Service with a Smile

Excerpt

Herbert bowed with a muted clank—indicating he probably needed oiling somewhere—and presented Alice with a perfect martini on a silver tray. He stood holding the tray, a white, permanent porcelain smile on his smooth metal face, as Alice sipped the drink and grimaced.

"It's a good martini, Herbert," said Alice. "Thank you. But, dammit, I wish you didn't have that everlasting smile!"

"I am very sorry, Miss Alice, but I am unable to alter myself in any way," replied Herbert in his polite, hollow voice.

He retired to a corner and stood impassively, still holding the tray. Herbert had found a silver deposit and made the tray. Herbert had found sand and made the cocktail glass. Herbert had combined God knew what atmospheric and earth chemicals to make what tasted like gin and vermouth, and Herbert had frozen the ice to chill it.

"Sometimes," said Thera wistfully, "it occurs to me it would be better to live in a mud hut with a real man than in a mansion with Herbert."

The four women lolled comfortably in the living room of their spacious house, as luxurious as anything any of them would have known on distant Earth. The rugs were thick, the furniture was overstuffed, the paintings on the walls were aesthetic and inspiring, the shelves were filled with booktapes and musictapes.

Herbert had done it all, except the booktapes and musictapes, which had been salvaged from the wrecked spaceship.

"Do you suppose we'll ever escape from this best of all possible manless worlds?" asked Betsy, fluffing her thick black hair with her fingers and inspecting herself in a Herbert-made mirror.

"I don't see how," answered blond Alice glumly. "That atmospheric trap would wreck any other ship just as it wrecked ours, and the same magnetic layer prevents any radio message from getting out. No, I'm afraid we're a colony."

"A colony perpetuates itself," reminded sharp-faced Marguerite, acidly. "We aren't a colony, without men."

They were not the prettiest four women in the universe, nor the youngest. The prettiest women and the youngest did not go to space. But they were young enough and healthy enough, or they could not have gone to space.

It had been a year and a half now—an Earth year and a half on a nice little planet revolving around a nice little yellow sun. Herbert, the robot, was obedient and versatile and had provided them with a house, food, clothing, anything they wished created out of the raw elements of earth and air and water. But the bones of all the men who had been aspace with these four ladies lay mouldering in the wreckage of their spaceship.

And Herbert could not create a man. Herbert did not have to have direct orders, and he had tried once to create a man when he had overheard them wishing for one. They had buried the corpse—perfect in every detail except that it never had been alive.

"It's been a hot day," said Alice, fanning her brow. "I wish it would rain."

Silently, Herbert moved from his corner and went out the door.

Marguerite gestured after him with a bitter little laugh.

"It'll rain this afternoon," she said. "I don't know how Herbert does it—maybe with silver iodide. But it'll rain. Wouldn't it have been simpler to get him to air-condition the house, Alice?"

"That's a good idea," said Alice thoughtfully....