He said, “I’m broke. I don’t have any money.”

  “You’ve got car fare. You got up here.”

  “That was the last I had, my last quarter.”

  “Listen, I heard your change rattle, I’ve got good ears.” She rubbed a hip against his thigh, and he wondered if she had really heard the coins on the glassboard slab at the cashier’s. She might easily be guessing. “I can feel them in your pocket now,” she said.

  An express came roaring by, loaded with men and women in bathing suits and beach robes, small children with plastic pails and spades and larger ones with beach balls and Porta-Screens. Going to the beach, he thought, going to the beach. Or coming home. To the girl he said, “Wouldn’t you rather go to the beach?”

  “I’d rather go home with you.”

  “Do you know what I’m going to do when I get home? I’m going to work.”

  “Isn’t it kind of late?”

  “I need the money. I mean it—I need the money. No work, no eat; I’m one of those.”

  “That’s O.K.,” the girl said.

  “You mean you’d go with someone who has to work?” He found he was a trifle revolted by it himself; there were graduations, he knew, even among these creatures, and this girl must belong to one of the lowest.

  “It’s us that keep things going, right? Working androids and the humans who still work.”

  He said, “I doubt that what either of us does has much effect on it.”

  “The principle’s the same. Tonight I’ll help you and you’ll feel better, and you’ll give me something and I’ll feel better.” She was rubbing her breast, quite consciously he felt certain, against his upper arm.

  “I won’t feel better,” he said, “and I’m not going to give you a cent.” His train was pulling up to the platform; he stepped on board and pushed her backward, hoping that she would be unable to get her balance before the doors shut. For a moment it seemed as though he might succeed; she tottered on her high heels, flailing the air with her bag. Then she was beside him on the steps, her eyes bright with glycerin tears as the doors snapped shut. “That was a h-h-hell of a thing to do,” she said.

  He said, “You don’t really feel anything.”

  “I do too—how do you know I don’t?”

  “How do you know you do? You’ve never experienced real emotion.”

  “I’m capable of monitoring my own state, and I’m capable of realizing it when a situation threatens my primary instructions.”

  “That’s only the fear of failure,” he said. “That’s not real emotion.”

  “When you don’t want to die—or be humiliated…”

  “Again,” he said involuntarily.

  “…or experience pain, isn’t that what it is? How do you know what I feel when my eyes get wet like this? I’m made to respond in certain ways, and I don’t always like those ways. Sometimes I hate them.”

  He said, “Let’s go sit down,” and they did, taking a seat near the middle of the almost-empty car. She sat next to the window, and he saw her looking out at the stars. She asked if he ever looked at them, and he said he did, all the time.

  “What does that mean? You’re not looking at them now.”

  “In my head—I carry them there. Everything I see, I see with them behind it.”

  She said, “Well, I suppose they’re there all right, but knowing they’re there makes you a little bit crazy.”

  He got up and moved to another seat. She followed him, as he had known she would, and said, “Don’t be mad at me. We’re going to have a good time when we get to your place, remember?”

  “I’m not paying you anything,” he said. “I won’t even pay you to go away, if that’s what you’re thinking. Haven’t you learned yet that people who have to earn their money don’t get much and are tight with what they have?”

  “Listen…”

  “No, you listen. If I gave you half of what you usually get, I wouldn’t have a dime left until…”

  “Shhh,” she said, “they’ll hear you.” She jerked her head toward the back of the car, where two middle-aged women sat.

  “I don’t give a damn if they do hear me,” he said.

  “Look, they think I’m with you—I saw them when you changed seats, and they think I’m with you, they think we’re lovers.”

  “You think they can’t see what you are?”

  “No, they can’t. The light’s not too good in here, and anyway they haven’t been around a lot; you saw what they were like, what do they know?”

  “Then what do you care?” he said.

  “Well, I do care. They think you’re my boyfriend and I don’t want them to know you’re not on the Honorable Income.” He shifted in his seat, and she said, “Are we getting close to your stop?” and when he nodded, “Listen to me please, just for a minute. I have to plug in—I really do. I haven’t plugged in for about a week.”

  There was a coin-operated unit at the front of the car, and he pointed toward it.

  “I don’t have the money,” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “You’ve got a wall receptacle, don’t you, in your apartment? They all do, and it doesn’t cost you anything extra unless you go over a certain number. Let me use it, O.K.? Let me use it and I won’t bother you, I won’t try to get any money out of you, and I’ll go as soon as I’m finished if that’s what you want.”

  The train glided to a stop. He said, “You really do have to, don’t you,” and she nodded.

  As they were going up the stairs to his room she said, “I’m kind of glad it worked out like this. I would have had to plug in first anyway, and I was afraid you’d get mad when I told you. It takes a couple of hours—you know that?”

  He said, “I hear it takes three if you’re really low.”

  “Yes,” she said, “three. You won’t get mad? I just sit there and hum, I won’t bother you.”

  “I won’t get mad,” he promised. He opened the door to his room—a bed, a dresser; his machine on a table in the middle of the floor; a hard chair. The power receptacle was in the wall beside the bed; she made straight for it, drawing her cord out of her purse as she went. While he watched she thrust the smaller end of the cord under her clothing, then made the connection. Her eyes glazed, and she sank slowly to a seated position on the floor, a low crooning coming from her mouth. He walked over to her, took off the beret, and ran his fingers through the real human hair; then dumped her purse out on the floor beside her—an empty billfold, a few niggardly containers of colored greases, a comb. She might have money hidden in the top of a stocking or between her breasts, but he doubted it; she had probably been telling the truth. He scooped her few possessions into her purse again and dropped it in her lap.

  He was about to start to work when he remembered that the engineer was coming. He looked at his watch, saw that it was nearly time, and decided to go down the block for a sandwich instead.

  When he returned the engineer was waiting for him, sitting on his bed; there was a large bundle beside him. He hung up his coat and gestured toward the girl on the floor. “You too, if you like.”

  The engineer gave him a faultlessly polite android smile. “I wasn’t sure you knew she was there. She has your permission?”

  He nodded. “Look, I’ve got to get to work—don’t make it too long, huh.”

  The engineer smiled again. “You know,” he said, “that if we never succeed in automating your function you will have to work for the remainder of your life.”

  “I’ve already worked for the best part of it,” he said. “I won’t be saving much.”

  “You will be saving all you have.”

  “I guess so.” He looked toward the bundle the android carried. “That the latest?”

  “The most recent and the best,” the engineer said, and unwrapping it handed it to him.

  His hands shook as he reached for it. He hated himself for it, but they shook anyway. He turned his back to the engineer so that the android would not see his emotion. Half under his breath he said, “Going to the beach.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said going to the beach. I saw a trainful of people going there—or coming back. Some damn thing. I had to come back here and work. I was thinking…”

  “I see,” the engineer said. “You could have leisure.”

  “Time to think. And maybe a family, like everybody else. And time to enjoy it.”

  The engineer said, “You are not the only person who is unautomated.”

  “Sometimes it seems like it.”

  “Once,” the engineer said, “people resisted automation. Engineers designed and built wonder-new devices for them to make their work less onerous, and they sabotaged them because their economic well-being depended upon their work. To enlist their cooperation…”

  “I know the story. Shut up, will you? I want to look at this.”

  “Thus they retarded the progress of the race. To enlist their cooperation…”

  “Shut up! Say, this stuff is good.”

  “You are being dishonest.”

  “No, I’m not. Sure, I’ve only had time to look at a little, but what I’ve seen…” He whistled.

  The engineer said, “This is a pointless charade and you must know it. What is your real opinion?”

  “It stinks in spades.” He sat down in the hard chair.

  “That is what they said. You must point out to us where it has gone astray.”

  “Not now. I have work of my own I have to do.”

  “Soon. I will come back tomorrow.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’ll take a month.” He felt almost too tired to argue.

  “I will return for it Thursday. I am sorry to hear that you are in need of money—surely you have enough for food.”

  “I want to buy her,” he said. He gestured toward the girl on the floor.

  “You jest.”

  “You saw through me, you shrewd genius you.”

  “I will leave now,” the engineer said. “Doubtless you have a real desire to proceed with your work.”

  The man in the chair nodded wearily and rolled a piece of fresh stock into his machine: Seventeen years ago, Miss Hiteecher his high school teacher—everyone’s high school teacher…

  It was a beginning.

  Comber

  The news whispered by his radio this morning was the same as the news when he and Mona had gone to bed: the city had topped the crest, and everything was flat and wonderful—if only for a day or two. “You’re flat yourselves,” he told it softly, and switched it off.

  Mona was still asleep when he had shaved and dressed, her swollen belly at rest on the mattress, her face full of peace, and her slow inhalations loud to his acute hearing. He grabbed a breakfast bar on his way through the kitchen and wondered how the hell he could start the car without waking her up.

  There was a ball on the driveway, a chewed-up rubber ball some dog had stopped chasing when it had stopped running. He picked it up and bounced it off the concrete. It bounced a few more times and settled down to rest again, as round as Mona, though not quite as happy. He tossed it into the car and followed it.

  Press the accelerator, let it up, twist the key. The little engine purred to life as if it knew its work would be easy today. The suburb passed in a familiar blur.

  From the tollway, he eyed the tall buildings that marked the center of the city. The last crest had come before he was born (the crest of a wholly different wave, something he found hard to imagine) but he knew that not one of those spumecatchers had been built then. Now the city might have to pay for its pride and the convenience of having so many offices close together. Pay with its very existence, perhaps.

  The brass inclinometer he had bought when he had foreseen the danger the year before was waiting for him when he reached his desk, solidly screwed to the desktop, its long axis coinciding exactly with the direction of motion of the plate. He squinted at the needle, and at last got out a magnifying glass. Zero. It seemed supernatural: a portent.

  A memo taped to his monitor warned him that the new angle “which will soon grow steep” would be the reverse of what it called “the accustomed angle.” Everything was to be secured a second time with that new angle in mind. Workmen would make the rounds of all offices. He was asked to cooperate for the good of the company. He tossed the memo, woke his processor, and opened Mona’s private dream house instead. His design was waiting there to be tinkered with, as it would not have been if anyone in authority had found it.

  “Okay if I look at your gadget?” It was Phil, and Phil looked without waiting for his permission. “Flat,” Phil said happily, and laughed. “The plate’s flat. First time in my life.”

  “The last time, too.” He closed Mona’s dream-house. “For either one of us.”

  Phil rubbed his hands. “It will all be different. Entirely different. A new slant on everything. Want to go up to the roof, ol’ buddy? Should be a great view.”

  He shook his head.

  It would be very different indeed, he reflected when Phil had left, if the plate overturned. As it very well might. If the building did not break up when it hit the water, it would point down and would be submerged. Water would short out the electrical equipment, probably at once; and in any event, the elevators would no longer operate. Rooms and corridors might (or might not) hold some air for a few hours—most it down on what were now the lower floors. He might, perhaps, break a window and so escape; if he lived long enough to rise to street level, the edge of the plate, and air, would be what? Thirty miles away? Forty?

  Back home, Mona would have drowned. If the plate were going to turn over, he decided, it would be better if it did it while he was at home with her. Better if they died together with their unborn child.

  · · · ·

  Next day the inclinometer was no longer on zero, and the chewed ball he had left on his desk had rolled to one side; as he wrote letters and called contacts, as he began to sketch the outline of his next project, he watched the space between the end of the needle and the hair-thin zero line grow.

  By Friday the needle was no longer near zero, and there were intervening marks which he did not trouble to read. Because on Friday, at not-quite eleven o’clock of that bright and still almost-level morning, Edith Benson called to say that Mona had gone into labor while they chatted across the fence, and that she had driven Mona to the hospital.

  He took some time off. By the time he returned to his desk, the needle was no more than a pencil’s width from the peg. It seemed to him to tremble there, and he was reminded of his conversation with the proprietor of the little shop in which he had bought the inclinometer. He had asked why the scale went no further; and the proprietor had grinned, showing beautifully regular teeth that had certainly been false. “Because you won’t be there to look at it if she goes farther than that,” the proprietor had told him.

  A note taped to his desk informed him that he had neglected to set the brake on his swivel chair. It had pushed open the door of his office and crashed into Mrs. Patterson’s desk. He apologized to her in person.

  At quitting time, the space between the point of the needle and the peg would admit three of his business cards, but not four.

  That evening he and Mona sat up until their son’s next feeding, talking about colleges and professions. It would be up to Adrian to choose, they agreed on that. But would not their own attitudes, the training the gave him, and their very table-talk, influence Adrian’s choices? At ten they kissed, looked in on Adrian, and kissed again.

  “Goodnight, honey,” Mona said; and he, knowing that she did not want him to watch, “Goodnight, darling.”

  · · · ·

  As he combed his hair the next morning, he found that his thoughts, which should have been focused on work, were full of Adrian—and the plate. More and taller buildings would go up when this was over. More and taller building would be built, that was to say, if there was anyone left alive to plan and build them. His firm would have a part of that, and would profit by it. Those profits would contribute to his profit-sharing plan.

  He shrugged, rinsed his comb, and put it away. The new and wonderful house that he himself had designed—with a den and a sewing room, and enough bedrooms for five children—would not be quite so far off then.

  At work, he found the needle not quite so near the peg as it had been. Three business cards slipped into the opening easily. Four would just clear.

  Up on the roof, a little knot of his coworkers were marveling at the vastness of the tossing green waters that stretched to the horizon in every direction. The secretary with the gold pince-nez gripped his arm. “I come up here every morning. We’ll never be able to see anything like this again, and today will be the last day we’re this high up.”

  He nodded, trying to look serious and pleased. The secretary with the gold pince-nez was the CEO’s, and although he had seen her often he had never spoken to her—much less been spoken to.

  An executive vice president laid large soft hands on his shoulders. “Take a good long look, young man. If it sticks with you, you’ll think big. We always need people who think big.”

  He said, “I will, sir.”

  Yet he found himself looking at the people who looked, and not at the boundless ocean. There was the freckled kid from the mailroom who whistled, and over there the pretty blonde who never smiled.

  All alone at the very edge of the gently slanting roof, was old Parsons. Hadn’t Parsons retired? Clearly Parsons had not; and Parsons had set up a tarnished brass telescope on a tripod—a telescope through which he peered down into the watery abyss that had opened before the city, not out at the grandeur of the horizon.

  “Something in the water?”

  Parsons straightened up. “Sure is.”

  “What is it?”

  Gnarled fingers stroked bristling, almost invisible white whiskers. “That,” Parsons said slowly, “is what I’m trying to figure, young feller.”

  “A whale?” he asked.

  Parsons shook his head. “Nope. ’Tain’t that. You might think it’d be easy to figure, with a good glass. But ’tain’t.” Parsons stepped aside. “You want to look?”