The noise turned out to be heavily amplified music from a ten-piece band with six singers. Studying the musicians carefully, Zeb decided that at least some of them were human, too. Was that the purpose of the place? To give the humans an audience for their talents, or an outlet for their spiritual benevolence? Very likely, he decided, but he could not see that it affected the spirit of the crowd. Besides the dancers, there were groups playing cards, clots of robots talking animatedly among themselves, sometimes laughing, sometimes deeply earnest, sometimes shouting at one another in fury. As they entered, a short, skinny he looked up from one of the earnest groups seated around a table. It was Timothy, and a side of Timothy that Zeb had not seen before; impassioned, angry, and startled. “Zeb! How come you’re here?”
“Hello, Timothy.” Zeb was cautious, but the other robot seemed really pleased to see him. He pulled out a chair beside him and patted it, but Lori’s hand on Zeb’s aim held him back.
“Hey, man, we going to dance or not?”
“Lady,” said Timothy, “go dance with somebody else for a while. I want Zeb to meet my friends. This big fellow’s Milt; then there’s Harry, Alexandra, Walter 23-X, the kid’s Sally, and this one’s Sue. We’ve got a kind of a discussion group going.”
“Zeb,” Lori said, but Zeb shook his head.
“I’ll dance in a minute,” he said, looking around the table as he sat down. It was an odd group. The one called Sally had the form of a six-year-old, but the patches and welds that marred her face and arms showed a long history. The others were of all kinds, big and little, new and old, but they had one thing in common. None of them were smiling. Neither was Timothy. If the gladness to see Zeb was real, it did not show in expression.
“Excuse me for mentioning it,” Zeb said, “but the last time we ran into each other, you didn’t act all that friendly.”
Timothy added embarrassment to the other expressions he wore; it was a considerable tribute to his facial flexibility. “That was then,” he said.
”Then was only three nights ago,” Zeb pointed out.
“Yeah. Things change,” Timothy explained, and the hulk he had called Milt leaned toward Zeb.
“The exploited have to stick together, Zeb,” Milt said. “The burden of oppression makes us all brothers.”
“And sisters,” tiny Sally piped up.
“Sisters, too, right. We’re all rejects together, and all we got to look forward to is recycling or the stockpile. Ask Timothy here. Couple nights ago, when he first came here, he was as, excuse me, Zeb, as ignorant as you are. He can’t be blamed for that, any more than you can. You come off the line, and they slide their programming into you, and you try to be a good robot because that’s what they’ve told you to want. We all went through that.”
Timothy had been nodding eagerly. Now, as he looked past Zeb, his face fell. “Oh, God, she’s back,” he said.
It was Lori, returning from the bar with two foaming tankards of beer. “You got two choices, Zeb,” she said. “You can dance, or you can go home alone.”
Zeb hesitated, taking a quick sip of the beer to stall for time. He was not so rich in friends that he wanted to waste any, and yet there was something going on at this table that he wanted to know more about.
“Well, Zeb?” she demanded ominously.
He took another swallow of the beer. It was an interesting sensation, the cold, gassy liquid sliding down his new neck piping and thudding into the storage tank in his right hip. The chemosensors in the storage tank registered the alcoholic content and put a tiny bias on his propriocentric circuits, so that the music buzzed in his ear and the room seemed brighter.
“Good stuff, Lori,” he said, his words suddenly a little thick.
“You said you could dance, Zeb” she said. “Time you showed me.”
Timothy looked exasperated. “Oh, go ahead. Get her off your back! Then come back, and we’ll pick it up from there.”
Yes, he could dance. Damn, he could dance up a storm! He discovered subroutines he had not known he had been given: the waltz, the Lindy, the Monkey, a score of steps with names and a whole set of heuristic circuits that let him improvise. And whatever he did, Lori followed, as good as he. “You’re great,” he panted in her ear. “You ever think of going professional?”
“What the hell do you mean by that, Zeb?” she demanded.
“I mean as a dancer.”
“Oh, yeah, Well, that’s kind of what I was programmed for in the first place. But there’s no work. Human beings do it when they want to, and sometimes you can catch on with a ballet company or maybe a nightclub chorus line when they organize one. But then they get bored, you see. And then there’s no more job. How ‘bout another beer, big boy?
They sat out a set, or rather stood it out, bellied up to the crowded bar, while Zeb looked around. “This is a funny place,” he said, although actually, he recognized, it could have been the funny feelings in all his sensors and actuators that made it seem so. “Who’s that ugly old lady by the door?”
Lori glanced over the top of her tankard. It was a female, sitting at a card table loaded with what, even at this distance, clearly were religious tracts. “Part of the staff. Don’t worry “bout her. By this time every night she’s drunk anyway.”
Zeb shook his head, repelled by the fat, the pallid skin, the stringy hair. “You wonder why they make robots as bad-looking as that,” he commented.
“Robot? Hell, she ain’t no robot-. She’s real flesh and blood. This is how she gets her kicks, you know? If it wasn’t for her and maybe half a dozen other human beings who think they’re do-gooders, there wouldn’t be any community center here at all. About ready to dance some more?”
Zeb was concentrating on internal sensations he had never experienced before. “Well, actually,” he said uneasily, “I feel a little funny.” He put his hand over his hip tank. “Don’t know what it is, exactly, but it’s kind of like I had a power-store failure, you know? And it all swelled up inside me. Only that’s not where my power store is.”
Lori giggled. “You just aren’t used to drinking beer, are you, hon? You got to decant, that’s all. See that door over there marked HE? You just go in there, and if you can’t figure out what to do, you just ask somebody to help you.”
Zeb didn’t have to ask for help. However, the process was all new to him, and it did require a lot of trial and error. So it was some time before he came back into the noisy, crowded room. Lori was spinning around the room with a big, dark-skinned he, which relieved Zeb of that obligation. He ordered a round of beers and took them back to the table.
Somebody was missing, but otherwise they didn’t seem to have changed position at all. “Where’s the little she?” Zeb asked, setting the beers down for all of them.
“Sally? She’s gone off panhandling. Probably halfway to Amadeus Park by now.”
Toying with his beer, Zeb said uneasily, “You know, maybe I better be getting along, too, soon as I get this down-“
The he named Walter 23-X sneered. “Slave mentality! What’s it going to get you?”
“Well, I’ve got a job to do,” Zeb said defensively.
“Job! Timothy told us what your job was?” Walter 23-X took a deep draft of the beer and went on, “There’s not one of us in this whole place has a real job! If we did, we wouldn’t be here, stands to reason! Look at me. I used to chop salt in the Detroit mines. Now they’ve put in automatic diggers and I’m redundant. And Milt here, he was constructed for the iron mines up around Lake Superior.”
“Don’t tell me they don’t mine iron,” Zeb objected. “How else would they build us?”
Milt shook his head. “Not around the lake, they don’t. It’s all out in space now. They’ve got these Von Neumann automata, not even real robots at all. They just go out to the asteroid belt and ship off ore and refine it and build duplicates of themselves, and then they come back to the works in low-Earth orbit and hop right into the smelter! How’s a robot going to compete with that?”