“Let us speak no more of horticulture,” said John to Old Pete. “Your knowledge of the subject is legend hereabouts and I am not up to matching wits with you. Tell me something, do you sleep well of a night?”

“The sleep of the just, nothing else.”

“Then you must indeed have a cosy nest to take your slumbers in.”

“No, nothing much, a mattress upon a rough wooden pallet. It serves as it has since my childhood.”

Omally shook his head in dismay, “Longevity, as I understand it to be, is very much the part and parcel of good sleeping. Man spends one third of his life in bed. Myself a good deal more. The comfort of the sleeper greatly reflects upon his health and well being.”

“Is that a fact?” said Old Pete. “I have no complaints.”

“Because you have never experienced greater comfort. Take myself. You would take me for a man of thirty.”

“Never. Forty.”

Omally laughed. “Always the wag. But truthfully, I attribute my good health to the comfort afforded by my bed. There is a science in these things, and believe me, I have studied this particular science.”

“Never given the matter much thought,” said Old Pete.

“So much I suspected,” said John. “You, as an elderly gentleman, and by that I mean no offence, must first look after your health. Lying upon an uncomfortable bed can take years off your life.”

“As it happens, my old bed is a bit knackered.”

“Then there you have it.” Omally smacked his hands together. “You are throwing away your life for a few pennies wisely invested in your own interest.”

“I am a fool to myself,” said Old Pete, who definitely wasn’t. “What are you selling, John?”

Omally tapped at his nose, “Something very, very special. The proper palatial pit. The very acme of sleeping paraphernalia. Into my possession has come of late a bed which would stagger the senses of the gods. Now had I the accommodation I would truly claim such a prize for my own. But my apartments are small and I know that yours could easily house such a find. What do you say?”

“I’ll want to have a look at the bugger first, five-thirty p.m. tonight, here.”

Omally spat upon his palm and smacked it down into the wrinkled appendage of the elder. “Done,” said he.

“I’d better not be,” said Old Pete.

Omally drew his partner away to a side-table, “Now that is what you call business,” he told Jim. “The old bed is not even dug out, yet it is already sold.”

Pooley groaned; he could already feel the blisters upon his palms. “You are on to a wrong’n there,” he said. “This venture has to me the smell of doom about it. That is a bomb site you will be digging on. There will probably be a corpse asleep in that bed. Should bed it in fact be and not simply a shaft or two of nothing.”

Omally crossed himself at the mention of a corpse. “Stop with such remarks,” said he. “There is a day’s pay in this and as the digger you deserve half of anything I get.”

“And what about Norman’s wheel and the many millions to be made from that?”

“Well, we have no absolute proof that the wheel spins without cessation. This would be a matter for serious scientific investigation. Such things take time.”

“We have no lack of that, surely?”

“I will tell you what,” Omally finished his pint and studied the bottom of his glass. “I will chance your wheel if you will chance my bedframe.”

Pooley looked doubtful.

“Now be fair,” said John. “There are degrees of doubt to be weighed up on either side. Firstly, of course you cannot approach Norman, he knows that you are on to him. A third party must act here. Someone with a subtlety of approach. Someone gifted in such matters.”

“Someone such as yourself?”

“Good idea,” said John. “But time is of the essence, we don’t want any opportunists dipping in before us. When we leave here you collect a couple of tools from my plot and whip the bed out and I will go around to Norman’s.”

If Pooley had looked doubtful before, it was nought to the way he looked now. “I do not feel that I am getting the better part of this,” he said slowly.

“Better part?” Omally’s face was all outrage. “We are a business partnership are we not? There are no better parts involved here. Surely you are now sowing seeds of distrust?”

“Who, me? Perish the thought. The fact that I will be labouring away in a minefield digging up a rusty old bedframe while you stand chit-chatting in a cosy corner-shop had not crossed my mind.”

“So?”

Jim folded his brow. “Whose round is it?”

“Yours, Jim,” said John Omally, “most definitely yours.”

Norman had been dancing gaily through his morning’s work. Between customers he had skipped backwards and forwards, turning the enamel door handle and squinting into the gloom to assure himself that all was as it should be. The wheel had been tirelessly spinning for more than four hours now and showed no signs whatever of grinding to a halt. As the Memorial Library clock struck one in the distance he turned his sign to the “Closed For Lunch” side, bolted up, and pranced away to his sanctum sanctorum. The wheel was an undoubted success and, as such, meant that Phase One of his latest, and in his own humble opinion undeniably greatest, project was complete.

Norman slipped off his shopkeeper’s overall and donned a charred leather apron and a pair of welder’s goggles. Dusting down his rubber gloves with a tube of baby powder, he drew them over his sensitive fingers and flexed these magical appendages. With a flourish, he dragged aside a length of gingham tablecloth which curtained off a tiny alcove in one corner of the crowded room.

Upon a worm-eaten kitchen chair sat another Norman!

Clad in grey shopkeeper’s workcoat, shirt, tie, trousers, and worn brown brogues, he was a waxen effigy of the Madame Tussaud’s variety. The scientific shopkeeper chuckled and, reaching out a rubber-clad finger, tickled his doppelgänger under the chin. “Afternoon, Norman,” he said.

The double did not reply, but simply sat staring sightlessly into space. It was as near a perfect representation of its living counterpart as it was possible to be. And so it might well have been considering the long years of Norman’s labour. Countless thousands of hours had gone into its every detail. Every joint in its skeletal frame was fully articulated with friction-free bearings of the shopkeeper’s own design. The cranial computer banks were loaded to the very gunwhales with all the necessary information, which would enable it to perform the mundane and tiresome duties required of a corner-shopkeeper, whilst its creator could dedicate the entirety of his precious time to the more essential matters of which Phase Three of the project were composed. All it lacked was that essential spark of life, and this now ground away upon the kitchen table at precisely twenty-six revolutions per minute.

Norman chuckled anew and drew his masterpiece erect. Unbuttoning the shirt, he exposed the rubberized chest region which housed the hydraulic unit designed to simulate the motions of breathing. Tinkering with his screwdriver, he removed the frontal plate and applied a couple of squirts of Three-in-One to the brace of mountings, identical in shape and size to those which now cradled the ever-spinning wheel. He had sought far and wide for a never-failing power supply, having previously nothing to hand save clumsy mains cables which, even when disguised by poking from trouser bottoms, left his progeny little scope for locomotion. This compact unit would do the job absolutely.

Norman crossed to the table, and with a set of specially fashioned tongs carefully lifted the spinning wheel upon its polished axle-rod. It turned through space gyroscopically, if nothing else it would certainly keep the robot standing upright. With a satisfying click the wheel fell into place, and Norman closed the chest cavity and rebuttoned the shirt, straightening the tie and workcoat lapels. The shopkeeper stepped back to view his mirror image. Perfection. There was a gentle flutter of movement about the chest region, a sudden blinking of eyelids and focusing of eyes, a yawn, a stretch. Clearing its throat with a curiously mechanical coughing sound, the creature spoke.