If Joe Mulloy was perfect—and
he was—then beyond his perfection
here only could be ...
SUPERJOEMULLOY
By SCOTT F. GRENVILLE
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, November 1960.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Joe Mulloy lounged in the plushest chair in his luxurious office. Allaround him, on the walls, on the ceiling, even in strategic spots allover the floor, there were mirrors. Joe sneered at the place where themirrors were most profuse; twenty or thirty perfectly identical Joessneered back at him. He admired his sneer from every angle, shapingand changing the contemptuous look on his face with his hands, strokingit, much as other young men in a far earlier age had stroked andtwisted their fine mustachios.
As usual, Joe Mulloy was engrossed in his two favorite hobbies:narcissism and indolence.
Joe's friends, of which there were very few, could have given you afairly accurate resume of his character in five words, his sneer andhis indolence.
In the first respect they would have been right. Joseph Mulloy had beenborn with a sneer on his face. His whole early life had been centeredaround that sneer. It had enraged his father, distressed his mother,driven his teachers to tears, his playmates to tantrums. He stoppeddoing homework at the age of eight, but the teachers passed him onanyway to avoid complete mental breakdown.
Gradually, Joe Mulloy began to get his way in everything by virtue ofhis sneer. It was not merely openly supercilious; that was the beautyof it. It was so subtle, so faint, and yet such an open avowal ofcontempt for the entire human race, that try as the people he tormentedwould, to find something in his sneer to charge him with, they neverfound anything.
In a very few years, registration day at Joe's elementary schoolbecame a game of Russian Roulette, having as the loaded chamber thequestion: "Who's going to get little Joey Mulloy in his class thisyear?" Finally, when Joe Mulloy was fifteen years old, the local Boardof Education wisely decided to end Joe's formal education, rather thanmake screaming meemies an occupational disease at the local high school.
Joe's father welcomed the expelling as an excuse to beat him to a pulpand kick him out of the house. It was not until three days later thatthe memory of Joe's sneer, enduring through all the punishment he hadreceived, made the father blow his brains out with the most accurateGerman Luger he could buy at the pawn shop on short notice.
But Joe's friends would have been wrong in the second instance, forJoseph Mulloy was not chronically indolent. In his own profession, JoeMulloy was the most industrious man imaginable. For Joe Mulloy was arobot builder.
Disinherited by his father, he had made a beeline for the nearestpositronics laboratory. The personnel manager had flatly refused himthe job when he had told her he had absolutely no qualifications, butshe was so disconcerted by his persistent sneer that she had to givehim the job just to get him out of her sight.
Once in the laboratory, he had gone right to work learning everythingthere was to know about robots, scorning all help from the othertechnicians. Since he held other scientists, past or present, in anineffable contempt, he had to learn everything by experience insteadof studying what his merely human predecessors had done. He was soempirical that he learned all about alternating