“I don’t understand,” he said, “how I could be so wrong. Just let me check to see what you say is true.” He sat down inside the machine. “You won’t go away?”

His wife nodded. “We’ll wait, Lee.”

He shut the door. In the warm darkness he hesitated, pressed the button, and was just relaxing back in color and music, when he heard someone screaming.

“Fire, Papa! The machine’s on fire!”

Someone hammered the door. He leaped up, bumped his head, and fell as the door gave way and the boys dragged him out. Behind him he heard a muffled explosion. The entire family was running now. Leo Auffmann turned and gasped, “Saul, call the fire department!”

Lena Auffmann caught Saul as he ran. “Saul,” she said. “Wait.”

There was a gush of flame, another muffled explosion. When the machine was burning very well indeed, Lena Auffmann nodded.

“All right, Saul,” she said. “Run call the fire department.”

Everybody who was anybody came to the fire. There was Grandpa Spaulding and Douglas and Tom and most of the boarders and some of the old men from across the ravine and all the children from six blocks around. And Leo Auffmann’s children stood out front, proud of how fine the flames looked jumping from the garage roof.

Grandfather Spaulding studied the smoke ball in the sky and said, quietly, “Lee, was that it? Your Happiness Machine?”

“Some year,” said Leo Auffmann “I’ll figure it and tell you.”

Lena Auffmann, standing in the dark now, watched as the firemen ran in and out of the yard; the garage, roaring, settled upon itself.

“Leo,” she said, “it won’t take a year to figure. Look around. Think. Keep quiet a little bit. Then come tell me. I’ll be in the house, putting books back on shelves, and clothes back in closets, fixing supper, supper’s late, look how dark. Come, children, help Mama.”

When the firemen and the neighbors were gone Leo Auffmann was left with grandfather Spaulding and Douglas and Tom, brooding over the smoldering ruin. He stirred his foot in the wet ashes and slowly said what he had to say.

“The first thing you learn in life is you’re a fool. The last thing you learn in life is you’re the same fool. In one hour, I’ve done a lot of thinking. I thought, Leo Auffmann is blind! . . .You want to see the real Happiness Machine? The one they patented a couple thousand years ago, it still runs, not good all the time, no! but it runs. It’s been here all along.”

“But the fire—” said Douglas.

“Sure, the fire, the garage! But like Lena said, it don’t take a year to figure; what burned in the garage don’t count!” They followed him up the front-porch steps.

“Here,” whispered Leo Auffmann, “the front window. Quiet, and you’ll see it.”

Hesitantly, Grandfather, Douglas, and Tom peered through the large windowpane.

And there, in small warm pools of lamplight, you could see what Leo Auffmann wanted you to see. There sat Saul and Marshall, playing chess at the coffee table. In the dining room Rebecca was laying out the silver. Naomi was cutting paper-doll dresses. Ruth was painting water colors. Joseph was running his electric train. Through the kitchen door, Lena Auffmann was sliding a pot roast from the steaming oven. Every hand, every head, every mouth made a big or little motion. You could hear their faraway voices under glass. You could hear someone singing in a high sweet voice. You could smell bread baking, too, and you knew it was real bread that would soon be covered with real butter. Everything was there and it was working.

Grandfather, Douglas, and Tom turned to look at Leo Auffmann, who gazed serenely through the window, the pink light on his cheeks.

“Sure,” he murmured. “There it is.” And he watched with now-gentle sorrow and now-quick delight, and at last quiet acceptance as all the bits and pieces of this house mixed, stirred, settled, poised, and ran steadily again. “The Happiness Machine,” he said. “The Happiness Machine.”

A moment later he was gone.

Inside, Grandfather, Douglas, and Tom saw him tinkering, making a minor adjustment here, eliminate friction there, busy among all those warm, wonderful, infinitely delicate, forever mysterious, and ever-moving parts.

Then smiling, they went down the steps into the fresh summer night.

Twice a year they brought the big flapping rugs oui into the yard and laid them where they looked out of place and uninhabited, on the lawn. Then Grandma and Mother came from the house with what looked to be the back rungs of those beautiful looped wire chairs downtown in the soda-fountain place. These great wire wands were handed around so they stood, Douglas, Tom, Grandma, Great-grandma, and Mother poised like a collection of witches and familiars over the duty pattens of old Armenia. Then at a signal from Great-grandma, a blink of the eyes or a gumming of the lips, the flails were raised, the harping wires banged down again and again upon the rugs.

“Take that! And that!” said Great-grandma. “Get the flies, boys, kill the cooties!”

“Oh, you!” said Grandma to her mother.

They all laughed. The dust storm puffed up about them. Their laughing became choked.

Showers of lint, tides of sand, golden flakes of pipe tobacco fluttered, shivered on the exploded and re-exploded air. Pausing, the boys saw the tread of their shoes and the older people’s shoes pressed a billion times in the warp and woof of this rug, now to be smoothed clean as the tide of their beating swept again and again along the oriental shore.

“There’s where your husband spilled that coffee!” Grandma gave the rug a blow.

“Here’s where you dropped the cream!” Great-grandma whacked up a great twister of dust.

“Look at the scuff marks. Boys, boys!”

“Double-Grandma, here’s the ink from your pen!”

“Pshaw! Mine was purple ink. That’s common blue!”

Bang!

“Look at the path worn from the hall door here to the kitchen door. Food. That’s what brings the lions to the water hole. Let’s shift it, put it back the other way around.”

“Better yet, lock the men out of the house.”

“Make them leave their shoes outside the door.”

Bang, bang!

They hung the rugs on the wash line now, to finish the job. Tom looked at the intricate scrolls and loops, the flowers, the mysterious figures, the shuttling patterns.

“Tom, don’t stand there. Strike, boy!”

“It’s fun, seeing things,” said Tom.

Douglas glanced up suspiciously. “What do you see?” “The whole dam town, people, houses, here’s our house!” Bang! “Our street!” Bang! “That black part there’s the ravine!” Bang! “There’s school!” Bang! “This funny cartoon here’s you, Doug!” Bang! “Here’s Great-grandma, Grandma, Mom.” Bang! “How many years this rug been down?”

“Fifteen.”

“Fifteen years of people stomping across it; I see every shoe print,” gasped Tom.

“Land, boy, you got a tongue,” said Great-grandma.

“I see all the things happened in that house in all those years right here!” Bang! “All the past, sure, but I can see the future, too. Just squinch up my eyes and peek around at the patterns, there, to see where we’ll be walking, running around, tomorrow.”

Douglas stopped swinging the beater. “What else you see in the rug?”

“Threads mostly,” said Great-grandma. “Not much left but the underskin. See how the manufacturer wove the thing.”

“Right!” said Tom mysteriously. “Threads one way, threads another. I see it all. Dire fiends. Deadly sinners. There’s bad weather, there’s good. Picnics. Banquets. Strawberry festivals.” He tapped the beater from place to place portentously.

“That’s some boardinghouse you got me running,” said Grandma, glowing with exertion.

“It’s all there, fuzzylike. Hold your head on one side, Doug, get one eye almost shut. It’s better at night, of course, inside, the rug on the floor, lamplight and all. Then you get shadows all shapes, light and dark, and watch the threads running off, feel the nap, run your hand around on the fur. Smells just like a desert, I bet. All hot and sandy, like inside a mummy case, maybe. Look, that red spot, that’s the Happiness Machine burning up!”