"A robot!" he could hear Mr. Ditmars wail, as the typopads began to click thinly, his voice somehow sounding far away. "How could you--why didn't you let us know he was a robot beforehand?" Mr. Replogle opened his eyes and nothing had changed; it was all real--it was the end. "Because you would have discriminated against him," Hervey McGeachin was saying, his grey face shiny with excessive emotion. "Everybody discriminates against my poor robots. Trustworthy, hard-working, clean, loyal to a fault--yet everybody discriminates against them merely because they're machines. I knew that, if I had told you he was a robot, you would never have hung his pictures in Cimabue, in spite of the fact that it was I who recommended him." Top management or no, Mr. Replogle felt he must speak; there were principles at stake. The dismal future of humanity rested somehow in his own shaking hands. "Sir," he said, in a hoarse voice, "you have not dealt fairly with us. You said that this Orville was a protege of yours." "And so he is." McGeachin put a thick, unmuscular arm around the robot's hard shoulders. "He is my protege and friend and I don't care if people do call me a robot-lover." There was a gasp from the reporters, even those representing the liberal press. McGeachin pointed his cigar at them. "Listen," he said. "Autobiographical note." Typopads began to click. "Up until the age of seventeen I hardly knew there was anybody on the planet but robots. My father didn't have time to mess around with kids, since he believed in running all of his multifarious industries personally. I, myself, though I tour the factories only once a year, have succeeded, by means of a computer and a ouija board, in increasing what little remained of his vast fortune after taxes to an amount that is ten times as great as his was at its peak." "How do you spell _ouija_?" the man from the _World-Post and Journal_ interrupted. "So," McGeachin continued, after affably spelling the word and making a few adverse remarks on the sad state of current education, "during my childhood, I was left entirely in the care of robots, and I was a happy, carefree lad until I was sent to Harvard. There I discovered the dark truth which has over-shadowed my life ever since and rendered me a virtual recluse--that there are also large numbers of people in the world. Give me a robot, any time. Trustworthy, hard-working, clean, loyal to a fault, and, in Orville's case, artistic also. Tell 'em how you started in to paint, Orville." "Well, it was like this, gents," Orville said in a voice like a rusty hinge. "I work for the Perfect Paint Section of the Superior Chemicals Division of the Universal Materials Corporation, which is a subsidiary of the McGeachin interests, and, as I'm getting along in gears, I was put onto artists' oil colors, which are individually ground, like all the artists nowadays want 'em to be--"