y.

"Exactly. She also asked me," Helen went on grimly, "if I thought he'd
be less of a freak as he got older."

Tom Benton swore. "Bee always did have less sense than the average hen,"
he gritted. "My son a freak! Hell's-bells!"

Tommy, arriving at the hall door in time to hear the tail-end of the
sentence, crept back to bed feeling numb and dazed. So even his father
thought he was a freak.

* * * * *

The last few days before parting was one of strain for all of them. If
Tommy was unnaturally subdued, no one noticed it; his parents were not
feeling any great impulse toward gaiety either.

They all went dutifully sight-seeing as before; they saw the Zoo, and
went shopping on the Skywalks, and on the last day wound up at the great
showrooms of "Androids, Inc."

Tommy had hated them on sight; they were at once too human and too
inhuman for comfort. The hotel was full of them, and most private homes
had at least one. Now they saw the great incubating vats, and the
processing and finally the showroom where one of the finished products
was on display as a maid, sweeping and dusting.

"There's one that's a dead-ringer for you, Helen. If you were a little
better looking, that is." Tommy's dad pretended to compare them
judicially. Helen laughed, but Tommy looked at him with a resentfulness.
Comparing his mother to an Android....

"They say for a little extra you can get an exact resemblance. Maybe I'd
better have one fixed up like you to take back with me," Big Tom added
teasingly. Then as Helen's face clouded over, "Oh, hon, you know I was
only kidding. Let's get out of here; this place gives me the
collywobbles. Besides, I've got to pick up my watch."

But his mother's face was still unhappy and Tommy glowered sullenly at
his father's back all the way to the watch-shop.

It was a small shop, with an inconspicuous sign down in one corner of
the window that said only, "KRUMBEIN--watches," and was probably the
most famous shop of its kind in the world. Every spaceman landing on
Terra left his watch to be checked by the dusty, little old man who was
the genius of the place. Tommy ranged wide-eyed about the clock and
chronometer crammed interior. He stopped fascinated before the last
case. In it was a watch ... but, _what_ a watch! Besides the regulation
Terran dial, it had a second smaller dial that registered the
corresponding time on Mars. Tommy's whole heart went out to it in an
ec