All he knew for certain was that he’d never had such a crummy night in all his life. It couldn’t just be this goddamned robot—staring back blankly. It was everything. The mortgage payment was due; Benjy had to go in to the orthodontist and where the hell was the money going to come from for that; Dorothy had called the precinct just before he’d come down, to tell him the hot water had split and drowned the carpets in the kid’s bedroom; and to top it all off, he’d been assigned this buzzing pain in the ass and got caught with a little juice passed by that nitwit Rico; he’d had to have this Brillo pain tell him there was a hassle two blocks away; he was sure as God made little green apples going to get a bad report out of this, maybe get set down, maybe get reprimanded, maybe get censured…he didn’t know what all.

But one thing was certain: this metal bird-dog, this stuffed shirt barracks lawyer with the trailalong of a ten-year-old kid behind his big brother, this nuisance in metal underwear, this…this…thing was of no damned earthly use to a working cop pulling a foot beat!

On the other hand, a voice that spoke with the voice of Mike Polchik said, he did keep that jughead from using a broken bottle on you.

“Shuddup!” Polchik said.

“I beg your pardon?” answered the robot.

Ingrate! said the inner voice.

It was verging on that chalky hour before dawn, when the light filtering out of the sky had a leprous, sickly look. Mike Polchik was a much older man.

Brillo had interfered in the apprehension of Milky Kyser, a well-known car thief. Mike had spotted him walking slowly and contemplatively along a line of parked cars on Columbus Avenue, carrying a tightly-rolled copy of the current issue of Life magazine.

When he had collared Milky, the robot had buzzed up to them and politely inquired precisely what in the carborundum Polchik thought he was doing. Polchik had responded with what was becoming an hysterical reaction-formation to anything the metal cop said. “Shuddup!”