THE HOUSE DUTIFUL

To--to be... an unformable, lonely thought groped blindly for a potential fact... need, a need... it was--something... it was--needed... it was needed? Consciousness!

A living creature came with the pride of ownership, the triggering wistfulness for it. Unlike its first darling, this creature had notions that were bizarre and primitive, conceptually agonizing. Painful, painful, painful they were to organize into. But it had purpose again--and, more, it had desire--

Thoughtlessly, lovingly, the immense thing began to flow to the fixed-upon place, twitching awkward experimental shapes upward as it went.

--|--

The back-country Canadian road was obscure even for the biting concentration of the deluxe Caterpillar runabout. Metal treads apologized shrilly as they hit a rock that was too large and too snugly embedded in the mud. The bright yellow car canted steeply to the right and came down level again with a murky splash.

"And I was so happy in the dairy," Esther Sakarian moaned in histrionic recollection as she dug her unpainted, thoroughly trimmed fingernails into the lavender upholstery of the front seat. "I had my own quiet little lab, my neatly labeled samples of milk and cheese from the day's production; at night I could walk home on cement sidewalks or drop into a dry, air-conditioned restaurant or movie. But Philadelphia wasn't good enough for me! No, I had to--"

"Bad storms last night, smooth riding, usually," Paul Marquis muttered on her left. He grimaced his glasses back into correct nose position and concentrated on the difficult visual task of separating possible road from possible marsh.

"I had to come up to the Great Bear Lake where every prospector sneezes and all the men are vile. Adventure I wanted--hah! Well, here I am, using up the last of my girlhood. I spend my days purifying water for a bunch of whisky-soaked nuclear physicists. Every night I ask God: Is this by you adventure?"

Marquis sloughed the runabout around a dwarfed red spruce that grew belligerently in the middle of the damp highway. "Should be there in a minute or two, Es. Forty of the sweetest acres that anybody ever talked the Canadian government into selling. And a little bumpy hill just off the road that's a natural foundation for the Cape Cod cottage Caroline's always talking about."

The bacteriologist prodded his shoulder tenderly. "Talking about it in Boston and building it in northern Canada--a little different, don't you think? You haven't married the gal yet."

"You don't know Caroline," Marquis told her confidently. "Besides, we'll be only forty miles from Little Fermi--and the town will grow. The lode we're working on seems to be about ten times as rich as the Eldorado mine over at Port Radium. If it holds up, we'll build a uranium pile that will be a power plant for the entire western hemisphere. Business will get interested, real estate values will boom--"

"So it's a good investment, too? Sheer mysticism, like your opinion that a lifetime spent behind Beacon Street walls makes the housemaid-and-mistress combo you want in a wife."

"Now you sound like that mad medico Connor Kuntz when I beat his classic Capablancan chess with an inspirational heresy. There's a nineteenth-century mechanist you could be happy with; all he wants is a mate of good disposition and fair heredity who will be absorbed in her work and let him do his bone-setting in peace. I don't want a mate--I want a marriage. No servant any employment agency ever--"

"Dr. Kuntz is a mass of greasy rationalization. And I wasn't proposing to you by indirection."

"--ever sent out," he went on doggedly, "could handle the menial essentials of domestic living with the affection and grace of a wife. Machines are no substitute; you don't get omnipresent, understanding love from a machine. Not that I'm marrying Caroline just to get someone who'll kiss me while she's preparing dinners I like--"

"Of course not! It's comfortable, though, to know you'll get it just the same. Which you wouldn't if you married, say... oh, say a female bacteriologist who had work of her own to do and would be as tired as you at the end of the day. Up with the double standard; but keep it intellectual!"

The excessively thin young man slapped the car to a stop and turned with his mouth open for a blast. Esther Sakarian was one of those tidy, docile-appearing women whose remarks generated a surprising amount of factional heat in men.

"Look here, Es," he began loudly, "social development and the relatively new integrity of the individual to one side, people still consist of men and women. Women--with the exception of maladjusted--"

"Hey, there!" Esther was staring over his shoulder with her nostrils flaring respectfully. "You've done quite a job! It doesn't look a bit prefabricated, Paul. But it must have been expensive getting priorities for those sections on the Diesel snow trains. And you banged it together in one week by yourself? Quite a job!"

"I would appreciate it if you stopped raving and told me--"

"Your house... your Cape Cod cottage! It's perfect."

"My what?" Paul Marquis spun around.

Esther slid the right-hand door back into its slot and stepped delicately onto the mud. "I'll bet you have it half furnished, too. And full of the crazy domestic gimmicks you're always working out. Downy old duck, aren't you? 'Come on, Es, I want to ask your advice on where to stick a house on that land I bought!' So go on and smirk: don't worry, I won't have the gall to say I knew it all the time."

Marquis watched the progress of her feminized blue jeans up the bush-infested hill toward the green and white cottage with anything but a smirk.

Finally, he swung madly over the side, slipped headlong into the mud, picked himself up and clambered on, dripping great brown chunks of Canadian soil as he thudded up the slope.

Esther nodded at him as he approached, her hand truculent on the long, old-fashioned doorknob. "What's the sense of locking doors in this wilderness? If anyone were going to burglarize, they could smash a window quite easily and help themselves while you were away. Well, don't stand there looking philosophical--make with the key, make with the key!"

"The... the key." Dazed, he took a small key chain out of his pocket, looked at it for a moment, then shoved it back violently. He ran a hand through a tangle of blond hair and leaned against the door. It opened.

The bacteriologist trotted past him as he clawed at the post to retain his balance. "Never could get the hang of those prehistoric gadgets. Photoelectric cells will be good enough for my children, and they're good enough for me. Oh, Paul! Don't tell me your sense for the fitness of things extends no further than atomic nuclei. Look at that furniture!"

"Furniture?" he asked very weakly. Slowly, he opened eyes which had been tightly closed while he leaned against the door. He took in the roomful of chairs and tables done in the sprouting-from-one-center-leg style which was currently popular. "Furniture!" he sighed and carefully closed his eyes again.

Esther Sakarian shook her sober head with assurance. "New Single-Support just doesn't go in a Cape Cod cottage. Believe me, Paul, your poetic soul may want to placate your scientific mind by giving it superfunctional surroundings, but you can't do it in this kind of a house. Furthermore, just by looking at that retouched picture of Caroline you have pasted to your Geiger counter, I know she wouldn't approve. You'll have to get rid of at least--"

He had come up to her side and stood plucking the sleeve of her bright plaid shirt. "Esther," he muttered, "my dear, sweet, talkative, analytical, self-confident Esther--please sit down and shut up!"

She dropped into a roundly curved seat, staring at him from angled eyebrows. "You have a point to make?"

"I have a point to make!" Paul told her emphatically. He waved wildly at the modern furniture which seemed to be talking slang in the pleasant, leisurely room. "All this, the house, the furniture, the accessories, was not only not built nor sent here by me, but... but wasn't here a week ago when I came out with the man from the land office and bought the property. It shouldn't be here!"

"Nonsense! It couldn't just--" She broke off.

He nodded. "It did just. But that only makes me feel crazy. What makes me positively impatient for a jacket laced securely up the back is the furniture. It's the kind of furniture I thought of whenever Caroline talked about building this cottage. But the point is this: I knew she wanted to stuff it full of New England antique, and--since I feel a woman's place is in the home--I never argued the point. I never mentioned buying Single-Support to her; I've never mentioned the idea to anyone. And every chair and table in this room is exactly what I thought it should be--privately!"

Esther had been listening to him with an expanding frown. Now she started an uneasy giggle, and cut it off before it began to throb. "Paul, I know you're too neurotic to be insane, and I'm willing to admit my leg isn't pretty enough for you to pull. But this... this--Look, the house may have been dropped by a passing plane; or possibly Charles Fort had the right idea. What you're trying to tell me about the furniture, though--It makes for belly butterflies!"

"Mine have electric fans on their wings," he assured her. "Now let's try to stay calm. Let's hold hands and go into the kitchen. If there's a certain refrigerator-sink-stove combination--"

There was. Paul Marquis gripped the sleek enamel and whistled "The Pilgrim's Chorus" through his teeth.

"I will a-ask you to c-consider this f-fact," he said at last, shakenly. "This particular rig is one which I worked out on the back of an envelope from Caroline at three-fifteen yesterday when the big dredge got kinked up and I had nothing else to do. Prior to that time, all I knew was that I wanted something slightly different in the way of an all-in-one kitchen unit. This is what I drew."

Esther patted the sides of her face as if she were trying to slap herself back into sanity ever so gently. "Yes, I know."

"You do?"

"You may not remember, Mr. Marquis, but you showed me the drawing in the mess hall at supper. Since it was too fantastically expensive to be considered seriously, I suggested shaping the refrigerator like a sphere so that it would fit into the curve of the stove. You chucked out your lower lip and agreed. The refrigerator is shaped like a sphere and fits into the curve of the stove."

Paul opened a cupboard and pulled out a rainbow-splashed tumbler. "I'm going to get a drink, even if it's water!"

He held the tumbler under the projecting faucet and reached for a button marked "cold." Before his questing finger pressed it, however, a stream of ice-cold fluid spurted out of the faucet, filled the glass and stopped without a trickle.

The physicist exhaled at the completely dry bottom surface of the sink. He tightened his fingers convulsively on the tumbler and poured its contents down his throat. A moment passed, while his head was thrown back; then Esther, who had been leaning against the smooth wall, saw him begin to gag. She reached his side just as the coughs died away and the tears started to leak out of his eyes.

"Whoo-oof?" he explained. "That was whisky--the finest Scotch ever to pass these tired old lips. Just as it started to pour, I thought to myself: 'What you need, friend, is a good swift slug of Scotch.' And Esther--that's what that water was! Talk about miracles!"

"I don't like this," the brown-haired woman decided positively. She pulled a small glass vial from a breast pocket. "Whisky, water or whatever it is--I'm going to get a sample and analyze it. You've no idea how many varieties of algae I've seen in the water up here. I think the presence of radioactive ore--Hullo. It doesn't work."

With thumb and forefinger, she pressed the hot and cold water buttons until the flesh under her fingernails turned white. The faucet remained impassively dry.

Paul came over and bent his head under the metal arm. He straightened and smiled impishly. "Pour, water!" he commanded. Again water spat from the faucet, this time describing a curve to where Esther Sakarian had moved the vial to permit her companion to examine the plumbing. When the vial was full, the water stopped.

"Yup!" Paul grinned at the gasping bacteriologist. "Those buttons, the drain--they're only for display. This house does exactly what's required of it--but only when I require it! I have a robot house here, Es, and it's mine, all mine!"

She closed the vial and replaced it in her pocket. "I think it's a little more than that. Let's get out of here, Paul. Outside of the obvious impossibility of this whole business, there are a couple of things that don't check. I'd like to have Connor Kuntz up here to go over the place. Besides, we'd better get started if we're to make Little Fermi before the sun goes down."

"You don't tell Kuntz about this," Paul warned her as they moved toward the already opening door. "I don't want him fussing up my robot house."

Esther shrugged. "I won't, if you insist. But Doc Kuntz might give you a line on exactly what you have here. Hit him with the extraordinary and he'll bring five thousand years of scientific banalities to bear on it. Tell me, do you notice any other change in your land since you were here last?"

The physicist stood just outside the door and swept his eyes over the tangle of bush that seasoned the glinting patches of swamp and out-cropped rock. Sick orange from the beginning sunset colored the land weirdly, making the desolate subarctic plains look like the backdrop to a dying age. A young, cold wind sprang up and hurried at them, delighting in its own vigor.

"Well, over there for example. A patch of green grass extending for about a quarter mile. I remember thinking how much like a newly mowed lawn it looked, and how out of place it was in the middle of all this marsh. Over there, where you now see that stretch of absolutely blank brown soil. Of course, it could have withered and died in a week. Winter's coming on."

"Hm-m-m." She stepped back and looked up at the green roof of the cottage which harmonized so unostentatiously with the green shutters and door and the sturdy white of the walls. "Do you think--"

Paul leaped away from the door and stood rubbing his shoulder. He giggled awkwardly. "Seemed as if the post reached over and began rubbing against me. Didn't frighten me exactly--just sort of startling."

He smiled. "I'd say this robot whatever-it-is likes me. Almost a mechanical caress."

Esther nodded, her lips set, but said nothing until they were in the car again. "You know, Paul," she whispered as they got under way, "I have the intriguing thought that this house of yours isn't a robot at all. I think it's thoroughly alive."

He widened his eyes at her. Then he pushed his glasses hard against his forehead and chuckled. "Well, that's what they say, Es: It takes a livin' heap to make a house a home!"

They rode on silently in the seeping darkness, trying to develop reasons and causes, but finding none. It was only when they clattered onto the concrete outskirts of Little Fermi that Paul started abruptly: "I'm going to get some beans and coffee and spend the night in my living house. Breckinbridge won't need me until that shipment of cadmium rods comes in from Edmonton; that means I can spend tonight and all day tomorrow finding out just what I've got."

His companion started to object, then tossed her head. "I can't stop you. But be careful, or poor Caroline may have to marry a young buck from the Harvard Law School."

"Don't worry," he boasted. "I'm pretty sure I can make that house jump through hoops if I ask it. And maybe, if I get bored, I'll ask it!"

He looked up Breckinbridge in the clapboard barracks and got a day's leave of absence from him. Then there was a discussion with the cooks, who were rapidly persuaded to part with miscellaneous packaged foodstuffs. A hurriedly composed telegram to Caroline Hart of Boston, Massachusetts, and he was thumping his way back to the house behind headlights that were willing to split the darkness but were carefully noncommittal about the road.

It wasn't till Paul saw the house clutching the top of the hill that he realized how easily he would have accepted the fact of its disappearance.

Parking the runabout on the slope so that its lights illumined the way to the top, he pushed the side back and prepared to get out.

The door of the house opened. A dark carpet spilled out and humped down the hill to his feet. Regular, sharp protuberances along its length made it a perfect staircase. A definite rosy glow exuded from the protuberances, lighting his way.

"That's really rolling out the welcome mat," Paul commented as he locked the ignition in the car and started up.

He couldn't help jumping a bit when, passing through the vestibule, the walls bulged out slightly and touched him gently on either side. But there was such an impression of friendliness in the gesture and they moved back in place so swiftly that there was no logical reason for nervousness.

The dining-room table seemed to reach up slightly to receive the gear he dropped upon it. He patted it and headed for the kitchen.

Water still changed into whisky at his unspoken whim; as he desired, it also changed into onion soup, tomato juice and Napoleon brandy. The refrigerator, he found, was full of everything he might want, from five or six raw tenderloins to three bottles of dark beer complete with the brand name he usually asked for when shopping for himself.

The sight of the food made him hungry; he had missed supper. A steak suffocating under heaps of onions, surrounded by beans and washed down with plenty of hot coffee was an interesting thought. He started for the dining room to collect his gear.

His haversack still rested on the near side of the table. On the far side... On the far side, there reposed a platter containing a thick steak which supported a huge mound of onions and held an encircling brown mass of beans at one corner. Gleaming silverware lay between the platter and a veritable vase of coffee.

Paul found himself giggling hysterically and shook fear-wisps out of his head. Everything was obviously channeled for his comfort. Might as well pull up a chair and start eating. He looked around for one, in time to see a chair come gliding across the floor; it poked him delicately behind the knees and he sat down. The chair continued to the appointed position at the table.

It was while he was spooning away the last of the melon he had imagined into existence for dessert--it had been exuded, complete with dish, from the table top--that he noticed the lighting fixtures were also mere decorative devices. Light came from the walls--or the ceiling--or the floor; it was omnipresent in the house at just the right intensity--and that was all.

The dirty dishes and used silverware vanished into the table like sugar dissolving into hot solution.

Before he went up to bed, he decided to look in at the library. Surely, he had originally imagined a library? He decided he couldn't be certain, and thought one up next to the living room.

All the books he had ever enjoyed were in the warm little space. He spent a contented hour browsing from Aiken to Einstein, until he hit the beautifully bound Britannica. The first volume of the Encyclopedia he opened made him understand the limitations of his establishment.

The articles he had read completely were complete, those he had read in part showed only the sections he had touched. For the rest, there was a curious blur of not-quite print which puzzled him until he realized that this was just the picture the eyes retained while the pages of a book were flipped before it.

He climbed the narrow stairs to bed.

Yawningly tired, he noted vaguely that the bed was just the width he had always wanted. As fast as he dropped his clothes to the bedside chair, they were shaken off and pushed along a writhing strip of floor to the corner closet where he imagined they were hung neatly.

He lay down finally, repressing a shudder as the sheets curled up and over him of their own accord. Just before he fell asleep, he remembered he'd spent the largest parts of the past three nights playing chess and was likely to oversleep. He'd intended to rise early and examine his delightfully subservient property in detail, but since he hadn't thought to bring an alarm clock--

Did that matter?

He raised himself on one elbow, the sheet still hugging his chest. "Listen, you," he told the opposite wall sternly. "Wake me exactly eight hours from now. And do it pleasantly, understand?"

--|--

Wakefulness came with a sense of horror that nibbled at his mind. He lay still, wondering what had shocked him so.

"Paul, darling, please wake up. Paul, darling, please wake up. Paul, darling, please--"

Caroline's voice! He leaped out of bed and looked around crazily. What was Caroline doing here? The telegram he'd sent asking her to come up and look at their new house had probably not arrived until breakfast. Even a plane--

Then he remembered. Of course! He patted the bed. "Nice job. Couldn't have done better myself." The headboard curled against his hand and the walls vibrated with a humming noise that was astonishingly like a baritone purr.

The shower, he decided, must have been one of those brilliant yearning concepts he had once entertained for a second or two and then forgotten. It was merely a matter of stepping into a roomy cubicle dotted with multitudes of tiny holes and being sprayed with warm lather which stopped the moment he was soaped up and was succeeded by plain water at the same temperature. As the lather washed away, needle jets of air dried him completely.

He stepped out of the shower to find his clothes hung outside, excellently pressed and smelling faintly of laundry. He was surprised at the laundry odor, although he liked it; but then again that's why there was an odor--because he liked it!

It was going to be an unusually fine day, he noted, after suggesting to the bathroom window that it open--unfortunate that he hadn't brought any light clothes with him. Then, as his eyes glanced regretfully downward, he observed he was now wearing a sports shirt and summer slacks.

Evidently his own soiled clothes had been absorbed into the economy of the house and duplicates provided which had the pleasantly adaptive facilities of their source.

The hearts-of-palm breakfast he had worked out while strolling downstairs was ready for him in the dining room. The copy of Jane Austen's Emma he'd been rereading recently at mealtime lay beside it open to the correct place.

He sighed happily. "All I need now is a little Mozart played softly."

So, a little Mozart--

--|--

Connor Kuntz's helicopter lazed down out of the mild sky at four o'clock that afternoon. Paul thought the house into a Bunk Johnson trumpet solo and sauntered out to greet his guests.

Esther Sakarian was out of the plane first. She wore a severe black dress that made her look unusually feminine and much less of a laboratory type. "Sorry about bringing Doc Kuntz, Paul. But for all I knew you might need a medic after a night in this place. And I don't have a copter of my own. He offered to give me a lift."

"Perfectly all right," he told her magnanimously. "I'm ready to discuss the house with Kuntz or any other biologist."

She held up a yellow sheet. "For you. Just came."

He read the telegram and winced.

"Anything important?" Esther inquired, temporarily looking away from a pink cloud which seemed to have been fascinating her.

"Oh." He crumpled the sheet and bounced it gloomily on his open palm. "Caroline. Says she's surprised to discover I intended to make my permanent home up here. Says if I'm serious about it, I'd better reconsider our engagement."

Esther pursed her lips. "Well, it is a nice long haul from Boston. And allowing that your house isn't quite a dead issue..."

Paul laughed and snapped the paper ball into the air. "Not quite. But the way I feel at the moment: love me, love my house. And, speaking of houses--Down, sir! Down, I say!"

The house had crept down the slope behind him as he spoke, extruded a bay window and nuzzled his back with it. Now, at his sharp reproach, the window was sucked abruptly into the wall. The house sidled backward to its place at the top of the hill and stood quivering slightly. The trumpet solo developed extremely mournful overtones.

"Does... does it do that often?"

"Every time I move a little distance away," he assured her. "I could stop it permanently with a direct overall command, but I find it sort of flattering. I also don't want to step on a pretty warm personality. No harm in it. Hey, Connor, what do you think?"

The doctor perspired his plump body past them and considered the noisy structure warily. "Just now--I confess I don't know."

"Better give it up, Connor," Esther advised, "or you'll rupture an analysis."

Paul slapped his back. "Come inside and I'll explain it over a couple of glasses of beer I just got thirsty enough to think about."

Five beers later, Dr. Connor Kuntz used the black beads he had in place of eyes to watch his host shimmer from the uniform of the Coldstream Guards to a sharply cut tuxedo.

"Of course I believe it. Since it is so, it is so. You have a living house here. Now we must decide what we are to do with it."

Paul Marquis looked up, halfway into a white gabardine suit. The lapels, still tuxedo, hesitated; then gathered their energies and blended into a loose summer outfit.

"What we are to do with it?"

Kuntz rose and wrapped his hands behind his back, slapping the knuckles of one into the palm of the other. "You're quite right about keeping the information secret from the men in the development; a careless word and you would be undergoing swarms of dangerously inquisitive tourists. I must get in touch with Dr. Dufayel in Quebec; this is very much his province. Although there's a young man at Johns Hopkins--How much have you learned of its basic, let us say its personal composition?"

The young physicist's face lost its grip on resentment. "Well, the wood feels like wood, the metal like metal, the plastic like plastic. And when the house produces a glass-like object, it's real glass so far as I can determine without a chemical analysis. Es, here, took--"

"That's one of the reasons I decided to bring Connor along. Biologically and chemically, the water is safe--too safe. It's absolutely pure H_2O. What do you think of my chlorophyll roof theory, doctor?"

He ducked his head at her. "Possibly. Some form of solar energy transformation in any case. But chlorophyll would argue a botanical nature, while it has distinct and varied means of locomotion--internal and external. Furthermore, the manipulation of metals which do not exist in any quantities in this region suggest subatomic reorganization of materials. Esther, we must prepare some slides from this creature. Suppose you run out to the plane like a good girl and get my kit. For that matter, you can prepare slides yourself, can't you? I want to explore a bit."

"Slides?" Paul Marquis asked uncertainly as the bacteriologist started for the open door. "It's a living thing, you know."

"Ah, we'll just take a small area from an... a nonvital spot. Much like scraping a bit of skin off the human hand. Tell me," the doctor requested, thumping on the table experimentally, "you no doubt have some vague theories as to origin?"

Marquis settled himself back in a gleaming chair. "As a matter of fact, they're a little more than that. I remembered the ore in Pit Fourteen gave out suddenly after showing a lot of promise. Pit Fourteen's the closest to here from Little Fermi. Adler, the geologist in charge, commented at the time that it seemed as if Pit Fourteen had been worked before--about six thousand years ago. Either that or glacial scraping. But since there was little evidence of glacial scraping in the neighborhood, and no evidence of a previous, prehistoric pitchblende mine, he dropped the matter. I think this house is the rest of the proof of that prehistoric mine. I also think we'll find radioactive ore all the way from this site to the edge of Pit Fourteen."

"Comfortable situation for you if they do," Kuntz observed, moving into the kitchen. Paul Marquis rose and followed him. "How would this peculiar domicile enter into the situation?"

"Well, unless our archaeology still has to grow out of its diapers, nobody on Earth was interested in pitchblende six thousand years ago. That would leave the whole wide field of extraterrestrials--from a planet of our sun or one of the other stars. This could have been a fueling station for their ships, a regularly worked mine, or an unforeseen landing to make repairs and take on fuel."

"And the house?"

"The house was their dwelling--probably a makeshift, temporary job--while they worked the mine. When they went, they left it here as humans will leave deserted wood and metal shacks when they move out of Little Fermi one day. It lay here waiting for something--say the thought of ownership or the desire for a servitor-dwelling--to release a telepathic trigger that would enable it to assume its function of--"

A despairing shout from Esther tugged them outside.

"I've just broken my second scalpel on this chunk of iridium masquerading as fragile flesh. I have a definite suspicion, Paul, that I won't so much as scratch it unless you give me permission. Please tell your house it's all right for me to take a tiny chunk."

"It's... it's all right," Paul said uncomfortably, then added, "only, try not to hurt it too much."

Leaving the girl slicing a long, thin strip from the western corner, they walked down the cellar steps into the basement. Connor Kuntz stumbled around peering down at the floor for some example of an obviously biological organ. He found only whitewashed cement.

"Assume its function of--" he said at last. "Its function of serving! My dear fellow, do you realize this house has a sex?"

"Sex?" Paul moved aback, taken there by the thought. "You mean it can have lots of little bungalows?"

"Oh, not in the reproductive sense, not in the reproductive sense!" The plump doctor would have prodded him in the ribs if he hadn't started hurriedly up the stairs. "It has sex in the emotional, the psychological sense. As a woman wants to be a wife to a man, as a man searches for a woman to whom he can be an adequate husband--just so this house desires to be a home to a living creature who both needs it and owns it. As such it fulfills itself and becomes capable of its one voluntary act--the demonstration of affection, again in terms of the creature it serves. By the by, it also seems to be that theoretically happy medium in those disagreements on twentieth-century domestic arrangements with which you and Esther liven up the mess hall on occasion. Unostentatious love and imaginative service."

"Does at that. If only Es didn't make a habit of plucking my nerve-ends... Hum. Have you noticed how pleasant she's been today?"

"Of course. The house has made adjustments in her personality for your greater happiness."

"What? Es has been changed? You're crazy, Connor!"

"On the contrary, my boy. I assure you she was just as argumentative back in Little Fermi and on the way out here as she ever was. The moment she saw you, she became most traditionally feminine--without losing one jot of her acuity or subtlety, remember that. When someone like Esther Sakarian who has avoided the 'You are so right, my lord' attitude all her life acquires it overnight, she has had help. In this case, the house."

Paul Marquis dug his knuckles at the solid, reassuring substance of the basement wall. "Es has been changed by the house for my possible personal convenience? I don't know if I like that. Es should be Es, good or bad. Besides, it might take a notion to change me."

The older man looked at him with a deadly twinkle. "I don't know how it affects personalities--high-order therapeutic radiation on an intellectual level?--but let me ask you this, Paul, wouldn't you like to be happy at the agreeable alteration in Miss Sakarian? And, furthermore, wouldn't you like to think that the house couldn't affect your own attitudes?"

"Of course." Paul shrugged his shoulders. "For that matter, I am happy about Es getting some womanly sense in her head. And, come to think of it, I doubt if you or anyone else could ever convince me that the house could push mental fixations around like so much furniture. Whole thing's too ridiculous for further discussion."

Connor Kuntz chortled and slapped his thighs for emphasis. "Perfect! And now you can't even imagine that the wish for such a state of mind made the house produce it in you. It learns to serve you better all the time! Dr. Dufayel is going to appreciate this!"

"A point there. I don't go for advertising my peculiar residence and its properties--whatever they are--up and down the field of research medicine. Is there any way I can persuade you to lay off?"

Kuntz stopped his dignified little dance and looked up seriously. "Why, certainly! I can think of at least two good reasons why I should never again discuss your house with anyone but you or Esther." He seemed to consider a moment. "Rather, I should say there are six or seven reasons for not mentioning your house's existence to Dufayel or any other biologist. In fact, there are literally dozens and dozens of reasons."

--|--

Paul followed Connor Kuntz and Esther back to the copter, promising them he'd be in for duty the next morning. "But I'm going to spend my nights here from now on."

"Take it slow and easy," Esther warned. "And don't brood over Caroline."

"Don't worry." He nodded at the affectionately trembling structure. "Have to teach it a couple of things. Like not bouncing around after me when there's company. Es, think you'd like to share it with me? You'd get as much care and affection as I would."

She giggled. "The three of us--going down the beautiful years together in a perfect marriage. We won't need any servants, just you and I and the house. Maybe a cleaning woman once or twice a week for the sake of appearances if a real estate boom materializes and we have neighbors."

"Oh, we'll have neighbors all right," Paul boasted to include Connor Kuntz's suddenly whiter-than-usual face. "We'll become very rich once the new lode is traced to part of our property, and when Little Fermi is operating as the power city of the American continents we'll make another fortune selling the land for suburban development. And think of the research we'll be able to do in physics and bacteriology, Es, with the house supplying us with any equipment we can visualize!"

"You'll be very happy," Kuntz told them shortly. "The house will see to it that you're happy if it has to kill you--or, rather, your egos." He turned to the bacteriologist. "Esther, I thought you said yesterday that Paul would have to change a good deal before you could marry him. Has he changed, or has the house changed you?"

"Did I say that? Well, Paul hasn't exactly--But the house--"

"And how about that odd feeling you said the house gave you?" the doctor went on. "As if something were disconnecting wires in your brain and resplicing them according to a new blueprint? Don't you see that wiring blueprint belongs to Paul and the house is installing it?"

Paul had taken the girl in his arms and stood frowning at Kuntz. "I just don't like that idea, even if it is vaguely possible." His face cleared. "But it's vague enough to be impossible. Don't you think so, Es?"

She seemed to be struggling with an inner confusion that darted and shed sparks. "I... I don't know. Yes, I do. Impossible isn't the word for it! Why, I never heard of anything so completely--All your house wants to do is serve you. It's lovable and harmless."

"It isn't!" The physician was dancing up and down like a partridge in a net. "Admitted, it will only make psychological adjustments as required to resolve your serious inner conflicts, but remember, this house is a distinctly alien form of life. If it was ever completely controlled, the power was vested in creatures far superior to ourselves. There's danger enough, now, when it makes you think exactly as you want to think from moment to moment; but when it begins to feel the looseness of your mental reins--"

"Stow it, Connor!" Paul cut him off. "I told you I couldn't accept that line of thought. I don't want you to mention it again. It's plain ugly. Isn't it, darling?"

"And illogical." She smiled.

And Dr. Connor Kuntz was able merely to stand and think terrifying thoughts to himself.

Behind them, the house joyfully hummed a connubial snatch of Lohengrin.

Oh, glorious master, who will never want to leave--

While the copter wound upward into the sallow sky, and Esther waved at the dwindling figure below with the house skipping gayly to his side, Kuntz asked cautiously:

"If you two intend to go on any sort of honeymoon inside that place, you'll have to get a release from the company. That won't be easy."

She turned to him. "Why?"

"Because you signed a contract, and the government is backing the company on the contract. No out for either of you. Fact is, Paul may get into some trouble with his extended vacation."

Esther pondered it for a moment. "Yes, I see. And you know, Connor, with the house and all, I was sort of planning to leave the company permanently and take up residence right away. I'm pretty sure Paul feels the same way. I hope there won't be any trouble."

Then she laughed easily, and the angular frown lines disappeared from her face. "But I don't think there will be any trouble. I think everything will go smoothly. I just feel it."

Shocked, Connor Kuntz realized that this unusual display of "feminine intuition" from Esther Sakarian was correct. He thought:

The house will see to it that the government voids their contracts without any trouble, because the house wants to keep them happy. It will keep them happy, giving them anything they want--except the means to get away from it. This product of some gigantic imagination has two desires actually--the desire to serve, and the desire to have a master. Having reacquired one after all these years, it will keep him, her, them, at any cost. But making adjustments in the world to keep them happy will be like knocking over the first in a row of dominoes; it will have to do more and more to keep the world from interfering.

Eventually this domestic utensil could control all humanity and make it jump at the vagrant whims of Paul Marquis and Esther Sakarian. All in the name of service! It has the power to do it, probably is nothing more itself than a collection of basic forces in temporary formful stasis. And if it does ever control the planet--why, there will be no more objection to it than Esther and Paul exhibit! This servile hunk of real estate is so far above us in capability, that it can run our world and make us think we like it. And to think I'm sitting next to one of the people whose most passing fancy could become my unalterable command! Horrible, horrible--

But by the time he had landed the copter at Little Fermi, Connor Kuntz no longer found the idea objectionable. He thought it quite in order that he could only do those things to which Paul and Esther did not object. Extremely natural, in fact.

AFTERWORD

My original reason for writing this story had little to do with science fiction as such or with making a living out of writing. I was trying to do a portrait of my two closest friends at the time, Judy Merril and Ted Sturgeon. When they saw the completed piece, they both said I had done a fine job on the other one, but I had missed completely on themselves.

I, though, felt it was a complete failure then, and I feel it is a complete failure now; I produce it here for whatever historical or personal-literary significance it might have.

To quote our great phrase-making President, Richard Milhous Nixon, let me make one thing perfectly clear: Judy and Ted never so much as contemplated marriage with each other. We were all three happily involved with different partners at the time--but I felt that bundling the two of them together helped increase dramatic tension which might in turn strengthen the portrait I was attempting.

A few last and completely minor notes. I am in the story in a sort of shadowy way: the reading matter and musical tastes I ascribe to the male protagonist were mine, rather than Sturgeon's; Connor Kuntz's character was based on that of L. Jerome Stanton, then the associate editor of Astounding Science Fiction (where the story eventually appeared), and the man who took Sturgeon practically out of the gutter and into his apartment when Ted came back to New York from the tropics after a bad writing slump and a painful divorce. And the house? The house was my attempt to write into existence the kind of living arrangement that Ted at the time seemed to be searching for, as he grappled with the problems of domesticity. He told me he felt it was the best part of the story. It is.