"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.