So he paid attention. And kept on paying attention, even when Dr. Mincus’s lessons were about such irrelevant (to him) niceties of civilized employed persons’ behavior as why you should always participate in. an office pool, how to stand in line for tickets to a concert, and what to do at a company Christmas party. Not all of his classmates were so well behaved. The little ancient next to him gave very little trouble, being generally sunk in gloom, but the two she-robots, the ones with the beaded handbags and the miniskirts, richly deserved (Zeb thought) to be the ones to fulfill Dr. Mincus’s statistical predictions by being expelled from the course. The one with the green eye makeup snickered at almost everything the instructor said and made faces behind her back. The one with the black spitcurl across her forehead gossiped with the other students and even dared to talk back to the teacher. Reprimanded for whispering, she said lazily, “Hell, lady, this whole thing’s a shuck, ain't it? What are you doing it for?”
Dr. Mincus’s voice trembled with indignation and with the satisfaction of someone who sees her gloomiest anticipations realized: “For what? Why, because I’m trained in psychiatric social work … and because it’s what I want to do … and because I’m a human being, and don’t any of you ever let that get out of your mind!”
The course had some real advantages, Zeb discovered when he was ordered back to the robot replacement depot for new fittings. The blonde R.R.R. muttered darkly to herself as she pulled pieces out of his chest and thrust others in. When he could talk again, he thanked her, suddenly aware that now we had an appetite -a real appetite. He wanted food, which meant that some of those new pieces included a whole digestive system-and that she had muted the ,worst part of his overdainty vocabulary. She pursed her lips and didn’t answer while she clamped him up again.
But then he discovered, too, that it did not relieve him of his duties. “They think because you’re handicapped,” The R. R. R. smirked, “you’re forced to get into trouble. So now you’ve got all this first-rate equipment, and if you want to know what I think, I think it’s wasted. The bums in that class always revert to type,” she told him, “and if you want to try to be the exception to the rules, you’re going to have to apply yourself when you’re back on the job.”
“Mugging?”
“What else are you fit for? Although,” she added, pensively twisting the crystal that dangled from her right ear around a fingertip, “I did have an opening for a freshman English composition teacher. If I hadn’t replaced your vocabulary unit-“
“I’ll take mugging, please.”
She shrugged. “Might as well. But you can’t expect that good a territory again, you know. Not after what you did.”
So, rain or dry, Zeb spent every six P.m. to midnight lurking around the old Robert Taylor Houses, relieving old shes of their rent money and old hes of whatever pitiful possessions were in their pockets. Once in a while he crossed to the Illinois Institute of Technology campus on the trail of some night-school student or professor, but he was always careful to ask them whether they were robot or human before he touched them. The next offense, he knew, would allow him no parole.
There was no free-spending taxi money from such pickings, but on nights when Zeb made his quota early he would sometimes take the bus to the Loop or the Gold Coast. Once he saw Timothy, but the little robot, after one look of disgust turned away. Now and then he would drift down to Amalfi Amadeus Park, along the lakefront, where green grass and hedges reminded him of the good old days in the soy fields, but the urge to chew samples of soil was too strong, and the frustration over not being able to, too keen. So he would drift back to the bright lights and the crowds. Try as he might, Zeb could not really tell which of the well-dressed figures thronging Water tower Place and Lake Shore Drive were humans, clinging to life on the planet Earth instead of living in one of the fashionable orbital colonies, and which were robots assigned to swell the crowds.
Nor was Dr. Mincus any help. When he dared to put up a hand in class to ask her, she was outraged. “Tell the difference? You mean you don’t know the difference? Between a human person and a hunk of machinery that doesn’t have any excuse for existence except to do the things people don’t want to do and help them enjoy doing the things they do? Holy God, Zeb, when I think of all the time I put in learning to be empathetic and patient and supportive with you creeps, it just turns my stomach. Now pay attention while I try to show you he-slugs the difference between dressing like a human person of good taste and dressing like a pimp.”
At the end of the class, Lori, the hooker with the green eye shadow, thrust her arm through his and commiserated. “Old bitch’s giving you a hard time, hon. I almost got right up and told her to leave you alone. Would have, too, if I wasn’t just one black mark from getting kicked out already.”
“Well, thanks, Lori.” Now that Zeb had a set of biochemical accessories suitable for a city dandy rather than a farmhand, he discovered that she wore heavy doses of perfume-musk, his diagnostic sensors told him, with trace amounts of hibiscus, bergamot, and extract of vanilla. Smelling perfume was not at all like sniffing out the levels of CO, ozone, water vapor, and particulate matter in the air over the soy fields. It made him feel quite uncomfortable.
He let her tug him through the front door, and she smiled up at him. “I knew we’d get along real well, if you’d only loosen up a little, sweetie. Do you like to dance?”
Zeb explored his as-yet-unpracticed stores of skills. “Why, yes, I think I do,” he said, surprised.
“Listen. Why don’t we go somewhere where we can just sit and get to know each other, you know?”
“Well, Lori, I certainly wish we could. But I’m supposed to get down to my territory.”
“Down Southside, right? That’s just fine.” she cried, squeezing his arm, “because I know a really great place right near there. Come on, nobody’s going to violate you for starting a teeny bit late one night. Flag that taxi, why don’t you?”
The really great place was a low cement-block building that had once been a garage. It stood on a corner, facing a shopping center that had seen better days, and the liquid crystal sign over the door read:
SOUTHSIDE SHELTER AND COMMUNITY CENTER GOD LOVES YOU!
“It’s a church!” Zeb cried joyously, his mind flooding with memory of the happy days when he sang in Reverend Harmswallow’s choir.
“Well, sort of a church,” Lori conceded as she paid the cabbie. “They don’t bother you much, though. Come on in and meet the gang, and you’ll see for yourself!”
The place was not really that much of a church, Zeb observed. It was more like the second-floor lounge over Reverend Harmswallow’s main meeting room, back on the farm, even more like-he rummaged through his new data stores -a “Neighborhood social club.” Trestle tables were scattered around a large, low room, with folding chairs around the tables. A patch in the middle of the room had been left open for dancing, and at least a dozen hes and shes were using it for that. The place was crowded. Most of the inhabitants were a lot more like Zeb’s fellow rehab students than like Reverend Harmswallow’s congregation. A tired-looking, faded-looking female was drowsing over a table of religious tracts by the door, in spite of a blast of noise that made Zeb’s auditory-gain-control cut in at once. There were no other signs of religiosity present.