Commutor jet station. Nowhere was there a light; not even from the city ten miles from the housing project in which Kelsey lived. But Alice had no thought whatever of an air-raid. There were worse darknesses than a blackout. There were worse ways to die than under a rain of white fire bombs.

The fear of the bombs was the fear of never having lived, not a fear of dying.

The fear was over. There was only hope. The commitment was made. Nothing could be worse than the way it had been, and failure could be only a final admission of a defeat that had been there all the time.

She got off the Commutor Jet at the uptown station and walked through darkness. She walked alone in the city. No human being would have been walking in the darkness. They were hovering together behind blacked-out windows in groups. But she felt nothing as she walked in the blackness.

She knew where the Clinic was. The address was on the order blank.

She hurried faster and faster. At no moment in her life had she felt dawning in her such a hope of happiness, such a feeling of ecstasy. At no time, even in her deepest dreams, had she dreamed that she might really be loved by Master Kelsey.

It was such a daring scheme that she even hesitated to think about it, afraid it might be merely a projection of a dream.

In black print at the top of the Order Blank were the words:

FIX ME PLEASE! Make me beautiful! MAKE ME PLEASANT TO THE CUSTOMERS, AND A LOVELY ROBOT TO REMEMBER!

Alice was a domestic. She was not supposed to carry that order to the Clinic and be fixed up. The order blank was strictly for specialized receptionist robots, office workers, robots that had to have a different sort of front to meet the consumer public. Originally, all robots had been made to look alike. But now, for psychological reasons, it had been decided to change the outward appearance of receptionists and other robots that met the general public.

They had to be lovely to look at, and be able to smile in the most pleasant way possible.

Laboring robots, domestics, their form was more functional than beautiful. It lacked the surface polish of the office-working robots. And yet Alice knew that one of the beautiful receptionist robots for example was indeed beautiful, and that it was almost impossible to distinguish them from beautiful human beings.

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