“Ha! Got it!” Morey exclaimed triumphantly. “Get rid of robots!”
“Oh, no. No! No! No. We wouldn’t eat. Everything is mechanized. Can’t get rid of them, can’t slow down production—slowing down is dying, stopping is quicker dying. Principle of twoness is the concept that clarifies all these—”
“No!” Morey said violently. “What should we do?”
“Do? I’ll tell you what we should do, if that’s what you want. I can tell you.”
“Then tell me.”
“What we should do is—” Tanaquil hiccupped with a look of refined consternation—“have another drink.”
They had another drink. He gallantly let her pay, of course. She ungallantly argued with the bartender about the ration points due her.
Though not a two-fisted drinker, Morey tried. He really worked at it.
He paid the price, too. For some little time before his limbs stopped moving, his mind stopped functioning. Blackout. Almost a blackout, at any rate, for all he retained of the late evening was a kaleidoscope of people and places and things. Howland was there, drunk as a skunk, disgracefully drunk, Morey remembered thinking as he stared up at Howland from the floor. The Bigelows were there. His wife, Cherry, solicitous and amused, was there. And oddly enough, Henry was there…
It was very, very hard to reconstruct. Morey devoted a whole morning’s hangover to the effort. It was important to reconstruct it, for some reason. But Morey couldn’t even remember what the reason was; and finally he dismissed it, guessing that he had either solved the secret of twoness or whether Tanaquil Bigelow’s remarkable figure was natural.