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found it or him altogether credible. The old sparkle in the eye of apparent vitality, though of course always simulated, was missing now. Hallstrom’s responses seemed diminished from what they had been. He no longer initiated the banal polite conversations of old, the platitudes about the weather, the clichés on the traffic problem, and other minutiae of quotidian life. Whether he was still being nasty to Janet could not be discerned from the countenance of either.
    For his own part, Pierce failed to feel the least sensitivity, on seeing Hallstrom, that he normally would have known in the presence of a human husband whom he had cuckolded. But as time went by he felt more and more as though he had been rejected in a human way by Phyllis’s departure. The difference was that as his creation she could not be altogether a machine. Her moral status would properly be at the level of daughter or wife, while being neither. Their special relationship might not be what had hitherto been included under the umbrella of normality, but he was no more a pervert than Phyllis was a sex doll.
    Something unique had occurred in the process of her making, something that had escaped his attention at the time, but perusing the copious notes he had kept did him no good now in his efforts to produce her successor, which had thus far failed in almost every particular. Though the advances in technology since he had first begun to construct Phyllis I should have made the job with II easier at almost every stage, he kept encountering new obstacles. The latest development in artificial flesh, which could be brought more quickly to normal human body temperature and maintained there with an improved thermostat, did not have, to Pierce’s touch, quite the old resilience … that was to say, Phyllis’s.
    Try as he did with every supplier, he simply could not find the perfect hazel of artificial eye—the hazel of Phyllis’s. He paid a fortune for a vast selection of human hair from various European sources without acquiring a match for that on Phyllis’s scalp, which was finer, silkier, more richly yet subtly colored, though itself synthetic—he had previously exhausted the capabilities of all those who produced the latter.
    As to a voice, every version was impossible, erring someplace across a range from oleaginous to abrasive. Any attempt to soften coarseness of timbre resulted in a creamy loss of character. Concentrating for months on one sound, that of his own name—Phyllis’s pronunciation of which he cherished above all others, and which he had invoked from her almost immediately—he could now reproduce nothing that came close to her perfect pitch, her elegant but never pretentious enunciation, the flutelike tones of glee, the cello of passion.
    Phyllis’s had been a miraculous conception, not the sort of thing that one could reasonably expect to be repeated. The longer she was gone, the more mythic she became to Pierce, who was in danger of losing a clear image of her in a general refulgence, which state of affairs he believed deplorable but also remarkable, given his basic irreligiosity.
    Lack of success in creating another artificial woman had its effect on his professional career. While previously moonlighting on Phyllis’s construction, often being distracted by it and in fact stealing the materials from which she was made, he had nevertheless done such outstanding work on his firm’s projects that he had been appointed head of the research department of Animatronics, Inc. But now, having arrived at an impasse in the effort to build her successor, Pierce neglected his job, his attention turning diffuse in matters that demanded precision, his focus no nearer than the middle distance. Seeking to conceal the void in his moral authority, he assumed a brusque style that appeared rude to his colleagues, who rather sooner than later were turned against him by his second-in-command and hitherto