"Why didn't you move around when my friends were here, you heap of junk?" Joe asked the super-robot. Superjoemulloy turned to him. "I didn't want to display my perfection before mere humans, you distorted blob of protoplasm," it said. Joe Mulloy was becoming angry, but he tried not to show it. He downed his drink. "Get me another," he told the robot, holding out his glass. "The hell with you," said Superjoemulloy. "What do you think you are, God or something? Just because you slapped me together with your clumsy butterfingers doesn't give you the right to order me around like some common servant. Now that you've created me, I could do a better job of robot-building myself. Now get the hell out of here." Joe Mulloy turned on his heel and stomped out of the room. No robot was going to talk to him like that! No, sir! The super-robot quietly followed Joe to the door and gave him a kick that sent him sprawling down the stairs. At the bottom of the staircase, Joe whacked his face against the solid oak of the banister. He turned groggily to look at the blurred image of the robot standing defiantly at the top of the steps, with its hands on its hips. For a brief second the sneer faded from Superjoemulloy's face, and was replaced by an evil sadistic leer. Joe Mulloy recalled the last line of Father William: "Now be off, or I'll kick you down stairs." But the super-robot was far worse than Father William. A conceited, contemptuous monster, it was totally unlike Joe's warm, humble, self-effacing self! The sneering monster must be destroyed! Joe cunningly enticed the robot to leave the laboratory for Joe's office, where it could admire its sneer in all the mirrors. Sneeringly Joe wondered why anyone could admire a sneer so much. Without thinking, he used his hand to smooth out the wrinkles in his now slightly worn sneer. Then he crept upstairs to his laboratory to barricade himself in there to think of a way to destroy Superjoemulloy. At last he hit on the answer. A hypnosis machine. "The robot is mechanical, so I'll have to hypnotize him by mechanical means," Joe reasoned to himself. He worked day and night, learning the necessary techniques as he went along. He made some mistakes at first, of course. But in four days the mechanical hypnosis machine was complete. Joe found the super-robot in the mirror-lined office, where it had been admiring and improving its sneer for the last four days. The sneer was magnificent. But it still lay just one iota short of absolute perfection. Try as the robot would, perfection in a sneer still lay without its grasp. "Genius!" shouted Joe, to get the robot to turn its head. He turned the dial on the mechanical hypnosis instrument up to full power. "You are now in my power!" But now Superjoemulloy's sneer was completely perfect. With a look of sublime contempt on its plastic face, it took the hypnosis machine, turned it around, and aimed it right back at Joe Mulloy. * * * * *