My father at last said to it, "Won't you step inside?" He held the door open, and the thing passed on inside and out of sight; the door shut, leaving the porch lit up and empty.

"How about that," I said to Maury.

We followed after it. The door being unlocked, we went on inside.

There in the living room sat the Stanton, in the middle of the sofa, its hands on its knees, discoursing with my dad, while Chester and my mother went on watching the TV.

"Dad," I said, "you're wasting your time talking to that thing. You know what it is? A machine Maury threw together in his basement for six bucks."

Both my father and the Edwin M. Stanton paused and glanced at me.

"This nice old man?" my father said, and he got an angry, righteous expression; his brows knitted and he said loudly, "Remember, Louis, that man is a frail reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but goddamn it, mein Sohn, a thinking reed. The entire universe doesn't have to arm itself against him; a drop of water can kill him." Pointing his finger at me excitedly, my dad roared on, "But if the entire universe were to crush him, you know what? You know what I say? Man would still be more noble!" He pounded on the arm of his chair for emphasis. "You know why, mein Kind? Because he knows that he dies and I'll tell you something else; he's got the advantage over the god-damn universe because it doesn't know a thing of what's going on. And," my dad concluded, calming down a little, "all our dignity consists in just that. I mean, man's little and can't fill time and space, but he sure can make use of the brain God gave him. Like what you call this 'thing,' here. This is no thing. This is _ein Mensch_, a man. Say, I have to tell you a joke." He launched, then, into a joke half in Yiddish, half in English.

When it was over we all smiled, although it seemed to me that the Edwin M. Stanton's was somewhat formal, even forced.