A shock ran up his spine, and he froze motionless, blinking his eyes. Robert was holding a frog on the ground, blood spilling from its punctured body. With a knife he'd taken from the kitchen drawer, he kept stabbing at the green and crimson mass beneath his spread fingers, intoning his hateful chant.
"Kill it! Kill the living thing!"
Eddie turned away, revulsion crawling through him like a horde of slimy insects.
He went to the bathroom and washed his hands, and then he sat down to wait for Mary. When she came home from the beauty parlor, he told her about it.
"I . . . I don't know what to do," he said. "He . . . where did he pick that up?"
"Did . . . did you scold him?"
"Scold him? No, no—of course not."
"Someone's been tampering with him," Mary said. "They've fixed his insides so that he can record outside impressions. Someone taught him that."
"Someone taught him to kill," Eddie said in a dead voice. "To kill . . . living things."
"Who?" Mary asked.
"Who?" Eddie echoed.
When Robert came in to supper that night, his hands were clean, and he bore an angelic smile on his face.
"Hello, son," Eddie said. "Where have you been hiding all day?"
Robert' smiled and took his place at the table. "Down to the ball park," he said. "Few of the fellows got a game going."
Eddie's eyes opened in horror, and he looked at Mary. Mary's face almost crumpled. This was her twelve-year old son speaking. This was her son lying.
That night, they decided to do something about it.
But the questioning had to be very tactful.
They didn't want anyone to know that Robert was a robot, and; yet they wanted to find out just who had fed his memory tapes such poison.
They took different sections of the neighborhood, dividing all the houses and shops between them.
Everyone was most co-operative. They answered all the questions that were put to them. No, they hadn't seen any of the neighbors behaving strangely with Robert. No, they hadn't even seen any of them alone with Robert. Why, what was it all about?
Eddie moved from house to house, from store to store. Something was troubling him. Something about the way they'd looked at him, with pity was it? Or what? Just what? He didn't pinpoint it until he spoke to Mr. Jeffries next door.
"So you're worried about the boy, eh?" Mr. Jeffries asked.
"Yes. Yes, I am. I feel . . . I think someone has been . . . been corrupting him."
Mr. Jeffries chuckled. "Now, now, Eddie, that's silly."
"No," Eddie insisted. "Someone has been twisting his mind. Someone is teaching him to . . . to kill."
Mr. Jeffries opened his eyes wide, and Eddie looked deep into their pupils. "Y-yes," Eddie stammered.
"To kill, you say?"
Eddie kept looking into Mr: Jeffries' eyes. "To . . . to kill living things," he said.
Mr. Jeffries laughed loudly. "Well, now, we're all living things." He paused. "Aren't we?"
Eddie turned and ran. He had seen it there, deep in Mr. Jeffries' eyes; he had seen it and he knew what it was now. He threw open the front door.
"Mary," he shouted. "Mary! Oh my God, Mary!"
His wife was sitting on the couch, her head buried in her hands. She had just returned from covering her half of the neighborhood, and she was still wearing her coat. She looked up when Eddie came into the room.
"Mary," he said, "we've got to get out of here. Mr. Jeffries, the D'Allessio's, the Clarks—"
"And McCarthy the cop, and the Steins, and the grocer, and—" She buried her face in her hands. "It's no use, Eddie. It's no use. We can't run away."
"The flicker," he said. "Behind the right eye. The flicker."
"Yes ... yes." Mary's voice was broken and toneless.
"Robots," Eddie said flatly. "All robots. Every last one of them. Robots." He fell to his knees at Mary's feet, burying his head in her lap.
Neither of them heard Robert as he came into the room with the pair of shears clutched tightly in his fist, his eyes flickering.