AWAKENING A Novelet by BRYCE WALTON [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Startling Stories Summer 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The scream of the commutor jet bringing Kelsey home broke like glass outside the house. Startled, Alice realized that she was behind schedule in her household duties. Quickly she switched the news off the Tevee. Master Kelsey hated newscasts. They made him uneasy, particularly with all this talk about a possible air-raid. Instead, she hurriedly tuned in Kelsey's evening preference: self-improvement commercials with the latest pop-tunes for background. Then she ran into the bathroom to prepare Kelsey's intricate beauty ritual. She turned up her thermostat so that her machinery would run a little faster. If she wasn't careful, Master Kelsey would trade her in for a more modern and physically attractive domestic. She heard footsteps in the hall. His footsteps-- In another few seconds he would be there, real, breathing, but unobtainable, a living dream, something on the other side of the looking glass. Oh the pain, the indescribable pain of love, greater and deeper and drowning love, going out and out all the time and never coming back again. Painful, painful unrequited love. The cumulative loneliness, the hours of lonely loving, the hours and days and weeks and years of tireless mechanical walking in the indifferent round of the hours of her life. The loneliness of loving something that can never love in return, that doesn't even know of your love, that can't even conceive of your being able to love. For you are only a machine and your soul can never be shared; for only you know that you have a soul, and it is an accident and no one could even suspect that it could possibly be--this crying hungry, yearning, lonely soul. Without effort she could have cried out her heart to Master Kelsey, but she had not been made to cry, and no one would think of looking for her heart or soul. Or the lonely yearning of the heart or soul. For the soul can be trapped in ugliness, or in the slashing streak of electrons. Dying there, the soul alone can mourn its dying, for who can feel the soul in the rectifiers and diodes, or behind the ugliness of a distorted shell? It was very good for her, she thought, that no one, no human, including Master Kelsey could ever guess at the awful intensity, the terrible hunger of the soul that kept loving in silence, alone, in the dark, behind the plastoid walls of an inhuman shell.