«On Honeymoon,» said Lulu, «there were different species that—»
«Forget Honeymoon. Honeymoon’s a freak. You could check a billion planets and not find another like it.»
«I love you,» Lulu repeated obstinately, «and we are eloping.»
«Where’d she get that eloping stuff?» asked Ben.
«It’s the junk they filled her up with back on Earth,» I said.
«It wasn’t junk,» protested Lulu. «If I am to do my job, it’s necessary that I have a wide and varied insight into humanity.»
«They read her novels,» Jimmy said, «and they told her about the facts of life. It’s not Lulu’s fault.»
«When I get back,» said Ben, «I’m going to hunt up the jerk who picked out those novels and jam them down his throat and then mop up the place with him.»
«Look, Lulu,» I said, «it’s all right if you love us. We don’t mind at all, but don’t you think eloping is going too far?»
«I’m not taking any chances,» Lulu answered. «If I went back to Earth, you’d get away from me.»
«And if we don’t go back, they’ll come out and hunt us down.»
«That’s exactly right,» Lulu agreed. «That’s the reason, sweetheart, that we are eloping. We’re going out so far that they’ll never find us.»
«I’ll give you one last chance,» I said. «You better think it over. If you don’t, I’ll message back to Earth and—»
«You can’t message Earth,» she said. «The circuits have been disconnected. And, as Ben guessed, I’ve jammed all emergencies. There’s nothing you can do. Why don’t you stop this foolishness and return my love?»
Getting down on the floor on his hands and knees, Ben began to pick up the cards. Jimmy tossed his tablet on the desk.
«This is your big chance,» I told him. «Why don’t you rise to the occasion? Think what an ode you could indite about the ageless and eternal love between Machine and Man.»
«Go chase yourself,» said Jimmy.
«Now, boys,» Lulu scolded us. «I will not have you fighting over me.»
She sounded like she already owned us and, in a way, she did. There was no way for us to get away from her, and if we couldn’t talk her out of this eloping business, we were through for sure.
«There’s just one thing wrong with all of this,» I said to her. «By your standards, we won’t live long. In another fifty years or less, no matter how well you may take care of us, we’ll be dead. Of old age, if nothing else. What will happen then?»
«She’ll be a widow,» said Ben. «Just a poor old weeping widow without chick or child to bring her any comfort.»
«I have thought of that,» Lulu replied. «I have thought of everything. There’s no reason you should die.»
«But there’s no way—»
«With a love as great as mine, there’s nothing that’s impossible. I won’t let you die. I love you too much ever to let you die.»
We gave up after a while and went to bed and Lulu turned off the lights and sang us a lullaby.
With her squalling this lullaby, there was no chance of sleeping and we all yelled at her to dry up and let us get to sleep. But she paid no attention to us until Ben threw one of his shoes at the audio.
Even so, I didn’t go to sleep right away, but lay there thinking.
I could see that we had to make some plans and we had to make them without her knowing it. That was going to be tough, because she watched us all the time. She kibitzed and she listened and she read over our shoulders and there wasn’t anything we did or said that she didn’t know about.
I knew that I might take quite a while and that we must not panic and that we must have patience and that, more than likely, we’d be just plain lucky if we got out of it at all.
After we had slept, we sat around, not saying much, listening to Lulu telling us how happy we would be and how we’d be a complete world and a whole life in ourselves and how love canceled out everything else and made it small and petty.
Half of the words she used were from Jimmy’s sappy verse and the rest of it was from the slushy novels that someone back on Earth had read her.
I would have got up right then and there and beat Jimmy to a pulp, only I told myself that what was done was done and it wouldn’t help us any to take it out on him.
Jimmy sat hunched over in one corner, scribbling on his tablet, and I wondered how he had the guts to keep on writing after what had happened.
He kept writing and ripping off sheets and throwing them on the floor, making disgusted sounds every now and then.
One sheet he tossed away landed in my lap, and when I went to brush it off, I caught the words on it:
I’m an untidy cuss,
I’m always in a muss,
And no one ever loves me
Because I’m a sloppy Gus.
I picked it up quick and crumpled it and tossed it at Ben and he batted it away. I tossed it back at him and he batted it away again.
«What the hell you trying to do?» he snapped.
I hit him in the face with it and he was just starting to get up to paste me when he must have seen by my look that this wasn’t just horseplay. So he picked up the wad of paper and began fooling with it until he got it unwrapped enough to see what was written on it. Then he crumpled it again.
Lulu heard every word, so we couldn’t talk it over. And we must not be too obvious, because then she might suspect.
We went at it gradually, perhaps more gradually than there was any need, but we had to be casual about it and we had to be convincing.
We were convincing. Maybe we were just natural-born slobs, but before a week had ended, our living quarters were a boar’s nest.
We strewed our clothes around. We didn’t even bother to put them in the laundry chute so Lulu could wash them for us. We left the dishes stacked on the table instead of putting them in the washer. We knocked out our pipes upon the floor. We failed to shave and we didn’t brush our teeth and we skipped our baths.
Lulu was fit to be tied. Her orderly robot intellect was outraged. She pleaded with us and she nagged at us and there were times she lectured us, but we kept on strewing things around. We told her if she loved us, she’d have to put up with our messiness and take us as we were.
After a couple of weeks of it, we won, but not the way we had intended.
Lulu told us, in a hurt and resigned voice, she’d go along with us if it pleased us to live like pigs. Her love, she said, was too big a thing to let a small matter like mere personal untidiness interfere with it.
So it was no good.
I, for one, was rather glad of it. Years of spaceship routine revolted against this kind of life and I don’t know how much more of it I could have stood.
It was a lousy idea to start with.
We cleared up and we got ourselves clean and it was possible once again to pass downwind of one another.
Lulu was pleased and happy and she told us so and cooed over us and it was worse than all the nagging she had done. She thought we’d been touched by her willing sacrifice and that we were making it up to her and she sounded like a high school girl who had been invited by her hero to the Junior Prom.
Ben tried some plain talk with her and he told her some facts of life (which she already knew, of course) and tried to impress upon her the part that the physical factor played in love.
Lulu was insulted, but not enough to bust off the romance and get back to business.
She told us, in a sorrowful voice tinged by the slightest anger, that we had missed the deeper meaning of love. She went on to quote some of Jimmy’s more gooey verse about the nobility and the purity of love, and there was nothing we could do about it. We were just plain licked.
So we sat around and thought and we couldn’t talk about it because Lulu would hear everything we said.