ONE FOR THE ROBOT—TWO FOR THE SAME
By ROG PHILLIPS
The ingredients were simple: one man for
one robot. But the results were something else!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
October 1950
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
I took an instinctive disliking to him from the very first. I don't know exactly what caused it. His appearance? He wore a well tailored gray plaid suit draped on what I would have sworn to be nothing but a skeleton. Blue-veined skin fitted over the exposed parts, such as his long slender hands, folded together on his lap, the stretch of bare leg below the cuffs of his perfectly pressed trousers and above his carelessly drooped sox, his turkey-like neck with its large Adam's apple threatened at any moment to wobble up and down while a gobble-gobble-gobble burst forth.
His face? It made me think of a broken handled cup inverted on a saucer, the edge of the saucer being his jaw line. If you were to wrap the cup and saucer in tightly stretched dull white plastic or rubber sheeting and paint eyes in the proper places you would have it down pat.
Maybe it was the eyes that made me dislike him. They were faded blue, but not the kind you would call characterless. It would be more accurate to call them emotionless. Not emotionless in a cold way, but in a dead way.
On either side of his head were cartilages shaped like ears, and over the top of his head faded and lifeless grey hair parted with artificial neatness.
Those were my impressions, though the hair was real enough, and I might have seen him through different eyes if I had been in a better mood.