Mockingbird by Walter Tevis Read Free Book Online Page A

though she had done me a great service. The nervousness that had driven me out here to the zoo in the middle of the night was now as dissipated as though I had taken two tabs of Nembucaine. . . . But I did not know how to thank her, so I merely stepped back into the building and said, “Good night” and started to leave again.
    “Wait,” she said, and I turned around to face her.
    “Why don’t you take me with you?”
    That came as a shock. “Why?” I said. “For sex?”
    “Maybe,” she said. “Not necessarily. I would . . . like to use your recorder.”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “I have an agreement with the university. I’m not sure . . .”
    Suddenly her face changed. It became frighteningly twisted in anger—anger as great as on the faces of some of the actors in the films. “I thought you were different.” Her voice was trembling, but controlled. “I thought you didn’t care about making Mistakes. About Rules.”
    Her anger was very upsetting. Showing anger in public—and this was, in a sense, a public thing—was one of the worst of Mistakes itself. Almost as bad as my crying outside the Burger Chef had been. And then I thought of myself, of my crying, and I did not know what to say.
    She must have interpreted my silence as disapproval, or as the beginning of a Retreat into Privacy, because suddenly she said, “Wait.”
    She walked quickly out of the House of Reptiles as I stood there, not knowing what else to do. In a moment she returned. She was carrying a rock as big as her hand. She must have taken it from one of the flower borders outside. I watched her, fascinated.
    “Let me show you about Mistakes and Rules of Behavior,” she said. She drew back and hurtled the rock right into the glass front of the python’s case. It was astonishing. There was first a loud noise and the front of the case caved in. A large triangle of glass crashed to the floor at my feet and broke. While I stood there horrified, she walked up to the case, reached in with both hands, and pulled out the python. I shuddered; her confidence was overwhelming. What if the snake were not a robot?
    She dragged the creature over headfirst, pulling open its mouth as she did so and bending to peer down into it. Then she held the head out toward me, with the broad, evil-looking mouth gaping wide. We had been right. About a foot or so down the throat was the unmistakable nuclear battery pack of a Class D robot.
    I was too horrified by what she had done to be able to say anything.
    And as we stood there in what must have looked like a “tableau” in the old movies, she triumphantly holding the serpent and I watching in horror at the magnitude of what she had just done, there was a sudden noise behind me and I turned just as the door between two of the reptile cases in the wall opened and a tall, fierce Security robot came striding out. As he came toward us his voice boomed: “You are under arrest. You have a right to remain silent, you may. . .”
    The woman had been looking up coolly at the robot, who towered over her. And then she interrupted him sharply. “Bug off, robot,” she said. “Bug off and shut up.”
    The robot stopped talking. He was immobile.
    “Robot,” she said. “Take this damn snake and get it fixed.”
    And the robot reached out, took the snake from her into its arms, and quietly walked out of the room into the night.
    I hardly knew what I felt, seeing it all. It was a little like watching those violent scenes in some of the films, like the one in
Intolerance
where the great stone buildings came crashing down. You just stare at it all and feel nothing.
    But then I began to think, and I said, “The Detectors . . .”
    She looked at me. Her face was surprisingly calm. “You have to handle robots like that. They were made to serve people, and nobody knows it anymore.”
    To serve people
? It sounded as though it might be true. “But what about the Detectors?”
    “The Detectors don’t detect