No, SUM wants me to believe that It makes no mistakes. I agreed to that price. And to much else.. . I don’t know how much else, I am daunted to imagine, but that word “recondition” is ugly Does not my woman have some rights in the matter too? Shall we not at least ask her if she wants to be the wife of a prophet; shall we not, hand in hand, ask SUM what the price of her life is to her?
Was that a footfall? Almost, I whirl about. I check myself and stand shaking; names of hers break from my lips. The robot urges me on.
Imagination. It wasn’t her step. I am alone. I will always be alone.
The halls wind upward. Or so I think; I have grown too weary for much kinesthetic sense. We cross the sounding river and I am bitten to the bone by the cold which blows upward around the bridge, and I may not turn about to offer the naked newborn woman my garment. I lurch through endless chambers where machines do meaningless things. She hasn’t seen them before. Into what nightmare has she risen; and why don’t I, who wept into her dying sense that I loved her, why don’t I look at her, why don’t I speak?
Well, I could talk to her. I could assure the puzzled mute dead that I have come to lead her back into sunlight. Could I not? I ask the robot. It does not reply. I cannot remember if I may speak to her. If indeed I was ever told. I stumble forward.
I crash into a wall and fall bruised. The robot’s claw closes on my shoulder. Another arm gestures. I see a passageway, very long and narrow, through the stone. I will have to crawl through. At the end, at the end, the door is swinging wide. The dear real dusk of Earth pours through into this darkness. I am blinded and deafened.
Do I hear her cry out? Was that the final testing; or was my own sick, shaken mind betraying me; is there a destiny which, like SUM with us, makes tools of
suns and SUM? I don’t know. I know only that I turned, and there she stood. Her hair flowed long, loose, past the remembered face from which the trance was just departing, on which the knowing and the hove of me had just awakened—flowed down over the body that reached forth arms, that took one step to nieet me and was halted.
The great grim robot at her own back takes her to it. I think it sends lightning through her brain. She falls. It bears her away.
My guide ignores mny screaming. Irresistible, it thrusts me out through the tunnel. The door clangs in my face. I stand before the wall which is like a mountain. Dry snow hisses across concrete. The sky is bloody with dawn; stars still gleam in the west, and arc lights are scattered over the twihit plain of the mnachines.
Presently I go dumb. I become almost calni. What is there heft to have feelings about? The door is iron, the wall is stone fused into one basaltic niass. I walk some distance off into the wind, turn around, lower my head, and charge. Let my brains be smeared across Its gate; the pattern will be my hieroglyphic for hatred.
I amn seized from behind. The force that stops me must needs be bruisinghy great. Released, I crumple to the ground before a machine with talons and wings. My voice from it says, “Not here. I’ll carry you to a safe place.”
“What more can You do to me?” I croak.
“Release you. You won’t be restrained or molested on any orders of Mine.”
“Why not?”
“Obviously you’re going to appoint yourself My enemy forever. This is an unprecedented situation, a valuable chance to collect data.”
“You tell me this, You warn me, deliberately?”
“Of course. My computation is that these words will have the effect of provoking your utmost effort.”
“You won’t give her again? You don’t want my love?”
“Not under the circumstances. Too uncontrollable. But your hatred should, as I say, be a useful experimental tool.”