Awakening

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Startling Stories Summer 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The scream of the commutor jet bringing Kelsey home broke like glass outside the house.

Startled, Alice realized that she was behind schedule in her household duties. Quickly she switched the news off the Tevee. Master Kelsey hated newscasts. They made him uneasy, particularly with all this talk about a possible air-raid.

Instead, she hurriedly tuned in Kelsey's evening preference: self-improvement commercials with the latest pop-tunes for background.

Then she ran into the bathroom to prepare Kelsey's intricate beauty ritual.

She turned up her thermostat so that her machinery would run a little faster. If she wasn't careful, Master Kelsey would trade her in for a more modern and physically attractive domestic.

She heard footsteps in the hall. His footsteps--

In another few seconds he would be there, real, breathing, but unobtainable, a living dream, something on the other side of the looking glass.

Oh the pain, the indescribable pain of love, greater and deeper and drowning love, going out and out all the time and never coming back again. Painful, painful unrequited love.

The cumulative loneliness, the hours of lonely loving, the hours and days and weeks and years of tireless mechanical walking in the indifferent round of the hours of her life. The loneliness of loving something that can never love in return, that doesn't even know of your love, that can't even conceive of your being able to love.

For you are only a machine and your soul can never be shared; for only you know that you have a soul, and it is an accident and no one could even suspect that it could possibly be--this crying hungry, yearning, lonely soul.

Without effort she could have cried out her heart to Master Kelsey, but she had not been made to cry, and no one would think of looking for her heart or soul. Or the lonely yearning of the heart or soul.

For the soul can be trapped in ugliness, or in the slashing streak of electrons. Dying there, the soul alone can mourn its dying, for who can feel the soul in the rectifiers and diodes, or behind the ugliness of a distorted shell?

It was very good for her, she thought, that no one, no human, including Master Kelsey could ever guess at the awful intensity, the terrible hunger of the soul that kept loving in silence, alone, in the dark, behind the plastoid walls of an inhuman shell.

Master Kelsey came into the living room, tall and broad and beautiful and neat in his business suit, his blond hair in a waving shine. But with that tired sharp look to his mouth in spite of its frozen smile. He always seemed so relieved to see her standing there waiting, responsive, receptive, an understanding shadow that filled up his frightened loneliness between the time of his arrival and the absorption in Tevee, or the always demanded presence of guests.

He leaned wearily against the wall, breathing heavily as though he had been running from something for a long time.

"Hello, hello, Alice," he said quickly, forcing exaggerated joy into the greeting to conceal something full of fear.

"Hello, Master Kelsey. You had a fine day at the office?"

"Fine! It was great, simply perfect!" He said it almost fiercely, as though even a robot might challenge the statement.

As he stared at the Tevee's hypnotic glow, his face began to relax a little. "Everybody," he whispered, "was happy today. The Manager gave our office group a Silver Star for being tops in the Group Sociability scale for the week."

"That's wonderful, Master Kelsey!"

He stared at her. "I wish they had made you so you could smile more, Alice. The way you look, it--it gives me a sort of doubtful feeling sometimes."

If you only knew how I felt, my dearest Kelsey, inside, inside the machinery that has the cold and tiny shell. I'm all one great warm smile of joy just to be near you, darling Kelsey.

"I'm happy for you, Master Kelsey," she said.

He nodded slowly.

Why wasn't he happier, she wondered, as she had wondered so many times before. He had all that anyone should need to be happy. In the first place, he was human among many others who were human. And then all the other things, and the woman, the woman he loved, Gloria Tonnencourt, the woman he loved, loved, loved--

Gloria was coming over to see him tonight. Alice would have to watch it again, hear it again. She would have to listen again to love, while she stood alone and frozen in the dark closet of her own longings.

"Alice?"

"Yes."

"It's that ten minutes on the commutor to the jet station. Don't they realize that a man is alone those ten minutes? Nobody else to talk to. No Tevee. No sound even. Alone."