"I have 200 credits," Higgens intoned, "which, if I do say so, is about one tenth of what she's worth. Do I hear three?"
"300," the drunk said.
"350," the Dutch colonist said.
"450."
The Dutch colonist could outbid anybody in the crowd, and everybody in the crowd knew it, including the drunk. But the drunk didn't give a damn, and he went along to the one thousand mark before dropping out. The Dutch colonist got her for 1100 credits, and the first stage of Isolde's servitude began.
The Dutch colonist's name was Vanderzee. You've seen him, too. Forget about his race: his race has nothing to do with it. All races have their Vanderzees. This one was a bachelor, and made a prosperous living buying seconds in large lots and selling them for firsts. The business he happened to be in was the clothing business, but no matter what business he had been in, he would have conducted it in the same way. There were Vanderzees in the time of Gautama Siddhartha; there were Vanderzees in the time of Christ; there were Vanderzees in the time of FDR. There will always be Vanderzees.
This one took his purchase home in a ground skimmer. He looked at her sideways as they skimmed along, a little awed by her classic features, which even the converter's skill had been unable to destroy altogether. By the time they reached the apartment above his store, the first droppings of his sense of inferiority had already fertilized the ground where his latent hatred lay, and when he asked her a simple question, the hatred burst forth in twisted stems and ugly blossoms. For, instead of answering the question with the simple "yes sir" or "no sir" which was all it required, Isolde responded with the particular recitative it most closely provoked, and the windows rattled in the majestic blast from her Kirsten Flagstad tapes. Vanderzee, for all his shrewdness, had neglected to make the most obvious inquiry of all from Higgens, re his prospective purchase—i.e., Can she talk?
But Vanderzee didn't take her back. For one thing, he knew that Higgens had already closed his lock and would be blasting off any second. For another, taking her back would have been a tacit admission that he had been outwitted by a business man sharper than himself, and this he could not bear. No, Vanderzee had made a purchase, and he would stick with it: but he would get his money's worth out of it if it took him the rest of his life.
Isolde was put to work with a vengeance. Each dawn she milked the milch bront Vanderzee kept in the shed behind his store. Each day she washed dishes, cooked, scrubbed floors, waited on customers and unloaded supplies for Vanderzee. Each evening she washed dishes, cooked, scrubbed floors, waited on customers and unloaded supplies for Lanesce, the local tavern keeper to whom Vanderzee sublet her for part time work. But in this subsidiary attempt to get all he could out of her, and in the getting of it, obtain his revenge on her for having deceived him (by the end of the second week, Vanderzee actually had himself believing that it was she, and not Higgens, who had put one over on him), Vanderzee made a mistake.
It was a natural enough mistake. Who would have dreamed that an android who screamed or sang gibberish (German was a dead language by 2241 in any but the most esoteric sense, and Vanderzee was generations removed from his native tongue) could attain to any degree of popularity whatsoever in any kind of an establishment whatsoever. But taverns are not ordinary establishments, and frequently events come to pass in them that could never have come to pass elsewhere. Isolde became popular. She became so popular, in fact, that Lanesce's business doubled. Tripled.