'Yes. ... I mean, if you don't mind.'
'Will you need help later in dressing?'
'Oh, my, no!' She clutched frantically at the sheet, so that the coffee hovered at the edge of catastrophe. She remained so, in rigor, then sank helplessly back against the pillow when the door closed him out of her sight again.
She got through breakfast somehow. ... He was only a machine, and if it were only more visible that he were it wouldn't be so frightening. Or if his expression would change. It just stayed there, nailed on. You couldn't tell what went on behind those dark eyes and that smooth, olive skin-stuff. The coffee cup beat a faint castanet for a moment as she set it back, empty, on the tray.
Then she realized that she had forgotten to add the sugar and cream after all, and she did so hate black coffee.
She burned a straight path from bedroom to kitchen after dressing. It was her house, after all, and there wasn't anything frippy about her, but she liked her kitchen clean. He should have waited for supervision. . . .
But when she entered, she found a kitchen that might have been minted
fire-new from the factory the moment before.v
She stopped, stared, turned on her heel and nearly ran into Tony. She yelped.
'May I help?' he asked.
'Tony,' and she scraped the anger off the edges of her mind's panic, 'you must make some noise when you walk. I can't have you stalking me, you know. . . . Didn't you use this kitchen?'
'I did, Mrs. Belmont.'
'It doesn't look it.'
'I cleaned up afterward. Isn't that customary?'
Claire opened her eyes wide. After all, what could one say to that. She opened the oven compartment that held the pots, took a quick, unseeing
look at the metallic glitter inside, then said with a tremor, 'Very good. Quite satisfactory.'
If at the moment, he had beamed; if he had smiled; if he had quirked the corner of his mouth the slightest bit, she felt that she could have warmed to him. But he remained an English lord in repose, as he said, 'Thank you, Mrs. Belmont. Would you come into the living room?'
She did, and it struck her at once. 'Have you been polishing the furniture?'
'Is it satisfactory, Mrs. Belmont?'
'But when? You didn't do it yesterday.'
'Last night, of course.'
'You burned the lights all night?'
'Oh, no. That wouldn't have been necessary. I've a built-in ultra-violet source. I can see in ultraviolet. And, of course, I don't require sleep.'
He did require admiration, though. She realized that, then. He had to know that he was pleasing her. But she couldn't bring herself to supply that pleasure for him.
She could only say sourly, 'Your kind will put ordinary houseworkers out of business.'
'There is work of much greater importance they can be put to in the world, once they are freed of drudgery. After all, Mrs. Belmont, things like myself can be manufactured. But nothing yet can imitate the creativity and versatility of a human brain, like yours.'
And though his face gave no hint, his voice was warmly surcharged with awe and admiration, so that Claire flushed and muttered, 'My brain! You can have it.'
Tony approached a little and said, 'You must be unhappy to say such a thing. Is there anything I can do?'
For a moment, Claire felt like laughing. It was a ridiculous situation. Here was an animated carpet-sweeper, dishwasher, furniture-polisher, general factotum, rising from the factory table-and offering his services as consoler and confidant.
Yet she said suddenly, in a burst of woe and voice, 'Mr. Belmont doesn't think I have a brain, if you must know. . . . And I suppose I haven't.' She couldn't cry in front of him. She felt, for some reason, that she had the honor of the human race to support against this mere creation.
'It's lately,' she added. 'It was all right when he was a student; when he was just starting. But I can't be a big man's wife; and he's getting to be a big man. He wants me to be a hostess and an entry into social life for him-like G-guh-guh-Gladys Claffern.'
Her nose was red, and she looked away.
But Tony wasn't watching her. His eyes wandered about the room. 'I can help you run the house.'
'But it's no good,' she said fiercely. 'It needs a touch I can't give it. I can
only make it comfortable; I can't ever make it the kind they take pictures of for the Home Beautiful magazines.'
'Do you want that kind?'
'Does it do any good-wanting?'
Tony's eyes were on her, full. 'I could help.'
'Do you know anything about interior decoration?'
'Is it something a good housekeeper should know?'
'Oh, yes.'
'Then I have the potentialities of learning it. Can you get me books on the subject?'
Something started then.
Claire, clutching her hat against the brawling liberties of the wind, had manipulated two fat volumes on the home arts back from the public library. She watched Tony as he opened one of them and flipped the pages. It was the first time she had watched his fingers flicker at anything like fine work.
I don't see how they do it, she thought, and on a sudden impulse reached for his hand and pulled it toward herself. Tony did not resist, but let it lie limp for inspection.
She said, 'It's remarkable. Even your fingernails look natural.'
'That's deliberate, of course,' said Tony. Then, chattily, 'The skin is a flexible plastic, and the skeletal framework is a light metal alloy. Does that amuse you?'
'Oh, no.' She lifted her reddened face. 'I just feel a little embarrassed at sort of poking into your insides. It's none of my business. You don't ask me about mine.'
'My brain paths don't include that type of curiosity. I can only act within my limitations, you know.'
And Claire felt something tighten inside her in the silence that followed. Why did she keep forgetting he was a machine. Now the thing itself had to remind her. Was she so starved for sympathy that she would even accept a robot as equal-because he sympathized?
She noticed Tony was still flipping the pages-almost helplessly-and there was a quick, shooting sense of relieved superiority within her. 'You can't read, can you?'
Tony looked up at her; his voice calm, unreproachful. 'I am reading, Mrs. Belmont.'
'But-' She pointed at the book in a meaningless gesture.
'I am scanning the pages, if that's what you mean. My sense of reading is photographic.'
It was evening then, and when Claire eventually went to bed Tony was well into the second volume, sitting there in the dark, or what seemed dark to Claire's limited eyes.
Her last thought, the one that clamored at her just as her mind let go and
tumbled, was a queer one. She remembered his hand again; the touch of it. It had been warm and soft, like a human being's. How clever of the factory, she thought, and softly ebbed to sleep.
It was the library continuously, thereafter, for several days. Tony suggested the fields of study, which branched out quickly. There were books on color matching and on cosmetics; on carpentry and on fashions; on art and on the history of costumes.
He turned the pages of each book before his solemn eyes, and, as quickly as he turned, he read; nor did he seem capable of forgetting.
Before the end of the week, he had insisted on cutting her hair, introducing her to a new method of arranging it, adjusting her eyebrow line a bit and changing the shade of her powder and lipstick.
She had palpitated in nervous dread for half an hour under the delicate touch of his inhuman fingers and then looked in the mirror.
'There is more that can be done,' said Tony, 'especially in clothes. How do you find it for a beginning?'
And she hadn't answered; not for quite a while. Not until she had absorbed the identity of the stranger in the glass and cooled the wonder at the beauty of it all. Then she had said chokingly, never once taking her eyes from the warming image, 'Yes, Tony, quite good-for a beginning.'
She said nothing of this in her letters to Larry. Let him see it all at once. And something in her realized that it wasn't only the surprise she would enjoy. It was going to be a kind of revenge.
Tony said one morning, 'It's time to start buying, and I'm not allowed to leave the house. If I write out exactly what we must have, can I trust you to get it? We need drapery, and furniture fabric, wallpaper, carpeting, paint, clothing-and any number of small things.'
'You can't get these things to your own specifications at a stroke's notice,' said Claire doubtfully.
'You can get fairly close, if you go through the city and if money is no object.'
'But, Tony, money is certainly an object.'
'Not at all. Stop off at U.S. Robots in the first place. I'll write a note for you. You see Dr. Calvin, and tell her that I said it was part of the experiment.'
Dr. Calvin, somehow, didn't frighten her as on that first evening. With her new face and a new hat, she couldn't be quite the old Claire. The psychologist listened carefully, asked a few questions, nodded-and then Claire found herself walking out, armed with an unlimited charge account against the assets of U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation.
It is wonderful what money will do. With a store's contents at her feet, a
saleslady's dictum was not necessarily a voice from above; the uplifted eyebrow of a decorator was not anything like Jove's thunder.
And once, when an Exalted Plumpness at one of the most lordly of the garment salons had insistently poohed her description of the wardrobe she must have with
