He sat down on the crate again and looked at the robot parts.
No one would ever guess. Come inventory time, How-2 Kits would be long one dog and short one robot, but with carloads of dog kit orders filled and thousands of robots sold, it would be impossible to check.
Gordon Knight had never, in all his life, done a consciously dishonest thing. But now he made a dishonest decision and he knew it was dishonest and there was nothing to be said in defense of it. Perhaps the worst of all was that he was dishonest with himself.
At first, he told himself that he would send the robot back, but-since he had always wanted to put a robot together-he would assemble this one and then take it apart, repack it and send it back to the company. He wouldn't activate it. He would just assemble it.
But all the time he knew that he was lying to himself, realized that the least he was doing was advancing, step by evasive step, toward dishonesty. And he knew he was doing it this way because he didn't have the nerve to be forthrightly crooked.
So he sat down that night and read the instructions carefully, identifying each of the parts and their several features as he went along. For this was the way you went at a How-2. You didn't rush ahead. You took it slowly, point by point, got the picture firmly in your mind before you started to put the parts together. Knight, by now, was an expert at not rushing ahead. Besides, he didn't know when he would ever get another chance at a robot.
It was the beginning of his four days off and he buckled down to the task and put his heart into it. He had some trouble with the biologic concepts and had to look up a text on organic chemistry and try to trace some of the processes. He found the going tough. It had been a long time since he had paid any attention to organic chemistry, and he found that he had forgotten the little he had known.
By bedtime of the second day, he had fumbled enough information out of the textbook to understand what was necessary to put the robot together.
He was a little upset when Grace, discovering what he was working on, immediately thought up household tasks for the robot. But he put her off as best he could and, the next day, he went at the job of assembly.
He got the robot together without the slightest trouble, being fairly handy with tools-but mostly because he religiously followed the first axiom of How-2-ism by knowing what he was about before he began.
At first, he kept assuring himself that as soon as he had the robot together, he would disassemble it. But when he was finished, he just had to see it work. No sense putting in all that time and not knowing if he had gotten it right, he argued. So he flipped the activating switch and screwed in the final plate.
The robot came alive and looked at Knight.
Then it said, "I am a robot. My name is Albert. What is there to do?"
"Now take it easy, Albert," Knight said hastily. "Sit down and rest while we have a talk."
"I don't need to rest," it said.
"All right, then, just take it easy. I can't keep you, of course. But as long as you're activated, I'd like to see what you can do. There's the house to take care of, and the garden and the lawn to mind, and I'd been thinking about the landscaping…"
He stopped then and smote his forehead with an open palm. "Attachments! How can I get hold of the attachments?"
"Never mind," said Albert. "Don't get upset. Just tell me what's to be done."
So Knight told him, leaving the landscaping till the last and being a bit apologetic about it.
"A hundred acres is a lot of land and you can't spend all your time on it. Grace wants some housework done, and there's the garden and the lawn."
"Tell you what you do," said Albert. "I'll write a list of things for you to order and you leave it all to me. You have a well-equipped workship. I'll get along."
"You mean you'll build your own attachments?"
"Quit worrying," Albert told him. "Where's a pencil and some paper?"
Knight got them for him and Albert wrote down a list of materials-steel in several dimensions and specifications, aluminum of various gauges, copper wire and a lot of other items.
"There!" said Albert, handing him the paper. "That won't set you back more than a thousand and it'll put us in business. You better call in the order so we can get started."
Knight called in the order and Albert began nosing around the place and quickly collected a pile of junk that had been left lying around.
"All good stuff," he said.
Albert picked out some steel scrap and started up the forge and went to work. Knight watched him for a while, then went up to dinner.
"Albert is a wonder," he told Grace. "He's making his own attachments."
"Did you tell him about the jobs I want done?"
"Sure. But first he's got to get the attachments made."
"I want him to keep the place clean," said Grace, "and there are new drapes to be made, and the kitchen to be painted, and all those leaky faucets you never had the time to fix."
"Yes, dear."
"And I wonder if he could learn to cook."
"I didn't ask him, but I suppose he could."
"He's going to be a tremendous help to me," said Grace. "Just think, I can spend all my time at painting!"
Through long practice, he knew exactly how to handle this phase of the conversation. He simply detached himself, split himself in two. One part sat and listened and, at intervals, made appropriate responses, while the other part went on thinking about more important matters.
Several times, after they had gone to bed, he woke in the night and heard Albert banging away in the basement workshop and was a little surprised until he remembered that a robot worked around the clock, all day, every day. Knight lay there and stared up at the blackness of the ceiling and congratulated himself on having a robot. Just temporarily, to be sure-he would send Albert back in a day or so. There was nothing wrong in enjoying the thing for a little while, was there?
The next day, Knight went into the basement to see if Albert needed help, but the robot affably said he didn't. Knight stood around for a while and then left Albert to himself and tried to get interested in a model locomotive he had started a year or two before, but had laid aside to do something else. Somehow, he couldn't work up much enthusiasm over it any more, and he sat there, rather ill at ease, and wondered what was the matter with him. Maybe he needed a new interest. He had often thought he would like to take up puppetry and now might be the time to do it.
He got out some catalogues and How-2 magazines and leafed through them, but was able to arouse only mild and transitory interest in archery, mountain-climbing and boat-building. The rest left him cold. It seemed he was singularly uninspired this particular day.
So he went over to see Anson Lee.
He found Lee stretched out in a hammock, smoking a pipe and reading Proust, with a jug set beneath the hammock within easy reaching distance.
Lee laid aside the book and pointed to another hammock slung a few feet from where he lay. "Climb aboard and let's have a restful visit."
Knight hoisted himself into the hammock, feeling rather silly.
"Look at that sky," Lee said. "Did you ever see another so bluer'
"I wouldn't know," Knight told him. "I'm not an expert on meteorology."
"Pity," Lee said. "You're not an expert on birds, either."
"For a time, I was a member of a bird-watching club."
"And worked at it so hard, you got tired and quit before the year was out. It wasn't a bird-watching club you belonged to-it was an endurance race. Everyone tried to see more birds than anyone else. You made a contest of it. And you took notes, I bet."
"Sure we did. What's wrong with that?"
"Not a thing," said Lee, "if you hadn't been quite so grim about it."
"Grim? How would you know?"
"It's the way you live. It's the way everyone lives now. Except me, of course. Look at that robin, that ragged-looking one in the apple tree. He's a friend of mine. We've been acquainted for all of six years now. I could write a book about that bird-and if he could read, he'd approve of it. But I won't, of course. If I wrote the book, I couldn't watch the robin."