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“I’ll go in the van,” he said. “I can make better time that way.” He got out of the cab and got some excitement going—so no one would point out that moving vans weren’t famous as fast transportation. “You come with me,” he said, “and we can drive straight through.”

I called the office, and they told me that not only could I go with Jenny and George—I had to go. They said that George was the most dedicated employee the company had, next to Jenny, and that I was to do anything I could to help him in this time of need.

When I got back from telephoning, George was off telephoning somewhere else himself. He’d put on a pair of sneakers and left the magic shoes behind. Sully Harris had picked up the magic shoes, and was looking inside.

“My God,” Sully said to me, “it’s like these little buttons all over an accordion in there.” He slipped his hand into a shoe. He left it in there for about a minute before he got nerve enough to push a button.

“Fuh,” Jenny said. She was perfectly deadpan.

Sully pushed another button.

“Fuh,” Jenny said.

He pushed another button. Jenny

Jenny smiled like Mona Lisa.

Sully pushed several buttons.

“Burplappleneo,” said Jenny. “Bama-uzztrassit. Shuh,” she said. She did a right face and stuck out her tongue.

Sully lost his nerve. He put the magic shoes down by the van the way you’d put bedroom slippers by a bed. “Boy—” he said, “those people aren’t gonna come back here. They’re gonna think it’s a morgue or something after that show he put on. I just thank God for one thing.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“At least they didn’t find out whose voice and face the refrigerator’s got.”

“Whose?” I said.

“You didn’t know?” said Sully. “Hell—he made a mold of her face and put it on Jenny. Then he had her record every sound in the English language. Every sound Jenny makes, she made first.”

“Who?” I said.

“Nancy, or whatever her name is,” Sully said. “Right after the honeymoon he did all that. The dame that’s dying now.”

We made seven hundred miles in sixteen hours, and I don’t believe George said ten words to me the whole time. He did do some talking, but not to me. It was in his sleep, and I guess he was talking to Jenny. He would say something like “Uffa-mf-uffa” while he was snoozing next to me. Then his toes would wiggle in his sneakers, signalling for Jenny to give him whatever answer he wanted to hear.

He didn’t have the magic shoes on, so Jenny didn’t do anything. She was strapped up against a wall in the dark in the back of the van. George didn’t worry much about her until we got within about an hour of where we were going. Then he got as fidgety as a beagle. Every ten minutes or so he’d think Jenny had busted loose and was crashing around in her brains. We would have to pull over and stop, and go around in back and make sure she was fine.

You talk about plain living: the inside of the van looked like a monk’s cell in a television station’s control room. I’d seen floorboards that were wider and springier than George’s cot. Everything that was for George in the van was cheap and uncomfortable. I wondered at first where the quarter of a million dollars he’d talked about was. But every time he passed his flashlight beam over Jenny’s brains I got more excited. Those brains were the most ingenious, most complicated, most beautiful electronic system I’ll ever see. Money was no object where Jenny was concerned.

As the sun came up we turned off the highway and banged over chuckholes into the hometown of the General Household Appliances Company. Here was the town where I’d started my career, where he’d started his career, where he’d brought his bride so long ago.

George was driving. The banging woke me up, and it shook something loose in George. All of a sudden he had to talk. He went off like an alarm clock.

“Don’t know her!” he said. “Don’t know her at all, Sonny Jim!” He bit the back of his hand, trying to drown out the pain in his heart. “I’m coming to see a perfect stranger, Sonny Jim,” he said. “All I know