Gradually, Joe Mulloy began to get his way in everything by virtue of his sneer. It was not merely openly supercilious; that was the beauty of it. It was so subtle, so faint, and yet such an open avowal of contempt for the entire human race, that try as the people he tormented would, to find something in his sneer to charge him with, they never found anything.
In a very few years, registration day at Joe's elementary school became a game of Russian Roulette, having as the loaded chamber the question: "Who's going to get little Joey Mulloy in his class this year?" Finally, when Joe Mulloy was fifteen years old, the local Board of Education wisely decided to end Joe's formal education, rather than make screaming meemies an occupational disease at the local high school.
Joe's father welcomed the expelling as an excuse to beat him to a pulp and kick him out of the house. It was not until three days later that the memory of Joe's sneer, enduring through all the punishment he had received, made the father blow his brains out with the most accurate German Luger he could buy at the pawn shop on short notice.
But Joe's friends would have been wrong in the second instance, for Joseph Mulloy was not chronically indolent. In his own profession, Joe Mulloy was the most industrious man imaginable. For Joe Mulloy was a robot builder.
Disinherited by his father, he had made a beeline for the nearest positronics laboratory. The personnel manager had flatly refused him the job when he had told her he had absolutely no qualifications, but she was so disconcerted by his persistent sneer that she had to give him the job just to get him out of her sight.
Once in the laboratory, he had gone right to work learning everything there was to know about robots, scorning all help from the other technicians. Since he held other scientists, past or present, in an ineffable contempt, he had to learn everything by experience instead of studying what his merely human predecessors had done. He was so empirical that he learned all about alternating current by deliberately sticking a wet finger in a light socket again and again.
He made mistakes at first, of course. In fact, he ruined several thousand dollars' worth of laboratory equipment during his apprenticeship. But his amazing sneer conquered all, and he was soon recognized as the most brilliant—and the most conceited—man in the field of positronics.
Now Joe Mulloy was lounging in a plush office chair, cultivating to near perfection his already mature sneer, and suddenly feeling maddeningly thirsty.
"Robot!" he said.