“All the brain of a bus does,” Bob was saying, “is read the mind of a passenger who has a destination thought out, and then work out a way to drive him there without any accidents. And to fit his destination in with those of the other passengers. It probably isn’t a bad life.”
I looked up at him. “If you like rolling around on wheels,” I said.
“The first models of thought buses that were made at the Ford works were two-way telepaths. They would broadcast music or pleasant thoughts into the heads of their passengers. Some of the night runs would send out erotic thoughts.”
“Why don’t they do that anymore? The equipment broke down?”
“No,” he said. “As I told you, thought buses are different from the rest of the junk. They don’t break down. What happened was that nobody would get off the buses.”
I nodded. Then I said, “I might have.”
“But you’re different,” he said. “You’re the only unprogrammed woman in North America. And certainly the only pregnant one.”
“Why would I be pregnant if no one else is?” I said.
“Because you don’t use pills or marijuana. Most drugs for the past thirty years have contained a fertility-inhibiting agent. I checked some control tapes at the library after the subject came up between us the other day. There was a Directed Plan to cut back population for a year. A computer decision. But something went wrong with it, and the population was never turned back on again.”
That was a shocker. I just sat there for a moment, thinking about it. Another equipment malfunction, or another burned-out computer, and no more babies. Ever.
“Could you do anything about it? Fix it, I mean?”
“Maybe,” he said. “But I’m not programmed for repair.”
“Oh, come on, Bob,” I said, suddenly irritated. “I bet you could paint these walls and fix the sink if you really wanted to.”
He said nothing.
I was feeling strange, annoyed. Something about our conversation about the lack of children in the world—a thing I had never noticed until Paul had pointed it out to me—was bothering me.
I looked at him hard—with that look that Paul calls mystical and says he loves me for. “Are robots able to lie?” I said.
He didn’t answer.
SIX
Yesterday afternoon Bob came home early from the university. I’m seven months pregnant now, and I loaf around the apartment a lot, just letting the time pass by and watching the snow falling. Sometimes I read a little, and sometimes I just sit. Yesterday when Bob came in I was bored and restless and I told him, “If I had a decent coat I’d take a walk.”
He looked at me strangely a moment. Then he said, “I’ll get you a coat,” and he turned around and walked out the door.
It must have been two hours before he got back. By that time I was even more bored, and impatient with him for taking so long.
He had a package with him and held it a minute, standing in front of me, before he gave it to me. There was something odd about his face. He looked very serious and—how can I say this?—vulnerable. Yes, big as he is, and powerful, he looked vulnerable to me, like a child, as he handed me the box.
I opened it. In it was a bright red coat with a black velvet collar. I took it out and tried it on. It was certainly red. And I didn’t much like the collar. But it sure was warm.
“Where did you get this?” I said. “And what took you so long?”
“I searched the inventories of five warehouses,” he said, staring at me, “before I found it.”
I raised my eyebrows but said nothing. The coat fit pretty well as long as I didn’t try to button it over my belly. “How do you like it?” I said, turning around in front of him.
He said nothing, but stared at me thoughtfully for a long moment. Then he said, “It’s all right. It might look better if you had black hair.”
That was an odd thing for him to say. And he had never given any sign before that he ever noticed how I looked. “Should I have the color changed?” I said. My hair is brown. Just plain brown, with no particular character to it. Where I have it is in the figure. And the eyes. I like my eyes.
“No,” he said. “I don’t want you to dye your hair.” There was something sad about the way he said it. And then he said another strange thing: “Would you like to take a walk with me?”
I looked up at him, not letting myself blink for a moment. Then I said, “Sure.”
And when we were out on the street he took my hand. Surprised hell out of me. He began to whistle. We walked like that for about an hour on the nearly empty streets in the snow and through Washington Square, where only a few zonked old ladies sat smoking their joints in silence. Bob was careful to walk slowly so that I could keep up with him—he really is enormous—but he said nothing the whole time. He would stop whistling every now and then and look down at me, as if he were studying my face; but he did not say a word.
It was strange. Yet I felt somehow pleased with it. I felt there was something important to him about the red coat and the walking and the holding of my hand, and I didn’t really feel it necessary to know exactly what it was. If he had wanted me to know he would have told me. Somehow I felt needed by him, and for a while very important. It was a good feeling. I wish he had put his arm around me.
Sometimes the thought that I will soon be a mother frightens me and makes me feel alone. I’ve never talked to Bob about this, would not know how to talk to him; he seems so absorbed in bis own longings.
I have read a book about having babies and taking care of them. But I have no idea of what it will feel like to be a mother. I have never seen one.
SEVEN
Here in New York, when walking by myself through the snow I watch the faces. They are not always bland, not always empty, not stupid. Some are frowning in concentration, as if difficult thought were trying to burst out in speech. I see middle-aged men with lean bodies and gray hair and bright clothing, their eyes glazed, lost in thought. Suicides by immolation abound in this city. Are the men thinking of death? I never ask them. One doesn’t.
Why don’t we talk to one another? Why don’t we huddle together against the cold wind that blows down the empty streets of this city? Once, long ago, there were private telephones in New York. People talked to one another then—perhaps distantly, strangely, with their voices made thin and artificial by electronics; but they talked. Of the price of groceries, the presidential elections, the sexual behavior of their teen-age children, their fear of the weather and their fear of death. And they read, hearing the voices of the living and the dead speaking to them in eloquent silence, in touch with a babble of human talk that must have filled the mind in a manner that said: I am human. I talk and I listen and I read.
Why can no one read? What happened?
I have a copy of the last book ever published by Random House, once a place of business that caused books to be printed and sold by the millions. The book is called Heavy Rape; it was published in 2189. On the flyleaf is a statement that begins: “With this novel, fifth in a series, Random House closes its editorial doors. The abolition of reading programs in the schools during the past twenty years has helped bring this about. It is with regret…” And so on.
Bob seems to know almost everything; but he doesn’t know when or why people stopped reading. “Most people are too lazy,” he said. “They only want distractions.”