"Yes."
Herl sneaked a mental look at his urge to kiss her. As when eating Crawford's steak, he found that he could forgive and forget a great deal when confronted with considerable pleasure in prospect.
He continued. "Will you decide and tell me what questions I ought to ask and what actions I ought to take and what limitations I should set on the data you have to offer?" Now he would have communication by the roots.
"No."
"Are you capable of doing so, Abigail?" A crucial question, asked almost in a whisper.
"No."
Grief more bitter than anger ran through his veins like corrosive poison. This was the wrong answer. She must be a machine-thing after all, he concluded ... limited, arbitrary, unhuman, incapable of loving him or being concerned for his welfare, incapable of sorting out good from bad or valuable from expedient.
He withdrew his eyes from her brightness and from her delicate features and from her rounded limbs and put his head in his hands. An agonized sigh burst from him. No human woman could keep from giving him good advice, particularly if she knew all the answers ... his mother never had avoided the responsibilities of knowledge. So she could have nothing human about her. She was just a thing.
"No ... no ... no," her music faded slowly away; and Herl looked up to catch the faintest after-image of the brilliance that had centered on the table. That, too, was gone in an instant; and no presence or effects of a presence other than his own was visible before him.
He sat motionless in his supporting chair, his eyes staring unseeingly at brown table and black film lockers and at the long blue chart roll hung behind the table and at the calculator keys in their neat meaningless ranks. In her absence, he felt compressed between the backward thrust of disillusion and emptiness and the forward pull of a tearing desire to be with her wherever she was. He would have done anything she wanted, gone anywhere, been anything ... and there was nothing she wanted of him. He remained slumped, drained of purpose. Drained, he reflected, by a shiny machine more bound than he to commands and limitations. At any rate he did have a few minor purposes of his own.