IT WAS in hopeful April that he stirred. The vapor shield had been turned off for that beautiful and rainy month, and when the sun shone bright on Moderan there was a touch of heaven in that iron and plastic place. A few true flowers, red and yellow and purple, peeped up at the edges of plastic yards; a sprinkling of grass sprigs lanced through at places of join and wear cracks in the gray surfacing of the yards and fields. How many other seedlets and bulbs and grass blades must have broken their heads against the steel-gray crust of Moderan, seeking to come to the sun!
Like a young man dreaming of his love, like a man of old going on carpets of peacock feathers and rose-pink scented air, he came in his imagination across the slate-gray yard. But in reality it was plunk plunt tap ta-rap tunk tunka tap that his iron feet went on the plastic, and his silvered joints responded in their own way to the urgency of his need.
He had started at sunrise on this bright Easter Sunday, had whistled the three sharp notes that opened the door of his house and had inched out jauntily, remembering a promise given at Xmas. By noon he was almost half to her, with hard walking. On down the yard he went through the hours of the afternoon, jaunty in his mind and hopeful as songs of birds, but shackled in movement to inch-along progress by the metal that had “replaced” him. “Maybe by Easter I can’t walk,” he remembered saying at Xmas. And she, his wife, had promised then to see him. At her place. To talk a bit at Easter. If Jon got through in time. Jon? Jon was her plastic man.
Sweat oozed up, from his great need, out of the urgency, out of the terrible exertion, to the flesh-strips on his face. Fatigue was coming in him, all the flesh of him, like a giant hand of lead slowly pulling him back and down. But his keen “replaced” eyes and the scientific detached brain noted clearly that he was making progress; the join cracks of his yard inexorably were inching by, or rather, he was passing across them in his bold struggle. If she ever would want me again, he thought, if she regularly wants me again, he thought, I’ll have to have a roll-go put in the yard. He wiped the flesh-strips of his face. I wonder if she can walk now, he mused, and then dismissed the thought. It had been years since he had seen her in any pose except reclining or sitting on her white plastic bed. He remembered her reclining. He recalled the deep richness of the nylo-wov gowns she wore, the dancing ever-changing sheen of them. He thought of her legs—“replaced” just enough and in just the places to bring them up to most-beautiful-legs-in-the-world standards. He remembered them in the rich sunnylons, and how she would sit sometimes, coy legs dangled off bed edge, her small feet decorated with slippers of milky glass, the tall stemmy heels of which were clear, usually, glowing and shouting with diamonds. A tiny ball of pink or red feathers, expensively woven from plumage of some exotic bird kept from the Old Days, sometimes enhanced each slipper. If with straps, these were of new-gold mesh, either white or yellow or green gold.
He fought on down the yard until he came, very late in the afternoon, to a place beneath her bedroom window. He forced back the cold and clammy metal wish in him that made him want to flee across the yard, back the way he had come, back to his hip-snuggie chair and his thinking work, the formulas, the pleasant baffling precision of Universal Deep Problems. The hot wants of the flesh that was still his mastered the metal wish that was fast becoming his true cold preference, and he forced his very accurate “replaced” eyes to go from looking at the gray yard up to pry into her window. The yellow fear, the bitter taste of gold (his larynx had been worked in that against cancer) was rank in his throat as questions tattered the flesh of him to shreds of apprehension and doubt. Had Jon got through? Would she talk? Had she remembered?
Then he saw her! His very accurate eyes found her. He gripped the walls of the house with his metaled hands. She lay upon a white-lace coverlet upon her white bed. The full skirt of her white dress was arranged, fanned-out, in a perfect half-moon arc, just cutting across the centers of her knees, fabulous in dark nylons, with the tip of the half-moon centered precisely on either edge of the bed. She was fully dressed even to very tall-heeled glass slippers sparkling with many diamonds, and a little hat of green gold scales and chains slanted charmingly toward one blue eye. Her breasts were two round hills that came to summits, shape of berries, and the sheer valley between narrowed and widened, narrowed and widened, in a way to bring madness.
“Marblene!” he cried, “oh, Marblene!”
She stretched slowly, like some indolent new-metal cat. She turned her head when she was ready and gazed out the top half of the window, and across her face came a look of majestic and very haughty boredom. And bewilderment. He called again.
“I’m here, Jon,” she said. “Where are you, Jon? Oh hurry Jon. It hurts worse than it has.”
His hands slipped on the wall; he almost fell. All the sounds of metal were in his ears, and all the tastes on metal choked his throat. All the air seemed to burst in flame and had an acrid smell. He saw Jon. The tall plastic Jon came through her bedroom door, and he had a length of glass broomstick in his hands. It was warmed and perfumed and set with many gems. In his halting hinge-joint way the plastic one strutted about the room for awhile, rubbing and caressing the piece of glass broom-stick and applying a warm liquid to it. Then carefully he was over her. He fumbled at fastenings. He worked a long time at fastenings in what looked like hot hurry. And, at the end of it all, Jon had removed her glass slippers. He fell to rubbing the soles of her feet then, violently, with the glass rod. After awhile, with her moaning in contentment, he arose and hurried into another room. He came back carrying eight small glass sticks which he promptly inserted between all her toes and then swayed back and forth in a gentle sawing motion with the sticks. “So much better, Jon,” she murmured. “So good to me, Jon. So good for me, Jon. I’ll probably sleep some in awhile.”
“MARBLENE!” he shouted then, all the frustrations of many months and this immediate jealousy of the plastic man welling up in him to bring this great yell. She turned her head a little to look out the lower half of the window, and Jon kept up the gentle motion at her toes. She saw him, her husband, hanging on to the wall, and there was no expression anywhere on her face to show that his being there meant one thing or another. “Jon’s not through,” she said. “He’ll be activating at my toes a great while yet. Now that you’ve seen me for Easter, why don’t you try again? At Halloween?”
He slipped and fell on down to the plastic yard. He crawled on around her house, and at the back, where she couldn’t see him, he struggled to his feet. Then, plunk plunt tap ta-rap tunk tunka tap, he set off again across the steel-gray yard toward home, a pathetic figure of a little flesh and much of the new-metal new-alloy “replacements,” destined, if the hopes and promises of Moderan were true, to live forever. About midnight a tin man in Seasons pressed the Central button for rain and a cold one started up to make more miserable the condition. Chilled and wet and throbbing with disappointment he reached his place in the very early hours of Monday morning. He went immediately to his hip-snuggie chair where his work awaited him, the formulas and the pleasant baffling precision of Universal Deep Problems. Somehow, oh, somehow, he must keep busy and make his flesh-strips forget her. At least until Halloween.