Flaswell cleared his throat twice. “Sheila, I love you. I can’t offer you much luxury here, but if you’d stay—”
“It’s about time you found out you loved me, you dope!” she said. “Of course I’m staying!”
The next few minutes were ecstatic and decidedly vertiginous. They were interrupted at last by the sound of loud robot voices outside. The door burst open and the Marrying Robot stamped in, followed by Gunga-Sam and two farm mechanicals.
“Really!” the Marrying Robot said. “It is unbelievable! To think I’d see the day when robot pitted himself against robot!”
“What happened?” Flaswell asked.
“This foreman of yours sat on me,” the Marrying Robot said indignantly, “while his cronies held my limbs. I was merely trying to enter this room and perform my duty as set forth by the government and the Roebuck-Ward Company.”
“Why, Gunga-Sam!” Flaswell said, grinning.
The Marrying Robot hurried up to Sheila. “Are you damaged? Any dents? Any short-circuits?”
“I don’t think so,” said Sheila breathlessly.
Gunga-Sam said to Flaswell, “The fault is all mine, Boss, sir. But everyone knows that Human Man and Human Woman need solitude during the courtship period. I merely performed what I considered my duty to the Human Race in this respect, Mr. Flaswell, Boss, sahib.”
“You did well, Gunga-Sam,” Flaswell said. “I’m deeply grateful and—oh, Lord!”
“What is it?” Sheila asked apprehensively.
Flaswell was staring out the window. The farm robots were carrying the large packing case toward the house.
“The Frontier Model Bride!” said Flaswell. “What’ll we do, darling? I canceled you and legally contracted for the other one. Do you think we can break the contract?”
Sheila laughed. “Don’t worry. There’s no Frontier Model Bride in that box. Your order was canceled as soon as it was received.”
“It was?”
“Certainly.” She looked down, ashamed. “You’ll hate me for this—”
“I won’t,” he promised. “What is it?”
“Well, Frontiersmen’s pictures are on file at the Company, you know, so Brides can see what they’re getting. There is a choice—for the girls, I mean—and I’d been hanging around die place so long, unable to get unclassified as an Ultra Deluxe, that I—I made friends with the head of the order department. And,” she said all in a rush, “I got myself sent here.”
“But the Pasha of Srae—”
“I made him up.”
“But why?” Flaswell asked puzzledly. “You’re so pretty—”
“That everybody expects me to be a toy for some spoiled, pudgy idiot,” she finished with a good deal of heat. “I don’t want to be! I want to be a wife! And I’m just as good as any chunky, homely female!”
“Better,” he said.
“I can cook and doctor robots and be practical, can’t I? Haven’t I proved it?”
“Of course, dear.”
She began to cry. “But nobody would believe it, so I had to trick you into letting me stay long enough to—to fall in love with me.”
“Which I did,” he said, drying her eyes for her. “It’s all worked out fine. The whole thing was a lucky accident.”
What looked like a blush appeared on Gunga-Sam’s metallic face.
“You mean it wasn’t an accident?” Flaswell exclaimed.
“Well, sir, Mr. Flaswell, effendi, it is well known that Human Man needs attractive Human Woman. The Frontier Model sounded a little severe and Memsahib Sheila is a daughter of a friend of my former master. So I took the liberty of sending the order directly to her. She got her friend in the order department to show her your picture and ship her here. I hope you are not displeased with your humble servant for disobeying.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Flaswell finally got out “It’s like I always said—you robots understand Human People better than anyone.” He turned to Sheila. “But what is in that packing case?”
“My dresses and my jewelry, my shoes, my cosmetics, my hair styler, my—”
“But—”
“You want me to look nice when we go visiting, dear,” Sheila said. “After all, Cythera III is only fifteen days away. I looked it up before I came.”
Flaswell nodded resignedly. You had to expect something like this from an Ultra Deluxe Luxury Model Bride.
“Now!” Sheila said, turning to the Marrying Robot.
The robot didn’t answer.
“Now!” Flaswell shouted.
“You’re quite sure?” the robot queried sulkily.
“Yes! Get started!”
“I just don’t understand,” the Marrying Robot said. “Why now? Why not last week? Am I the only sane one here? Oh, well. Dearly beloved...”
And the ceremony was held at last. Flaswell proclaimed a three day holiday and the robots sang and danced and celebrated in their carefree robot fashion.
Thereafter, life was never the same on Chance. The Flaswells began to have a modest social life, to visit and be visited by couples fifteen and twenty days out, on Cythera III, Tham, and Randico I. But the rest of the time, Sheila was an irreproachable Frontier Wife, loved by the robots and idolized by her husband. The Marrying Robot, following his instruction manual, retrained himself as an accountant and bookkeeper, skills for which his mentality was peculiarly well suited. He often said the whole place would go to pieces if it weren’t for him.
And the robots continued to dig thorium from the soil, and the dir, olge, and smis blossomed, and Flaswell and Sheila shared together the responsibility of Human People’s Burden.
Flaswell was always quite vocal on the advantages of shopping at Roebuck-Ward. But Sheila knew that the real advantage was in having a foreman like the loyal, soulless Gunga-Sam.
FEAR IN THE NIGHT
She heard herself screaming as she woke up and knew she must have been screaming for long seconds. It was cold in the room but she was covered with perspiration; it rolled down her face and shoulders, down the front of her nightgown. Her back was damp with sweat and the sheet beneath her was damp.
Immediately she began to shiver.
“Are you all right5” her husband asked.
For a few moments she couldn’t answer. Her knees were drawn up and she coiled her arms tightly around them, trying to stop shuddering. Her husband was a dark mass beside her, a long dark cylinder against the faintly glimmering sheet. Looking at him, she began trembling again.
“Will it help if I snap on the light?” he asked.
“No!” she said sharply. “Don’t move—please!”
And then there was only the steady ticking of the clock, but somehow that was filled with menace also.
“Did it happen again?”
“Yes,” she said. “Just the same. For Lord’s sake, don’t touch me!” He had started to move toward her, dark and sinuous against the sheet, and she was trembling violently again.
“The dream,” he began cautiously, “was it...was I...?” Delicately, he left it unvoiced, shifting his position on the bed slightly, carefully so she wouldn’t be frightened.
But she was getting a grip on herself again. She unclenched her hands, putting the palms hard and flat against the bed.
“Yes,” she said. “The snakes again. They were crawling all over me. Big ones and little ones, hundreds of them. The room was filled with them and more were coming in the door, through the windows. The closet was filled with snakes, so full they were coming under the door onto the floor—”
“Easy,” he said. “Sure you want to talk about it?”
She didn’t answer.
“Want the light on yet?” he asked her gently.
She hesitated, then said, “Not yet. I don’t dare just yet.”
“Oh,” he said in a tone of complete understanding. “Then the other part of the dream—”
“Yes.”
“Look, perhaps you shouldn’t talk about it.”
“L
et’s talk about it.” She tried to laugh but it came out a cough. “You’d think I’d be getting used to it. For how many nights now?”
The dream always began with the little snake, slowly crawling across her arm, watching her with evil red eyes. She flung it from her, sitting up in bed. Then another slithered across the covers, fatter, faster. She flung that one away too, getting quickly out of bed and standing on the floor. Then there was one under her foot and then one was coiled in her hair, over her eyes, and through the now- opened door came still more, forcing her back on the bed, screaming, reaching for her husband.
But in the dream her husband wasn’t there. In the bed beside her, a long dark cylinder against the faintly glimmering sheets, was a tremendous snake. She didn’t realize it until her arms were around it.
“Turn on the light now,” she commanded. Her muscles contracted, straining against each other as light flooded the room. Her thighs tensed, ready to hurl her out of bed if....
But it was her husband after all.
“Dear Lord,” she breathed and relaxed completely, sagging against the mattress.
“Surprised?” he asked her, grinning wryly.
“Each time,” she told him, “each time I’m sure you won’t be there. I’m sure there’ll be a snake there.” She touched his arm just to make sure.
“You see how foolish it all is?” he said softly, soothingly. “If only you would forget. If you would only have confidence in me these nightmares would pass.”
“I know,” she said, drinking in the details of the room. The little telephone table was immensely reassuring with its litter of scribbled lists and messages. The scarred mahogany bureau was an old friend, as was the little radio, and the newspaper on the floor. And how sane her emerald-green dress was, thrown carelessly across the slipper chair!
“The doctor told you the same thing,” he said. “When we were having our trouble you associated me with everything that went wrong, everything that hurt you. And now that our troubles are over, you still do.”
“Not consciously,” she said, “I swear, not consciously.”
“But you do it all the same,” he insisted. “Remember when I wanted the divorce? When I told you I’d never loved you? Remember how you hated me then, even though you wouldn’t let me go?” He paused for breath. “You hated Helen and me. That has taken its toll. The hate has remained under our reconciliation.”
“I don’t believe I ever hated you,” she said. “Only Helen—that skinny little monkey!”
“Mustn’t speak ill of those departed from trouble,” he murmured.
“Yes,” she said thoughtfully. “I suppose I drove her to that breakdown. I can’t say I’m sorry. Do you think she’s haunting me?”
“You mustn’t blame yourself,” he said. “She was high-strung, nervous, artistic. A neurotic type.”
“I’ll get over all this now that Helen’s gone.” She smiled at him and the lines of worry on her forehead vanished. “I’m so crazy about you,” she murmured, running her fingers through his light-brown hair. “I’d never let you go.”
“You’d better not.” He smiled back at her. “I don’t want to go.”
“Just help me.”
“With all I’ve got.” He bent forward and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “But, darling, unless you get over these nightmares—featuring me as the principal villain—I’ll have to—”
“Don’t say it,” she murmured quickly. “I can’t bear the thought. And we are past the bad time.”
He nodded.
“You’re right, though,” she said. “I think I’ll try a different psychiatrist. I can’t stand much more of this. These dreams, night after night.”
“And they’re getting worse,” he reminded her, frowning. “At first it was only once in a while but now it’s every night. Soon, if you don’t do something, it’ll be—”
“All right,” she said. “Don’t talk about it.”
“I have to. I’m getting worried. If this snake fixation keeps up, you’ll be taking a knife to me while I’m asleep one of these nights.”
“Never,” she told him. “But don’t talk about it. I want to forget it. I don’t think it’ll happen again. Do you?”
“I hope not,” he said.
She reached across him and turned off the light, kissed him and closed her eyes.
After a few minutes she turned over on her side. In half an hour she rolled over again, said something incoherent and was quiet. After twenty minutes more she had shrugged one shoulder but, other than that, made no motion.
Her husband was a dark mass beside her, propped up on one elbow. He lay in the darkness, thinking, listening to her breathe, hearing the tick of the clock. Then he stretched out at full length.
Slowly he untied the cord of his pajamas and pulled until he had a foot of it free. Then he drew back the covers. Very gently he rolled toward her with the cord in his hand, listening to her breathing. He placed the cord against her arm. Slowly, allowing himself seconds to an inch, he pulled the cord along her arm.
Presently she moaned.
BAD MEDICINE
On May 2, 2103, Elwood Caswell walked rapidly down Broadway with a loaded revolver hidden in his coat pocket. He didn’t want to use the weapon, but feared he might anyhow. This was a justifiable assumption, for Caswell was a homicidal maniac.
It was a gentle, misty spring day and the air held the smell of rain and blossoming dogwood. Caswell gripped the revolver in his sweaty right hand and tried to think of a single valid reason why he should not kill a man named Magnessen, who, the other day, had commented on how well Caswell looked.
What business was it of Magnessen’s how he looked? Damned busybodies, always spoiling things for everybody....
Caswell was a choleric little man with fierce red eyes, bulldog jowls and ginger-red hair. He was the sort you would expect to find perched on a detergent box, orating to a crowd of lunching businessmen and amused students, shouting, “Mars for the Martians, Venus for the Venusians!”
But in truth, Caswell was uninterested in the deplorable social conditions of extraterrestrials. He was a jetbus conductor for the New York Rapid Transit Corporation. He minded his own business. And he was quite mad.
Fortunately, he knew this at least part of the time, with at least half of his mind.
Perspiring freely, Caswell continued down Broadway toward the 43rd Street branch of Home Therapy Appliances, Inc. His friend Magnessen would be finishing work soon, returning to his little apartment less than a block from Caswell’s. How easy it would be, how pleasant, to saunter in, exchange a few words and....
No! Caswell took a deep gulp of air and reminded himself that he didn’t really want to kill anyone. It was not right to kill people. The authorities would lock him up, his friends wouldn’t understand, his mother would never have approved.
But these arguments seemed pallid, over-intellectual and entirely without force. The simple fact remained—he wanted to kill Magnessen.
Could so strong a desire be wrong? Or even unhealthy?
Yes, it could! With an agonized groan, Caswell sprinted the last few steps into the Home Therapy Appliances Store.
Just being within such a place gave him an immediate sense of relief. The lighting was discreet, the draperies were neutral, the displays of glittering therapy machines were neither too bland nor obstreperous. It was the kind of place where a man could happily lie down on the carpet in the shadow of the therapy machines, secure in the knowledge that help for any sort of trouble was at hand.
A clerk with fair hair and a long, supercilious nose glided up softly, but not too softly, and murmured, “May one help?”
“Therapy!” said Caswell.
“Of course, sir,” the clerk answered, smoothing his lapels and smiling winningly. “That is what we are here for.” He gave Caswell a searching look, performed an instant mental diagnosis, and tapped a gleaming white-and-copper machine.
“Now this,” the clerk said, “is the new Alc
oholic Reliever, built by IBM and advertised in the leading magazines. A handsome piece of furniture, I think you will agree, and not out of place in any home. It opens into a television set.”
With a flick of his narrow wrist, the clerk opened the Alcoholic Reliever, revealing a 52-inch screen.
“I need—” Caswell began.
“Therapy,” the clerk finished for him. “Of course. I just wanted to point out that this model need never cause embarrassment for yourself, your friends or loved ones. Notice, if you will, the recessed dial which controls the desired degree of drinking. See? If you do not wish total abstinence, you can set it to heavy, moderate, social or light. That is a new feature, unique in mechanotherapy.”
“I am not an alcoholic,” Caswell said, with considerable dignity. “The New York Rapid Transit Corporation does not hire alcoholics.”
“Oh,” said the clerk, glancing distrustfully at Caswell’s bloodshot eyes. “You seem a little nervous. Perhaps the portable Bendix Anxiety Reducer—”
“Anxiety’s not my ticket, either. What have you got for homicidal mania?”
The clerk pursed his lips. “Schizophrenic or manic-depressive origins?”
“I don’t know,” Caswell admitted, somewhat taken aback.
“It really doesn’t matter,” the clerk told him. “Just a private theory of my own. From my experience in the store, redheads and blonds are prone to schizophrenia, while brunettes incline toward the manic- depressive.”
“That’s interesting. Have you worked here long?”
“A week. Now then, here is just what you need, sir.” He put his hand affectionately on a squat black machine with chrome trim.
“What’s that?”
“That, sir, is the Rex Regenerator, built by General Motors. Isn’t it handsome? It can go with any decor and opens up into a well- stocked bar. Your friends, family, loved ones need never know—”
“Will it cure a homicidal urge?” Caswell asked. “A strong one?”
“Absolutely. Don’t confuse this with the little ten amp neurosis models. This is a hefty, heavy-duty, twenty-five amp machine for a really deep-rooted major condition.”
“That’s what I’ve got,” said Caswell, with pardonable pride.
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