Part 3

She could tell by the way he said it that it meant something else to him, not two hours, but something infinitely longer, unendurably longer, some kind of awful forever.

She helped him into the shelter and closed the thick door. She couldn't understand that kind of loneliness. She had stood in the black lonely closet for years. She had worked alone. She could understand the loneliness of being without love. But this fear of his--it had no meaning for her.

And as she looked at Kelsey cowering in the corner of the shelter, she realized something else--Kelsey himself had very little meaning. He was not what he had seemed. He was empty. He was hollow. He wasn't quite real. That was what his fear was; a fear of discovering he had nothing inside; a horror of the absence of something you could create inside yourself only by being alone.

Alice knew that now. Maybe she had always known it, but now she admitted it to herself.

The shelter was a small square room lined with concrete and lead and steel. There was a large supply of food, and a method of reprocessing the air. A person could live in it for a long time. Alice knew she could. She would have loved being there just with Kelsey, but Kelsey was empty, and there was no way he could give her back her love, nothing in him he could use to share loneliness with her.

"Two hours--"

"But I love you," she said weakly. "We have one another. We can talk. We can tell one another all about--"

"No Tevee," Kelsey whispered. "We can't get out! No one can get in! Two hours!"

The screaming was in the shelter walls. It quivered in the floor and ceiling and walls. But there was really no sound. Nothing could penetrate here; no sound or light. Kelsey looked around the small enclosure. "It may be longer--"

"It's only a warning," Alice said. "There may not be a real air-raid at all."

"Talk!" he suddenly screamed at her. "Let's talk! Talk to me--"

But the superficial things slipped away and she couldn't remember any of them. She wanted to take him in her arms, but she couldn't do that now because it wasn't real. She couldn't talk about all those meaningless things. Maybe now nothing would be enough to satisfy Kelsey's hollow fear.

* * * * *

With Gloria, with all of them, Alice knew that Kelsey had always been alone. More alone, more horribly alone, than she had ever been. For Kelsey had nothing inside of him to keep him company, or to sincerely share with another.

He had no love in him.

She tried to comfort him, but he was on his knees, shivering and whimpering. Then he tried to beat his way out through the door. She pulled him back and he fell sobbing on the floor, squirming and rubbing his hands and his face into the floor as though to get some feeling of life from it.

The trembling of the walls and floor continued, very gently as though even that was somehow being polite, as though even that was trying to make things not so discomforting.

Kelsey was whining and sobbing. "I've got to get out--get out. There's a shelter--a communal shelter. The project place--people--lots of people--"

"All right," she said. "Let's take a chance, if you want to. We'll go to that other shelter--with people in it."

But when they got to the top of the stairs and stepped into the living room, the lights went on, the Tevee came to color-sound-life again.

The air-raid warning was over.

A smiling face materialized out of the wavery lines.

"The threat of the air-raid is over. Due to our wonderful cooperative spirit, the enemy's cowardly attack accomplished little except the minor destruction of a few scattered points. We're sure now that anyone who has not ordered our Cozy-Corner Air-Raid Shelter will do so without further delay! It comes equipped, remember, with three-dimensional Tevee. There is the illusion of real people--"

Over fifty million air-raid shelters were sold within an hour.

But Alice wasn't concerned about that. She gave Kelsey a sedative and put him to bed, and then she went to her dark closet and stood in it until Wednesday morning. She had time to think about things, and a wonderful calm came over her, and she knew she didn't care what happened to her now. She was strong enough to live alone, and take whatever was coming to her without fear.

When she shook Kelsey awake Wednesday morning and told him she was Alice, he laughed, shocked and incredulous, trying to appear amused. But she told him about the order blank, and convinced him she really was Alice and Anita Starre did not exist.

He ran and called a robot repair clinic. He was almost incoherent, trying to tell the clinic what had happened, but they finally understood and said they would be right out to take the domestic away.

He seemed frightened as he looked at her.

"I don't understand," he said several times. "No one told you to do such a thing. How could a robot just up and do such a thing?"

She started to answer, but didn't. There was nothing to say.

"Robots can become inefficient," Kelsey said. "They can wear down a little and have to be repaired. But how could a robot just up and do a thing like this?"

Because of loneliness and the need for love? She smiled. She could smile now. It would have been funny for her to have said such a thing as that.

She didn't care. She heard the jet-truck drop down by the curb outside Kelsey's house. She heard the footsteps coming up the walk, onto the porch. But she didn't care. She was strong enough not to care at all.

She cared not at all for any of them, Master Kelsey included. She cared a little for Julian, for he had understood a little. But she didn't care about any of the others now. They hardly existed! They had nothing! In them, everything had been frozen forever and nothing really moved inside.

They were empty, they were nothing, they didn't exist!

You saw the bright surfaces and the smiles as they walked and talked on the street, and for a while you wanted to believe they existed, that they were there. But they weren't really there at all.

She smiled and stood still and waited for them to move toward her. They seemed afraid of her.

There's nothing to be afraid of, not here, not in me, she wanted to say. It's in you that the fear is, for what is more frightening than emptiness and the feel of hollow time going by?

At least she had the joy of knowing she had been alive.

The hand turned off her thermostat.