OLD LADY: Haven’t you got the doctor yet, you bitch?
ANSWERING SERVICE: No, madam. He has gone out on an emergency case. I am trying to contact his copter, but the storm is interfering with short-wave telephony.
OL: I know all about the storm. Haven’t you arranged yet for my medicine to be delivered, you incompetent slut?
AS: No, madam. The copters of all regional taxi and delivery services have been grounded by the storm. There have been two deaths by frightening—excuse me, lightning. I have your Cardinal pills here now. If the madam’s phone were equipped with a matter-receiver—
OL: It isn’t. Stop tormenting me by holding those pills just out of reach. Haven’t you got the doctor yet?
AS: No, madam. He has gone out on an emergency case. I am trying to contact his copter, but the storm—
OL: That tape is beginning to bore me. You are just a bunch of tapes, aren’t you? All very cleverly keyed to whatever I say, but still just a bunch of tapes.
AS: No, madam. I am a flesh-and-blood woman, age 23, name Doris. It’s true, I sometimes think I’m just a tape. I’m surrounded by miles of them, which do answer routine inquiries. Alongside my matter-transmitter and keyboard I have a tape-writer for punching out more tapes. I have a long scissors and a pot of cement for editing them. But I am truly not a tape myself, though once I took a small bottle of sleeping pills because I thought—No, no, I am a flesh-and-blood woman, age 23…
OL:… name Doris. Yes, I got that on the first spin past the transmitting head. So now we have tapes with biographies, tapes that attempt suicide and ask for sympathy, tapes that play on the customer’s feelings. How charming. Here I am, an old woman, all alone in a storm, and without a single servant, ever since the government with its red tape and its oversell of democracy made it possible to hire them, or even private nurses. An old—
AS: You haven’t a robot nurse, madam?
OL: Shining horrors! No! I’m just an old, old woman, all alone, dying for lack of a doctor and medicine, but privileged to listen to tapes making excuses.
AS: Please, madam, I am not—
OL: Ooooh… my heart… please, nurse, my Cardinal pills… please, tape…
AS: Madam! Madam?
OL:… my heart… I’m going… ooooh…
AS: Madam, I’m breaking the rules to say this, but if you’re having a heart attack, it’s essential that you relax, make no effort or outcry, waste no strength on—
OL: Oooh… yes, and tapes to help you die quietly, to leave your tortured body without making a fuss that might embarrass the powers that be. Oh, don’t worry, dear tape,—and let’s not have any sympathetic-anxiety spools. I’m over that spasm now and merely waiting for the next. Just an old woman alone in the midst of a dreadful storm—hear that crash?—listening to tapes and waiting to die for lack of one Cardinal pill.
AS: Madam, a phone of your rating should have a matter-receiver. Are you quite certain you have not? I will inquire of our master files—
OL: And tapes to make a sales pitch while you die. Next you’ll be trying to sell me a casket and a burial plot, or even urn space in a tomb satellite. I already have the first two of those, thank you. I do not have a matter-receiver.
AS: Madam, I am not trying to sell you anything, I am trying to save your life. I have your Cardinal pills here—
OL: Stop tantalizing me.
AS: —and I am doing everything I can to get them to you. If you had a matter-receiver, I would only have to drop one of the pills in the transmitter bowl in front of me or punch out its codes, and you would have it the next microsecond. Well over 99 percent of all phones of your rating have both a matter-receiver and telekinesis glove. I will inquire—
OL: Oh yes, a telekinesis glove—so I’d be able to sign checks long-distance for silver caskets cool with pearls and orchid plots and pills and masses to be said for my soul in Chartres, no doubt. But I don’t have one, ha-ha, or a matter-receiver either. Who’d swallow a pill that came over a wire, all dirty with oil and electricity? Oooh…
AS: I have programmed an inquiry, madam. It is possible that you have a matter-receiver and aren’t aware of it. Please don’t distress or in any way exert yourself, madam; but I must point out to you that actual matter is never transmitted over the waves or wires and that, in any case, no oil is involved. The chemical and mass-shape codes for the object are punched into the transmitter or analyzed from a sample. Only those codes travel over the wires or waves. When they reach the receiver, they instantly synthesize an exact duplicate from standard raw materials there. I am oversimplifying somewhat, but—
OL: Even tapes to give lectures, to contradict and argue with a dying customer. Very clever indeed, especially when one knows that a computer, working a billion times as fast as a mere brain, can always out-think a human being, even one who isn’t dying.
AS: Madam, I am not a tape! I am a flesh-and-blood…. Oh, what’s the use?
OL: That would have been the third running for that one. Is it possible that even a computer, even a tape has a little shame? Very well, my dear, we will pretend you are not a tape, but a woman: age 23, name Doris. A young woman—it’s only bitchy little sexpots that get to record those tapes, isn’t it? Or do they concoct them entirely nowadays from the squeal of metal and the hum of power? Anyhow, we’ll pretend you’re a beautiful young woman who is tormenting me with pills I can’t have and with grounded delivery-copters and with doctors who have skipped off on emergency visits to their mistresses and can’t be reached. Yes, a beautiful vicious young woman, dear tape. At least that will give me something definite to hate while I die here all alone, someone who could conceivably suffer as I suffer. Ooooh…
AS: Madam, I am not beautiful and I’m trying hard not to be vicious. And I’m quite as alone as you are. All alone in a tiny cubical, surrounded by yards and yards of electric circuits, until my relief turns up. Yet I can faintly hear through the air-conditioning system the same storm you’re having. It’s moving my way.
OL: I’m glad you’re all alone. I’m glad you can hear the storm. I’m glad you’re in a tiny cubical and can’t get away. Then you can imagine something horrible creeping silently toward you, as death is creeping toward me, while you puff your cigarettes into the air-conditioning outlet and drink your cocktails from a flask disguised as a walkie-talkie, I imagine, and preen yourself in front of a mirror and call one of your boy friends and amuse yourself by cat-and-mousing an old woman dying—
AS: Stop, mother, please!
OL: So now I’ve become the mother of a tape. How interesting. Oh, excuse me, dear, I forgot we’re pretending you’re a beautiful young woman; but my memory’s not so good these last hours, or minutes. And besides, it startled me so to discover that now tapes—excuse me again—even have mother fixations and have been psychoanalyzed, no doubt, and—
AS: Please, madam, I’m being serious. I may not be dying, but I wish I were—
OL: You’re making me feel better, dear. Thank you.