Doll-Friend

By Robert F. Young

He had a beautiful wife. But the girl he really loved came out of a slot machine — warm and soft and clinging and unalive.

Robert F. Young was a Hugo nominated author known for his lyrical and sentimental prose. His work appeared in Amazing Stories, Fantastic Stories, Startling Stories, Playboy, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Galaxy Magazine, and Analog Science Fact & Fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilder Publications, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781515445944

Book preview

Doll-Friend

by Robert F. Young

©2020 Positronic Publishing

Cover Photo © Can Stock Photo / kjekol

Doll-Friend is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, locales or institutions is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except for brief quotations for review purposes only.

ISBN 13: 978-1-5154-4594-4

Table of Contents

Doll-Friend

Doll-Friend

He had a beautiful wife. But the girl he really loved came out of a slot machine — warm and soft and clinging and unalive.

Of all the doll-friends Carter had ever danced with, Edie Four was by far his favorite. The mere act of depressing keys E, D, and 4 on the console of the huge juke-doll box gave him a thrill comparable to the thrill Aladdin must have felt when he rubbed his magic lamp; and the mere sight of her when she emerged, all tall and golden in a golden gown, was in itself well worth the half dollar it cost to bring her to life.

It was a truism to say that all doll-friends were beautiful. Man, working with his lathes and his shapers and his plastics and his photoelectric cells, was a creator in his own right, and while unlike God he could not endow his products with souls, he could, and did, endow them with a physical perfection unmatched by any product ever to have come off the celestial production line. However, Carter’s preference for Edie did not stem solely from her physical allure: she had personality, too.

When he said something to her, she didn’t respond with the cliches the other doll-friends used.