Mockingbird Read Online Free PDF Page B

“You don’t take pills?”
    “I did. But now they make me sick.” Her face softened a bit. “I mean, I vomit when I take pills.”
    “But isn’t there a pill for that? I mean, a drug robot could . . .”
    “I suppose so,” she said, “but wouldn’t I vomit up an anti-vomit pill?”
    I didn’t know whether I should smile at that but I did. Even though it all had a shocking ring to it.
    “You could take an injection. . .”I said.
    “Forget it,” she said. “Relax.” Abruptly she turned and looked toward the iguana cage. The iguanas were, as always, lively. They jumped around like toads in their glass cage. She bit her sandwich and began chewing.
    “And you live here. At the zoo?” I said.
    “Right,” she said between bites.
    “Doesn’t it get. . . boring?” I said.
    “Jesus, yes.”
    “Then why do you stay?”
    She looked at me as though she wasn’t going to answer. All she would have to do, of course, would be to shrug her shoulders and close her eyes, and Mandatory Politeness would require that I leave her alone. You can’t go around interfering with Individualism with impunity.
    But apparently she decided to answer me, and I felt grateful—I don’t know why—when I saw that she was going to speak. “I live at the zoo,” she said, “because I don’t have a job and I have nowhere else to live.”
    I must have stared at her for a full minute. And then I said, “Why don’t you drop out?”
    “I did. I lived on a Drop-out Reservation for at least two yellows. Until I started vomiting from smoking dope and taking pills.”
    I had heard of the dope at Drop-out Reservations, of course; it was cultivated in vast fields by automatic equipment and was supposed to have a potency almost beyond belief. But I had never heard of anyone becoming sick from it.
    “But when you dropped in again . . . shouldn’t you have been assigned a job?”
    “I didn’t drop in again.”
    “You didn’t. . . ?”
    “Nope.” Then she finished off her sandwich, turning her head away from me and toward the iguana cage again, chewing. For a moment I felt not bafflement but anger. Those stupid, leapfrogging iguanas!
    Then I thought,
I should report her
. But I knew as I thought it that I wouldn’t. I should have reported that group immolation too, as any responsible person is supposed to. But I hadn’t. Probably no one had. You never heard of people being reported anymore.
    When she had finished eating she turned to me and said, “I just left the dormitory and walked here. Nobody seemed to notice.”
    “But how do you live?” I said.
    “Oh. It’s easy.” Her eyes had lost some of their intensity. “Outside this building, for instance, there’s a sandwich machine. The kind you operate with a credit card. And every morning a servo robot comes to fill it with fresh sandwiches. I found out when I first came here, half a yellow ago, that the robot always brings five more sandwiches than the machine holds. He’s a moron robot, so he just stands there holding the five extra sandwiches. And I take them from him. That’s what I eat during the day. I drink from the water fountains.”
    “And you don’t work?”
    She stared at me. “You know what work is these days. They have to deactivate robots to find things to pay us for doing.”
    I knew that was true. Everybody did, I suppose. But no one ever actually said it. “You could garden ...” I said.
    “I don’t
like
to garden,” she said.
    I walked over and sat on the bench by the python cage. The two old men had left, and we were alone. I didn’t look at her. “What do you
do
?” I said. “What do you do when you are bored? There’s no TV out here. And you can’t use the Fun Facilities in New York without credit. And there’s no way to get credit without a job. . .”
    There was no answer, and for a minute I thought she hadn’t heard me. But then I heard her footsteps and in a moment she was sitting beside me. “Lately,” she said, “I’ve been