"But we won't be able to taste anything unless we eat for ourselves," Eddie said.
"Tough," Vince sneered. "I'll do the tasting for all of us."
Mishkin ventured to speak. "Excuse me, Vince…"
"Mr Pagliotelli to you," Vince said.
"I just wanted to point out that I am a form of intelligent life, and where I come from one intelligent creature does not eat another intelligent creature except under really exceptional circumstances."
"You trying to teach me manners?" Vince said. "I gotta good mind to break your back for making a remark like that. Besides, you attacked me first."
"That was before I knew you were intelligent."
"You trying to put me on?" Vince said. "Me, intelligent? I never even finished high school! Ever since Poppa died I've had to work twelve hours a day in the sheet metal shop just to keep the kids in orlotans. But at least I'm smart enough to know that I ain't smart."
"You sound pretty smart to me," Mishkin said smarmily.
"Oh, sure, I got a certain native shrewdness. I'm maybe as smart as any other uneducated Wop worm. But education-wise…"
"Formal education is frequently overrated," Mishkin pointed out.
"Don't I know it," Vince said. "But how else are you going to get along in the world?"
"It's tough," Mishkin admitted.
"You'll laugh at me when I tell you this, but what I really always wanted to do was study the violin. Isn't that funny?"
"Not at all," Mishkin said.
"Can you imagine me, big stupid Vince Pagliotelli, playing stuff from Aida on a goddamned fiddle?»
"Why not?" Mishkin said. "I'm sure you have a talent."
"The way I see it," Vince said, "I had a dream. Then life came along full-freighted with responsibilities, and I exchanged the insubstantial gossamer fabric of vision for the coarse grey cloth of — of —"
"Bread?" Mishkin suggested.
"Duty?" asked Chico.
"Responsibility?" asked the robot.
"Naw, none of them's quite it," said Vince. "An uneducated dumbell like me oughtn't to fool around with parallel constructions."
"Perhaps you could change the key terms," the robot suggested. "Try "gossamer fabric of poesy for the coarse grey cloth of the mundane"."
Vince glared at the robot, then asked Mishkin, "Who's your wise-guy buddy?"
"He's a SPER robot," Mishkin said. "But he's on the wrong planet."
"Well, tell him to watch his mouth. I don't let no goddamned robot talk to me that way."
"Sorry about that," the robot said briskly.
"Forget it. I guess I ain't going to eat either of you. But if you want some advice you'll watch your step around here. Not everyone is as basically distractable, good-hearted, and childlike as I am. Other persons in this forest would as soon eat you as look at you.
They'd rather eat you, frankly, because you don't neither of you look so good to look at."
"What sort of things should we look out for, specifically?" Mishkin asked.
"Everything, specifically," Vince replied.
8
Mishkin and the robot thanked the good-natured Wop worm and nodded politely to his ill-mannered brothers. They moved on through the forest, for now there seemed no other way to go. Slowly they marched, and then more rapidly, and each sensed at his footsteps the sour breath and sodden cough of old mortality shuffling along behind them as usual.
The robot commented on this, but Mishkin was too preoccupied to answer.
They passed huge rough trees that peeked at them through amber eyes half-covered by green shades. After they had passed, the trees whispered about it to each other.
"A real bunch of weirdos," said a great elm.
"I think it was maybe an optical illusion," said an oak. "Especially that metal thing."
"Oh, my head," said a weeping willow. "What a night! Let me tell you about it."
Mishkin and the robot continued into the inner recesses of the deeper glooms where, wraith-like, the dim, indistinct memories of past arboreal splendours still clung in a pale miasma. (A kind of dying around the sacred shafts of vague luminescence that crept broken-backed down the branches of lachrymose trees.)
"It sure is gloomy in here," Mishkin said.
"Stuff like that generally does not affect me," the robot said. "We robots tend to unemotionality. Empathy is built into us, however, so we come to experience everything vicariously, which is the same as experiencing it legitimately in the first place."
"Huh," said Mishkin.
"Because of that, I am inclined to agree with you. It is gloomy in here. It is also spooky."
The robot was a good-hearted sort and not nearly as mechanical as his appearance would lead one to believe. Years afterward, when he was quite red with rust and his hands had the telltale cracks of metal fatigue, he would speak to the robot youngsters about Mishkin. "He was a quiet man," the robot said, "and you might have thought he was a little simpleminded. But there was a directness about him and a willingness to accept his own condition that was endearing in the extreme. Taken all in all, he was a man; we shall not see his like again."
The robot children said, "Sure, Grandfather," and went away laughing behind his back.
They were smooth and sharp and bright, and they thought that they were the only ones who had ever been modern, and it never occurred to them that others had been so before them and that others would be so after them. And if they had been told that someday they would be put back on the shelf with other pieces of discarded merchandise they would have laughed all the harder. That is the way of the young robots and no amount of programming seems able to change it.
But that was still in the far future. Now there was the robot and there was Mishkin, journeying together into the forest, both of them filled with knowledge of the most exquisitely detailed sort, none of it apropos to their situation. It was probably about this time that Mishkin came to his great realization — that knowledge is never pertinent to one's needs. What you need is always something else, and a wise man builds his life around this knowledge about the lack of usefulness of knowledge.
Mishkin worried around danger. He wanted to do the right thing when he faced danger. Ignorance of the appropriate action made him anxious. He was more afraid of appearing ridiculous than he was of dying.
"Look," he said to the robot, "we must make up our minds. We may meet a danger at any time, and we really must decide how we will handle it."
"Do you have any suggestions?" the robot asked.
"We could toss a coin," Mishkin suggested.
"That," said the robot, "is the epitome of fatalism and quite opposed to the scientific attitude we both represent. Give ourselves up to chance after all our training? It is quite unthinkable."
"I don't like it much, myself," Mishkin said, "but I think that we can agree that no plan of action is a disastrous course."
The robot said, "Perhaps we could decide each case upon its merits."
"Will we have time for that?" Mishkin asked.
"Here's the chance to find out," the robot said.
Up ahead, Mishkin saw something flat and thin and wide, like a sheet. It was coloured a mouse-grey. It floated about three feet above the ground. It was coming straight towards them, like everything else in Harmonia.
"What do you think we ought to do?" Mishkin asked.
"Damned if I know," the robot said, "I was going to ask you."
"I don't think we could outrun it."
"I don't think immobility would do any good," the robot said.
"Should we shoot it?"
"Blasters don't seem to work too well on this planet. We'd probably just get it angry."