'And she said okay, if you hurried.'
Of course, there was only one thing to do, though I could have wrung fat Mrs. van Styler's neck cheerfully. It wouldn't have happened if she'd used robots like everyone else—but she had to be different.
Consequently, while Dave was back home puttering with Helen, I was racking my brain to trick Archy van Styler into getting the counter- hormones, and giving the servant girl the same. Oh, I wasn't supposed to, but the poor kid was crazy about Archy. Dave might have written, I thought, but never a word did I get.
It was three weeks later instead of two when I reported that Archy was 'cured,'
and collected on the line. With that money in my pocket, I hired a personal rocket and was back in Messina in half an hour. I didn't waste time in reaching the house.
As I stepped into the alcove, I heard a light patter of feet, and an eager voice called out, 'Dave, dear?' For a minute I couldn't answer, and the voice came again, pleading, 'Dave?'
I don't know what I expected, but I didn't expect Helen to meet me that way, stopping and staring at me, obvious disappointment on her face, little hands fluttering up against her breast.
'Oh,' she cried. 'I thought it was Dave. He hardly comes home to eat now, but I've had supper waiting hours.' She dropped her hands and managed a smile. 'You're Phil, aren't you? Dave told me about you when ... at first. I'm so glad to see you home, Phil.'
'Glad to see you doing so well, Helen.' Now what does one say for tight conversation with a robot? 'You said something about supper?' 'Oh, yes. I guess Dave ate downtown again, so we might as well go 'i- It'll be nice having someone to talk to around the house, Phil. You don't mind if I call you Phil, do you? You know, you're sort of a godfather to me.'
We ate. I hadn't counted on such behavior, but apparently she considered eating as normal as walking. She didn't do much eating, at that; most of the time she spent staring at the front door.
Dave came in as we were finishing, a frown a yard wide on his face. Helen started to rise, but he ducked toward the stairs, throwing words over his shoulder.
'Hi, Phil. See you up here later.'
There was something radically wrong with him. For a moment, I'd thought his eyes were haunted, and as I turned to Helen, hers were filling with tears. She gulped, choked them back, and fell to viciously on her food.
'What's the matter with him... and you?' I asked.
'He's sick of me.' She pushed her plate away and got up hastily. 'You'd better see him while I clean up. And there's nothing wrong with me. And it's not my fault, anyway.' She grabbed the dishes and ducked into the kitchen; I could have sworn she was crying.
Maybe all thought is a series of conditioned reflexes—but she certainly had picked up a lot of conditioning while I was gone. Lena in her heyday had been nothing like this. I went up to see if Dave could make any sense out of the hodgepodge.
He was squirting soda into a large glass of apple brandy, and I saw that the bottle was nearly empty. 'Join me?' he asked.
It seemed like a good idea. The roaring blast of an ion rocket overhead was the only familiar thing left in the house. From the look around Dave's eyes, it wasn't the first bottle he'd emptied while I was gone, and there were more left. He dug out a new bottle for his own drink.
'Of course, it's none of my business, Dave, but that stuff won't steady your nerves any. What's gotten into you and Helen? Been seeing ghosts?'
Helen was wrong; he hadn't been eating downtown—nor anywhere else. His muscles collapsed into a chair in a way that spoke of fatigue and nerves, but mostly of hunger. 'You noticed it, eh?'
'Noticed it? The two of you jammed it down my throat.'
'Uhmmm.' He swatted at a non-existent fly, and slumped further down in the pneumatic. 'Guess maybe I should have waited with Helen until you got back. But if that stereo cast hadn't changed ... anyway, it did. And those mushy books of yours finished the job.'
'Thanks. That makes it all clear.'
'You know, Phil, I've got a place up in the country ... fruit ranch. My dad left it to me. Think I'll look it over.'
And that's the way it went. But finally, by much liquor and more perspiration, I got some of the story out of him before I gave him an amytal and put him to bed.
Then I hunted up Helen and dug the rest of the story from her, until it made sense.
Apparently as soon as I was gone, Dave had turned her on and made preliminary tests, which were entirely satisfactory. She had reacted beautifully—so well that he decided to leave her and go down to work as usual.
Naturally, with all her untried emotions, she was filled with curiosity, and wanted him to stay. Then he had an inspiration. After showing her what her duties about the house would be, he set her down in front of the stereovisor, tuned in a travelogue, and left her to occupy her time with that.
The travelogue held her attention until it was finished, and the station switched over to a current serial with Larry Ainslee, the same cute emoter who'd given us all the trouble with the twins. Incidentally, he looked something like Dave.
Helen took to the serial like a seal to water. This play acting was a perfect outlet for her newly excited emotions. When that particular episode finished, she found a love story on another station, and added still more to her education. The afternoon programs were mostly news and music, but by then she'd found my books; and I do have rather adolescent taste in literature.
Dave came home in the best of spirits. The front alcove was neatly swept, and there was the odor of food in the air that he'd missed around the house for weeks. He had visions of Helen as the super-efficient housekeeper.
So it was a shock to him to feel two strong arms around his neck from behind and hear a voice all a-quiver coo into his ears, 'Oh, Dave, darling, I've missed you so, and I'm so thrilled that you're back.' Helen's technique may have lacked polish, but it had enthusiasm, as he found when he tried to stop her from kissing him. She had learned fast and furiously—also, Helen was powered by an atomotor.
Dave wasn't a prude, but he remembered that she was only a robot, after all. The fact that she felt, acted, and looked like a young goddess in his arms didn't mean much. With some effort, he untangled her and Bagged her off to supper, where he made her eat with him to divert n« attention.
After her evening work, he called her into the study and gave her a thorough lecture on the folly of her ways. It must have been good, for it lasted three solid hours, and covered her station in life, the idiocy of stereos, and various other miscellanies. When he finished, Helen looked up with dewy eyes and said wistfully,
'I know, Dave, but I still love you.'
That's when Dave started drinking.
It grew worse each day. If he stayed downtown, she was crying when he came home. If he returned on time, she fussed over him and threw herself at him. In his room, with the door locked, he could hear her downstairs pacing up and down and muttering; and when he went down, she stared at him reproachfully until he had to go back up.
I sent Helen out on a fake errand in the morning and got Dave up. With her gone, I made him eat a decent breakfast and gave him a tonic for his nerves. He was still listless and moody.
'Look here, Dave,' I broke in on his brooding. 'Helen isn't human, after all. Why not cut off her power and change a few memory coils? Then we can convince her that she never was in love and couldn't get that way.'
'You try it. I had that idea, but she put up a wail that would wake Homer. She says it would be murder—and the hell of it is that I can't help feeling the same about it. Maybe she isn't human, but you wouldn't guess it when she puts on that martyred look and tells you to go ahead and kill her.'
'We never put in substitutes for some of the secretions present in man during the love period.'
'I don't know what we put in. Maybe the heterones backfired or something.
Anyway, she's made this idea so much a part of her thoughts that we'd have to put in a whole new set of coils.'
'Well, why not?'
'Go ahead. You're the surgeon of this family. I'm not used to fussing with emotions. Matter of fact, since she's been acting this way, I'm beginning to hate work on any robot. My business is going to blazes.'
He saw Helen coming up the walk and ducked out the black door for the monorail express. I'd intended to put
