An Ape About the House

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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?”

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