"Very nice. Some coughing and I can stretch it a little by having him apologize at the end."

"By then I can have my answer on the screen, ready to punch it through. Have we got room on the board?"

"Oceans of room. And I can add another circuit board if we have to."

"Then give me some more small talk, please. The way people talk to each other over the phone. Like "That's very interesting" and "I'm glad you brought that up" and something like "Maybe you'd like to tell me a little more about what happened." Just give me a new row on the bottom of the pad, all time killers. When the delay gets to be too long, I can hear them breathing and that gets me so upset I mess up what I'm trying to keyboard onto the screen."

"I can get that done by tomorrow afternoon."

"Good. But I want some time to practice with it."

A sudden flashlight beam dazzled them, making them squint and turn their eyes away from the light. A guard said, "Pardon me, Mrs. Lopez. You too, sir. I thought some of the kids had snuck in here from the school again somehow. It's like a game with them."

She said there was no harm done, and wasn't it a lovely night, and the guard agreed and walked away. She yawned and stood up and said, Thanks for listening, Mick. I'm kind of unwinding, maybe down to the point where I can get some sleep. I wake up a lot lately."

As he stood up, she stretched and yawned again. She was a thin woman, almost scrawny, given to graceless poses, bad posture, nervous mannerisms tugging at her hair, pinching her nose, pulling her earlobes, biting the edges of her fingernails.

They walked slowly to the pedestrian exit beside the main gate, where the guard said good night and let them out. For the first fifty feet beyond the gate, they were in the bright glare of the security floodlights, and as they neared the darkness she said, "Hey, don't walk me home or we could become an item."

"I beg your pardon?"

"An item. Didn't they used to say that in California? This place, honest to God, is the world's worst rumor factory. If people work together, talk together and then walk home together, they think something has to be going on."

"I see. And you wouldn't like that to happen?" He suddenly realized how that sounded and said, "I mean, you wouldn't like to have people talking like that."

"I really don't care. I was just making conversation, I guess.

Anyway, they would probably decide it's not exactly earthshaking even if we were all buddy-buddy. The spic lady and the Jap genius. There's enough going on around here, we'd be one very small item. Page twenty-seven, half a column inch. Besides that, I think I can spend the rest of my life without becoming anybody's item."

They walked on. He coughed and said, "We haven't talked about anything personal. But I do know you are Mrs. Lopez."

"Would you like to know about Lopez? Okay. Lopez is six three and about as broad as that gate we went through back there. But I'm never going to see him again."

"I don't understand."

"Oh, I could go see him, but there's no point in it." She stopped in the darkness, the lights behind her.

"Mick, you're absolutely right. We've never talked about anything but this crazy voice synthesis, not until tonight. Okay, it's a dull story.

He was a very proud man. He didn't take anything from anybody. He worked in a foundry and got in a brawl. It wasn't his fault. A foreman worked him over with a piece of pipe while some other people held him. Then they left him on the floor until somebody finally realized something might be really wrong. It happened up in Rochester. Lots of brain damage.

He's three years old for the rest of his life, and the company insurance takes care of the bills from the state institution. He doesn't know me and never will and so I will probably never see him again alive."

"I'm very, very sorry, Glinda."

"Don't be. I seldom ever think about him. Those guys killed him. It's that simple. And that might be one of the things that make this synthesis program so hard for me to do."

He stood, looking at her, the distant light aslant across his face, a square, broad-bodied man with a round cheerful face, and black bangs that came down almost to his eyebrows.

"I.

think I see what you mean, what the connection is. Your husband can't talk anymore. Doctor Meadows can't talk anymore."

Thanks for the psychiatric analysis, Oshiro."

"Look, I was only trying to..."

"I know. Hey, I'm sorry. I'm really, really pooped, and when I'm pooped I get cross. You are a nice guy for a computer specialist. I never knew any Japanese person before. I was kind of edgy around you at first, but then you turned out to be just like anybody else. Don't you have any personal problems? We can work on those too."

"No problems, Glin. Too busy for problems. I worked with the Votrax Type-"N-Talk and the Telesensory Prose 2000. I worked with Pisoni and Nusbaum at Indiana, then back out to Silicon Valley. Our little outfit is called Macro Mix There's just five of us. We all worked for bigger outfits. We thought we might get rich, but it isn't happening yet. We design. We don't manufacture. Consultant contracts like this keep us going.

And keep us learning. I dream that I am running along a beach, running like hell to keep away from a huge wave curling over me. The running is the learning. What we all believe, the five of us, is that one day, probably with a thirty-two-bit microprocessor, there will be a super program which will be able to be programmed to keep improving itself. Meanwhile, run, run, run."

"You have to realize I haven't any idea what you're talking about, Mick."

"What brought you here?"

"Me? It was kind of the end of the world for me. I tried Lopez's priest. I converted when I married Lopez. The priest couldn't seem to get hold of how desperate I felt. I loved Lopez, and for God's sake they had him in diapers, saying "Gooo."

How do you rebuild your life? Then one evening I had the television on, it was a cable broadcast, and the Reverend Doctor John Tinker Meadows was sitting behind a desk. They zoomed the camera until his whole face filled the screen, and he looked right at me! He looked right into my eyes and he said very gently, "You are sick at heart, aren't you?" And I answered him! What kind of a nut talks to a television set? The tears busted right out of my eyes and ran down my face and I said, "Yes, yes I am!"

"You are in despair," he said.

"You don't know what to do with your life. Nobody cares how deep you are in black depression. I am holding my hand out to you.

If you take it, I can help you climb out of the pit into the sunshine." So... okay. I took his hand. I wrote for the literature. I joined the Church. I took Bible lessons. I tithed ten percent. But I began to begin to feel myself sort of slipping backward. It all seemed sort of secondhand. So I quit my job and came down here." She lowered her voice.

"It isn't perfect.

What is? I'm down here. The sun isn't exactly shining yet, but maybe it will. I can live with myself better than I could before. I pray a lot. I believe. I really believe that God is love, bless His holy name. He will watch over me. What do you believe, Oshiro?"

"I...1 guess I believe in the miracle of silicon. For thousands of years we've been savages living in the darkness. Now there is a bright light beginning to shine across the world, and we are standing in it, blinking and scratching and looking around. I believe that through this new communication man is evolving into something different. Not better and not worse. Different.

And I am proud to be one of the pioneers. Maybe my God is speaking to us through silicon."

"I like working with you, whatever."

"I'll be around a while longer. You are one smart lady and you make the work more fun. You pick up on things, and you make pretty good suggestions."

"The calls still tear me up too much. Like tonight that old boy in Memphis wondering if he could send in ten percent of his food stamps. Maybe... maybe I don't want to get used to it. Maybe I'm resisting that because I think I probably will.

And then it will be a job and I can use half my mind to keep track of what I'm doing." She sighed. She put her hand on his shoulder.

"Good night, Mickey. And thanks for listening."

They stood awkwardly for a moment, alone together in the darkness, immobilized perhaps by what she had said about their becoming an item, but wanting a way to say good night that involved touching, involved human contact. And on simultaneous impulse they thrust out their right hands, and shook hands, and both laughed aloud because they recognized the parody of it, and the friendship.

And then off they went, she to a small room with hot plate, a room in the wing of the dormitory the University did not yet need to occupy. It was an inexpensive arrangement and it hastened the day when she would have the lawyers paid off in full, the ones who had negotiated the lifelong institutional support for Lopez.