I don't want that either, Pepper thought, but you don't have to be such a stupid fool as that. You can, of course, announce a campaign to abolish winter, do a bit of shamanism after eating mushrooms full of drugs, beat drums, screech curses, but all the same, it's better to sew yourself a fur coat and buy warm boots... Anyhow, that grizzled protector of timid cheeks will have his little shout from the platform, then steal an oil can from his lover's sewing-machine case, steal up to some electronic giant, and start oiling its pinions, glancing at the dials and giggling respectfully when it gives him a shock. God preserve us from grizzled old fools. And while you're about it, God, save us from clever fools in cardboard masks.
"In my opinion, it's your dreams," someone announced up above in a kindly bass. "I know from experience that dreams can leave a really nasty feeling. Sometimes it's as if you were paralyzed. You can't move, can't work. Then it all wears off. You should work a bit. Why not? Then all the aftereffects disappear in the pleasure of it."
"Oh I can't bring myself to that," returned a thin fretful voice. "I'm sick of it all. Always the same:
metal, plastic, concrete, people. I'm fed up to here with them. I get no pleasure out of it anymore. The world's so beautiful and so full of different things and I sit in one place and die of boredom."
"You should have upped and transferred to another job," creaked some peevish oldster.
"Easily said - transfer! I've been transferred already and I'm bored stiff all the same. And it was hard getting away, let me tell you!"
"All right, now," said the bass judiciously. "Just what do you want? It almost passes understanding. What can one want if not to work?"
"Why can't you understand? I want to live life to the full. I want to see new places, have new experiences, it's always the same old around here..."
"Dismissed!" barked a leaden voice. "Idle chatter! Same old around - good thing. Constant aim. All clear? Repeat!"
"Ah, to hell with you and your orders..."
There could be no doubt it was the machines conversing. Pepper had never set eyes on them and couldn't imagine what they looked like, but he had the feeling that he was hiding under a toyshop counter and hearing the toys talking, toys he'd known since childhood, only huge, and by virtue of that, frightening. That thin hysterical voice belonged of course to a fifteen-foot doll called Jeanne. She had a bright-colored tulle dress on and a fat, pink unmoving face with rolling eyes, fat, foolishly spread arms, and legs with fingers and toes stuck together. The bass was a bear, an enormous Winnie the Pooh bursting out of the container, gentle, shaggy, sawdust-filled, brown, with glass-button eyes. The others were toys, too, but Pepper couldn't place them yet.
"All the same, I suggest you ought to work a bit," rumbled Winnie the Pooh. "Remember, my dear, that there are creatures who are a good deal less fortunate than yourself. Our gardener, for instance. He really wants to work, but he sits here thinking day and night, because he hasn't worked out a plan of action properly. But nobody's heard any complaints from him. Monotonous work's still work. Monotonous pleasure's still pleasure. No reason for talk of death and stuff like that."
"Oh, there's no making you out," said Jeanne the doll. "For you, everything's caused by dreams, or I don't know what. But I've got premonitions. I can't stay still. I know there's going to be a terrible explosion and I'll be blown to tiny pieces. I'll turn into steam. I know. I've seen..."
"Dismissed!" burst out the leaden voice. "I can't stand it! What do you know about explosions? You can run toward the horizon with any speed you like at any angle. But the one whose business it is can overtake you at any distance and that'll be a real explosion, not some intellectual vapor. But I'm not the one whose business it is, am I? Nobody will tell you that, and even if they wanted to tell, they wouldn't be able. I know what I'm saying. All clear? Repeat."
There was a good deal of blind self-assurance in all this. It was probably a huge wind-up tank speaking. With exactly the same blind self-assurance it used to move its rubber tracks forward, scrambling over a boot placed in its way.
"I don't know what you mean," said the Jeanne doll. "But if I fled here to you, the only creatures of my own kind, that doesn't mean, in my view, that I intend at whoever's pleasure to run off to the horizon at some angle. And anyway I would like you to observe that I'm not talking to you... If it's work we're discussing, well I'm not ill, I'm a normal creature, and I need pleasures just as all of you do. But this isn't real work, just a sort of unreal pleasure. I keep waiting for my real work, but there's no sign of it, no sign. I don't know what's the matter but when I start thinking, I think myself into all sorts of nonsense." She gave a sob.
