In his work, Dolan kept running into reminders of the first technician,
and the matter bothered him. The man seemed to have been making
progress, and surely he would not have been such a fool as simply to
refuse to work, the message he had left showed he understood quite
clearly his danger. He asked Moirta about this, and got another shock.
"That was a mistake," she said. "We did not fully understand your
world then. In our time, medical science is very exact. There are no
incomplete men or incomplete women. We assumed that because this
man ... person ... looked like a man, and seemed to be a man, he was
one. However, we have since discovered that this is not always true,
and it was not in this case. We could not allow him to work on the
machine, since we could not predict his reactions adequately."
Not predict his reactions? There was an obvious corollary--
Dolan's lips tightened. "But you _can_ predict mine, is that it?"
Moirta ran her fingers lightly along the back of his hand, studying his
knuckles with the tips of them. "Of course," she said idly, "Why not?
There is nothing wrong with _your_ reactions, George dear."
He flung her hand away violently. "Why not? So you push the buttons,
and I react as predicted, and you sit back and laugh at me while
I fix your machine, and then you all go tootling off to find more
suckers, while I hold the bag. That's it, isn't it? Boy, I bet you've
been getting a _big_ charge out of this. I thought it was mighty
coincidental the way one of your boyfriends always pops up as soon as
we're alone for five minutes. Not taking any chances on the reaction
getting out of hand, are you?"
She stared up at him in shocked surprise. "No," she said, "no. Oh, poor
George. How stupid of me. You see, I am not really very wise, I know
only one thing, how to be a woman. I keep forgetting that you do not
think as we do. Because we can predict a reaction, does that make it
less real?"
"But you _used_ me, you knew this would happen."
There were tears in her eyes. "I used you," she admitted, "and I used
myself, and Brown used both you _and_ me.
"And you used me, also. Do you wish me to think that when you hold
a woman's hand, and say certain things to her, and look at her in a
certain way; you are entirely innocent, you do not guess what may
happen?"
"I didn't force you," he said stubbornly, "the choice was yours to
make."
"Nor did I force you. But I knew what your choice would be, and
further, I knew what _my_ choice would be. Emotion is my trade, as
electronics is yours. Electrons, I have been told, have a certain
freedom of choice, or appear to have. Yet you know with quite high
probability which choice they will make under the influence of certain
physical fields. In the same way, I know what choice to expect of a man
or a woman, under the influence of certain emotional fields."
"You didn't want _me_, though, you just wanted a technician. The first
man would have done just as well for you, if he had 'reacted.'"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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