Next to him a man was declaiming to a middle-aged woman:
Smote I the monstrous rock, yahoo!
Smote I the turgid tube, Bully Boy!
Smote I the cankered hill-
"Why, Morey!" he interrupted himself. "What are you doing here?"~
He turned farther around and Morey recognized him. "Hello, Howland," he said. "I-uh-I happened to be free tonight, so I thought-"
Howland sniggered. "Well, guess your wife is more liberal than mine was. Order a drink, boy."
"Thanks, I've got one," said Morey.
The woman, with a tigerish look at Morey, said, "Don't stop, Everett. That was one of your most beautiful things."
"Oh, Morey's heard my poetry," Howland said. "Morey, I'd like you to meet a very lovely and talented young lady, Tanaquil Bigelow. Morey works in the office with me, Tan."
"Obviously," said Tanaquil Bigelow in a frozen voice, and Morey hastily withdrew the hand he had begun to put out.
The conversation stuck there, impaled, the woman cold, Howland relaxed and abstracted, Morey wondering if, after all, this had been such a good idea. He caught the eye-cell of the robot bartender and ordered a round of drinks for the three of them, politely putting them on Howland's ration book. By the time the drinks had come and Morey had just got around to deciding that it wasn't a very good idea, the woman had all of a sudden become thawed.
She said abruptly, "You look like the kind of man who thinks, Morey, and I like to talk to that kind of man. Frankly, Morey, I just don't have any patience at all with the stupid, stodgy men who just work in their offices all day and eat all their dinners every night, and gad about and consume like mad and where does it all get them, anyhow? That's right, I can see you understand. Just one crazy rush of consume, consume from the day you're born plop - to the day you're buried pop! And who's to blame if not the robots?"
Faintly, a tinge of worry began to appear on the surface of Howland's relaxed calm. "Tan," he chided, "Morey may not be very interested in politics."
Politics, Morey thought; well, at least that was a clue. He'd had the dizzying feeling, while the woman was talking, that he himself was the ball in the games machine he had designed for the shop earlier that day. Following the woman's conversation might, at that, give his next design some valuable pointers in swoops, curves and obstacles.
He said, with more than half truth, "No, please go on, Miss Bigelow. I'm very much interested."
She smiled; then abruptly her face changed to a frightening scowl. Morey flinched, but evidently the scowl wasn't meant for him. "Robots!" she hissed. "Supposed to work for us, aren't they? Hah! We're their slaves, slaves for every moment of every miserable day of our lives. Slaves! Wouldn't you like to join us and be free, Morey?"
Morey took cover in his drink. He made an expressive gesture with his free hand-expressive of exactly what, he didn't truly know, for he was lost. But it seemed to satisfy the woman.
She said accusingly, "Did you know that more than three-quarters of the people in this country have had a nervous breakdown in the past five years and four months? That more than half of them arc under the constant care of psychiatrists for psychosis-not just plain ordinary neurosis like my husband's got and Howland here has got and you've got, but psychosis. Like I've got. Did you know that? Did you know that forty per cent of the population are essentially manic depressive, thirty-one pen cent are schizoid, thirty-eight pen cent have an assortment of other unfixed psychogenic disturbances and twenty-four-"
"Hold it a minute, Tan," Howland interrupted critically. "You've got too many per cents there. Start oven again."
"Oh, the hell with it," the woman said moodily. "I wish my husband were here. He expresses it so much better than I do." She swallowed her drink. "Since you've wriggled off the hook," she said nastily to Morey, "how about setting up another round-on my ration book this time?"
Morey did; it was the simplest thing to do in his confusion. When that was gone, they had another on Howland's book.
As near as he could figure out, the woman, her husband and quite possibly Howland as well belonged to some kind of anti-robot group. Morey had heard of such things; they had a quasi-legal status, neither approved nor prohibited, but he had never come into contact with them before. Remembering the hatred he had so painfully relived at the psychodrama session, he thought anxiously that perhaps he belonged with them. But, question them though he might, he couldn't seem to get the principles of the organization firmly in mind.
The woman finally gave up trying to explain it, and went off to find her husband while Morey and Howland had another drink and listened to two drunks squabble over who bought the next round. They were at the Alphonse-Gaston stage of inebriation; they would regret it in the morning; for each was bending over backward to permit the other to pay the ration points. Morey wondered uneasily about his own points; Howland was certainly getting credit for a lot of Morey's drinking tonight. Served him right for forgetting his book, of course.
When the woman came back, it was with the large man Morey had. encountered in the company of Sam, the counterfeiter, steerer and general man about Old Town.
"A remarkably small world, isn't it?" boomed Walter Bigelow, only slightly crushing Morey's hand in his. "Well, sir, my wife has told me how interested you are in the basic philosophical drives behind our movement, and I should like to discuss them further with you. To begin with, sir, have you considered the principle of Twoness?"
Morey said, "Why-"
"Very good," said Bigelow courteously. He cleared his throat and declaimed:
Han-headed Cathay saw it first,
Bright as brightest solar burst;
Whipped it into boy and girl,
The blinding spiral-sliced swirclass="underline"
Yang
And Yin.
He shrugged deprecatingly. "Just the first stanza," he said. "I don't know if you got much out of it."
"Well, no," Morey admitted.
"Second stanza," Bigelow said firmly:
Hegal saw it, saw it clear;
Jackal Marx drew near, drew near:
O'er his shoulder saw it plain,
Turned it upside down again:
Yang
And Yin.
There was an expectant pause. Morey said, "I-uh-"
"Wraps it all up, doesn't it?" Bigelow's wife demanded. "Oh, i only others could see it as clearly as you do! The robot peril and the robot savior. Starvation and surfeit. Always twoness, always!"
Bigelow patted Morey's shoulder. "The next stanza makes it ever clearer," he said. "It's really very clever-I shouldn't say it, of course but it's Howland's as much as it's mine. He helped me with th~ verses." Morey darted a glance at Howland, but Howland was care fully looking away. "Third stanza," said Bigelow. "This is a hard one, because it's long, so pay attention."
Justice, tip your sightless scales;
One pan rises, one pan falls.
"Howland," he interrupted himself, "are you sure about that rhyme I always trip over it. Well, anyway:
Add to A and B grows less;
A's B's partner, nonetheless.
Next, the Twoness that there be
In even electricity.
Chart the current as it's found:
Sine the hot lead, line the ground.
The wild sine dances, soars and falls,
But only to figures the zero calls.
Sine wave, scales, all things that be
Share a reciprocity.
Male and female, light and dark:
Name the numbers of Noah's Ark!
Yang
And Yin!
"Dearest!" shrieked Bigelow's wife. "You've never done it better!" There was a spatter of applause, and Morey realized for the first time that half the bar had stopped its noisy revel to listen to them. Bigelow was evidently quite a well-known figure here.