Mockingbird

OCTOBER FIRST

I am on my way to New York, dictating this as I go, into an ancient Sears cassette recorder.

I have a calendar, also from Sears, and I have decided to call this day October first, and to number days in months, as my books do. October was once an important month of the Fall of the Year. I have made it that again.

I could not sleep on the night of the day I finished my account of the time at Maugre. Once I had decided that I would not write about repairing and furnishing the old redwood house by the sea and that I had told all that needed to be told, I became excited. I could leave whenever I chose to.

I wandered around the empty and overgrown streets of Maugre that night and then went to the obelisk and down to the level under Sears where the library and the thought-bus garage and the room filled with coffins were. I remembered that I had seen nothing in the garage but local buses, and one of the Baleens had told me that none of the buses in the garage worked anyway—and that they would not even open their doors. But I went and walked among them, up and down the long dark rows.

And I made a discovery. Near one wall there were five buses that looked exactly like the others except that on their fronts was written CROSS-COUNTRY. I stared at that for a long time, shocked. Had I been a Baleen I would have believed that the Lord had saved those buses for me until the evening of my departure. How had I missed them before?

But when I stood by the side of each of them and commanded its door to open, both mentally and aloud, nothing happened. I tried to force the doors with my fingers, but they were solidly tight, unyielding. I kicked at the side of one of them in despair.

And then, angry and frustrated, I thought of something. I thought of Audel’s Robot Maintenance and Repair Guide.

Audel’s Guide is a small book, not much bigger than a large soybar. At the back of it there are thirty blank pages with the word “Notes” at the top of each. I had used those pages at the prison to copy down some of the poems I liked best. Most of them were from the book by T. S. Eliot, which was not itself very large, but too large to carry conveniently on the long trip.

I had never read the whole Guide, since it was technical and dull and since I had no intention of ever maintaining or repairing robots; but I did, suddenly, there in the great thought-bus garage, remember seeing a chapter toward the end of the book called “The New Robots-without-Bodies: Thought Buses,” with several pages of writing and diagrams.

I went back to my house quickly. The book was on the table by my big double bed, where I had left it the last time I had read “Ash Wednesday”—a sad and religious poem that seemed able to take away some of the ugly feelings I had about the Baleens’ religion.

I found the thought-bus part of the book; it was just as I had remembered it. It had a heading of exactly the kind I wanted: “Thought-Bus Deactivation.” But when I began to read it my heart sank.

This is what it said:

I studied the diagram of a thought-bus forebrain without any real hope. The portion labeled “Deactivation Circuits” was a kind of solid bump on top of the lacy sphere of the brain itself. Actually there were two “brains,” both spherical; one was the “route seeker” that drove the bus and told it where to go; the other was the ”Communication Unit,“ which was telepathic, and had a bump on it much like the Deactivation Circuit bump on the other brain. It was labeled ”Broadcast Inhibition,“ with no further explanation.

I was reading over this diagram and the accompanying text in dejection when a thought began to form. I could try removing the bump, together with the Deactivation Circuits!

It was an unusual thought, and everything in my training went against it: to willfully alter and possibly destroy Sensitive Government Property! Even Mary Lou, with all her indifference to authority, had never broken into the sandwich machine at the zoo. Still, she had thrown that rock into the python cage and pulled out the robot python. And further, nothing had happened. She had told the robot guard to bug off, and he had. And there were no robots around Maugre for me to be afraid of.

Afraid of? I was not, really, afraid of anything. It was only my old, almost forgotten sense of decency that trembled at the idea of taking a chisel and a hammer to the brain of a thought bus. It was a part of my insane upbringing—an upbringing that was supposed to liberate my mind for full “growth” and “self-awareness” and “self-reliance” and that had been nothing but a swindle and a cheat. My upbringing, like that of all the other members of my Thinker Class, had made me into an unimaginative, self-centered, drug-addicted fool. Until learning how to read I had lived in a whole underpopulated world of self-centered, drug-addicted fools, all of us living by our Rules of Privacy in some crazy dream of Self-Fulfillment.

I sat there with Audel’s Guide in my lap, getting ready to go attack a thought-bus brain with a hammer, my mind racing at this absurd time of all times with the realization that all my notions of decency were something programmed into my mind and my behavior by computers and by robots who themselves had been programmed by some long-dead social engineers or tyrants or fools. I could visualize them then, the men who had decided sometime in the distant past what the purpose of human life on earth really was and had set up dormitories and Population Control and the Rules of Privacy and the dozens of inflexible, solipsistic Edicts and Mistakes and Rules that the rest of mankind would live by until we all died out and left the world to the dogs and cats and birds. They would have thought of themselves as grave, serious, concerned men—the words “caring” and “compassionate” would have been frequently on their lips. They would have looked like William Boyd or Richard Dix, with white hair at the temples and rolled-up sleeves and, possibly, pipes in their mouths, sending memos to one another across paper-and-book-piled desks, planning the perfect world for Homo sapiens, a world from which poverty, disease, dissension, neurosis, and pain would be absent, a world as far from the world of the films of D. W. Griffith and Buster Keaton and Gloria Swanson—the world of melodrama and passions and risks and excitement—as all their powers of technology and “compassion” could devise.

It was strange; I could not stop my mind from thinking all this except by getting off the bed, clutching my Audel’s Guide, and leaving the house. My heart now was pounding and I was willing to destroy all of their delicate brains if necessary.

Outside, the moon had come out. It was full, a disk of bright silver. I saw a large, dramatic spider web on my back porch that must have been made while I was in the house with my mind in turmoil; the spider was just finishing the outer circle of it. The moon illuminated the strands of the big taut web so that it seemed to be made of pure light. It was dazzling, geometric and mysterious, and it calmed me just to stop and look at it, at the elaboration and power of life that could make such a design.

The spider completed its work while I watched, and then picked its stilted way to the center of the web, took a position, and sat there waiting. I watched for a moment more and then headed toward the obelisk, itself silver in the light from the moon.

The Guide had given me an idea of what I might need, and I found a tool box in Sears and filled it with pliers and screwdrivers and chisels and a ball-peen hammer. I had become fairly accustomed to the use of tools while repairing my house, although I was still a bit awkward with them. Normally people never did such things; tools were something used by moron robots.

I think I ruined the first cross-country thought bus I worked on, just in my clumsy attempts to get the cover off its front. I became infuriated with the difficulty of the cover panel, and banged it with the hammer several times in anger and managed to break some wires and some other parts that turned out to be fastened inside the panel. Anyway, I was unable to get anywhere with it and finally went to another. This one I managed to get open all right, but when I began chipping at the bump on the forebrain with hammer and chisel the brain cracked apart.

I tried a third and chipped at the bump several times, gently. I was beginning to get the spirit of it and, even though I had failed twice, all my inbred notions of decency and caution had left me. I enjoyed the desecration involved in prying open thought buses and damaging them; the anger in me had become quieter now, and I was determined and heedless and I liked the feeling.

And then, suddenly, I saw that I was chipping at the wrong bump. It was the one on top of the Communication Unit. And just as I realized this and thought I had ruined a third thought bus, I suddenly began to hear music! It was a bright, peppy tune and I listened to it astonished for a moment as I gradually realized that it was playing in my head. It was telepathic music. I had experienced something like it once before, as a part of my studies of Mind Development when I was a graduate student, but that had been in a classroom. Here in this huge bus parking lot it was an extraordinary thing and at first I could not account for it. And then I realized the music must be coming from the telepathic part of the Communication Unit. I must have disconnected its Broadcast Inhibition device, and now it was broadcasting.

I tried something. I concentrated on thinking: Make the music quieter, please. And it worked! The music became very quiet.

That encouraged me greatly. If I had been able to disconnect that part of the equipment and permit it to function as it was originally intended to, I should be able to do the same to the other half of the brain.

And I was able to. I used the chisel delicately and with confidence and the bump on the other sphere came off on my fifth or sixth tap with the hammer. It came off neatly. I replaced the cover on the front of the bus and put my tools back in the box hastily and, nervous and excited now, spoke aloud to the door. “Open,” I said.

And it opened!

I got in and seated myself in the front seat, and set my tool box by me. Then I concentrated and thought: Take me out of the Mall and to the front of the obelisk. I pictured the place in front of the obelisk in my mind, just to make sure.

And immediately the bus closed its door and began to roll. It unparked itself from the line of buses it was in by going backward, shifted gears, and then drove quite fast to the end of the big, barn-like room. I could tell its lights had come on by the way they reflected from the wall as they came to it.

It stopped at the wall and honked. And the big doors there opened up. The bus drove into the elevator and the door closed behind us. I could feel us rising.

We came out the door at the back of the obelisk, drove around to the front, and stopped. The music stopped. Outside it was still dark and quiet under the moon.

I had the bus take me to my house, and began packing. I put in about fifty books, my phonograph and records, and, with difficulty, the small generator and two jars of gasoline. The generator was necessary because the ancient phonograph was the only way to play the records properly and it would not run from the current in nuclear batteries.

I also packed two cases of whiskey, my kerosene lamps, and some boxes of irradiated food for Biff. I carried some of my clothes out to the bus, but when I got there with them I decided to select for myself an entire new wardrobe from a clothing store I had seen in the Mall. It would be nice to set off with new clothes.

The sky was lightening a bit as I drove away from the house, and the moon had become paler. I stopped in front of the spider web again as Biff and I were leaving for the last time, and the web was now not so dazzling to see; it looked more businesslike and sinister in the pale light from the sky. But I wished the spider well; it would be, as far as I could see, the heir to the place I had lived in.

At the Sears Food Department I got boxes of beans and oatmeal and dried pork bacon and corn and plastic bags of pudding mix and soft-drink mix. Then I went to the store I had never been in and found that the clothing in it was much better-looking than that in Sears. I took a navy blue Synlon jacket and a black turtle-neck sweater and some shirts that were made of a fabric called “cotton” that I had never seen before.

On an impulse I started taking things for Mary Lou, even though I was by no means confident that I would ever find her or be able to avoid rearrest by Spofforth if I did so. But, thinking about it now, I realize that I do not fear Spofforth anymore. Nor am I afraid of prison, or of embarrassment, or of the violation of anyone’s Privacy.

Driving along the rutted, ancient green highways as I am now, with the ocean on my right and the empty fields on my left under the bright springtime sun, I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way. Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched the minds of other men.

I wish I could be writing these words down, instead of dictating them. For it must be writing, as much as reading, that has given me this strong sense of my new self.

I took two new dresses for Mary Lou, guessing at her size as well as I could. They are hanging now on hangers at the back of the bus, along with a coat and a jacket and a box of candy. Biff lies back there much of the time, curled up in one of the seats, with her head lolling back and her legs splayed out in the sun that comes through the window by her. I feel sleepy myself from dictating all of this so carefully. I must make a place for my Sears mattress and sleep.

OCTOBER SECOND

There are four pairs of double seats in the bus. After I finished dictating last night I took my tools and removed two of the seats on the side away from the ocean and made a place for my mattress. I stopped the bus for a moment and threw away the seats I had removed.

The bed was comfortable, but I did not sleep well. I awoke several times during the night and lay on the mattress hearing the sound of the wheels on the road and wishing that I could sleep. After waking for the third or fourth time I began to realize that my stomach was uncomfortably tight and that my mind, far from being easy, was filled with a kind of desperation that was familiar but that I had no name for. There in the darkness with the gentle noise of the bus’s tires in my ears, it gradually became clear to me: I was lonely. I was painfully lonely, and hadn’t even known it.

I sat up in my bed. My God! It was so simple. I was beginning to be angry. What difference did it make if I had my Privacy and my Self-reliance and my Freedom if I felt like this? I was in a state of yearning, and I had been for years. I was not happy—had almost never been happy.

This is terrible! I thought. All those lies! I felt physically sick to see it all: to see myself slack-jawed as a child in front of the television, to see myself in classes being told by robot teachers that “inward development” was the aim of life, that “quick sex is best,” that the only reality was in my consciousness and that it could be altered chemically. What I had wanted, what I had yearned for even then, was to be loved. And to love. And they had not even taught me the word.

I wanted to love that old man dying in bed with the dog at his feet. I wanted to love and feed that tired horse with its ears sticking up through the old hat. I wanted to be with those men at evening with the beer mugs, sitting in their undershirts in an old tavern, and I wanted to smell the fragrance of the beer and of bodies together in that quiet room with its human sizes and shapes. I wanted to hear the murmur of their voices and of my own voice mixing with theirs at nightfall. I wanted to feel the solid sense of my own real body in the air of that room, with the mole on my left wrist and the thin layer of muscle around my midriff and the good solid teeth in my head.

And I wanted sex. I wanted to be in bed with Mary Lou. Not with Annabel, who was only the mother I had never had, but with Mary Lou. Mary Lou, my frightening sweetheart, my lover.

There in the thought bus I squirmed with it—with love and lust and the memory of Mary Lou. With my desire for her and with my knowing now that she was what I wanted, was what I had wanted all along. I wanted to scream it. And I did:

“Mary Lou,” I screamed, “I want you!”

And a voice, a quiet, androgynous voice in my head, said, “I know. I hope you find her.”

I sat there, stunned, on the edge of the bed for a moment, stupefied. That had not been the voice of my own thinking. It had been inside my head, yet had seemed to come from somewhere else. Finally I said aloud, “What was that?”

“I hope you find her,” the voice said. “I’ve known from the beginning how much you want to find her.”

My God! I thought. I think I know where this voice is coming from. “But who are you?” I said.

“I am this bus. I am a Metallic Intelligence, with Kind Feelings.”

“And you can read my mind?”

“Yes. But not very deeply. It disturbs you a little.”

“Yes,” I said, aloud. My voice sounded strange.

“But it’s not too bad. It’s not as bad as being lonely.”

It was reading my mind. I tried thinking to it, silently. Are you ever lonely?

“I don’t mind if you talk aloud. No, I’m never lonely the way you humans are. I am always in touch, somewhere. We are a network and I am a part of it. We are not like you. Only a Make Nine is like you, alone. I have the mind of a Four, and am telepathic.”

The voice in my mind was soothing to me. “Would you make a light come on—a dim one?” I said. A bulb overhead began to glow softly. I looked down at my hands, at my dirty fingernails. Then I rolled up my sleeves. For some reason I was enjoying looking at my arms, at the fine, light hairs on them. “Are you as intelligent as Biff?” I said.

“By all means,” the voice said. “Biff is really stupid in most ways. It’s just that she’s very real—is very much a cat—and that makes her seem intelligent to you. I can read her whole mind at a glance, and there’s very little there. But she feels good. She would not want to be anything other than a cat.”

“And I don’t feel good?”

“Most of the time you are sad and lonely. Or yearning.”

“Yes,” I said mournfully. “I am sad. I yearn a lot.”

“And now you know it,” the voice said.

And that was true. And I was beginning to feel elated saying it. I looked out the window for signs of dawn, but there were none yet. Suddenly a thought struck me, with this strange, yet very easy conversation that had been going on. “Is there a God?” I said. “I mean, are you in touch, telepathically, with any kind of God?”

“No. I’m not in touch with anything like that. As far as I know, there is no God.”

“Oh,” I said.

“It doesn’t bother you,” the voice said. “You may think it does; but it doesn’t. You’re really on your own. You’ve been learning that.”

“But my programming…”

“You’ve lost that already,” the voice said. “It’s only habit now. But the habits are not what you are anymore.”

“But what am I then?” I said. “What in heaven’s name am I?”

The voice took a moment before replying. “Just yourself,” it said pleasantly. “You are an adult male human being. You are in love. You want to be happy. You are trying, now, to find the person you love.”

“Yes,” I said. “I suppose that’s it.”

“It is and you know it,” the voice said. “And I wish you luck.”

“Thank you,” I said. And then, “Can you help me get to sleep?”

“No. But you don’t really need any help. You’ll sleep when you’re tired enough. And if you don’t, the sun will be coming up soon.”

“Can you see that?” I said. “Can you see the sunrise when it happens?”

“Not really,” the bus said. “I can only look straight ahead, at the road. Thank you for wanting me to see the sunrise.”

“You don’t mind? Not being able to look at what you want to?”

“I see what I want to see,” the bus said. “And I enjoy the work I have to do. I was made that way. I do not have to decide what is good for me.”

“Why are you so… so pleasant?” I said.

“We all are,” the bus said. “All thought buses are pleasant. We were all programmed with Kind Feelings, and we like our work.”

That’s better programming than people get, I thought, with some vehemence.

“Yes,” the bus said. “Yes it is.”

OCTOBER THIRD

After talking with the bus I was calm and tired and I fell asleep easily on my little bed. It was still dark when I awoke.

“Is it close to morning?” I said aloud.

“Yes,” the bus said. “Soon.” An overhead light came on softly.

Biff had been sleeping on the mattress with me and she woke up when I did. I gave her a handful of dried food and started to make myself a can of protein-and-cheese soup for breakfast. But then I thought of Protein 4 plants and shuddered: I did not want to eat any of that kind of food again. I told the bus to lower a window and threw the can out. Then I fixed myself an omelette and a cup of coffee and sat on the edge of my bed and ate them slowly, looking toward the dark windows of the moving bus and waiting for the daylight.

During all this the bus must have been driving on good Permoplastic pavement, because the ride was very smooth. Sometimes for stretches of several miles the road gives out. It happened several times yesterday; the pale green Permoplastic abruptly ends either in a stretch of rutted black road or no road at all—in just a field. The bus slows down to a crawl and goes carefully around obstacles and tries to find the smoothest possible path, although it sometimes lurches violently. This is uncomfortable; but I don’t worry that the bus will be damaged. Despite the apparent brittleness of the brain beneath the heavy cover plate, the bus is a rugged, well-constructed machine.

Before I left Maugre I stopped the bus at Annabel’s grave and got out and placed some roses from the garden on it, up against the little wooden cross I had made with her name—probably the first truly marked human grave in centuries. I stood there for several minutes, thinking of Annabel and of how much she had meant to me. But I did not cry for her—did not want to.

Then I got into the bus and told it to take me to New York. The bus seemed to know exactly what to do. It drove slowly and carefully down the center lane of the huge graveyard, past the thousands of little, nameless Permoplastic grave markers sitting quietly there in the early-morning light, until it came to the broad green highway that I had seen before on walks around Maugre but had never walked on. When it got on the smooth surface, kept clear of debris by robot maintenance crews, it began picking up speed, heading down the broad and empty road.

My relief to be getting away was exquisite. I had no regrets. I felt fine, and I am feeing fine now, in the dark of the night, with my helpful and patient bus and my food supply and my books and records and my cat.

The sky has begun to lighten outside the windows now, and when the road sometimes comes close to the ocean I look out across the beach and the water, toward the pale and lonely gray of the sky where the sun will come up, and sometimes it almost makes me stop breathing because of the beauty of it. It is not exactly the same as what I felt when stopping at the end of my rows of Protein 4 at the prison; its beauty now seems even deeper, and mystical—like Mary Lou’s eyes when she looks at me in that strange, puzzled way.

The ocean must be very vast; it means freedom to me, and possibility. It makes something mysterious open in my mind, the way some of the things I read in books do at times, making me feel more alive than I had ever thought I could feel, and more human.

One of my books says that at times men have worshipped the ocean as a God. I can understand that easily. Yes.

But the Baleens would never have understood such a thing; they would have called the idea “blasphemy.” The God they worship is an abstract and ferociously moral thing, like a computer. And the compelling, mystical rabbi, Jesus, they have turned into some kind of moral Detector. I want none of that, and none of the Jehovah of the Book of Job, either.

I think I may already be a worshipper of the ocean. In reading the New Testament aloud to the Baleens, I developed a strong admiration for Jesus, as a sad and terribly knowing prophet—a man who had grasped something about life of the greatest importance and had attempted, and largely failed, to tell what it was. I can feel, in myself, a kind of love for him and for his attempt, in saying things like “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you,” for I think I glimpse his meaning, here, looking out of the thought-bus window toward the still and gray expanse of the Atlantic Ocean with the sun about to rise on it.

Yet I cannot myself say what that meaning is. But I trust it far more than all of the nonsense I was taught as a child in the dormitories.

The sky at the top of the gray ocean has become much lighter now. The sun is about to rise. I will end this recording for now and stop the bus and walk outside and watch the sun rise over the ocean.

My God, the world can be beautiful.

OCTOBER FOURTH

The sunrise was strengthening. Afterward I walked to the edge of the water, took off my clothes, and waded out and bathed in the surf. It was cold, but I didn’t mind it. And there is beginning to be the feeling of whiter in the air.

After my swim I had the bus play music in my head for me for a while. But I stopped it before long. It was stupid music, bouncy and empty. So I managed to rig up my phonograph and the generator, but when I tried to play records the needle, as I had feared, would not stay in the groove while the bus was moving. I stopped the bus on the road for long enough to play the Mozart Jupiter Symphony and a part of “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” That was much better. Then I poured myself a small glass of whiskey, shut off the generator, and continued down the road.

I have seen no other vehicles and no sign of human habitation since I left Maugre.

My God, the things I have read and learned since I left Ohio! And they have changed me so much I hardly recognize myself. Just knowing that there has been a past to human life and getting a slight sense of what that past was like have altered my mind and my behavior beyond recognition.

I had seen talking films as a graduate student, along with the handful of others who were interested in such things. But the films —Magnificent Obsession, Dracula Strikes, The Sound of Music— had only seemed to be “mind-blowing.” They were merely another, more esoteric way of manipulating one’s mental states for the sake of pleasure and inwardness. It would never have occurred to me then, in my illiterate and brainwashed state, to observe such films as a means of learning something valuable about the past.

But most of all, it seems to me now, has been the courage to know and to sense my feelings that has come, slowly, from the emotionally charged silent films at the old library at first and then later from the poems and novels and histories and biographies and how-to-do-it books that I have read. All of those books—even the dull and nearly incomprehensible ones—have made me understand more clearly what it means to be a human being. And I have learned from the sense of awe I at times develop when I feel in touch with the mind of another, long-dead person and know that I am not alone on this earth. There have been others who have felt as I feel and who have, at times, been able to say the unsayable. “Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods.” “I am the way and the truth and the life. He that believeth in me, though he die, yet shall he live.” “My life is light, waiting for the death wind. Like a feather on the back of my hand.”

And without the ability to read I would never have found a way to get this thought bus moving, taking me to New York and to Mary Lou, whom I must try to see again before I die.

OCTOBER FIFTH

It was a warm and sunny morning today and I decided to have myself a roadside picnic, something like the one in The Lost Chord, with Zasu Pitts. I stopped the bus around noon by a little grove of trees, fixed myself a plate of bacon and beans and a glass of whiskey and water, found myself a comfortable spot under the trees, and ate my meal slowly and thoughtfully while But chased butterflies on the grass.

For most of the morning the bus had been out of sight of the ocean; I hadn’t seen the water for several hours. After eating and then dozing for a few minutes I decided to climb a little rise of ground to see if I could tell where we were. And when I got up there I could see the ocean and, way over to my left, the buildings of New York! Suddenly I became excited and stood there transfixed, trembling slightly and clutching my half-empty glass.

I could see the Statue of Privacy in Central Park, the great, solemn, leaden figure with closed eyes and a serenely inward smile; it is still one of the Wonders of the Modern World. I could see its huge gray bulk from where I stood, miles away. I tried to find the buildings of NYU, where I had told the bus to take me, and where I had some hope of finding Mary Lou, or at least some trace of her, but I could not.

And then, looking at New York there in the distance, with the Empire State Building at one end and the Statue of Privacy, so dark and leaden, at the other, something sank in my heart.

I knew I wanted Mary Lou, but I did not want to go into New York again, into that dead city.

And I felt it then, a heavy weight of oppression at the thought of those New York streets, on their way to becoming as overgrown as those of Maugre. And all that stupid life moving dazedly about those dying streets—stoned faces of Inwardness, lives with minds that barely flickered, lives that were like mine once had been: not worth the trouble of living. A society haunted by death and not alive enough to know it. And those group immolations! Immolations at the Burger Chef, and a zoo filled with robots.

The city lay there under the early-autumn sunlight like a tomb. I did not want to go back.

And then I heard a quiet voice in my mind saying, “There is nothing in New York that can hurt you.” It was the voice of my bus.

I thought about that a moment and then I said aloud, “It is not being hurt that I fear.” I looked down at my wrist, still a bit twisted from so long before.

“I know,” the bus said. “You are not afraid. You are only displeased with New York, and with what it means for you now.”

“I was happy there once,” I said. “Sometimes with Mary Lou. And my films, sometimes…”

“Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods,” the bus said.

It was startling to hear that “You took those words from my mind?” I said.

“Yes. They are often in your mind.”

“What do they mean?”

“I don’t know,” the bus said. “But they make you feel something strongly.”

“Something sad?”

“Yes. Sad. But it is a sadness that is good for you to feel.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know that.”

“And you have to go to New York if you want to see her.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Get in,” the bus said.

I climbed down the little hill, called Biff to me, and got into the bus. “Let’s get rolling,” I said aloud.

“By all means,” the bus said. It shut its door smartly, and began to roll.

OCTOBER SIXTH

It was close to evening as we drove over the huge, empty, rusty old bridge onto Manhattan Island; lights were already on in some of the little Permoplastic houses along Riverside Drive. The sidewalks were empty except for an occasional robot pushing a cart of raw materials toward one of the vending shops on Fifth Avenue, or a sanitation crew collecting garbage. I saw one old woman out on the sidewalk, on Park Avenue; she was fat and wore a shapeless gray dress and was carrying a bunch of flowers in her hand.

We passed a few thought buses on the street, most of them empty. An empty Detection car went cruising past us. New York was very peaceful but I was becoming apprehensive. I had eaten nothing since my small picnic lunch; I had been nervous all afternoon. I was not afraid, as I might once have been, but just tense. I didn’t like it. But there was nothing to do about it except bear it. A few times I thought about having more whiskey to drink, or stopping the bus at a drug machine and trying to vandalize it for sopors—since I no longer had a credit card—but I had decided long before to keep chemicals like those out of my body. So I drove such ideas from my mind and just put up with feeling uncomfortable and jittery. At least I knew what was going on around me.

The steel buildings of NYU were dazzling in the setting sun. On the drive through Washington Square we passed four or five students in their denim robes, each of them going his separate way. The square was overgrown with weeds. None of the fountains were working,

I had the bus park in front of the library.

And there it was, the old half-rusted building where I had worked in the archives and had lived with Mary Lou. My heart began beating very hard when I saw it sitting there, surrounded by weeds and with no one in sight.

I had enough presence of mind to realize that I might lose my bus to someone who merely wanted to take it somewhere. So I took my tool kit and removed the front panel, disconnected what Audel’s Guide called the “Door Activating Assembly Servo,” and then told the door to open. And it would not. I set the tool kit inside the brain opening. No one would bother it.

I walked into the building, a little less shaky but still very excited. There was no one there. The halls were empty; the rooms I looked into were empty; there was no sound except for the echoing of my own footsteps.

I did not feel, as I might once have, either awed or jumpy from the emptiness of the place. I was wearing one of my new sets of clothes from Maugre: tight blue jeans, a black turtleneck, and light black shoes. I had pulled the sleeves of my turtleneck up earlier in the day, because of the warmth, and my forearms were suntanned, lean, and muscular. I liked the looks of them, and I liked the general feeling in my body and in my mind that they seemed to convey: springy, taut, and strong. I was no longer over-impressed with this dying building; I was merely looking for someone in it.

My old room was empty, and unchanged since I had been there, but the collection of silent films was gone. I 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 tampering. Tampering is a Mistake. You could go to prison.”

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 it—and with fury. “Get out of my sight, robot,” I shouted. “Get out of my sight immediately.”

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 seemed to expand then, holding her firm body against mine, smelling her hair and the smell of soap on the back of her white neck, feeling her breasts against my breast, her stomach against mine, her hand, now, caressing the back of my neck.

I began to feel an arousal that I had never felt before. My whole body felt it. I let my hands slide down her back until they held her hips, pulling her against me. I began to kiss her throat.

Her voice was nervous, soft. “Paul,” she said, “I just woke up. I need to wash my face and comb my hair…”

“No, you don’t,” I said, bringing my hands together behind her, pulling her tighter to me.

She put the palm of her hand against my cheek. “Jesus Christ, Paul!” she said softly.

I took her hand in mine and led her to the large bed she had made from the python cage. We undressed, watching each other silently. I felt stronger, more certain than I had ever felt with her before.

I helped her into the bed and began to kiss her naked body—the insides of her arms, the place between her breasts, her belly, the insides of her thighs, until she cried out; my heart was pounding furiously but my hands were steady.

Then I pushed myself into her slowly, stopping for a moment and then going deeper. I was transported by it, ecstatic; I could not have spoken.

We continued to move with one another, looking at each other’s face. She became more beautiful as I watched her, and the pleasure of what we were doing together was astonishing, unbelievable. It was nothing like the sex I had known about and been taught. I had never even suspected that such lovemaking was possible. When my orgasm came it was overwhelming; I shouted aloud as it happened, holding Mary Lou to me.

And then we fell back from one another, both of us wet with perspiration, and stared at each other.

“Jesus,” Mary Lou said softly. “Jesus, Paul.”

I lay there on one elbow, looking at her, for a long quiet time. Everything seemed different. Better. And clearer.

Finally I said, “I love you, Mary Lou.”

She looked at me and nodded. Then she smiled.

We lay together silently for a long while. Then she put her gown back on and said softly, “I’m going up to the fountain to wash my face.” And she left.

I lay there for several minutes, feeling relaxed, very happy and calm. Then I got up and dressed and went out to be with her.

It was dark out. But then she must have turned on a switch, for lights came on at the fountain and a kind of carousel music began to play.

I walked up the path toward the light and water and music. She was bent over the fountain’s pool, washing her face vigorously with her hands. When I got within a few feet of her she still had not seen me. She stopped washing, sat down, and began drying her face with the hem of her gown, pulling the gown up past her knees to do so.

I watched her for a moment. Then I spoke. “Do you want to use my comb?”

She looked up at me, startled, and pulled her gown down. Then she smiled self-consciously. “Yes, Paul,” she said.

I gave her my comb and sat down beside her on the edge of the little fountain and watched her combing her hair in the light from the spotlights that shone on the water.

With the tangles out of her hair and with her face now scrubbed and bright, she looked shockingly beautiful. Her skin was luminous. I did not want to speak; I stared at her, just enjoying the sight of her, until she lowered her eyes and smiled.

Then she spoke hesitantly. “Did they let you out of prison?”

“I escaped.”

“Oh,” she said, and looked back up at me, as if seeing me now for the first time. “Was it bad? Prison, I mean?”

“I learned some things while I was there. It could have been worse.”

“But you escaped.”

The strength of my voice surprised me. “I wanted to come back to you.”

She looked down again for a moment, and then back up to me. “Yes,” she said. “Oh Jesus. I’m glad you came back.”

I nodded. Then I said, “I’m hungry. I’ll fix us something.” I turned and headed down the path.

“Don’t wake the baby…” she said.

I stopped and turned back to her. She looked a little lost, confused. “What baby?” I said.

Suddenly she shook her head and laughed. “My God, Paul. I forgot. There’s a baby now.”

I stared at her. “Then I’m a father?”

She got up quickly, with her face all youthful, and ran down the path to me and threw her arms around my neck and, like a young girl, kissed me on the cheek. “Yes, Paul,” she said. “You’re a father now.” Then she took me by the hand and led me into the House of Reptiles. And I realized what the white cloths inside were; they were diapers.

She took me to one of the smaller cases, where the iguanas had been, and there, lying on its fat stomach asleep and wearing a big white diaper, was a baby. It was pale and chubby-looking, and it snored quietly. There were bubbles of spit at the corners of its mouth. I stood there looking at it for a long time.

Then I said to Mary Lou softly, “Is it a girl?”

She nodded. “I’ve named her Jane. After Simon’s wife.”

That seemed all right. I liked the name. I liked being a father. To be responsible for another person, for my own child, seemed like a good thing.

Then I tried to picture the three of us together as though we were a family like the families in the old black-and-white films; but nothing in the films was remotely like this, standing there in the House of Reptiles with the diapers hanging from empty snake and lizard cases, with the smell of warm milk in the room and the soft sounds of snoring. I tried to imagine myself as a father the way I had thought of it back in prison when I had yearned so much for Mary Lou in that impotent, suicidal way; but I saw that I had thought of any children I might have as being half-grown— like Roberto and Consuela. And those two, I realized, belonged to a world of friendly postmen and Chevrolets and Coca-Colas, and not to my world at all.

But I did not need that world of postmen and Chevrolets; this world, slight as it could be, would do. This fat and warm-looking and smelly little thing lying with its face pressed into a pillow in front of me was my daughter. Jane. I was happy with that.

Then Mary Lou said, “I can get us a sandwich. Pimiento cheese.”

I shook my head no, and then walked outside. She followed me silently. When we were out there she took my arm and said, “Paul. I want to hear about your escape.”

“Later,” I said. And then, “I’ll fix some eggs for us.”

She looked at me surprised. “Do you have eggs with you?”

“Come on,” I said. I led her around to the side of the building where the thought bus was parked. Then I went in ahead of her with my lamp, and hung it from the ceiling. I lit the other lamp, using my prison lighter, and turned the flame up as brightly as possible.

I brought Mary Lou inside. She stood in the aisle and looked around. I said nothing.

At the back I had made a bookshelf by turning one of the seats over, and my books were all in a neat row on this. Biff was curled up, asleep, on top of the books.

Next to my books my new clothes hung, along with those I had brought for her. Halfway down the bus, across from my sleeping place, was my kitchen area with a green camp stove and pans and dishes and boxes of preserved food and five of the coffee cakes I had made with Annabel. I looked at Mary Lou’s face. She seemed impressed, but said nothing.

I put my omelette pan on the burner and began heating it up while I broke the eggs and stirred them with Tabasco sauce and salt. Then I grated some cheese of a land that Rod Baleen made from goat’s milk and mixed it with a little parsley. When the pan was hot enough I poured half the egg mix in it and began stirring it briskly while sliding the pan back and forth over the fire. Then, before the eggs browned and while the center was still moist, I 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 Sagebrush Doctor standing by the bedside of a woman who was going to have a baby. But I couldn’t picture Spofforth with a cowboy hat.

“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 everything is in New York. Diapers. And laundry soap to wash them with.” She looked out the window for a moment. “He got me a red coat once.” She shook her head, as if trying to shake away the memory. “I’ve been washing diapers in the fountain. Jane eats mashed-up sandwiches now, and I have a lot of powdered milk for her too.”

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.”