"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."
"What if we just stroll along, minding our own business," Mishkin said. "Maybe it'll just leave us alone."
"The hope of despair," said the robot.
"Do you have any other ideas?"
"No."
"Then let's start strolling."
9
Mishkin and the robot were strolling through the forest one day in the merry, merry month of May when they happened to surprise a pair of bloodshot eyes in the merry, merry month of May.
Nothing is very funny when you're underneath.
"Stand up and be counted," Mishkin's father had said to him. So Tom Mishkin stood up to be counted, and the number was one. This was not very instructive. Mishkin never stood up to be counted again.
Let's take it now from the point of view of the monster who was approaching Mishkin.
Usually reliable sources tell us that the monster did not feel at all monstrous. The monster felt anxious. That is the way everyone feels except when they are drunk or high.
It would be good to remember that when making any strange contacts: The monster feels anxious. Now, if only you can convince him that you too, despite being a monster, also feel anxious. The sharing of anxieties is the first step in communication.
"Ouch," said Mishkin.
"What's the matter?" asked the robot.
"I stubbed my toe."
"You'll never get out of this spot like that."
"What should I do?"
"It might be best to continue strolling."
The sun beat down. The forest contained many colours. Mishkin was a complicated human being with a past and a sex life and various neuroticisms. The robot was a complicated simulacrum of a man and might just as well be considered a man. The creature who was approaching them was a complete unknown but can be presumed to have had a certain pleasurable amount of complication about him. Everything was complicated.
As Mishkin approached the monster he had various fantasies, none of which are interesting enough to record.
The monster also had various fantasies.
The robot never permitted himself fantasies. He was an old-fashioned, inner-directed, Protestant ethic type of robot, and he didn't hold with tomfoolery.
There were drops of crystal clear water trembling on the green, pouting, heart-curved lips. Actually, they weren't drops of water at all; they were decals made in some loathsome factory in Yonkers. The children had decorated the trees with them.
The monster he went astrolling. He nodded civilly to Mishkin and the robot nodded civilly to the monster as they strolled past.
The monster did a double take. "What in hell was that?" he asked.
"Beats the hell out of me," said one of the perambulatory trees, who had moved back from the north forty in hopes of making a killing on the stock exchange.
"It seems to have worked," Mishkin said.
"It usually does," the robot said, "on Darbis IV."
"Do you suppose it would usually work here on Harmonia?"
"I don't see why not. After all, if a thing is right once, it is capable of being right an infinite number of times. The actual figure is n minus one, which is a very large number indeed and contains only one possibility of error out of an infinity of correct actions."
"How often does that once come up?" Mishkin asked.
"Too damned often," the robot told him. "It really knocks hell out of the law of averages."
"Well, then," Mishkin said, "maybe your formula is wrong."
"Not a chance of it," the robot said. "The theory is right, even if it usually doesn't work out in practice."
"I suppose that's good to know," Mishkin said.
"Sure it is. It's always good to know things. Anyhow, we have another chance to test it out. Here comes another monster."
10
Not everyone in the forest was capable of taking consolation from philosophy. The raemit, for example, walked along in a fog of self-loathing. The raemit knew that he was utterly and completely alone. In part this was because the raemit was the only one of his species, which tended to reinforce his feeling of isolation. But the raemit also knew that the responsibility for alienation resides with the individual and that circumstance, no matter how apparently normative, was merely the neutral ground against which the individual worked out his own internal dramas. That was a depressing thought and also a confusing one, so the raemit walked along feeling weird and spaced out and like the only raemit on Harmonia, which it was.
"What's that?" the raemit asked himself. He stared long and hard at the two alien creatures. Then he said, "Hallucinations, yet. That's what having a sensitivity such as mine brings you."
The two alien creatures or hallucinations continued walking. The raemit quickly reviewed his entire life.
"It's all a bag of shit," the raemit concluded. "A raemit works all his life and what happens? He gets himself into trouble with the cops, his girlfriend leaves him, his wife leaves him, and then he starts seeing hallucinations. I mean, really, alien creatures, what will it be next?"
11
"What I'm going to do," said the Countess of Melba, "I am going to take the pledge."
"Then for the love of God Almighty," cried the Duke of Melba, "get on with it, do get on with it, and stop nattering on about it."
"I do not believe in you any more," the Duchess of Melba said.
At that instant the Duke of Melba vanished like the insubstantial thing he was and, as far as I'm concerned, always will be.
Mishkin remembered something that had happened to him as a little boy on a stud ranch near Abilene. But he didn't pursue it because he couldn't see how it would help him in his present circumstances, whatever they were.
"One can be on the verge of violent death," said the robot, "and still be bored. I wonder why that is so?"
"One can get damned sick of the thoughts of robots," Mishkin replied.
The forest died. It was an attack of the floral version of hoof and mouth disease that had wracked such ruin around the countryside. Nothing for it, we will simply have to get along without that forest.
12
Mishkin was walking through a large parking lot. It was a beige parking lot with green and yellow stripes. The parking meters were mauve, and the crumpled old newspapers were scarlet and bronze. It was a humdinger of a parking lot.
"This seems to be a parking lot," Mishkin remarked.
"It does seem so, doesn't it?" the Duke of Melba replied, twirling the ends of his long blond moustaches. "Reminds me of a story. Rather good story. Friend of mine was staying at a friend's house in Surrey. Cotswolds, actually. He had retired for the night in a room that was purported to be haunted. My friend thought that a rather piquant touch, but he didn't buy it, of course. No one does. Well, then. My friend set the guttering candle down by his bedside — the place had no electricity, you see; or rather, it did have electricity but a sudden storm had sent it all kaput. He was just settling in for the night, in quite a calm mood, when…"