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refrigerator, I m saved. He could afford to take no chances. He would have to
move.
He lifted one leg.
The robot moved toward him. The humming and sparking were more distinct this
time. He dropped the leg.
Behind the plates above the refrigerator!
The robot stopped, nearly at his side. Seconds had decided. The robot hummed,
sparked, and returned to its niche.
Now he knew!
He pressed the button. The invisible beam of the flashlight leaped out,
speared the bulkhead above the refrigerator. He pressed the button again and
again, the flat circle of light appearing, disappearing, appearing,
disappearing on the faceless metal of the life hutch s wall.
The robot sparked and rolled from its niche. It looked once at Terrence. Its
rollers changed direction in an instant and the machine ground toward the
refrigerator.
The steeled fist swung in a vicious arc, smashing with a deafening clang! at
the spot where the light bubble flickered on and off.
It swung again and again. Again and again till the bulkhead had been gouged
and crushed and opened, and the delicate coils and plates and circuits and
memorex modules behind it were refuse and rubble. Until the robot froze, with
arm half-ready to strike again. Dead. Immobile. Brain and appendage.
Even then Terrence did not stop pressing the flashlight button. Wildly he
thumbed it again and again and again.
Then he realized it was allover.
The robot was dead. He was alive. He would be saved. He had no doubts about
that.
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Now he could cry.
The medicine chest grew large through the shimmering in his eyes. The relay
machines smiled at him.
God bless you, little life hutch, he thought, before he fainted.
The Very Last Day of a Good Woman
FINALLY, HE KNEW the world was going to end. It had grown in certainty with
terrible slowness. His was not a perfect talent, but rather, a gem with many
small flaws in it. Had he been able to see the future clearly, had he not been
a partial clairvoyant, his life might not have come to what it had. His hunger
would not have been what it was. Yet the brief, fogged glimpses were molded
together, and he knew the Earth was about to end. By the same rude certainty
that told him it was going to end, he knew it was not self-
deception-it was not merely his death. It was the final irrevocable finish of
his world, with every life upon it. This he saw in a shattered fragment of
clarity, and he knew it would come in two weeks, on a Thursday night.
His name was Arthur Fulbright, and he wanted a woman.
How strange or odd. To know the future. To know it in that most peculiar of
fashions: not as a unified whole, as a superimposed something on the image of
now, but in bits and snatches, in fits and starts.
In humming, deliberate quickness
-a truck will come around the corner in a moment-
that made him
-Native
Dancer will win
-almost a denizen of two worlds
-the train will leave ten minutes early-
he saw the future through a glass darkly
-you will find your other cuff link in the medicine cabinet-
and was hardly aware of
what this power promised.
For years, a soft, brown shambling man all hummed words and gentle glances,
living with his widowed mother in an eight-room house set about with
honeysuckle and sweet pea. For years, working in a job of unidentifiable type
and station; for years returning to the house and the comforting pastel of
Mother.
Years that held little change, little activity, little of note or importance.
Yet good years, and silent.
Then Mother had died. Sighing in the night, she had slowed down like a
phonograph, like the old crank phonograph covered under a white sheet in the
attic, and had died. Life had played its melody for her, and just as naturally
had trembled to an unsatisfactory end.
For Arthur it had meant changes.
Now, no more the nights of sound sleep, the evenings of quiet discussion and
backgammon or whist, the afternoons of lunch prepared in time for a return to
the office, the mornings with cinnamon toast and orange juice ready. Now it
was a single-lane highway that he would travel alone.
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