by Walter Tevis
His walk this August day took him through midtown Manhattan, on the West Side. He walked through streets with small Permoplastic houses, centuries old, some of them with poorly tended flower gardens. Gardening, for some reason, was taught in the dormitories. Probably hundreds of years before, some Engineer-Planner with a liking for flowers had decided that flower gardening should be a part of the standard human experience; because of that one casual idea, generations of humanity had planted marigolds and zinnias and phlox and yellow roses without really ever knowing why.
Sometimes Spofforth would stop and minutely examine the equipment of a store, to see if its computers were working properly, keeping supplies at the proper level, its Make One unloaders ready and able to handle the morning’s trucks, its vending machines in good working order. He might go into a clothing store, slip his special Unlimited credit card into a slot, speak out loud into the Orderphone, saying, “I want a pair of gray trousers that will fit me tightly.” Then he would stand in one of the little booths, just barely being able to fit into it, let himself be measured by sound waves, and step out again to watch the machines that would select the fabric from huge overhead bolts, cut it, and stitch his trousers together before returning his credit card. If something went wrong—and it often did—with the way the zipper was put in or the pockets were made or whatever, he would either repair the machine himself or try to commandeer a technician robot by telephone to repair it. If the telephone was working.
Or he would enter a sewer main and look around him to see what was cracking or jammed or rusting, and do what he could to get that repaired. Without him, New York might have no longer functioned at all. He sometimes wondered how other cities stayed alive, with no Make Nines, and no really effective humans around; he remembered the piles of garbage in the streets of Cleveland, and how poorly everyone had been dressed in St. Louis when he had served, briefly, as mayor of that city. And that had been almost a century before. No one in St. Louis had had pockets for years, and everyone’s shirts had been too big, until Spofforth himself had repaired the sonic measuring equipment and removed a dead cat from the pocket machine of the city’s only clothing store. They were probably not yet naked and starving in St. Louis; but what would happen in twenty blues, when everyone was old and weak, and there were no young people around with sense enough to go out and find a Make Seven to help in an emergency? Had he been able to he would have replicated himself, putting another hundred Make Nines into the world to keep things running in Baltimore and Los Angeles and Philadelphia and New Orleans. Not because he cared that much for humanity, but because he hated to see machinery that worked poorly. He thought of himself as a machine sometimes, and he felt responsible.
But had he been able to produce more Make Nines he would have made certain they would come into the world without the ability to feel. And with the ability to die. With the gift of death.
On this hot August afternoon he did not stop anywhere until he came to a squat old building on Central Park West. He had a particular thing on his mind.
The building was one of the few in the city made of concrete, and it had columns in front of it and big, multi-paned windows and a dark, stained old wooden door. He opened the door, entered a dusty lobby with a glass chandelier hanging from a white ceiling, and walked up to a wooden counter with a scarred, gray plastic top.
Behind the counter a small man was hunched in an armchair, asleep.
Spofforth spoke to him sharply. “Are you the mayor of New York?”
The man opened his eyes sleepily. “Uh-huh,” he said. “I’m the mayor.”
“I want to talk to National Records,” Spofforth said, allowing irritation to show1 in his voice. “I want the population for western America.”
The man had wakened a bit. “Don’t know about that,” he said. “Nobody just comes in here off the street and talks to the records.” He stood up and stretched, arrogantly. Then he looked at Spofforth more closely. “You a robot?” he said.
“That’s right,” Spofforth said. “Make Nine.”
The man stared at him for a moment. Then he said, blinking, “Make Nine?”
“Ask your Control what to do. I want to talk to Government Records.”
The man was peering at him now, with some interest. “They call you Spofforth?” he said. “The one who tells City Council how high to keep the water pressure and when to get the tires for thought buses? Things like that?”
“I’m Spofforth and I can have you fired. Call your Computer Control.”
“Okay,” the man said. “Okay, sir.” Then he flipped a switch on a table beside his armchair. A synthetic female voice from a speaker somewhere said, “This is Government.”
“There’s a Make Nine robot here. Name of Spofforth. Wants to talk to Government Records . . .”
“I see,” the voice said, a trifle sweetly. “What may I help you with?”
“Does he have access?”
The speaker hummed a moment. Then the artificial voice said, “Of course he has access. If not he, who?”
The man flipped the switch off and then looked toward Spofforth. “Okay, sir,” he said, trying to sound helpful.
“Well,” Spofforth said, “where is the record?”
“The Population Record is ... ah ...” He began looking around the room. There was nothing in the room to look at, except the chandelier, and for a moment he stared at a distant wall. Then he shrugged, leaned over, and flipped the switch again, and the female voice again said, “This is Government.”
“This is the mayor. Where’s the National Population Record?”
“In New York,” the voice said. “In Government Hall, Central Park West.”
“That’s where I am,” the mayor said. “Where is it in the building?”
“Fifth floor. Second door on the left,” the Government of the United States said.
As the man was turning the switch off again, Spofforth asked him where the elevator was.
“Don’t work, sir. Not since I remember.”
Spofforth looked at him a moment, wondering just how far back a human like that could remember. Probably no more than a blue. “Where are the stairs?” he said.
“All the way back and to the right,” the mayor said. Then he fumbled in his shirt pocket, took out a joint and held it speculatively between his stubby fingers. “Tried to get that elevator fixed a lot of times. But you know how robots are . . .”
“Yes,” Spofforth said, heading for the stairs, “I know how robots are.”
The Records console was a tarnished metal box about the size of a man’s head, with a switch and a speaker. In front of it sat a metal chair. That was all there was in the room.
He turned the switch to the green “on” position and a rather cocky-sounding male voice said, “This is the record of the population of the world.”
Suddenly, at this final annoyance, Spofforth became furious. “You’re supposed to be for North America. I don’t want the whole goddamn world.”
Instantly the voice said brightly, “The population of the whole goddamn world is nineteen million four hundred thirty thousand seven hundred sixty-nine, as of noon, Greenwich Standard Time. By continent, alphabetically: Africa has approximately three million, ninety-three percent dormitory-trained, four percent freeloaders, and the rest in institutions. Asia has about four and a half million souls, ninety-seven percent dormitory and almost all the others in institutions. Australia has been evacuated and has zero population. Europe is about the same. . .”
“Shut up!” Spofforth said. “I don’t want to know all that. I want to know about a person from North America. One person . . .”
The voice interrupted him. “Okay,” it said, “okay. The goddamn population of North America is two million one hundred seventy-three thousand and twelve, with ninety-two percent dormitory-trained . . ”
“I don’t care about that,” Spofforth said. He had run into computers like this one before, but not for a long time. They dated from an era long b
efore his own creation when it had been a fad to give machines “personality,” when the techniques of Random Programming had first been worked out. One thing he didn’t understand about the way the computer had been programmed, and he decided to ask. “Why do you say ‘goddamn’?” he said.
“Because you did,” the voice said affably. “I am programmed to reply in kind. I am a D 773 Intelligence, programmed to have personality.”
Spofforth nearly laughed. “How old are you?” he said.
“I was programmed four hundred ninety goddamn yellows ago. In years, two hundred forty-five.”
“Quit saying ‘goddamn,’” Spofforth said. And then, “Do you have a name?”
“No.”
“Do you have feelings?”
“Repeat the question please.”
“You say you have personality. Do you have emotions too?”
“No. Goodness, no,” the computer said.
Spofforth smiled wearily. “Are you ever bored?”
“No.”
“All right,” Spofforth said. “Now get my question right this time. And no cute answers.” He looked around the empty room, noticing now the rotting plaster walls, the sagging ceiling. Then he said, “I want the available statistics on a human woman named Mary Lou Borne, from the Eastern New Mexico Dormitory. She is now about thirty years old. Sixty yellows.”
Immediately the computer began to answer, its voice more mechanical, less bouncy than before. “Mary Lou Borne. Weight at birth seven pounds four ounces. Blood type seven. DNA code alpha delta niner oh oh six three seven four eight. High genetic indeterminacy. Candidate for Extinction at birth. Extinction not carried out. Reason unknown. Left-handed. Intelligence thirty-four. Eyesight . . .”
“Repeat the intelligence,” Spofforth said.
“Thirty-four, sir.”
“On the Charles scale of intelligence?”
“Yes, sir. Thirty-four Charles.”
That was surprising. He had never heard of a human being that intelligent before. Why hadn’t she been destroyed before puberty? Probably for the same reason that pants in St. Louis didn’t have zippers: malfunction.
“Tell me,” Spofforth said. “When was she sterilized and when was her dormitory graduation?”
There was a long wait this time, as though the computer had been embarrassed by the question. Finally the voice said, “I have no record of sterilization, nor of supplementary birth control through sopors. I have no record of dormitory graduation.”
“I thought so,” Spofforth said grimly. “Search your memory. Do you have a record of any other female in North America without sterilization, birth control, and dormitory graduation? From either Thinker or Worker dormitories?”
The voice was silent for over a minute, making the search. Then it said, “No.”
“What about the rest of the world?” Spofforth said. “What about the dormitories in China . . . ?”
“I will call Peking,” the voice said.
“Don’t bother,” Spofforth said. “I don’t want to think about it.”
He turned the switch to red, consigning the World Population Record to whatever limbo its garrulous intelligence lived in, without feelings and without boredom, between its rare evocations into speech.
Downstairs the mayor of New York was slumped in his plastic armchair with a blank smile on his face. Spofforth did not disturb him.
Outside the sun had began to shine. On his way back to his university office Spofforth walked through a small, robot-operated park and picked himself a yellow rose.
Bentley
DAY FIFTY-SEVEN
It is nine days since I have written in this journal: nine days. I have learned to add and subtract numbers. From one of the books. But it was boring to learn what is called Arithmetic for Boys and Girls, so we stopped after adding and subtracting. If you have seven peaches and take away three you will have four left. But what is a peach?
Mary Lou is learning very fast—so much faster than I did that it is astonishing. But she has me to help her, and I had no one.
I found some easy books with big print and pictures and I would read slowly aloud to Mary Lou and have her say words after me. And on the third day we made a discovery. It was in the Arithmetic for Boys and Girls book. One problem began: “There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet. . .” Mary Lou said, “What’s ‘alphabet’?” and I decided to try to find it in Dictionary. And I did. And Dictionary said: “Alphabet: the letters of a given language, arranged in the order fixed by custom. See facing page.” I puzzled for a moment over what a “given” language might be, and a “facing” page, and then I looked at the page on the other side of the book and it was a chart, with the letter “A” at the top and the letter “Z” at the bottom. They were all familiar, and their order seemed familiar too. I counted them, and there were twenty-six, just as Arithmetic for Boys and Girls had said. “The order fixed by custom” seemed to mean the way people arranged them, like plants in a row. But people didn’t arrange letters. Mary Lou and I were, as far as I knew, the only people who knew what a letter was. But of course people—perhaps everybody—had once known letters, and they must have put them into an order that was called an alphabet.
I looked at them and said them aloud: “A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J . . .” And then it struck me. That was the way the words were put into Dictionary! The “A” words were first, and then the “B” words!
I explained it to Mary Lou and she seemed to understand immediately. She took the book and leafed through it. I noticed that she had already become expert at handling books; her awkwardness with them was gone. After a minute she said, “We should memorize the alphabet.”
Memorize. To learn by heart. “Why?” I said.
She looked up at my face. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, in her yellow Synlon dress that I had bought her, and I was sitting at my bed-and-desk, with books piled on it in front of me. “I’m not sure,” she said. She looked back down at the book in her lap. “Maybe it would help us use this book, if we could say the alphabet?”
I thought about that a moment. “All right,” I said.
So we memorized it. And I was embarrassed because she could say it long before I could. But she helped me learn to say it, and I finally did learn. It was difficult—especially the last part that went “W, X, Y, Z”—but I finally got it straight and said the whole twenty-six letters exactly right twice. When I finished Mary Lou laughed and said, “Now we know something together,” and I laughed too. I didn’t know why. It wasn’t really funny.
She looked at my face a moment, smiling. Then she said, “Come here and sit by me.” And I found myself doing it, sitting on the rug next to her.
Then she said, “Let’s say it one after the other,” and she squeezed my arm and said, “A.”
This time the touch of her did not embarrass me or make me self-conscious. Not at all. I said, “B.”
She said, “C,” and turned herself around to face me.
I said, “D,” and watched her mouth, waiting for her to say her letter. She moistened her lips with her tongue, and said it softly. “E.” It sounded like a sigh.
I said, “F,” quickly. My heart was beginning to beat fast.
She turned her face and put her mouth next to my ear and said, “G.” Then she giggled softly. And I felt something that almost made me jump. It was warm and wet, on my ear, and I realized it was her tongue. My heart almost stopped.
I did not know what to do, so I said, “H.”
This time her tongue was actually in my ear. It made a shudder, a soft shudder, pass through my body, and something seemed to go loose in my stomach. And in my mind. With her tongue still in my ear she breathed, “I”—stretching it out so that it sounded: “aaaaiiiiiieeeeeeeee.”
Frankly I had not had a sexual experience for blues and yellows. And what I was feeling now was something altogether new to me, and so exciting, so overwhelming, so shaking to my body and my imagination that I found myself sitting on
the floor with her face against mine and I was crying. My face was becoming wet with tears.
And she whispered, “Jesus, Paul. You’re crying. In front of me.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t. . .”
“Do you feel bad?”
I wiped at my cheek with my hand, and it brushed against hers. I held still, with the, back of my hand against her cheek, and then I felt her hand turning mine, ever so gently, until my palm was holding her cheek. I felt a wave of a new feeling, a soft, sweet feeling like that of a powerful drug, enter me. I looked at her face, at her wide and curious eyes, now somewhat sad. “No,” I said. “No. I don’t feel bad at all. I feel . . . something. I don’t know.” I was still crying. “It’s a very good thing, what I feel.”
Her face was very close to mine. She seemed to understand what I was saying, and she nodded her head. “Shall we finish saying the letters?”
I smiled. Then I said, “J.” And I took my hand from her cheek and placed it on her back. “‘J’ is the next letter.”
She smiled.
We did not get to the difficult part of the alphabet. The “W, X, Y and Z.”
DAY FIFTY-NINE
Mary Lou has moved in with me! For two nights now we have slept together in my bed. By unfastening the desk part of it and setting it against the wall, she was able to make room for herself.
It was difficult for me to sleep with another person in the bed with me. I had heard of men and women sharing beds, but never to sleep in. But that was the way she wanted to do it, so I have done it.
I am self-conscious about her body, afraid to touch her or press against her. But I awoke this morning to find myself holding her in my arms. She was snoring lightly. I smelled her hair and kissed her lightly on the back of the neck and then just lay there, holding her sleeping body for a long, long time, until she woke.
She laughed when she woke and found me holding her and snuggled against me warmly. I became self-conscious again. But then we started talking and I forgot my self-consciousness. She talked about learning to read. She said she had dreamt she was reading—had dreamt that she had already read thousands and thousands of books and now knew everything there was to know about life.