McGeachin was followed by a Class Three, All-Purpose Manual Labor Robot, well-burnished but of rather an early pattern. Surely, Mr. Replogle thought, if the financier had to use a mechanical man, and personal attendants were far more hand-made, he could at least have got a more recent model.
"Welcome to Cimabue, Mr. McGeachin," Mr. Ditmars and Mr. Replogle said almost simultaneously.
"But where is Orville?" the senior partner added.
McGeachin pointed with his long green cigar. "This is Orville," he said in a crisp metallic voice.
Mr. Replogle could feel himself growing pale all the way down to his mukluks. This was precisely the way his nightmare had always begun. Only now it was reality ... or was it? Perhaps he was back in the dream again. He could close his eyes and, when he opened them, he would be lying in his own standard air-conditioned toti-comfort sleeplounge under his own satin-covered, goose-down filled luxury quilt.
"A robot!" he could hear Mr. Ditmars wail, as the typopads began to click thinly, his voice somehow sounding far away. "How could you—why didn't you let us know he was a robot beforehand?"
Mr. Replogle opened his eyes and nothing had changed; it was all real—it was the end.
"Because you would have discriminated against him," Hervey McGeachin was saying, his grey face shiny with excessive emotion. "Everybody discriminates against my poor robots. Trustworthy, hard-working, clean, loyal to a fault—yet everybody discriminates against them merely because they're machines. I knew that, if I had told you he was a robot, you would never have hung his pictures in Cimabue, in spite of the fact that it was I who recommended him."
Top management or no, Mr. Replogle felt he must speak; there were principles at stake. The dismal future of humanity rested somehow in his own shaking hands. "Sir," he said, in a hoarse voice, "you have not dealt fairly with us. You said that this Orville was a protege of yours."
"And so he is." McGeachin put a thick, unmuscular arm around the robot's hard shoulders. "He is my protege and friend and I don't care if people do call me a robot-lover."