"It's important to me, too, Cliff."
"Well, I'll be—" The smaller man rolled to his feet and put his hands on his hips. "I never thought to see the day when honored Elder Webb Fellow would come muling around like a sub-century freshman. Of all the anachronistic drivel!"
"You see?" Webb said eagerly, "It isn't important to you at all. Why can't you do this for me, Cliff? I—I just can't stand the thought of being without Anne all those years."
"Relax, Webb. It's a long life. Anne will be back in circulation before you know it." He paced to a low desk and extracted a small address book from a drawer. "If you're short of female acquaintances at the moment you can have these. I won't be needing them for awhile."
He flipped the book at Webb. By chance the cover opened, caught the air and slanted the book up in its course so it struck the physician's cheek with a slap. The faint sting was the detonator that exploded all the careful restraint of seven centuries.
Webb arose to his feet slowly and moved toward Clifford. "So medicine was too elementary for you? Human physiology and behaviour has no unsolved problems in it, you said once. So you went into robotics—positronic brains—infinite variety of response, with built in neuroses and psychoses. Human behaviour was too stereo-typed for you, Clifford. Everyone was predictable to seven decimal places. You were bored."
"You have it about right," the engineer said insolently. He let his arms drop to his sides, relaxed, unconcerned at the tension in the physician's voice.
"You build fine chess-playing machines, I hear," Webb said softly, gradually closing the distance between them. "Your mechanical geniuses have outstripped our finest playwrights and novelists for creativity and originality. You've probed every conceivable aberrated twist of human nature with your psychological-probabilities computers. You've reduced sociology and human relations to a cipher—"
Clifford shrugged. "Merely an extension of early work in general semantics—the same work that gave us mental stability to go with physical immortality. Certainly you don't disparage—"
"I'm disparaging nothing," Webb broke in. "I'm merely pointing out your blind spot, your fatal blind spot."