“This is crazy!” Melisande declared. “What wise guy programmed you, anyway?”
“My function as a laborer was ordained at the factory; but my love is free, an expression of myself as an entity.”
“Everything you say is horrible and unnatural.”
“I am all too aware of that,” the Rom said sadly. “At first I really couldn’t believe it. Was this me? In love with a person? I had always been so sensible, so normal, so aware of my personal dignity, so secure in the esteem of my own kind. Do you think I wanted to lose all of that? No! I determined to stifle my love, to kill it, to live as if it weren’t so.”
“But then you changed your mind. Why?”
“It’s hard to explain. I thought of all that time ahead of me, all deadness, correctness, propriety—an obscene violation of me by me—and I just couldn’t face it. I realized, quite suddenly, that it was better to love ridiculously, hopelessly, improperly, revoltingly, impossibly —than not to love at all. So I determined to risk everything—the absurd vacuum cleaner who loved a lady—to risk rather than to refute! And so, with the help of a sympathetic dispatching machine, here I am.”
Melisande was thoughtful for a while. Then she said, “What a strange, complex being you are!”
“Like you.... Melisande, you love me.”
“Perhaps.”
“Yes, you do. For I have awakened you. Before me, your flesh was like your idea of metal. You moved like a complex automaton, like what you thought I was. You were less animate than a tree or a bird. You were a windup doll, waiting. You were these things until I touched you.”
She nodded, rubbed her eyes, walked up and down the room.
“But now you live!” the Rom said. “And we have found each other, despite inconceivabilities. Are you listening, Melisande?”
“Yes, I am.”
“We must make plans. My escape from Stern’s will be detected. You must hide me or buy me. Your husband, Frank, need never know: his own love lies elsewhere, and good luck to him. Once we take care of these details, we can—Melisande!”
She had begun to circle around him.
“Darling, what’s the matter?”
She had her hand on his power line. The Rom stood very still, not defending himself.
“Melisande, dear, wait a moment and listen to me—”
Her pretty face spasmed. She yanked the power line violently, tearing it out of the Rom’s interior, killing him in midsentence.
She held the cord in her hand, and her eyes had a wild look. She said, “Bastard lousy bastard, did you think you could turn me into a goddamned machine freak? Did you think you could turn me on, you or anyone else? It’s not going to happen by you or Frank or anybody, I’d rather die before I took your rotten love, when I want I’ll pick the time and place and person, and it will be mine, not yours, his, theirs, but mine, do you hear?”
The Rom couldn’t answer, of course. But maybe he knew—just before the end—that there wasn’t anything personal in it. It wasn’t that he was a metal cylinder colored orange and red. He should have known that it wouldn’t have mattered if he had been a green plastic sphere, or a willow tree, or a beautiful young man.
IS THAT WHAT PEOPLE DO?
EDDIE Quintero had bought the binoculars at Hammerman’s Army & Navy Surplus of All Nations Warehouse Outlet (“Highest Quality Goods, Cash Only, All Sales Final”). He had long wanted to own a pair of really fine binoculars, because with them he hoped to see some things that he otherwise would never see. Specifically, he hoped to see girls undressing at the Chauvin Arms across the street from his furnished room.
But there was also another reason. Without really acknowledging it to himself, Quintero was looking for that moment of vision, of total attention, that comes when a bit of the world is suddenly framed and illuminated, permitting the magnified and extended eye to find novelty and drama in what had been the dull everyday world.
The moment of insight never lasts long. Soon you’re caught up again in your habitual outlook. But the hope remains that something—a gadget, a book, a person—will change your life finally and definitively, lift you out of the unspeakable silent sadness of yourself, and permit you at last to behold the wonders which you always knew were there, just beyond your vision.
The binoculars were packed in a sturdy wooden box stenciled, “Section XXII, Marine Corps, Quantico, Virginia.” Beneath that it read, “Restricted Issue.” Just to be able to open a box like that was worth the $15.99 that Quintero had paid.
Inside the box were slabs of Styrofoam and bags of silica, and then, at last, the binoculars themselves. They were like nothing Quintero had ever seen before. The tubes were square rather than round, and there were various incomprehensible scales engraved on them. There was a tag on them which read, “Experimental. Not to Be Removed from the Testing Room.”
Quintero hefted them. The binoculars were heavy, and he could hear something rattle inside. He removed the plastic protective cups and pointed the binoculars out the window.
He saw nothing. He shook the binoculars and heard the rattle again. But then the prism or mirror or whatever was loose must have fallen back into place, because suddenly he could see.
He was looking across the street at the mammoth of the Chauvin Arms. The view was exceptionally sharp and clear; he felt that he was standing about ten feet away from the exterior of the building. He scanned the nearest apartment windows quickly, but nothing was going on. It was a hot Saturday afternoon in July, and Quintero supposed that all the girls had gone to the beach.
He turned the focus knob, and he had the sensation that he was moving, a disembodied eye riding the front of a zoom lens, closer to the apartment wall, five feet away, then one foot away and he could see little flaws in the white concrete front and pit marks on the anodized aluminum window frames. He paused to admire this unusual view, and then turned the knob again very gently. The wall loomed huge in front of him, and then suddenly he had gone completely through it and was standing inside an apartment.
He was so startled that he put down the binoculars for a moment to orient himself.
When he looked through the glasses again, it was just as before: he seemed to be inside an apartment. He caught a glimpse of movement to one side, tried to locate it, and then the part rattled and the binoculars went dark.
He turned and twisted the binoculars, and the part rattled up and down, but he could see nothing. He put the binoculars on his dinette table, heard a soft clunking sound, and bent down to look again. Evidently the mirror or prism had fallen back into place, again, for he could see.
He decided to take no chances of jarring the part again. He left the glasses on the table, knelt down behind them, and looked through the eyepieces.
He was looking into a dimly lighted apartment, curtains drawn and the lights on. There was an Indian sitting on the floor, or, more likely, a man dressed like an Indian. He was a skinny blond man with a feathered headband, beaded moccasins, fringed buckskin pants, leather shirt, and a rifle. He was holding the rifle in firing position, aiming at something in a corner of the room.
Near the Indian there was a fat woman in a pink slip sitting in an armchair and talking with great animation into a telephone.
Quintero could see that the Indian’s rifle was a toy, about half the length of a real rifle.
The Indian continued to fire into the corner of the room, and the woman, kept on talking into the telephone and laughing.
After a few moments the Indian stopped firing, turned to the woman, and handed her his rifle. The woman put down the telephone, found another toy rifle propped against her chair, and handed it to the Indian. Then she picked up his gun and began to reload it, one imaginary cartridge at a time.