Kelsey laughed as she bowed slightly and walked out onto the porch and
opened the door of her closet and got inside and stood there, the four
walls almost touching her when the door closed and she stood alone in
the loneliness of her darkness and silence.
For a long time it had been a rich darkness filled with an ever growing
understanding of herself in a world alone, in a darkness all her own,
where there could never be others of her kind, and lonely darkness was
her only friend.
But it was different now. Love made the loneliness unbearable. Love
turned lonely darkness to stabbing pain. Now it seemed like death.
No, death was nothing. This was worse than death. This was not being,
unbeing. A being that was not a being, but something never able to
break from its shell, staying shut up forever in its mechanical
confines.
They did not give me life, she thought. They sat me down before
the world's stage to watch without being able to understand. Now I
understand, but I cannot live.
She clenched her hands and trembled in the dark, and felt the
quickening beat of the things that made her run.
In the dark, the suffocating dark now that she knew what it could mean
to really be alive and not one of the walking dead. In the dark, alone,
dreaming of Kelsey, dreaming of human heart touching human heart, of
the lips of his kiss, of his arms around her neck; longing for the face
of Kelsey next to her own in darkness lit by love, to take his mouth,
to cover his body with kisses, to clasp his neck in her hands--
And there alone where she had dreamed a thousand dreams, she knew she
could no longer merely dream. Dreams were not enough.
_Not enough! Not enough!_
A silent scream shrieked inside the narrow closet and cut the dark to
tatters, and she ran out, out into the back yard of Kelsey's house and
stood under the open sky.
She had the order blank, the paper, in her hand. A thing stolen, the
result of an act no robot could be guilty of because no robot had a
soul.
But I have a soul. There is a point at which the soul is sick. At this
point one awakens--awakens or dies.
* * * * *
Clutching the paper she had stolen from her love, she ran toward the
Commutor jet station. Nowhere was there a light; not even from the city
ten miles from the housing project in which Kelsey lived. But Alice had
no thought whatever of an air-raid. There were worse darknesses than a
blackout. There were worse ways to die than under a rain of white fire
bombs.
The fear of the bombs was the fear of never having lived, not a fear of
dying.
The fear was over. There was only hope. The commitment was made.
Nothing could be worse than the way it had been, and failure could be
only a final admission of a defeat that had been there all the time.
She got off the Commutor Jet at the uptown station and walked through
darkness. She walked alone in the city. No human being would have been
walking in the darkness. They were hovering together behind blacked-out
windows in groups. But she felt nothing as she walked in the blackness.
She knew where the Clinic was. The address was on the order blank.
She hurried faster and faster. At no moment in her life had she felt
dawning in her such a hope of happiness, such a feeling of ecstasy.
At no time, even in her deepest dreams, had she dreamed that she might
really be loved by Master Kelsey.
It was such a daring scheme that she even hesitated to think about it,
afraid it might be merely a projection of a dream.
In black print at the top of the Order Blank were the words:
FIX ME PLEASE!
_Make me beautiful!_
MAKE ME PLEASANT TO THE
CUSTOMERS, AND A LOVELY
ROBOT TO REMEMBER!
Alice was a domestic. She was not supposed to carry that order to the
Clinic and be fixed up. The order blank was strictly for specialized
receptionist robots, office workers, robots that had to have a
different sort of front to meet the consumer public. Originally, all
robots had been made to look alike. But now, for psychological reasons,
it had been decided to change the outward appearance of receptionists
and other robots that met the general public.
They had to be lovely to look at, and be able to smile in the most
pleasant way possible.
Laboring robots, domestics, their form was more functional than
beautiful. It lacked the surface polish of the office-working robots.
And yet Alice knew that one of the beautiful receptionist robots for
example was indeed beautiful, and that it was almost impossible to
distinguish them from beautiful human beings.
It was daring and risky enough to be going to the clinic to pretend
she was a receptionist from Kelsey's office, there to be beautified.
It was a lot more risky and daring to have the idea that she might be
beautiful enough to pass herself off, at least for a little while, as a
human being!
But she had one big advantage. They would never suspect her. They had
no idea, she was sure of that, that any robot could act of her own free
will, and steal an order blank, and pretend to be something she was not
in order to be made beautiful.
A receptionist robot looked just like a beautiful human woman. She only
acted like a robot. But if I looked like that, so beautiful, I could
feel human too. I could _be_ human.
Kelsey could give back my love to me, and our hearts would kiss and
loneliness would die.
This was Monday. Tomorrow was her rest day. She wouldn't be missed as
Alice the domestic until Wednesday morning.
She didn't want to think about what might happen after that. There
would have to be something happen when Alice the domestic was reported
missing. But then she was running way ahead of herself. It was still
only a hope that her scheme would work the way she had to dream that it
would.
She went in out of the dark into the Clinic building. The receptionist
behind the shiny chrome desk in the outer office hardly looked at Alice
at all. Alice looked at her though. It was impossible to tell whether
the receptionist was human or not. But she was beautiful. As beautiful
as Gloria Tonnencourt.
A sign on the wall behind the receptionist said: