Tempt the Stars

move, not knowing what it might view as a threat.
    Minutes passed. The clock, a big wooden cuckoo by the door, continued to tick. The rain continued to beat against the windows. And the robot continued to scratch at its eye, only I couldn’t figure out what it was—
    Oh.
    Like the Tin Man with his floppy garden sack, and Big Red, whose shoulders terminated in nothing but a small knob, this one didn’t have a proper head. As if whoever had designed them had just lost interest above the collar. But somebody else had decided that wouldn’t do, and had stuffed a white plastic bucket partly down the neck hole.
    That might not have been so bad, since at least it had been formed into vaguely the right shape. And its cheerful, prosaic surface was less
Children of the Corn
than Tin Man’s. But then somebody had had to go and ruin it.
    By gluing a pair of false eyelashes to the front.
    For a moment, I just stared.
    They were thick and black and droopy, like two dispirited spiders, and one had slid halfway down what I guess you’d have to call the cheek, maybe because eyelash glue was designed to stick to other eyelashes, not to shiny plastic. This seemed to bother the . . . whatever it was . . . which kept poking at it, trying to slide it back into place. But despite having nice, robotic-looking hands instead of gardening shears, it didn’t appear to be making much progress.
    I watched it for a while, blankly, a not-unpleasant white noise buzzing in my ears. And then I decided that maybe I just wouldn’t think at all for a while. My brain obviously wasn’t up to it, and zoning out was sounding really good right about—
    But of course not.
    There was a heavy tread on the stairs, and then Roger burst back into the kitchen, with his usual frenetic energy and a basin of water. “Dropping in like this,” he was grumbling, as if he’d been talking to himself. “Could have gotten your damned fool self killed!”
    “You’re not exactly easy to find,” I said, my voice sounding a little strange and a little breathy, like I was doing a bad Marilyn impression. I put my head down on the table.
    That left me looking at him sideways, but it didn’t help. He was scowling from this angle, too. “You might have called!”
    “Called?”
    “We’re in the phone book!” he said, and slammed one down on the wood in front of me.
    I blinked at it, cross-eyed. “Under what? Gods and demons?”
    “The only demon is the one you brought with you,” he said, transferring the scowl to Pritkin.
    And okay, I thought. It looked like Mom was home. Because I didn’t think her . . . lover? friend? pet? . . . was likely to have figured out what Pritkin was that fast. He’d barely laid eyes on the guy, and Pritkin looked like a human.
    Well, usually. At the moment he looked more like a corpse. I got up with the vague idea of doing something, only my legs vetoed that plan halfway through the motion, which left me stumbling awkwardly into the table.
    It hurt. A lot. My knee came into painful contact with one of the table’s sturdy legs, and the table won. I backed off, to the accompaniment of Roger cursing a string worthy of a war mage I knew.
    “Sit down before you fall down!”
    “Too late,” I mumbled, but my butt somehow found the chair again anyway. He slammed the basin down on the tabletop and muttered some more, while cleaning off Pritkin like he was going to die of dirt or something. I kind of thought if that was the case, we’d both be goners, since we’d passed filthy a while ago. But on the plus side, I didn’t look so improper anymore, being decently covered in mud.
    Silver lining, I thought, and sprawled there, watching the robot try to fix its wonky eyelash.
    It kind of looked like it had had a hard night.
    I could relate.
    “What is that?” I asked, after a few minutes.
    Roger looked up from checking Pritkin for damage. “Is that what you came here to ask?”
    “No.”
    “Then you don’t need to know, do you?” he snapped, and slammed out.
    I stared after him for a moment. And then I managed to get up and check on Pritkin, too, who was a good deal cleaner but no more conscious than he’d ever been. I felt my stomach fall, since my first-aid training hadn’t included what to do for magical pranks or man-eating forests or attacks by supernatural robots.
    I put a hand on his cheek, and his skin felt clammy. Or maybe it was just that it was chilly in here, too. His face turned into my palm, his