"Happiness!" she wailed. "And for the first time in six months we have a fight! Happiness, and for the first time in twenty years it's not bread, it's charcoal for supper!"
When the smoke cleared, Leo Auffmann was gone.
The fearful clangor, the collision of man and inspiration, the flinging about of metal, lumber, hammer, nails, O square, screwdriver, continued for many days. On occasion, defeated, Leo Auffmann loitered out through the streets, nervous, apprehensive, jerking his head at the slightest sound of distant laughter, listened to children's jokes, watching what made them smile. At night he sat on neighbors' crowded porches, listening to the old folks weigh and balance life, and at each explosion of merriment Leo Auffmann quickened like a general who has seen the forces of darkness routed and whose strategy has been reaffirmed. On his way home he felt triumphant until he was in his garage with the dead tools and the inanimate lumber. Then his bright face fell away in a pale funk, and to cover his sense of failure he banged and crashed the parts of his machine about as if they really did make sense. At last it began to shape itself and at the end of the ten days and nights, trembling with fatigue, self-dedicated, half starved, fumbling and looking as if he had been riven by lightning, Leo Auffmann wandered into his house.
The children, who had been screaming horribly at each other, fell silent, as if the Red Death had entered at the chiming of the clock.
"The Happiness Machine," husked Leo Auffmann, "is ready."
"Leo Auffmann," said his wife, "has lost fifteen pounds. He hasn't talked to his children in two weeks, they are nervous, they fight, listen! His wife is nervous, she's gained ten pounds, she'll need new clothes, look! Sure--the machine is ready. But happy? Who can say? Leo, leave off with the clock you're building. You'll never find a cuckoo big enough to go in it! Man was not made to tamper with such things. It's not against God, no, but it sure looks like it's against Leo Auffmann. Another week of this and we'll bury him in his machine!"
But Leo Auffmann was too busy noticing that the room was falling swiftly up.
How interesting, he thought, lying on the floor.
Darkness closed in a great wink on him as someone screamed something about that Happiness Machine, three times.
The first thing he noticed the next morning was dozens of birds fluttering around in the air stirring up ripples like colored stones thrown into an incredibly clear stream, gonging the tin roof of the garage softly.
A pack of multibred dogs pawfooted one by one into the yard to peer and whine gently through the garage door; four boys, two girls, and some men hesitated in the driveway and then edged along under the cherry trees.
Leo Auffmann, listening, knew what it was that had reached out and called them all into the yard.
The sound of the Happiness Machine.
It was the sort of sound that might be heard coming from a giant's kitchen on a summer day. There were all kinds of hummings, low and high, steady and then changing. Incredible foods were being baked there by a host of whirring golden bees as big as teacups. The giantess herself, humming contentedly under her breath, might glide to the door, as vast as all summer, her face a huge peach-colored moon gazing calmly out upon smiling dogs, corn-haired boys and flour-haired old men.
"Wait," said Leo Auffmann out loud. "I didn't turn the machine on this morning! Saul!"
Saul, standing in the yard below, looked up.
"Saul, did you turn it on?"
"You told me to warm it up half an hour ago!"
"All right, Saul, I forgot. I'm not awake." He fell back in bed.
His wife, bringing his breakfast up, paused by the window, looking down at the garage.
"Tell me," she said quietly. "I f that machine is like you say, has it got an answer to making babies in it somewhere? Can that machine make seventy-year-old people twenty? Also, how does death look when you hide in there with all that happiness?"
"Hide!"
"If you died from overwork, what should I do today, climb in that big box down there and be happy? Also tell me, Leo, how is our life? You know how our house is. Seven in the morning, breakfast, the kids; all of you gone by eight-thirty and it's just me and washing and me and cooking and socks to be darned, weeds to be dug, or I run to the store or polish silver. Who's complaining? I'm just reminding you how the house is put together, Leo, what's in it! So now answer: How do you get all those things I said in one machine?"
"That's not how it's built!"
"I'm sorry. I got no time to look, then."
And she kissed his cheek and went from the room and he lay smelling the wind that blew from the hidden machine below, rich with the odor of those roasted chestnuts that sold in the autumn streets of a Paris he had never known....
A cat moved unseen among the hypnotized dogs and boys to purr against the garage door, in the sound of snow-waves crumbling down a faraway and rhythmically breathing shore.
Tomorrow, thought Leo Auffmann, we'll try the machine, all of us, together.
Late that night he awoke and knew something had wakened him. Far away in another room he heard someone crying.
"Saul?" he whispered, getting out of bed.