- Leo Auffmann's still riding home on his bike, pondering the Happiness Machine. He's thinking about the shocks of life, which are, according to him, birth, growing up, growing old, and dying. He concedes that there's nothing to be done about the first one, but wonders if he can do something about the other three.
- He decides that one of the things a Happiness Machine should do is make you feel more comfortable about dying when you're lying in bed being old.
- When he arrives home, his six kids, Saul, Marshall, Joseph, Rebecca, Ruth, and Naomi come running up to him to tell him they got ice cream. He goes inside to eat some.
- As he sits at the table, he tells his wife he's thinking of inventing a Happiness Machine. Her response: "Something's wrong?"
- Which is kind of an odd way to end a chapter, because you could probably want to be happier even if nothing was wrong, but hey, we're all over the decisive punctuation.