Mockingbird. Part 5

I shook my head. Then I said, "There might be more. Here in the library."

"You mean books about people?"

"That's right."

Her face lit up again. "Let's go look."

"I'm tired." I was tired, from all that reading and running around.

"Come on," she said. "This is important."

So I agreed to go search more rooms with her.

We must have spent over an hour going down hallways and opening doors. The rooms were all empty, although some of them had shelves along the walls. Once, Mary Lou asked me, "What are all these empty rooms for?" and I said, "Dean Spofforth told me the library is scheduled for demolition. I think that's why the rooms are empty." I supposed she knew that buildings all over New York had been scheduled for demolition long before we were born, but nothing happened to them.

"Yes," she said, "half of the buildings at the zoo are that way, too. But what are all these rooms for?"

"I don't know," I said. "Books?"

"That many books?"

"I don't know."

And then, at the end of a long, especially mossy hallway, where some of the overhead lights were dim, we came to a gray door that had a sign saying: STORAGE. We pushed the door open with some difficulty; it was a much heavier door than the others and it had some kind of seal around it. We got it open by pus.h.i.+ng together and I was immediately surprised by two things. The air inside smelled strange-it smelled old-and there were steps going down. I had thought we were on the lowest floor of the library already. We took the steps, and I almost slipped and fell. They were heavily layered with some kind of slippery, yellowish dust. I caught myself just in time.

As we descended, the air smelled even stronger, older.

At the bottom of the stairs was a hallway. There were overhead lights, but they were very dim. The hallway was short, and at the end of it were two doors. One said: EQUIPMENT, and the other said: BOOKS, and below this, in smaller letters: TO BE RECYCLED. We pushed the door open. There was at first nothing but darkness and sweet-smelling air behind the door. Then, suddenly, lights flickered on and Mary Lou gasped. "Jesus Christ!" she said.

The room was huge and there were books everywhere.

You could not see any walls because of the shelves filled with books. And books were stacked up on their sides in the middle of the room, and in piles along the walls in front of the full shelves. They were of every color and size.

I stood there not knowing what to do or say. I was feeling something that was like what some of the films had made me feel- a sense that I was in the presence of great waves of feeling that had once been felt by people who were now dead and who understood things that I did not.

I knew that there had been books in the ancient world, of course, and that most of them were probably from that time before television, but I had no idea there were that many.

While I stood there, feeling what I have no name for, Mary Lou walked toward a pile of big, thin books that was not as high as the others. She reached up, the way I had seen her reach up for the inedible fruit in the python cage at the House of Reptiles, and took the top book down carefully. She held it awkwardly in both hands, and stared at its cover. Then very carefully she opened its pages. I could see that there were pictures. She stared at some of the pages for a long time. Then she said, "Flowers!" and closed the book and handed it to me. "Can you . . . say what you read on this?"

I took it from her and read the cover: Wildflowers of North America. I looked at her.

"Paul," she said softly, "I want you to teach me how to read."

Spofforth

Every afternoon at two o'clock Spofforth took a walk, for about an hour. Like his habitual whistling, which was the only manifestation of his to-him-unknown ability to play the piano, the habit of taking walks had been, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, copied into his metal brain from the start. It was not a compulsion; he could override it when he wished to; but he usually did not. His work at the university was so slight, so trivial to him, that he could easily spare the time. And there was no one with the authority to tell him not to.

He would walk through the city of New York, his arms swinging, his tread light, his head erect, usually looking neither to the right nor to the left. Sometimes he would look in the windows of the small automatic stores that distributed food and clothing to anyone with a credit card, or stop to watch a crew of Make Twos emptying garbage, or working on the repair of ancient sewers. These matters concerned him; Spofforth knew far better than any human being did the importance of supplying food and clothing and removing waste. The inept.i.tudes and malfunctions that plagued the rest of this moribund city could not be allowed to stop those services. So Spofforth would walk through a different part of Manhattan every day and check to see if the food and clothing equipment were functioning and if the wastes were being removed. He was not a technician, but he was smart enough to repair ordinary breakdowns.

He generally did not look at the people he pa.s.sed on the street. Many of them would stare at him-at his size, his physical vigor, his black earlobes-but he ignored them.

His walk this August day took him through midtown Manhattan, on the West Side. He walked through streets with small Permoplastic houses, centuries old, some of them with poorly tended flower gardens. Gardening, for some reason, was taught in the dormitories. Probably hundreds of years before, some Engineer-Planner with a liking for flowers had decided that flower gardening should be a part of the standard human experience; because of that one casual idea, generations of humanity had planted marigolds and zinnias and phlox and yellow roses without really ever knowing why.

Sometimes Spofforth would stop and minutely examine the equipment of a store, to see if its computers were working properly, keeping supplies at the proper level, its Make One unloaders ready and able to handle the morning's trucks, its vending machines in good working order. He might go into a clothing store, slip his special Unlimited credit card into a slot, speak out loud into the Orderphone, saying, "I want a pair of gray trousers that will fit me tightly." Then he would stand in one of the little booths, just barely being able to fit into it, let himself be measured by sound waves, and step out again to watch the machines that would select the fabric from huge overhead bolts, cut it, and st.i.tch his trousers together before returning his credit card. If something went wrong-and it often did-with the way the zipper was put in or the pockets were made or whatever, he would either repair the machine himself or try to commandeer a technician robot by telephone to repair it. If the telephone was working.

Or he would enter a sewer main and look around him to see what was cracking or jammed or rusting, and do what he could to get that repaired. Without him, New York might have no longer functioned at all. He sometimes wondered how other cities stayed alive, with no Make Nines, and no really effective humans around; he remembered the piles of garbage in the streets of Cleveland, and how poorly everyone had been dressed in St. Louis when he had served, briefly, as mayor of that city. And that had been almost a century before. No one in St. Louis had had pockets for years, and everyone's s.h.i.+rts had been too big, until Spofforth himself had repaired the sonic measuring equipment and removed a dead cat from the pocket machine of the city's only clothing store. They were probably not yet naked and starving in St. Louis; but what would happen in twenty blues, when everyone was old and weak, and there were no young people around with sense enough to go out and find a Make Seven to help in an emergency? Had he been able to he would have replicated himself, putting another hundred Make Nines into the world to keep things running in Baltimore and Los Angeles and Philadelphia and New Orleans. Not because he cared that much for humanity, but because he hated to see machinery that worked poorly. He thought of himself as a machine sometimes, and he felt responsible.

But had he been able to produce more Make Nines he would have made certain they would come into the world without the ability to feel. And with the ability to die. With the gift of death.

On this hot August afternoon he did not stop anywhere until he came to a squat old building on Central Park West. He had a particular thing on his mind.

The building was one of the few in the city made of concrete, and it had columns in front of it and big, multi-paned windows and a dark, stained old wooden door. He opened the door, entered a dusty lobby with a gla.s.s chandelier hanging from a white ceiling, and walked up to a wooden counter with a scarred, gray plastic top.

Behind the counter a small man was hunched in an armchair, asleep.

Spofforth spoke to him sharply. "Are you the mayor of New York?"

The man opened his eyes sleepily. "Uh-huh," he said. "I'm the mayor."

"I want to talk to National Records," Spofforth said, allowing irritation to show1 in his voice. "I want the population for western America."

The man had wakened a bit. "Don't know about that," he said. "n.o.body just comes in here off the street and talks to the records." He stood up and stretched, arrogantly. Then he looked at Spofforth more closely. "You a robot?" he said.

"That's right," Spofforth said. "Make Nine."

The man stared at him for a moment. Then he said, blinking, "Make Nine?"

"Ask your Control what to do. I want to talk to Government Records."

The man was peering at him now, with some interest. "They call you Spofforth?" he said. "The one who tells City Council how high to keep the water pressure and when to get the tires for thought buses? Things like that?"

"I'm Spofforth and I can have you fired. Call your Computer Control."

"Okay," the man said. "Okay, sir." Then he flipped a switch on a table beside his armchair. A synthetic female voice from a speaker somewhere said, "This is Government."

"There's a Make Nine robot here. Name of Spofforth. Wants to talk to Government Records . . ."

"I see," the voice said, a trifle sweetly. "What may I help you with?"

"Does he have access?"

The speaker hummed a moment. Then the artificial voice said, "Of course he has access. If not he, who?"

The man flipped the switch off and then looked toward Spofforth. "Okay, sir," he said, trying to sound helpful.

"Well," Spofforth said, "where is the record?"

"The Population Record is ... ah ..." He began looking around the room. There was nothing in the room to look at, except the chandelier, and for a moment he stared at a distant wall. Then he shrugged, leaned over, and flipped the switch again, and the female voice again said, "This is Government."

"This is the mayor. Where's the National Population Record?"

"In New York," the voice said. "In Government Hall, Central Park West."

"That's where I am," the mayor said. "Where is it in the building?"

"Fifth floor. Second door on the left," the Government of the United States said.

As the man was turning the switch off again, Spofforth asked him where the elevator was.

"Don't work, sir. Not since I remember."

Spofforth looked at him a moment, wondering just how far back a human like that could remember. Probably no more than a blue. "Where are the stairs?" he said.

"All the way back and to the right," the mayor said. Then he fumbled in his s.h.i.+rt pocket, took out a joint and held it speculatively between his stubby fingers. "Tried to get that elevator fixed a lot of times. But you know how robots are . . ."

"Yes," Spofforth said, heading for the stairs, "I know how robots are."

The Records console was a tarnished metal box about the size of a man's head, with a switch and a speaker. In front of it sat a metal chair. That was all there was in the room.

He turned the switch to the green "on" position and a rather c.o.c.ky-sounding male voice said, "This is the record of the population of the world."

Suddenly, at this final annoyance, Spofforth became furious. "You're supposed to be for North America. I don't want the whole G.o.dd.a.m.n world."

Instantly the voice said brightly, "The population of the whole G.o.dd.a.m.n world is nineteen million four hundred thirty thousand seven hundred sixty-nine, as of noon, Greenwich Standard Time. By continent, alphabetically: Africa has approximately three million, ninety-three percent dormitory-trained, four percent freeloaders, and the rest in inst.i.tutions. Asia has about four and a half million souls, ninety-seven percent dormitory and almost all the others in inst.i.tutions. Australia has been evacuated and has zero population. Europe is about the same. . ."

"Shut up!" Spofforth said. "I don't want to know all that. I want to know about a person from North America. One person . . ."

The voice interrupted him. "Okay," it said, "okay. The G.o.dd.a.m.n population of North America is two million one hundred seventy-three thousand and twelve, with ninety-two percent dormitory-trained . . "

"I don't care about that," Spofforth said. He had run into computers like this one before, but not for a long time. They dated from an era long before his own creation when it had been a fad to give machines "personality," when the techniques of Random Programming had first been worked out. One thing he didn't understand about the way the computer had been programmed, and he decided to ask. "Why do you say *G.o.dd.a.m.n'?" he said.

"Because you did," the voice said affably. "I am programmed to reply in kind. I am a D 773 Intelligence, programmed to have personality."

Spofforth nearly laughed. "How old are you?" he said.

"I was programmed four hundred ninety G.o.dd.a.m.n yellows ago. In years, two hundred forty-five."

"Quit saying *G.o.dd.a.m.n,'" Spofforth said. And then, "Do you have a name?"

"No."

"Do you have feelings?"

"Repeat the question please."

"You say you have personality. Do you have emotions too?"

"No. Goodness, no," the computer said.

Spofforth smiled wearily. "Are you ever bored?"

"No."

"All right," Spofforth said. "Now get my question right this time. And no cute answers." He looked around the empty room, noticing now the rotting plaster walls, the sagging ceiling. Then he said, "I want the available statistics on a human woman named Mary Lou Borne, from the Eastern New Mexico Dormitory. She is now about thirty years old. Sixty yellows."

Immediately the computer began to answer, its voice more mechanical, less bouncy than before. "Mary Lou Borne. Weight at birth seven pounds four ounces. Blood type seven. DNA code alpha delta niner oh oh six three seven four eight. High genetic indeterminacy. Candidate for Extinction at birth. Extinction not carried out. Reason unknown. Left-handed. Intelligence thirty-four. Eyesight . . ."

"Repeat the intelligence," Spofforth said.

"Thirty-four, sir."

"On the Charles scale of intelligence?"

"Yes, sir. Thirty-four Charles."

That was surprising. He had never heard of a human being that intelligent before. Why hadn't she been destroyed before p.u.b.erty? Probably for the same reason that pants in St. Louis didn't have zippers: malfunction.

"Tell me," Spofforth said. "When was she sterilized and when was her dormitory graduation?"

There was a long wait this time, as though the computer had been embarra.s.sed by the question. Finally the voice said, "I have no record of sterilization, nor of supplementary birth control through sopors. I have no record of dormitory graduation."

"I thought so," Spofforth said grimly. "Search your memory. Do you have a record of any other female in North America without sterilization, birth control, and dormitory graduation? From either Thinker or Worker dormitories?"

The voice was silent for over a minute, making the search. Then it said, "No."

"What about the rest of the world?" Spofforth said. "What about the dormitories in China . . . ?"

"I will call Peking," the voice said.

"Don't bother," Spofforth said. "I don't want to think about it."

He turned the switch to red, consigning the World Population Record to whatever limbo its garrulous intelligence lived in, without feelings and without boredom, between its rare evocations into speech.

Downstairs the mayor of New York was slumped in his plastic armchair with a blank smile on his face. Spofforth did not disturb him.

Outside the sun had began to s.h.i.+ne. On his way back to his university office Spofforth walked through a small, robot-operated park and picked himself a yellow rose.

Bentley DAY FIFTY-SEVEN.

It is nine days since I have written in this journal: nine days. I have learned to add and subtract numbers. From one of the books. But it was boring to learn what is called Arithmetic for Boys and Girls, so we stopped after adding and subtracting. If you have seven peaches and take away three you will have four left. But what is a peach?