The core of my guilt, though none of the rest suspected it, lay in the knowledge of my responsibility for Sunday’s death—and something more. The further element was part of the knowledge that I had always failed with any person or thing who had tried to get close to me. It was a fact of my experience; and, buried behind it all this time, had been the darker suspicion that when I could not turn love away from me, I would always at least manage to destroy its vehicle. Now, in my awareness of my own responsibility for the death of Sunday, I had confirmed that suspicion.
The confirmation was my own private purgatory. No one, not even Porniarsk, seemed to suspect that I might have, subconsciously, used the moment of coming to grips with the time storm to rid myself of the one creature who embarrassed me with an affection I lacked the personal machinery to return. But I myself knew the truth. I knew—and I woke fresh to the knowledge every morning. I sat with it through days of the months that followed and went to sleep with it at night.
As I saw it, my sin was not one of simple, but of calculated, omission. Which made it one of commission instead. It printed itself as a damning question on the clouds above me in the daytime and glowed, invisible to all eyes but mine, on the darkness of the ceiling above me, at night. If I could read the factors of the time storm, the question ran—and I had been able—then why hadn’t I also taken a moment to puzzle out the factors of human and animal interaction that had led to the deaths of Tek and Sunday?
I had not done so, the whisper inside me repeated night and day, because I had wanted them dead. Particularly, I had wanted Sunday dead; for if he continued to exist and follow me about, eventually the other humans would discover that there was an emptiness in me where a heart ought to be. Then it would strike them that I could never care two cents for them either; and they would turn on me because who could be safe with someone like me around?
So, I told myself all this through something like a year and a half following the time storm; and in the telling I skirted the grey edge of insanity, because I could not stand myself as I now knew myself to be. It was a grim trick of fate that had sent me into life lacking the one necessary, invisible part that would have made me human, rather than some flesh and blood robot. Inside my mind, I pounded on walls, screaming at the unfairness of circumstances, that had taken me out of a situation where I had not known what an emotional cripple I was and brought me face to face with the fact of it.
For that was what had happened. Beginning with my mental explosion, when I had found out that Swannee was gone—dead and gone, gone forever—there had been a string of small confrontations. A series of little turns which gradually turned me about one hundred and eighty degrees, until at last I saw myself full-on in the mirror of my mind and stared at the metal bones shining through my plastic skin, the glow of the light bulbs artificially illuminating the polished caverns of my eyesockets. It was then I realized what had been going on in my unconscious all along.
Only Swannee had known me for the essentially nonhuman I was. Her reaction to that had been a sort of proof that I was human; but with all hope of finding her gone, I ran the risk of being recognized. At first, I had believed that the two with me—the crazy girl and the insane cat—were no threat to my secret. No one could expect me to have to prove myself to them. But then had come Marie and the unrecognized, but nagging, suspicion that she sensed the lack in me. Then Bill, another real person to watch me and draw conclusions. Then Porniarsk, who, perhaps, was too alienly knowledgeable; and after him, the experimentals, who, by definition, must also be creatures without souls, so that at any moment any one of the other people, the real people, might say to themselves—look at the way he acts with Sunday! Doesn’t that strike you as being like the way you’d expect the experimentals to respond to any affection or kindness?
But the greatest danger had come from the girl outgrowing her craziness after all. She had known me too long; and she had known Sunday. There had been signs in her to show that she knew me better than I had thought she did. I wanted to keep her around; but unless I did something, she would be the very one who would watch me with Sunday and put two and two together-after which she would have no use for me, and I would lose her forever.
Of course, Tek had threatened to take her away anyway, which would have solved things in a way I did not want. But deep inside me, I knew Tek was no match for me. He had never really been a threat. There were a dozen ways in which I could have eliminated him from the situation, right down to following him and the girl, killing him and bringing her back by force. No, Sunday had been the one to eliminate, and now I had taken care of him. Sitting around by myself as the days and nights went past, I mourned—not for him, but for the bitterness of having to face what I was, when I had been so successful at hiding it from myself before.
The others were very patient with me. I would have shot me, dug a grave, tumbled myself in and got rid of the extra mouth to feed, the extra clothes to wash. But they were different. So they endured me, letting me roam around as I liked, only coming to collect me when it was time for a meal or bedtime; and I had the privacy I wanted.
Or at least, I had it for a long time. But then my isolation began to be invaded. I don’t know when I first became conscious of it; perhaps I had been seeing his dark, lean figure around, but ignoring it for some time. But the day came when I noticed the Old Man sitting watching me, hunkered down in the shade of a boulder (it was summer again by that time) about thirty yards off along the hillside where I sat by myself.
I remember wondering then how he had gotten loose. In the back of my mind, he had been still chained up, all this time, in the station. Possibly, I thought, they had turned him loose some time since to go back down with his fellow experimentals. I did not want to come out of my grey fog to the effort of asking any of the others about him, so I decided to ignore him. He was simply sitting, watching me; and his limited mind, I thought, should get tired of that after a while, and I would be rid of him.
I decided to ignore him.
But he did not grow tired of watching and go away. Gradually, I began to be aware that he would always be around somewhere close, even if he was not plainly visible. Not only would he be there, but after some weeks, it became obvious that he was gradually lessening the distance at which he sat from me.
I had no idea what he was after; but I wanted him gone. I wanted to be left alone, even by imitation subhumans. One day-he was now in the habit of sitting less than twenty feet from me—I let one hand that was hidden from him by my body drop casually on a stone about the size of a medium hen’s egg, gathered it in, and waited. Sometime later, when I thought I saw his attention distracted for a moment—as it turned out I was wrong—I scooped it up and threw it at him as hard as I could.
He lifted a hand and caught it before it reached him.
The catch he made was so effortless that I never tried to throw another thing at him. Nothing except his arm had moved, not even his shoulder. His long, skinny arm had simply lifted and let the stone fly into the palm of it. Then he had dropped it, discarding it with a disinterested opening of his fingers; and all the while, his eyes had stayed unmoving on mine.