He climbed stiffly down from the high stool, and snapped on the lights at last—cheap fluorescent fixtures, which a man could light and extinguish for himself. He unrolled his drawings and explained the work that Underhill could do. Underhill agreed to come back early next morning.
“I can bring some tools from my workshop,” he added. “There’s a small lathe I used to turn parts for models, a portable drill, and a vise.”
“We need them,” the old man said. “But watch yourself. You don’t have my immunity, remember. And, if they ever suspect, mine is gone.”
Reluctantly, then, he left the shabby little rooms with the cracks in the yellowed plaster and the worn familiar carpets over the manmade floor. He shut the door behind him—a common, creaking wooden door, simple enough for a man to work. Trembling and afraid, he went back down the steps and across to the new shining door that he couldn’t open.
“At your service, Mr. Underhill.” Before he could lift his hand to knock, that bright smooth panel slid back silently. Inside, the little black mechanical stood waiting, blind and forever alert. “Your dinner is ready, sir.”
Something made him shudder. In its slender naked grace, he could see the power of all those teeming horses, benevolent and yet appalling, perfect and invincible. The flimsy little weapon that Sledge called an integrator seemed suddenly a forlorn and foolish hope. A black depression settled upon him, but he didn’t dare to show it.
VII
Underhill went circumspectly down the basement steps next morning to steal his own tools. He found the basement enlarged and changed. The new floor, warm and dark and elastic, made his feet as silent as a humanoid’s. The new walls shone softly. Neat luminous signs identified several new doors: LAUNDRY, STORAGE, GAME ROOM, WORKSHOP.
He paused uncertainly in front of the workshop. The new sliding panel glowed with soft greenish light. It was locked. The lock had no keyhole, but only a little oval plate of some white metal that doubtless covered a rhodomagnetic relay. He pushed at it, uselessly.
“At your service, Mr. Underhill.” He made a guilty start, and tried not to show the sudden trembling in his knees. He had made sure that one humanoid would be busy for half an hour, washing Aurora’s hair, and he hadn’t known there was another in the house. It must have come out of the door marked STORAGE, for it stood there motionless beneath the sign, benevolently solicitous, beautiful and terrible. “What do you wish?”
“Er—nothing.” Its blind steel eyes were staring. Afraid that it would see his secret purpose, he groped desperately for logic. “Just looking around.” His voice came hoarse and dry. “Some improvements you’ve made!” He nodded suddenly at the door marked GAME ROOM. “What’s in there?”
It didn’t even have to move, to work the concealed relay. The bright panel slid silently open as he started toward it. Dark walls, beyond, burst into soft luminescence. The room was bare.
“We are manufacturing recreational equipment,” it explained brightly. “We shall furnish the room as soon as possible.”
To end an awkward pause, Underhill muttered hoarsely, “Little Frank has a set of darts, and I think we had some old exercising clubs.”
“We have taken them away,” the humanoid informed him softly. “Such instruments are dangerous. We shall furnish safe equipment.” Suicide, he remembered, was also forbidden.
“A set of wooden blocks, I suppose,” he said bitterly.
“Wooden blocks are dangerously hard,” it told him gently. “Wooden splinters can be harmful. We manufacture plastic building blocks, which are entirely safe. Do you wish a set of those?”
Speechless, he merely stared at its dark, graceful face.
“We shall also have to remove the tools from your workshop,” it informed him softly. “Such tools are excessively dangerous. We can, however, supply you with equipment for shaping soft plastics.”
“Thanks,” he muttered uneasily. “No rush about that.”
He started to retreat, but the humanoid stopped him.
“Now that you have lost your business,” it urged, “we suggest that you formally accept our total service. Assignors have a preference, so that we should be able to complete your household staff at once.”
“No rush about that, either,” he said grimly.
He escaped from the house—although he had to wait for it to open the back door for him—and climbed the stair to the garage apartment. Sledge let him in. He sank into the crippled kitchen chair, grateful for the cracked walls that didn’t shine and the door that man could work.
“I couldn’t get the tools,” he reported despairingly. “They are going to take them.”
Now, by gray daylight, the old man looked bleak and pale. His rawboned face looked drawn, his hollowed sockets deeply shadowed, as if he hadn’t slept. Underhill saw the tray of neglected food, still forgotten on the floor.
“I’ll go back with you.” Worn as he was, his tortured eyes had a blue spark of purpose. “We must have the tools. I believe my immunity will protect us both.”
He found a battered traveling bag. Underhill went with him down the steps and across to the house. At the back door, he produced a tiny horseshoe of white palladium, which he touched to the metal oval. The door slid open promptly. They went on through the kitchen to the basement stair.
A little black mechanical stood at the sink, washing dishes with never a splash or a clatter. Underhill glanced at it uneasily—he supposed this must be the one that had come upon him from the storage room, since the other should still be busy with Aurora’s hair.
Sledge’s dubious immunity seemed a very uncertain defense against its vast, remote intelligence. Underhill felt a tingled shudder. He hurried on, breathless and relieved, for it ignored them.
The basement corridor was dark. Sledge touched the tiny horseshoe to another relay, to light the walls. He opened the workshop door, and lit the walls inside.
The shop had been dismantled. Benches and cabinets were demolished. The old concrete walls had been covered with some sleek, luminous stuff. For one sick moment, Underhill thought that the tools were already gone. Then he found them, piled in a corner with the archery set that Aurora had bought the summer before—another item too dangerous for fragile and suicidal humanity—all ready for disposal.
They loaded the bag with the tiny lathe, the drill and vise, a few smaller tools. Underhill took up the burden, as Sledge extinguished the wall and waited to close the door. Still the humanoid was busy at the sink, and still—inexplicably—it didn’t seem aware of them.
Suddenly blue and wheezing, Sledge had to stop to cough on the outside stair, but at last they got back to the little apartment, where the invaders were forbidden to intrude. Underhill mounted the lathe on the battered library table in the tiny front room and went to work.
Slowly, day by day, the director took form.
Sometimes Underhill’s doubts came back. Sometimes, when he watched the cyanotic color of Sledge’s haggard face and the wild trembling of his twisted, shrunken hands, he was afraid the old man’s mind might be as ill as his body, his plan to stop the dark invaders all foolish illusion.
Sometimes, when he studied that tiny machine on the kitchen table, the pivoted needle and the thick lead ball, the whole project seemed the sheerest folly. How could anything detonate the seas of a planet so far away that its very mother star was only a telescopic object?
The humanoids, however, always cured his doubts.
It was always hard for Underhill to leave the shelter of the little apartment, because he didn’t feel at home in the bright new world the humanoids were building. He didn’t care for the shining splendor of his new bathroom, because he couldn’t work the taps—some suicidal human being might try to drown himself. He didn’t like the windows that only a mechanical could open—a man might accidentally fall, or suicidally jump—or even the majestic music room with the wonderful glittering equipment that only a humanoid could play.
He came to share the old man’s desperate urgency, until Sledge warned him solemnly: “You mustn’t spend too much time with me. You mustn’t let them guess our work is so important. Better put on an act—you’re slowly getting to like them, and you’re just killing time, helping me.”
