"A long way off," she said. "Where we can be alone."
"My God!" yelled Ben. "Do you really think—"
I shook my head. "I don't think so. There is something wrong, but—"
Ben rose so swiftly to his feet that he tipped the table and sent the whole deck of cards spinning to the floor.
"I'll go and see," he said.
Jimmy looked up from his table. "What's going on?"
"You and your poetry!" I described his poetry in a rather bitter manner.
"I'm in love with you," said Lulu. "I'll love you forever. I'll take good care of you and I'll make you see how much I really love you and someday you'll love me—"
"Oh, shut up!" I said.
Ben came back sweating.
"We're way off course and the emergencies are locked."
"Can we—"
He shook his head. "If you ask me, Lulu jammed them intentionally. In that case, we're sunk. We'll never get back."
"Lulu," I said sternly.
"Yes, darling."
"Cut out that kind of talk!"
"I love you," Lulu said.
"It was Honeymoon," said Ben. "The damn place put notions in her head."
"Honeymoon," I told him, "and that crummy verse Jimmy's always writing—"
"It's not crummy verse," Jimmy shot back, all burned up. "One day, when I am published—"
"Why couldn't you write about war or hunting or flying in the depths of space or something big and noble, instead of all that mush about how I'll always love you and fly to me, sweetheart, and all the other—"
"Tame down," Ben advised me. "No good crawling up Jimmy's frame. It was mostly Honeymoon, I tell you."
"Lulu," I said, "you got to stop this nonsense. You know as well as anything that a machine can't love a human. It's just plain ridiculous."
"In Honeymoon," said Lulu, "there were different species that—"
"Forget Honeymoon. Honeymoon's a freak. You could check a billion planets and not find another like it."
"I love you," Lulu repeated obstinately, "and we are eloping."
"Where'd she get that eloping stuff?" asked Ben.
"It's the junk they filled her up with back on Earth," I said.
"It wasn't junk," protested Lulu. "If I am to do my job, it's necessary that I have a wide and varied insight into humanity."
"They read her novels," Jimmy said, "and they told her about the facts of life. It's not Lulu's fault."
"When I get back," said Ben, "I'm going to hunt up the jerk who picked out those novels and jam them down his throat and then mop up the place with him."
"Look, Lulu," I said, "it's all right if you love us. We don't mind at all, but don't you think eloping is going too far?"
"I'm not taking any chances," Lulu answered. "If I went back to Earth, you'd get away from me."
"And if we don't go back, they'll come out and hunt us down."
"That's exactly right," Lulu agreed. "That's the reason, sweetheart, that we are eloping. We're going out so far that they'll never find us."
"I'll give you one last chance," I said. "You better think it over. If you don't, I'll message back to Earth and—"
"You can't message Earth," she said. "The circuits have been disconnected. And, as Ben guessed, I've jammed all emergencies. There's nothing you can do. Why don't you stop this foolishness and return my love?"
Getting down on the floor on his hands and knees, Ben began to pick up the cards. Jimmy tossed his tablet on the desk.
"This is your big chance," I told him. "Why don't you rise to the occasion? Think what an ode you could indite about the ageless and eternal love between machine and man."
"Go chase yourself," said Jimmy.
"Now, boys," Lulu scolded us. "I will not have you fighting over me."
She sounded like she already owned us and, in a way, she did. There was no way for us to get away from her, and if we couldn't talk her out of this eloping business, we were through for sure.
"There's just one thing wrong with all of this," I said to her. "By your standards, we won't live long. In another fifty years or less, no matter how well you may take care of us, we'll be dead. Of old age, if nothing else. What will happen then?"
"She'll be a widow," said Ben. "Just a poor old weeping widow without chick or child to bring her any comfort."
"I have thought of that," Lulu replied. "I have thought of everything. There's no reason you should die."
"But there's no way—"
"With a love as great as mine, there's nothing that's impossible. I won't let you die. I love you too much ever to let you die."
We gave up after a while and went to bed and Lulu turned off the lights and sang us a lullaby.
With her squalling this lullaby, there was no chance of sleeping and we all yelled at her to dry up and let us get to sleep. But she paid no attention to us until Ben threw one of his shoes at the audio.
Even so, I didn't go to sleep right away, but lay there thinking.
I could see that we had to make some plans and we had to make them without her knowing it. That was going to be tough, because she watched us all the time. She kibitzed and she listened and she read over our shoulders and there wasn't anything we did or said that she didn't know about.
I knew that I might take quite a while and that we must not panic and that we must have patience and that, more than likely, we'd be just plain lucky if we got out of it at all.
After we had slept, we sat around, not saying much, listening to Lulu telling us how happy we would be and how we'd be a complete world and a whole life in ourselves and how love cancelled out everything else and made it small and petty.
Half of the words she used were from Jimmy's sappy verse and the rest of it was from the slushy novels that someone back on Earth had read her.
I would have got up right then and there and beat Jimmy to a pulp, only I told myself that what was done was done and it wouldn't help us any to take it out on him.
Jimmy sat hunched over in one corner, scribbling on his tablet, and I wondered how he had the guts to keep on writing after what had happened.
He kept writing and ripping off sheets and throwing them on the floor, making disgusted sounds every now and then.
One sheet he tossed away landed in my lap, and when I went to brush it off, I caught the words on it:
I'm an untidy cuss,
I'm always in a muss,
And no one ever loves me
Because I'm a sloppy Gus.
I picked it up quick and crumpled it and tossed it at Ben and he batted it away. I tossed it back at him and he batted it away again.
"What the hell you trying to do?" he snapped.
I hit him in the face with it and he was just starting to get up to paste me when he must have seen by my look that this wasn't just horseplay. So he picked up the wad of paper and began fooling with it until he got it unwrapped enough to see what was written on it. Then he crumpled it again.
Lulu heard every word, so we couldn't talk it over. And we must not be too obvious, because then she might suspect.
We went at it gradually, perhaps more gradually than there was any need, but we had to be casual about it and we had to be convincing.
We were convincing. Maybe we were just natural-born slobs, but before a week had ended, our living quarters were a boar's nest.
We strewed our clothes around. We didn't even bother to put them in the laundry chute so Lulu could wash them for us. We left the dishes stacked on the table instead of putting them in the washer. We knocked out our pipes upon the floor. We failed to shave and we didn't brush our teeth and we skipped our baths.
Lulu was fit to be tied. Her orderly robot intellect was outraged. She pleaded with us and she nagged at us and there were times she lectured us, but we kept on strewing things around. We told her if she loved us, she'd have to put up with our messiness and take us as we were.
After a couple of weeks of it, we won, but not the way we had intended.
Lu
lu told us, in a hurt and resigned voice, she'd go along with us if it pleased us to live like pigs. Her love, she said, was too big a thing to let a small matter like mere personal untidiness interfere with it.
So it was no good.
I, for one, was rather glad of it. Years of spaceship routine revolted against this kind of life and I don't know how much more of it I could have stood.
It was a lousy idea to start with.
We cleared up and we got ourselves clean and it was possible once again to pass downwind of one another.
Lulu was pleased and happy and she told us so and cooed over us and it was worse than all the nagging she had done. She thought we'd been touched by her willing sacrifice and that we were making it up to her and she sounded like a high school girl who had been invited by her hero to the Junior Prom.
Ben tried some plain talk with her and he told her some facts of life (which she already knew, of course) and tried to impress upon her the part that the physical factor played in love.
Lulu was insulted, but not enough to bust off the romance and get back to business.
She told us, in a sorrowful voice tinged by the slightest anger, that we had missed the deeper meaning of love. She went on to quote some of Jimmy's more gooey verse about the nobility and the purity of love, and there was nothing we could do about it. We were just plain licked.
So we sat around and thought and we couldn't talk about it because Lulu would hear everything we said.
We didn't do anything for several days but just mope around.
As far as I could see, there was nothing we could do. I ran through my mind all the things a man might do to get a woman sore at him.
Most women would get burned up at gambling. But the only reason they got sore at that was because it was a threat to their security. Here that threat could not possibly exist. Lulu was entirely self-sufficient. We were no breadwinners.
Most women would get sore at excessive drinking. Security again. And, besides, we had not a thing to drink.
Some women raised hell if a man stayed away from home. We had no place to go.
All women would resent another woman. And here there were no women—no matter what Lulu thought she was.
There was no way, it seemed, to get Lulu sore at us.
And arguing with her simply did no good.
I lay in bed and ran through all the possibilities, going over them again and again, trying to find a chink of hope in one of them. By reciting and recounting them, I might suddenly happen on one that I'd never thought of, and that might be the one that would do the job.
And even as I turned these things over in my head, I knew there was something wrong with the way I had been thinking. I knew there was some illogic in the way I was tackling the problem—that somehow I was going at it tail-end to.
I lay there and thought about it and I mulled it considerably and, all at once, I had it.
I was approaching the problem as if Lulu were a woman, and when you thought about it, that didn't make much sense. For Lulu was no woman, but just a robot.
The problem was: How do you make a robot sore?
The untidiness business had upset her, but it had just outraged her sense of rightness; it was something she could overlook and live with. The trouble with it was that it wasn't basic.
And what would be basic with a robot—with any machine, for that matter?
What would a machine value? What would it idealize?
Order?
No, we'd tried that one and it hadn't worked.
Sanity?
Of course.
What else?
Productiveness? Usefulness?
I tossed insanity around a bit, but it was too hard to figure out. How in the name of common sense would a man go about pretending that he was insane—especially in a limited space inside an all-knowing intelligent machine?
But just the same, I lay there and dreamed up all kinds of insanities. If carried out, they might have fooled people, but not a robot.
With a robot, you had to get down to basics and what, I wondered, was the fundamental of insanity? Perhaps the true horror of insanity, I told myself, would become apparent to a robot only when it interfered with usefulness.
And that was it!
I turned it around and around and looked at it from every angle.
It was airtight.
Even to start with, we hadn't been much use. We'd just come along because Earth Center had rules about sending Lulu out alone. But we represented a certain potential usefulness.
We did things. We read books and wrote terrible poetry and played cards and argued. There wasn't much of the time we just sat around. That's a trick you learn in space—keep busy doing something, no matter what it is, no matter how piddling or purposeless.
In the morning, after breakfast, when Ben wanted to play cards, I said no, I didn't want to play. I sat down on the floor with my back against the wall; I didn't even bother to sit in a chair. I didn't smoke, for smoking was doing something and I was determined to be as utterly inactive as a living man could manage. I didn't intend to do a blessed thing except eat and sleep and sit.
Ben prowled around some and tried to get Jimmy to play a hand or two, but Jimmy wasn't much for cards and, anyhow, he was busy with a poem.
So Ben came over and sat on the floor beside me.
"Want a smoke?" he asked, offering me his tobacco pouch.
I shook my head.
"What's the matter? You haven't had your after-breakfast smoke."
"What's the use?" I said.
He tried to talk to me and I wouldn't talk, so he got up and paced around some more and finally came back and sat down beside me again.
"What's the trouble with you two?" Lulu wanted to know. "Why aren't you doing something?"
"Don't feel like doing anything," I told her. "Too much bother to be doing something all the time."
She berated us a bit and I didn't dare look at Ben, but I felt sure that he began to see what I was up to.
After a while, Lulu left us alone and the two of us just sat there, lazier than hill-billies on a Sunday afternoon.
Jimmy kept on with his poem. There was nothing we could do about him. But Lulu called his attention to us when we dragged ourselves to lunch. She was just a little sharper than she had been earlier and she called us lazy, which we surely were, and wondered about our health and made us step into the diagnosis booth, which reported we were fine, and that got her burned up more than ever.
She gave us a masterly chewing out and listed all the things there were for us to occupy our time. So when lunch was over, Ben and I went back and sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall. This time, Jimmy joined us.
Try sitting still for days on end, doing absolutely nothing. At first it's uncomfortable, then it's torture, and finally it gets to be almost intolerable.
I don't know what the others did, but I made up complex mathematical problems and tried to solve them. I started mental chess game after chess game, but was never able to hold one in my mind beyond a dozen moves. I went clean back to childhood and tried to recreate, in sequence, everything I had ever done or experienced. I delved into strange areas of the imagination and hung onto them desperately to string them out and kill all the time I could.
I even composed some poetry and, if I do say so myself, it was better than that junk of Jimmy's.
I think Lulu must have guessed what we were doing, must have known that our attitude was deliberate, but for once her cold robotic judgment was outweighed by her sense of outrage that there could exist such useless hulks as us.
She pleaded with us, she cajoled us, she lectured us—for almost five days hand-running, she never shut her yap. She tried to shame us. She told us how worthless and low-down and no account we were and she used adjectives I didn't think she knew.
She gave us pep talks.
She told us of her love in prose poems that made Jimmy's sound almost unrestrained.
She appealed to
our manhood and the honor of humanity.
She threatened to heave us out in space.
We just sat there.
We didn't do a thing.
Mostly we didn't even answer. We didn't try to defend ourselves. At times we agreed with all she said of us and that, I believe, was most infuriating of all to her.
She got cold and distant. Not sore. Not angry. Just icy.
Finally she quit talking.
We sat, sweating it out.
Now came the hard part. We couldn't talk, so we couldn't try to figure out together what was going on.
We had to keep on doing nothing. Had to, for to do anything at all would have spoiled whatever advantage we might have.
The days dragged on and nothing happened. Lulu didn't speak to us. She fed us, she washed the dishes, she laundered, she made up the bunks. She took care of us as she always had, but she did it without a word.
She sure was fuming.
A dozen crazy thoughts crossed my mind and I worried them to tatters.
Maybe Lulu was a woman. Maybe a woman's brain was somehow welded into that great hulk of intelligent machinery. After all, none of us knew the full details of Lulu's structure.
The brain of an old maid, it would have to be, so often disillusioned, so lonely and so by-passed in life that she would welcome a chance to go adventuring even if it meant sacrificing a body which, probably, had meant less and less to her as the years went by.
I built up quite a picture of my hypothetical old maid, complete with cat and canary, and even the boardinghouse in which she lived.
I sensed her lonely twilight walks and her aimless chattering and her small imaginary triumphs and the hungers that kept building up inside her.
And I felt sorry for her.
Fantastic? Of course. But it helped to pass the time.
But there was another notion that really took solid hold of me—that Lulu, beaten, had finally given up and was taking us back to Earth, but that, womanlike, she refused to give us the satisfaction and comfort of knowing that we had won and were going home at last.
I told myself over and over that it was impossible, that after the kind of shenanigans she'd pulled, Lulu wouldn't dare go back. They'd break her up for scrap.
But the idea persisted and I couldn't shake it off. I knew I must be wrong, but I couldn't convince myself I was and I began to watch the chronometer. I'd say to myself, "One hour nearer home, another hour and yet another and we are that much closer."
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