Doug worked silently. His eyes stung, and he wasted a moment to rub them again, because he must see, must see so precisely, so exactly. The work table was almost bare of the equipment he had ordered. The new Contraption had devoured it into its fantastic vitals as fast as his taut hands and flagging memory were able to feed. Yet it was useless work—the gleaming thing he had built would never so much as fry an egg.
Yet he worked as though the power-pack were resting on the table among the scraps of wire, bits and pieces that were left, as though somehow it would be there when he needed it, and then they could go, could escape, and then forget... The two shiny terminals glared at him dully like two tiny eyes, each telling him that he was such a fool to hope that they could ever be anything else than bare. They glared at him, told him that he was finished now, finished, but with the end impossibly far away.
He let the tools drop amid the bits and pieces The Contraption was a cold, dead thing, a mockery without its great surging electric heart. A mockery, a precisely assembled heap of shiny junk.
He was near exhaustion as he looked at the two empty terminals. The anger in him had burned out and became a cold leaden thing. He no longer cared about the ridiculous beliefs, the regulations, the laws that prohibited him from obtaining the thing he needed to free himself—no longer cursed himself, for it was not he who was to blame.
He went upstairs to where Dot slept, and wondered if this was how it felt to be a thousand years old. Finally tired, finally fed-up, finally weary of being a fool.
He watched her as she slept, watched the gentle rise and fall of her breasts, let his eyes wander over the soft symmetry of her body, and asked himself why men were so dutiful in creating their clanking idiocies about life and about death when all that such diligence accomplished was eternal blasphemy of the pure and simple. The beautiful they defiled, then disguised the ruin they left with a cloak labeled Duty, and went forth armed with the rotten wood of what they called Law to build a dingy world more to their liking than the garden that had been given them for nothing....
It was not fair, no it was not fair, but he was tired at last. Too tired to look now for another time-track, to throw the Contraption wildly out of focus and careen through a thousand tracks, a million, and look for a place where a man and a woman could be simply that and nothing either more nor less. For in all infinity there was no such place, and the running would be worth less than the wasted breath it took.
With Dot, one last time, then.
She stirred. Her eyes opened, and she smiled.
"Doug? Did you finish it, Doug?"