old for the Old Man. The same old bromides every time; and the same hearty chuckle. Ben left on the end of it.

Dialing home on his new, Company-owned, convertible soar-kart, he felt not too bad. Some of the old lift in spirits came as the kart-pilot circuits digested the directions, selected a route and zipped up into a north-north-west traffic pattern. The Old Man was a wonderful sales manager and boss. The new house-warming pitch that he and Betty would try tonight was smart. He could feel he had done something.

Exercising his sales ability with fair success, he fed himself this pitch all along the two hundred mile, twenty-minute hop home from the city. The time and distance didn’t bother him. “Gives me time to think,” he had told Betty. Whether or not this seemed to her an advantage, she didn’t say. At least she

liked the place, “Amalgamated’s

Country Gentleman Estate—Spacious, Yet fully Automated.”

“We are,” the Old Man told Ben when he was given the Company-assigned quarters, “starting a new trend. With the terrific decline in birth rate during the past 90 to 100 years, you’ll be astonished at how much room there is out there. No reason for everyone to live in the suburban centers any more. With millions of empty apartments in them, high time we built something else, eh? Trouble with people today, no initiative in obsolescing. But we’ll move them.”

Home, Ben left the kart out and conveyed up the walk. The front door opened. Betty had been watching for him. He walked to the family vueroom, as usual declining to convey in the house. The hell with the conveyor’s feelings, if so simple a robot really had any. He liked to walk.

“Color pattern,” Betty ordered the vuescreen as he came in, “robot audio out.” With people talking in the house it was still necessary to put the machines under master automatic and manual control. Some of the less sophisticated robots might pick up some chance phrase of conversation and interpret it as an order if left on audio.

“Ben,” said Betty, getting up to meet him, “you’re late.”

Ben was too good a salesman [p 29] to argue that. Instead, he took her in his arms and kissed her. It was a very good sixty seconds later that she pushed him away with a severeness destroyed by a blush and a giggle to say, “Late but making up for lost time, huh? And sober, too. You must be feeling good for a change.”

“Sure—and you feel even better, sugar.” He reached for her again. She slipped away from him, laughing, but his wrist tel-timer caught on the locket she always wore, her only memento

from her parents, dead in the old moon-orb crash disaster. She stood still, slightly annoyed, as he unhooked and his mood was, not broken, but set back a little. “What’s got into you tonight anyway, Ben?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Did I tell you, the O.M. may give us a vacation? Remember some of those nights up at that new ‘Do It Yourself’ Camp last summer?”

“Ben!” She blushed, smiled. “We won’t get any vacation if we blow our house-warming pitch tonight, you know. And we have three couples due here in less than a half hour. Besides, I have to talk to you about Nana.”

“That damned new CD-IX model. Now what?”

“She’s very upset about Bennie. I’m not sure I blame her. This afternoon he simply

refused his indoctrination. All the time he should have been playing store with Playmate he insisted on drawing things—himself, mind you, not Playmate. On the walls, with an old pencil of yours he found someplace in your things. Nana couldn’t do a thing with