The Servant Problem | Page 8

golden eyes, then headed in the direction of the lights. Philip took a
deep breath, and followed him. He would have visited the village
anyway, Zarathustra or no Zarathustra. Was it Pfleugersville? He knew
suddenly that it was.
* * * * *
He had not gone far before he saw a highway. A pair of headlights
appeared suddenly in the direction of the village and resolved rapidly
into a moving van. To his consternation, the van turned off the
thoroughfare and headed in his direction. He ducked into a coppice,
Zarathustra at his heels, and watched the heavy vehicle bounce by.
There were two men in the cab, and painted on the paneling of the
truckbed were the words, PFLEUGERSVILLE MOVERS, INC.
The van continued on in the direction from which he had come, and
presently he guessed its destination. Judith, clearly, was in the midst of
moving out the furniture she had been too sentimental to sell. The only
trouble was, her house had disappeared. So had the village of
Valleyview.
He stared at where the houses should have been, saw nothing at first
except a continuation of the starlit plain. Then he noticed an upright
rectangle of pale light hovering just above the ground, and presently he
identified it as Judith's back doorway. He could see through it into the
kitchen, and by straining his eyes, he could even see the stove and the
refrigerator.
Gradually he made out other upright rectangles hovering just above the
ground, some of them on a line with Judith's. All of them, however,
while outlined in the same shimmering blue that outlined hers, lacked
lighted interiors.
As he stood there staring, the van came to a halt, turned around and

backed up to the brightest rectangle, hiding it from view. The two men
got out of the cab and walked around to the rear of the truckbed. "We'll
put the stove on first," Philip heard one of them say. And then,
"Wonder why she wants to hang onto junk like this?"
The other man's voice was fainter, but his words were unmistakable
enough: "Grass widows who turn into old maids have funny notions
sometimes."
Judith Darrow wasn't really moving out of Valleyview after all. She
only thought she was.
Philip went on. The breeze was all around him. It blew through his hair,
kissed his cheeks and caressed his forehead. The stars shone palely
down. Some of the land was under cultivation, and he could see green
things growing in the starlight, and the breeze carried their green breath
to his nostrils. He reached the highway and began walking along it. He
saw no further sign of vehicles till he came opposite a large brick
building with bright light spilling through its windows. In front of it
were parked a dozen automobiles of a make that he was unfamiliar
with.
He heard the whir of machinery and the pounding of hammers, and he
went over and peered through one of the windows. The building proved
to be a furniture factory. Most of the work was being done by machines,
but there were enough tasks left over to keep the owners of the parked
cars busily occupied. The main manual task was upholstering. The
machines cut and sewed and trimmed and planed and doweled and
assembled, but apparently none of them was up to the fine art of
spitting tacks.
* * * * *
Philip returned to the highway and went on. He came to other buildings
and peered into each. One was a small automobile-assembly plant,
another was a dairy, a third was a long greenhouse. In the first two the
preponderance of the work was being performed by machines. In the
third, however, machines were conspicuously absent. Clearly it was

one thing to build a machine with a superhuman work potential, but
quite another to build one with a green thumb.
[Illustration]
He passed a pasture, and saw animals that looked like cows sleeping in
the starlight. He passed a field of newly-sprouted corn. He passed a
power plant, and heard the whine of a generator. Finally he came to the
outskirts of Pfleugersville.
There was a big illuminated sign by the side of the road. It stopped him
in his tracks, and he stood there staring at its embossed letters:
PFLEUGERSVILLE, SIRIUS XXI Discovered April 1, 1962
Incorporated September 11, 1962
Philip wiped his forehead.
Zarathustra had trotted on ahead. Now he stopped and looked back.
Come on, he seemed to say. Now that you've seen this much, you might
as well see the rest.
So Philip entered Pfleugersville ... and fell in love--
Fell in love with the lovely houses, and the darling trees in summer
bloom. With the parterres of twinkling star-flowers and the expanses of
verdant lawns.