The result, of course, was Helen. The Dillard people had performed a miracle and put all the works in a girl-modeled case. Even the plastic-and-rubberite face was designed for flexibility to express emotions, and she was complete with tear glands and taste buds, ready to simulate every human action, from breathing to pulling hair. The bill they sent with her was another miracle, but Dave and I scraped it together; we had to turn Lena over to an exchange to complete it, though, and thereafter we ate out.
I’d performed plenty of delicate operations on living tissues, and some of them had been tricky, but I still felt like a pre-med student as we opened the front plate of her torso and began to sever the leads of her "nerves." Dave’s mechanical glands were all prepared, complex little bundles of radio tubes and wires that heterodyned on the electrical thought impulses and distorted them as adrenalin distorts the reaction of human minds.
Instead of sleeping that night, we pored over the schematic diagrams of her structures, tracing the thought mazes of her wiring, severing the leaders, implanting the heterones, as Dave called them. And while we worked, a mechanical tape fed carefully prepared thoughts of consciousness and awareness of life and feeling into an auxiliary memory coil. Dave believed in leaving nothing to chance.
It was growing light as we finished, exhausted and exultant. All that remained was the starting of her electrical power; like all the Dillard mechs, she was equipped with a tiny atomotor instead of batteries, and once started she would need no further attention.
Dave refused to turn her on. "Wait until we’ve slept and rested," he advised. "I’m as eager to try her as you are, but we can’t do much studying with our minds half dead. Turn in, and we’ll leave Helen until later."
Even though we were both reluctant to follow it, we knew the idea was sound. We turned in, and sleep hit us before the air conditioner could cut down to sleeping temperature. And then Dave was pounding on my shoulder.
"Phil! Hey, snap out of it!"
I groaned, turned over, and faced him. "Well?… Uh! What is it? Did Helen—"
"No, it’s old Mrs. Van Styler. She ’visored to say her son has an infatuation for a servant girl, and she wants you to come out and give counterhormones. They’re at the summer camp in Maine."
Rich Mrs. Van Styler! I couldn’t afford to let that account down, now that Helen had used up the last of my funds. But it wasn’t a job I cared for.
"Counterhormones! That’ll take two weeks’ full time. Anyway, I’m no society doctor, messing with glands to keep fools happy. My job’s taking care of serious trouble."
"And you want to watch Helen." Dave was grinning, but he was serious too. "I told her it’d cost her fifty thousand!"
"Huh?"
"And she said okay, if you hurried."
Of course, there was only one thing to do, though I could have wrung fat Mrs. Van Styler’s neck cheerfully. It wouldn’t have happened if she’d used robots like everyone else—but she had to be different.
Consequently, while Dave was back home puttering with Helen, I was racking my brain to trick Archy Van Styler into getting the counterhormones, and giving the servant girl the same. Oh, I wasn’t supposed to, but the poor kid was crazy about Archy. Dave might have written, I thought, but never a word did I get.
It was three weeks later instead of two when I reported that Archy was "cured," and collected on the line. With that money in my pocket, I hired a personal rocket and was back in Messina in half an hour. I didn’t waste time in reaching the house.
As I stepped into the alcove, I heard a light patter of feet, and an eager voice called out, "Dave, dear?" For a minute I couldn’t answer, and the voice came again, pleading, "Dave?"
I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect Helen to meet me that way, stopping and staring at me, obvious disappointment on her face, little hands fluttering up against her breast.
"Oh," she cried. "I thought it was Dave. He hardly comes home to eat now, but I’ve had supper waiting hours." She dropped her hands and managed a smile. "You’re Phil, aren’t you? Dave told me about you when… at first. I’m so glad to see you home, Phil."
"Glad to see you doing so well, Helen." Now, what does one say for light conversation with a robot? "You said something about supper?"
"Oh, yes. I guess Dave ate downtown again, so we might as well go in. It’ll be nice having someone to talk to around the house, Phil. You don’t mind if I call you Phil, do you? You know, you’re sort of a godfather to me."
We ate. I hadn’t counted on such behavior, but apparently she considered eating as normal as walking. She didn’t do much eating, at that; most of the time she spent staring at the front door.
Dave came in as we were finishing, a frown a yard wide on his face. Helen started to rise, but he ducked toward the stairs, throwing words over his shoulder.
"Hi, Phil. See you up here later."
There was something radically wrong with him. For a moment I’d thought his eyes were haunted, and as I turned to Helen hers were filling with tears. She gulped, choked them back, and fell viciously on her food.
"What’s the matter with him… and you?" I asked.
"He’s sick of me." She pushed her plate away and got up hastily. "You’d better see him while I clean up. And there’s nothing wrong with me. And it’s not my fault, anyway." She grabbed the dishes and ducked into the kitchen; I could have sworn she was crying.
Maybe all thought is a series of conditioned reflexes—but she certainly had picked up a lot of conditioning while I was gone. Lena in her heyday had been nothing like this. I went up to see if Dave could make any sense out of the hodgepodge.
He was squirting soda into a large glass of apple brandy, and I saw that the bottle was nearly empty. "Join me?" he asked.
It seemed like a good idea. The roaring blast of an ion rocket overhead was the only familiar thing left in the house. From the look around Dave’s eyes, it wasn’t the first bottle he’d emptied while I was gone, and there were more left. He dug out a new bottle for his own drink.
"Of course, it’s none of my business, Dave, but that stuff won’t steady your nerves any. What’s gotten into you and Helen? Been seeing ghosts?"
Helen was wrong; he hadn’t been eating downtown—nor anywhere else. His muscles collapsed into a chain in a way that spoke of fatigue and nerves, but mostly of hunger. "You noticed it, eh?"
"Noticed it? The two of you jammed it down my throat."
"Uhmmm." He swatted at a nonexistent fly and slumped farther down in the pneumatic. "Guess maybe I should have waited with Helen until you got back. But if that stereo cast hadn’t changed… Anyway, it did. And those mushy books of yours finished the job."
"Thanks. That makes it all clear."
"You know, Phil, I’ve got a place up in the country—fruit ranch. My dad left it to me. Think I’ll look it over."
And that’s the way it went. But finally, by much liquor and more perspiration, I got some of the story out of him before I gave him a phenobarbital and put him to bed. Then I hunted up Helen and dug the rest of the story from her, until it made sense.
Apparently as soon as I was gone Dave had turned her on and made preliminary tests, which were entirely satisfactory. She had reacted beautifully—so well that he decided to leave her and go down to work as usual.
Naturally, with all her untried emotions, she was filled with curiosity and wanted him to stay. Then he had an inspiration. After showing her what her duties about the house would be, he set her down in front of the stereovisor, tuned in a travelogue, and left her to occupy her time with that.