HE SAW her, far across the ice-bright fields of plastic, a bouncing shape come toddling to show him her new-metal hands. And deep in his flesh-strips he felt a love tear try to surface, but of course it could not, because he had new metal eyeballs.
“My little girl! Growing up!” he said.
“Since you’re my father,” she said, “and it’s my first, Mother said I should come show you.”
Half past four she was. He looked at her. Half past four. “Growing up,” he said. “My latest little girl!” Yes, they had brought her to them four and one-half years ago from the place where they kept the live womb-shells. Her mother and he had agreed by long-range conference over their multi-viewers one day—she in her bubble home lounging, he across five fields in his own thinking stronghold—that perhaps it would be all right to have a last child. The ten others had all gone nicely—five sturdy lads and five lasses they were, well on toward being “replaced” now, all in domes of their own now, thinking along Universal Deep Problems. Yes, for a last child before they “replaced” him down there and before the womb-shell should be taken from the line of the actives and destroyed, or it might be returned to his wife as a memento if she wished. It was bright sunny May, he remembered, when he went down with his last packet to the long glass hall where the Commissioner of Incubation accepted the germs. His wife had followed him all along on her multi-viewer, so he did not feel alone. When the Incubator man said, “Which?” and the prospective father said, “Girl,” and they joshed a bit, since it was no secret that it was to be the eleventh, it seemed that the wife was there too, so smiling was her picture. “You’re a brute for punishment,” the man said, and the father-hopeful said, “Yes!” although a bit later he said, “Nothing like children to keep the family alive!” The Incubator man agreed, and the wife smiled big.
When he came down to the place where they did it to the wombs she was soon there too, come whirring in on her beams to set her picture down by his side. In the cool clean, nearly airless, womb-room it seemed he could almost hold hands with her, so good were her beams that day, and he did not feel lonely while the miraculous act was done. In fact, who would say that it wasn’t the best of conceptions—he, his wife’s clear smiling picture, his wife’s womb, the packet of germs and the efficient nearly-all-plastic ward boy administering things and making the right adjustments?
But that was more than five years ago. How time blasts off and rockets by! And here was Little Sister. “Hello, Little Sister.” As four-and-one-half-year-old-like she gulped for her greeting he thought of how it had been, how they had all come across the white fields between him and their mother’s place to show off their new-metal things. And how inevitably they had all been so proud of their first “replacements.” “Growing up! My little boy!” Or, “My little girls!” He had said it to each of them in their turn. And then they had chatted on a bit about the newest in spaceships, or some Universal Deep Problem, the child not understanding, he knew, but it was all he had to talk on, and certainly he wanted to show his interest and be a complete father. And then after things had grown tedious—in about five minutes, say—when they were tired of him and he was sick of them, it would be back across the yard to Mother’s place, toddling, but walking proud always, glad of the new things they had got. And then it would take perhaps a year before they would be back again to pester, the occasion some major “replacement” from the Rebuilders—and he would have been free of them all that time to sit thinking in his hip-snuggie chair. Yes, he sat in a castle of thought while far away, across five fields, their mother reared them by automatics over in the nursery dome where she pressed the do-a-tot buttons.
She looked up at him, her blue eye intent out of a face of beautiful flesh. And a tear tried again for his surface while he thought fast thoughts of new spaceships and longed for the tears to stop trying. What an odd irritating little discomfort it was. “Little Sister,” he said, “if you can’t stop looking at me so, you’ll have to fire up and blast off.”
“Daddy! Mother says I can’t come back to see you for about a year. Not until I get my feet changed by the Rebuilders. And since you’re my really Daddy, don’t you think that’s a too-long-time? I want to look at you!”
“No,” he answered, not thinking, “about a year. That’s about right. That’s probably the way your ‘replacement’ program has been set up. It’s the usual.”
“But daddies are supposed to be Daddies,” she said all at once in a burst. “I’ve been hearing on the Programs. . . .”
CRASH! His hip-snuggie chair hit its other two feet down from where he had them tipped for his thinking and instantly he was on his feet, clanking and rattling and sweating. “YOU’VE BEEN HEARING ON THE PROGRAMS?!” Then he knew how the wife had betrayed him. As a last final chance to get to him she was playing tricks with the little girl’s training, pressing the old tot buttons, letting her hear some of the ancient garbage of love, togetherness, and the family stew. “Little Sister!” he gasped, and he knew today he would not speak much of spaceships, nor the problems of the Red Galaxy, nor the space run to Marsoplan. “Little Sister, you’ll have to hear me. And remember what I have said. Let your young mind cling to these things for your future may well depend on them all.
“Once, long ago, in an age of horror, living conditions were as your mother has let you hear on the old tot tubes in that abandoned nursery. People lived together in clusters of rooms, whole families lumped not only in each other’s consciousness, but together in sight and smell as well as feel. Their personalities were untrue; their characters developed twisted; they were walking nightmares of contradictions because they warped one another by their proximities. They even ate together, food such as, thank all the powers of Thinking, you have never seen—sustenance that often times came in great chunks which they took by mouth and actually had to chew and swallow by their own power. Now, who would have time for that today, what with the need for power mentalics and the overriding necessity for using all our abilities for Universal Deep Thinking? And remember. THEY WALKED IN THE WEAKNESS OF FLESH ALL THE DAYS OF THEIR LIVES!”
Little Sister was dabbing at her eyes with her steel fingers, and for some unaccountable and wholly disgusting reason he felt the love tear deep inside him trying again to embarrass him. “It sounded so wonderful,” she said. “Daddies loved their little girls. And sometimes at Xmas . . .What’s love? What does it mean?”
BANG BANG BOOM!!! He pressed the button for Big BIG Din to start, for this second IT, a minor “ultimate contingency,” and all over his plastic stronghold things rapped together, making a worse sound surely than thunder and shore batteries and field pieces at cannonade in the Old Days before we shipped our atmosphere, most of it, out toward Marsoplan. When Big BIG Din was over and he had pressed the all-done things she just stood there, a frightened little girl with steel fingers in her ears, “Love!!” he said in a quiet exclamation, and his voice filled up with horror to attain the complete effect, “let us not hear of that word again, ever, that nasty impossible word again, for which if ever again you mouth it here, your mouth will be rinsed out with plain boiling lead.
“Now, let us get on. A few of the horrors of the past I have hinted at such as living together, having to chew actual horrible chunk food, and running around in flesh all the time with no hope of, or very little hope of—metal!” To strike a point home he leaped over suddenly until his steel feet were close to her and he gave her a horrible sharp little pinch on the face with one steel hand while he dug a steel fingernail into her ribs with the other, not injurious but painful enough that she felt it. While she shrieked and screamed getting over it he talked on matter-of-factly. “You see, Little Sister, in all the old days they had no hope. Flesh all the time and no chance of getting out of it, and the horrible pinchings and fingernail jabbings they must have done on each other all the time! How the blood must have flowed! And the screamings. Oh, horror! But you, Little Sister, have the fine hope of one day being nearly all new-metal alloys with the very minimum of flesh-strip holding you together, and that can be cleverly sheathed and camouflaged until almost no one can tell where to pinch you and jab you. And besides, sometime, who knows, the way women’s rights keep going, you may well have a Stronghold almost as good as mine, with all the weapons men and the warners to help you, and then you’ll be nearly safe from all the pinchers and the jabbers because you can blast them from a long way out. And in these complete and fun-filled days of the automatics, when almost nearly everyone sits expertly served by gad-goes and thinks generally on Universal Deep Problems, who goes visiting anyway? Except little girls perhaps, for a very short while, showing something new to their daddies.”
He thought she might take the hint, stop screaming, show him her new hands again and then blast off for the bubble-dome home of her mother. But not Little Sister! She stopped screaming, jabbed at a couple of watery blue eyes and fixed him with a blunt stare. “I came for a good long talk,” she said, “Daddy. And then you’ll just have to walk me home, because by that time it’ll be night, and I’d be SCARED to go across all that plastic in the dark by myself. And besides you need to go over anyway to help press some of the buttons. Mama says she’s getting fed up having to do all those do-a-tots by herself.”
Oh, horrors! Woe! Worry! Damnation! Grief! What a pest are little girls, he thought. “I CAN’T DO ANY OF THE DO-A-TOTS,” he said, screaming fast. “Besides, the agreement was, if I’d take the germs down to the incubator for you your mother’d do the do-a-tots and rear you. And anyway, there’s trouble in the Red Galaxy lately and the space run to Marsoplan has been strangely deviating currently and requires that we all think clear. I’m sorry, but I’ve work here to hold me. You’ll just have to let dark not catch you, and your mother’ll have to do the do-a-tots herself. Because the Great Thinking of the Universe cannot be held up for any one child.”
She started one of the fits then that he had hated so in the rest of the children. She threw herself on the floor. She jumped up and down on her knees. She made her new-steel hands do a tattoo against each other. She started to take off her clothes. And through it all she was yelling, “I want Daddy! I want Daddy!” Rotten vile little flesh creature, showing all this embarrassing emotion. But the upshot was he was soon out in the ice-bright plastic yard, dressed in an old throw-away space snuggie, headed toward Mother’s place, and Little Sister was jumping up and down chortling beside him, “Daddy’s going to do a do-a-tot, Daddy’s going to do a do-a-tot.” And far overhead, somewhere out in the dark blue of the gathering darkness, he knew he was neglecting the troubles in the Red Galaxy and the space run to Marso-plan was in need of his best mental time. Thinking of all their Deep Problems and watching Little Sister so happily ignorantly flesh-ridden beside him he felt a tear come up from somewhere deep away in an almost forgotten flesh-strip, and, breaking across multiple lenses then, it made a blur in some depth quite negating the marvelous precision of his wide-sweep mechanized eyeballs. Unable now to see clearly—indeed for awhile quite blacked-out—he clutched Little Sister’s steel hand and they dug in staunchly, and he moved on through the slick yard with her, tear-blind in the coming of darkness.