Granny thought it a perfectly horrible idea; but then, she could remember the days when there were human servants.

“If you imagine,” she snorted, “that I’ll share the house with a monkey, you’re very much mistaken.”

“Don’t be so old-fashioned,” I answered. “Anyway, Dorcas isn’t a monkey.”

“Then what is she—it?”

I flipped through the pages of the Biological Engineering Corporation’s guide. “Listen to this, Gran,” I said. “ ‘The Super-chimp (Registered Trade-mark) Pan Sapiens is an intelligent anthropoid, derived by selective breeding and genetic modification from basic chimpanzee stock—’ ”

“Just what I said! A monkey!”

“—and with a large-enough vocabulary to understand simple orders. It can be trained to perform all types of domestic work or routine manual labour and is docile, affectionate, housebroken, and particularly good with children—”

“Children! Would you trust Johnnie and Susan with a—a gorilla?”

I put the handbook down with a sigh.

“You’ve got a point there. Dorcas is expensive, and if I find the little monsters knocking her about—”

At this moment, fortunately, the door buzzer sounded. “Sign, please,” said the delivery man. I signed, and Dorcas entered our lives.

“Hello, Dorcas,” I said. “I hope you’ll be happy here.”

Her big, mournful eyes peered out at me from beneath their heavy ridges. I’d met much uglier humans, though she was rather an odd shape, being only about four feet tall and very nearly as wide. In her neat, plain uniform she looked just like a maid from one of those early twentieth-century movies; her feet, however, were bare and covered an astonishing amount of floor space.

“Morning, Ma’am,” she answered, in slurred but perfectly intelligible accents.

“She can speak!” squawked Granny.