That orange thing was going down the incinerator, it was.
Man of Action
One of the very finest ways to louse up someone who is determined but unwise is to give him just exactly what he thinks he wants…
When Roger awoke, the calendar-clock beside his bed told him it was August 14, 2138.
“That’s odd.” mused Roger. “It was December 3, 1960 when I went to sleep.” He frowned and tilted his head to one side. “Or was it December 4th?”
“December 3rd,” said a voice.
Roger looked around and saw that he was alone in the room. “I don’t think I said that,” he told himself. “My voice isn’t that deep.”
He waited, but the voice didn’t say anything.
Roger sat up and studied the room. He’d never seen it before, he was quite sure of that. The walls were of a peculiarly bright golden hue that Roger would never have chosen for a bedroom, and the floor seemed to be of black linoleum. Or something like linoleum. He stooped and touched the polished black smoothness of the floor, and it felt… well, non-linoleum-like. “It certainly isn’t linoleum,” said Roger. “What in the world is it?”
“Fluoryl plastic,” said the voice.
Roger spun around. The voice, this time, had come from behind him. But still he was alone in the room. “Who said that?” he demanded.
“I did,” said the voice, from somewhere straight ahead.
“Where are you?” asked Roger, squinting a trifle.
“Here,” said the voice.
“Who are you, then?”
“Your mechanical.”
Roger blinked. “My mechanical what?”
“Uh,” said the voice. “Squawk. Brrrp-brrrp, crah! I am your mechanical.” Except for the ‘crah!’, all of the sounds and words had been delivered with the same unemotional monotone that had characterized the voice from the beginning. The ‘crah’ was different only in that it was somewhat louder and a bit higher in pitch.
“My mechanical,” echoed Roger. He frowned and folded his arms and blinked at the blank golden wall. And it was a blank wall, a very blank wall. All the walls were blank, save for a door in the wall to Roger’s right and a window in the wall to his left. The door was silver and knobless, and in conjunction with the golden walls it made Roger think of money. And money made him think of income and outgo, which made him think of work, which made him remember that he had gone to sleep on December 3, 1960 and had awakened — if the calendar-clock were to be believed — on August 14, 2138, in a room utterly different from his own bedroom, and in a bed as strange as any he had ever seen.
Stranger, come to think of it. It was the first bed he’d ever seen hover eighteen inches above the floor.
Which made him think of the voice, for some reason, and he said, petulantly, “My mechanical what?”
“Machine?” said the voice, with a definite air of hesitant doubt.
“My mechanical machine?” Roger looked again at the blank wall. “A robot, you mean?”
“Not precisely,” said the voice.
“Where’s your grid?” asked Roger.
“Meaning doubtful,” said the voice. “Grid nonexistent.”
“Is it really August 14, 2138?” asked Roger, struck suddenly by the idea that the calendar-clock might be wrong. Must be wrong. 1960 to 2138 was — he couldn’t figure it exactly, but it was over a hundred years. Well over a hundred years.
“The date is correct,” said the voice.
“Where am I, exactly?” asked Roger.
“In this room,” said the voice.
“I mean, geographically,” said Roger, annoyed at the infuriating habit of the voice of taking every question at its most literal level of meaning.
“New York,” said the voice, “North-Eastern Union, North America, Earth, Solar Sys—”
“Enough! Thank you very much, New York was enough. That was where I went to sleep last night. Or whenever it was. At least that hasn’t changed.” Roger walked over to the window and looked out, to discover that it had changed after all. The New York outside his window was far different from the New York outside his Greenwich Village window at home, back in 1960. This New York consisted almost entirely of straight vertical lines and elliptical diagonal lines, and almost everything was the same gold as the room walls or the same silver as the room door or the same black as the room floor, “Is that real gold?” asked Roger, then hurriedly added, “Wait! I mean the metal, not the color.”
“No,” said the voice.
Roger sighed with irritation. “What is it, then?” he asked. “Fluoryl plastic,” said the voice. “And the silver?”
“Yes.”
“And the black.”
There was no answer, and Roger wondered what had gone wrong until he realized he’d phrased that last remark as a statement rather than a question. The voice, he now understood, responded only to direct questions.
It was time for the most direct question of all. “What’s going on here?” asked Roger.
“You are asking questions,” said the voice, “and I am answering them.”
“That isn’t what I mean,” wailed Roger. “I mean… I mean— What am I doing here?”
“You are asking questions,” said the voice.
Yelping, Roger snatched up the calendar-clock to hurl it, and stood posed, off-balance, rocking a bit. There wasn’t anything to hurl at, nothing but the four golden walls, the black floor, the silver door, the hovering bed, the kidney-shaped bedside table and the view out of the window. That last was good enough for Roger. He hurled the calendar-clock out the window.
The window hurled it right back. The calendar-clock bounced off the window, passed Roger at waist-level, and clashed to the floor, where it slid along until it brought up against the far wall, near the door.
Roger gaped in all directions at once, and finally moved forward to gingerly touch the window. It looked like glass, and it felt like glass, but it certainly hadn’t reacted like glass.
“What in the world is it?” he wondered.
“Fluoryl plastic,” said the voice.
Roger jumped. He hadn’t realized he’d asked that question aloud. It was a habit of his, he knew, talking to himself. It was because his three vocations — interior decorating, set designing and department store window display designing — were all essentially solitary occupations. Himself over a drawing board or prowling a presently-shabby living room or pinning a dress to a mannequin, always more or less alone, thinking and deciding and planning, and quite naturally he had developed the habit of voicing his thoughts aloud. Things like, “Red over that fireplace, I should think,” or, “Never do to put an entrance on that side,” or, “Black crepe hangings around the wedding gown would be chic.”
Which brought to mind, once again, the fact that it was morning and Roger should definitely be on his way to work. He was probably late already, and the manager at Wellman’s Department Store was a terror for punctuality.
“Of course I’m late,” he said aloud, struck by the incongruity of it all. “I’m well over a hundred years late.”
He whirled on the wall from which the voice seemed to emanate. “I want to know what’s going on,” he said angrily. “I want to know how I got here and why and when I can expect to go back and just exactly what’s going on here. And I want to know now, this minute.”
Ultimatum delivered, Roger folded his arms and waited, glaring at the wall. But the voice made no sound, and Roger remembered again that he had to ask his questions so that they sounded like questions, or the voice would simply ignore him. “All right,” he said, disgusted. “All right, then. We’ll play it your way. Question number one: How did I get here?”