“You’ve succeeded.”
Booth gazed down at his hands hung between his knees as if they held an old but suddenly remembered and simple weapon.
“Did you ever kill a turtle?”
“What?”
“When I was ten I found out about death. I found out that the turtle, that big dumb rocklike thing, was going to live long after I was dead. I figured if I had to go, the turtle went first. So I took a brick and hit him on the back until I broke his shell and he died…”
Bayes slowed in his constant pacing and said, “For the same reason, I once let a butterfly live.”
“No,” said Booth, quickly, then added, “no, not for the same reason. A butterfly lit on my hand once. The butterfly opened and shut its wings, just resting there. I knew I could crush it. But I didn’t because I knew that in ten minutes or an hour some bird would eat it. So I let it just fly away. But turtles?! They lie around backyards and live forever. So I went and got a brick and I was sorry for months after. Maybe I still am. Look…”
His hands trembled before him.
“And what,” said Bayes, “has all this to do with your being here tonight?”
“Do? What!” cried Booth, looking at Bayes as if he were mad. “Haven’t you been listening? Great God, I’m jealous! Jealous of anything that works right, anything that’s perfect, anything that’s beautiful all to itself, anything that lasts I don’t care what it is! Jealous!”
“You can’t be jealous of machines.”
“Why not, dammit?” Booth clutched the back of the seat in front of him and slowly pulled himself forward staring at the slumped figure in that highback chair in the center of the stage. “Aren’t machines more perfect, ninety-nine times out of a hundred than most people you’ve ever known? I mean really? Don’t they do things right? How many people can you name do things right one third, one half the time? That damned thing up there, that machine, not only looks perfection, but speaks and acts perfection. More, if you keep it oiled and wound and fixed it’ll be looking, speaking, acting right and grand and beautiful a hundred, two hundred years after I’m in the earth! Jealous? Damn right I am!”
“But a machine doesn’t know what it is.”
“I know, I feel!” said Booth. “I’m outside it looking in. I’m always outside things like that. I’ve never been in. The machine has it. I don’t. It was built to do one or two things exactly on the nose. No matter how much I learned or knew or tried the rest of my life, no matter what I did, I could never be as perfect, as fine, as maddening, as deserving of destruction as that thing up there, that man, that thing, that creature, that president…”
He was on his feet now, shouting at the stage eighty feet away.
Lincoln said nothing. Machinery oil gathered glistening on the floor under the chair.
“That president—” murmured Booth, as if he had come upon the real truth at last. “That president. Yes. Lincoln. Don’t you see? He died a long time ago. He can’t be alive. He just can’t be. It’s not right. A hundred years ago and yet here he is. He was shot once, buried once, yet here he is going on and on and on. Tomorrow and the day after that and all the days. So his name being Lincoln and mine Booth … I just had to come…”
His voice faded. His eyes had glazed over.
“Sit down,” said Bayes, quietly.
Booth sat, and Bayes nodded to the remaining security guard. “Wait outside, please.”
When the guard was gone and there was only Booth and himself and the quiet thing waiting up there in the chair, Bayes turned slowly at last and looked at the assassin. He weighed his words carefully and said:
“Good but not good enough.”
“What?”
“You haven’t given all the reasons why you came here tonight.”
“I have!”
“You just think you have. You’re kidding yourself. All Romantics do. One way or the other. Phipps when he invented this machine. You when you destroyed it. But it all comes down to this … very plain and very simple, you’d love to have your picture in the papers, wouldn’t you?”
Booth did not answer, but his shoulder straightened, imperceptibly.
“Like to be seen coast-to-coast on magazine covers?”
“No.”
“Get free time on TV?”
“No.”
“Be interviewed on radio?”
“No!”
“Like to have trials and lawyers arguing whether a man can be tried for proxy-murder…”
“No!”
“…that is, attacking, shooting a humanoid machine…”
“No!”
Booth was breathing fast now, his eyes moving wildly in his face. Bayes let more out:
“Great to have two hundred million people talking about you tomorrow morning, next week, next month, next year!”
Silence.
But a smile appeared, like the faintest drip of saliva, at the corner of Booth’s mouth. He must have felt it. He raised a hand to touch it away.
“Fine to sell your personal true real story to the international syndicates for a fine chunk?”
Sweat moved down Booth’s face and itched in his palms.
“Shall I give you the answer to all, all the questions I have just asked? Eh? Eh? Well,” said Bayes, “the answer is—”
Someone rapped on a far theater door.
Bayes jumped. Booth turned to stare.
The knock came, louder.
“Bayes, let me in, this is Phipps,” a voice cried outside in the night.
Hammering, pounding, then silence. In the silence, Booth and Bayes looked at each other like conspirators.
“Let me in, oh Christ, let me in!”
More hammering, then a pause and again the insistent onslaught, a crazy drum and tattoo, then silence again, the man outside panting, circling perhaps to find another door.
“Where was I?” said Bayes. “No. Yes. The answer to all those questions? Do you get worldwide TV radio film magazine newspaper gossip broadcast publicity…?”
A pause.
“No.”
Booth’s mouth jerked
