SO, AFTER a fighting year, the autumn came. Finally. The tin birds screamed south under the orange vapor shield and a made moon floated splendiferously over our land. The trees folded up and collapsed into the yard-holes, and the big bags went aloft from Central, the big brown leaf-filled bags floating high in the air and ready to shower us with ersatz autumn at the press of a switch in Seasons. And those brown bags, emptied and collapsed, would float to earth and, looking like the biggest of all fallen leaves, perhaps be found by tin men, or Go-Now men, or strange bleary mutant men roaming the homeless plastic.
And then the winter passed in a flutter of made snow and crystal, and the men in Seasons, working hard and over-stepping the bounds of good taste, I thought, went far back and made us a Christmas. It was a simple thing, but hard work, and withal poor taste, I felt, this clothing the regular trees with a sheath of green plastic and springing them up in the yard-holes in December with a strange-haloed star. Who could care? Oh, who could care?
And then it was spring again. And I knew how much I had lost. Through the tag-end days of summer, through the autumn, through powdery winter—my Stronghold on Automatic, my needs expertly served by the self-run ever-ready Gad-Goes—I had sat in my hip-snuggie chair watching the months go, watching the antics of Central. Not even bored; not even amused. For I had set my blood to low-low and my flesh-strips to dormant, and I had remained the long days through almost as quiet in every part of the new-metal in all my “replacements.”
But the spring—something happens in spring. The world slips round to unrest and something dormant shakes off the cold coils, slithers up and stares you silly with beady eyes. Or did a tin man, while I slept, jog a bit at my heart switch? It is a thing I cannot tell you, truly. One month I’m sitting calm as a cold ball of lead, thinking on Universal Deep Problems, my heart pistoning a slow steady Moderan rhythm designed to last me forever, my world a flat sea of smooth-time for me to float on. The next I’m in the crash waves, my heart pistoning a blast-beat, my thin green blood coming up to swell the tubes in my throat and choke me. I am thinking of her! And the summer day that she left me.
Or was it night? I have not been so well since she has gone. Or is it pride? Who can say, on such things, what would mean anything to another?
Sometimes I think I will rise to power in this land. Why not? I’ll make scientists out of my weapons men. And the tin men. We’ll throw this Stronghold into one grand laboratory of experimentation. We’ll come up with an Ultimate Contingency weapon to make other Ultimate Contingency weapons look like toyland fuzz bombs. We’ll come up with such a blaster that just by thinking into the ON-OFF place I can obliterate whole countrysides. And then I’ll say to Central, “Central,” I’ll say, “you have given me your last hard time. No more spring, see. Likewise, no more summer, see. Check?” And check they better will, or else. Oh, after that, I’ll be a benevolent ruler. We’ll sit in autumn and winter, all of us. For spring and summer are really dead, you know. All gone. But perhaps I do not make myself clear. Who can, perhaps, to another?
At other times I think I’ll make snakes. I have the blueprints. I’ll throw my Stronghold into one big green-plastic snake factory. And let them crawl all over a gaunt land. Snakes! That is the symbol. What better to say what I have to say to all the world? And I’ll train one special one to go and sit upon the roof which she is under. With him.
But perhaps all this will make you think that I am mean. Or jealous. It is not that—not that at all. But I am outraged by her stupidity, and I am hurt by something that moves and turns in the cold sections of my heart box when it comes spring in the wheel of the world’s sad journey. I think it is mostly her stupidity that so outrages me. You see, she left me for one much inferior to me! You must take my word for that. You must, you must—
It was not that I did not treat her well. She was my new-metal mistress for many a happy month. And then, as such things go, I guess she learned to love me. And I cannot blame her for that. Certainly that was not part of her stupidity. But, as women will, she wanted more and more, more and more of the time. What I mean to say is, she wanted to share my life, even help run, or perhaps run! the Stronghold. She wanted me to leave her life-switch to ON! But I explained patiently, as to a child, how it was better for her to have her life-switch to ON only while we were loving. And then we could flip it to OFF when we were not loving and she could go to lie under the bed and rest there like a stick of steel, or old plastic shoes, until I needed her again most sorely. Any other arrangement, as I explained to her time and time again, would perhaps lead to a lessening of my mind-force in Universal Deep Thinking. I thought she understood.
And then one day—it was summer, the heavy flowers were up all about and the ersatz baby robins were testing their tender wings and throbbing little new-learned songs—that day I grew careless. I guess I left her life-switch to ON when we were through. I remember it was a time of heavy thinking. There was terrible trouble again in the Out World on the space run to Marsoplan, and the Red Galaxy was again posing problems. I guess I left her life-switch to ON. Or perhaps one of the tin men . . . But I must not grow too suspicious. Even now it seems that every eye I look into is somehow guilty. Sometimes I wonder if they were not all making love with her when my back was turned in thinking. And when I think this, the green blood comes up in my flesh-strips so hotly that it is all I can do not to blast the countryside with a Maximum Weapons Fire just to let off my feelings.
But the upshot was, she left me that day while I was in my thinking room, busy. I know they must have helped her get over my Stronghold’s eleven steel walls. They must have. I am, even now, still thinking up punishment for those traitor servants, and no punishment seems big enough to fit them. When I find out who they are—Oh, my revenge-needs grow and grow and overwhelm me.
And when I find her! which I will! I hope I have my revenge schedule ready. My “boys” are out even now infiltrating all the neighboring Strongholds, where the inferior masters are, to find out which inferior master was the nature of her stupidity. And when I find her!!!
But you know, I have a hope. Even in this heart-hurt spring, flat place in the wheel of the sad world’s journey, I have a hope. That she’ll come back? Ah, no. I have a hope that she’ll be found outside a Stronghold. Maybe wandering over the homeless plastic, saying my name. Or perhaps “living” in some yard-hole for trees, hoping I’ll come to her to say, “Come back!”
But would I take her back? Could I take her back? There seems a guilt in every eye I look into. I’m caught with my green blood. I think of snakes, and will—until I know. And who can know? About such things? So it is full ahead with all my punishment schedules. And when she’s found—and she will be found!—I hope it does not find my schedules wanting. I’ll rush that new machine through to completion. I’ll leave her life-switch to ON! I’ll let her “live” while this new machine hammers her “life” down to jellied atoms. For stupidity—well, stupidity is a most terrible thing, you know—especially in the judging of ME against another—and must have a massive pounding.