"My G.o.d, Bob," I said. "My G.o.d." Suddenly I hated him, hated his coolness, his strength, his sadness. "You G.o.dd.a.m.ned monster," I said. "Devil. Devil. You're letting us die that way. And you're the one who is suicidal."

He stopped painting and turned to look at me again. "That's right," he said.

I took a breath. "And if you wanted to, could you stop those birth-control sopors from being made in this country?"

"Yes. In the whole world."

"Could you just stop sopors? All of them?"

"Yes."

I took another long breath. Then I said softly, "About the Empire State Building." I looked downtown, toward it. "I could push you off."

I looked back toward him. He was staring at me.

"After my baby is born," I said, "and when I'm well again and know how to take care of it, I could push you off."

Bentley OCTOBER FIRST.

I am on my way to New York, dictating this as I go, into an ancient Sears ca.s.sette 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: Thought buses are activated and deactivated by a computer code that, by Edict of the Directors, cannot be reprinted here. Deactivation is a necessity in order to control movement within cities when needed. The deactivation circuits are in the "forebrain" of the route-seeking Intelligence Unit, between the headlights. See diagram.

I studied the diagram of a thought-bus forebrain without any real hope. The portion labeled "Deactivation Circuits" was a kind of solid b.u.mp 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 b.u.mp on it much like the Deactivation Circuit b.u.mp 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 b.u.mp, 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 Cla.s.s, 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 "compa.s.sionate" 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 h.o.m.o 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 pa.s.sions and risks and excitement-as all their powers of technology and "compa.s.sion" 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 b.u.mp on the forebrain with hammer and chisel the brain cracked apart.

I tried a third and chipped at the b.u.mp 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 b.u.mp. 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 cla.s.sroom. 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 b.u.mp 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 embarra.s.sment, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d! 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 cla.s.ses being told by robot teachers that "inward development" was the aim of life, that "quick s.e.x 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 s.e.x. 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 l.u.s.t 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 G.o.d! 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 G.o.d?" I said. "I mean, are you in touch, telepathically, with any kind of G.o.d?"

"No. I'm not in touch with anything like that. As far as I know, there is no G.o.d."

"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.