Eva surged to her feet in one furious motion. Her fingers grasped him by the beard and jerked his head painfully around again.
“You reedy male platitude!” she said, in a low grinding voice. “How you could see almost the whole point and make so little of itWomen, is it? So you think I came creeping in here, full of humbleness, to settle our technical differences.”
He closed his hand on her wrist and twisted it away. “What else?” he demanded, trying to imagine how it would feel to stay reasonable for five minutes at a time with these Bridge-robots. “None of us need bother with games and excuses.
We’re here, we’re isolated, we were all chosen because, among other things, we were judged incapable of forming permanent emotional attachments, and capable of such alliances as we found attractive without going unbalanced when the attraction diminished and the alliance came unstuck.
None of us have to pretend that our living arrangements would keep us out of jail in Boston, or that they have to involve any Earth-normal excuses.”
She said nothing. After a while he asked, gently, “Isn’t that so?”
“Of course it’s so. Also it has nothing to do with the matter.”
“It doesn’t? How stupid do you think I am? / don’t care whether or not you’ve decided to have a child here, if you really mean what you say.”
She was trembling with rage. “You really don’t, too. The decision means nothing to you.”
“Well, if I liked children, I’d be sorry for the child.
But as it happens, I can’t stand children. In short, Eva, as far as I’m concerned you can have as many as you want, and to me you’ll stilt be the worst operator on the Bridge.”