Joe Mulloy lounged in the plushest chair in his luxurious office. All around him, on the walls, on the ceiling, even in strategic spots all over the floor, there were mirrors. Joe sneered at the place where the mirrors were most profuse; twenty or thirty perfectly identical Joes sneered back at him. He admired his sneer from every angle, shaping and changing the contemptuous look on his face with his hands, stroking it, much as other young men in a far earlier age had stroked and twisted their fine mustachios. As usual, Joe Mulloy was engrossed in his two favorite hobbies: narcissism and indolence.
Joe's friends, of which there were very few, could have given you a fairly accurate resume of his character in five words, his sneer and his indolence.
In the first respect they would have been right. Joseph Mulloy had been born with a sneer on his face. His whole early life had been centered around that sneer. It had enraged his father, distressed his mother, driven his teachers to tears, his playmates to tantrums. He stopped doing homework at the age of eight, but the teachers passed him on anyway to avoid complete mental breakdown.
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.
A startlingly human-looking robot seemed to materialize instantaneously from nowhere.
"How might thy humble servant serve thee, O magnificent Master?" it inquired, bowing so low that its partially metallic nose scratched the rich mahogany floor.
"What took you so long, you damned fool?" asked Joe.
"I apologize, Gracious Master. I am incompetent and worthless."
"Get me a drink, you bucket of bolts," said Joe.
"I am grateful for a chance to serve thee, Benevolent Master," replied the robot in its monotonous Uncle Tom patter, and made another floor-scratching bow. Then it groveled out of the room.
"That robot is getting too slavelike," said Joe to himself, after the robot had left. "All my robots seem to be that way. They do exactly what I tell them to, and degrade themselves sickeningly before me. All the people I've ever known seem to be that way, too. I wish I could find at least one mind equal to mine to clash with. Then I could have a real fight for once. None of this bowing and scraping."
Just then the robot entered with a Manhattan, made its usual floor-gouging bow, and scraped its metal feet to get Joe's attention. Joe turned to glare at the mechanical minion.
"Robot!"
"Yes, Omnipotent Mas—" the robot began, but Joe cut it off.
"Get over to the laboratory and blow yourself up! And find an empty corner, where you won't do too much damage."
"Master, I am happy for the chance to give my life—"
"Never mind that, you glorified Erector set! Do as I say!"
"Yes, Master." The robot hazarded a slight bow, but forgot to crawl out of the room on its hands and knees in its eagerness to follow its master's orders.
Joe Mulloy leaped to his feet. In the moment of his excitement, he forgot that melodrama is a human weakness, and he became melodramatic himself. Even his incorruptible sneer faded slightly as his excitement grew.
"I must find someone with a mind equal or superior to mine," he told himself. "Now who has a mind equal to mine? Obviously no one but me. Therefore I must find someone with a mind superior to mine. Now who is superior to me?" For the first time in his life, Joe Mulloy was confronted by what seemed an unanswerable question.
Joe's train of thought was interrupted by a deafening explosion from the laboratory, as his latest robot jubilantly committed suicide. The building shook violently for a few seconds, then subsided.
To ............