Dimly, inside the gloom of the warehouse beyond the tracks, he could see black mechanicals opening the crates. A lid came up, revealing dark, rigid bodies, closely packed. One by one they came to life. They climbed out of the crate and sprang gracefully to the floor. Shining black, glinting with bronze and blue, they were all identical.
One of them came out past the truck to the sidewalk, staring toward him with blind steel eyes. Its high silver voice spoke melodiously:
“At your service, Mr. Underhill.”
He fled. When his name was promptly called by a courteous mechanical, just out of the crate in which it had been imported from a remote and unknown planet, he found the experience hard to take.
Two blocks beyond, the sign of a bar caught his eye. He took his dismay inside. He had made it a business rule not to drink before dinner, and Aurora didn’t like for him to drink at all; but these new mechanicals, he felt, had made the day exceptional.
Unfortunately, however, alcohol failed to brighten the brief visible future of the agency. When he emerged after an hour, he looked wistfully back in hope that bright new building might have vanished as abruptly as it came. It hadn’t. He shook his head dejectedly, turning uncertainly homeward.
Fresh air had cleared his head somewhat before he arrived at the neat white bungalow in the outskirts of the town, but it failed to solve his business problems. He also realized uneasily that he would be late for dinner.
Dinner, however, had been delayed. His son Frank, a freckled ten-year-old, was still kicking a football on the quiet street in front of the house. Little Gay, who was tow-haired and adorable and eleven, came running across the lawn mid down the sidewalk to meet him.
“Father, guess what!” Gay was going to be a great musician someday, and no doubt properly dignified, but she was pink and breathless with excitement now. She let him swing her high off the sidewalk, and she wasn’t critical of the bar-aroma on his breath. He couldn’t guess, and she informed him eagerly:
“Mother’s got a new lodger!”
II
Underhill had foreseen a painful inquisition, because Aurora was worried about the notes at the bank and the bill for the new consignment and the money for little Gay’s lessons.
The new lodger, however, saved him from that. With an alarming crashing of crockery, the household android was setting dinner on the table, but the little house was empty. He found Aurora in the back yard, burdened with sheets and towels for the guest.
Aurora, when he married her, had been as utterly adorable as now her little daughter was. She might have remained so, he felt, if the agency had been a little more successful. While the pressure of slow failure was gradually crumbling his own assurance, however, small hardships had turned her a little too aggressive.
Of course he loved her still. Her red hair was still alluring, but thwarted ambitions had sharpened her character and sometimes her voice. Though they had never quarreled, really, there had been little differences.
There was the apartment over the garage—built for human servants they had never been able to afford. It was too small and shabby to attract any responsible tenant, and Underhill wanted to leave it empty. It hurt his pride to see her making beds and cleaning floors for strangers.
Aurora had rented it before, however, when she wanted money to pay for Gay’s music lessons, or when some colorful unfortunate touched her sympathy, and it seemed to Underhill that her lodgers had all turned out to be thieves and vandals.
She turned back to meet him, now, with the clean linen in her arms.
“Dear, it’s no use objecting.” Her voice was quite determined. “Mr. Sledge is the most wonderful old fellow, and he’s going to stay just as long as he wants.”
“That’s all right, darling.” He never liked to bicker, and he was thinking of his troubles at the agency. “I’m afraid we’ll need the money. Just make him pay in advance.”
“But he can’t!” Her voice throbbed with sympathetic warmth. “Not yet. He says he’ll have royalties coming in from his inventions. He can pay in a few days.”
Underhill shrugged; he had heard that before.
“Mr. Sledge is different, dear,” she insisted. “He’s a traveler and a scientist. Here in this dull little town, we don’t see many interesting people.”
“You’ve picked up some remarkable types.”
“Don’t be unkind, dear,” she chided him gently. “You haven’t met him yet. You don’t know how wonderful he is.” She hesitated. “Have you a ten, dear?”
“What for?”
“Mr. Sledge is ill.” Her voice turned urgent. “I saw him fall on the street, downtown. The police were going to send him to the city hospital, but he didn’t want to go. He looked so noble and sweet and grand. I told them I would take him. I got him in the car and took him to old Dr. Winters. He has this heart condition, and he needs the money for medicine.”
Reasonably, Underhill inquired, “Why doesn’t he want to go to the hospital?”
“He has work to do,” she said. “Important scientific work—and he’s so wonderful and tragic. Please, dear, have you a ten?”
Underhill thought of many things to say. These new mechanicals promised to multiply his troubles. It was foolish to take in an invalid vagrant, who could have had free care at the city hospital. Aurora’s tenants always tried to pay their rent with promises, and generally wrecked the apartment and looted the neighborhood before they left.
But he said none of those things. He had learned to compromise. Silently he found two fives in his thin pocketbook and put them into her hand. She smiled and kissed him impulsively—he barely remembered to hold his breath in time.
Her figure was still good, by dint of periodic dieting. He was proud of her shining red hair. A sudden surge of affection brought tears to his eyes, and he wondered what would happen to her and the children if the agency failed.
“Thank you, dear!” she whispered. “I’ll have him come for dinner, if he feels able. You can meet him then. I hope you don’t mind dinner being late.”
He didn’t mind tonight. Moved to a sudden impulse of domesticity, he got hammer and nails from his workshop in the basement and repaired the sagging screen on the kitchen door with a neat diagonal brace.
He enjoyed working with his hands. His boyhood dream had been to be a builder of fission power plants. He had even studied engineering—before he married Aurora and had to take over the ailing mechanicals agency from her indolent and alcoholic father. He was whistling happily by the time the little task was done.
When he went back through the kitchen to put up his tools, he found the household android busy clearing the untouched dinner away from the table—the androids were good enough at strictly routine tasks, but they could never learn to cope with human unpredictability.
“Stop, stop!” Slowly repeated, in the proper pitch and rhythm, his command made it halt; then he said carefully, “Set—table; set—table.”
Obediently, the gigantic thing came shuffling back with the stack of plates. He was suddenly struck with the difference between it and those new humanoids. He sighed wearily. Things looked black for the agency.
Aurora brought her new lodger in through the kitchen door. Underhill nodded to himself. This gaunt stranger, with his dark shaggy hair, emaciated face, and threadbare garb, looked to be just the sort of colorful, dramatic vagabond that always touched Aurora’s heart. She introduced them, and they sat down to wait in the front room while she went to call the children.
The old rogue didn’t look very sick, to Underhill. Perhaps his wide shoulders had a tired stoop, but his spare, tall figure was still commanding. The skin was seamed and pale, over his rawboned, cragged face, but his deep-set eyes still had a burning vitality.
