He squatted there for a moment, looking like the chimpanzee AM had intended him to resemble. Then he leaped high, caught a trailing beam of pitted and corroded metal, and went up it, handoverhand like an animal, till he was on a girdered ledge, twenty feet above us. "Oh, Ted, Nimdok, please, help him, get him down before-" She cut off. Tears began to stand in her eyes. She moved her hands aimlessly. It was too late. None of us wanted to be near him when whatever was going to happen, happened. And besides, we all saw through her concern. When AM had altered Benny, during the machine's utterly irrational, hysterical phase, it was not merely Benny's face the computer had made like a giant ape's. He was big in the privates; she loved that! She serviced us, as a matter of course, but she loved it from him. Oh Ellen, pedestal Ellen, pristinepure Ellen; oh Ellen the clean! Scum filth. Gorrister slapped her. She slumped down, staring up at poor loonie Benny, and she cried. It was her big defense, crying. We had gotten used to it seventyfive years earlier. Gorrister kicked her in the side. Then the sound began. It was light, that sound. Half sound and half light, something that began to glow from Benny's eyes, and pulse with growing loudness, dim sonorities that grew more gigantic and brighter as the light/sound increased in tempo. It must have been painful, and the pain must have been increasing with the boldness of the light, the rising volume of the sound, for Benny began to mewl like a wounded animal. At first softly, when the light was dim and the sound was muted, then louder as his shoulders hunched together: his back humped, as though he was trying to get away from it. His hands folded across his chest like a chipmunk's. His head tilted to the side. The sad little monkeytace pinched in anguish. Then he began to howl, as the sound coming from his eyes grew louder. Louder and louder. I slapped the sides of my head with my hands, but I couldn't shut it out, it cut through easily. The pain shivered through my flesh like tinfoil on a tooth. And Benny was suddenly pulled erect. On the girder he stood up, jerked to his feet like a puppet. The light was now pulsing out of his eyes in two great round beams. The sound crawled up and up some incomprehensible scale, and then he fell forward, straight down, and hit the platesteel floor with a crash. He lay there jerking spastically as the light flowed around and around him and the sound spiraled up out of normal range. Then the light beat its way back inside his head, the sound spiraled down, and he was left lying there, crying piteously. His eyes were two soft, moist pools of puslike jelly. AM had blinded him. Gorrister and Nimdok and myself... we turned away. But not before we caught the look of relief on Ellen's warm, concerned face.
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