In his room Saul wept, his head buried in his pillow. "No ... no ..." he sobbed. "Over ... over...."
"Saul, you had a nightmare? Tell me about it, son."
But the boy only wept.
And sitting there on the boy's bed, Leo Auffmann suddenly thought to look out the window. Below, the garage doors stood open.
He felt the hairs rise along the back of his neck.
When Saul slept again, uneasily, whimpering, his father went downstairs and out to the garage where, not breathing, he put his hand out.
In the cool night the Happiness Machine's metal was too hot to touch.
So, he thought, Saul was here tonight.
Why? Was Saul unhappy, in need of the machine? No, happy, but wanting to hold onto happiness always. Could you blame a boy wise enough to know his position who tried to keep it that way? No! And yet ...
Above, quite suddenly, something white was exhaled from Saul's window. Leo Auffmann's heart thundered. Then he realized the window curtain had blown out into the open night. But it had seemed as intimate and shimmering a thing as a boy's soul escaping his room. And Leo Auffmann had flung up his hands as if to thwart it, push it back into the sleeping house.
Cold, shivering, he moved back into the house and up to Saul's room where he seized the blowing curtain in and locked the window tight so the pale thing could not escape again. Then he sat on the bed and put his hand on Saul's back.
"A Tale of Two Cities? Mine. The Old Curiosity Shop? Ha, that's Leo Auffmann's all right! Great Expectations? That used to be mine. But let Great Expectations be his, now!"
"What's this?" asked Leo Auffmann, entering.
"This," said his wife, "is sorting out the community property! When a father scares his son at night it's time to chop everything in half! Out of the way, Mr. Bleak House, Old Curiosity Shop. In all these books, no mad scientist lives like Leo Auffmann, none!"
"You're leaving, and you haven't even tried the machine!" he protested. "Try it once, you'll unpack, you'll stay!"
"Tom Swift and His Electric Annihilator--whose is that?" she asked. "Must I guess?"
Snorting, she gave Tom Swift to Leo Auffmann.
Very late in the day all the books, dishes, clothes, linens had been stacked one here, one there, four here, four there, ten here, ten there. Lena Auffmann, dizzy with counting, had to sit down. "All right," she gasped. "Before I go, Leo, prove you don't give nightmares to innocent sons!"
Silently Leo Auffmann led his wife into the twilight. She stood before the eight-foot-tall, orange-colored box.
"That's happiness?" she said. "Which button do I press to be overjoyed, grateful, contented, and much-obliged?"
The children had gathered now.
"Mama," said Saul, "don't!"
"I got to know what I'm yelling about, Saul." She got in the machine, sat down, and looked out at her husband, shaking her head. "It's not me needs this, it's you, a nervous wreck, shouting."
"Please," he said, "you'll see!"
He shut the door.
"Press the button!" he shouted in at his unseen wife.
There was a click. The machine shivered quietly, like a huge dog dreaming in its sleep.
"Papa!" said Saul, worried.
"Listen!" said Leo Auffmann.
At first there was nothing but the tremor of the machine's own secretly moving cogs and wheels.