rejected.
Roony and Rachel sat at the bar of a neighborhood tavern on Second Avenue. Over in the corner, an Irishman and a Hungarian were yelling at each other over the bowling game.
'Where does she go at night,' Roony wondered.
'Paola is a strange girl,' said Rachel. 'You learn after a while not to ask her questions she doesn't want to answer.'
'Maybe seeing Pig.'
'No. Pig Bodine lives at the V-Note and the Rusty Spoon. He has a letch for Paola a mile long but he reminds her too much, I think, of Pappy Hod. The Navy has a certain way of endearing itself. She stays away from him and it's killing him, and I for one am glad to see it.'
It's killing me, Winsome wanted to say. He didn't. Lately, he'd been running for comfort to Rachel. He'd come in a way to depend on it. Her sanity and aloofness from the Crew, her own self-sufficiency drew him. But he was no nearer to arranging any assignation with Paola. Perhaps he was afraid of Rachel's reaction. He was beginning to suspect she was not the sort who approved of pimping for one's roommate. He ordered another boilermaker.
'Roony, you drink too much,' she said. 'I worry about you.'
'Nag, nag, nag.' He smiled.
Next evening, Profane was sitting in the guardroom at Anthroresearch Associates, feet propped on a gas stove, reading an avant-garde western called Existentialist Sheriff, which Pig Bodine had recommended. Across one of the laboratory spaces, features lit Frankenstein's-monsterlike by a night light, facing Profane, sat SHROUD: Synthetic Human, Radiation Output Determined.
Its skin was cellulose acetate butyrate, a plastic transparent not only to light but also to X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons. Its skeleton had once been that of a living human; now the bones were decontaminated and the long ones and spinal column hollowed inside to receive radiation dosimeters. SHROUD was five feet nine inches tall - the fiftieth percentile of Air Force standards. The lungs, sex organs, kidneys, thyroid, liver, spleen and other internal organs were hollow and made of the same clear plastic as the body shell. These could be filled with aqueous solutions which absorbed the same amount of radiation as the tissue they represented.
Anthroresearch Associates was a subsidiary of Yoyodyne. It did research for the government on the effects of high-altitude and space flight; for the National Safety Council on automobile accidents; and for Civil Defense on radiation absorption, which was where SHROUD came in. In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on more as a heat-engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons. Such at least was Oley Bergomask's notion of progress. It was the subject of his welcome-aboard lecture on Profane's first day of employment, at five in the afternoon, as Profane was going on and Bergomask off. There were two eight-hour night shifts, early and late (though Profane, whose time scale was skewed toward the past, preferred to call them late and early) and Profane to date had worked them both.
Three times a night he had to make the rounds of the lab areas, windows and heavy equipment. If an all-night routine experiment was in progress he'd have to take readings, and if they were out of tolerance wake up the technician on duty, who'd usually be sleeping on a cot in one of the offices. At first there'd been a certain interest in visiting the accident research area, which was jokingly referred to as the chamber of horrors. Here weights were dropped on aged automobiles, inside which would be sitting a manikin. The study now under way had to do with first-aid training, and various versions of SHOCK - Synthetic Human Object, Casualty Kinematics - got to sit in the driver's, death, or back seat of the test cars. Profane still felt a certain kinship with SHOCK, which was the first inanimate schlemiel he'd ever encountered. But in there too was a certain wariness, because the manikin was still only a 'human object'; plus a feeling of disdain, as if SHOCK had decided to sell out to humans; so that now what had been its inanimate own were taking revenge.
SHOCK was a marvelous manikin. It had the same build as SHROUD but its flesh was molded of foam vinyl, its skin vinyl plastisol, its hair a wig, its eyes cosmetic-plastic, its teeth (for which, in fact, Eigenvalue had acted as subcontractor) the same kind of dentures worn today by 19 per cent of the American population, most of them respectable. Inside were a blood reservoir in the thorax, a blood pump in the midsection and a nickel-cadmium battery power supply in the abdomen. The control panel, at the side of the chest, had toggles and rheostat controls for venous and arterial bleeding, pulse rate, and even respiration rate, when a sucking chest wound was involved. In the latter case, plastic lungs provided the necessary suction and bubbling. They were controlled by an air pump in the abdomen, with the motor's cooling vent located in the crotch. An injury of the sexual organs could still be simulated by an attachable moulage, but then this blocked the cooling vent. SHOCK could not therefore have a sucking chest wound and mutilated sexual organs simultaneously. A new retrofit, however, eliminated this difficulty, which was felt to be a basic design deficiency.
SHOCK was thus entirely lifelike in every way. It scared the hell out of Profane the first time he saw it, lying half out the smashed windshield of an old Plymouth, fitted with moulages for depressed-skull and jaw injuries and compound arm and leg fractures. But now he'd got used to it. The only thing at Anthroresearch that still fazed him a little was SHROUD, whose face was a human skull that looked at you through a more-or-less abstracted butyrate head.
It was time to make another round. The building was empty except for Profane. No experiments tonight. On the way back to the guardroom he stopped in front of SHROUD.
'What's it like,' he said.
Better than you have it.
'Wha.'
Wha yourself. Me and SHOCK are what you and everybody will be someday. (The skull seemed to be grinning at Profane.)
'There are other ways besides fallout and road accidents.'
But those are most likely. If somebody else doesn't do it to you, you'll do it to yourselves.
'You don't even have a soul. How can you talk.'
