Leaving the dance with Annie, he took a few sobering right-nostril breaths and wrapped his arm around her waist. She was acting girlish and giggly. "Have you finished your research, Cobb?" "What." The moon was hanging over the sea now. Its light made a long lapped lane of gold, leading out to the edge of the world, "What research?"
She slipped her hand into his pants in back and smoothed his buttock. "You know."
"That's right," Cobb said. "Be-boppa-lu-la."
"Library accessed," a voice in his head said. "I want to have sex."
"I'm glad," Annie said. "So do I."
"SEX subroutine now activated," the voice said.
"OUT," Cobb said.
"It's out?" Annie asked. "I thought you wanted to."
Cobb felt his pants tightening in front. "I do, I do."
They stopped once or twice to kiss and rub against each other. Every square centimeter of Cobb's body tingled with anticipation. For the first time in years his whole consciousness was out on his skin. Out on both their skins, really, for when they kissed he felt himself merging into Annie's personality. One flesh.
For some reason the lights in his cottage were on. At first he thought it had just been an oversight ... but walking up to the door he heard Sta-Hi's voice.
"Oh," Annie cried happily. "How wonderful! Your friend is better again!"
Cobb followed her into his cottage. Sta-Hi and Mooney were sitting there arguing. They fell silent when they saw Cobb and Annie.
Annie was angry to see Mooney there again. "What do you want, pig?"
Mooney didn't say anything, but just leaned back in Cobb's easy chair, his alert eyes looking the old man up and down.
"It is really you, Sta-Hi?" Cobb asked. "Did they beam you down or..."
"It's the real me," Sta-Hi said. "All-meat. I came back on the shuttle today. How was your trip?"
"You would have loved it. I couldn't tell yes from no." Cobb started to say more, then stopped himself. It wasn't clear how much it would be safe to let Mooney know. Had they found the switched-off robot in the bedroom? Then he noticed the pistol in Mooney's lap.
"Maybe you should send the lady home," Mooney suggested easily. "I think we have some things to talk over."
"SEX OUT," Cobb muttered bitterly, "DRUNKENNESS OUT. You better go, Annie. Mr. Mooney's right."
"But why should I? I live here now, too. Who does this crummy Gimmie loach think he is, making me leave?" She was close to tears. "And after such a wonderful evening, just when ..."
Cobb put his arm around her and walked her out the door. Patches of light from his cottage windows lay on the crushed-shell driveway. He could see Mooney's alert shadow in one of the windows.
"Don't worry, Annie. I'll make it up to you tomorrow. Suddenly it's like... like life is starting all over again."
"But what do they want? Have you done something wrong? Do they have a right to arrest you?"
Cobb thought a minute. Conceivably they could have him dismantled as a bopper spy. As a machine, he probably wouldn't even be entitled to a trial. But there was no reason it had to come to that. He put his arms around Annie and gave her a last kiss.
"I'll talk to them. I'll talk my way out. Save a place for me in your bed. I might be over in a half-hour."
"All right," Annie breathed in his ear. "And I've got a gun too, you know. I'll watch out the window in case ..."
Cobb hugged her tighter, whispering back, "Don't do that, honey. I can handle them. If worst comes to worst I'll... skip out. But ..."
"Come on, Anderson," Mooney called from Cobb's window. "We're waiting to talk to you."
Cobb and Annie exchanged a last hand-squeeze, and Cobb went back in his house. He sat down in the easy chair that Mooney had been using, leaving Mooney to lean against the wall and glower at him, pistol in hand. Sta-Hi was lounging in a deck-chair he'd dragged in, a lit reefer in his mouth.
"Start talking, Anderson," Mooney said. He was keeping the pistol aimed at Cobb's head. A body shot probably wouldn't stop a robot, but ...
"Take it easy, Dad," Sta-Hi put in. "Cobb's not going to hurt anyone."
"You let me be a judge of that, Stanny. For all we know, that other robot is hiding right outside to help him."
"What robot?" Cobb said. How much did they really know, anyway? He and Sta-Hi had split up before the operation, and...
"Look," Sta-Hi said, a little wearily. "Let's cut the noise-level. I know that you're a machine now, Cobb. The boppers put you in your robot-double. Stuzzy! I can wave with it. The only problem is that my father here ..."
The old hard-cop/soft-cop routine. Cobb abandoned his first line of defense and asked for information.
"Where's the Sta-Hi2 robot?"
"The Little Kidders were here," Sta-Hi said. "They carried the robot out of your bedroom and left. It looked like they were driving an ice-cream truck."
"Mr. Frostee," Cobb said absently. He was thinking hard. What the boppers had done to him was, on the whole, a good thing. A whole nother ball-game. If only he could make Sta-Hi and Mooney see...
"Where's your base of operations?" Mooney demanded. "How many others like you are there?" He gestured menacingly with his pistol.
Cobb shrugged. "Don't ask me. The boppers never tell me anything. I'm just a poor old man with an artificial body." He looked over at Sta-Hi for sympathy. As with Annie before, he was getting a telepathic feeling, a feeling that he could see through the two other men's eyes. Sta-Hi was stoned, receptive and open to change. But Mooney was tense and frightened.
"As far as I know," Cobb said, "I'm completely in control of myself. I don't think the boppers plan to use me as a remote-control robot or anything like that."
"What's in it for them?" Mooney asked.
"They said they wanted to do me a favor," Cobb said. He considered opening his food-unit door to show Mooney the letter, but then thought better of it. But thinking of the door suggested a possibility.
"Be-boppa-lu-la," Cobb said out loud.
"Library accessed."
"Was there a subroutine called MR. FROSTEE?"
"Now activated," the voice murmured.
Something opened up in Cobb's mind, and a whole different set of visual stimuli overlaid the yellowed walls of his living-room.
He was still in his cottage, yet he was also in a concrete parking garage. Something very bad had just happened. Berdoo had shot Phil, his best remote. It was like losing an eye. And now there was no way to see what Berdoo and Haf-N-Haf were doing. Should he send the extra remote after them?
"Hello," Cobb thought, stopping himself from saying the word aloud.
"Cobb?" Mr. Frostee's response was quick and unsurprised. "I was hoping to talk to you. But I wanted to let you make the first move. We don't want you to feel ..."
"Like a remote?"
"Right. You're designed for full autonomy, Cobb. If you can help us, so much the better. But there's no way we would have edited out your freewill... even if we knew how. You're still entirely your own man."
"What do you want from me?" Silently asking this, Cobb leaned back in his chair, stretching out his legs. Mooney looked impatient. Sta-Hi was staring at the bugs on the ceiling.
"Convince the others," came Mr. Frostee's reply. In the background, Cobb could make out the interior of a truck-cab. Hands on the steering wheel. The concrete walls of a parking garage, then the garish lights of Daytona Beach streaming past.