‘Good morning, sir,’ it said. ‘The sun is up and bright. The storm is over and there are no clouds. The forecast is for fair and warm. The present temperature is forty-nine and before the day is over, it will reach more than sixty. A beautiful autumn day has dawned and everything looks fine. Do you have any preferences, sir? How about the decor? How about the furniture? How about some music?’
‘Ask him,’ the Kitchen bellowed, ‘what he wants to eat.’
‘And also,’ said the House, ‘what do you want to eat?’
‘How about some oatmeal?’
‘Oatmeal!’ wailed the Kitchen. ‘It is always oatmeal. Or it’s ham and eggs. Or it’s pancakes. Just for once, why not something special? Why not…’
‘Oatmeal,’ Blake insisted.
‘The man wants oatmeal,’ said the House.
‘OK,’ said the Kitchen, beaten. ‘One oatmeal coming up.’
‘You must not mind the Kitchen,’ said the House. ‘It labours under a very great frustration. It has all these fancy recipes programmed into its cores and it’s really very good at them, but it almost never gets a chance to use a single one of them. Some time, sir, just for the hell of it, why don’t you let the Kitchen…’
‘Oatmeal,’ said Blake.
‘Oh, very well, sir. The morning paper is in the PG tray. But there’s not much news this morning.’
‘If you don’t mind,’ said Blake, ‘I’ll take a look myself.’
‘Quite, sir. As you wish, sir. I was only attempting to be informative.’
‘Just try,’ said Blake, ‘not to overdo it.’
‘Sorry, sir,’ said the House. ‘I will watch myself.’
In the entry hall he picked up the paper and tucked it underneath his arm. He walked to a side window to look out.
The house next door was gone. The platform stood empty.
‘They left this morning,’ said the House. ‘About an hour ago. A short vacation trip, I gather. We all are glad…’
‘We?’
‘Why, yes. All the other houses, sir. We are glad they’re only to be gone for a short time and will be coming back again. They are such good neighbours, sir.’
‘You seem to know a lot about them. I haven’t more than spoken to them.’
‘Oh,’ said the House, ‘not the people, sir. I wasn’t talking of the people. It was the house itself I was thinking of.’
‘You houses, then, consider yourself neighbours.’
‘Why, of course we do. We visit among ourselves. We talk back and forth.’
‘Just exchanging information.’
‘Naturally,’ said the House. ‘But now about the decor.’
‘It’s all right as it is.’
‘It’s been this way for weeks.’
‘Well.’ Blake said, thoughtfully, ‘you might do something about that wallpaper in the dining-room.’
‘It’s not the wallpaper, sir.’
‘I know it’s not. The point I want to make is that I’m getting a little bored watching that rabbit nibble clover.’
‘What would you like instead?’
‘Anything you like. Just so it has no rabbits in it.’
‘But, sir, we can work out some thousands of combinations.’
‘Anything you like,’ said Blake, ‘but be sure there are no rabbits.’
He turned from the window and went into the dining-room. Eyes stared out at him from the walls – thousands of eyes, eyes without a single face, eyes plucked from many faces and plastered on the walls. And while there were some of them that went in pairs, there were others that stood alone. And every eye was staring straight at him.
There were baby-blue eyes, with the look of wistful innocence, and the bloodshot eyes that glared with fearsomeness, the lecherous eye, the dimmed and rheumy eye of the very old. And they all knew him, knew who he was, and they stared at him in a horribly personal manner and if there had been mouths to go with the eyes they all would be talking at him, screaming at him, mouthing at him.
‘House!’ he screamed.
‘What is the matter, sir?’
‘These eyes!’
‘But you said, sir, anything but rabbits. I thought the eyes were quite a novel …’
‘Get them out of here!’ howled Blake.
The eyes went away and in their place a beach led down to a seashore. The white sand ran down to the surging waves that came beating in and on a distant headland; scraggly, weather-beaten trees leaned against the wind. Above the water, birds were flying, screaming as they flew. And within the room was the smell of salt and sand.
‘Better?’ asked the House.
‘Yes,’ said Blake. ‘much better. Thank you very much.’
He sat entranced, staring out upon the scene. It was, he told himself, as if he sat upon the beach.
‘We put in the sound and smell,’ said the House. ‘We can add the wind as well.’
‘No,’ said Blake. ‘This is quite enough.’
The waves came thundering in and the birds flew crying over them and the great black clouds were rolling up the sky. Was there anything, he wondered, that the House could not reproduce upon that wall? Thousands of combinations, the House had said. A man could sit here and stare out upon any scene he wished.
A house, he thought. What was a house? How had it evolved?
First, in mankind’s dim beginning, no more than a shelter to shield a man against the wind and rain, a place in which to huddle, a place for one to hide. And that, basically, still might be its definition, but now a man did more than hide and huddle; a house was a place to live. Perhaps the day might come, in some future time, when a man no more would leave his house, but live out his life inside it, never venturing out of doors, with no need or urge to venture.
That day, he told himself, might be nearer than one thought. For a house no longer was a shelter merely or a simple place to live. It was a companion and a servant and within its walls was all that one might need.
Off the living-room stood the tiny room that housed the dimensino, the logical expansion and development of the TV he had known two hundred years ago. But now it was no longer something that one watched and listened to, but something one experienced. A piece of imagery, he thought, with this stretch of sea coast that lay upon the wall. Once in that room, with the set turned on, one entered into the action and the sense of the entertainment form. Not only was one surrounded and caught up by the sound, the smell, the taste, the temperature, the feel of what was going on, but in some subtle way became a sympathetic and an understanding part of the action and emotion that the room portrayed.
And opposite the dimensino, in a corner of the living area, was the library that contained within the simplicity of its electronic being all the literature that still survived from man’s long history. Here one could dial and select all the extant thoughts and hopes of every human being who had ever put down words, trying to capture on a sheet of paper the ferment of experience and of feeling and conviction which welled inside the brain.
It was – this house – a far cry from two centuries ago, a structure and an institution which must be wondered at. And it was not finished yet. In another two centuries there might be as many changes and refinements as there had been in the last two hundred years. Would there ever be an end, he wondered, to the concept of the house?
He took the paper from underneath his arm and opened it. The House had been right, he saw. There was little news.
Three men had been newly nominated for the Intelligence Depository, to join all those other selected humans whose thoughts and personalities, knowledge and intelligence, had, over the last three hundred years, been impressed into the massive mind bank which carried in its cores the amassed beliefs and thoughts of the world’s most intellectual humans. The North American weather-modification project finally had been referred for review to the supreme court in Rome. The squabble over the shrimp herds off the coast of Florida still was going on. A survey and exploration ship finally had touched down at Moscow, after being gone for ten years and given up for lost. And the regional hearings on the biological engineering proposal would begin in Washington tomorrow.
The biological engineering story carried with it two one-column cuts, one of Senator Chandler Horton and the other of Senator Solomon Stone.
Blake folded the paper and settled down to read.
WASHINGTON, NORTH AMERICA The two senators of North America will square off on the proposal for the much-argued programme of biological engineering as the regional hearing on the matter opens here tomorrow. Political fireworks are expected. No proposal in recent years has so seized the public imagination and no matter of greater controversy exists in the world today.