A splash of lightning covered the sky, and a second later there was another peal of thunder.
"... And this is a summer storm," he lectured. "You see how the rain affects the foliage, and ourselves. What you just saw in the sky before the thunderclap was lightning."
"... Too much," she said. "Let up on it for a moment, please."
The rain stopped instantly and the sun broke through the clouds.
"I have the damnedest desire for a cigarette," she said, "but I left mine in another world."
As she said it one appeared, already lighted, between her fingers.
"It's going to taste rather flat," said Render strangely.
He watched her for a moment, then:
"I didn't give you that cigarette," he noted. "You picked it from my mind."
The smoke laddered and spiraled upward, was swept a-way.
"... Which means that, for the second time today, I have underestimated the pull of that vacuum in your mind-in the place where sight ought to be. You are assimilating these new impressions very rapidly. You're even going to the extent of groping after new ones. Be careful. Try to contain that impulse."
"It's like hunger," she said.
"Perhaps we had best conclude this session now."
Their clothing was dry again. A bird began to sing.
"No, wait! Please! I'll be careful. I want to see more things."
"There is always the next visit," said Render. "But I suppose we can manage one more. Is there something you want very badly to see?"
"Yes. Winter. Snow."
"Okay"—the Shaper smiled—"then wrap yourself in that fur-piece..."
The afternoon slipped by rapidly after the departure of his patient. Render was in a good mood. He felt emptied and filled again. He had come through the first trial without suffering any repercussions. He decided that he was going to succeed. His satisfaction was greater than his
fear. It was with a sense of exhilaration that he returned to working on his speech.
"... And what is the power to hurt?" he inquired of the microphone.
"We live by pleasure and we live by pain," he answered himself. "Either can frustrate and either can encourage. But while pleasure and pain are rooted in biology, they are conditioned by society: thus are values to be derived. Because of the enormous masses of humanity, hectically changing positions in space everyday throughout the cities of the world, there has come into necessary being a series of totally inhuman controls upon these movements. Every day they nibble their way into new areas—driving our cars, flying our planes, interviewing us, diagnosing our diseases— and I can not ever venture a moral judgment upon these intrusions. They have become necessary. Ultimately, they may prove salutary.
"The point I wish to make, however, is that we are often unaware of our own values. We cannot honestly tell what a thing means to us until it is removed from our life-situation. If an object of value ceases to exist, then the psychic energies which were bound up in it are released. We seek after new objects of value in which to invest this—mana, if you like, or libido, if you don't. And no one thing which had vanished during the past three or four or five decades was, in itself, massively significant; and no new thing which came into being during that time is massively malicious toward the people it has replaced or the people it in some manner controls. A society though, is made up of many things, and when these things are changed too rapidly the results are unpredictable. An intense study of mental illness is often quite revealing as to the nature of the stresses in the society where the illness was made. If anxiety-patterns fall into special groups and classes, then something of the discontent of society can be learned from them. Karl Jung pointed out that when consciousness is repeatedly frustrated in a quest for values it will turn its search to the unconscious; failing there, it will proceed to quarry its way into the hypo-
thetical collective unconscious. He noted, in the postwar analyses of ex-Nazis, that the longer they searched for something to erect from the ruins of their lives—having lived through a period of classical inconoclasm, and then seen their new ideals topple as well—the longer they searched, the further back they seemed to reach into the collective unconscious of their people. Their dreams themselves came to take on patterns out of the Teutonic mythos.
"This, in a much less dramatic sense, is happening today. There are historical periods when the group tendency for the mind to turn in upon itself, to turn back, is greater than at other times. We are living in such a period of Quixotism in the original sense of the term. This because the power to hurt, in our time is the power to ignore, to baffle—and it is no longer the exclusive property of human beings—"
A buzz interrupted him then. He switched off the recorder, touched the phone-box.
"Charles Render speaking," he told it.
"This is Paul Charter," lisped the box. "I am headmaster at Dilling."
"Yes?"
The picture cleared. Render saw a man whose eyes were set close together beneath a high forehead. The forehead was heavily creased; the mouth twitched as it spoke.
"Well, I want to apologize again for what happened. It was a faulty piece of equipment that caused—"
"Can't you afford proper facilities? Your fees are high enough."
"It was a new piece of equipment. It was a factory defect-"
"Wasn't there anybody in charge of the class?"
"Yes, but-"
"Why didn't he inspect the equipment? Why wasn't he on hand to prevent the fall?"
"He was on hand, but it happened too fast for him to do anything. As for inspecting the equipment for factory defects, that isn't his job. Look, I'm very sorry. I'm quite fond
of your boy. I can assure you nothing like this will ever happen again."
"You're right, there. But that's because I'm picking him up tomorrow morning and enrolling him in a school that exercises proper safety precautions."
Render ended the conversation with a flick of his finger.
After several minutes had passed he stood and crossed the room partly masked, though not concealed, by a shelf of books. It took only a moment for him to open it and withdraw a jewel box containing a cheap necklace and a framed photograph of a man resembling himself, though somewhat younger and a woman whose upswept hair was dark and whose chin was small, and two youngsters between them—the girl holding the baby in her arms and forcing her bright bored smile on ahead. Render always stared for only a few seconds on such occasions, fondling the necklace, and then he shut the box and locked it away again for many months.
Whump! Whump! went the bass. Tchg-tchg-tchga-tchg, the gourds.
The gelatins splayed reds, greens, blues and godawful yellows about the amazing metal dancers.
HUMAN? asked the marquee.
Robots? (immediately below).
COME SEE FOR YOURSELF! (across the bottom, cryptically).
So they did.
Render and Jill were sitting at a microscopic table, thankfully set back against a wall, beneath charcoal caricatures of personalities largely unknown (there being so many personalities among the subcultures of a city of 14 million people) . Nose crinkled with pleasure, Jill stared at the present focal point of this particular subculture, occasionally raising her shoulders to ear level to add emphasis to a silent laugh or a small squeal, because the performers were just too human— the way the ebon robot ran his fingers along the silver robot's forearm as they parted and passed...