The dachshund had finished and was kicking up grass blades with his hind legs. From far to the west came a rumble of thunder; Miss Vicks grew aware of the changing temperature of the air. In this latitude summer storms moved in quickly and did a lot of damage before moving away. “Come on,” she said to the dog, who seemed frozen in place, staring at nothing. Dark spots appeared on the sidewalk, a few at first and then more and more. She yanked the leash. Face it, she told herself. The man is a beast. You’d be better off without him. She could hear windows closing, the sound of Mr. O’Toole yelling instructions at Mrs. O’Toole. The back door — something about the back door swinging in the wind.
On the sidewalk outside number 37 (another prime) came the first flash of lightning, just a flash like a huge light had been turned on; for a moment it was as if it was possible to see everything in the world. Then there was another flash, this one displayed like an X-ray image of the central nervous system above the even-numbered houses on the other side of the street. Everyone knew the family inside number 37 were robots. Mr. XA, Mrs. XA, Cindy XA, Carol XA — when you saw them outside the house they looked like people. Carol had been in Miss Vicks’s class the previous year and she had been an excellent if uninspired student; Cindy would be in her class starting tomorrow. The question of how to teach — or even whether to teach — a robot came up from time to time among the teachers. No one had a good answer.
By the time Miss Vicks got to number 49 the storm was making it almost impossible to find her front door. Often it happened that the world’s water got sucked aloft and came down all at once as rain. She swept her little dog into her arms and felt her way onto the porch. They were both completely drenched, the dog’s red coat so wet it looked black. For a while they sat there in the glider, surrounded by thundering curtains of rainwater. 1511MV — what kind of a license plate was that? One plus five plus one plus one equaled eight, a number signifying the World, the very essence of the sorcerer’s domain. If you knocked eight on its side it became the symbol of infinity.
As she sat there on the porch she tried getting a sense of what was going on in number 47, the house attached to hers where Mary lived. If she had ever had a daughter the girl would have been like Mary — they even looked a little bit alike, both being bird-boned and pale, and parting their limp mouse-brown hair girlishly down the middle. Miss Vicks’s part was always ruler-straight, though, whereas Mary’s jogged to the left at the back of her head, suggesting a lack of interest in things she couldn’t see. Her teeth were too big for her mouth, too, making her appear more vulnerable than she really was.
Usually in the summer with the windows open Miss Vicks had no trouble eavesdropping on Mary’s family, but now the rain was drowning out everything except itself. Could that have been the piano? Her ears often played tricks on her, making voices come from things that couldn’t speak, especially machines that had a rhythmic movement like the washer. She’d been feeling uneasy ever since she heard Mary ask where Eddie was and Roy Duffy say he disappeared. Even after the rain had stopped pouring from the sky and dripping from the trees and streaming from the gutter spout — even after the street was restored to silence, the only thing she could hear besides the porch glider squeaking on its rusting joints and the yip her dachshund let out when she made a move to get up was a loud whispering coming from Mary’s parents’ living room, a sound that always suggested urgency to her and made her feel powerless and left out, cast back into the condition of childhood in a world where the adults were too busy to notice whatever those things were that were tunneling under the streets and slipping from their holes at night to dart under porches and along the telephone wires. Then the bells would start to peal, a stroke for each soul. She gave up and went inside and went to bed.
It was only when everyone on the street was asleep that the robots came flying out of number 37. There were four of them, two the size and shape of needles and two like coins, their exterior surface burnished to such a high state of reflective brilliance that all a human being had to do was look at one of them for a split second to be forever blinded. The robots waited to come out until after the humans were asleep. They’d learned to care about us because they found us touchingly helpless, due in large part to the fact that we could die. Unlike toasters or vacuum cleaners, though, the robots were endowed with minds. In this way they were distant relatives of Body-without-Soul, but the enmity between the sorcerer and the robots ran deep.
IN THE MORNING MISS VICKS HANDED OUT SHEETS OF colored construction paper. The students were to fold the paper in half and in half again and then in half again, the idea being that after unfolding the paper they would end up with eight boxes, in each of which they were to work a problem in long division. Mary filled her boxes with drawings of Eddie, some of them not so bad; arithmetic bored her and besides, it was her plan to be an artist of some kind when she grew up. A feeling attached to the act of being given instructions involving paper and folding it, a feeling of intense apprehension verging on almost insane excitement.
From time to time Mary looked to her left to where her model usually sat. His seat was empty, his yellow pencil lying in the groove at the top of the desk, covered with tooth marks. Eddie chewed on the pencil when he was nervous; he was a high-strung boy, sensitive and easily unhinged. One day last summer Mary had lost control of her bicycle in front of the Darlings’ house. She had fallen off and skinned her knee and Eddie stood for a long time staring at the place on the sidewalk where he could see her blood. “I shouldn’t have let it happen,” he said, even though he’d been at the dentist having a cavity filled at the time.
They were too young, really, to understand the implications, but their bond was of the kind Miss Vicks still hoped for, exquisite and therefore unbreakable, according to the rules governing chemical bonds, in this universe at least.
“Do you know where Eddie is?” Mary asked the teacher when she came around to collect the papers. “Does anyone know where he went?”
“I’m sure he’s fine,” Miss Vicks replied, even though she wasn’t. If Mary’s failure to do the assigned work troubled her she kept it to herself.
At recess Cindy XA climbed down from the top of the jungle gym to sit beside Mary on one of the wooden seats of the swing set. “Scooch over,” Cindy said, shoving her with her little butt to make room.
Cindy was petite, her bright blonde hair cut very straight, the bangs kept back from her face with red bow-shaped barrettes — Mary didn’t like her all that much. They’d tried trading cards throughout the summer but the deals had been oddly unsatisfying. Cindy always gave in without a fight. Being immune to desire, she found the enterprise pointless. As a robot she knew that human bodies had been created to an identical template, one that had been established long ago and owed almost everything to the skeletal structure of the great apes. Apes or humans — we all made the same mistake, tempted by shifting leaves or the smell of sex, by music or a ripe banana. She also knew Miss Vicks didn’t have a clue what had happened to Eddie.