THE COSMIC COMPUTER

Back Forward Menu

below the house, where the scow was being unloaded, and found his mother
in the living room watching a screen play with one eye and keeping the
other on a soulless machine like a miniature contragravity tank, which
was going over the carpet with a vacuum cleaner and taking swipes at the
furniture with a rotary dustmop. She was glad to see him, and then
became troubled.[Pg 50]

"Conn, when Flora comes home, you won't argue with her, will you?"

"Only in self-defense." That was the wrong thing to say. He changed it
to, "No; I won't argue with her at all," and then quoted Wade Lucas
quoting Thomas Paine. Then he had to assure his mother a couple of times
that there really was a Merlin, and then assure her that it wouldn't get
loose and hurt anybody if he did find it.

In the middle of his assurances about the harmlessness of Merlin, the
housecleaning-robot began knocking things off the top of a table.