Mockingbird

by Walter Tevis

  After a while the sun came out from behind clouds. And sandpipers appeared on the beach, and gulls began flying overhead, and there was the good, clean smell of the ocean in the air. My arm was not uncomfortable in the sling and, although it still hurt greatly when I allowed myself to think about it, I knew I could stand it. I had felt worse my first few days in prison, and I had survived that—had, in fact, become stronger for it. I would survive this.

  That night I slept on the sand beside an old log that lay half buried at the place where the beach began to have grass growing on it. I built myself a fire with a few sticks of driftwood, lighting it with my prison lighter the way I had seen Belasco do it that time that seemed so long before. I sat by the fire, leaning against the log for a while, and held Biff in my lap, until the sky became dark and the stars came out, very brightly, above us. Then I lay down in the sand in my blue prison sweater, covering myself with my jacket, and fell soundly asleep.

  I awoke at dawn. The fire was out and my body was cold and stiff and my wrist throbbed painfully. The other wrist was sore and stiff where the bracelet had been twisted on it. But I was deeply rested from the long sleep, despite the pain in my body. And I was not afraid.

  Biff was curled against me. She woke when I did.

  And I did find clams, for breakfast! I had no rake of the kind the book showed in its pictures, but I used a long stick and searched the beach for the little bubbles in the wet sand where their necks stick up. I lost seven or eight before I learned to be fast enough to flip one out of the hard-packed sand before it burrowed in deeper. But I got four of them—all big ones.

  For a while it seemed as if opening them was impossible. I got the book out of my pocket—Cooking Shore Dinners: Let’s Have a Party!—and looked at the instructions, but they weren’t much help. They showed a special knife being used to “whisk the little fellow from his hiding place,” as the book put it. But I had no knife. There were no sharp knives in the prison. But then I thought of something. I had put the two pieces of the second bracelet into my pocket after I got it off. I reached into my pocket, got out the larger piece of the metal, and, while Biff watched with only slight interest, used the sharp end that had been cut by the blade to pry open my first clam. It took a while, and I almost cut myself several times, but I managed it!

  I ate the clam raw. I had never tasted anything like that before. It was delicious. And it was food and drink also; there was a good deal of drinkable liquid in each clam.

  That day I walked a great many miles up the coast, still a bit apprehensive about being pursued. But I saw and heard no sign of anyone following me. Nor did I see any sign of human habitation. The weather was cold, and for a while in the afternoon a light snow fell; but my prison clothes were warm enough and I was not seriously bothered by it. I found more clams for lunch, and ate half a soybar with them and drank some more of the liquid protein. Biff took easily to eating clams, lapping and biting them out of their shells with great enthusiasm. I soon became proficient at finding and opening them.

  From time to time I would go inland for some distance and try to find some high ground and look around me for fresh water—a lake, river, or irrigation ditch—but I saw none. I knew I would eventually need more than the clams and the liquid protein.

  It was like that for days; I lost count of them. Gradually my wrist became better, and one night by my fire I tried an experiment that worked and that made me feel much more confident about the future. There happened to be a sizable patch of ice and frozen snow trapped under a rocky ledge a short distance from the beach. I had a metal prison bowl in my backpack, brought along for cooking my shore dinners in; and I went to the patch of ice and, using my broken bracelet, chipped some into the bowl. Then I built a small fire, let it burn down, and set the bowl on the hot coals. When the ice melted I found that I could drink it! And I did, letting Biff have some of it. Then I added a few sticks to my fire, put more ice in the bowl to melt, and dug a double handful of clams while it did so. Then I added the clams to the now-boiling water and after a few minutes I had a delicious hot clam stew.

  I survived that way for a month, finding what shelter I could to sleep by, and eating the food Belasco had given me a little at a time. But eventually Belasco’s food ran out, and I was forced to live on clams alone for days and days—I do not know how many, since I was not keeping this journal at the time—until I eventually found a frozen fish lying on the beach and cooked it. It gave me a change of diet for two days; but it was soon gone.

  Biff caught herself several small shore birds, and I was able to get one of them away from her; but after that she would disappear up the beach to do her hunting. It would have been nice to make a hunting cat out of her, but I had no idea how to do that.

  I knew, too, that the ocean was full of fish and crustaceans and other good things to eat; but I had no idea how to get any of them out of it. Cooking Shore Dinners spoke of berries and roots and potatoes, but there were none of these to be had. I kept making regular excursions inland in search of water and of fields like the one at the prison; I found nothing but wild, dead grass and weeds. There was no sense that the land had ever been cultivated, and no sign of any kind of life. I wondered if the Denver Incident had caused the land to be “stifled,” as my history books put it, back at that time, or during some later war after the death of literacy, unrecorded in books. When literacy died, so had history.

  Toward the end of this time I must have gone twenty or more days with nothing to eat but clams, and sometimes even they were hard to find. I would wake up in the mornings with a metallic taste in my mouth and a cramping in my stomach, and I would find that after walking for only a short time I had to lie in the sand and rest. And my skin had become dry and itchy. I knew I needed something else in my diet, but there was nothing else to be had. I tried sneaking up on sleeping or resting gulls, but I was never able to get really close to one. Once, in a field of brown grass, I saw a snake and chased it, but it slithered away too fast for my tired legs to follow. I fell in the field exhausted; the snake would have made a meaty stew. Sometimes I would see a rabbit; but they were far too fast for me.

  I began to get sick. My wrist was healed by then, although it was a bit crooked and stiff and would hurt when I picked up Biff with my right hand, but now my head began to ache furiously, and I would become terribly thirsty. I had to stop often to melt ice for water, and then sometimes I would throw it up. And one night I threw up my dinner and was too weak to cook anything more. I fell asleep, face down, by the remains of my fire, not really even sheltered from the weather.

  When I awoke I was shivering terribly and my head was wet with perspiration. I was covered with a light blanket of snow; and the snow was still falling on me. The sky was a dark gray, and the sand around me had frozen. All of my joints ached.

  I tried to get up, and could hardly stand. Eventually the best I could do was to sit up on the beach and look around me for wood to build a fire with. But there was none around; I had gathered up all of the sticks in the area the night before. I needed a fire desperately.

  Biff rubbed herself against my hip, crying softly.

  In a dormitory or in prison a robot would have given me a sin-gle Med Pill and I would have been all right. But I had no pills with me whatever.

  I must have sat there for over an hour, waiting for the sky to become lighter and for the day to become warmer. But that did not happen. The sky remained very dark, and a cold wind began to blow, blowing snow into my face and stinging my cheeks and eyes.

  I knew that if I continued to sit there, or lay down, I would become sicker. I kept thinking of a line from a poem by T. S. Eliot:

  My life is light, waiting for the death wind,

  Like a feather on the back of my hand.

  Finally I said the line aloud, into the wind, as strongly as I could. And I knew that if I did not get up I would probably die, that my lean flesh would be picked by gulls and that my bones would eventually roll in the winds and the water o
n that beach. And I did not want that to happen.

  Moaning slightly, I pushed myself upright, and then fell on one knee. “Up!” I said aloud, and stood up again. I staggered for a moment, my head hanging over, too weak to hold it erect. The pain and the vertigo were powerful. But I got my head up and began walking. Several times I veered into the surf and staggered out again.

  But eventually I found some wood and, shaking terribly, managed to make a fire. And I reserved a sturdy, long stick of driftwood to use as a walking staff.

  My backpack was empty now, except for my bowl. I was able to slide the denim material it was made of from the light metal tubes, take off my coat and sweater, and, shaking violently with the cold, button the fabric around me like a vest. Then I quickly put the sweater and coat back on and after I warmed my body up again at the fire I was even better sheltered from the cold. A scarf and a cap would have been very useful; but I had grown a beard and that helped keep my face and neck warm. I could have killed Biff and eaten her and used her skin for a hat; but I did not want to kill Biff. I was a changed person from what I had been trained to be; I no longer wished to be alone, private, or even self-reliant. I needed Biff. Self-reliance was not just a matter of drugs and silence.

  I managed to tie the bowl with a string to the frame of my backpack. I put the frame back over my shoulders, took up my walking staff, and, still feverish and dizzy, but stronger now, continued northward along the empty beach.

  It continued to snow, and as the day wore on I became colder. I stopped twice to attempt a fire, but I wasn’t able to get one lighted because of the wetness of what wood I could find and the way the wind kept blowing out my little lighter. When I became thirsty there was nothing to do but swallow handfuls of snow. The beach had become frozen too hard for me to be able to dig for clams. I kept moving ahead, slowly, and tried not to worry.

  And then as I came around a curve in the beach toward evening, I saw in front of me, sitting on a low bluff back from the shore, a large old building, with lights in the windows. The snow was falling faster. The possibility of finding shelter, and warmth, gave me some strength, and I hurried forward, in a kind of limping half-run, until I came to the bottom of the bluff. But my heart sank. There were no stairs up to it—only loosely piled boulders all around, as a bulwark against the ocean.

  I stood there for a while wondering what to do, until I realized that I must climb up there. I could not take the chance of sleeping on the beach and of being too weak and fevered in the morning even to sit up.

  I began climbing, scrambling up a boulder, resting, and pushing myself slowly up the next one. Biff seemed to think I was playing, and ran up and down the rocks with ease, while my right wrist ached and my throat ached for water and the boulders scraped my legs and knees. It must have been immensely painful, but I did not think about the pain. I just kept clawing my way up those rocks, knowing that the snow-filled beach might be my death.

  And I made it to the top and lay there, panting, while Biff snuggled against me. I patted her head. The palm of my hand was scratched and bleeding and there was a long gash in the sleeve of my jacket. But I was all right.

  I had not been able to climb with my staff, so I had to half walk and half crawl to get to the door of the building. And it was, thank God, unlocked. I pushed, it open and fell into light and warmth.

  I sat on some kind of hard floor for a long time, leaning back against the door I had come in, holding my head in my hands. I was dizzy, and sick; but I was warm.

  When the dizziness subsided I looked around me.

  I was in a vast, powerfully lighted room, under a high ceiling. In front of me and on either side were heavy gray machines, and a long conveyor belt and robots, their backs toward me, tending the machines. There was very little noise.

  Strengthened by the warmth, I began to search the huge room for water. I found some almost immediately. One of the big machines was some sort of drill, with its bit cooled by a fine spray from a hose; the used water ran down a small trough in front of the conveyor belt and into a floor drain.

  The robot who stood by the machine, doing nothing, ignored me and I ignored him. I kneeled by the belt, held my hands above the floor drain, caught the water and drank it from my hands. It was warm and slightly oily, but drinkable.

  After I had my fill of it and while Biff was still lapping at the wetness around the floor drain, I washed my hands and face as best I could with the water. The oil in it seemed to soothe the scratched places on my skin.

  Then I stood up, feeling better, and began to look more closely around me.

  I now saw that there were actually three conveyor belts; one along each of three walls of the room. And moving along steadily on these belts were what I now recognized to be bright steel toasters. There had been toasters like them when I was a small child doing KP in the dormitory kitchen, but I hadn’t seen one since.

  They were being constructed and wired by machines as they passed along the belts. Some machines would add a part and weld it in place as the toaster passed by. Each machine was tended by a Make Two robot—a kind of shuffling imbecile of an android—who stood by it, watching it work. Sheet steel came from a huge roll at the start of the line; completed toasters came off the end of it. Toasters were being made at a rapid pace, there in that over-lighted and cavernous room. Metal was being bent and formed by machine, with almost no noise, and parts were being made and added to the basic form. Standing there, finally warm but still half starved, I found myself wondering whatever became of the toasters and why it was that I had not seen one in thirty years. Whenever I wanted toast I had always stuck a fork in a slice of bread and held it over an open flame. I think that was what everybody did.

  And then, walking toward the end of the line, I saw what was happening. A Make Three robot in a pale gray uniform was standing there. Unlike the others, he was rather deft in his movements. As each completed toaster came to him he would throw a switch on its side, just above the little nuclear battery, and when nothing happened—when no heating element became red hot—he would discard the toaster into a large, wheeled bin.

  Like all of the other robots, he ignored my presence completely. I stood there, still a bit dazed by the warmth of the room, watching him for what seemed to be a long time. He would pick up each finished toaster as it came off the automatic production line, throw the switch, look inside, discover that it didn’t work, and then drop it in the bin at his side.

  The robot had a round face and eyes that bulged slightly; he looked a bit like Peter Lorre but without the intelligence. While I was standing there by him the bin filled up with shiny new toasters and, seeing this, he shouted, in a deep, mechanical voice, “Recycle time!” and then reached under the conveyor belt and threw the handle of a switch.

  The toaster line stopped, and all of the robots stood at attention, in their gray uniforms. From the ones I could see, they all had faces like Peter Lorre.

  The bin full of discarded toasters began to roll along the floor; I had to move quickly to get out of its way. It rolled smartly down to the end of the room where the production line began and stopped in front of a small doorway. The door opened and a robot came out and began taking the toasters from the bin, carrying them awkwardly in his arms. He took them into a small room behind the door and I could see him putting them into a hopper that fed them into a machine of a kind I had seen at the prison. It was a machine for converting junked steel into new steel. The toasters were being made into sheet metal again.

  The factory was a closed system. Nothing came in and nothing went out. It could have been making and unmaking defective toasters for centuries, for all I knew. If there was a robot-repair station anywhere nearby, the sub-moron robots would last nearly forever. And, apparently, no new raw materials were needed.

  I spent the rest of that night there, sitting against the wall and sleeping as well as I could. When I awoke in the morning, daylight was coming in the windows and the lights had dimmed themselves. Toasters were s
till moving along the production line there in the gray morning light and the robots were still standing where they had been the evening before. My body was stiff, and I was ravenous.

  It was good to be warm again, and I decided to stay there in the factory for the rest of the winter, if I could just find food. And it turned out that there was food. The robots were of a very primitive make, somewhat like the ones diagrammed in my Audel’s Robot Maintenance and Repair Guide. They had been made by selective cloning from living tissue, and they required food. Shortly after I awoke, the assembly line shut itself down automatically and all of the robots gathered in a sheep-like cluster by a doorway next to the recycling room, and the inspector robot, the one from the end of the line, opened the door. Inside was a large closet with three sets of shelves, two of them stacked high with little cartons slightly larger than a package of cigarettes. On the other shelf were cans of some kind of drink.

  Nearly starving, I pushed in with the robots and was handed a carton of food and a can of drink.

  The food was some kind of unfavored soybar, and the drink was terribly sweet; but I got them eaten and drunk in a hurry. Then, a bit apprehensively, I opened the closet and took out ten food cartons and four cans of drink. None of the robots paid any attention. I was enormously relieved; I would not starve.

  Later I discovered a huge pile of unused shipping cartons under the conveyor belt on the back wall. I took four of them and flattened them out on the floor where I had slept the night before, and they made a fairly comfortable bed—far better than the frozen beaches I had been sleeping on.

  So I was provided for, and I kept saying to myself, “This is my winter home.” But even from the start I did not believe it, for, sick as I was, the place was no home to me. It was the most horrible place I have slept in in my life, with that mindless parody of productivity going on constantly around me, and with the wretched waste of time and energy in the making and unmaking of battery-powered toasters. And those gray-uniformed sub-morons, parodies of humanity, shuffling around silently, with no real work to do. During the five days I stayed there I saw no robot except the inspector do anything at his job. And he only dropped toasters into a bin and every hour or so shouted, “Recycle time!” And fed the others their two meals a day.