One for the Robot—Two for the Same

The ingredients were simple: one man for one robot. But the results were something else!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy October 1950 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

I took an instinctive disliking to him from the very first. I don't know exactly what caused it. His appearance? He wore a well tailored gray plaid suit draped on what I would have sworn to be nothing but a skeleton. Blue-veined skin fitted over the exposed parts, such as his long slender hands, folded together on his lap, the stretch of bare leg below the cuffs of his perfectly pressed trousers and above his carelessly drooped sox, his turkey-like neck with its large Adam's apple threatened at any moment to wobble up and down while a gobble-gobble-gobble burst forth.

His face? It made me think of a broken handled cup inverted on a saucer, the edge of the saucer being his jaw line. If you were to wrap the cup and saucer in tightly stretched dull white plastic or rubber sheeting and paint eyes in the proper places you would have it down pat.

Maybe it was the eyes that made me dislike him. They were faded blue, but not the kind you would call characterless. It would be more accurate to call them emotionless. Not emotionless in a cold way, but in a dead way.

On either side of his head were cartilages shaped like ears, and over the top of his head faded and lifeless grey hair parted with artificial neatness.

Those were my impressions, though the hair was real enough, and I might have seen him through different eyes if I had been in a better mood.

He wore his suit like it didn't belong to him, or if it did he very seldom had one on. I looked closely at him, sitting near me on the park bench half turned toward where I was slouched, trying to imagine what type of clothes would be natural to him; all I could conjure up was a white frock and rubber gloves and a white face mask.

He had asked me, "Are you employed?", and I had swallowed an impulse to snap at him long enough to size him up.

So now I had sized him up. I didn't like anything about him. But a civil answer to his question might lead to the price of a badly needed meal. I forced a polite grin.

"Not at the moment," I said.

"I surmised as much," he said quickly, smirking. His voice had the quality of a high school chemistry teacher talking to an audience of sulphuric acid carboys.

I turned away, looking out across the expanse of lawn and trees and flower beds of the park to where the double decker busses bobbed along like water bugs above the carpet of cars flowing along the inner drive. The impatient honking of tired motorists on their way home after their day's work mingled with the contented quacking of ducks on the pond at my back.

"Would you like to earn some money?"

"Huh?" I said, jerking my attention back to him.

His smile was the kind a professor would give to a pupil who had just awakened from a sound sleep.

"I said, would you like to earn some money?"

"Uh, uh," I said. "I'm hungry. I'd mow your lawn on an empty stomach and get maybe fifty cents. That's one hamburger and two cups of coffee. I'd still be hungry."

Instead of answering, he reached one of his blue-veined hands inside his coat and drew out a new looking black leather billfold. I watched him while he pulled out a thick sheaf of currency.

He carefully counted out ten twenty dollar bills, dropping them one by one in a neat pile on the park bench. He stuck the rest back in his billfold and took out a white glossy card, dropping it on the pile of bills.

Then, smirking, he stood up and turned his back on me, slowly walking down the path that wound up onto a bridge over the duck pond, without looking back.

I waited until he was out of sight, then picked up the card and read the name printed on it in raised green lettering: Dr. Leopold Moriss.