After two days the snow stopped, and the day after, the weather warmed up. I provided myself with all the food and drink I could carry in my backpack, and left. It was a warm, safe place, and there was plenty of food and drink there. But it was no home for me.
After I had packed my backpack with fifty soybars and thirty-five cans of drink at the toaster factory and was ready to leave, I made a close inspection of the machines along the assembly line, studying the function of each of them. They were all of gray metal and all quite big, but each was differently made. One formed the sheets of metal into the toaster shell, another fastened a heating element in place, a third installed the battery, and so on. The robot who stood in front of each machine, supposedly attending it, paid no attention to me.
Eventually I found what I was looking for. It was a machine slightly smaller than the others, with a hopper that held some kind of little metallic chip in stacks of hundreds. Where the chips were supposed to drop from a narrow neck in the hopper and be picked up by metal fingers and placed on the passing toaster, one of them had fallen sideways and stuck in place so that no more chips could get out. I stood there a moment looking at it and thinking of how much wasted energy that little jammed-up piece of silicon or whatever it was must have caused. I remembered when the toaster in my dormitory had broken down and how we had had no toast ever after that.
Then I reached out and jiggled the hopper with my hand until the chip came loose.
The mechanical hand took it from the bottom of the hopper and placed it inside the next toaster, just below the switch on its side, and a small laser beam flared briefly and welded it there.
A few moments later, at the end of the line, the inspector robot flipped up the switch on that toaster and its element glowed red. He showed no surprise but merely flipped the switch back off and set the toaster in an empty carton, and then repeated his action.
I watched him fill up a carton with twenty toasters ready for shipping. I had not the remotest idea how they would be shipped or where, but I felt pleased with what I had done.
Then I put on my backpack, picked up Biff, and left.
Mary Lou
Last night I couldn’t sleep. I had lain in bed an hour or more, thinking about the loneliness in the streets, about how no one seemed to talk to anyone. Paul had shown me a film once, called The Lost Chord. There was a long scene in it of what was called a “picnic,” in which ten or twelve people bad sat at a big table out of doors eating things like corn on the cob and watermelon and talking to one another—just talking, all of them. I had not paid much attention at the time, sitting by Paul at his bed-and-desk in that gaudy room of his in the library basement; but the scene had somehow stayed with me and would come into my mind from time to time. I had never seen anything like it in real life—a whole big group of people engaged in eating and talking together, their faces alive with the talk, sitting outdoors with a breeze blowing their shirts and blouses gently—the women with their hair softly blowing around their faces—and with good honest food in their hands, eating and talking to one another as though there were no better thing in life to do.
It was a silent movie, and I could not at the time read the words on the screen, so I had no idea what they were talking about. But it did not matter. Lying in bed last night, I ached to be a part of that conversation, to be sitting around that wooden table in that ancient black-and-white film, eating corn on the cob and talking to all those other people.
Finally I got out of bed and went into the living room, where Bob was sitting staring at the ceiling. He nodded to me as I seated myself in the chair by the window, but he said nothing.
I stretched myself in the chair and yawned. Then I said, “What happened to conversations? Why don’t people talk anymore, Bob?”
He looked at me. “Yes,” he said, as though he had been thinking about the same thing himself. “When I was newly made, back in Cleveland, there was more of it than now. At the automobile factories there were still a few humans working along with the robots, and they would get together—five or six at a time—and talk. I would see them doing it.”
“What happened?” I said. “I’ve never seen groups of people talking. Maybe sometimes in twos—but then very seldom.”
“I’m not sure,” Bob said. “The perfecting of drugs had much to do with it. And the inwardness. I suppose Privacy rules reinforced it.” He looked at me thoughtfully. Sometimes Bob was more human than any human I have known, except maybe Simon. “Privacy and Mandatory Politeness were invented by one of my fellow Make Nines. He felt it was what people really wanted, once they had the drugs to occupy themselves with. And it nearly put a stop to crime. People used to commit a lot of crimes. They would steal from one another and do violent things to one another’s bodies.”
“I know,” I said, not even wanting to think about it. “I’ve seen television…”
He nodded. “When I was first awakened into life—if what I have may be called life—I was taught mathematics. That was done by a Make Seven named Thomas. I enjoyed talking with him. And I enjoy talking to you.” He was looking out the window as he said this, into a moonless night.
“Yes,” I said. “And I like talking to you. But what happened? Why did talking—and reading and writing—die out?”
He was silent for what seemed to be a long while. Then he ran his fingers through his hair and began to talk, softly. “When I was learning Industrial Management, I was shown films on all aspects of the Automobile Monopoly. I was being trained to be a major executive—which was what Make Nines were originally for—and I was shown everything from the film and tape and voice recording files of General Motors and Ford and Chrysler and Sikorsky. One of the films showed a big silver car going down an empty highway silently and smoothly, like an apparition—or a dream. It was an ancient gasoline-powered car, made before the Death of Oil and long before the Nuclear Battery Age.”
“The Death of Oil?”
“Yes. When gasoline had become more expensive than whiskey, and most people stayed home. That was the Death of Oil. It happened in what was called the twenty-first century. Then there were the Energy Wars. And then Solange was made. He was the first of the Make Nines and strongly programmed—as I was not— to give mankind what it wanted to have. Solange invented the nuclear battery. Controlled fusion; safe, clean, and limitless. He learned to power his own body with it, and all the rest of us were built afterward for nuclear power. One battery lasts me for nine blues.“
“Was Solange black?” I said.
“No. He was very white—with blue eyes.”
I got up to make myself some coffee. “Why are you black?” I said.
He didn’t answer until I was pouring the hot water onto the coffee powder. “I have never known why,” he said. “I think I am the only black robot ever made.”
I brought my coffee over and sat down again. “What about that film?” I said. “The one with the car.”
“There was just one man in it,” he said. “A man with a pastel blue sport shirt and gray polyester trousers. He had the windows rolled up and the stereo playing and the air conditioner and the cruise control on. His hands were white and soft and held the steering wheel lightly. And his face—oh, his face!—was as vacant as the moon.”