If Joe Mulloy was perfect--and he was--then beyond his perfection here only could be ... SUPERJOEMULLOY By SCOTT F. GRENVILLE [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, November 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] 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.