Howland showed pique. “No. Certainly not.”
“Does that poem mean anything? Does this whole business of twoness mean anything?”
Howland shrugged. “If it means something to them, it means something. They’re philosophers, Morey. They see deep into things. You don’t know what a privilege it is for me to be allowed to associate with them.”
They had another drink. On Howland’s book, of course.
Morey eased Walter Bigelow over to a quiet spot. He said, “Leaving twoness out of it for the moment, what’s this about the robots?”
Bigelow looked at him round-eyed. “Didn’t you understand the poem?”
“Of course I did. But diagram it for me in simple terms so I can tell my wife.”
Bigelow beamed. “It’s about the dichotomy of robots,” he explained. “Like the Utile salt mill that the boy wished for: it ground out salt and ground out salt and ground out salt. He had to have salt, but not that much salt. Whitehead explains it clearly—”
They had another drink on Bigelow’s book.
Morey wavered over to Tanaquil Bigelow. He said fuzzily, “Listen. Mrs. Walter Tanaquil Strongarm Bigelow. Listen.”
She grinned smugly at him. “Brown hair,” she said dreamily.
Morey shook his head vigorously. “Never mind hair,” he ordered. “Never mind poem. Listen. In pre-cise and el-e-men-ta-ry terms, explain to me what is wrong with the world today.”
“Not enough brown hair,” she said promptly.
“Never mind hair!”
“All right,” she said agreeably. “Too many robots. Too many robots make too much of everything.”
“Ha! Got it!” Morey exclaimed triumphantly. “Get rid of robots!”
“Oh, no. No! No! No. We wouldn’t eat. Everything is mechanized. Can’t get rid of them, can’t slow down production—slowing down is dying, stopping is quicker dying. Principle of twoness is the concept that clarifies all these—”
“No!” Morey said violently. “What should we do?”
“Do? I’ll tell you what we should do, if that’s what you want. I can tell you.”
“Then tell me.”
“What we should do is—” Tanaquil hiccupped with a look of refined consternation—“have another drink.”
They had another drink. He gallantly let her pay, of course. She ungallantly argued with the bartender about the ration points due her.
Though not a two-fisted drinker, Morey tried. He really worked at it.
He paid the price, too. For some little time before his limbs stopped moving, his mind stopped functioning. Blackout. Almost a blackout, at any rate, for all he retained of the late evening was a kaleidoscope of people and places and things. Howland was there, drunk as a skunk, disgracefully drunk, Morey remembered thinking as he stared up at Howland from the floor. The Bigelows were there. His wife, Cherry, solicitous and amused, was there. And oddly enough, Henry was there…
It was very, very hard to reconstruct. Morey devoted a whole morning’s hangover to the effort. It was important to reconstruct it, for some reason. But Morey couldn’t even remember what the reason was; and finally he dismissed it, guessing that he had either solved the secret of twoness or whether Tanaquil Bigelow’s remarkable figure was natural.
He did, however, know that the next morning he had waked in his own bed, with no recollection of getting there. No recollection of anything much, at least not of anything that fit into the proper chronological order or seemed to mesh with anything else, after the dozenth drink when he and Howland, arms around each other’s shoulders, composed a new verse on twoness and, plagiarizing an old marching tune, howled it across the boisterous bar-room:
It had, at any rate, seemed to mean something at the time.
If alcohol opened Morey’s eyes to the fact that there was a twoness, perhaps alcohol was what he needed. For there was.
Call it a dichotomy, if the word seems more couth. A kind of two-pronged struggle, the struggle of two unwearying runners in an immortal race. There is the refrigerator inside the house. The cold air, the bubble of heated air that is the house, the bubble of cooled air that is the refrigerator, the momentary bubble of heated air that defrosts it. Call the heat Yang, if you will. Call the cold Yin. Yang overtakes Yin. Then Yin passes Yang. Then Yang passes Yin. Then-Give them other names. Call Yin a mouth; call Yang a hand.
If the hand rests, the mouth will starve. If the mouth stops, the hand will die. The hand, Yang, moves faster.
Yin may not lag behind.
Then call Yang a robot.
And remember that a pipeline has two ends.
Like any once-in-a-lifetime lush, Morey braced himself for the consequences—and found startledly that there were none.
Cherry was a surprise to him. “You were so funny,” she giggled. “And, honestly, so romantic.”
He shakily swallowed his breakfast coffee.
The office staff roared and slapped him on the back. “Howland tells us you’re living high, boy!” they bellowed more or less in the same words. “Hey, listen to what Morey did—went on the town for the night of a lifetime and didn’t even bring his ration book along to cash in!”
They thought it was a wonderful joke.
But, then, everything was going well. Cherry, it seemed, had reformed out of recognition. True, she still hated to go out in the evening and Morey never saw her forcing herself to gorge on unwanted food or play undesired games. But, moping into the pantry one afternoon, he found to his incredulous delight that they were well ahead of their ration quotas. In some items, in fact, they were out—a. month’s supply and more was gone ahead of schedule!
Nor was it the counterfeit stamps, for he had found them tucked behind a bain-marie and quietly burned them. He cast about for ways of complimenting her, but caution prevailed. She was sensitive on the subject; leave it be.
And virtue had its reward.
Wainwright called him in, all smiles. “Morey, great news! We’ve all appreciated your work here and we’ve been able to show it in some more tangible way than compliments. I didn’t want to say anything till it was definite, but—your status has been reviewed by Classification and the Ration Board. You’re out of Class Four Minor, Morey!”
Morey said tremulously, hardly daring to hope, “I’m a full Class Four?”
“Class Five, Morey. Class Five! When we do something, we do it right. We asked for a special waiver and got it—you’ve skipped a whole class.” He added honestly, “Not that it was just our backing that did it, of course. Your own recent splendid record of consumption helped a lot. I told you you could do it!”
Morey had to sit down. He missed the rest of what Wainwright had to say, but it couldn’t have mattered. He escaped from the office, side-stepped the knot of fellow-employees waiting to congratulate him, and got to a phone.
Cherry was as ecstatic and inarticulate as he. “Oh, darling!” was all she could say.
“And I couldn’t have done it without you,” he babbled. “Wainwright as much as said so himself. Said if it wasn’t for the way we— well, you have been keeping up with the rations, it never would have got by the Board. I’ve been meaning to say something to you about that, dear, but I just haven’t known how. But I do appreciate it. I— Hello?” There was a curious silence at the other end of the phone. “Hello?” he repeated worriedly.
Cherry’s voice was intense and low. “Morey Fry, I think you’re mean. I wish you hadn’t spoiled the good news.” And she hung up.
Morey stared slack-jawed at the phone.