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+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #65013 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/65013)
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-The Project Gutenberg eBook of One for the Robot--Two for the Same, by Rog
-Phillips
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
-of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
-will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
-using this eBook.
-
-Title: One for the Robot--Two for the Same
-
-Author: Rog Phillips
-
-Release Date: April 07, 2021 [eBook #65013]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-Produced by: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed
- Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
-
-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ONE FOR THE ROBOT--TWO FOR THE
-SAME ***
-
-
-
-
- ONE FOR THE ROBOT--TWO FOR THE SAME
-
- By ROG PHILLIPS
-
- The ingredients were simple: one man for
- one robot. But the results were something else!
-
- [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
- Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
- October 1950
- Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
- the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
-
-
-I took an instinctive disliking to him from the very first. I don't
-know exactly what caused it. His appearance? He wore a well tailored
-gray plaid suit draped on what I would have sworn to be nothing but
-a skeleton. Blue-veined skin fitted over the exposed parts, such as
-his long slender hands, folded together on his lap, the stretch of
-bare leg below the cuffs of his perfectly pressed trousers and above
-his carelessly drooped sox, his turkey-like neck with its large
-Adam's apple threatened at any moment to wobble up and down while a
-gobble-gobble-gobble burst forth.
-
-His face? It made me think of a broken handled cup inverted on a
-saucer, the edge of the saucer being his jaw line. If you were to wrap
-the cup and saucer in tightly stretched dull white plastic or rubber
-sheeting and paint eyes in the proper places you would have it down pat.
-
-Maybe it was the eyes that made me dislike him. They were faded blue,
-but not the kind you would call characterless. It would be more
-accurate to call them emotionless. Not emotionless in a cold way, but
-in a dead way.
-
-On either side of his head were cartilages shaped like ears, and over
-the top of his head faded and lifeless grey hair parted with artificial
-neatness.
-
-Those were my impressions, though the hair was real enough, and I might
-have seen him through different eyes if I had been in a better mood.
-
-He wore his suit like it didn't belong to him, or if it did he very
-seldom had one on. I looked closely at him, sitting near me on the park
-bench half turned toward where I was slouched, trying to imagine what
-type of clothes would be natural to him; all I could conjure up was a
-white frock and rubber gloves and a white face mask.
-
-He had asked me, "Are you employed?", and I had swallowed an impulse
-to snap at him long enough to size him up.
-
-So now I had sized him up. I didn't like anything about him. But a
-civil answer to his question might lead to the price of a badly needed
-meal. I forced a polite grin.
-
-"Not at the moment," I said.
-
-"I surmised as much," he said quickly, smirking. His voice had the
-quality of a high school chemistry teacher talking to an audience of
-sulphuric acid carboys.
-
-I turned away, looking out across the expanse of lawn and trees and
-flower beds of the park to where the double decker busses bobbed along
-like water bugs above the carpet of cars flowing along the inner drive.
-The impatient honking of tired motorists on their way home after their
-day's work mingled with the contented quacking of ducks on the pond at
-my back.
-
-"Would you like to earn some money?"
-
-"Huh?" I said, jerking my attention back to him.
-
-His smile was the kind a professor would give to a pupil who had just
-awakened from a sound sleep.
-
-"I said, would you like to earn some money?"
-
-"Uh, uh," I said. "I'm hungry. I'd mow your lawn on an empty stomach
-and get maybe fifty cents. That's one hamburger and two cups of coffee.
-I'd still be hungry."
-
-Instead of answering, he reached one of his blue-veined hands inside
-his coat and drew out a new looking black leather billfold. I watched
-him while he pulled out a thick sheaf of currency.
-
-He carefully counted out ten twenty dollar bills, dropping them one by
-one in a neat pile on the park bench. He stuck the rest back in his
-billfold and took out a white glossy card, dropping it on the pile of
-bills.
-
-Then, smirking, he stood up and turned his back on me, slowly walking
-down the path that wound up onto a bridge over the duck pond, without
-looking back.
-
-I waited until he was out of sight, then picked up the card and read
-the name printed on it in raised green lettering: Dr. Leopold Moriss.
-
- * * * * *
-
-I had a hamburger and two cups of coffee in a place where they'd never
-seen me before. It would have been too hard to explain a twenty dollar
-bill. Afterward I rented a room and soaked some of the accumulated dirt
-out of my pores.
-
-Next morning I bought a new suit and the things that go with it. By
-noon I was wearing a hundred of that two hundred dollars. Most of the
-rest was in my pocket.
-
-Everything was fine, except that Dr. Leopold Moriss' smirking bloodless
-lips and dead eyes, framed by his skin-covered jaw kept dancing before
-me, taunting me, daring me to use that money without eventually showing
-up to earn it.
-
-I began to dislike him even more intensely. Instead of having lunch I
-went into a cocktail lounge and had a few Bourbons straight. When their
-warmth began to soak in Dr. Leopold's smirking face faded.
-
-It came back, though, and with it came his classroom voice.
-
-"_I don't know who you are_," it taunted. "_If you never show up I
-can't find you, can't do anything about it._" Its tones were laughing,
-knowing, goading. I drank. The face faded, the voice became inaudible.
-
-Three days later, and God knows how many quarts, I took that drink
-every alcoholic dreads--the one you can't keep down.
-
-I awoke a long time later and opened my eyes. Something vaguely
-like the desk clerk was hovering over me. A loud voice was pounding
-unmercifully against my tortured ears.
-
-"Come on, get up and get out of here, you filthy bum," it was shouting.
-"We've got no rooms for the likes of you in this hotel."
-
-I shook my head to clear away the fog over my eyes. The indignant face
-of a maid was staring at me.
-
-"You ought to be ashamed," she said shrilly, "vomiting on the rug!
-Where do you think you are, in the park?"
-
-"Get a wet towel and bring him to," the desk clerk ordered....
-
-I reached the precarious footing of the sidewalk with a feeling that I
-had been rushed too much, and with the afternoon sun ejecting fiery red
-shafts of searing pain into my brain through my punctured eye-balls.
-
-People were staring at me as they passed. In an attempt to appear
-casual I stuck my hands in my pockets. The fingers of my right hand
-encountered something stiff, with sharp corners.
-
-Swaying to maintain my balance, and casually whistling snatches of some
-nameless tune, I pulled the thing out and held it up where I could
-focus my eyes on it. It was Dr. Leopold Moriss' card.
-
-I managed an uncertain about face and thumbed my nose at the entrance
-to the hotel; only it was my ear, and my thumb bumped it so painfully
-that the pleasure I had anticipated at my insult was destroyed.
-
-When my consciousness settled into enough stability to be aware of
-outside impressions once more, I was in a taxi, bumping along a
-cobblestone street. There were no springs on the cab, and the back of
-the driver's head sneered at me and dared me to open the door and jump
-to my death.
-
-I wondered where I was being taken. Then my eyes caught the white
-rectangle still held in my fingers. The doctor's card. So I was on my
-way at last.
-
-On my way? I was there! The taxi had swerved abruptly to the curb and
-stopped. I slid forward off the seat. When the driver came around and
-opened the door I managed to get up on my knees. That was all.
-
-He opened the door and stood there patiently. I studied the sidewalk
-and tried to figure out how to make it from the position I was in. I
-gave up, and appealed to him with my eyes.
-
-"Here we go," he said good naturedly, lifting me out and balancing me
-carefully on my feet. "The fare is a buck eighty-five."
-
-"Help me up the steps," I said, stalling. I was trying to remember if I
-had any money left. I had a strong suspicion I hadn't.
-
-His hands held me up and pushed me across the walk and up the steps
-while I fumbled in a fruitless search of my pockets.
-
-At the top of the steps my fingers encountered the cool smoothness
-of a piece of paper in my coat pocket. I pulled it out and held it up
-to the driver. He steadied me against the frame of the door. Then he
-counted out change, closing my fingers over the money.
-
-The sound of the taxi pulling away from the curb let me know I was on
-my own. It was a diminishing yellow spot far down the street.
-
-The door frame was white set in brick. The door was stained oak. I
-reached out to lift the knocker and saw I had a fist full of money. I
-reached out with the other hand. It had the card in it. I hooked the
-little finger under the knocker and lifted it, letting it fall. It
-emitted a feeble tap.
-
-After a while I saw the door moving inward. Pausing in my futile
-stabbing for my pockets, I lifted my eyes slowly, beginning with the
-shapely hips encased in spotlessly clean watermelon red, past the slim
-waist with its black belt, pausing at the firm lift of the breast,
-jumping to the smooth neck, and finally coming to the face with its
-smooth contours, red lips, blue eyes lit with questioning curiosity,
-and iridescent waves of spun brown hair.
-
-Not daring to talk, I mutely held out the card.
-
- * * * * *
-
-Her graceful curves of eyebrows lifted just a trifle as she looked at
-the card. Then her eyes surveyed me again, quickly.
-
-"Won't you please come in?" she asked, stepping backward invitingly.
-
-I went past her with an attempt at dignity. The door closed behind
-me. Her feet tapped pertly on the foyer floor as she went past me and
-opened another door.
-
-"Wait in here Mr. Stevens," she said, her voice rich in velvet
-overtones. "I'll tell my father you're here."
-
-I ducked my head at her in acquiescence and went past her into the
-room, a luxurious library.
-
-The door closed softly as I dropped into the soft enfoldment of a
-pillow-lined barrel chair. Abruptly I sat up, staring at the blank face
-of the closed door, my eyes large and round.
-
-She had called me by name!
-
-I was still staring at the door when it jerked open. Dr. Leopold Moriss
-strode in closing it after him, his steps and motions jerky and swift.
-
-"Well, well, well," he said. "So you came after all."
-
-"How did your daughter know my name?" I asked.
-
-His shoulders arched back in a gesture of amusement.
-
-"She should know," he said. "I've done nothing but talk about January
-Stevens this and January Stevens that for the past two months."
-
-"Two months?" I echoed dumbly.
-
-"The detective agency I put on the job of finding you did an almost
-impossible job," he went on, in high good humor. "They followed you
-from the time you moved out of your bachelor apartment three years
-ago, to Los Angeles, Seattle, through Kansas, and right back here to
-Chicago again. When they found you they came and got me, and pointed
-you out to me in the park."
-
-"I don't get it," I said, bewildered. "That kind of a search would
-cost plenty. After paying that kind of dough I can understand your
-willingness to throw two hundred after it in a--childish gesture. But
-why? Since you know me, you must know I was kicked out of the Bentley
-Research Laboratories because I refused to account for five thousand
-dollars of research funds."
-
-"I know more than that," Dr. Leopold Moriss said, crisp sureness in his
-tones.
-
-"What do you mean?" I asked woodenly.
-
-"Let's just say for the present, January," he said, "that I know why
-you refused to account for those funds."
-
-"Let's just say goodbye," I said, staggering to my feet. I started for
-the door.
-
-"Sit down, you drunken bum," he said.
-
-"Why you--" I snarled, turning toward him sober with rage, my fingers
-constricting.
-
-He sat there, grinning at me, undisturbed by my threatening posture. As
-if to flaunt his unconcern in my face he took out a long cigar and lit
-it nonchalantly.
-
-I stared into his lifeless eyes through the screen of freshly
-generated blue smoke and sat down slowly.
-
-He looked back at me, his face expressionless behind the cigar. My rage
-subsided gradually.
-
-"That's better," he said finally. From that moment I hated him.
-
-Then the door opened. The girl in the watermelon red dress entered,
-wheeling a tray crowded with white sandwiches, green pickles and
-steaming black coffee.
-
-I scowled at the dream from heaven pushing the service cart, a friendly
-smile on her red lips, feeling a sense of defeat, of being crowded into
-a corner.
-
-"No thanks," I said harshly. "My stomach couldn't hold even the coffee
-right now." I jerked my eyes away from hers, past Dr. Leopold Moriss,
-to the curtains on the windows.
-
-"Get him a big glass of half tomato juice half grapefruit juice," the
-doctor said. "He can hold that down. It'll make him feel better."
-
-I continued to hold my eyes on the curtains, but I knew that I was
-licked. Whipped. Beaten into submission. When I heard the pert
-footsteps return and felt the cold roundness of the glass against my
-hand, I turned and looked up into her smiling, sympathetic eyes.
-
-"Thanks," I said gruffly.
-
- * * * * *
-
-The cold liquid stayed down, soothing the raw walls of my stomach. I
-half closed my eyes, experiencing the first pleasant body sensation
-since the warm glow of that first drink three or four days before.
-
-I watched shapely legs below the swishing dress as they went across
-the room to a desk. When they returned I looked up to see a cigarette
-between fingernails the same shade of red as the dress. I followed the
-slender fingers to the slim wrist, up the graceful, slightly tanned arm
-to the short sleeve, and from there my eyes jumped to her smiling red
-lips.
-
-"I'm Paula, January," she said.
-
-"Oh yes, January," Dr. Moriss' voice broke in. "This is my daughter,
-Paula. Her mother died many years ago. There's just the two of us,
-besides the handyman."
-
-I took the cigarette from her fingers without taking my eyes away from
-her face. She snapped a lighter and lit it the same way. I inhaled
-deeply, letting the smoke out slowly.
-
-"Glad to know you, Paula," I murmured.
-
-"I think you'd better leave us now, Paula," Dr. Moriss broke in in his
-school teacher voice. "January Stevens and I have a lot to discuss."
-
-"We can talk later, if at all," I turned on him angrily. "Two or three
-days from now, after my stomach will hold food down."
-
-"We'll talk now," he said with maddening calmness. "Three days from now
-you'll have had time to think. You'll refuse to talk. Just like you let
-yourself be branded a thief rather than talk before."
-
-I reached out and picked up a cup of coffee from the tray. With slow
-deliberation I poured the black liquid into the empty glass that had
-held my tomato and grapefruit juice. There was a large plate glass
-mirror on the wall across the room. I threw the empty cup at it without
-rising from my chair. The mirror shattered.
-
-Dr. Moriss looked back and forth from me to the broken mirror, like a
-spectator at a tennis match, the same kind of interest portrayed on his
-face.
-
-"Why did you do that?" Paula asked, her eyes flashing fire.
-
-"He did it because he likes you, Paula," the doctor's maddeningly
-unperturbed voice said. "If he didn't like you he would have thrown it
-at me." He puffed mockingly at his cigar, his eyes squinting through
-the smoke.
-
-"You _are_ expensive to know, January," Paula purred. The sound of her
-heels on the bare floor near the door jerked my eyes from Dr. Moriss'
-face.
-
-"Don't leave," I said hastily.
-
-"Why?" Paula asked, turning, her hand still on the knob.
-
-"Because--" her father began.
-
-"Shut up!" I snapped. "I'll tell her myself. Because if you do I might
-kill your father before I walk out of here."
-
-Dr. Moriss nodded agreement, puffing contentedly, his features mocking
-me through the haze.
-
-"He's afraid, Paula," he said abruptly. "It's the same fear that made
-him destroy his research and all the bills for materials and his notes,
-and let them smirch his name." He lifted on his elbows and leaned
-toward me. "The same fear that made you an alcoholic bum, January. But
-I'm going to get under that fear and find out what you discovered."
-
-"You think so?" I sneered, my voice sounding reedy to my ears.
-
-"Yes," he said. "You see, I've got to. I know everything you
-know--except what made you afraid."
-
-"You think so?" I repeated monotonously.
-
-"Yes," he matched my monotony. "Everything except that. I'll prove it
-to you. I know how you built the synthetic brain. I know how you built
-the robot body. I even know how you charged the brain. I even know that
-that Boston Bull Terrier pet you had at your feet while they questioned
-you, and which followed you out the door when you left, disgraced, _was
-not a living creature_!"
-
-I lifted my hands and looked at them. They were trembling so much their
-outlines were blurred.
-
-"Show him to his room," Dr. Leopold Moriss said suddenly. "Keep a
-generous supply of grapefruit and tomato juice near him."
-
-"You heard what the man said." Paula soothed gently, tugging at the
-shoulder of my coat.
-
-At the door I turned ponderously. Dr. Moriss was sitting there, his
-eyes on me, puffing at his cigar. Dully I turned away, following Paula
-into the hall. The door closed....
-
- * * * * *
-
-The bed was soft. The kind you sink down into, surrounded by billowing
-piles of shiny pink satin, fluffy orchid wool, white sheets, and an
-atmosphere of apple blossoms, with your head resting on down softer and
-warmer than your mother's breast.
-
-The pajamas were new and my size, obviously bought in anticipation of
-my showing up.
-
-I stood teetering in the middle of the bedroom, looking at them, the
-sound of water running into a tub coming from the adjoining bathroom.
-Tears forced themselves into my eyes. Hot scalding tears.
-
-Paula stood less than three feet from me, an eager expression on her
-face, like a Spaniel wiggling in expectation of voiced approval.
-
-I turned and staggered blindly toward the door. I wanted to get out.
-I felt strangled. I couldn't breathe, couldn't possibly get another
-breath of air until I got out of this house and felt my feet on God's
-pavement again. I fumbled for the knob, groaning in frantic desperation
-to escape.
-
-My fingers settled around the knob. I jerked the door open and started
-out into the hall.
-
-The placid face of a man twice my size, radiating peace and good will,
-blocked the doorway. I blinked at him blearily, backing away a step or
-two. He blinked back like a simpleton trying to understand geometry.
-
-"Oh, January," Paula said behind me. "This is Carl Friedman, our
-Jack-of-all-work."
-
-"Pleased to meet you, January," the giant said, sounding like an
-uncouth character concentrating on not saying pleeze t'meetcha.
-
-My snarl was purely animal as I slammed the door on him and turned back
-into the room. I stood there, swaying and holding my head for a minute.
-
-"All right," I gave up. "Get out. I'll take a nice warm bath and bury
-myself in apple blossoms. Then you can bring me some grapefruit juice
-and radiate at me like a harvest moon. Only get this straight. I hate
-your old man. I hate him more every minute."
-
-"That's all right," Paula said, going to the door and opening it. "I
-hate him too--sometimes."
-
-Carl backed away far enough for her to get out. She flashed me a
-sympathetic smile. The door closed. I was alone. With the smell of
-apple blossoms. And my hate.
-
-I took off my clothes and climbed into the tub. The temperature was
-just right. I sighed in reluctant contentment, splashing around a
-little to help the warmth soak in.
-
-"What made you afraid, January?" Dr. Moriss' voice came from the
-doorway.
-
-I catapulted to my feet, water cascading off my body over the edge of
-the tub onto the floor. Glaring at him I carefully stepped out of the
-tub, my hands working in choking motions.
-
-He watched me with that air of detached interest he would have used in
-observing the motions of a monkey in a zoo. I glared at him another
-moment, then turned my back on him, drying myself with the thick
-turkish towel.
-
-"What made you afraid, January?" It was patient repetition, insistent
-and unemotional. A school teacher repeating a question to a stubborn
-pupil.
-
-I ignored it. When I finished drying and turned to go out, he was gone.
-
-There was a pitcher of bright red liquid with ice cubes floating in
-it on the table by the bed, and a glass of it already poured sitting
-beside it. I splashed it down my throat with loud swallows, struggled
-into the pajamas, and slid under the covers. It seemed only an instant
-later--
-
-"What made you afraid, January?" When I opened my eyes the hand shaking
-my shoulder stopped. "What made you afraid, January?"
-
-I stared without answering. Finally I closed my eyes to blot out that
-serene disinterested, hateful face. When I opened them again it was
-gone. I cursed with the vocabulary of the scum from New York to San
-Francisco. His psychological game was obvious, now. He hoped to wear me
-down, drive me to the point where I would tell him what I would never
-tell anyone, as the price of peace. He'd wake me again as soon as I
-fell asleep. He'd wake me again and again and again. And again....
-
-"What made you afraid, January?"
-
-"Go 'way," I murmured drowsily.
-
-"What made you afraid, January? What made you afraid?"
-
- * * * * *
-
-No one but an alcoholic could possibly know how I suffered. With
-every cell in my body crying out in agony the only relief was the
-unconsciousness of sleep. Sleep, that welcomed me only to toss me back
-into the hell of consciousness and that mad, unemotionally reiterated
-question.
-
-"What made you afraid, January?"
-
-I grew to hate every syllable, every unvarying intonation and
-inflection. I began to force myself to stay awake each time, scheming
-ways to murder Dr. Leopold Moriss.
-
-I dreamed of him with his throat cut, going down, puffing unconcernedly
-on his cigar while his throat spurted out his life's blood. I dreamed
-of him falling to the sidewalk outside my window.
-
-"What made you afraid, January?"
-
-I dreamed I was raining blow after blow on his battered head while
-he sagged slowly to the floor, his face that of an unemotional,
-disinterested automaton.
-
-"What made you afraid, January?"
-
-I sucked in my breath. A moment later I heard the soft closing of the
-door. I opened my eyes. The room was empty.
-
-Slipping cautiously out of bed I took the pitcher of tomato juice to
-the bathroom and emptied it in the wash basin, then returned to bed
-with it, placing it under my pillows in such a way that I could bring
-it out and strike without warning.
-
-"What made you afraid, January?"
-
-I opened my eyes abruptly. The face above me bent closer suddenly,
-noting my new reaction.
-
-My hand was around the handle of the heavy glass pitcher. I drew in
-a deep breath. With convulsive movement I struck, only to feel the
-pitcher caught and pulled from my fingers.
-
-"I noticed it was gone," the doctor said calmly. "I'll get it filled
-again for you."
-
-The door closed softly. I sobbed in angry frustration, in hopeless
-protest. In murderous hate, for I knew that Dr. Leopold Moriss' every
-move and every word were coldly calculated, directed toward one goal.
-To break me down.
-
-"What made you afraid, January?"
-
-My mind skidded through vast spaces to jar into its cradle of pain. I
-opened my eyes. There was a glass of red fluid hovering in front of my
-eyes, the doctor's fingers around it. I brought the back of my hand
-against where it had been. It had bobbed up so that I missed. The
-action half turned me on my face.
-
-I stayed that way. There was the careful sound of the glass being set
-on the table, the sound of the door closing. With a deep sigh I turned
-on my back again.
-
-There must be a way out. There had to be a way out. All I had to do was
-think about it, if I could think through the torture of my body. One
-thing I knew: I would never tell him what he wanted to know. Not to
-escape a thousand years of torture.
-
-I sat up and drank the glass of tomato juice. The empty glass slipped
-out of my fingers to the floor, landing with a dull thud on the rug.
-Getting out of bed, I went into the bathroom and washed my face in cold
-water.
-
-There had to be a way out. Maybe I could tell him a lie that would
-satisfy him. But what lie would satisfy him? What, other than the
-truth, could satisfy him?
-
-I looked in the bathroom mirror at my unshaven, tortured features, my
-bloodshot eyes, my rats-nest of uncombed hair. And slowly I saw a smile
-crease my lips, distorting my face. I knew a lie he would accept as the
-truth--if I played it right.
-
-I had to play it right. Just as there was only one truth, there was
-only one lie he would accept as the truth. If I failed to make him
-accept it I was licked.
-
-How does an actor play his part? He lives it, believes it. I had to do
-that. I must keep repeating the lie in my mind, believing it, repeating
-it. Then I must _break down_ in the way my torturer expected me to.
-
-I snapped off the light in the bathroom and struggled back to bed.
-
- * * * * *
-
-When I awoke, blinding white sunlight was bursting into the room from
-between half closed slats in the Venetian blinds, sending searing pain
-through my dehydrated eyes into my aching brain. A window was half open
-behind the blinds. A bird was singing just outside the window, its song
-a shrill, jarring discordance to my tortured eardrums.
-
-I looked blankly around the room, feeling that something was missing.
-The sight of the pitcher with its red liquid, and the glass beside it,
-brought back memory. What was missing was Dr. Leopold Moriss standing
-over me asking his eternal question.
-
-I cursed in a low mumble, hating him for even that. He had kept up his
-torture until I figured out something, and had ended it before I could
-put my plan into action. He was a dancing, taunting opponent who struck
-painful blows with ease, and danced out of reach when I found a way to
-fight back.
-
-"Shut up!" I shouted at the bird, and felt a small sense of triumph
-when it obeyed.
-
-Getting out of bed, I went to the door and opened it cautiously. There
-was no one outside. From somewhere in the house came the all too
-familiar sound of Dr. Moriss' voice. It was interrupted by Paula's,
-raised angrily. I left my door open, sneaking along the hall to the
-head of the stairs, until I could make out what was being said.
-
-"... stop torturing him," Paula's voice came, angry and insistent.
-
-"It's the only way, Paula," the doctor's voice said, as unperturbed as
-ever, even in the face of his daughter's obvious anger. "A fear that
-silences a man, makes him remain silent while his employers brand him a
-thief and blackball him from his profession, that drives him down the
-road to alcoholism, can't be broken down with kindness nor anything
-less than complete destruction of his ability to fight."
-
-"It isn't human!" Paula's voice shot back. "If you keep it up
-I'll--I'll hate you as much as January does, even though you are my
-father."
-
-"I won't have to keep it up much longer," her father replied, and for
-the first time I heard a note of human emotion in his tones. "When he
-breaks down and gets the load off his mind he'll get over the past few
-years and be himself again. I think you're half falling for him. It
-wouldn't be any good being married to an alcoholic who is incurable
-because he's hiding the thing that made him an alcoholic to begin with."
-
-His next words shocked their way into my startled thoughts.
-
-"But my motive isn't that humanitarian and you know it," he said,
-returning to his school-teacherish, lecturing voice. "I've repeated
-January's experiments. Out in my laboratory I have the completed and
-tested robot body exactly like my own, all ready for the transfer of my
-mind. I could go out there right this minute, and come in again in less
-than half an hour in that immortal mechanical body. But I don't dare to
-_until I find out what made January afraid_."
-
-My turbulent thoughts settled into a state of wondering confusion.
-If he had gone that far why didn't he know what had made me afraid?
-Could it be--? Suddenly I knew! He hadn't discovered that _one last
-refinement_. That was it! I felt like laughing. But my attention was
-jerked back to the conversation below.
-
-"I don't care," Paula's voice said doggedly. "I don't care if you
-never finish. It's inhuman anyway--to discard the body you were born
-in and transfer the electronic pattern of your mind and consciousness
-to a mass of non-living colloid dielectric perched inside the head of
-a robot made of stainless steel bones, plastic muscles, and copper
-nerves. You've got to stop torturing January."
-
-"I won't have to after a couple more hours," Dr. Moriss said. "I'm
-going to wake him up and get him to drink some of that tomato juice
-with a little seasoning in it designed to make him sicker than he is.
-A few glasses of that and pounding my repeated question at him a few
-more times should do it."
-
-I stole back to my room and grinned at the tomato juice. Did you ever
-put a jigsaw together and get a flash of insight that made the pieces
-fall into place suddenly, completing the puzzle almost by itself? That
-pitcher of tomato juice was the last piece. Everything fit, including
-that.
-
-I would be able to tell my lie, and make Dr. Leopold Moriss believe
-it. Then--I would _help_ him. My wild laughter burst into my ears. By
-an effort of will I shut it off and climbed back into bed, simulating
-sleep, my ears tuned for the first sound of the doctor's coming.
-
- * * * * *
-
-The door opened. After a moment of suspense during which I kept my
-breathing slow and deep it closed softly. Padded footsteps came across
-the rug.
-
-"January!" The doctor's voice was impersonal and insistent. His hand
-was gripped on my shoulder, shaking me. "Why were you afraid, January?"
-
-I kept my eyes closed for a moment, mumbling protests. Inside I was
-laughing to myself, gloatingly. His voice was no longer torture. It was
-the senseless repetition of a parrot.
-
-Suddenly it angered me. I opened my eyes, glaring, a corner of my mind
-thrilling to the beautiful way my emotions were giving authenticity to
-my acting.
-
-"Why are you afraid, January?" the doctor repeated, his calm face
-hovering above me.
-
-I shoved his hand away, sneering at him, and sat up. The movement sent
-stabs of pain through my head. I gripped my head in my hands, groaning.
-
-"Drink this," Dr. Moriss ordered.
-
-I looked up. He was holding the glass of tomato juice toward me,
-the tomato juice containing something to make me sicker. I felt the
-sneering smile distort the sensitive skin of my face as I reached out
-deliberately and took the glass from him. I looked into his dead eyes
-while I lifted it to my lips. Then I drank it.
-
-I set the empty glass down on the stand.
-
-"Get out!" I rasped. "Leave me alone."
-
-"What made you afraid, January?"
-
-Suddenly nausea gripped me. Blindly I struggled out of bed to the
-bathroom. As I went I felt a bitter laughter welling up silently in my
-mind.
-
-"What made you afraid, January?"
-
-I was retching. That was genuine. I clamped my hands over my ears. That
-was acting, because Dr. Leopold Moriss had lost his power to torture
-me.
-
-"What made you afraid, January?"
-
-With an animal snarl I straightened and turned on him, my eyes blinded
-with tears produced by the retching, my chin wet with vomit. He caught
-my flailing arms easily, folding them over my chest and pinning me
-against the wall.
-
-"What made you afraid, January?"
-
-I began to cry. It was an act, but my condition made anything
-resembling crying come out authentic.
-
-I felt his hands drop from my arms. Still blubbering as though
-completely broken, I slid slowly to the tile floor, letting my head
-drop.
-
-"All right, I'll tell you," I said weakly. A chill shudder shook my
-body. I buried my face in my arms resting on my knees.
-
-"No, January!" It was Paula's voice. My head jerked upright. She was
-standing in the doorway, the living image of anger. The doctor had
-turned toward her, irritation showing on his face. "Dad," she said, her
-eyes flashing blue fire at him, "if you don't stop I'll get the police."
-
-Alarm coursed through me. She was endangering my plan. I dropped my
-head back in the cradle of my arms to hide my expression.
-
-"Paula!" the doctor was saying in exasperation. "Leave us--"
-
-"I was afraid," I cut in, making my voice sound utterly listless and
-defeated, "of what I knew I would do unless I stopped my experiments
-and destroyed them.
-
-"I had transferred the mind of a dog into a robot duplicate of its
-own body. The dog was a pet. It didn't know it was no longer in its
-own body, the body that had died when the mind pattern in the brain
-was lifted out and transplanted into the colloidal dielectric brain.
-It didn't know what had happened, so although it was often puzzled by
-things, it didn't mind.
-
-"But I knew what the next step would be!" I lifted my head and stared
-at the doctor, avoiding Paula's eyes. They were standing there, holding
-their breath, waiting for my next words. I let my head drop into
-concealment in my arms again.
-
-"The next step would be a robot body for myself," I said mechanically,
-tonelessly. "I would build it and enter it. And I would never be able
-to re-enter my normal body, because it would die in the transfer.
-I would be immortal--but at an awful price. The price of normal
-life, loving, being loved, and someday getting married and having
-children--and a mother for those children.
-
-"And yet I knew that I would build that robot body and transfer my mind
-to it--if I kept on. So I destroyed my work, my reputation, my ability
-to earn the kind of money it would take to do what I didn't have the
-will not to do, if I could."
-
-I looked up cautiously, my face lax, my eyes half veiled, to see how
-they were taking what I was saying. Paula's face was a mask of pity
-and sympathy. Her father's was one of fixed attention and belief. I
-dropped my head again and muffled my voice.
-
-"Pepper--my dog--not comprehending what was wrong with him, grew
-more and more bewildered. He got run over a month later. It couldn't
-kill him, but it wrecked his robot frame. I smashed his colloid
-brain and buried him to put his immortal mind out of its bewildering
-confused--existence."
-
-"But--" It was Dr. Moriss' voice, full of growing, pleased conviction.
-"Then there was nothing you discovered other than what I've already
-discovered and tried?"
-
-"No," I lied. And he believed me.
-
- * * * * *
-
-The hours passed swiftly, with long gaps during which I slept,
-unconscious of the conflict of hunger and alcohol starvation being
-fought in every cell of my body. The sunlight through the lattice-work
-of the Venetian blinds became a pleasant and welcome warmth. The song
-of the persistent bird outside the window grew joyful, and something I
-missed when it didn't come for a long time.
-
-Paula sat on the edge of the bed and washed my face and ran an electric
-razor over it while I basked in the pleasant rays from her deep
-blue eyes. She fed me tall glasses of tomato juice spiked only with
-grapefruit juice, and with cool, clinking ice cubes that caressed my
-fevered lips....
-
-"You're looking much better this morning, January," she said, leaning
-back and inspecting her handiwork with the shaver. "Feel up to trying a
-scrambled egg fried in butter, with golden brown toast and nice crisp
-bacon?"
-
-"And make the coffee black--and hot," I said.
-
-"Yes, sir," she said in mock subservience.
-
-She had her breakfast with me. The fluffy scrambled eggs and warm
-toast began to nestle comfortably in my stomach, and Paula nestled
-comfortably on the edge of the bed sipping her coffee, her hair radiant
-flows of rich browns and mahoganies capturing and transmitting the
-sunlight from the window.
-
-Her red lips parted to reveal gleaming white teeth when she laughed
-intimately, happily, at my running humor. I relaxed, my mind at ease,
-Dr. Leopold Moriss momentarily forgotten....
-
-She displayed my suit proudly on its coat hanger, freshly cleaned
-and pressed, the stack of four new shirts still in their cellophane
-wrappers. I watched her retreat from the room with something inside me,
-my heart perhaps, hurting.
-
-I stood in front of the bathroom mirror putting a knot in the tie. It
-had been a long time since I'd had a choice of ties, ten of them. I
-inspected it in the glass. Then the realization that it wasn't a new
-tie rose to consciousness. It was Dr. Moriss'.
-
-I tore it off, ripping the collar of the shirt in my anger. I stood
-there, panting with emotion. My purpose was back! Slowly, like the
-flames of a charcoal fire fanned by a gust of wind, the fire of hate
-in my eyes died down, leaving only the glowing coals, which would be
-unnoticed behind the mask of a smile.
-
-I practiced that smile while I put on another shirt and knotted another
-of Dr. Leopold Moriss' ties about my neck. I had played enough poker
-in penny ante dives up and down the west coast during my wanderings to
-perfect the lazy unrevealing poker smile.
-
-There was a knock. Paula's voice sounded. "Are you dressed?"
-
-"Come in!" I called.
-
-Her eyes literally bathed me with admiration. She let the door slam
-behind her without hearing it.
-
-"That's right!" I said. "You've never seen me before when I looked like
-a decent human being."
-
-"Oh, I have too," she retorted.
-
-"Do I look anything like you thought I would?"
-
-"That's just it," she said. "You look _exactly_ like I dr-- hoped you
-would." Then, like she was snapping out of a dream, "Dad wants you
-downstairs. That is, he said to tell you he would like you to drop
-into the study if you want to, but also to tell you you don't have to.
-You're free to come and go as you please. He said expressly to tell you
-that." She stopped breathlessly, the dreamy stare coming back into her
-eyes.
-
-"Why, sure," I said. "I guess I won't mind dropping into his study--too
-much." I grinned. "Though I'd much rather ignore him and go out
-someplace with you."
-
-"That's a date," she said softly, wrinkling her nose at me, "after you
-see dad."
-
-We tripped lightly down the stairs hand in hand as if we had done it
-hundreds of times before.
-
-"That the door?" I asked, looking at the one she had ushered me through
-when I had first arrived.
-
-"Yes," she said.
-
-I gently disengaged her hand and tapped her cheek with my fingers.
-Suddenly I took her chin between my fingers and tilted her face up. She
-looked gravely into my eyes. I bent to kiss her. Her red lips curved to
-meet mine....
-
-"You stay out here," I said gruffly.
-
-I turned to the door. My hand touched it, hesitated, then twisted the
-knob. On my face was the smile I had practiced.
-
- * * * * *
-
-Dr. Leopold Moriss was sitting as I had left him so long ago,
-puffing contentedly on a long black cigar, his dead eyes staring
-expressionlessly through the haze and streamers of blue smoke. I
-stepped inside, closing the door behind me. Its click seemed to be the
-spring that brought him to life.
-
-"Well, January," he said like a school teacher welcoming a child who
-has been down with the mumps, "you're looking better." He nodded.
-"Much better. I hope you feel better, too." He shot me a questioning
-look.
-
-"Yes sir," I said.
-
-"Nothing like getting rid of something," he said. "Getting it off your
-chest so you can forget it--but that isn't what I wanted to see you
-about." He leaned forward suddenly. "Is that lipstick?" he asked.
-
-"No, tomato juice," I said dryly. He chuckled while I wiped it off.
-
-"I'd like you to go over my research with me," he said, reverting
-abruptly to his school teacher voice. "You're the only living man who
-knows anything about it other than me. You'd like that?" He looked
-almost pleading.
-
-"All right," I said, shrugging indifferently.
-
-"Not exactly keen about it?" he said, chuckling again. "After what you
-told me I don't blame you. But it'll be good therapy, and with Paula in
-the background I don't believe you'll have any trouble resisting the
-temptation to gain immortality in a non-living robot."
-
-"Maybe you're right," I said.
-
-"With me it's different," he went on enthusiastically, paying little
-attention to my comment. "I'm getting on in years. My wife has been
-gone long enough so that she's just a memory. Paula is grown up.
-There's nothing to keep me from making the jump. Of course, I get a
-rather peculiar feeling every time I think of actually taking this
-step, and waking up to find my original body lying there on the other
-table, dead. But it doesn't alter the milk to pour it into another
-bottle. And from my experiments with dogs there doesn't seem to be
-any sensation accompanying the process of transfer. As a matter of
-fact, with one dog I teased him with a juicy bone up to the instant of
-transfer. The first thing he did in the robot body was look around for
-the bone. Rapid as the flicker of a film."
-
-"Yes, I know," I said dryly. "I found the same thing. No consciousness
-of transfer or any other sensation. With the scanner-transferer it
-takes place in less than a ten thousandth of a second. Every electrical
-pattern of the brain complex is lifted out as an infinitesimal
-segment and transplanted into the colloid dielectric complex without
-alteration."
-
-"Like a television eye scans a scene, in a way," the doctor added. "But
-let's go out to my laboratory. I'll show you _my body_."
-
-He laughed at the remark as he stood up and went to the door.
-
-My hands were trembling visibly. I hid them in my pockets, gripping
-them into tight fists to stop their trembling. I followed him into the
-hall, holding onto my appearance of calm detachment with every ounce of
-my will. The doctor had not yet found out what had made me afraid. But
-he would. He'd find out when I was ready for him to.
-
-"We're going out to the lab, Paula," Dr. Moriss was saying.
-
-"Oh," Paula said, disappointment in her tone.
-
-"Wait a minute, Dr. Moriss," I said. "Paula and I are going out for a
-walk first."
-
-"That can wait a half hour," he said. "I just want to show you--my
-body." He chuckled.
-
-"It can't wait," I said, "and even if it could I want a breath of fresh
-air before going into that lab."
-
-"He's been sick for three days without being out," Paula said. "Stop
-being so selfish, dad."
-
-"That's unkind, Paula," Dr. Moriss said, "but go ahead." He turned back
-into his study.
-
- * * * * *
-
-We walked along sidewalks hand in hand, with kids playing catch and
-hop-skip as hazards, and shapeless, harassed women struggling home
-with overloaded shopping bags.
-
-We heard the dying wail of sirens and saw a crowd at a corner, and
-joined it to watch the callous internes lift a screaming woman onto a
-stretcher while she repeated, "Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God," over and
-over, and a white faced teenage boy kept repeating to an unsympathetic
-but silent police officer, "I didn't see her. I didn't see her. I
-didn't see her."
-
-We had coffee and hamburgers in a smelly, ten stool hole-in-the-wall
-served by a jovial, potbellied cook-and-waiter who sweated olive oil
-profusely over a dirty griddle, while his cracked jukebox blared out
-music from cracked records--and looked at each other and laughed when
-we couldn't talk above the noise.
-
-On impulse we climbed aboard a streetcar just as it was starting up,
-and grinned at the conductor when he yelled above the noise, "Watch
-it. Wanta get killed?" And sat very close together while the ancient
-monument to a past civilization thundered on, on what promised to be
-its last trip.
-
-And we got off and pretended we were lost. We went into pawnshops and
-looked at second hand diamond rings, whose fires were dimmed by the
-grimy sweat of the pawnbroker's fingers and the secret knowledge they
-held within their secret carbon heart of broken romances and marriages,
-and poverty that had led their former owners here to exchange a dream
-that had shattered for a week's rent in a fourth rate hotel.
-
-We bought a newspaper from a blind man, and had a coke in a corner
-drugstore while we read it and worried about the world situation, and
-a gaunt thing with brown bags under her eyes told the patient druggist
-all her symptoms in a whining monotone.
-
-We looked in windows at fur coats marked down from four hundred and
-ninety-nine ninety-five. We bought a sack of popcorn in an automatic
-vending machine that cheated on the amount, and fought over it until
-it skidded out of our hands onto the sidewalk. We had our picture
-taken together in a twenty-five cent booth, pretending to each other it
-wasn't so we could sit with our heads together.
-
-When our feet grew reluctant we looked about us and discovered we were
-back home, and wondered with real surprise how that had happened, and
-how our feet had known without us knowing.
-
-I half turned to retreat, feeling a panic and a sense of having
-left something undone or unsaid that should have been said. Paula
-was looking at me, her eyes troubled, and suddenly I knew she felt
-the same way, only there was a basic difference. She was holding
-back her feelings about her father shuffling off his mortal body
-for an imperishable one of non-living matter. And I? The thought
-fled fearfully into my subconscious. There could be no turning back,
-whatever the price.
-
-I took Paula's hand, patted the side of her face until her smile
-brightened again. Hand in hand we slowly walked toward the house, our
-eyes on the drawn curtains of the study window behind which waited a
-man whom I had grown to hate even more than I loved his daughter.
-
- * * * * *
-
-The laboratory was a two story building in back of the house, reached
-by a narrow sidewalk in the grudging space the builders had left
-between the two. I paused at the door after the doctor had opened it
-and gone in. Paula was still at the kitchen door where we had left her,
-her eyes round with unvoiced protest and mute appeal.
-
-"Are you coming?" the doctor's voice protested my delay.
-
-"O.K.," I said, stepping inside and closing the door.
-
-Our feet rang hollowly on the wood floor as we crossed a conventional
-chemical laboratory to steps leading upward. The doctor's face was
-flushed with excitement and eagerness. His footsteps were light on
-the stairs, light and swift. My own were heavy and slow behind him,
-each hollow blow the beat of a devil drum in some voodoo jungle as my
-thoughts rushed back over the lifetime I had crowded into the past
-three years, to prepare me for what I would see.
-
-"There it is," the doctor said as I reached the last step and paused.
-
-I saw the trim panel of the transfer machine, the two leather
-upholstered tables. But they were no more than background impressions
-as my eyes fixed on the form lying full length on one of those two
-tables.
-
-If Dr. Leopold Moriss had not been standing beside me I would have
-sworn it was him--or his corpse. Unconsciously my feet carried me
-forward and to one side where I could look down at that face of
-carefully molded synthetic rubber, tinted the exact shade of the
-doctor's living flesh, the open unblinking eyes with irises the same
-pale blue. And blue-veined hands that seemed to have died just the
-moment before.
-
-"Color photography," the doctor was explaining. "The sensitized
-chemicals impregnated in the rubberoid, and the color image of my own
-flesh imprinted in it from a projector."
-
-"As authentic as a counterfeit ten dollar bill," I wisecracked
-tonelessly. "Even to the clothes and shoes!"
-
-"Exactly," Dr. Moriss said, laughing gleefully. "Take a look at the
-insides of the transferer and see if it looks familiar to you. I built
-it so the circuits are all exposed and easy to follow. Different
-colored wires."
-
-I stepped around the duplicate of the doctor on the table, something
-inside me crawling frantically, and unfastened the back of the cabinet,
-exposing the circuit. Skills that had not dimmed and would never dim
-took control of my sight and traced each element of the circuit,
-comparing it with that which I myself had built--and destroyed....
-
-The drops of solder that held wires in contact glistened dully--silver
-blobs dotting orderly geometrical designs composed of blue, yellow,
-green, orange, and too many other colors to count. Little cylinders
-that were condensers and resistors and tubes and coils.
-
-My mind clicked off one detail after another. It was my circuit. I
-might have built it myself. But I had destroyed everything except what
-I carried in my mind. Dr. Leopold Moriss had repeated my discoveries
-step by step. Reason had followed the path I had destroyed, just as
-surely as the instinct of an insect makes it live the life pattern of
-its ancestors down to the finest detail.
-
-"Does it check?" The doctor asked.
-
-I looked at one particular blob of solder connecting a blue coated wire
-with a red one, and nodded.
-
-"Yes," I said carefully.
-
-"How about the hoods?" he asked.
-
-I quickly examined the hoods, heavy things on maneuverable frames. They
-could almost have been cast from the same mold.
-
-"They're O.K.," I said.
-
-"Then I want to get it over with now," Dr. Moriss said.
-
-"What!" I exclaimed.
-
-"Yes. Now," he said. "The sooner the better. Paula isn't expecting me
-to do it this way."
-
-I took a deep breath. My eyes studied the straps to be buckled around
-the robot in such a way that it could only release itself when it
-became activated by a calm intelligence, and the straps fastened into
-the vacant table that could be buckled and unbuckled the same way, that
-would keep the body from throwing itself around violently under the
-wild play of neutral forces set loose as the mind was plucked from the
-living brain.
-
-"All right," I said, my voice sounding queer and remote to me. "Lie
-down and I'll strap you up."
-
-As he climbed onto the vacant table my eyes searched the room
-frantically for something _to cut the connection between that blue and
-that red wire_.
-
- * * * * *
-
-"I'm ready," the doctor said, relaxing on the table with no more
-apparent concern than a man getting into a barber chair for a shave.
-
-I buckled the straps with fumbling fingers, my thoughts racing. There
-was not a tool in sight anywhere. Nothing that could cut that wire.
-
-"We forgot to warm up the tubes!" Dr. Moriss exclaimed.
-
-"You aren't as calm as you pretend to be," I chided, hiding the thrill
-of triumph that rose in me. "As soon as I finish buckling the straps on
-you and your future receptacle I'll warm up the circuit."
-
-"Thanks, January," he said with relief.
-
-I finished with him and went to the robot, the robot so soon to be
-activated with the doctor's intelligence. I buckled the straps about
-its inert form exactly the way I had done with the living.
-
-"Why don't you turn the current on before doing that?" Dr. Moriss asked.
-
-I smiled at him slowly. "Plenty of time," I said.
-
-"What do you mean by that?" he asked. His eyes were suddenly sharp with
-suspicion.
-
-"Oh, nothing," I said, shrugging. "A minute won't make a big
-difference will it?"
-
-He studied me closely. My heart was beating against my ribs.
-
-"I've changed my mind," he said abruptly, his fingers fumbling with the
-buckle that would release his arms. "I'll wait until later to do this."
-
-"No you don't!" I said, my calm deserting me. I leaped around the
-tables. His fingers were trying desperately to open the buckle that
-would free his arms. I slapped them away and stood over him.
-
-"This is for those hours of torture," I said, leering into his blank
-eyes. My fist crashed against the side of his jaw just in front of the
-ear. He sank back, limp and unconscious.
-
-It was better this way. I was glad it had happened. Now I could be
-sure of what I did. I crossed the room to a bench and searched swiftly
-through drawers of tools until I found a wire cutter. In a moment I
-had clipped the blue coated wire where it was soldered to the red one.
-Quickly, with sure movements, I fastened the cover back on the case,
-threw the switch that sent electric current glowing through the cold
-filaments of tubes, and returned the wire clipper to its drawer. And by
-the time I had adjusted the two hoods into position over Dr. Leopold
-Moriss' head and that of the waiting robot form, the meters on the
-instrument panel showed that everything was ready for the final moment.
-The moment I had been looking forward to, working toward; when I could
-touch the switch that would begin the final act, completing my revenge.
-
-My breathing was the only sound in the room as I stood for a moment
-surveying everything to be sure. I grinned into the doctor's closed
-eyes. It was too bad now that he wasn't conscious so that I could watch
-his fear and horror, so that he could know before I jabbed down on that
-switch what he had tortured me to discover.
-
- * * * * *
-
-All the hate that had built up in my soul went into that final act. I
-heard the faint click as the switch snapped over to contact. A horrible
-scream welled from the throat of the unconscious man as I ran to the
-stairs and stumbled down them.
-
-[Illustration: A wild laughter filled his eyes as he adjusted the
-controls and turned to see the figures stiffen under the jolting
-impact of the high electrical charge....]
-
-I waited in the chemical lab, knowing that Paula would be watching the
-door of the building, and not wanting to face her until it was all
-finished. I was waiting for the sound of footsteps over my head. Slow
-steps that would cross and come down the stairs.
-
-And finally I heard them. I watched the stairs and saw first the legs
-and then the rest of the man that was descending. It was the robot,
-controlled by the mind of Dr. Leopold Moriss. There was no hostility
-in its expression as its eyes settled on me. Rather, there was grave
-respect. It stopped in front of me, its movements so natural and smooth
-that no one could have guessed it was a non-living robot. I returned
-its studied gaze in silence. Then it went on past me to the door. I
-watched without moving as the door closed.
-
-"Dad!" It was Paula's voice. "Tell January to come in here. Lunch's
-ready. Dad!" Her voice was full of sudden alarm. "Dad!" Then,
-"January!" Her feet pounded on the back steps and the narrow sidewalk
-outside. The knob rattled as she fumbled, then the door burst open and
-she stood framed there, her eyes wide with fear and horror and a half
-realization of what her mind was not conditioned to quite accept.
-
-She saw me, and with a sob of relief she was across the room and in my
-arms. I held her head against the cradle of my neck, waiting.
-
-And then it came.
-
-Over our heads sounded a faint scuffle of a shoe, a hesitant footstep,
-another, and then another, dragging, stumbling.
-
-Paula's trembling body stiffened at the first sound. She looked up at
-me in numb unbelief, then wonder, seeing in my expression, my eyes, the
-culmination of my revenge. She started to pull away, to run toward the
-stairs.
-
-"No!" I said softly. "Wait. He deserved this."
-
-The defiance left her. She stood beside me while we both waited.
-
-Feet came into view. Legs. Hands sliding weakly along the wall for
-support. A face bearing the shocked realization that another mind
-existed in the world identical with itself. A realization of the
-fallacy of believing that by destroying oneself at the instant of
-creation of that other mind it would in some absolute way _become_
-oneself.
-
-As I looked at him standing there on the stairs the hate that I had
-nurtured disappeared. In its place was pity and sympathy.
-
-I was up the stairs catching him before he could fall, lifting him,
-surprised at his lightness. Paula, her lips trembling on a hesitant
-worried smile, was opening doors ahead of me as I carried her father
-into the house and laid him on his bed.
-
-And as Paula and I undressed him to treat the bruises caused by the
-straps, in my mind rose a picture of the other Dr. Leopold Moriss, the
-robot, hurrying along some street and, perhaps, already making plans to
-search for--the _other_ January Stevens.
-
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-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
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-<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Title: One for the Robot--Two for the Same</div>
-
-<div style='display:block; margin-top:1em; margin-bottom:1em; margin-left:2em; text-indent:-2em'>Author: Rog Phillips</div>
-
-<div style='display:block; margin:1em 0'>Release Date: April 07, 2021 [eBook #65013]</div>
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-
-<div style='margin-top:2em; margin-bottom:4em'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ONE FOR THE ROBOT--TWO FOR THE SAME ***</div>
-
-<div class="titlepage">
-<h1>ONE FOR THE ROBOT&mdash;TWO FOR THE SAME</h1>
-
-<h2>By ROG PHILLIPS</h2>
-
-<p>The ingredients were simple: one man for<br />
-one robot. But the results were something else!</p>
-
-<p>[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from<br />
-Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy<br />
-October 1950<br />
-Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that<br />
-the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]</p>
-
-</div>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p>I took an instinctive disliking to him from the very first. I don't
-know exactly what caused it. His appearance? He wore a well tailored
-gray plaid suit draped on what I would have sworn to be nothing but
-a skeleton. Blue-veined skin fitted over the exposed parts, such as
-his long slender hands, folded together on his lap, the stretch of
-bare leg below the cuffs of his perfectly pressed trousers and above
-his carelessly drooped sox, his turkey-like neck with its large
-Adam's apple threatened at any moment to wobble up and down while a
-gobble-gobble-gobble burst forth.</p>
-
-<p>His face? It made me think of a broken handled cup inverted on a
-saucer, the edge of the saucer being his jaw line. If you were to wrap
-the cup and saucer in tightly stretched dull white plastic or rubber
-sheeting and paint eyes in the proper places you would have it down pat.</p>
-
-<p>Maybe it was the eyes that made me dislike him. They were faded blue,
-but not the kind you would call characterless. It would be more
-accurate to call them emotionless. Not emotionless in a cold way, but
-in a dead way.</p>
-
-<p>On either side of his head were cartilages shaped like ears, and over
-the top of his head faded and lifeless grey hair parted with artificial
-neatness.</p>
-
-<p>Those were my impressions, though the hair was real enough, and I might
-have seen him through different eyes if I had been in a better mood.</p>
-
-<p>He wore his suit like it didn't belong to him, or if it did he very
-seldom had one on. I looked closely at him, sitting near me on the park
-bench half turned toward where I was slouched, trying to imagine what
-type of clothes would be natural to him; all I could conjure up was a
-white frock and rubber gloves and a white face mask.</p>
-
-<p>He had asked me, "Are you employed?", and I had swallowed an impulse
-to snap at him long enough to size him up.</p>
-
-<p>So now I had sized him up. I didn't like anything about him. But a
-civil answer to his question might lead to the price of a badly needed
-meal. I forced a polite grin.</p>
-
-<p>"Not at the moment," I said.</p>
-
-<p>"I surmised as much," he said quickly, smirking. His voice had the
-quality of a high school chemistry teacher talking to an audience of
-sulphuric acid carboys.</p>
-
-<p>I turned away, looking out across the expanse of lawn and trees and
-flower beds of the park to where the double decker busses bobbed along
-like water bugs above the carpet of cars flowing along the inner drive.
-The impatient honking of tired motorists on their way home after their
-day's work mingled with the contented quacking of ducks on the pond at
-my back.</p>
-
-<p>"Would you like to earn some money?"</p>
-
-<p>"Huh?" I said, jerking my attention back to him.</p>
-
-<p>His smile was the kind a professor would give to a pupil who had just
-awakened from a sound sleep.</p>
-
-<p>"I said, would you like to earn some money?"</p>
-
-<p>"Uh, uh," I said. "I'm hungry. I'd mow your lawn on an empty stomach
-and get maybe fifty cents. That's one hamburger and two cups of coffee.
-I'd still be hungry."</p>
-
-<p>Instead of answering, he reached one of his blue-veined hands inside
-his coat and drew out a new looking black leather billfold. I watched
-him while he pulled out a thick sheaf of currency.</p>
-
-<p>He carefully counted out ten twenty dollar bills, dropping them one by
-one in a neat pile on the park bench. He stuck the rest back in his
-billfold and took out a white glossy card, dropping it on the pile of
-bills.</p>
-
-<p>Then, smirking, he stood up and turned his back on me, slowly walking
-down the path that wound up onto a bridge over the duck pond, without
-looking back.</p>
-
-<p>I waited until he was out of sight, then picked up the card and read
-the name printed on it in raised green lettering: Dr. Leopold Moriss.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb" />
-
-<p>I had a hamburger and two cups of coffee in a place where they'd never
-seen me before. It would have been too hard to explain a twenty dollar
-bill. Afterward I rented a room and soaked some of the accumulated dirt
-out of my pores.</p>
-
-<p>Next morning I bought a new suit and the things that go with it. By
-noon I was wearing a hundred of that two hundred dollars. Most of the
-rest was in my pocket.</p>
-
-<p>Everything was fine, except that Dr. Leopold Moriss' smirking bloodless
-lips and dead eyes, framed by his skin-covered jaw kept dancing before
-me, taunting me, daring me to use that money without eventually showing
-up to earn it.</p>
-
-<p>I began to dislike him even more intensely. Instead of having lunch I
-went into a cocktail lounge and had a few Bourbons straight. When their
-warmth began to soak in Dr. Leopold's smirking face faded.</p>
-
-<p>It came back, though, and with it came his classroom voice.</p>
-
-<p>"<i>I don't know who you are</i>," it taunted. "<i>If you never show up I
-can't find you, can't do anything about it.</i>" Its tones were laughing,
-knowing, goading. I drank. The face faded, the voice became inaudible.</p>
-
-<p>Three days later, and God knows how many quarts, I took that drink
-every alcoholic dreads&mdash;the one you can't keep down.</p>
-
-<p>I awoke a long time later and opened my eyes. Something vaguely
-like the desk clerk was hovering over me. A loud voice was pounding
-unmercifully against my tortured ears.</p>
-
-<p>"Come on, get up and get out of here, you filthy bum," it was shouting.
-"We've got no rooms for the likes of you in this hotel."</p>
-
-<p>I shook my head to clear away the fog over my eyes. The indignant face
-of a maid was staring at me.</p>
-
-<p>"You ought to be ashamed," she said shrilly, "vomiting on the rug!
-Where do you think you are, in the park?"</p>
-
-<p>"Get a wet towel and bring him to," the desk clerk ordered....</p>
-
-<p>I reached the precarious footing of the sidewalk with a feeling that I
-had been rushed too much, and with the afternoon sun ejecting fiery red
-shafts of searing pain into my brain through my punctured eye-balls.</p>
-
-<p>People were staring at me as they passed. In an attempt to appear
-casual I stuck my hands in my pockets. The fingers of my right hand
-encountered something stiff, with sharp corners.</p>
-
-<p>Swaying to maintain my balance, and casually whistling snatches of some
-nameless tune, I pulled the thing out and held it up where I could
-focus my eyes on it. It was Dr. Leopold Moriss' card.</p>
-
-<p>I managed an uncertain about face and thumbed my nose at the entrance
-to the hotel; only it was my ear, and my thumb bumped it so painfully
-that the pleasure I had anticipated at my insult was destroyed.</p>
-
-<p>When my consciousness settled into enough stability to be aware of
-outside impressions once more, I was in a taxi, bumping along a
-cobblestone street. There were no springs on the cab, and the back of
-the driver's head sneered at me and dared me to open the door and jump
-to my death.</p>
-
-<p>I wondered where I was being taken. Then my eyes caught the white
-rectangle still held in my fingers. The doctor's card. So I was on my
-way at last.</p>
-
-<p>On my way? I was there! The taxi had swerved abruptly to the curb and
-stopped. I slid forward off the seat. When the driver came around and
-opened the door I managed to get up on my knees. That was all.</p>
-
-<p>He opened the door and stood there patiently. I studied the sidewalk
-and tried to figure out how to make it from the position I was in. I
-gave up, and appealed to him with my eyes.</p>
-
-<p>"Here we go," he said good naturedly, lifting me out and balancing me
-carefully on my feet. "The fare is a buck eighty-five."</p>
-
-<p>"Help me up the steps," I said, stalling. I was trying to remember if I
-had any money left. I had a strong suspicion I hadn't.</p>
-
-<p>His hands held me up and pushed me across the walk and up the steps
-while I fumbled in a fruitless search of my pockets.</p>
-
-<p>At the top of the steps my fingers encountered the cool smoothness
-of a piece of paper in my coat pocket. I pulled it out and held it up
-to the driver. He steadied me against the frame of the door. Then he
-counted out change, closing my fingers over the money.</p>
-
-<p>The sound of the taxi pulling away from the curb let me know I was on
-my own. It was a diminishing yellow spot far down the street.</p>
-
-<p>The door frame was white set in brick. The door was stained oak. I
-reached out to lift the knocker and saw I had a fist full of money. I
-reached out with the other hand. It had the card in it. I hooked the
-little finger under the knocker and lifted it, letting it fall. It
-emitted a feeble tap.</p>
-
-<p>After a while I saw the door moving inward. Pausing in my futile
-stabbing for my pockets, I lifted my eyes slowly, beginning with the
-shapely hips encased in spotlessly clean watermelon red, past the slim
-waist with its black belt, pausing at the firm lift of the breast,
-jumping to the smooth neck, and finally coming to the face with its
-smooth contours, red lips, blue eyes lit with questioning curiosity,
-and iridescent waves of spun brown hair.</p>
-
-<p>Not daring to talk, I mutely held out the card.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb" />
-
-<p>Her graceful curves of eyebrows lifted just a trifle as she looked at
-the card. Then her eyes surveyed me again, quickly.</p>
-
-<p>"Won't you please come in?" she asked, stepping backward invitingly.</p>
-
-<p>I went past her with an attempt at dignity. The door closed behind
-me. Her feet tapped pertly on the foyer floor as she went past me and
-opened another door.</p>
-
-<p>"Wait in here Mr. Stevens," she said, her voice rich in velvet
-overtones. "I'll tell my father you're here."</p>
-
-<p>I ducked my head at her in acquiescence and went past her into the
-room, a luxurious library.</p>
-
-<p>The door closed softly as I dropped into the soft enfoldment of a
-pillow-lined barrel chair. Abruptly I sat up, staring at the blank face
-of the closed door, my eyes large and round.</p>
-
-<p>She had called me by name!</p>
-
-<p>I was still staring at the door when it jerked open. Dr. Leopold Moriss
-strode in closing it after him, his steps and motions jerky and swift.</p>
-
-<p>"Well, well, well," he said. "So you came after all."</p>
-
-<p>"How did your daughter know my name?" I asked.</p>
-
-<p>His shoulders arched back in a gesture of amusement.</p>
-
-<p>"She should know," he said. "I've done nothing but talk about January
-Stevens this and January Stevens that for the past two months."</p>
-
-<p>"Two months?" I echoed dumbly.</p>
-
-<p>"The detective agency I put on the job of finding you did an almost
-impossible job," he went on, in high good humor. "They followed you
-from the time you moved out of your bachelor apartment three years
-ago, to Los Angeles, Seattle, through Kansas, and right back here to
-Chicago again. When they found you they came and got me, and pointed
-you out to me in the park."</p>
-
-<p>"I don't get it," I said, bewildered. "That kind of a search would
-cost plenty. After paying that kind of dough I can understand your
-willingness to throw two hundred after it in a&mdash;childish gesture. But
-why? Since you know me, you must know I was kicked out of the Bentley
-Research Laboratories because I refused to account for five thousand
-dollars of research funds."</p>
-
-<p>"I know more than that," Dr. Leopold Moriss said, crisp sureness in his
-tones.</p>
-
-<p>"What do you mean?" I asked woodenly.</p>
-
-<p>"Let's just say for the present, January," he said, "that I know why
-you refused to account for those funds."</p>
-
-<p>"Let's just say goodbye," I said, staggering to my feet. I started for
-the door.</p>
-
-<p>"Sit down, you drunken bum," he said.</p>
-
-<p>"Why you&mdash;" I snarled, turning toward him sober with rage, my fingers
-constricting.</p>
-
-<p>He sat there, grinning at me, undisturbed by my threatening posture. As
-if to flaunt his unconcern in my face he took out a long cigar and lit
-it nonchalantly.</p>
-
-<p>I stared into his lifeless eyes through the screen of freshly
-generated blue smoke and sat down slowly.</p>
-
-<p>He looked back at me, his face expressionless behind the cigar. My rage
-subsided gradually.</p>
-
-<p>"That's better," he said finally. From that moment I hated him.</p>
-
-<p>Then the door opened. The girl in the watermelon red dress entered,
-wheeling a tray crowded with white sandwiches, green pickles and
-steaming black coffee.</p>
-
-<p>I scowled at the dream from heaven pushing the service cart, a friendly
-smile on her red lips, feeling a sense of defeat, of being crowded into
-a corner.</p>
-
-<p>"No thanks," I said harshly. "My stomach couldn't hold even the coffee
-right now." I jerked my eyes away from hers, past Dr. Leopold Moriss,
-to the curtains on the windows.</p>
-
-<p>"Get him a big glass of half tomato juice half grapefruit juice," the
-doctor said. "He can hold that down. It'll make him feel better."</p>
-
-<p>I continued to hold my eyes on the curtains, but I knew that I was
-licked. Whipped. Beaten into submission. When I heard the pert
-footsteps return and felt the cold roundness of the glass against my
-hand, I turned and looked up into her smiling, sympathetic eyes.</p>
-
-<p>"Thanks," I said gruffly.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb" />
-
-<p>The cold liquid stayed down, soothing the raw walls of my stomach. I
-half closed my eyes, experiencing the first pleasant body sensation
-since the warm glow of that first drink three or four days before.</p>
-
-<p>I watched shapely legs below the swishing dress as they went across
-the room to a desk. When they returned I looked up to see a cigarette
-between fingernails the same shade of red as the dress. I followed the
-slender fingers to the slim wrist, up the graceful, slightly tanned arm
-to the short sleeve, and from there my eyes jumped to her smiling red
-lips.</p>
-
-<p>"I'm Paula, January," she said.</p>
-
-<p>"Oh yes, January," Dr. Moriss' voice broke in. "This is my daughter,
-Paula. Her mother died many years ago. There's just the two of us,
-besides the handyman."</p>
-
-<p>I took the cigarette from her fingers without taking my eyes away from
-her face. She snapped a lighter and lit it the same way. I inhaled
-deeply, letting the smoke out slowly.</p>
-
-<p>"Glad to know you, Paula," I murmured.</p>
-
-<p>"I think you'd better leave us now, Paula," Dr. Moriss broke in in his
-school teacher voice. "January Stevens and I have a lot to discuss."</p>
-
-<p>"We can talk later, if at all," I turned on him angrily. "Two or three
-days from now, after my stomach will hold food down."</p>
-
-<p>"We'll talk now," he said with maddening calmness. "Three days from now
-you'll have had time to think. You'll refuse to talk. Just like you let
-yourself be branded a thief rather than talk before."</p>
-
-<p>I reached out and picked up a cup of coffee from the tray. With slow
-deliberation I poured the black liquid into the empty glass that had
-held my tomato and grapefruit juice. There was a large plate glass
-mirror on the wall across the room. I threw the empty cup at it without
-rising from my chair. The mirror shattered.</p>
-
-<p>Dr. Moriss looked back and forth from me to the broken mirror, like a
-spectator at a tennis match, the same kind of interest portrayed on his
-face.</p>
-
-<p>"Why did you do that?" Paula asked, her eyes flashing fire.</p>
-
-<p>"He did it because he likes you, Paula," the doctor's maddeningly
-unperturbed voice said. "If he didn't like you he would have thrown it
-at me." He puffed mockingly at his cigar, his eyes squinting through
-the smoke.</p>
-
-<p>"You <i>are</i> expensive to know, January," Paula purred. The sound of her
-heels on the bare floor near the door jerked my eyes from Dr. Moriss'
-face.</p>
-
-<p>"Don't leave," I said hastily.</p>
-
-<p>"Why?" Paula asked, turning, her hand still on the knob.</p>
-
-<p>"Because&mdash;" her father began.</p>
-
-<p>"Shut up!" I snapped. "I'll tell her myself. Because if you do I might
-kill your father before I walk out of here."</p>
-
-<p>Dr. Moriss nodded agreement, puffing contentedly, his features mocking
-me through the haze.</p>
-
-<p>"He's afraid, Paula," he said abruptly. "It's the same fear that made
-him destroy his research and all the bills for materials and his notes,
-and let them smirch his name." He lifted on his elbows and leaned
-toward me. "The same fear that made you an alcoholic bum, January. But
-I'm going to get under that fear and find out what you discovered."</p>
-
-<p>"You think so?" I sneered, my voice sounding reedy to my ears.</p>
-
-<p>"Yes," he said. "You see, I've got to. I know everything you
-know&mdash;except what made you afraid."</p>
-
-<p>"You think so?" I repeated monotonously.</p>
-
-<p>"Yes," he matched my monotony. "Everything except that. I'll prove it
-to you. I know how you built the synthetic brain. I know how you built
-the robot body. I even know how you charged the brain. I even know that
-that Boston Bull Terrier pet you had at your feet while they questioned
-you, and which followed you out the door when you left, disgraced, <i>was
-not a living creature</i>!"</p>
-
-<p>I lifted my hands and looked at them. They were trembling so much their
-outlines were blurred.</p>
-
-<p>"Show him to his room," Dr. Leopold Moriss said suddenly. "Keep a
-generous supply of grapefruit and tomato juice near him."</p>
-
-<p>"You heard what the man said." Paula soothed gently, tugging at the
-shoulder of my coat.</p>
-
-<p>At the door I turned ponderously. Dr. Moriss was sitting there, his
-eyes on me, puffing at his cigar. Dully I turned away, following Paula
-into the hall. The door closed....</p>
-
-<hr class="tb" />
-
-<p>The bed was soft. The kind you sink down into, surrounded by billowing
-piles of shiny pink satin, fluffy orchid wool, white sheets, and an
-atmosphere of apple blossoms, with your head resting on down softer and
-warmer than your mother's breast.</p>
-
-<p>The pajamas were new and my size, obviously bought in anticipation of
-my showing up.</p>
-
-<p>I stood teetering in the middle of the bedroom, looking at them, the
-sound of water running into a tub coming from the adjoining bathroom.
-Tears forced themselves into my eyes. Hot scalding tears.</p>
-
-<p>Paula stood less than three feet from me, an eager expression on her
-face, like a Spaniel wiggling in expectation of voiced approval.</p>
-
-<p>I turned and staggered blindly toward the door. I wanted to get out.
-I felt strangled. I couldn't breathe, couldn't possibly get another
-breath of air until I got out of this house and felt my feet on God's
-pavement again. I fumbled for the knob, groaning in frantic desperation
-to escape.</p>
-
-<p>My fingers settled around the knob. I jerked the door open and started
-out into the hall.</p>
-
-<p>The placid face of a man twice my size, radiating peace and good will,
-blocked the doorway. I blinked at him blearily, backing away a step or
-two. He blinked back like a simpleton trying to understand geometry.</p>
-
-<p>"Oh, January," Paula said behind me. "This is Carl Friedman, our
-Jack-of-all-work."</p>
-
-<p>"Pleased to meet you, January," the giant said, sounding like an
-uncouth character concentrating on not saying pleeze t'meetcha.</p>
-
-<p>My snarl was purely animal as I slammed the door on him and turned back
-into the room. I stood there, swaying and holding my head for a minute.</p>
-
-<p>"All right," I gave up. "Get out. I'll take a nice warm bath and bury
-myself in apple blossoms. Then you can bring me some grapefruit juice
-and radiate at me like a harvest moon. Only get this straight. I hate
-your old man. I hate him more every minute."</p>
-
-<p>"That's all right," Paula said, going to the door and opening it. "I
-hate him too&mdash;sometimes."</p>
-
-<p>Carl backed away far enough for her to get out. She flashed me a
-sympathetic smile. The door closed. I was alone. With the smell of
-apple blossoms. And my hate.</p>
-
-<p>I took off my clothes and climbed into the tub. The temperature was
-just right. I sighed in reluctant contentment, splashing around a
-little to help the warmth soak in.</p>
-
-<p>"What made you afraid, January?" Dr. Moriss' voice came from the
-doorway.</p>
-
-<p>I catapulted to my feet, water cascading off my body over the edge of
-the tub onto the floor. Glaring at him I carefully stepped out of the
-tub, my hands working in choking motions.</p>
-
-<p>He watched me with that air of detached interest he would have used in
-observing the motions of a monkey in a zoo. I glared at him another
-moment, then turned my back on him, drying myself with the thick
-turkish towel.</p>
-
-<p>"What made you afraid, January?" It was patient repetition, insistent
-and unemotional. A school teacher repeating a question to a stubborn
-pupil.</p>
-
-<p>I ignored it. When I finished drying and turned to go out, he was gone.</p>
-
-<p>There was a pitcher of bright red liquid with ice cubes floating in
-it on the table by the bed, and a glass of it already poured sitting
-beside it. I splashed it down my throat with loud swallows, struggled
-into the pajamas, and slid under the covers. It seemed only an instant
-later&mdash;</p>
-
-<p>"What made you afraid, January?" When I opened my eyes the hand shaking
-my shoulder stopped. "What made you afraid, January?"</p>
-
-<p>I stared without answering. Finally I closed my eyes to blot out that
-serene disinterested, hateful face. When I opened them again it was
-gone. I cursed with the vocabulary of the scum from New York to San
-Francisco. His psychological game was obvious, now. He hoped to wear me
-down, drive me to the point where I would tell him what I would never
-tell anyone, as the price of peace. He'd wake me again as soon as I
-fell asleep. He'd wake me again and again and again. And again....</p>
-
-<p>"What made you afraid, January?"</p>
-
-<p>"Go 'way," I murmured drowsily.</p>
-
-<p>"What made you afraid, January? What made you afraid?"</p>
-
-<hr class="tb" />
-
-<p>No one but an alcoholic could possibly know how I suffered. With
-every cell in my body crying out in agony the only relief was the
-unconsciousness of sleep. Sleep, that welcomed me only to toss me back
-into the hell of consciousness and that mad, unemotionally reiterated
-question.</p>
-
-<p>"What made you afraid, January?"</p>
-
-<p>I grew to hate every syllable, every unvarying intonation and
-inflection. I began to force myself to stay awake each time, scheming
-ways to murder Dr. Leopold Moriss.</p>
-
-<p>I dreamed of him with his throat cut, going down, puffing unconcernedly
-on his cigar while his throat spurted out his life's blood. I dreamed
-of him falling to the sidewalk outside my window.</p>
-
-<p>"What made you afraid, January?"</p>
-
-<p>I dreamed I was raining blow after blow on his battered head while
-he sagged slowly to the floor, his face that of an unemotional,
-disinterested automaton.</p>
-
-<p>"What made you afraid, January?"</p>
-
-<p>I sucked in my breath. A moment later I heard the soft closing of the
-door. I opened my eyes. The room was empty.</p>
-
-<p>Slipping cautiously out of bed I took the pitcher of tomato juice to
-the bathroom and emptied it in the wash basin, then returned to bed
-with it, placing it under my pillows in such a way that I could bring
-it out and strike without warning.</p>
-
-<p>"What made you afraid, January?"</p>
-
-<p>I opened my eyes abruptly. The face above me bent closer suddenly,
-noting my new reaction.</p>
-
-<p>My hand was around the handle of the heavy glass pitcher. I drew in
-a deep breath. With convulsive movement I struck, only to feel the
-pitcher caught and pulled from my fingers.</p>
-
-<p>"I noticed it was gone," the doctor said calmly. "I'll get it filled
-again for you."</p>
-
-<p>The door closed softly. I sobbed in angry frustration, in hopeless
-protest. In murderous hate, for I knew that Dr. Leopold Moriss' every
-move and every word were coldly calculated, directed toward one goal.
-To break me down.</p>
-
-<p>"What made you afraid, January?"</p>
-
-<p>My mind skidded through vast spaces to jar into its cradle of pain. I
-opened my eyes. There was a glass of red fluid hovering in front of my
-eyes, the doctor's fingers around it. I brought the back of my hand
-against where it had been. It had bobbed up so that I missed. The
-action half turned me on my face.</p>
-
-<p>I stayed that way. There was the careful sound of the glass being set
-on the table, the sound of the door closing. With a deep sigh I turned
-on my back again.</p>
-
-<p>There must be a way out. There had to be a way out. All I had to do was
-think about it, if I could think through the torture of my body. One
-thing I knew: I would never tell him what he wanted to know. Not to
-escape a thousand years of torture.</p>
-
-<p>I sat up and drank the glass of tomato juice. The empty glass slipped
-out of my fingers to the floor, landing with a dull thud on the rug.
-Getting out of bed, I went into the bathroom and washed my face in cold
-water.</p>
-
-<p>There had to be a way out. Maybe I could tell him a lie that would
-satisfy him. But what lie would satisfy him? What, other than the
-truth, could satisfy him?</p>
-
-<p>I looked in the bathroom mirror at my unshaven, tortured features, my
-bloodshot eyes, my rats-nest of uncombed hair. And slowly I saw a smile
-crease my lips, distorting my face. I knew a lie he would accept as the
-truth&mdash;if I played it right.</p>
-
-<p>I had to play it right. Just as there was only one truth, there was
-only one lie he would accept as the truth. If I failed to make him
-accept it I was licked.</p>
-
-<p>How does an actor play his part? He lives it, believes it. I had to do
-that. I must keep repeating the lie in my mind, believing it, repeating
-it. Then I must <i>break down</i> in the way my torturer expected me to.</p>
-
-<p>I snapped off the light in the bathroom and struggled back to bed.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb" />
-
-<p>When I awoke, blinding white sunlight was bursting into the room from
-between half closed slats in the Venetian blinds, sending searing pain
-through my dehydrated eyes into my aching brain. A window was half open
-behind the blinds. A bird was singing just outside the window, its song
-a shrill, jarring discordance to my tortured eardrums.</p>
-
-<p>I looked blankly around the room, feeling that something was missing.
-The sight of the pitcher with its red liquid, and the glass beside it,
-brought back memory. What was missing was Dr. Leopold Moriss standing
-over me asking his eternal question.</p>
-
-<p>I cursed in a low mumble, hating him for even that. He had kept up his
-torture until I figured out something, and had ended it before I could
-put my plan into action. He was a dancing, taunting opponent who struck
-painful blows with ease, and danced out of reach when I found a way to
-fight back.</p>
-
-<p>"Shut up!" I shouted at the bird, and felt a small sense of triumph
-when it obeyed.</p>
-
-<p>Getting out of bed, I went to the door and opened it cautiously. There
-was no one outside. From somewhere in the house came the all too
-familiar sound of Dr. Moriss' voice. It was interrupted by Paula's,
-raised angrily. I left my door open, sneaking along the hall to the
-head of the stairs, until I could make out what was being said.</p>
-
-<p>"... stop torturing him," Paula's voice came, angry and insistent.</p>
-
-<p>"It's the only way, Paula," the doctor's voice said, as unperturbed as
-ever, even in the face of his daughter's obvious anger. "A fear that
-silences a man, makes him remain silent while his employers brand him a
-thief and blackball him from his profession, that drives him down the
-road to alcoholism, can't be broken down with kindness nor anything
-less than complete destruction of his ability to fight."</p>
-
-<p>"It isn't human!" Paula's voice shot back. "If you keep it up
-I'll&mdash;I'll hate you as much as January does, even though you are my
-father."</p>
-
-<p>"I won't have to keep it up much longer," her father replied, and for
-the first time I heard a note of human emotion in his tones. "When he
-breaks down and gets the load off his mind he'll get over the past few
-years and be himself again. I think you're half falling for him. It
-wouldn't be any good being married to an alcoholic who is incurable
-because he's hiding the thing that made him an alcoholic to begin with."</p>
-
-<p>His next words shocked their way into my startled thoughts.</p>
-
-<p>"But my motive isn't that humanitarian and you know it," he said,
-returning to his school-teacherish, lecturing voice. "I've repeated
-January's experiments. Out in my laboratory I have the completed and
-tested robot body exactly like my own, all ready for the transfer of my
-mind. I could go out there right this minute, and come in again in less
-than half an hour in that immortal mechanical body. But I don't dare to
-<i>until I find out what made January afraid</i>."</p>
-
-<p>My turbulent thoughts settled into a state of wondering confusion.
-If he had gone that far why didn't he know what had made me afraid?
-Could it be&mdash;? Suddenly I knew! He hadn't discovered that <i>one last
-refinement</i>. That was it! I felt like laughing. But my attention was
-jerked back to the conversation below.</p>
-
-<p>"I don't care," Paula's voice said doggedly. "I don't care if you
-never finish. It's inhuman anyway&mdash;to discard the body you were born
-in and transfer the electronic pattern of your mind and consciousness
-to a mass of non-living colloid dielectric perched inside the head of
-a robot made of stainless steel bones, plastic muscles, and copper
-nerves. You've got to stop torturing January."</p>
-
-<p>"I won't have to after a couple more hours," Dr. Moriss said. "I'm
-going to wake him up and get him to drink some of that tomato juice
-with a little seasoning in it designed to make him sicker than he is.
-A few glasses of that and pounding my repeated question at him a few
-more times should do it."</p>
-
-<p>I stole back to my room and grinned at the tomato juice. Did you ever
-put a jigsaw together and get a flash of insight that made the pieces
-fall into place suddenly, completing the puzzle almost by itself? That
-pitcher of tomato juice was the last piece. Everything fit, including
-that.</p>
-
-<p>I would be able to tell my lie, and make Dr. Leopold Moriss believe
-it. Then&mdash;I would <i>help</i> him. My wild laughter burst into my ears. By
-an effort of will I shut it off and climbed back into bed, simulating
-sleep, my ears tuned for the first sound of the doctor's coming.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb" />
-
-<p>The door opened. After a moment of suspense during which I kept my
-breathing slow and deep it closed softly. Padded footsteps came across
-the rug.</p>
-
-<p>"January!" The doctor's voice was impersonal and insistent. His hand
-was gripped on my shoulder, shaking me. "Why were you afraid, January?"</p>
-
-<p>I kept my eyes closed for a moment, mumbling protests. Inside I was
-laughing to myself, gloatingly. His voice was no longer torture. It was
-the senseless repetition of a parrot.</p>
-
-<p>Suddenly it angered me. I opened my eyes, glaring, a corner of my mind
-thrilling to the beautiful way my emotions were giving authenticity to
-my acting.</p>
-
-<p>"Why are you afraid, January?" the doctor repeated, his calm face
-hovering above me.</p>
-
-<p>I shoved his hand away, sneering at him, and sat up. The movement sent
-stabs of pain through my head. I gripped my head in my hands, groaning.</p>
-
-<p>"Drink this," Dr. Moriss ordered.</p>
-
-<p>I looked up. He was holding the glass of tomato juice toward me,
-the tomato juice containing something to make me sicker. I felt the
-sneering smile distort the sensitive skin of my face as I reached out
-deliberately and took the glass from him. I looked into his dead eyes
-while I lifted it to my lips. Then I drank it.</p>
-
-<p>I set the empty glass down on the stand.</p>
-
-<p>"Get out!" I rasped. "Leave me alone."</p>
-
-<p>"What made you afraid, January?"</p>
-
-<p>Suddenly nausea gripped me. Blindly I struggled out of bed to the
-bathroom. As I went I felt a bitter laughter welling up silently in my
-mind.</p>
-
-<p>"What made you afraid, January?"</p>
-
-<p>I was retching. That was genuine. I clamped my hands over my ears. That
-was acting, because Dr. Leopold Moriss had lost his power to torture
-me.</p>
-
-<p>"What made you afraid, January?"</p>
-
-<p>With an animal snarl I straightened and turned on him, my eyes blinded
-with tears produced by the retching, my chin wet with vomit. He caught
-my flailing arms easily, folding them over my chest and pinning me
-against the wall.</p>
-
-<p>"What made you afraid, January?"</p>
-
-<p>I began to cry. It was an act, but my condition made anything
-resembling crying come out authentic.</p>
-
-<p>I felt his hands drop from my arms. Still blubbering as though
-completely broken, I slid slowly to the tile floor, letting my head
-drop.</p>
-
-<p>"All right, I'll tell you," I said weakly. A chill shudder shook my
-body. I buried my face in my arms resting on my knees.</p>
-
-<p>"No, January!" It was Paula's voice. My head jerked upright. She was
-standing in the doorway, the living image of anger. The doctor had
-turned toward her, irritation showing on his face. "Dad," she said, her
-eyes flashing blue fire at him, "if you don't stop I'll get the police."</p>
-
-<p>Alarm coursed through me. She was endangering my plan. I dropped my
-head back in the cradle of my arms to hide my expression.</p>
-
-<p>"Paula!" the doctor was saying in exasperation. "Leave us&mdash;"</p>
-
-<p>"I was afraid," I cut in, making my voice sound utterly listless and
-defeated, "of what I knew I would do unless I stopped my experiments
-and destroyed them.</p>
-
-<p>"I had transferred the mind of a dog into a robot duplicate of its
-own body. The dog was a pet. It didn't know it was no longer in its
-own body, the body that had died when the mind pattern in the brain
-was lifted out and transplanted into the colloidal dielectric brain.
-It didn't know what had happened, so although it was often puzzled by
-things, it didn't mind.</p>
-
-<p>"But I knew what the next step would be!" I lifted my head and stared
-at the doctor, avoiding Paula's eyes. They were standing there, holding
-their breath, waiting for my next words. I let my head drop into
-concealment in my arms again.</p>
-
-<p>"The next step would be a robot body for myself," I said mechanically,
-tonelessly. "I would build it and enter it. And I would never be able
-to re-enter my normal body, because it would die in the transfer.
-I would be immortal&mdash;but at an awful price. The price of normal
-life, loving, being loved, and someday getting married and having
-children&mdash;and a mother for those children.</p>
-
-<p>"And yet I knew that I would build that robot body and transfer my mind
-to it&mdash;if I kept on. So I destroyed my work, my reputation, my ability
-to earn the kind of money it would take to do what I didn't have the
-will not to do, if I could."</p>
-
-<p>I looked up cautiously, my face lax, my eyes half veiled, to see how
-they were taking what I was saying. Paula's face was a mask of pity
-and sympathy. Her father's was one of fixed attention and belief. I
-dropped my head again and muffled my voice.</p>
-
-<p>"Pepper&mdash;my dog&mdash;not comprehending what was wrong with him, grew
-more and more bewildered. He got run over a month later. It couldn't
-kill him, but it wrecked his robot frame. I smashed his colloid
-brain and buried him to put his immortal mind out of its bewildering
-confused&mdash;existence."</p>
-
-<p>"But&mdash;" It was Dr. Moriss' voice, full of growing, pleased conviction.
-"Then there was nothing you discovered other than what I've already
-discovered and tried?"</p>
-
-<p>"No," I lied. And he believed me.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb" />
-
-<p>The hours passed swiftly, with long gaps during which I slept,
-unconscious of the conflict of hunger and alcohol starvation being
-fought in every cell of my body. The sunlight through the lattice-work
-of the Venetian blinds became a pleasant and welcome warmth. The song
-of the persistent bird outside the window grew joyful, and something I
-missed when it didn't come for a long time.</p>
-
-<p>Paula sat on the edge of the bed and washed my face and ran an electric
-razor over it while I basked in the pleasant rays from her deep
-blue eyes. She fed me tall glasses of tomato juice spiked only with
-grapefruit juice, and with cool, clinking ice cubes that caressed my
-fevered lips....</p>
-
-<p>"You're looking much better this morning, January," she said, leaning
-back and inspecting her handiwork with the shaver. "Feel up to trying a
-scrambled egg fried in butter, with golden brown toast and nice crisp
-bacon?"</p>
-
-<p>"And make the coffee black&mdash;and hot," I said.</p>
-
-<p>"Yes, sir," she said in mock subservience.</p>
-
-<p>She had her breakfast with me. The fluffy scrambled eggs and warm
-toast began to nestle comfortably in my stomach, and Paula nestled
-comfortably on the edge of the bed sipping her coffee, her hair radiant
-flows of rich browns and mahoganies capturing and transmitting the
-sunlight from the window.</p>
-
-<p>Her red lips parted to reveal gleaming white teeth when she laughed
-intimately, happily, at my running humor. I relaxed, my mind at ease,
-Dr. Leopold Moriss momentarily forgotten....</p>
-
-<p>She displayed my suit proudly on its coat hanger, freshly cleaned
-and pressed, the stack of four new shirts still in their cellophane
-wrappers. I watched her retreat from the room with something inside me,
-my heart perhaps, hurting.</p>
-
-<p>I stood in front of the bathroom mirror putting a knot in the tie. It
-had been a long time since I'd had a choice of ties, ten of them. I
-inspected it in the glass. Then the realization that it wasn't a new
-tie rose to consciousness. It was Dr. Moriss'.</p>
-
-<p>I tore it off, ripping the collar of the shirt in my anger. I stood
-there, panting with emotion. My purpose was back! Slowly, like the
-flames of a charcoal fire fanned by a gust of wind, the fire of hate
-in my eyes died down, leaving only the glowing coals, which would be
-unnoticed behind the mask of a smile.</p>
-
-<p>I practiced that smile while I put on another shirt and knotted another
-of Dr. Leopold Moriss' ties about my neck. I had played enough poker
-in penny ante dives up and down the west coast during my wanderings to
-perfect the lazy unrevealing poker smile.</p>
-
-<p>There was a knock. Paula's voice sounded. "Are you dressed?"</p>
-
-<p>"Come in!" I called.</p>
-
-<p>Her eyes literally bathed me with admiration. She let the door slam
-behind her without hearing it.</p>
-
-<p>"That's right!" I said. "You've never seen me before when I looked like
-a decent human being."</p>
-
-<p>"Oh, I have too," she retorted.</p>
-
-<p>"Do I look anything like you thought I would?"</p>
-
-<p>"That's just it," she said. "You look <i>exactly</i> like I dr&mdash; hoped you
-would." Then, like she was snapping out of a dream, "Dad wants you
-downstairs. That is, he said to tell you he would like you to drop
-into the study if you want to, but also to tell you you don't have to.
-You're free to come and go as you please. He said expressly to tell you
-that." She stopped breathlessly, the dreamy stare coming back into her
-eyes.</p>
-
-<p>"Why, sure," I said. "I guess I won't mind dropping into his study&mdash;too
-much." I grinned. "Though I'd much rather ignore him and go out
-someplace with you."</p>
-
-<p>"That's a date," she said softly, wrinkling her nose at me, "after you
-see dad."</p>
-
-<p>We tripped lightly down the stairs hand in hand as if we had done it
-hundreds of times before.</p>
-
-<p>"That the door?" I asked, looking at the one she had ushered me through
-when I had first arrived.</p>
-
-<p>"Yes," she said.</p>
-
-<p>I gently disengaged her hand and tapped her cheek with my fingers.
-Suddenly I took her chin between my fingers and tilted her face up. She
-looked gravely into my eyes. I bent to kiss her. Her red lips curved to
-meet mine....</p>
-
-<p>"You stay out here," I said gruffly.</p>
-
-<p>I turned to the door. My hand touched it, hesitated, then twisted the
-knob. On my face was the smile I had practiced.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb" />
-
-<p>Dr. Leopold Moriss was sitting as I had left him so long ago,
-puffing contentedly on a long black cigar, his dead eyes staring
-expressionlessly through the haze and streamers of blue smoke. I
-stepped inside, closing the door behind me. Its click seemed to be the
-spring that brought him to life.</p>
-
-<p>"Well, January," he said like a school teacher welcoming a child who
-has been down with the mumps, "you're looking better." He nodded.
-"Much better. I hope you feel better, too." He shot me a questioning
-look.</p>
-
-<p>"Yes sir," I said.</p>
-
-<p>"Nothing like getting rid of something," he said. "Getting it off your
-chest so you can forget it&mdash;but that isn't what I wanted to see you
-about." He leaned forward suddenly. "Is that lipstick?" he asked.</p>
-
-<p>"No, tomato juice," I said dryly. He chuckled while I wiped it off.</p>
-
-<p>"I'd like you to go over my research with me," he said, reverting
-abruptly to his school teacher voice. "You're the only living man who
-knows anything about it other than me. You'd like that?" He looked
-almost pleading.</p>
-
-<p>"All right," I said, shrugging indifferently.</p>
-
-<p>"Not exactly keen about it?" he said, chuckling again. "After what you
-told me I don't blame you. But it'll be good therapy, and with Paula in
-the background I don't believe you'll have any trouble resisting the
-temptation to gain immortality in a non-living robot."</p>
-
-<p>"Maybe you're right," I said.</p>
-
-<p>"With me it's different," he went on enthusiastically, paying little
-attention to my comment. "I'm getting on in years. My wife has been
-gone long enough so that she's just a memory. Paula is grown up.
-There's nothing to keep me from making the jump. Of course, I get a
-rather peculiar feeling every time I think of actually taking this
-step, and waking up to find my original body lying there on the other
-table, dead. But it doesn't alter the milk to pour it into another
-bottle. And from my experiments with dogs there doesn't seem to be
-any sensation accompanying the process of transfer. As a matter of
-fact, with one dog I teased him with a juicy bone up to the instant of
-transfer. The first thing he did in the robot body was look around for
-the bone. Rapid as the flicker of a film."</p>
-
-<p>"Yes, I know," I said dryly. "I found the same thing. No consciousness
-of transfer or any other sensation. With the scanner-transferer it
-takes place in less than a ten thousandth of a second. Every electrical
-pattern of the brain complex is lifted out as an infinitesimal
-segment and transplanted into the colloid dielectric complex without
-alteration."</p>
-
-<p>"Like a television eye scans a scene, in a way," the doctor added. "But
-let's go out to my laboratory. I'll show you <i>my body</i>."</p>
-
-<p>He laughed at the remark as he stood up and went to the door.</p>
-
-<p>My hands were trembling visibly. I hid them in my pockets, gripping
-them into tight fists to stop their trembling. I followed him into the
-hall, holding onto my appearance of calm detachment with every ounce of
-my will. The doctor had not yet found out what had made me afraid. But
-he would. He'd find out when I was ready for him to.</p>
-
-<p>"We're going out to the lab, Paula," Dr. Moriss was saying.</p>
-
-<p>"Oh," Paula said, disappointment in her tone.</p>
-
-<p>"Wait a minute, Dr. Moriss," I said. "Paula and I are going out for a
-walk first."</p>
-
-<p>"That can wait a half hour," he said. "I just want to show you&mdash;my
-body." He chuckled.</p>
-
-<p>"It can't wait," I said, "and even if it could I want a breath of fresh
-air before going into that lab."</p>
-
-<p>"He's been sick for three days without being out," Paula said. "Stop
-being so selfish, dad."</p>
-
-<p>"That's unkind, Paula," Dr. Moriss said, "but go ahead." He turned back
-into his study.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb" />
-
-<p>We walked along sidewalks hand in hand, with kids playing catch and
-hop-skip as hazards, and shapeless, harassed women struggling home
-with overloaded shopping bags.</p>
-
-<p>We heard the dying wail of sirens and saw a crowd at a corner, and
-joined it to watch the callous internes lift a screaming woman onto a
-stretcher while she repeated, "Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God," over and
-over, and a white faced teenage boy kept repeating to an unsympathetic
-but silent police officer, "I didn't see her. I didn't see her. I
-didn't see her."</p>
-
-<p>We had coffee and hamburgers in a smelly, ten stool hole-in-the-wall
-served by a jovial, potbellied cook-and-waiter who sweated olive oil
-profusely over a dirty griddle, while his cracked jukebox blared out
-music from cracked records&mdash;and looked at each other and laughed when
-we couldn't talk above the noise.</p>
-
-<p>On impulse we climbed aboard a streetcar just as it was starting up,
-and grinned at the conductor when he yelled above the noise, "Watch
-it. Wanta get killed?" And sat very close together while the ancient
-monument to a past civilization thundered on, on what promised to be
-its last trip.</p>
-
-<p>And we got off and pretended we were lost. We went into pawnshops and
-looked at second hand diamond rings, whose fires were dimmed by the
-grimy sweat of the pawnbroker's fingers and the secret knowledge they
-held within their secret carbon heart of broken romances and marriages,
-and poverty that had led their former owners here to exchange a dream
-that had shattered for a week's rent in a fourth rate hotel.</p>
-
-<p>We bought a newspaper from a blind man, and had a coke in a corner
-drugstore while we read it and worried about the world situation, and
-a gaunt thing with brown bags under her eyes told the patient druggist
-all her symptoms in a whining monotone.</p>
-
-<p>We looked in windows at fur coats marked down from four hundred and
-ninety-nine ninety-five. We bought a sack of popcorn in an automatic
-vending machine that cheated on the amount, and fought over it until
-it skidded out of our hands onto the sidewalk. We had our picture
-taken together in a twenty-five cent booth, pretending to each other it
-wasn't so we could sit with our heads together.</p>
-
-<p>When our feet grew reluctant we looked about us and discovered we were
-back home, and wondered with real surprise how that had happened, and
-how our feet had known without us knowing.</p>
-
-<p>I half turned to retreat, feeling a panic and a sense of having
-left something undone or unsaid that should have been said. Paula
-was looking at me, her eyes troubled, and suddenly I knew she felt
-the same way, only there was a basic difference. She was holding
-back her feelings about her father shuffling off his mortal body
-for an imperishable one of non-living matter. And I? The thought
-fled fearfully into my subconscious. There could be no turning back,
-whatever the price.</p>
-
-<p>I took Paula's hand, patted the side of her face until her smile
-brightened again. Hand in hand we slowly walked toward the house, our
-eyes on the drawn curtains of the study window behind which waited a
-man whom I had grown to hate even more than I loved his daughter.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb" />
-
-<p>The laboratory was a two story building in back of the house, reached
-by a narrow sidewalk in the grudging space the builders had left
-between the two. I paused at the door after the doctor had opened it
-and gone in. Paula was still at the kitchen door where we had left her,
-her eyes round with unvoiced protest and mute appeal.</p>
-
-<p>"Are you coming?" the doctor's voice protested my delay.</p>
-
-<p>"O.K.," I said, stepping inside and closing the door.</p>
-
-<p>Our feet rang hollowly on the wood floor as we crossed a conventional
-chemical laboratory to steps leading upward. The doctor's face was
-flushed with excitement and eagerness. His footsteps were light on
-the stairs, light and swift. My own were heavy and slow behind him,
-each hollow blow the beat of a devil drum in some voodoo jungle as my
-thoughts rushed back over the lifetime I had crowded into the past
-three years, to prepare me for what I would see.</p>
-
-<p>"There it is," the doctor said as I reached the last step and paused.</p>
-
-<p>I saw the trim panel of the transfer machine, the two leather
-upholstered tables. But they were no more than background impressions
-as my eyes fixed on the form lying full length on one of those two
-tables.</p>
-
-<p>If Dr. Leopold Moriss had not been standing beside me I would have
-sworn it was him&mdash;or his corpse. Unconsciously my feet carried me
-forward and to one side where I could look down at that face of
-carefully molded synthetic rubber, tinted the exact shade of the
-doctor's living flesh, the open unblinking eyes with irises the same
-pale blue. And blue-veined hands that seemed to have died just the
-moment before.</p>
-
-<p>"Color photography," the doctor was explaining. "The sensitized
-chemicals impregnated in the rubberoid, and the color image of my own
-flesh imprinted in it from a projector."</p>
-
-<p>"As authentic as a counterfeit ten dollar bill," I wisecracked
-tonelessly. "Even to the clothes and shoes!"</p>
-
-<p>"Exactly," Dr. Moriss said, laughing gleefully. "Take a look at the
-insides of the transferer and see if it looks familiar to you. I built
-it so the circuits are all exposed and easy to follow. Different
-colored wires."</p>
-
-<p>I stepped around the duplicate of the doctor on the table, something
-inside me crawling frantically, and unfastened the back of the cabinet,
-exposing the circuit. Skills that had not dimmed and would never dim
-took control of my sight and traced each element of the circuit,
-comparing it with that which I myself had built&mdash;and destroyed....</p>
-
-<p>The drops of solder that held wires in contact glistened dully&mdash;silver
-blobs dotting orderly geometrical designs composed of blue, yellow,
-green, orange, and too many other colors to count. Little cylinders
-that were condensers and resistors and tubes and coils.</p>
-
-<p>My mind clicked off one detail after another. It was my circuit. I
-might have built it myself. But I had destroyed everything except what
-I carried in my mind. Dr. Leopold Moriss had repeated my discoveries
-step by step. Reason had followed the path I had destroyed, just as
-surely as the instinct of an insect makes it live the life pattern of
-its ancestors down to the finest detail.</p>
-
-<p>"Does it check?" The doctor asked.</p>
-
-<p>I looked at one particular blob of solder connecting a blue coated wire
-with a red one, and nodded.</p>
-
-<p>"Yes," I said carefully.</p>
-
-<p>"How about the hoods?" he asked.</p>
-
-<p>I quickly examined the hoods, heavy things on maneuverable frames. They
-could almost have been cast from the same mold.</p>
-
-<p>"They're O.K.," I said.</p>
-
-<p>"Then I want to get it over with now," Dr. Moriss said.</p>
-
-<p>"What!" I exclaimed.</p>
-
-<p>"Yes. Now," he said. "The sooner the better. Paula isn't expecting me
-to do it this way."</p>
-
-<p>I took a deep breath. My eyes studied the straps to be buckled around
-the robot in such a way that it could only release itself when it
-became activated by a calm intelligence, and the straps fastened into
-the vacant table that could be buckled and unbuckled the same way, that
-would keep the body from throwing itself around violently under the
-wild play of neutral forces set loose as the mind was plucked from the
-living brain.</p>
-
-<p>"All right," I said, my voice sounding queer and remote to me. "Lie
-down and I'll strap you up."</p>
-
-<p>As he climbed onto the vacant table my eyes searched the room
-frantically for something <i>to cut the connection between that blue and
-that red wire</i>.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb" />
-
-<p>"I'm ready," the doctor said, relaxing on the table with no more
-apparent concern than a man getting into a barber chair for a shave.</p>
-
-<p>I buckled the straps with fumbling fingers, my thoughts racing. There
-was not a tool in sight anywhere. Nothing that could cut that wire.</p>
-
-<p>"We forgot to warm up the tubes!" Dr. Moriss exclaimed.</p>
-
-<p>"You aren't as calm as you pretend to be," I chided, hiding the thrill
-of triumph that rose in me. "As soon as I finish buckling the straps on
-you and your future receptacle I'll warm up the circuit."</p>
-
-<p>"Thanks, January," he said with relief.</p>
-
-<p>I finished with him and went to the robot, the robot so soon to be
-activated with the doctor's intelligence. I buckled the straps about
-its inert form exactly the way I had done with the living.</p>
-
-<p>"Why don't you turn the current on before doing that?" Dr. Moriss asked.</p>
-
-<p>I smiled at him slowly. "Plenty of time," I said.</p>
-
-<p>"What do you mean by that?" he asked. His eyes were suddenly sharp with
-suspicion.</p>
-
-<p>"Oh, nothing," I said, shrugging. "A minute won't make a big
-difference will it?"</p>
-
-<p>He studied me closely. My heart was beating against my ribs.</p>
-
-<p>"I've changed my mind," he said abruptly, his fingers fumbling with the
-buckle that would release his arms. "I'll wait until later to do this."</p>
-
-<p>"No you don't!" I said, my calm deserting me. I leaped around the
-tables. His fingers were trying desperately to open the buckle that
-would free his arms. I slapped them away and stood over him.</p>
-
-<p>"This is for those hours of torture," I said, leering into his blank
-eyes. My fist crashed against the side of his jaw just in front of the
-ear. He sank back, limp and unconscious.</p>
-
-<p>It was better this way. I was glad it had happened. Now I could be
-sure of what I did. I crossed the room to a bench and searched swiftly
-through drawers of tools until I found a wire cutter. In a moment I
-had clipped the blue coated wire where it was soldered to the red one.
-Quickly, with sure movements, I fastened the cover back on the case,
-threw the switch that sent electric current glowing through the cold
-filaments of tubes, and returned the wire clipper to its drawer. And by
-the time I had adjusted the two hoods into position over Dr. Leopold
-Moriss' head and that of the waiting robot form, the meters on the
-instrument panel showed that everything was ready for the final moment.
-The moment I had been looking forward to, working toward; when I could
-touch the switch that would begin the final act, completing my revenge.</p>
-
-<p>My breathing was the only sound in the room as I stood for a moment
-surveying everything to be sure. I grinned into the doctor's closed
-eyes. It was too bad now that he wasn't conscious so that I could watch
-his fear and horror, so that he could know before I jabbed down on that
-switch what he had tortured me to discover.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb" />
-
-<p>All the hate that had built up in my soul went into that final act. I
-heard the faint click as the switch snapped over to contact. A horrible
-scream welled from the throat of the unconscious man as I ran to the
-stairs and stumbled down them.</p>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<div class="figcenter">
- <img src="images/illus.jpg" alt=""/>
- <div class="caption">
- <p> A wild laughter filled his eyes as he adjusted the controls and turned to see the figures stiffen under the jolting impact of the high electrical charge....</p>
- </div>
-</div>
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p>I waited in the chemical lab, knowing that Paula would be watching the
-door of the building, and not wanting to face her until it was all
-finished. I was waiting for the sound of footsteps over my head. Slow
-steps that would cross and come down the stairs.</p>
-
-<p>And finally I heard them. I watched the stairs and saw first the legs
-and then the rest of the man that was descending. It was the robot,
-controlled by the mind of Dr. Leopold Moriss. There was no hostility
-in its expression as its eyes settled on me. Rather, there was grave
-respect. It stopped in front of me, its movements so natural and smooth
-that no one could have guessed it was a non-living robot. I returned
-its studied gaze in silence. Then it went on past me to the door. I
-watched without moving as the door closed.</p>
-
-<p>"Dad!" It was Paula's voice. "Tell January to come in here. Lunch's
-ready. Dad!" Her voice was full of sudden alarm. "Dad!" Then,
-"January!" Her feet pounded on the back steps and the narrow sidewalk
-outside. The knob rattled as she fumbled, then the door burst open and
-she stood framed there, her eyes wide with fear and horror and a half
-realization of what her mind was not conditioned to quite accept.</p>
-
-<p>She saw me, and with a sob of relief she was across the room and in my
-arms. I held her head against the cradle of my neck, waiting.</p>
-
-<p>And then it came.</p>
-
-<p>Over our heads sounded a faint scuffle of a shoe, a hesitant footstep,
-another, and then another, dragging, stumbling.</p>
-
-<p>Paula's trembling body stiffened at the first sound. She looked up at
-me in numb unbelief, then wonder, seeing in my expression, my eyes, the
-culmination of my revenge. She started to pull away, to run toward the
-stairs.</p>
-
-<p>"No!" I said softly. "Wait. He deserved this."</p>
-
-<p>The defiance left her. She stood beside me while we both waited.</p>
-
-<p>Feet came into view. Legs. Hands sliding weakly along the wall for
-support. A face bearing the shocked realization that another mind
-existed in the world identical with itself. A realization of the
-fallacy of believing that by destroying oneself at the instant of
-creation of that other mind it would in some absolute way <i>become</i>
-oneself.</p>
-
-<p>As I looked at him standing there on the stairs the hate that I had
-nurtured disappeared. In its place was pity and sympathy.</p>
-
-<p>I was up the stairs catching him before he could fall, lifting him,
-surprised at his lightness. Paula, her lips trembling on a hesitant
-worried smile, was opening doors ahead of me as I carried her father
-into the house and laid him on his bed.</p>
-
-<p>And as Paula and I undressed him to treat the bruises caused by the
-straps, in my mind rose a picture of the other Dr. Leopold Moriss, the
-robot, hurrying along some street and, perhaps, already making plans to
-search for&mdash;the <i>other</i> January Stevens.</p>
-
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