sir, have you considered the principle of Twoness?”
Morey said, “Why—”
“Very good,” said Bigelow courteously. He cleared his throat and declaimed:
