I Sing the Body Electric by Ray Bradbury Page A

not—!” Bayes forced his yell down to a steady calmness. “I will not be tried for murder because I killed a man who killed another man who wasn’t really a man at all, but a machine. It’s enough to shoot a thing that seems alive. I won’t have some judge or jury trying to figure a law for a man who kills because a humanoid computer was shot. I won’t repeat your stupidity.”
    â€œPity,” mourned the man named Booth, and saying it, the light went out of his face.
    â€œTalk,” said Bayes, gazing through the wall, imagining the night roads, Phipps in his car, and time running out. “You’ve got five minutes, maybe more, maybe less. Why did you do it, why? Start somewhere. Start with the fact you’re a coward.”
    He waited. The security guard waited behind Booth, creaking uneasily in his shoes.
    â€œCoward, yes.” said Booth. “How did you know?”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œCoward,” said Booth. “That’s me. Always afraid. You name it. Things. People. Places. Afraid. People I wanted to hit, but never hit. Things I always wanted, never had. Places I wanted to go, never went. Always wanted to be big, famous, why not? That didn’t work either. So, I thought, if you can’t find something to be glad about, find something to be sad. Lots of ways to enjoy being sad. Why? Who knows? I just had to find something awful to do and then cry about what I had done. That way you felt you had accomplished something. So, I set out to do something bad.”
    â€œYou’ve succeeded.”
    Booth gazed down at his hands hung between his knees as if they held an old but suddenly remembered and simple weapon.
    â€œDid you ever kill a turtle?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWhen I was ten I found out about death. I found out that the turtle, that big dumb rocklike thing, was going to live long after I was dead. I figured if I had to go, the turtle went first. So I took a brick and hit him on the back until I broke his shell and he died…”
    Bayes slowed in his constant pacing and said, “For the same reason, I once let a butterfly live.”
    â€œNo,” said Booth, quickly, then added, “no, not for the same reason. A butterfly lit on my hand once. The butterfly opened and shut its wings, just resting there. I knew I could crush it. But I didn’t because I knew that in ten minutes or an hour some bird would eat it. So I let it just fly away. But turtles?! They lie around backyards and live forever. So Iwent and got a brick and I was sorry for months after. Maybe I still am. Look…”
    His hands trembled before him.
    â€œAnd what,” said Bayes, “has all this to do with your being here tonight?”
    â€œDo? What!” cried Booth, looking at Bayes as if he were mad. “Haven’t you been listening? Great God, I’m jealous! Jealous of anything that works right, anything that’s perfect, anything that’s beautiful all to itself, anything that lasts I don’t care what it is! Jealous!”
    â€œYou can’t be jealous of machines.”
    â€œWhy not, dammit?” Booth clutched the back of the seat in front of him and slowly pulled himself forward staring at the slumped figure in that highback chair in the center of the stage. “Aren’t machines more perfect, ninety-nine times out of a hundred than most people you’ve ever known? I mean really? Don’t they do things right? How many people can you name do things right one third, one half the time? That damned thing up there, that machine, not only looks perfection, but speaks and acts perfection. More, if you keep it oiled and wound and fixed it’ll be looking, speaking, acting right and grand and beautiful a hundred, two hundred years after I’m in the earth! Jealous? Damn right I am!”
    â€œBut a machine doesn’t know what it is.”
    â€œI know, I feel!” said Booth. “I’m