“I never said it did.”

“Oh, but I could see a godlike look in your face. You were looking for ways to send down tablets from the mountain or part a body of water for them, were you not?”

“No, I was not!”

“I wasn’t speaking literally. But I think you’re trying to establish a relationship with them that is godlike, studying them and finding ways to improve their meager existence.”

“I requested Mistress Ariel to study them,” Eve said.

“Is that so? You continue to amaze me, what’s your name, Eve? You are quite a feat of robotics. While we’re on the subject of gods, who made you?”

“I do not know that.”

“Some fancy piece of programming blocking out the information?”

“No,” Adam interjected. “We do not know our makers. Each of us appeared on a planet in an egglike, embryonic form with no awareness of where we came from.”

“Embryonic? How did you come to look as you do now? Derec and Ariel did not cause you to be formed in, as it were, their own images.”

“We imprinted on them and thus resemble them. I have been many other forms.”

Avery was impressed. “Hmmm, I must pursue all this with you soon, but one experiment at a time. I try not to divide my concentration. It’s destructive to my work. And my work at present is these well-made little toys. I need one to take apart and find out what makes it tick.”

“Don’t be callous,” Ariel said angrily. “You can’t just take one of these and kill it.”

“That’s exactly what I plan to do. How are we to discover anything about them otherwise?” He looked around the room. “And this place is ideal, with all the right tools for dissection. I won’t waste time by returning to—”

“No!” Ariel shouted. “You can’t do it. I won’t let you.”

“My dear, your tears were sentimental enough. Forget any gallant defenses of these things. They are merely mechanical devices. Fairly sophisticated ones, yes, but—”

“Can’t you see? Look at them. They are sentient human beings.”

Ariel’s dislike of Avery had made her choose one side of the issue when, only moments ago, she had been contemplating just the point of view that the doctor was now suggesting.

“Not at all. They are, I am certain, genetically engineered experimental figures. Some miniaturized human cells have been grown to form an incredibly accurate framework but they are not alive.”

“They danced. They communicated with me.”

“I am sure they make decent substitutes for pets, but what you saw was the result of some impulses of cybernetic origin.”

“I don’t care what the hell is inside them or even if they were made in a lab. They are real people with a genuine culture.”

“Just some anthropological factors put into the design.”

Moving quickly, Avery reached down and picked up one of the figures, a chubby man with puffy cheeks. It began squirming in his hand, while the others scattered across the desktop.

Derec wondered why, at a time like this, he so often felt a need to use a Personal. There were none here at the computer center. There was no need for one, since humans did not generally come here. He would have to ascend to the surface to find one (they were in almost all Robot City buildings), but when he got there he no doubt would find out that all the Personals were, like the rest of the city’s systems, out of order. And he dreaded even imagining what a non-working Personal would be like.

Tentatively he touched a shard of the hanging moss. He was surprised to find it smooth instead of slimy, dry and not wet. It’s fake, he thought, but why would anyone make fake moss and hang it on a computer in big bunches like this?

“This part’s definitely out,” he said out loud. “Maybe I can juice it up.”

He looked around for a typer, the kind of keyboard designed to communicate with the core computer. There was a bank of view-screens along one wall, but all the keyboards had been removed.

“It would take somebody to disconnect them,” he said. “No computer could do this to itself. Somebody’s monkeying with things. But who? If not my father, who? There’s got to be somebody I don’t know about.”

As he said this, he leaned against the hiding place of the Watchful Eye, who might have been amused by the irony of Derec’s words if it had comprehended irony. It studied Derec closely (the haven did not block out sensory information), discovering much about him that it had not perceived when observing him through the city’s spy systems. There was apparently a musky odor to his body, perhaps caused by the fact that he had not had time to bathe since arriving on the planet. Since none of the spray-bathers worked, the chances were that Derec would get muskier.

And there was a surprising heft to the young man. He was thicker than he’d appeared, and inside the thickness, there was much more concentrated weight. Derec’s outer shell, what they called skin, was more softly textured than had been expected, at least by the Watchful Eye, who up till now had been knowledgeable only about the hard surfaces of robots.

It was tempted to reveal itself but was taken aback by Derec’s sudden curse. The man ran to the center of the room and looked up—where the Watchful Eye had hung the keyboards in clumps around cables. There were three clumps, all looking like some odd kind of fruit.

Derec, swinging around, appeared to address his words to the ceiling. “What’s going on around here? Who are you, you filthy Frosted bag of sewage waste?” The Watchful Eye wondered why Derec’s words made no sense. There had been nothing filthy in the sewer he had traveled through, and sewage waste might indeed be a compliment. “Why are you doing this? Why are you turning my city into a pesthole?”

It was amazed by Derec’s anger. While that was supposed to be a human characteristic, Derec nevertheless had not seemed the type to lose his composure. Now his face was quite red, and his body was trembling.

It longed for Derec to leave so that it could restore its haven to its normal shape, slip it into the compartment fashioned behind the wall, where he normally kept it, and shut out Robot City for a while. It had to calculate its next moves, and whether they’d be directed against Derec or elsewhere. It could not harm Derec or any of his companions, nor could it, under most circumstances, injure any of the city’s robots. But it could destroy the city, it thought. It only needed a rationale to begin the process.

As soon as Avery picked up the tiny creature, Ariel leaped toward him. But she was not quick enough. Eve got to Avery first. She grabbed him from behind and forced his arm slowly down until he released his captive. When the small man had run back to his companions, Eve let Avery go.

He whirled upon her, fury in his eyes.

“How dare you attack me?”

“First Law;’ she replied. “Your actions were going to result in the death of the human in your hand.”

“But that is not a human being! It is an android, a robot like yourself.”

“That may be true, but it has not been proven. I see a human being. I must not allow him to come to harm. And, sir, wouldn’t Third Law also be applicable to these circumstances?”

“How?”

“If the being is, like us, a robot, then shouldn’t we protect our own from harm as we would ourselves?”

Ariel might have been mistaken, but she thought that Or. Avery nearly choked with rage at Eve’s question. At any rate, he did not respond immediately. He merely stared at Eve, the way he might have if a peer had asked the question.

“Where in blazes did you get that idea?” he finally asked.

“It seems natural to me.”

Avery seemed stumped for a moment, then he addressed Eve slowly and methodically, “Eve, you and Adam are expensive pieces of merchandise. There is no need for you to endanger yourself when a human’s safety is not involved. That is what the Third Law is about. It is not about a community of robots evolving a set of ethics based on this law. You do not, I repeat, do not, have a duty to protect your own as you would yourselves.’;

“I am not certain about that,” Adam said, coming forward. “Especially since many robotic matters are different for us, for Eve and I. To our knowledge, we are the only beings like us. When a function-robot is deactivated, there are many other function-robots to take its place. If the very existence of either of us is threatened, I believe it the responsibility of the other to perform any act that would protect us.”

Avery smiled. “That’s almost theological, Adam. You seem to see yourself almost as a separate species, committed to preserve your kind as well as yourself.”

“Perhaps,” Adam said. “I believe you may be right, but as yet I don’t know why.”

“We don’t really know who we are, what we are,” Eve said. “It may be that the Three Laws are not the only ones that apply to us, or that our existence may depend on a different way of interpreting them.”

Avery shook his head several times in confusion. At the same time, Ariel noted, there was some admiration for the Silversides in his eyes.

“You’re verging on existentialism, Eve,” he said. “But I think you’re dead wrong. Look, humans have a history to preserve, science and philosophy to transmit through generations. They have to be concerned with protecting other humans from harm. They have vital reasons to, even if many of them, perhaps a majority, show no inclination toward such selfless activity. As robots, Adam and Eve, your only real duty is to protect the investment. No sense in letting yourselves be destroyed unnecessarily. But you have no reason to identify yourselves with anything more than that, not a higher calling or some set of philosophical speculations, especially some sort of ethical idea about being the protectors of each other. The important matter is that you harmed me when you should not have.”

“You were in no harm, and the little man was,” Eve said.

“All right, all right. I vow to you then: I intend no harm to this tiny creature you fancy so much. The Laws do not apply to this situation, understand?”

Eve and Adam were not sure what to do. It seemed that the doctor’s vow prevented them from moving against him. Yet...even if he handled the tiny creature gently now, would the future harm he might cause it in his laboratory be sufficient reason to intervene?

As Avery made another move toward the table, Ariel stepped forward, a surgical knife in her hand. “But I, because there are no effective Laws of Humanics, may stop you, Dr. Avery.”

“And I,” Wolruf said, “can act without rrestrrictionss, since I am neitherr, rrobot nor ‘uman, and there are no Lawss of Caninoidss.”

Avery looked from Ariel to Wolruf, then to the two robots. A smile flashed briefly across his face. It was a clue to a smile rather than a smile itself. Then he pulled a straight chair away from the nearest wall and sat down hard.

“Why am I even arguing with you?” he said in a soft, troubled voice. “I’m not a human. I’ve transformed myself into a robot.”

Ariel started to say that that was just his madness, then an idea came to her. “It’s worked, has it? You’ve got a positronic brain and all the rest?”

“Of course,” he muttered.

“Then, as a robot, you must obey me, a human. Correct?”

“What are you—I’ll never—I can’t—”

All the anger seemed to go out of his eyes, and he slumped in his chair. “Yes,” he muttered. “I must obey you. Second Law. I will obey you...Mistress Ariel.”

Ariel rubbed her hands together. She didn’t know how long she could work this new ploy, but it gave her an opportunity to use the doctor for both her projects. His great intelligence could help her to study the tiny creatures, and toying with his delusions might be the answer to curing them.

“Sit straight, doc—wait, what is your name now?”

He looked up at her with sad eyes and said weakly, “Name?”

“Do you have a robot name? Have you chosen one yet?”

He seemed momentarily puzzled by her questions.

“Yes, I have,” he said. “Just now.”

“And what is it?”

“Ozymandias.”

“Very good. That’s the name of a poem, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It’s about a once-mighty king, a ‘king of kings.’ On the pedestal of its statue are inscribed the words, ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ “

“How nice. You don’t mean them ironically, I hope. Well, I haven’t despaired yet, and neither should you. That, by the way, is an order, Ozymandias.”

“Yes, Mistress Ariel.”

“Okay, let’s get to work. I’m not sure where to start.”

Derec came out of the computer chamber with a hangdog look on his face. “The computer’s been severely tampered with, Mandelbrot,” he said. “We’ve got a pack of work to do.”

“Yes, sir. I will help.”

“Thank you. Let’s go.”

After Derec had taken a few steps, Bogie called to him, “What about us, Master Derec? What should we do?”

Derec resisted an offensive answer and said instead, “Do you have anything to do at this moment?”

The Watchful Eye had given the two robots no further orders, so Bogie could truthfully say, “No.”

“Well, then, I guess the two of you have danced and wisecracked yourselves right into my heart. Why don’t you tag along? That is, come with us.”

“I know what ‘tag along’ means,” Bogie said, and Derec wondered if there wasn’t a suggestion of huffiness in the robot’s reply.

CHAPTER 12

FRUSTRATIONS

Avery itched to grab one of the tiny creatures, whom Ariel was now calling “the dancers,” and take it apart under a microscopic scanner with a selection of the fine surgical instruments available in the medical facility. However, since Ariel forbade that any harm should come to the dancers, the dissection would be a violation of Second Law, and he must not violate Second Law. She still claimed it would also be a violation of First Law because of the essential humanity of the dancers, but he rejected that preposterous idea out of hand.

(Sometimes, in the back of his mind, he almost remembered he was really human and not subject to Ariel’s orders. At those moments his hands automatically reached toward the nearest dancer, and his fingers trembled.)

On her part Ariel felt as if she were swimming from one whirlpool to another. Each whirlpool was a different task, a different goal. At the center of one was Avery, who was acting crazier by the minute. The dancers (occupying her dreams as well as her daily routine) swirled in the middle of another. The third contained Adam and Eve, who, although themselves quite fascinated by the dancers, were still unpredictable and often disobedient. The previous day she had caught them trying to teach the dancers acrobatics. Eve picked up one, a male, and, keeping him firmly but gently between her fingers, tried to show him how to execute a series of midair flips. The little creature was obviously frightened, even though he did not struggle. The dancers, Avery suggested, treated their captors as gods and cooperated with any foolish things a god might try, no matter how dangerous.

It seemed that the Silversides would do anything to sidestep an order from Ariel. They had apparently never resolved the dilemma of whether or not Derec and Ariel were humans or if they were the proper kinds of humans, those for whom their mysterious and vague programming had been set. They knew they were supposed to serve humans and imprint themselves upon them, but had been given no guidelines about what a human was and how to recognize one. They were frequently puzzled by the behavior of Derec and Ariel (and, for that matter, the insanely contradictory actions of Avery), and had trouble convincing themselves to accept these particular humans as representative of the highest order of being in the universe.

Earlier in his existence, Adam had believed the blackbodies to be more intelligent than the humans he had encountered up to that time, and Eve had accepted the word of a demented blackbody that it was the only human in the galaxy. Their mistakes were just as responsible for making them cautious as were their doubts about Derec, Avery, and Ariel.

In a way, they were searching for some higher kind of human, dismissing Derec and Ariel as, like the dancers, some primitive and unworthy form of the species, not worthy of their loyalty and obedience. As a result, sometimes they responded like any robots to the requirements of the Laws of Robotics, but at other times, questioned every word of an order, or analyzed a First Law situation so interminably that Ariel or Derec would have died before the Silversides had stopped them from coming to harm. And sometimes they were just plain ornery, rejecting orders without rhyme or reason, as if they just meant to taunt her.

Ariel had decided to treat them as if they were human and subject to human weaknesses. If they were being obedient, she gave them orders. If they were not, she ignored them.

There was enough to do without pampering them.

Today Adam and Eve were relatively docile. Eve, especially, tended to be cooperative when Ariel was working with the dancers. She would stand beside the desk and study them with the same intensity that Ariel showed (and often looking exactly like her, a state that Ariel found unnerving).When the dancers needed to be fed, Eve even volunteered to do it. She would take a dancer and hold it in her hand, then put some food on the fingers of her other hand while each dancer picked the crumbs off her fingertip and ate them with evident enjoyment. The dancers always ate in a specific order, the leader first, an urge for order that Ariel believed proved their essential humanity.

She had worked out a proper diet for the dancers through the use of the chemical food processor, trying out various dishes until she found some they would accept. She was glad that Derec had chosen to fix the foodmaking machines early in his repairing of the city’s systems. It had come second, right after getting the Personals operative again.

“Can we make them play the game again?” Eve asked Ariel, after the last dancer had taken the last crumb from her fingertip.

“You bet. It represents about all the progress I’ve made with them.”

Avery, who had been sulking in a corner (guarded by Wolruf because he had already made four tries to escape), came forward to speak to Ariel’s back.

“Of course you’ve made no progress. There’s so little to be made. If you would only let me at them...”

“Swallow the words, Ozymandias. I won’t permit you to murder these—”

“But it wouldn’t be murder. They are no more than toys. They are not even miniature Frankenstein monsters or golems; they are merely mechanical devices. Mistress Ariel, way back in Earth history there were many manmade contraptions that fooled others into believing they were actual living beings or even miracles. There was a mechanical duck that would not only appear to eat and quack but would even excrete materials from its nether end. There was a chess-playing robot that convincingly won games from masters. A small figure with a quill pen that could laboriously but correctly write a letter; a companion piece that could draw kings and ships. There were figures whose movements were lifelike, who even appeared to breathe. Milkmaids swinging pails and mountaineers in alpenstock hats emerged from clocks, appearing very real. In more sophisticated times, people found the early robots, machines that couldn’t really do very much, quite amazing and lifelike. So you see, Ariel, your desktop figures are just extensions of a long tradition. They are partially grown from cells, and partially controlled by technological means, but they are not the small-scale humans you are so protective of.”

Ariel sighed. She had heard variations of this diatribe so often since they’d captured Avery that she wanted to wrap her hands around the doctor’s throat and strangle him, or at least remove his tongue so that she would not have to hear his whining maniacal voice again. Fortunately, as long as there were robots around, First Law prevented her from taking such drastic measures. That was why she could daydream about them without guilt. Come to think of it, she said to herself, she could not rely on either Eve or Adam to come to Avery’s rescue. If they were not in the mood for First Law that day, they might be willing to be a detached and curious audience to an actual act of murder.

Maybe strangling Avery wasn’t such a bad idea.

“Do you have anything constructive to offer, Ozymandias?”

“Wasn’t that constructive?”

“Not by a long shot. You know what really frosts me? That you consider yourself a robot and yet appear to hold robots in such low esteem.”

He shook his head vigorously. “On the contrary, Mistress Ariel. Once we establish that these people are indeed manmade constructs, I will revere them as I revere all robots, even the smallest function-robots that dust rooms and pick up trash. The robot is the highest order of existence, and I am proud to be one.”

She couldn’t dope Avery out any more. Sometimes he would talk normally—or at least in what was a normal fashion for a man whose eccentricity was legend—and then he’d switch over to this robot identity, praising his own efficiency or going on endlessly about the virtues of his positronic brain. Derec continued to urge her to deal with the man, as if compassion and intelligent conversation with him would bring about a cure. It was simply too large an order. Avery’s madness was beyond anything her homegrown sense of psychology could cope with.

Still, she had to try. She had promised.

While Avery and Ariel spoke, Eve moved closer to the desk. She wanted to watch the dancers play the game, which could not take place until Ariel returned her attention to them.

Or must she wait for Ariel? Indeed, why wait for her?

She placed her hand in the middle of the desk, resting it on its side, thumb up. The dancers immediately responded to the signal and began forming teams on either side of Eve’s hand. When they were ready, Eve raised her hand and dropped a tiny rolled up piece of paper onto the middle of the desktop. The dancers immediately began scrambling toward it. One of them, the chubby one that Avery had tried to take, reached it first. He picked it up and began to run with it, but the opposing team quickly assembled itself. A female sprang in front of the male carrying the paper and gestured others to join her. In an instant, it seemed, they had surrounded the male. They were not allowed to touch each other during the game, except by accident. That had been one of Ariel’s early rules, rules that she had communicated to the dancers through the use of a series of hand signs she had developed in her study of them. Once the player was surrounded, he must give up the paper, which he did. The new possessors began tossing the paper between them, while the other team, staying close together, watched, waiting for the next move, looking for their chance to surround the player carrying the paper.

Suddenly one of the females, a gaunt, thin one who had grown gaunter and thinner since the Silversides had brought the group to the medical facility, started to rush forward with the paper tucked under her arm. The other team started to go into a formation that could easily close itself around her, but she suddenly turned and flipped the paper back to a male who was running behind her. He quickly hurled it to another male standing at the edge of the desktop. This one ran in a straight line, along the desk edge, to the other side of the desk. Nobody could catch him.

When he reached the other side, he abruptly sat down, set the paper in front of him, and did a half-bow to it. The last act established the authenticity of the score, a procedure that Ariel (who had adapted the game from an ancient Auroran sport) had not originally taught them. It seemed they were such slaves to ritual that they had to perform some rite when they succeeded at scoring.

The male stood up and left the piece of paper where he had deposited it, a signal for Eve to pick it up and again drop it in the center after the teams had re-formed. She was about to let it go, when Ariel hollered at her harshly, “Eve! I did not give you permission to start the game!”

Eve, holding the paper over the anxiously awaiting dancers, looked up. “I wanted to start it. Since you were speaking with Ozymandias, I decided to—”

“It’s not up to you to decide. You haven’t learned yet. You are the robot, I am the human. You wait for my orders.”

“We are not sure that is correct. “

Ariel threw up her hands in despair. She did not need this kind of robotic sophistry right this minute. Staring down at the desktop, she said, “Okay, who’s ahead?”

Ariel didn’t have the patent on despairing gestures. In another part of the city, Derec was clenching his fists and resisting the impulse to slam them down on the nearest available surface.

“Another dysfunctional session, sir?” Mandelbrot said. Derec almost laughed. A dysfunctional session? Frost, an absolute failure.

“It seems that our computer does not yet want to activate full access, Mandelbrot. This just doesn’t make sense. It’s like the computer is playing with me, letting me do some things, blocking me from others.”

“Do not the computers obey the Laws of Robotics, too?”

Derec shrugged. “They’re supposed to. Unless someone is controlling them from some outside source, overriding my requests as I make them.”

“Is that possible?”

“I believe so. There is someone in the city somewhere, the same individual that the robots are blocked from telling me about, and he or she or it’s the boss right now. There’s something so, I don’t know, inhuman about our intruder’s actions that I suspect an alien, one as intelligent as the blackbodies and as mean as Aranimas.”

Aranimas had been the alien who, before Derec came to Robot City, had trapped him on his ship and tried to make a slave out of him. The most fortunate aspects of that terrible experience were that he had met Ariel and Wolruf and constructed the wonderfully loyal Mandelbrot out of spare parts.

With an expansive hand gesture that clearly dismissed the computer, Derec stood up and began pacing the room. “Mandelbrot, I should be in charge, but the he or she or it is not allowing it. This individual doles out some information through the computer—how to activate the devices for food, Personals, the slidewalk, heat and light—but only that data that we require in order to survive. When it comes to completely activating the computer, getting the services of the city running again, and putting the robots back in their proper jobs, it keeps blocking me from accomplishing anything. Obviously it is not out to destroy us, not at present anyway. But he, she, or it is definitely hiding something from us. Its identity, of course, but maybe something more. Maybe there’s something about its identity that we should not know. Or about its future plans.”

“What about the chemfets?” Mandelbrot asked. “In the past they have always provided the right information about the city.”

“That’s what’s really crazy, Mandelbrot. The chemfets aren’t any more functional than the city is now. Oh, I get a sensation or two about our mysterious visitor now and then, but no real clue about who or what he, she, or it is. And I get this vague feeling that there’s some kind of a solution, but it remains just outside my reach. At any rate, the chemfets are messed up, just like Robot City. There are times when I can hardly detect them. And I hate that more than I can tell you.”

He stretched his arms, as if trying to stir up the chemfets. “You know,” he continued, “I used to think the chemfets were a hellish thing. I thought they were controlling me, racing up and down my bloodstream, making me ill. Now that they’ve reached maturity and I’ve integrated myself with them, I can’t cope with them not working like this. I want to activate them desperately, and I can’t. It’s like me and the city. I want to get Robot City going again. I have to. Yet I’m so darn stymied. There’s got to be a way, Mandelbrot, and I’m going to find it.”

The Watchful Eye eavesdropped on Derec with some satisfaction. Now, back to its natural shape but completely hidden by layers of the mosslike substance it had strewn over the computer, it considered its next moves.

The strange word that Derec had used, stymied, seemed to apply to the Watchful Eye’s circumstances also. As Ariel and Avery continued their research on Series C, Batch 21, it did not feel safe in reactivating the robots who had done the original lab work that led to the creation of the various batches. It had convinced those robots that more research was needed on the Laws of Humanics, and, since there were no humans in the city, they would have to create their own. Of course the Watchful Eye knew, as Avery had perceived, that their little models were not full-fledged human beings, that they were just robotically activated biological material formed into human shapes. It could have made them into any shape, even made them look like itself, but it chose to create their appearance from pictures it called up from a computer file of historical figures.

Because the intruders had to occupy so much of its time, the Watchful Eye could conduct none of its other experiments, either. It had been about to begin a stress-test to see how the iron/plastic alloy that the city was made of could hold up under many different circumstances. It had intended to fully explore the many facets of Robot City and then, when finished, restructure and refashion it to suit its needs.

It was concerned with the Laws of Humanics because it wanted to find out just what a human was. Something just beneath the level of its consciousness compelled it to discover humans and emulate them. There were times when it hoped that Derec and Ariel, or Adam and Eve, would finally prove to be the real humans, so that the matter would be settled and it could go on to its future, whatever its future was meant to be. It was certain it had a destiny that would eventually be revealed.

More than anything else, however, the Watchful Eye missed the freedom to work on the biggest question it faced: who or what it was. It had to be something, fit some category of existence. For it did exist.

It could be human, although—if the intruders were humans (and which ones? Derec and Ariel? Adam and Eve? The dreadful Avery?)—it did not physically resemble them. But then, in its natural state, or at least the state it had been in when it came to awareness, it had resembled nothing more than a blob of matter. Later it had discovered that it had the ability to change its shape. Right now it could change itself into the shape of a human, but would it be human? Did these humans start out in the same puttylike shape it had? Had they originally hidden in their havens until they had chosen what they must look like?

It wondered if it could be some kind of animal. There did not appear to be any kind of animal native to Robot City, so it could only judge that subject from information extracted from computer files. The files only confused it further, since it felt no link with any animal in any picture it called up. In addition, it noted that many of the so-called animals resembled the so-called humans in many respects. Were they also kinds of humans?

It could be a robot, but it resisted that idea most. It had studied the robots and found them to be too subservient, too easily programmed. Admirable pieces of construction though they were, they simply did not seem complex enough for the Watchful Eye to belong to their class of being. It could not convince itself that there were any resemblances between a robot and it. If anything, it felt more like a computer than a robot. But it had a sentient life that the Robot City computer did not. So it had concluded it could not be a computer, either.

What was it?

It intended to find out soon.

Adam Silverside wandered through the streets of Robot City, not knowing where he was going, not knowing why he had left the medical facility. He had been watching Eve concentrate so completely on Ariel and the dancers that he had come to the conclusion that he was useless to their experiments. Sometimes Ariel and Eve conversed so intently on the behavior of the dancers that it seemed they were unaware of his presence in the room.

It was not that Adam felt hurt, or even annoyed, at the way he had been ignored. A robot does not feel the pangs of rejection that trouble humans in such matters. A robot would, under normal conditions, not feel left out or even ignored. After all, a robot can even stand alone without anything happening for a long, long time.

What Adam perceived essentially, and in a logical way, was that he served no purpose in their work. It seemed to him that since Robot City was in crisis and Derec and Ariel were in turmoil about how to solve their respective problems, there should be something he could do. It would be a terribly inefficient use of his time and abilities for him to stay where he was not needed. Their maker, whoever he or she was, had evidently planned them to be special. They were compelled to serve and be useful through the direct or implicit order of humans, a Second Law imperative.

He came to the lot where they had discovered the first group of dancers. It was completely empty now, with no traces left of its former inhabitants. That was, in itself, another anomaly. Who had taken away all traces of their lives, even including the remains of the campfire around which they had danced? Who had smoothed over the ground so that even the graves could not be detected? Some of the city’s robots were, it seemed, functional.

He came to a parkland, where precisely sculptured bushes were placed at even distances along a smoothly raked path. There were no footsteps on the path, and no people to sit in the benches under the park’s towering trees. It seemed anomalous to Adam that a park like this, and several other Robot City areas, were so obviously built for human habitation, and there had been as yet so few humans upon the planet. The city itself seemed useless, as useless as he now believed himself to be.

He came to an area where buildings stretched in a long semicircle around a nonworking fountain. Shops with blank signs were neatly arrayed along the street level of the semicircle.

The few robots walking through the streets were intent on their own goals. None stopped at any of the buildings. (Adam wondered why he felt no sense of belonging when he saw these robots. How could he be a robot and be so separated from other robots?) There were no goods in any of the shops, no shoppers to select items in the first place. Like the park, another Robot City anomaly.

Shops and parks with definite purposes and no way to fulfill them. The problem was similar to his own, he thought. He had not only an ability to imprint upon living creatures, but to become astonishingly like them, adopting the patterns and characteristics of their lives as well as their physical appearance. He could even lead them, as he had with the kin. Was this to be his life or, if not life, the parameters of his existence within the universe? He felt compelled to change his shape into that of another; he needed to keep doing it until his dilemma of interpreting what a human was had reached a conclusion. There was no purpose for him in Robot City, no one on whom to imprint. (He did not realize that this frustrating state had been planned by Derec and Wolruf, and they in turn did not know what an astonishing success the plan had been, at least in Adam’s case. It would not have occurred to Adam that he was being tamed. If it had, he would have resisted it firmly.)

As he had on the blackbodies’ planet, he changed into the kin shape and began to run down the streets of Robot City; then he tried the blackbody shape and clumsily flapped his wings, knocking them against the walls of buildings; then he was a function-robot, picking up debris and depositing it in a sewer grating; then he took on Derec’s shape; then Ariel’s; then Avery’s.

But all the transformations did not satisfy him. He had done them all before.

He needed a new creature to imprint on.

He changed back to kin shape so that he could howl at the stars spread in the sky over the city.

Then he was Derec again, walking the streets back to the medical facility, his mission in the city unfulfilled. He realized that, in a way, he was acting like the men in some legends he had read in computer files, the kind of legend where men shook their fists at the sky and castigated the universe.

He found the image odd. He could shake his fist at the sky, but, sadly perhaps, he could not really feel the emotion that inspired the gesture. The human emotion behind the gesture.

CHAPTER 13

AVERY AND THE SILVERSIDES

Ariel awoke with a start. She hadn’t realized she’d been asleep, must have dozed off with her head on the back of the cushioned chair she’d drawn up beside the desk.

It was certainly disconcerting to come to consciousness and look down on about a half-dozen of the dancers staring up at you, while the rest played at some game that Ariel had not yet interpreted. (They showed each other their hands, palms up or down, any number of fingers extended, sometimes no fingers extended, sometimes a fist.) There was a questioning look on their faces, as if they’d been curious about why their god seemed to need sleep every once in a while. The dancers themselves never seemed to sleep. Ariel had watched them and delegated the Silversides to observe them, but no sleep had ever been detected. She sometimes wondered what it would be like to be awake for one’s entire life. Would you get a lot done or go mad from being conscious without respite?

As she always did when she hadn’t been studying the dancers for some time, she counted them. There were still fourteen of them. Good. Avery, then, had not somehow eluded Wolruf’s vigilance and, while she was asleep, sneaked to the desk to abduct one of the tiny creatures.

She glanced toward the other side of the room, where Avery slouched in a chair, apparently dozing himself. (When he was Ozymandias, he insisted that he never slept.) Wolruf sat on the floor, keeping an eye on the doctor while thumbing through a picture book about Auroran art that Ariel had found in the small library attached to the medical facility. She was studying it for practice in reading and to learn about human customs. In the time that Ariel had known her, Wolruf’s ability to read standard had improved significantly, as had her command of the language. The task of guarding Avery had given her free time to add to her education in the ways of humans and robots.

Ariel couldn’t think of what to do next with the dancers. She’d been studying their customs for several days, and there didn’t seem to be much more to learn. She had tried to communicate with them, but, except for the hand gestures needed either to get their attention or initiate games, most of her attempts had been unsuccessful.

All the dancers had been examined by a diagnostic scanner, the only piece of equipment in the medical facility that appeared to work successfully. She was not sure why. However, since the only systems Derec had been able to (or been allowed to) restore tended to be life-sustaining, she wondered if the scanner worked because it might be needed in an emergency. Derec was right about the presence in the city, she was sure of it. And that presence was doling out favors, stingily but with some sense. The scanner had revealed nothing new about the dancers. As Avery told her, they were anatomically consistent with full-sized humans. If there was robotic circuitry, the scanner didn’t detect it.

She missed Derec so. They had not really been together since that interlude at the Compass Tower. They checked in with each other every once in a while, but at those times he was detached, more concerned with reviving the city than with reviving their passion. And she couldn’t pin all the blame in that arena of life solely upon him. After all, as Derec had pointed out, her attention was just as fiercely fixed on the dancers, Avery, and the Silversides.

The two of them made a great pair, workaholics without much time for each other. But she did long for a moment alone with him, just a brief time of being held by him, kissing him, feeling his gentle touches upon her back.

Well, there was no time for romance now. Thing to do, she thought, is get the jobs done, restore equilibrium, then grab each other and race to the nearest dark place.

She raised her arms, trying to stretch weariness out of them. As always, the dancers were interested in her movement. Whatever she did, they watched her do it with absolute fascination. This time they imitated her, making ritualistic, slow stretching motions that duplicated her gestures. How, she wondered, could Avery keep saying that they were not living beings? With such grace, such skill, they could be nothing less than human.

Her mouth felt dry, and she was sure that her breath could cause an air-purification system to malfunction. There was the beginning of a headache at the back of her eyes. She needed to use the Personal.

“Eve?”

“Yes, Mistress Ariel.”

“Time.”

The word was all she needed to bring Eve to the desk to take over from her. Ariel stood up.

“Have you conceived a new game?” she asked Eve.

“Yes.”

“Of course. I should have known. Show it to me when I get back.”

When Ariel had left, Eve picked up one of the dancers, a short (for a dancer) stocky female. The female did not resist in any way (none of the dancers did, anymore) and merely sat calmly in Eve’s palm.

“Adam?” Eve called.

Adam, newly returned from his wanderings, stepped out of a dark corner of the room from which he had been watching her.

“Yes, Eve.”

“There seems to be something wrong with the dancers, this one and all of them.”

“I have not seen it yet.”

“You have to examine their faces. This one was young, like Ariel, when we first brought them here. Now look.”

Adam bent down toward the stocky female in Eve’s hand. He hadn’t studied the dancers with the same meticulousness that Eve had and wasn’t certain what she’d meant. Nevertheless, at least he was being asked to do something.

“What do you see, Adam?”

“One of the dancers, female category.”

“Besides that.”

“Her hair. It was once dark-colored and now it is mostly gray. Her face. Once it was unlined, now there are many lines in it. Her mouth. Once it was—”

“That is enough, Adam. It is what I see, too. Not only in this one, but in all of them. They have been here for four days, and none of them is young any more. Look at that one.”

Adam looked where she pointed. A male dancer, one of the game players, had left the group and was sitting alone, his knees pulled up, his arms around his knees. His face was old, pitted, sallow.

“He appears to be unwell,” Adam commented.

“I wonder what it means. Are they changing their shapes like we do?”

“Perhaps, but I do not think so.”

“They are going to die,” Avery said, sitting up in his chair. His movement forced Wolruf to push her book aside and tense her body.

Avery stood up and approached the desk. “I’m not sure why they have to die. I suspect that whoever created them was at least partly interested in human life cycles. Otherwise he could have made them as permanent as robots. That is, after all, one of the advantages we robots have. Their creator wanted them to die, or he messed up, I’m not certain which. When they do go, I hope to find out by examining them.”

“Ariel said ‘u can’t touch them,” Wolruf cautioned.

“Well, she must at least let me examine a corpse or two.”

“No!” Eve said suddenly, unsure of why she had spoken out at all.

The doctor’s eyebrows raised in surprise. “You don’t wish me to, Eve?”

“That is true.”

“How curious. Are you a robot with compassion then?”

“I do not know what you mean.”

“If you are, and I get a shot at you, we’ll have to program it right out. I don’t know sometimes why things happen as they do in Robot City. First we get robots with artistic leanings (another trait I had to get rid of) and now compassionate robots. Is that a tear in your eye, Eve, or just a trick of the light? Don’t respond, I was only joking.”

Ariel returned from the Personal in time to hear the last of Avery’s comments. She was about to speak, to tell Avery to zip up his mouth, when she noticed what was happening to Adam.

Adam stood at the side of the desk, just slightly behind Avery. He was staring at the doctor and at the same time undergoing a transformation, changing shape. It was fascinating to watch. First his body seemed to shrink as he lost a few inches of height. (Was he trying to become a dancer? she wondered. Could that be possible? Wouldn’t his mass have to be concentrated impossibly for him to change to that size?) Then the shrinking stopped, and Adam’s shorter body began to expand outward, making him look rounder. His arms became shorter and hung differently, in a sort of apelike way. Then his face, which had been almost an exact replica of Derec’s, began to undulate slightly, with his chin puffing out and his forehead narrowing, his chin coming to a point, then reshaping itself to a rounder contour. At the top of his head, his metallic version of Derec’s sandy hair lightened to white and got longer, messier. But it was not until the next change that Ariel realized what was happening. Resembling the hair in color and texture, a silver bushy moustache appeared to sprout under Adam’s transformed nose.

Ariel laughed abruptly, pleased at the first hint of merriment in her life for some time.

Adam had changed himself from a mimicry of Derec to a nearly exact rendition of the short, round, wavy-haired and moustachioed Dr. Avery!

Avery didn’t notice Adam’s transformation until Ariel laughed. At first he thought she was laughing at him, and he prepared a withering comment. (Avery could not abide being laughed at. The mockery of too many colleagues had made him sensitive to criticism and developed in him a lightning reflex to respond as cruelly as he could.) Then he saw where Ariel’s attention was directed.

He saw Adam’s robotic and (to him) nightmarish version of himself, and he screamed in anger. It was the kind of scream that rattled any loose item or emotional equilibrium in its vicinity. On the desktop the dancers scattered in fear.

Adam had not expected such a violent reaction from Avery, and it shocked as well as intrigued him. He had imprinted upon Avery several times already, but only twice in Avery’s presence. Each of those times the self-centered doctor had not noticed or even looked at him.

Although Avery knew about the Silversides’ shape-changing abilities, this was the first time he had observed an actual transformation.

“I won’t have this!” Avery yelled. “It is mockery! You have no right to take my shape! How is it possible even? What kind of material are you made of?” He touched Adam on his arm, his chest, his face. Adam’s skin was still like the syntheskin on any robot, except the few humaniforms. “There’s no human texture to your skin, no—”

Ariel stepped forward. “That’s because Adam is a robot.” She searched Avery’s face for reactions and saw deep confusion in his eyes, so she added slyly, “Like you, Ozymandias.”

Avery seemed momentarily confused. “Of course,” he said. “Like me.” He examined Adam more closely. “And robots are fixed, permanent. Not like humans, not like animals. Then Adam can’t be a robot. He’s something else in a robot’s clothing.”

“What am I?” Adam asked.

“I don’t know what you are.”

“If not human, what? If not robot, what?”

“Yes,” Ariel said, moving closer to Avery, “what is Adam?”

“Some new kind of creature, but I don’t know what. He is capable of changing his shape?”

“Yes, he is. He can be human, robot, animal, alien. But he is robot, Ozymandias.”

“He can’t be!”

“Oh, but he can. They both can. Derec’s not sure how they shape-change, but he thinks it’s facilitated by a kind of DNA or DNA-analog in their cells. Apparently they can gain voluntary control over their cells, even adjusting their sizes and shapes. They sort of think of the shape they’ll take, and its details are worked out in their positronic brains. Mandelbrot can drastically change the shape of his arm, but these two work miracles on their entire bodies. Adam says he started as a blob and knew how to alter his shape into a practical ambulatory form in his first few moments of awareness.”

“I refuse to accept that. Why did you laugh?”

“Because you are like me now. You accused me of being sentimental for believing the dancers to be human, and now you refuse to believe Adam is a robot. Nevertheless, it is true. Why does it bother you so, Ozymandias?”

“I won’t discuss it.”

“Of course. Because it would embarrass you. Now that you’re a robot, you’re annoyed when another one comes along who’s greater than you are.”

“That’s not it at all! And it’s not true! Transmogrification is no special achievement. It makes him no more than a circus freak.”

“Maybe you’re right. It isn’t true. Good thing you’re not Avery any more, Ozymandias. If you were, I’d have to say that maybe the great Dr. Avery, creator of the Avery robots, is jealous that someone else has designed and built a better model.”

For a moment Avery did not speak. Instead, he merely stared at Adam, which was like looking in a mirror that slightly distorted the image. Adam’s skin was silvery, and there were more sharp lines in the shape of his body than in Avery’s softly curved figure. Adam’s eyes had a serenity in them that Avery had not, when looking in a mirror, seen in many years. It forced him to consider a human Avery whose life had been more satisfactory, when he had been married and at the top of his profession, adored by many, certainly respected by almost everyone. Why had his eyes changed? he wondered.

Ariel saw the emotional disruption in Avery’s face, and at the same time saw a way to work with the man as Derec had urged. She moved to the other side of the desk, beside Eve, who had been busy calming the dancers with gestures and a soft humming that almost had a tune to it.

“Eve,” Ariel whispered.

“Yes?”

“Can you do one of those shape-changes for me?”

“Yes, into anything I know about.”

“Well, do what Adam did. Imprint on Avery. Can you do that?”

“Of course.”

Ariel watched with fascination as Eve went through the same transformations that Adam had. It was even stranger to view in her, since before Ariel’s eyes, Eve changed from a female to a male. While she had always known that Eve could change shape, and had been told that Adam had been a female when he was a member of the kin, she was still amazed by the process. Eve’s face changed earlier than Adam’s had, and then she rearranged her body from the shoulders down. When finished, she was even more uncomfortably like Avery than Adam was.

“Ozymandias,” Ariel said, breaking his concentration on Adam. As the man turned toward her, his jaw dropped open when he saw still another copy of himself.

“This is unfair!” he cried, furious.

“Why? Most of the time they go around looking like Derec and me, and it doesn’t bother us. Why does it so upset you, Ozymandias?”

“I feel like they’re taking something away from me.”

“What? Your soul?”

Ariel’s question came as such a shock to Avery that it made him laugh. “My soul? Hardly. What would a robot do with a soul? No, I mean my personality, all that constitutes me, my dignity.”

“Dignity? Personality? What do you care about those?”

As Ariel talked, Eve had gone to Adam, and now they stood side by side, twin Averys, with the same subtle differences between them that a set of identical twins showed.

Avery, uncharacteristically speechless, whirled around and strode back to where Wolruf stood. Ariel might have been mistaken, but she thought, from the way the caninoid alien stood at a slight tilt and from the faint gargling sound coming from her throat (usually an indication of amusement for her), that Wolruf found the proceedings funny.

“Come back here!” Ariel shouted.

“I refuse.”

“How can you refuse my order? You are a robot and I am human. You have to obey me. Second Law, Ozymandias.” She spoke this last with a lilt in her voice, mockingly. He stood still for a moment, then spun around and returned to the desk.

Meanwhile Ariel had sidled up to the Silversides. “Adam, Eve, I want you to do something for me.” They both glanced at her, awaiting their orders. “You’ve been around Avery for long enough. Imitate him all the way. Talk like him, sound like him, rant like him, move like him, strut like him, whatever you have stored in your memory banks that you can use to be like him. Can you do that?”

They both responded yes. Adam, particularly, welcomed the challenge. It was a use of his shape-changing ability, after all. In a world where there was little to imprint on, any challenge would do.

“All right,” Ariel said when Avery had returned to the desk. “Separate from each other, and when I give the signal, start.”

Adam went to one side of the room, Eve to the other. Avery, who had not heard Ariel’s command, looked back and forth from one to the other.

Then, at a gesture from Ariel, the assault began. Adam immediately launched a diatribe of Avery’s that he had stored in his memory. It was an especially ripe one, filled with florid phrases and a good deal of invective. The robot’s voice was a remarkable playback, catching the tones and inflections of the doctor’s voice so precisely that Ariel, if she had shut her eyes, would not have known it was not the real Avery.

The target of the assault merely watched Adam disbelievingly; his eyes widened, displaying less intensity and more confusion than perhaps anyone had ever seen in him before. He chewed on his lower lip, another uncharacteristic act. His fingers tapped against the side of his legs, a gesture Ariel had seen often. Avery did it a lot when he was angry.

Making a loud cough very like the one Avery made to get another person’s attention, Eve entered the fray. Avery’s head turned to watch her, while Adam’s diatribe continued, louder.

Eve began to mutter to herself in an Avery-like way and began to pace her side of the room in a strutting fashion. As she walked her fingers, too, tapped against her legs. Once she stopped and banged her fist into the palm of her other hand, yelling, “I will not have it! This isn’t the way things will be! I demand you let me have a dancer to experiment upon!”

Then she whirled around, just as Avery had earlier, and walked to the desktop to stare down sternly at the dancers. Now that she looked like the doctor, she was amazed to find that the dancers were fooled by her. They scattered just the way they did when Avery hovered over them.

Ariel saw Eve’s face lose its hostility, softening into a gentler look. Because the Silversides could only form aspects of facial expression, becoming much like an artist’s caricature, Eve’s present look disconcerted Ariel. She did not like Avery’s face appearing to be kind. Further, there was a suggestion of Ariel’s face, seemingly superimposed upon the Avery mien, that annoyed her.

“Eve,” she whispered, “they’re all right. They just think you’re him. Don’t worry about it. We’ll take care of them, and you can resume your familiar shape.”

Eve recalled her task. Her face became hard again, and she resumed muttering. Suddenly, in a move that Ariel could not have expected, Eve slammed her fist upon the desktop (well away from any of the dancers). Even Avery flinched at’ the fury of the move, as if he didn’t believe someone looking like him could do such a violent thing.

“What are they—” he began, but Adam came forward to stand next to Eve. They seemed an odd pair, like identical twins who had labored to differentiate themselves in any way possible, but just could not stop looking like each other.

“We should not even experiment on these,” Adam said. “They are just vermin, like most humans, not like robots. We should kill them.”

Eve, taken in for a moment by Adam’s act, was ready to rush to defend them until she recalled her command to playact.

“That’s going too far,” Avery shouted. “I would never say that.”

“Ozymandias,” Ariel said, “what you see is just their impression of what you say, how you act. In their minds, capable as they are of processing data, you’ve shown yourself to be unpredictable and quite likely to perform violent acts. That you’d think of killing the dancers seems within the realm of possibility to them. And, for that matter, to me.”

“You don’t understand. I’m not a destroyer, I’m a creator. Yes, if necessary I’d dissect an animal for scientific knowledge, but I’d never willingly kill for killing’s sake.”

“Now you’ve said it, they know it. They understand you better now. Tell them more.”

Avery smiled. “I see your ploy. Make me reveal myself so you can continue this charade. Well, Ariel, it won’t work.”

She shrugged. “Don’t know anything about charades.”

“Stop them, Ariel. You’re making me very nervous.”

His tone had become whiny. Ariel felt they were really getting to him now. She whispered across the desk to the Silversides, “Fight, you two. Fight.”

“Fight?” Adam asked. “We cannot fight each other.”

“Not a real fight. Fake it.”

It was a bizarre, awkward battle, especially since Adam and Eve had to use precise arm movements in order not to strike each other in any way that might hurt either—by dislodging a circuit or causing positronic damage. But Adam’s voice circuit was quite capable of any imitative sound, and when they just missed with a blow, he created the sound of one. Many of the punches appeared to land with a thunderous impact. After a well-simulated blow, the victim would convincingly reel backwards from the apparent force of it.

“Stop!” Avery hollered. Then he screamed to Ariel, “They can’t fight each other. It’s strictly against Third Law procedure. A robot must protect its own existence. That means they can’t be aggressive.”

“But Second Law allows me to order them to fight to the death, if necessary.”

“Well, yes, true, I guess, but consider the Laws of Humanics then. You should not give an order that endangers the preservation of robotic existence.”

“That’s just so much balderdash. There are no Laws of Humanics, they’re just theory. Back home we call them ethics —and, Ozymandias, as anyone can tell you, Ariel Welsh is not an ethical person.”

“You’re lying.”

“Maybe. No Law of Humanics to cover that, is there?”

Avery was momentarily bemused. Adam and Eve still struggled in their mock battle. Eve managed a skillful flip over Adam’s shoulder and he staggered forward, nearly into Ariel’s arms.

Ariel wished Derec could be in the room to watch the unprecedented scene of a pair of robots fighting. She almost forgot that the prodding of Avery had to be the main purpose of this theatrical display.

She whispered to Adam and Eve to quit the fray. Each of them returned to portraying Avery, muttering and castigating, pacing and gesturing.

“Ozymandias, you’re trembling,” Ariel said from a point just behind his back, startling him and making him even more angry.

“I am not trembling!”

“You’re shaking like a leaf.”

“You are right, Ariel, you’re not ethical. This whole attack on me is unethical. You’re trying to drive me crazy.”

“That’s just paranoia, the least of your madnesses, I think. And I’m not trying to drive you crazy. I’m trying to do just the opposite—drive you sane.”

“That in itself is crazy.”

“You bet.”

Adam came by, now doing a full-scale imitation of Avery, with the right walk, the tics, the jumpy inflections in his voice, the sarcastic tone. Avery yelled in frustration and took a swipe at Adam, landing a weak blow to his back.

“Ozymandias,” Ariel said, “you just tried to hit Adam.”

“That’s right. I wish I could mangle him into spare parts.”

“But you’re a robot.”

“Yes, what of it?”

“Well, you just said robots shouldn’t be aggressive. You just put yourself in danger by hitting Adam. You reacted to him in a very human way. How could you possibly be a robot?”

“I am a robot.”

“No, you’re a human being.”

“I was once, but I’m not now.”

Now Ariel was frustrated. The idea that he was a robot seemed fixed in Avery’s unpositronic brain. Yet she sensed that his anger over what the Silversides were doing could be used to shake him out of his delusion.

“Are ‘u all fright, Arriel?” Wolruf said.

“I’m okay. I just had a foolish idea I could do something here, that’s all.”

“Iss there anything I may do?”

“Take me home to Aurora.”

“If I could—”

“No, Wolruf, no. I didn’t really mean it anyway. I’m happy here in scenic Robot City. I plan to be president of the Chamber of Commerce.”

She was about to tell the Silversides that they could end their playacting, just as Eve passed her. Eve stopped in front of Avery and leaned in toward him, continuing her muttering in his voice. He pushed her away. She slid backward a few feet, then came close to him again.

“Stay away from me!” Avery cried. “That’s an order. Second Law.”

Ariel moved in closer, too.

“You’re a robot. You can’t invoke Second Law.”

“What? Oh? Yes. Get her away from me.”

“No. Go ahead, Eve. Stalk him. Whatever he goes, you go. You, too, Adam. Encroach.”

They surrounded Avery. Whenever he broke away from them, one of them zoomed in on him again. He flailed out at them, and they sidestepped his badly thrown blows.

Finally, he broke into a run, pursued by Adam and Eve. Near the desk he spun around, and Ariel saw he had something in his hand. A moment passed before she realized what it was. She had not seen it in a long time.

The weapon was Avery’s electronic disrupter, a device that emitted an ion stream that would interfere with the circuits of any advanced machine. Any machine, like the Silversides. And he was raising it to aim at them.

Ariel, who had been standing behind the Silversides, ran between them, and roughly pushed them away. In the back of her mind, she realized that she’d just violated another of the Laws of Humanics, the one that said humans must not harm robots. Both Silversides went flying sideways.

Her move came just in time. Avery’s shot went right over Ariel’s head and would undoubtedly have affected circuitry in Adam or Eve.

She continued her rush to Avery, jumping at him, knocking the electronic disrupter out of his hand and throwing him to the floor.

“Some robot you are,” she said, breathing heavily. “You don’t even make a decent human being.”

“Ariel,” Avery said weakly. He struggled to his feet. “I don’t—that is, I—I’m—I am—I—”

He looked sick. All the color had drained from his face. Ariel could see that it wasn’t the result of the fighting. It was something else. From the look of him, he could be dying.

“You better sit down,” Ariel said. “Adam?”

Adam picked up a chair and brought it to Avery, who settled heavily down upon it. Eve walked to Adam and the two took up a position behind Avery’s chair. The fact they looked so much alike was disconcerting to Ariel, as if she were about to talk to a group called the Avery Trio.

“Are you all right?” Ariel asked Avery.

“I—I think so.”

“Robots don’t get sick, you know. They don’t suffer from heart palpitations or exhaustion. They—”

“It’s okay, Ariel. You don’t have to speak to me as if I were a child. I know who I am. I may not like it. I may want to live forever. I may want to be a robot. But I know who I am.”

“And that is—”

“Ariel, please.”

“No, I’m a literalist. Are you a robot, Dr. Avery?”

“No.”

“Say it out.”

“I. Am. Not. A. Robot.”

Ariel smiled.

“Well,” she said, “that’s a start.”

CHAPTER 14

A DISCONNECTED DETECTIVE

Bogie stood in the corner where Derec had placed him so long ago. Timestep was across the room in another corner. While it was impossible for Bogie to be bored or to consider the possibilities of nothingness while in fact doing nothing for several consecutive days, he was aware that he had been in the corner for some time. It seemed to him that his position must be very much like the detectives on stakeout in several of the films he had researched. In scenes where they had waxed philosophical in tough-guy language, with plenty of wise-cracks and sentimental observations about life, they had had to pass time with only their own words to keep them company, plus a few doughnuts. Bogie would, he decided, prefer to do a stakeout for Derec than merely to stand in a corner awaiting his next order.

The order came, but not from Derec. The Watchful Eye transmitted a comlink message to Bogie over the secret channel it had created for private communications with its robots. The message told Bogie to come at once but not to allow Derec to see him go. That posed quite a dilemma for Bogie. If he left immediately, it would be obvious. If he waited for the right time, he would be disobeying the Big Muddy’s command to come at once. For a while he stood in his corner, aware that he could get mental freeze-out, a condition where a robot’s positronic brain essentially stopped functioning because of an unresolvable dilemma. He was, he thought, a cybernetic goner if he could not slip away soon.

In the room Derec was speaking with Mandelbrot.

“I had another dream about my mother last night,” Derec was saying.

“That is your fifth dream about her,” Mandelbrot said. “The fifth that you have told me about.”

“Yep. That’s all of ‘em. There wasn’t much to this one. I was a child, and she came to give me medicine. But this time I saw her face clearly. She had blond hair and hazel eyes. She seemed very kind. We talked for a while, I don’t remember about what. Then she said she loved me and left. And I woke up.”

“It was a pleasant dream then?”

“I suppose. But I woke up wondering if the woman in the dream was really my mother. I mean, I’ve never seen her, so anyone I think up could come into my dream and say she’s my mother without even looking anything like her. Do you understand, Mandelbrot?”

“Frankly, no.”

“Well, I guess you don’t have a mother.”

“You know I do not.”

Derec seemed about to explain something to Mandelbrot, but there was a soft rapping on the door.

“That sounds like Wolruf,” Derec said. “I’d recognize that tap anywhere. Come in, Wolruf.”

The caninoid alien came into the room.

“Messsage frrom Arriel,” she said. “She ssent me. We are making progrresss with your fatherr, she told me to tell ‘u.”

Derec’s face brightened. “That’s wonderful news, Wolruf. How much progress, do you think?”

“Am not able to guesss. In my homeland iss no mental illnesss. Have not seen it before Dr. Averry.”

“But he seems better.”

“That may be ssaid, I think.”

“Good. But she still doesn’t want me to come there?”

“Afrraid you’ll—”

“I know, I know. I could set him back. That’s okay.” (It wasn’t, but he said so. He was very curious about what his father would be like as a sane man. He could not conceive of the possibility.) “How about your other project? The Silversides?”

“They help Arriel, but she feelss they are just ass unpredictable ass everr.”

“I suspect so. And the dancers?”

“She ssaid to tell ‘u they do not do well. They get old. One died.”

“Did that upset Ariel badly?”

“No, I don’t think so. Eve wass concerned. She inssissted on taking it somewhere and burrying it. Ariel ssaid that iss sstrange.”

“I agree. But Adam and Eve seem full of surprises, don’t they?”

“Alwayss.”

“Anything more, Wolruf?”

“That’ss all she told me to tell ‘u.”

“Well, thank you. You make a good messenger, Wolruf. I won’t have to shoot you.”

“Shoot me? You would—?”

Derec laughed. “No, I wouldn’t shoot you. According to some Earth legend I read about, if a king was dissatisfied with the news a messenger brought, he would order the messenger killed. But, if it were ever true, it was a custom that faded out with civilization.”

“I am thankful for that.”

“Stay with us, Wolruf. I’m hungry. We can eat something. I’ve taught Mandelbrot how to program the chemical food processor. He comes up with some awesome concoctions, and I’m sure if you state your preferences, he can devise something to your taste.”

Derec rose from his chair and led the others out of the room. The food machine was located in a kitchen on the other side of the corridor.

The human need for food solved Bogie’s problem. He slipped away from his corner and, checking the corridor carefully, went out into it. As he passed the kitchen, he heard Derec talking and the sounds of Mandelbrot operating the processor.

Growing again the thick legs it used to get around the computer chamber, the Watchful Eye moved out of its haven.

There were no robots or intruders anywhere near the computer complex at this time, and it wanted to be ready for Bogie when he arrived. It had a plan, and it needed Bogie to make the plan work.

It was night in Robot City, Bogie’s favorite time, and he noticed that the moonlight slashed off the sides of buildings like a mugger’s sudden attack. As he walked quickly through the streets, he liked to think of descriptive lines like that, lines derived from the voiceovers in many of the old movies he’d viewed. He glanced around for more opportunities to practice such lines. In the night sky, the stars flickered on and off, like the sequins on a party girl’s dress. The tunnel he would use to go down to the computer level—and the Watchful Eye—loomed mysteriously in front of him, like a black hole with a welcome mat in front of it.

He wondered why his thoughts had taken such an odd turn. Could it just be his fascination with all those movies he’d researched, or was there some reason to be wary of what the Watchful Eye had in store for him?

The Watchful Eye tracked Bogie on his trip through the intricate maze that was the route to the computer chamber, watching several view-screens so he could gain knowledge of the robot from all angles. The more it could study Bogie before the robot arrived, the easier it would be to duplicate him. Further, it could store images of Bogie’s movements in its own memory banks, so that it could duplicate him with Derec or the others.

Bogie came through the sliding wall, saying, “You called, boss?”

“That is correct, Bogie. You are the first robot ever allowed into this sanctum by me. I hope you are honored.”

“A singular honor, boss. I’ll dine out on this for years. It’ll impress all the dolls. A doll in Washington Heights once got a fox fur out of me.”

The Watchful Eye hadn’t the slightest idea what Bogie was talking about, but that didn’t matter. It had no more use for Bogie anyway.

It moved out of its haven, walking on the short, rudimentary legs so adequate for the computer room. Sometimes it had been necessary to get through interstices in the machinery, to stretch itself to an elongated shape and worm its way, grabbing with even shorter legs (and more of them), through an opening. At other times it had needed to puff itself out in order to roll through a chute or tunnel; at those times it retracted its legs. But now it was perched on its conventional limbs, standing in front of Bogie, who had to look down at it.

“Say, boss, you’re not what I expected.”

“You did not expect me to be so amorphous?”

“If you say so. What I mean, I didn’t expect a blob. From the movie of the same name.”

This robot had gone too far with its research, the Watchful Eye decided. Shutting him off was, in a way, a kindness.

Using Bogie as a model, supplemented with the images it had already stored, the Watchful Eye began transforming itself. Bogie watched silently as the blob began to grow in height and shrink in width. Soon its legs lengthened and it grew arms. A moment later it was in a clearly humanoid shape. Even quicker came the changes that made it clearly a robot. Last were the delicate shifts in the facial and bodily look that gave it features and characteristics. But it was not until the Watchful Eye had finished its transformation that Bogie recognized it.

“Hey,” he said, “You’re me now, boss. That’s a nifty trick. How’d you do it?”

“That is not necessary for you to know, Bogie. I must explain to you now, because I want you to realize, that I will have to disconnect you now.”

“Disconnect? You mean, rub me out?”

“That is exactly what I do mean. I need to observe our visitors up close, arid so I am going to pose as you. That means I cannot take the chance of anyone discovering you here and guessing my disguise. Further, you are the only robot to be allowed into my presence, and so you have already seen too much and cannot be allowed even to carry that information in your memory banks. Also, you are no longer of any use to me. So I must disconnect you.”

“It’s like shooting the messenger, I guess.”

“I do not understand the reference.”

Bogie explained what Derec had said about messengers while the Watchful Eye opened the control panel in his back.

“Boss?”

“Yes?”

“When I am activated again, I won’t remember anything? I won’t even have this identity? I’ll be reprogrammed?”

“If you are activated again, all that would be true.”

“If?”

“Your existence is a threat to my safety. I must protect myself, so I must destroy you.”

“Oh. I understand. Well, boss, I guess it’s goodbye, huh?”

“There is no need for amenities between us.”

Just before the Watchful Eye disconnected the final wire, Bogie said, “Well, we’ll always have Paris.”

After Bogie was shut off, the Watchful Eye, with the precision of a surgeon, broke him up into his components. He carried the parts to a recycling chute, from which they would eventually be collected and taken to a Robot Recycling Facility, where they would be used in the construction of new robots.

The Watchful Eye continued on down the corridor. It wanted to reach Derec’s quarters before Bogie was missed.

CHAPTER 15

SAVE THE LAST DANCER FOR ME

Ariel was exhausted but too jittery to sleep; She had spent the better part of two days working alternately with Avery and the dancers.

Avery was, as doctors or med-bots might say, responding to treatment. Under Ariel’s relentless questioning, assisted by many queries from Adam (she had briefed him on the types of questions to ask), the doctor had sunk into a depressed but much more rational state. He treated Adam politely, even though Adam had chosen to continue to look like him.

Sometimes, when Adam asked Avery a question, Ariel got confused. The question would be in Avery’s old, madder voice—abrupt, condescending, sharp-dictioned—but the real Avery would respond in an un-Averylike voice; quieter, kinder, sad. Yet the technique, one never used before in psychiatric circles—a robot interrogator who could become an exact double of the patient—seemed to have good effects. Avery’s responses to Adam tended to dig deeper into the man’s psyche, brought out more interesting possibilities. His responses to Ariel were more evasive, cloudier. It became her task to follow up on the clues drawn out by Adam. She would zero in on any hint, any opportunity; make any remarks about any revelations; do anything, finally, to make Avery talk.

In the last two days, Avery had become more relaxed, calmer. Many of the things he said were still outrageous, and he could not get off the subject of wanting to dissect a dancer, but he no longer ranted, and his sarcasm was considerably reduced. He seemed—to Ariel at least—more rational, though hardly sane, and still not very nice.

Now Avery had concluded that he was better off as a human than he had been when he’d thought of himself as a robot.

“No real insight there,” Ariel commented. “I should think that would be obvious.”

“No, no. You do not understand me.” When he was misunderstood, he had a tendency to pat the outside of his right thigh nervously with his right hand. “I still think of robots as the greatest entities of all. The perfect creatures, without emotion or aging; you know that old routine, I suspect?”

“I do. Schoolbook stuff back on Aurora. But I don’t agree that an invention without a true inner life or without feelings is worth being, no matter how long it exists.”

“Well, I did. In some ways I still do. I’ve always wanted a life of the mind, not of the emotions. And I’ve wanted to live longer than our natural lifespans.”

“An Auroran lives so long, I’m surprised you’d even worry. Isn’t the real issue your fear of death?”

He laughed scoffingly. “More schoolbook stuff, Ariel. If one wants to live forever, you reality-distorters automatically knee-jerk the idea of fear of death.”

“Hey, I’m young and I fear death.”

“That attitude is only sensible. We all have it. But I don’t care about death itself. If it comes, I’ll shake its hand and lead it off. No, it’s the chance to watch history, to see what will happen further in science, that’s the reason I want the long life of a robot. I want to see if the Settler worlds will succeed or perish from their own boorish and violent ways. I want to see if Earth can somehow survive its terrible, claustrophobic ways of life, or will decay and be destroyed from the inside, becoming a ghost planet, a worn-out memorial to what humanity once was. I want to see if Spacers—”

“Don’t get carried away by your own rhetoric, Dr. Avery. I get the message. It’s not fear of death, it’s a need to know the future.”

“Simplistically stated, but essentially correct. At any rate, I spent so much time with robots and thought so much about them that eventually I wanted to be one, needed to be one. I’d still like to be one. The difference is I no longer believe I am one.”

She turned the care of Avery back to Adam and took a short walk across the room to confront her other problem. Eve, now restored to her Ariel form, sat beside the desk, merely staring at the dancers, the five who were left. The other nine had all died quietly or, as Avery would have it, “ceased operation.”

Just looking at the remaining quintet made Ariel sad. She had hoped for great communicative advances when she had started working with the tiny creatures. So little had really been accomplished. The games were cute, and some of their behavior showed a minimal intelligence, but no language had been conveyed, only a few hand signals. The gestures were significant, but not enough for Ariel.

She had this faint sense that she had failed. And the apparent success of her other project, Avery, somehow did not compensate for her failure with the dancers.

“Anything new, Eve?” she said as she sat down in her customary chair.

“Nothing. They merely sit, holding hands like that. They never even look up at us anymore.”

“Perhaps they think that their gods are punishing them.”

“I do not understand. Their gods?”

“Us, Eve.”

“Would you explain?”

“Well, we—never mind. Ignore the comment.”

There was something morbid about Eve’s vigil over the remaining dancers. Each time one died, she insisted on taking it away, presumably to bury it. Ariel had never asked her where she went or exactly how she had performed the ritual. She did not want to know. The thought of Eve in a lonely, dark area, performing death rites for a dancer made Ariel shudder.

Avery, still demanding that one be handed over to him for study, had fussed over the first four or five deaths. Ariel’s adamant support of Eve had apparently discouraged him. He had been silent on the matter for some time. Once she tried to introduce the subject, but he h’dd dismissed it with a wave of his hand.

At times Ariel wished the dancers would finish their dying. Then she could return to Derec and help him in restoring the city. He had made some progress lately, managing to convince the computer to make all the lights of the city work again. And some utility robots had been seen picking up street debris. Water no longer tasted brackish, and the food coming out of the processors actually had flavor. But Derec wasn’t satisfied, he said. There were still so many things out of whack, and the essential mystery of why the city had deteriorated in their absence remained.

Wolruf came into the room. She was returning from stilt another meal with Derec and Mandelbrot. Ariel didn’t blame her for spending more time with them. Since Adam had begun working with Avery, there had been little for Wolruf to do here.

Coming to the desk, Wolruf glanced down at the dancers. “They look worrse, ‘u think?”

“Much worse.”

“What can I do?”

“Nothing much anyone can do.”

“Could ‘u just sset them loosse?”

“Why?”

“They could die in peace, alone. On my worrld, there iss a custom of dying alone.”

“Perhaps you’re right. But I think it’s too late for such a compassionate act. They’re too far gone.”

“Yess, I ssee, I think.”

When she turned her attention back to the desktop, Ariel saw one of the dancers, a once-chubby, now-emaciated male, break his grip on two of the others and fall backward.

Eve, now so used to a dancer’s passing, immediately scooped up the corpse and strode out of the room. Ariel, staring after her, said, “And then there were four. Soon, none. It won’t be long now.”

She glanced over toward Avery. He was now looking at her with some concern in his face. How sane of him, she thought.

Timestep, in his corner, had seen Bogie leave. Then, a short time later, he witnessed his return. After Bogie had gone back to his corner, Timestep catalogued the oddities. First, if not summoned by Derec or even Mandelbrot, why had Bogie left the corner in the first place? Second, where had he gone? Third, why was his return so secretive? Fourth, an important fourth, what was it that looked so wrong about Bogie?

Derec reentered the room, followed by Mandelbrot. He was silent, his index finger tapping on his chin thoughtfully. Timestep studied the tap. It was too slow, unrhythmic. He would not have been able to use it for any dancing step he knew. (All the while he stood in his corner he called up from his memory banks the dances he had memorized and visualized how he would do them if his feet were not forbidden to move just now.)

Across the way, Bogie appeared to lean forward, which seemed odd to Timestep. But then Bogie had left the corner and returned to it on his own, so a simple bending at the waist should not seem so out of the ordinary.

“Bogie!” Derec called, and Bogie came out of his corner. Did Timestep observe a hesitation before his companion moved?

“Did you think we’d forgotten you, Bogie?” Derec asked.

Bogie hesitated before saying, “That you would forget about me would not occur to me, Master Derec.”

“You seem a little sluggish. And what’s this Master Derec? What happened to ‘kid,’ ‘kiddo,’ ‘pal’?”

“I felt momentarily respectful, Mast—kiddo.”

Derec narrowed his eyes as he stared at Bogie. “Are you functional? Should I send you to the Robot Repair Facility for a diagnostic scan or a tune-up?”

“That will not be necessary. Pal.”

For a moment Derec seemed unsure. “That’s okay,” he finally said. “Tell me, Bogie, what do you know about our mysterious controller?”

“I know nothing of a mysterious controller, sir.”

“Weren’t you supposed to tell me there was a block on that information, something like that?”

Again Bogie hesitated. “The nature of the block upon information does not include such a question as the one you asked. Kid.”

Derec smiled. “Very good. It was a sort of ‘do you still beat your wife’ question, wasn’t it?”

“I do not have a wife. Kiddo.”

“It’d be an idea, though. Robot husbands and wives. Robot families. I might work on it when the mess here is cleared up. Would you like a family, Bogie?”

“I cannot have a family.”

“Isn’t there a family feeling among robots?”

“No, sir. Pal.”

“Okay, okay. You’ll have to forgive me. I’m bone-weary, and my mind isn’t even forming casual conversation effectively. Bogie?”

“Yes, Master—Pal.”

“I need Wolruf back here. Go to the medical facility and fetch her.”

“Fetch?”

“Bring her back here. In fact, since she just left, you might be able to catch up with her even before she reaches the medical facility. Well, what are you waiting for? Get a move on.”

“Yes, sir.”

Derec stared at the empty doorway for a long while after Bogie left. He seemed preoccupied. Then he turned suddenly and bellowed: “Timestep!”

Timestep immediately left his corner and went to Derec. “Yes, Master Derec?”

“Is something wrong with Bogie? Anything another robot can discern?”

“I do not know, sir.”

“Let me put it another way. Was that Bogie who just left here?”

“I do not know, sir.”

Derec looked worried. “Well, that’s some progress. You would know for certain if it was, wouldn’t you, Timestep?”

“Yes, Master Derec.”

“Then there’s a possibility that something has happened to Bogie?”

“Yes, that seems possible.”

“Is he malfunctioning?”

“I do not know, sir.”

“Right. I have to phrase the question differently. Is there a possibility that a robot such as Bogie could malfunction?”

“It is possible, but there would have to be a reason. He would have to be forced to resolve a dilemma involving the Laws of Robotics, or he would have to be given an order he could not carry out.”

“Are they the only possible reasons for him to act uncharacteristically?”

“No.”

“What’s another?”

“He is no longer Bogie as we knew him. He has been reprogrammed or has reprogrammed himself.”

“Mandelbrot? Do you agree with Timestep?”

“Yes. But there is another possibility. I tried to speak with him through comlink and he did not respond to his name. Also, there was a series of nicks along his right side before. They are no longer there.”

“What do you think about him?”

“I think it is not Bogie. I think it is someone else.”

“Our mysterious controller?”

“I cannot know that. But it is a possibility.”

“Timestep, what about this? Could it not be Bogie?”

“That is possible, sir.”

“Go after him, the both of you. Corner him. Bring him back to me.”

The two robots left the room, and Derec began to pace. He sensed that he was going to regain his control of the city. Even the chemfets inside him seemed to be reviving.

The rest of the dancers did not survive for long. Eve disposed of the next three, then returned for a somber death watch over the last, the formerly sturdy woman who had been the leader of the dancers. She was lying in the center of the desk, looking pale and weak, with no one to hold on to anymore. Ariel had leaned down close, watching the slight breathing movements of her tiny chest.

“I wonder what she thinks,” Ariel said to Wolruf

“Iss odd to me to wonderr what such a ssmall being thinkss.”

“Oh? We humans wonder about such things all the time. Part of our charm: our limitless curiosity about the universe.”

“I have at timess noticed ssuch.”

Avery, weary of the session with Adam, came to the desk. He stared down at the remaining dancer, whose arms rose upward for a moment in a characteristically graceful way.

“Let me have this one,” he said softly, sounding quite sane about it. “She is our last chance to find out something about them.”

“No,” Eve said. “I must take care of her.”

“Your care of them has been admirable, Eve,” Avery said, “but we shouldn’t waste this one on mere ritual, especially on ritual misunderstood by a robot. Ariel? It’s your decision really.”

“And you’ll abide by it?”

He sighed theatrically, as if assuming any judgment would be against him. “I will.”

Ariel looked from Eve to Avery, not certain how to say what she had been planning to say for some time.

“Eve, Dr. Avery is right. We must know about them, we—”

“But I must bury her.”

In a quick move, she picked up the last dancer from the desktop and held it close to her chest.

“Eve, put her back. You can’t bury her right now. She is still alive.”

“Alive is not the correct word,” Avery said.

“Shut up with your logic for once,” Ariel said. “Eve, I order you to return the dancer to the desk. You must obey my order. That is the Second Law, and the Laws are part of you, isn’t that true? You sense them inside you, don’t you?”

“No. Yes. I cannot be sure. Something seems to tell me to obey you, but I am not sure that I can.”

“You must. It is Second Law.”

“It is not just Second Law,” Adam said. He was standing behind Avery. “It is what we must do. We cannot continue if we do not discover what is wrong with the city, and the dancers are part of the mystery. Return the dancer, Eve.”

Eve gently settled the dancer back onto the desktop, then resumed her customary vigil.

“Eve,” Ariel said gently, “it is important to me to know whether or not these tiny creatures are living beings or merely some kind of experimental robots or even, as Dr. Avery has suggested, toys.”

“They are robots,” Eve said. “I have sensed no life in them, the kind of life I have felt coming from you, Derec, Wolruf. What I detect in them is the same as what comes to me from Mandelbrot and the other robots.” She pointed to the last dancer. “This, I believe, is a robot.”

Ariel was shocked. “You mean, you’ve known this all the time and not said anything about it?”

“You did not request it from me. And no, I did not know it all the time. Or even most of the time. When I first encountered these creatures in the vacant lot, I received my first glimmerings. As Adam did at the time, I felt little life in them. But I had not experienced much of this world, or any other world, and I was not sure at the time what constituted a living being and what constituted a robot. As I watched the dancers, I understood more and more what they were. My certainty has only come recently.”

“Eve, I—”

“Eve,” Avery interrupted, “what do you feel coming from Adam, coming from inside yourself? Do you feel, as you say, a living being or robot?”

“I cannot say. It is different. We are different.”

“That is so,” Adam said. “Since I came to awareness on the kin’s planet, I have not been certain what I am. I accept that we are robots, but actually, inside myself, I feel neither living being nor robot.”

“Fair enough,” Avery said.

“Eve,” Ariel said, “If you knew the dancers were not human, why did you treat them as humans?”

“I was not aware I was.”

“You cared for them, awarded them human death rituals, buried them as if they’d died. If they’re robots, then they didn’t really die and didn’t need to be treated as such.”

“They ceased to exist,” Eve said. “Isn’t a robot’s death as significant as a human’s?”

“Mistress Ariel,” Adam said, “you buried the robot Jacob Winterson on the blackbodies’ planet, did you not?”

“But that’s—I was about to say it was different, but you’re right, Adam, it’s not. I cared about Jacob the way Eve apparently cared for the dancers. You did care for them, didn’t you, Eve?”

“I am not sure what you mean. I performed rituals that I believed were appropriate.”

“Don’t go robotic on me now, Eve. You did feel compassion for them, sadness when they died.”

“There was an awareness of loss. Is that sadness, Ariel?”

“I don’t know, Eve. I’m not even sure I can get a sense of it.”

They watched each other silently for a time, then both looked down at the last dancer. She was still breathing.

“I must still order you, Eve,” Ariel said, “to allow Dr. Avery to perform his examination without interference. We need to know the facts that his work will show us.”

“Yes. That now seems logical.”

“Logical. Why logical now?”

“Enough information has been presented to me, and I understand the need. So I conclude agreement.”

“No wonder you are not sure what you are. I’m not sure what you are, both of you.”

When the last dancer had died, hours later, Avery gently picked it up from the desktop and went to a far comer of the room. A few minutes later he came back with a number of slides. Placing them under a microscopic scanner and transmitting images of his findings onto its large screen, he showed Ariel the infinitesimal microchips and circuit boards, miniature servo motors, linkages, wires.

“As I suspected,” Avery said, but without his usual smugness, “they are cleverly designed albeit ineffective robots capable of limited humanlike behavior. The use of genetic materials was skillful, but the maker could not compensate for their rapid aging process. If he had, these might have been quite successful little humaniform robots.”

Ariel stared at the screen without visible emotion. She didn’t know what to feel. Relief that they were not tiny humans or sadness that, whatever they were, they had existed and only for a very short time.

Finally, she took a cloth and wiped off the desktop. “Well,” she said, “that’s it then. Let’s go see if we can help Derec.”

Before they left, Avery handed Eve a small box. When Eve asked what it was, he said it was the remains of the last dancer. He was turning it over to her for whatever disposal she chose. She carried it away.

CHAPTER 16

FLIGHT

The Watchful Eye realized as it left Derec that its disguise had not fooled him. It had come to that conclusion by analyzing the purposes of his probing questions, reading his facial expressions, and interpreting his body language. (In its studies of humans, it had called up from the computer a file on metalinguistics and paralanguage.)

As it fled, the Watchful Eye wondered just where it had gone wrong in its Bogie portrayal. Perhaps the mistake had been to try to imitate a robot in the first place. After all, it was too complicated a being, too powerful an intellectual force, to get away with posing as a mere robot. On the other hand, the flaw in its behavior may have been an error of pride. It may have felt too easily superior to Bogie, and robots in general, to pretend to be one effectively. Somewhere in the research, it had read that actors often succeeded because they immersed themselves in their roles, losing their real identity in them. It should have studied Bogie more. Oddly enough, it thought, its failure in the robot guise reinforced its belief that it was definitely not a robot itself.

Perhaps its real error had been in leaving the safety of its haven in the computer chamber. The haven was where it belonged. Perhaps it was never meant to leave it, or at least not to stray too far from it. Perhaps its existence was that of an armchair observer, participating at a distance, pulling strings like a puppetmaster.

What should it do now? it wondered. Derec had ordered it to find Wolruf, but Wolruf was too much of a threat, and the caninoid alien might be with the other humans, all of whom might be able to detect that it wasn’t what it seemed to be. For a moment, as it had left the room, it had felt a compulsion to do what Derec said, treating it as a Second Law command. But if it wasn’t a robot, why should it obey Derec? It couldn’t even be sure Derec was a proper human, or a human at all.

At any rate, the order had been given to Bogie, and the Watchful Eye was not Bogie. If it were human, it had the power of choice; if it were robot, it did not have to follow orders given to another robot; if it were animal or alien, it could follow animal or alien instincts.

Since Derec might spread the word that it was not Bogie, there was no reason to stay out here in the streets, where the others could track it down and trap it.

As it headed toward the tunnel that led directly down to the central computer, it wondered if it could even continue its activities in Robot City. With Derec and Ariel there, it had enemies, and it could not abide enemies. Nevertheless, it didn’t want to eliminate them, as sensible a solution as that might be. Something inside it prevented it from killing.

Suddenly it realized how it could give the intruders a setback, assert its power, allow itself to maintain control of the city, mold an environment that would be suitable for it instead of humans, and make it the powerful entity it had decided to be.

It would just accelerate the program it had planned all along by skipping a few steps and going directly to the main goal.

It would destroy, then rebuild, Robot City.

Wolruf had left Ariel and the others for her nocturnal roaming of the city. She had come from a place whose inhabitants traveled through the night compulsively, searching for answers to questions they had not always known they had. While she subdued the urge at most times, tonight, after watching the end of the dancers, she had known she must be alone. She climbed over the smaller buildings, raced down dark streets in long loping strides, crouched at the edges of roofs.

Rounding a corner, she collided with a robot she recognized as Bogie.

“Bogie! What arre ‘u doing here?”

But the robot did not answer. It merely leaped over Wolruf and raced on, around the corner from which Wolruf had come.

“Stop!” said a voice. It was Mandelbrot, coming toward Wolruf so fast he would have run her down if she had not jumped adeptly out of the way. The robot Timestep tapped along behind Mandelbrot.

“There iss something wrrong, Mandelbrot, I can ssee,” Wolruf said. “ ‘0 only crush when ssomething iss wrrong.”

“Excuse me, Wolruf,” Mandelbrot said. “We are on urgent business. I cannot stop to explain.”

He sped past her. Her curiosity aroused, she raced after him on all fours. Timestep danced his way after them.

“I can help ‘u. Arre ‘u following Bogie?”

“No.”

They rounded the corner. Wolruf saw Bogie, still moving rapidly, up ahead.

“‘U sseem to be following Bogie.”

“No.”

“What arre ‘u doing?”

“Trying to overtake the Bogie that is not Bogie.”

“The Bogie not Bogie? Explain, pleasse.”

As they rushed along, Mandelbrot told the alien what had happened.

“Then ‘u arre to brring that rrobot back to Derec?”

“Yes.”

“Let me catch him forr ‘u.”

With a strong, leaping thrust, Wolruf surged ahead of Mandelbrot and Timestep. Her body low to the ground, she closed the gap between herself and the Watchful Eye in a matter of seconds. Her prey was not even aware of her pursuit.

With her last few powerful steps, Wolruf propelled herself into the air. Her leap was magnificent, a smooth arc that reached such an impressive height she was able to dive down upon the fleeing robot. Her forelegs hit its shoulders with a mighty impact, knocking it forward onto its face. Wolruf landed on top of it. She was able to hold it down long enough for the others to arrive.

Rolling off the Watchful Eye, she looked up to see Mandelbrot standing over them.

“Whoever you are,” Mandelbrot said, “Derec orders you to return to him with us.”

“Whoever?” the Watchful Eye said. “I am Bogie.”

“No, you are not. I can see that now.”

“What makes you think so?”

“You have not copied Bogie’s voice accurately, although the ability is programmed into you. There was a rough sound in Bogie’s voice that yours lacks.”

Another mistake, then. The Watchful Eye should have adapted its voice to the robot’s. For a moment, it wondered if it should have bothered with Bogie at all. For a botched piece of strategy, that robot was now parts on the Repair Facility floor. The Watchful Eye could not feel regret, but it was conscious of the waste caused by ineffective action.

“If you know I am not Bogie,” it said, “then you may guess that I don’t have to do what you say.”

Without waiting for Mandelbrot to continue the discussion, the Watchful Eye kicked out at Mandelbrot’s leg, The surprise move made Mandelbrot topple over, landing with an impressive clanking sound upon the pavement.

The Watchful Eye stood up quickly, feeling more in control of its unaccustomed robot body than before. It turned to find Wolruf leaping toward it. With a vicious backhand blow, it struck Wolruf in the neck. Choking, falling backward, Wolruf collapsed. She landed awkwardly on her back legs. causing them both to throb with intense pain.

The Watchful Eye jumped over the fallen alien and tried to continue its run, but Timestep, with a dancing twirl, tripped it up. It stumbled, but this time did not fall. When it regained its balance, it ran at Timestep so quickly that the robot did not have time even to consider his Third Law responsibility.

It wrestled Timestep to the pavement but then, in an abrupt move, broke its hold and raced away. It had progressed half a block before Mandelbrot stood up. However, since he regarded Wolruf the same way he did humans, First Law compelled him to kneel down beside the fallen alien to see if she was in need of help.

“I am fine,” Wolruf said in a faint voice. She could barely talk. “ ‘U go on. Continue purrsuit. I will go to Derec.”

Wolruf watched Mandelbrot and Timestep chase after the strange robot. When they were out of sight, she struggled to her feet. The pain from her legs seemed to be traveling through her whole body.

Her run to Derec was done at a much slower pace then usual.

The Watchful Eye wished it had been able to imitate a robot’s speed, but its mimicry did not automatically give it full physical control. Unlike a normal Avery robot, it skidded around corners and bumped into obstacles. Each little delay was allowing its pursuers to get closer.

It had one advantage over Mandelbrot and Timestep. It knew where it was going.

The tunnel was not too far away now. After looking back at its pursuers, it quickly calculated the time it would take them to close the gap between them and it. It was likely they would overtake it a few meters from the tunnel entrance.

It needed a diversion.

It flashed into its mind a map of the area and discovered that there was a building coming up on its right that stored several of the results of its genetic experiments. This had been one of its latest experiments, and many from this batch of creatures were still functioning.

If it went through this building, which had a rear exit, and could slow down its pursuers by doing so, it could reach the tunnel entrance easily.

As Mandelbrot’s footsteps became louder, sounding as if he were ready to climb onto its back, the Watchful Eye took an abrupt right turn toward the building. It ran at such velocity that it hit the entrance with an impact that sent the thick door flying open.

Inside, bright light illuminated an enormous room. Spread across its floor, on shelves, sprawled over furniture, was a large group of rejects from the Watchful Eye’s experiments.

The beings of this particular group, the one it had created just before the arrival of the intruders, were somewhat larger than the dancers and built with less delicacy. They were thick-muscled, with bulges all over their bodies, bulges that did not actually correspond accurately with the protuberances of the human body.

Toughness was their chief trait. Continually knocking against each other and starting fights, playing games that usually ended in fierce brawling, executing odd practical jokes, or banding together into groups and staging small battles that contained more strategy than one would expect, they had some resemblance to frontier people on the Settler planets and in Earth’s history.

In contrast to the roughness of their natures, they had organized themselves into a fairly intricate society, including a government laden with bribery and graft. The Watchful Eye had been quite taken with this group, but had had to reject it because it exhibited too many weaknesses, and outside of their corrupt politics and a tendency toward lively song, they had displayed minimal intelligence.

Most of its experiments were failures because they turned out to be too limited, even though each group displayed different characteristics. It had wanted to discover more about the Laws of Humanics (which stated, more or less, that human beings must not harm themselves or allow others to come to harm, must not give robots dangerous orders, and must not harm robots unless the action could save other human beings), but its experimental creations generally became too independent, forming their own societies and proving nothing about the ethics that were the foundation of the Laws.

On one side of the room, a large group was singing a raucous song, while a wild melee ensued near the Watchful Eye’s feet. Stepping carefully into spaces the tiny creatures tended to create when one of the larger entities came into the room that was their world, it managed to get about one-third of the way across the room before Mandelbrot and Timestep came through the open doorway. The Watchful Eye looked back for a moment and saw what it had expected. The two robots had come to a standstill. Uncertain of how to wind their way across the overpopulated room, they further wondered if their actions here should be governed by the First Law of Robotics. They were not sure if the law even applied to this situation. It walked on, knowing that even if there were creatures under its foot as it came down, they were used to visitors and adept enough to scamper out of the way. It easily reached the other side of the room, where some of the male citizens performed odd mating rituals with the females. (There had been no actual mating in any of the experimental creatures’ societies, although pairing off and flirtation were not uncommon.)

Before Mandelbrot and Timestep could work their way cautiously across the room, the Watchful Eye was on a new street and making its way toward its tunnel escape route. In its mind, coolly analytical in spite of the danger around it, it continued to formulate its plan for the destruction of Robot City.

CHAPTER 17

ADAM AND EVE AND PINCH ME

Adam found Eve standing at the entrance to a small park set in the middle of one of several Robot City building clusters. This cluster included a small art museum, a library, an auditorium meant for music performance, and one of those plazas with customerless commercial shops that dotted the city. The park itself was a circle of trees just inside a small metallic picket fence, with attractive groupings of benches, bushes, and flower beds throughout.

Although Eve stood still and looked into the park, it was clear to Adam that she was not studying its landscape or evaluating its function. She was staring at a particular comer, assuring herself that the activity she had just completed there had left no trace.

He stood by her side for a long while before speaking. She continued to resemble Ariel, while Adam had changed from Avery back to Derec. An outside observer might have judged them to be as romantically involved as the two humans were, the way they stood together silently against the park’s romantic setting. But that was only another facet of their mimicry, and romance was not a part of their repertoire, unless their creator had some later surprise to spring upon them.

“This is where the dancers are?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You have buried all of them someplace in this park?”

“Some of them. Others are elsewhere.”

“Do you know why you have performed this ritual?”

“It seemed appropriate. When we encountered the first group in that lot, they were burying their dead. I finished that job, so it seemed to me balanced that I do the same task for the dancers. I thought that, whatever they were, someone should perform the rites that appeared to be appropriate to their society. Am I wrong?”

“I would have no way of knowing that. Right and wrong seem to be the kind of polarity to which beings like Derec and Ariel and Or. Avery give importance. They are concerned with moral values. We do not have to be, except as they apply to us.”

“I thought we were moral beings, too.”

“We are. But we do not have to fret in the way that they do about values. And ours are less complicated, governed only by the distinctions of set codes of behavior. You have seen how they cannot even agree among themselves on an issue.”

“Yes. Dr. Avery seems almost like an enemy of Derec and Ariel, while Derec and Ariel do not always get along with each other. Why cannot they agree on proper rules of conduct, Adam?”

“I do not know. We must observe them further.”

“They differed in their attitudes about the dancers. Ariel seemed genuinely sorrowful about their deaths, while Avery appeared to be indifferent.”

“He was fearful of his own death. He admitted that.”

“Yes. I have no real idea what death is. It seems to be an operational being becoming nonoperational.”

“I believe that is somewhat accurate. Did you have feelings about the dancers when they became nonoperational?”

“I cannot answer you. Something was in my head but I do not know what. I thought perhaps it was a positronic disturbance, but I am not sure. All I know was that as I carried each dancer away from the medical facility, I sensed that there was an injustice in their lives, but I could not yet discern what. If that is feelings, then I may be a robot with feelings.”

“The evidence is inconclusive at best. Will you bury more of these people if we discover their corpses?”

“Yes, if it is possible.”

“Should you wish it, I will help you.”

They stood a while longer, then Adam said, “When I was helping Dr. Avery, he told me a story. He said I should know it because of our names. It went like this: Adam and Eve and Pinch Me went out to take a swim. Adam and Eve got drowned, and who got saved?”

Eve waited for Adam to continue. When he did not, she said, “That is incomprehensible as a story, Adam.”

“No, you’re supposed to answer the question. Perhaps it is a riddle. Try again; Adam and Eve got drowned, and who got saved?”

“Logic seems to indicate Pinch Me.”

“That’s right. And then I am supposed to do this.”

Adam put his hand against her arm, finger and thumb spread. Gradually he brought the two digits together and pressed against her skin in an approximation of a human pinch.

Adam dropped his hand away. Eve watched the gesture and said, “And...?”

“And what?”

“What is the point?”

“I do not know. I didn’t know when Dr. Avery did it either, but he seemed to think it was worth smiling about. When I asked him to explain it, he became angry.”

“Do you think it is an allegory? You see, Adam and Eve die and then Pinch Me is the survivor. Therefore, the teller touches the listener in a shared satisfaction that life goes on when other people die. Do you think that was what Dr. Avery was trying to convey?”

“Perhaps. He appears to want to live on very much, so this could have been his way of explaining life to me. These people can be like that, telling stories laced with obscurity when data is required.”

“I suspect that data is not always essential to them. Come, let’s find them.”

In the distance there was an odd popping sound. Looking up, Adam and Eve saw an entire building flying above them, high in the air.

“What is that?” Eve said.

“It appears that a building has left its foundation and taken flight. Odd. When the robots remove a building from the city, it just disappears and is replaced by a new one. It does not generally fly through the air. Something is wrong. We must find Derec and Ariel.”

CHAPTER 18

AVERY REDUX

Derec recognized the change in his father as soon as the man came into the room. Avery’s usually tense face, now drawn and tired with a sad darkness around his eyes, had relaxed. Its features were softer, and his eyes and mouth were not agitated by nervousness. Neither was his body. He moved with an uncharacteristic slowness. His fingers were still. That was the real oddity. His hands, usually so active, were not moving. Derec had become so used to the way Avery’s fingers drummed against things—furniture, his clothing—that their lack of movement was like a sudden silence in a jungle, too disturbing to cause calm.

Ariel looked a bit different, too, exhausted, eyelids drooping, mouth slack, no spring to her walk.

“Isn’t Wolruf with you?” Derec asked Ariel.

“She was, but she took off on her own. You know how she does.”

“I sent for her.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

Derec nodded. His suspicions seemed confirmed. “I sent Bogie to bring her here, except that I don’t think it was really Bogie I sent.”

“What do you mean?”

He explained.

“You think somebody’s done something to Bogie?” Ariel asked.

“Possibly. Or it wasn’t Bogie at all.”

“How could that be?”

“I don’t know, but Timestep seemed to agree with me. He and Mandelbrot went after him.”

Avery, who had lingered at the door, stepped forward. “Maybe it was the individual you’ve been looking for. The one behind the city’s shutdown.”

Derec considered the possibility. “You may be right. It’s worth considering anyway. But could he disguise himself as Bogie?”

Avery shrugged. “When you don’t know the identity of your antagonist, there’s very little to conclude. We need hard evidence.”

“I heard that ‘we,’ “ Ariel said. “Does that mean you want to work with us?”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Avery replied. “At least not what you insinuate. I may no longer believe I’m a robot, and you may be smug about how you prodded me back to normality with your cheap tricks and psychologizing, but it does not mean I am somehow, as your tone implied, your ally.”

“Well, pardon me,” Ariel said in mock anger. “Derec, I think the train’s returned to the station. Your father is his old self again.”

Derec didn’t know how much he could appreciate that. He had not liked Dr. Avery in their earlier encounters and didn’t relish having to deal closely with him again. And this was the man, after all, who had injected the chemfets into him, which had certainly turned out to be a mixed blessing. But Avery was also his father, and that had to count for something. If only the doctor would treat him like a son for a change.

“Well,” Derec said glumly, “we can use any help you might be able to give us.”

“Of course you could. The city is deteriorating. I’d want my help, too. I’d demand it. I didn’t put you in charge to oversee its decline and fall.”

Avery’s words stung Derec. It seemed as if the man was continually judging him, and finding him wanting.

“I think you two should get to know each other,” Ariel said. “You don’t need me around for that. I’m going to take a stroll. Perhaps I can find the missing Bogie. I mean, the real one.”

She walked out, an impish look on her face. She knew exactly what she was doing. The two Averys had to meet each other head to head, something neither of them could do with her around. She wasn’t sure why, but she thought something would have to happen between them, for good or ill.

After she left, Avery observed, “Well, your girlfriend’s ploy is quite obvious.”

“Stop! Don’t make her sound trivial by calling her my girlfriend.”

“Sorry. I thought you two were—”

“We are, but she means more to me than that.”

“I’ll choose better words. Do you like paramour, foxy lady, lollapalooza, some dish, the cat’s pyjamas, a tomato—”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just Earth slang. I’m a collector of ancient colloquialisms.”

“You told me something like that in a dream.”

“Did I?” Avery began to walk around the room slowly. He looked a bit more like his old self now, a shadow of it anyway. “Well, I don’t put much stock in dream mysteries. Symbols and clairvoyance and that sort of bilgewater scum. Buried in your brain somewhere, although you don’t remember it, you must remember observing me using the old slang terms.”

“Do you remember me observing you?”

Avery’s face softened. He looked almost kind.

“Yes. Many times. You used to come to my lab, sit on a high stool for hours, and watch me work. You not only picked up some of my scientific terminology, and probably my ancient lowdown slang, you were able to repeat a considerable number of my curses when you were a very young age. Embarrassed your mother no end—”

“My mother? She’s been in my dreams, too. She—”

“I don’t want to hear about your trivial dreams. You would probably assail me with sentimental theories, interpretations. I can do without psychobabble, believe me. Let’s get back to business, we—”

“No, wait. My mother, did she have blond hair, hazel eyes?”

Avery looked astonished. “Well, that’s true. I didn’t think you could, that is, I thought you had no memories of her.”

“No!”

The word was spoken so vehemently that Derec realized the subject must be difficult for him. Although he drew back from it, Derec had no intention of dropping it altogether. He would find out about her in any way he could.

“Was I a difficult child?” he asked instead.

Avery appeared ready to explode with anger.

“Can’t you get your bloody mind off nostalgic sentiment? We have to—no, wait, I’m sorry. I can be insensitive, I know that. It must be strange to you, having me as a father. I suppose an outsider might accuse me of having episodes of delusional paranoia, or perhaps intense megalomania. I hate such terms. Would-be interpreters of life hide behind words like that. Sometimes it seems that such words make them sound like they know something, instead of being the ignoramuses they are.”

Derec was confused by the changes in his father’s tone. He could sound like a normal father at one moment, even a rational human being, but then switch in mid-sentence to the sound of madness. Ariel’s treatment of him may have made him a more sensible human being, but clearly it had not completely cured him.

“Yes, Derec,” he said, his voice now eerily warm, “you had a more normal childhood than you suspect. Parents who doted on you and all that. You liked robots, and you picked up theories of robotics the way other children learn their letters and numbers. I helped you build your very own utility robot. You don’t remember Positron, do you?”

“No.”

He felt sad that he did not.

“That was the name you gave your robot. Of course, he was just a utility robot and didn’t even have a positronic brain, but I thought the name had a certain charm, and so I didn’t correct you. I suspect I didn’t have to correct you. Even that young, you probably knew what you were doing. You always know what you’re doing.”

“I wish that was true.”

“Isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Well, maybe the amnesia robbed you of some confidence, but you’re an Avery, as much as you resist the idea of being related to me. It may insult you for me to say it, but there are times when you do remind me of me.”

“It may surprise you for me to say it, but no, I’m not insulted. If I had your skills in robotics, I’d be, well, proud.”

Was it his imagination, Derec wondered, or did his father’s eyes momentarily glaze over? As he looked more closely into the man’s cool and detached eyes, he decided it must have been imagination.

“Well,” Avery finally said, “you’re pretty skilled in that area already. You may surpass me—and don’t say anything more about it now. We should pursue other subjects.”

“We will. In a moment. I have to know one thing, then I’ll let you off the hook.”

“Just don’t mistake me for an affectionate father.”

“I could hardly do that.”

Avery had walked away from Derec, and his back was turned to him.

“You said we were once close,” Derec said. “Why did that change?”

The answer came out abruptly, bitterly.

“Your mother left me.”

“Tell me about her. “

“No.”

This time his “no” was spoken softly, but with no less firmness. Derec was going to have to work hard to find out anything about her, that was abundantly clear.

“Derec,” Avery said softly, “even talking with you is difficult for me. Don’t expect a plethora of revelations.”

Derec nodded. “All right, I won’t.”

He wondered if he should walk to his father, perhaps embrace him, perhaps ask him if they could start over, perhaps suggest that he would still like to sit on a high stool and watch Avery work.

He took one step toward his father but was interrupted by a noise at the door. Turning around, he saw Wolruf limp into the room. She was clearly on the point of collapsing.

Derec rushed to her and caught her before she fell. Gently he eased her to the floor and felt for her pulse. The slow rate of her pulse beneath her normally cold skin assured Derec that whatever injuries she may have sustained, she was alive and not in immediate danger.

Avery, reaching over his son’s shoulder, delicately spread areas of Wolruf’s fur apart. She winced with pain.

“There seems to be a bruise on her neck,” he said, “a big one.”

“He strruck me there,” Wolruf said in a raspy voice.

“Who?” Derec asked. “Who hit you?”

“The Bogie that iss not Bogie.”

“All right, Wolruf. I want you to tell me about it. But don’t strain your voice. Speak quietly, slowly.”

She explained what had happened when she had caught up with Bogie, and how Mandelbrot and Timestep had continued the chase.

“Okay,” Derec said when she finished, “you rest right here. We’ll get you to the medical facility as soon as we can.”

“No, Derrec. I will be fine ssoon. You have too much that’ss necessary to do now.”

“Well, we’ll see.”

Derec stood up and turned to his father, asking, “What do you make of it?”

“I have some suspicions, but you tell me what you think first.”

Derec felt an odd pride in the way Avery solicited his opinion, almost as if they were colleagues now.

“Well,” he said, “whoever attacked Wolruf, it wasn’t Bogie.”

“I agree, but why?”

“It simply wasn’t a Robot City robot. They are all programmed to accept her as a human. That is, although they know she is an alien, they are to apply the Laws of Robotics to her, too. If Bogie was stopped by her, he would have had to allow it, according to First Law. Instead, he retaliated.”

“Was he reprogrammed perhaps, while you were off-planet?”

“I don’t think so. He was a proper robot previous to this incident, applying all the Laws to his behavior. No, if Bogie attacked Wolruf, he was not Bogie. I sensed a change in him before I sent him on an errand. I rather liked Bogie, and this one simply did not respond like the Bogie I’d known. And, by the way, all indications are that the robot I ordered to go to Ariel never even tried to get there, another clue that I didn’t give the order to Bogie, who would have been compelled by Second Law to obey it. Furthermore, in responding to Wolruf’s leap upon him, he seems to have been using Third Law, that of protecting himself, but First and Second Law would have prevented him from doing so.”

“Okay, good. Then if he wasn’t Bogie, who was he?”

“An alien?”

“What alien? Except for Wolruf, I haven’t encountered any aliens. You have, what with Aranimas and your erstwhile friends, the blackbodies. None of them have any talent for disguise, nor have the few alien races that have been reported. A human might pull off such a disguise, get into a robot suit and do a fairly accurate imitation, but there is no evidence of any other humans but us on the entire planet. If I were still mad, we might have made out a good case for it being me.” He laughed softly, sardonically, then said reflectively, “I did so want to be a robot. I still say the role would have suited me. So, Derec, who do you think it might be?”

“How about a robot, one that’s not programmed in the same manner as a Robot City robot?”

Avery’s eyes raised in admiration. “Very good. You’re right on the line of my thinking. It’s a robot, I’m sure, but not an Avery robot.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“It would have to be some kind of rogue robot. Not my style at all. An Avery robot would not have so much confusion about the three laws. No, somebody else made this robot, and I have a sneaking suspicion who.”

“Who? Tell me.”

Avery shook his head slowly. “Not now. In a moment. I have some questions to ask you. I need to know about Adam and Eve. Your view of them. I know where they came from, what they’ve done so far. Adam gave me a pretty full history during our marathon sessions together. What do you think of them? Robotically speaking, I mean.”

“I’m not sure what you want.”

“Free-associate about them, if you like. “

“Well, I don’t know.” He paused, trying to collect his thoughts. “Sometimes they don’t seem like robots.”

“Uh huh. I’ve noticed.”

“One thing, they can be too mischievous. I know some of it’s curiosity and some of it has to do with their over-meticulous attempts to define some kind of impossible human being, an ideal we apparently fail to live up to. As a result, their hold on the Laws of Robotics is shaky.”

“That seems to be because they apply them too specifically. Rather than accept us as the perfect humans they seek, they strip us of our humanity in their minds, and the result is that they don’t always jump to our aid according to First Law, or obey us as Second commands.”

“That’s not all of it, though. They don’t seem to be certain that they are robots, in spite of all evidence. They accept it and don’t accept it simultaneously. It’s as if their mechanisms are so refined, they can’t be ordinary robots like the others.”

Avery winced. “By ordinary, you mean Avery robots.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t like to think of my creations as somehow second-class models.”

Derec smiled. “If you say so, but I don’t think it’s a criticism of your skills as a roboticist. At any rate, their behavior is inconsistent. Sometimes they seem to be normal robots, at other times they are excellent copies of whomever they’ve imprinted on. Adam does a mean Wolruf, and Eve’s version of Ariel makes me edgy because it’s too accurate.”

“It’s this shape-changing ability that fascinates me, Derec. Explain it to me.”

Under Avery’s sharp questioning, Derec revealed what he had observed about the Silversides, about the differences in their cellular structure, about the sequences of physical transformation during the imprinting process, about the shifts in matter density when they took on the shapes of either smaller or larger beings, about the limits to which they could reduce or enlarge their mass. (Neither could approximate the size of small animals or insects, but could look like enormous versions of them. By the same token, if giants had been available, they could not stretch themselves to that size, either. When they had shaped their mass into a blackbody imprint, they had been about twice the size of that impressive flying alien.)

Excited by the information, revived by the challenge of a scientific dilemma, Avery seemed more and more his old self. He now stood by a desk, his fingers drumming in a fast, steady rhythm. His other hand kept touching his long white hair or bushy moustache. His eyes glowed again.

When Derec had related all he could remember, Avery balled up his hand into a fist and rammed it hard against his upper thigh.

“That’s it!” he cried. “That must be it!”

“I hope you’ll let me in on it, since I’m thoroughly confused now.”

“Bogie—the robot posing as Bogie is a Silverside.”

“You mean Adam or Eve? Really, I don’t think so. They weren’t even here when things started to go wrong. They were with me on—”

“I don’t mean literally Adam and Eve. I mean Silverside generically. There is another of these robots like Adam and Eve somewhere in Robot City.”

“Another one?” For a moment, Derec was appalled at the prospect of a third mischievous robot to contend with, but then of course, he said to himself, I’ve been contending with it for days now. “You mean it was being Bogie because it was able to change into his shape, to imprint upon him?”

Avery nodded and smiled oddly. “I guess we’ve got, as well as Adam and Eve, Pinch Me.”

Derec wondered if the doctor had slipped back into madness. Avery saw his son’s confusion and quickly explained about the children’s riddle he had tried out on Adam.

“Adam never really understood it. I tried to tell him it was just a joke, but he didn’t catch on.”

“I know what you mean. I’ve spent hours attempting to make Mandelbrot understand what humor is all about. But what really is our Pinch Me? For that matter, what are the Silversides?”

“They’rre demonss, ‘u know,” Wolruf said from the floor. She had been intently listening to the conversation. “‘U should lock them up and hide key until they grrow up. That iss my opinion.”

“I agree, Wolruf,” Avery said. “I’d like to get them into a cell and take them apart, see what makes them tick.”

“Don’t ‘u tell Ariel that. Rememberr what she said about dancerss.”

“Yes, that’s good advice, Wolruf.”

Derec had no idea what they were talking about, but, with so many immediate problems to deal with, he decided not to ask questions about it.

“Father, you said you had an idea who the Silversides are.”

“Yes, and I have a hunch I’m right. Sit down.”

“I’m too nervous—”

“Sit down!”

The tone in Avery’s command was so authoritative, Derec decided there must be a good reason for the order. He pulled up a chair and sat on the edge of it.

“I hadn’t wanted to talk to you yet about your mother, Derec. If I could avoid it, I’d never tell you about her. Unfortunately, circumstances now make it necessary.”

Derec realized why his father had told him to sit down. He felt as if the air had been knocked out of him. What could his mother possibly have to do with the crisis on Robot City?

Avery started to pace. His fingers kept busy as he walked.

“I’m not going to tell you her name. You can dream that, if you want. Suffice it to say that, like me, like you, she was, is, a roboticist. A very good one, the only one who could really challenge me. Perhaps it was, in fact, competition that kept me going, made me succeed, a competition that continued even after she left me.”

Wolruf was sitting up now, apparently to hear Avery better. She looked improved. Her eyes were clearer, and a sheen had returned to her fur.

“When I came back here and found the city deteriorating,” Avery continued, “I knew that somebody or something was behind it. It wasn’t until I had the long talks with Adam that I began to suspect that there might be a third robot like him in the city. However, until our little talk, Derec, I wasn’t sure. Now the evidence seems clear to me. There is another robot, one like Adam and Eve, and the creator of all three of them, I am positive, is your mother.”

That little piece of information really stunned Derec. He had to struggle to speak again.

“But how can you be so sure they come from her?”

“I admit there is some intuition involved, but it’s intuition supported by logic. The Silversides and, presumably, our mysterious controller can only be the work of a robotics expert as skilled as I. That isn’t ego speaking. There just simply isn’t another roboticist as meticulous and creative—and that includes all the incompetents at the Robotics Institute on Aurora—as I am. Except for your mother.”

Avery stopped to observe the effects of his words upon his son. Derec knew he was not disguising his emotions even though he very much didn’t want his father to see them.

“I am projecting her intellectual progress, of course. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her. At that time she was not yet my equal, especially in the fields of positronics and integrals, but in the years since, working in isolation, she may have come up to my level. I don’t like admitting that, but she is younger, and in some ways I’ve slowed down. Plus, I’ve channeled my activities into the planning and development of robot cities, while she has been able, apparently, to concentrate on robots alone. Even knowing her skills and intelligence, these new robots represent an achievement that takes my breath away. Does that seem strange to you, son? That the great egotist can indeed give credit to someone else? You’re thinking that, I can see.”

“Have you added telepathy to your considerable talents?”

Avery laughed abruptly. “You may be a chip off the old block after all. That sarcasm was worthy of me. Wonderful!”

“Why is it that your praise sounds like an insult?”

“That’ss enough,” Wolruf interjected. “You two can have yourr silly arrgument laterr. There’ss much to be done.”

Avery nodded toward Wolruf. “She’s bossy for an alien.”

“I like that in aliens,” Derec said.

“Pleasse,” Wolruf said.

“All right,” Derec said. “Assuming that my mother is behind all this, what’s she up to? Why develop this new kind of shape-changing robot and then dump individual ones on different planets?”

“I can only speculate about that.”

Avery resumed pacing on the far side of the room. Derec paced a shorter path on his side. Wolruf was amused by the resemblances between the two men when they were pacing.

“What it might be is that your mother always had a special interest in anthropology. She could go on for hours about tribes, customs, rites, that sort of bilgewater.”

“You don’t put much stock in anthropology?” Derec asked.

“Oh, it’s all right, just not in my sphere of interest. I’m a creator, a builder, and I like to stay by myself. Going out and observing sentient creatures go through their dull, daily routines, and analyzing the meanings of courtship and aggressive rituals just simply isn’t my line. It’s a useful minor science, where you can showboat by delivering solemn conclusions without much hard evidence, but it’s for people who are butterfingers in a lab. On the other hand, your mother thought it was fascinating to study cultures, and she’d go off for weeks and months to take a peek at some social grouping or other. She told me I was an old fuddy-duddy whenever I said anything the least bit derogatory about her precious anthropology. I suppose her scorn may have contributed to my present antipathy toward the field.”

“But I don’t see how anthropology applies to the new-styled robots.”

“Well, seems to me two factors particularly are clues to the anthropological nature of her experiment. One is that the Silversides seem to have come to consciousness with the urge to define and discover humanity, which they are further convinced is the highest intelligence in the universe. But she has deprived them of any real information about what humans are. Therefore, as you’ve described it, whatever kind of sentient being they discover, they almost desperately try to find its humanity.

“The real kicker has been that, because they’ve come to believe that humanity represents the highest standards, genuine humans are found wanting by them. Derec, your mother couldn’t have foreseen such a tantalizing irony. When she finds out, she’ll be quite thrilled.

“See, if another kind of being were to enter the city tomorrow, and it was a shade smarter than us, as those blackbodies you told me about might have been, then they would be convinced the newcomers are the humans, and it’s goodbye, Derec, Ariel, Avery. It wouldn’t matter if the newcomers were covered with slime, smelled like erupting sewers, and killed each other for fingernail scrapings.

“Anthropologically speaking, the key information that’s been denied them by not being programmed with detailed knowledge of humans is the data which would inform them of the nature of our culture. Another aspect of the denial process would appear to be the absence in their knowledge of our unfortunate tendencies toward emotion. They can’t understand that culture and emotion define humanity as much as intelligence does.

“Since they don’t know what a human really is, they have the freedom to enter an alien culture and adopt its ways easily. Once they believe that culture is human, then all its customs, rites, behavior patterns become logical. What a fruitful arena for anthropological study this’d make. I mean, do you see, Derec?”

When Avery stopped pacing, Derec halted a short beat later. They faced each other. Wolruf found an excitement in the way the two of them were now so furiously working together. For the first time she realized they must be father and son.

“You’re saying that the Silversides and our mystery robot could be catalysts for, say, a study of what happens to cultures when they encounter robots like the Silversides?” Derec asked.

“Exactly. And also what happens to them when they are introduced to cultures. I think that’s where the shape-changing ability comes in. Once they join a culture, they become like the individuals in it. They are assimilated, a word dear to social scientists everywhere. Then these robots, sent to discover a culture, become integrated into it. They can become the leader, as Adam did with the kin. Or they can be corrupted by the culture itself, as both Adam and Eve were with the blackbodies. Or they can even disrupt its environment. We and the robots are the ‘culture’ here in Robot City, and our Pinch Me has been studying us, manipulating us.

“You know what the real clue is? The dancers and all the other little creatures. I suspect they’re some sort of genetic/robotic experiments Pinch Me has been conducting. They are, in a way, its own tiny anthropological studies.

“Without humans, or any kind of being other than robots, to examine, it started to create its own subjects, restricted cultures that it could study anthropologically. They failed for the most part, I think. At least it seemed to get bored with them and store them away in buildings allover the city. But somehow they are based on its acquired knowledge of humanity, knowledge derived no doubt from the computer.

“The trouble is, Pinch Me doesn’t know how to deal with applied knowledge, so he combined some robotics data with some genetic experimental information and created the dancers and the other groups. That he could do as well as he did is impressive, but he couldn’t quite get the hang of it all. So his experiments were failures, he couldn’t control the city, and he even messed up his foray among us in disguise.”

Derec nodded. “That’s all highly speculative, but it does provide some ideas that fit the facts we do know.”

Avery paced a few steps more, then said, “It’s your mother’s failure really. She’s conceived this intricate anthropological study, probably to study positronic minds in various cultural situations. Like our Pinch Me, her work is theoretical, almost playful. Just the way she was.”

Even though he felt a twinge of irritation at the mere suggestion that his mother could have botched her experiment, Derec seemed to be gradually getting a picture of her through Avery’s asides. He figured if he could keep his father talking, he’d find out a great deal about her, especially when Avery was in a bitter mood and not guarding his words.

“She never was practical in her work. I suppose that was another standoff in our marriage. She could go off on such flights of fancy that I couldn’t bring her back to ground.”

“I wish I could meet her.”

Derec’s words angered Avery.

“I can see what you’re thinking. If she’s behind these robots, then maybe she’ll be around to check on them. Well, forget that. She has to leave them alone, let things happen long enough for data to be collected. So she won’t be showing up to see how her little creations have evolved for some time, years maybe. Keeping a watch on the Silversides won’t bring about any reunions for you, Derec.”

Derec kept his anger in check. There was no point in irritating his father any further. Give him some time, and maybe he’d relent on the subject of Derec’s mother, although he did seem adamant in his hatred of her.

“I’ll keep all that in mind,” Derec said. “For now, we have to find this third robot. I hope Mandelbrot and Timestep haven’t lost him.”

“Now that we have a concept of what we’re looking for, we can—”

Avery was interrupted by the appearance of Ariel in the doorway. She was out of breath from running.

“Derec! Dr. Avery! Something’s happening outside. Buildings are, I don’t know how to describe it, they’re self-destructing or something. Folding inward, sliding into the ground, falling over, disappearing altogether. Come see.”

Derec began to run out of the room immediately, Avery close behind. Ariel led them out to the street just in time to see a structure down the block begin to tremble, then—without a sound—fall sideways against another building, which in turn fell forward.

“There’s an ancient game, dominoes,” Avery remarked. “Sometimes people lined them up and they fell, toppling each other, something like those buildings there.”

“What’s doing this?” Ariel yelled.

“I should have known,” Derec said and begun running down the street. “Our robot,” he yelled back to Avery, “he’s trying to destroy everything. He has to be at the central computer.”

“I think you’re right,” Avery said, and ran after Derec.

“What robot?” Ariel said before taking up her position as third in line.

Wolruf limped out of the doorway and watched the trio disappear around a corner.

In the distance there was a bright flash of light and a tall narrow building’s sides began to undulate before the whole structure seemed to collapse inward.

“No way to get any resst arround here,” she said and loped after them. As the pain worked its way out of her leg, she picked up speed.

CHAPTER 19

THE FIRST CONFRONTATION

The Watchful Eye had to proceed carefully, destroying the city by sections. Before an area could be removed, it had to make sure that no harm would come to anyone—humans, robots, the alien, the thousands of creatures in labs all over the city that still survived its genetic experiments. It merely wanted to dismantle the city and start again, so only uninhabited sectors could be destroyed.

Nevertheless, destruction was easier than creation. Many programming steps had been necessary for the design of a building, but a mere six strokes on the main computer center keyboard could remove it. The Watchful Eye scanned each structure for signs of robotic or human activity before performing the six strokes. It was still in its Bogie shape, and to a cynical observer, watching a robot attempting to destroy a city built by robots might have seemed ironic.

As soon as it had initiated its sequences of destruction, the Watchful Eye realized that the process it had to use was too well-planned, too methodical, too full of fail-safe devices. It would take a long time to demolish the entire city. If it had foreseen these complications, it would have restructured the computer’s architectural programming so that an automatic programmed sequence could be activated, one that would bypass all the fail-safe devices that the city’s clever originator had installed in the computer.

Checking the whereabouts of Derec and its other enemies, it saw that they were nearing the underground entrance. They seemed to be heading to its computer lair, no doubt to stop it from its systematic destruction of the city, and it had to stop them before it could continue.

Derec had discovered Mandelbrot and Timestep wandering the streets looking for the Bogie imposter. When they had finally worked their way through the building with the roughhousing creatures, the street outside the exit had been empty.

“It’s down at the central computer,” Derec said. “I’m sure of it. Come with me.”

The slowdown to talk with the two robots allowed Ariel and Avery to catch up. Wolruf was so far behind that the others were not even aware she was on her way.

They headed for the tunnel entrance. Just before they reached it, the frame of the entrance appeared to balloon outward and then, like an enfolding hand, cover the opening Derec had intended to pass through.

As Adam and Eve strode down a wide boulevard, they saw Wolruf lope across an intersection, then disappear down a side street.

“Let’s go after her,” Adam said. “She might know what’s happening to the city.”

Without consulting with each other, both Adam and Eve changed to the kin shape and began to pursue Wolruf, who had disappeared around a comer. When they rounded that comer, they did not see the alien ahead of them.

“She must have gone down one of those streets,” Eve said. “It will be difficult to find her.”

“I know. But these beings leave a trace in the air that we can detect through our olfactory circuits if we increase them threefold.”

Eve discovered Adam was right. There was a sweet scent of Wolruf’s fur that lingered in the center of the roadway.

Wolruf reached Derec and the others just as several buildings in a nearby block tilted, fell against each other, and collapsed, some into the street, others against buildings to the rear. The effect was as if the buildings had been made of playing cards and someone had knocked them down.

Wolruf took in the situation immediately.

“Iss there anotherr way down?” she asked.

“Lots of them,” Avery said, “but, with this creature in charge of the computer, it can block us from going in any entrance. In the meantime, it could reduce the whole city to rubble.”

There was bitterness in the doctor’s voice. No wonder, Wolruf thought, he was watching the city, his own creation, being demolished at the whim of what appeared to be a rogue robot.

“Our best bet may be to dig through this,” Derec said. “One thing our friend doesn’t know about, and that’s the potential of Mandelbrot’s arm.”

When Derec had built Mandelbrot out of spare robotic parts, he had used an arm from a Supervisor robot. It was made of an enormously malleable cellular material and could be formed into many shapes with differing densities. On many occasions it had become a most useful tool.

“Mandelbrot!” Derec said. “Do you think you could make some people-sized holes through that mess?”

He pointed toward the entrance. Although the main opening was gone, there were still some gaps where the edges of the twisted frame had not quite come together.

“Yes,” Mandelbrot replied.

“Then do it.”

“Wait,” Wolruf said. “Make a Wolrruf-sized hole firrst. I’m smallerr, and I can get down there fasster than any of ‘u.”

“No,” Derec said. “That robot isn’t like the others. It doesn’t regard you as human. Last time you went up against it, it might have killed you. It could kill you for sure this time.”

“All of ‘u take riskss. Iss my turn thiss time.”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“Don’t be such an idiot, son,” Avery said. “Pinch Me can do too much damage if we waste time getting there.”

“Pinch Me?” Ariel said. “What are you talking about? That robot down there is named Pinch Me?”

“Just a pet name,” Avery said. “Let Wolruf go down there, Derec. Wolruf, just delay him. Don’t put yourself in danger.”

“Yes,” Derec said, “just concentrate on diversionary actions, okay?”

Wolruf came from a culture where there had never been much use for diversionary action. In a conflict, her people tended to go directly for the throat. But she said, “I will be careful, I prromisse ‘u.”

Derec considered the matter for a brief time before he said, “Okay, we’ll do it your way, Wolruf.”

“Thank ‘u.”

“I’m not sure that’s proper etiquette, thanking the leader for putting you in jeopardy. Mandelbrot, start digging.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mandelbrot raised his arm, which at the moment was configured into a good copy of a human limb. As he headed toward the tunnel entrance, which looked like a jumble of the city’s strange metal, the arm began to change. First, it lengthened and an extra joint appeared at the center of the forearm. Its hand widened and fingers thinned into what looked like pointed claws. Turning its palm up to the sky, the fingers became sharp-edged at their tips. When he reached the pile, his arm was ready, and he began to rake at the twisted metal of the door frame. He managed to insert one of the fingers into a tiny opening. Making the finger thicker, he made the opening just a little bit wider.

“The metal may resist whatever abilities that arm has,” Avery said. “It’s strong.”

“So is the metal of Mandelbrot’s arm,” Derec said. “Besides, it isn’t so much a matter of tensile strength as manipulation. Wherever there’s an opening in the material the city’s made of, it can be worked with. Only a solid wall of it can stop Mandelbrot—or, for that matter, any of us. Remember, Ariel, the time I wedged a hole open with my boot?”

Mandelbrot’s hand kept changing to fulfill the needs of the task. When the hole was wider, it bec3,me a whirling wheel that knocked against the sides of the hole, widening it more. After a moment, he could reach through it. He enlarged the mass of his arm slowly and, gradually, painstakingly, he carved a hole large enough for Wolruf to get through.

“Sstop now, Mandelbrrot,” Wolruf said. “Sstand by and give me rroom. Thank ‘u.”

Without so much as a farewell, the caninoid alien entered the hole, twisting and contracting her body to propel herself through it.

When she reached the other side and began loping down the dark tunnel, Mandelbrot resumed his work on the opening.

The Watchful Eye detected the activity at the tunnel entrance, but assumed it would take a long while before they could get through. It knew nothing of the abilities of Mandelbrot’s arm and did not detect Wolruf’s penetration of its improvised security barrier.

As it continued to pick and choose what part of Robot City it would destroy, it concentrated so completely on its efforts at annihilation that it did not detect Wolruf’s appearance in the computer chamber.

To make matters worse, it had been careless upon its return and left both the sliding door and wall open, so that Wolruf could silently creep into the mainframe area. She was happy to see that the Bogie that was not Bogie hadn’t even looked up from its work.

On a screen above the imposter Bogie, a spired building appeared. With a deft hand movement, the robot touched some keys on a massive keyboard. The screen showed the spired building appear to sink into the ground, as a ship might be swallowed by the sea.

Something must be done now, she thought. Derec had said something about a diversion. What kind of diversion was possible under these circumstances? she wondered. She decided none. Trickiness was not her way. Attack was her way. Her throat tightened as she remembered the pain of the pseudo Bogie’s last blow. But she hadn’t been prepared for that. Now she was ready.

Soon Mandelbrot had fashioned a hole large enough for Derec, Ariel, and Avery to pass through.

“Let me go first,” Avery said. “I know the networks and byways of this underground setup better than you possibly could. Better than anyone else could. Except, apparently, our little Pinch Me.”

He manipulated his body through the opening without waiting to see if anyone disagreed.

“Pinch Me, huh?” Ariel said.

“I’d love to,” Derec said, “but I’m kinda busy right now.”

“Ha ha. I hope somebody explains the significance of the name to me sometime.”

“It’d be a pleasure. You go next. Mandelbrot, you’ll never get your bulk through this pinhole. Go to the Compass Tower and man the computer terminal there. As soon as you get a signal from me on the screen, begin restoring the systems that are still out of order. I’ll work from my end with the chemfets. I want Robot City to be fully functional the next time we get together.”

“Yes, Master Derec. I will try.”

Timestep came forward, clearly expecting to be taken along. But he wouldn’t be able to work himself through the hole either, so Derec said, “And, Mandelbrot, take Timestep with you.”

“What is my assignment, Master Derec?” Timestep said.

Derec wished he could give him something legitimate to do, but this was no time to be concerned with manpower assignments. “Entertain Mandelbrot. Dance for him.”

“He never stops dancing,” Ariel muttered.

Mandelbrot and Timestep set off down the street as Ariel squeezed into the passageway, then Derec. Fortunately for them, the Watchful Eye did not observe their entrance. It was too busy with Wolruf.

Adam and Eve reached the tunnel entrance just after Derec had climbed into the hole. They had seen the bottoms of his boots shaking as he wiggled through the opening. Then the boots disappeared.

“What are they doing, do you think?” Eve asked.

“I would surmise that they are heading for the main computer.”

“Why?”

“I cannot know, but I would surmise that the present crisis in the city originates there.”

“We should follow them.”

“I agree.”

The hole was too narrow for them to go through in their kin shapes. Together, without consulting, they began to change, elongate. Restoring their basic Derec and Ariel facial features, their bodies became snakelike and sinuous, if snakes had long thin arms and legs to go with their bodies. When their mass had narrowed sufficiently, they were each about seven and a half feet long. Eve first, they slithered through the narrow opening easily.

At that moment the Watchful Eye had Wolruf, her jaws clamped around its wrist, hanging from its forearm. It tried to fling the alien away, but she hung on tightly. Slapping at her with its other arm didn’t have much effect either.

It was time to use its transmogrification potentials. concentrating on its arm, it flowed more mass into it, forcing the arm to swell up. Wolruf tried to bite harder, giving the hinge of her jaw great pain. The Watchful Eye’s arm enlarged more, prying Wolruf’s jaws apart. She dropped to the floor.

As the Watchful Eye brought its other arm down toward Wolruf’s head, she dodged sideways, then rammed the Bogie who was not Bogie in the legs. Like one of the buildings it had destroyed, the Watchful Eye toppled over, falling over Wolruf and hitting the computer chamber floor with a resounding thud. Wolruf scampered sideways to avoid being crushed.

The fall did not hurt it, but it wound up in an awkward position. Wolruf, who had realized she could not possibly defeat this metallic monster, hoped she could hold it off until Derec and the others arrived.

Avery led Derec and Ariel down several corridors, all of them dark or only partially lit, another feature of their enemy’s tampering with Robot City. At a junction whose tunnels led in three separate directions, Avery stopped suddenly. He looked from one tunnel to another, his face confused.

“What’s the matter,” Derec asked.

“The damn creature, robot, whatever he is—he’s altered the network of tunnels down here. They’re not laid out according to the original pattern. He’s rearranged them just like he’s redesigned the city.”

“Can we find our way?” Ariel asked. “Wolruf may be in trouble. You know her, Derec. She won’t wait for us long. She’ll go on the attack.”

“Don’t worry, don’t worry,” Avery said. “I can work this out. I built this city, remember? No robot can fool me for long. We’ll go this way.”

He plunged into the right-hand tunnel with his usual recklessness. Used to it now, Derec and Ariel followed close behind.

The false Bogie struggled to a sitting position, and Wolruf jumped onto its back, pushing it forward, ramming its head against its legs. Only the suddenness of her attack allowed it to succeed. Wolruf could tell the robot was too strong for her. It had all the tireless force of any robot. And it was bound by Third Law to fight back so long as it continued not to perceive Wolruf as human.

She tried to hold its torso down, but it only had to push against the floor with its hands for sufficient power to fling Wolruf off its back and send her flying through the air. Instinct took over, and Wolruf landed on her feet, wobbly but still in control of the situation.

It was straightening up its back while at the same time turning around to face Wolruf, ready to fend off another leap. Wolruf looked up and saw an empty shelf high up on the wall next to her. Crouching down, she pushed hard with her legs and flew up onto the shelf. The Bogie that was not Bogie could just barely track her with its optical circuits. She had hardly landed on the shelf when she jumped again, this time at an arc that led downward to the robot. Kicking out with both feet, she struck the Bogie imposter on the forehead, snapping its head back. It fell heavily. Wolruf landed on the floor, too, on her back. When she stood up, she could barely walk. The leg injury from her previous battle with the robot flared up again.

And the false Bogie had somehow gotten to its feet and was hovering over her.

She tensed herself for a killing blow, but instead the robot merely looked down at her and said, “Why are you trying to hurt me?”

Its voice sounded hurt, but not in physical pain, as if its feelings had been hurt more than its body.

“Why arre ‘u trrying to hurrt the city?” she said.

“I must. It must be my city.”

“Arre ‘u trrying to be leaderr?”

“I do not know what you mean.”

“Do you plan to be dictatorr of Rrobot City?”

“No. I just want things here to be logical. I must control events, and I cannot the way things are.”

“I don’t underrstand. Why need ‘u contrrol eventss?”

“I know inside me I have to. I don’t yet know why, but the answer will come. Answers have come to me when I needed them.”

“‘U talk strrangely.”

“I am not really used to talking.”

“Who arre ‘u?”

“I am me, that’s all I know. I have taken the temporary name, the Watchful Eye. The being whose shape I have taken called me ‘the Big Muddy.’ He did not know I heard him call me that. I don’t know why he did.”

“Where is he now? Where is Bogie?”

“I disconnected and dismantled him. It was necessary. Why do you exhibit emotional disturbance?”

“Am upset at what ‘u ssay. I liked Bogie, and he iss dead.”

“Why do you say that? He is not dead. All of his component parts still exist and will function again. I may put him together ~gain, or his parts will continue as parts of new robots. That is not death, there is no decay in it.”

“What do ‘u know of death?”

“Only what I have studied about it in computer files.”

“That iss no way to know about death.”

“Perhaps you will tell me more about death. Later, when I have finished with the city. Please attack me no further.”

The Watchful Eye turned back toward its keyboard. Wolruf, unbound by any robotic laws, sprang up and, howling, rammed against the Watchful Eye’s back as hard as she could. The blow knocked it off balance.

But not enough.

It whirled around and clipped Wolruf with a hard, clenched-fist punch to the side of her head.

She fell, limp, unconscious.

The Watchful Eye, with some gentleness, picked her up and placed her against the wall, and then it carefully rearranged her body in a way that, according to its observations, should be comfortable for a being that was the shape of the caninoid alien.

Then it returned to the task of destroying the city...

As they walked through the new tunnel, everything around them looking spookier than ever in the dim light, Derec asked Avery, “I’ve been wondering: If this new robot is like Adam and Eve, and by that I mean a shape-changer and meddlesome pest, What’ll it be like when all three of them get together?”

“That’s not the sort of question that occupies my mind at times like this.”

The snideness in his father’s voice was unmistakable. Derec wondered if the man would always be like that, scornful and sarcastic. Would they ever have a relationship that was anything like what normal fathers and sons had? Probably not.

“Still,” Derec continued, “I can’t help but wonder. Two of them are bad enough, but we were getting used to them. Three would be worse, unpredictable, possibly disastrous. When we get there and get things in control, it would be nice to find a way to get rid of Pinch Me.”

“You surprise me, Derec. I wouldn’t have thought you had such murderous thoughts.”

“Oh, I don’t mean we should kill it or even dismantle it. I’d just like to get it out of the way. Ship it to another planet, or secrete it in an attic, or hide it in a cave, anything to keep it away from Adam and Eve.”

“Where it would cause trouble for others? Still, dismantling might not be such a bad idea.”

He stopped talking, for they had reached the entrance to the computer chamber.

The Watchful Eye now realized that the immensity of Robot City was a hindrance to its destruction. After all the time it’d spent on the project, interrupted only by Wolruf’s attack, there had not been enough progress. Only a small percentage of Robot City had been toppled, collapsed, or removed.

Since the humans were not as adept in stalking as Wolruf, the Watchful Eye heard them ease open the outside door and come toward the computer.

It would have to confront them.

But it was afraid of confronting them. It did not know why.

The Watchful Eye turned around to face its new intruders. When it saw the three of them, all looking stern and clearly there with the same purpose as Wolruf, to take away its control of the city, it momentarily considered rushing at them, attacking them, hurling them through the air with the same force it had thrown Wolruf. But these were humans; it couldn’t harm them. It seemed as if the First Law of Robotics applied in this situation. But why? Robotics Laws were for robots. It was the Watchful Eye, and it should not be governed by laws governing inferior creatures.

Derec took a step forward.

“Dr. Livingstone, I presume,” he said. Of course it did not understand the reference.

“I am the Watchful Eye,” it responded.

“Cute name,” Ariel muttered.

“Perhaps derived from All-Seeing Eye, Eye of Providence, something like that,” Avery commented. “A symbol on currency, I think, signifying, I think, a new age or new order.”

Ariel saw Wolruf lying unconscious near the wall, and she rushed to her. After touching her and feeling for her life-signs, she nodded to Derec that Wolruf was alive. Derec turned back to the Watchful Eye.

“I don’t care who you are,” he said. “Why are you destroying my city?”

“Your city? It’s not your city now. I have taken it over. Look at the screens.” It pointed toward a bank of view-screens on which scenes of Robot City’s destruction were displayed. “Look at what I’ve done, and say it’s your city.”

“Look on my works, ye mighty...” Avery muttered.

“Okay,” Derec said. “Right now I don’t care whose city you think it is. Just give me your reasons for demolishing it.”

“It is...not right for me. I must accommodate it to my needs.”

“Seems to me you’ve done enough accommodating already, mister. I want you to stop accommodating and give me back control of the computer, so I can correct all the harm you’ve done.”

“It is not harm. I will improve the city. I cannot obey you, because there is no harm being done.”

“No harm? That’s just another robot word game. If I say there’s harm, there is harm, buster.”

“But I am not a robot.”

Here in the computer room Derec could already feel his chemfets stirring, beginning to move along his bloodstream with a purpose. It was as if they, too, had suffered structural damage from the Watchful Eye’s efforts and were now reestablishing themselves. Derec was sure control was coming back to him. He had only to remove this obstacle standing in front of him, and he thought he knew a way to defeat the Watchful Eye. He could, through his chemfets, sense disorientation in the new robot’s domination of the city.

“Watchful Eye, if you insist on calling yourself that, I am Derec.”

“I know that.”

“I am human. Do you understand? I am human. You must obey me.”

“I don’t see why that is so.”

“You have to obey me. It is Second Law. I know you have the Laws of Robotics embedded in your programming. Whatever I say, you must do. I am human.”

“I don’t know that.”

“I am telling you. I am human. Obey. Immediately cease your destruction of Robot City.”

“It is not suitable. It must be changed.”

“I want it the way it was before we arrived, before you came here and started tampering with it. Do it, robot.”

“I...I only look like a robot. My disguise. I am not a robot. I am something else. I must be something else.”

“You must be what you are, a robot. You were created to serve. To serve me. Obey me. It’s Second Law imperative.”

The Watchful Eye was not sure what to do.

“Only robots have to follow the Three Laws,” it said.

“It is objecting,” Avery whispered. “You can get it on the ropes. It would not have to object if it knew what it was. Did you hear, it said it must be something else. Derec, it doesn’t know what it is.”

“Watchful Eye,” Derec said, “you are a robot.”

“No, I am not. I have logically concluded that I am not. I look like one now because I have taken a robot’s shape. That in itself proves I am not a robot. Robots are fixed, immutable, they cannot change their shape.”

“If only Adam and Eve were here,” Derec mumbled.

“I thought you didn’t want to get them together,” Ariel remarked.

“I changed my mind.” Derec took another step forward. He didn’t know if encroaching on a robot’s personal space could unnerve it the way it did humans, but anything was worth a try.

The Watchful Eye again wondered if it could hurt Derec. But as soon as it thought of the act, something inside it seemed to make him immobile.

“Watchful Eye,” Derec said, “in spite of any evidence you have manufactured for yourself, you are a robot. There are others like you, and you will meet them.”

“Others? I know nothing of any others.”

“Perhaps you have spied on them, too. Adam and Eve are their names.”

“They cannot be robots. I’ve watched them. If they are of any designation, they are human.”

“No, we are the humans. The three of us. And you must, as I say, do what we tell you. Second Law. Second Law. Second Law.”

Derec’s chanting of the terms seemed eccentric behavior to the Watchful Eye. Where was the consistency of behavior that a high intelligence must have? it wondered.

“Watchful Eye, I order you to move away from that keyboard. We can take care of restoring the city. Do you understand? You must do it. Move away from the keyboard.”

Something happened in the Watchful Eye’s mind. something positronic, a clicking in, a prodding. It knew suddenly that Derec was right, and it must obey him. It moved away from the keyboard immediately, with no argument.

Derec felt his chemfets begin to function as they had before the Watchful Eye’s tampering had begun. They seemed to positively roil in his bloodstream. He gestured his father toward the keyboard.

“You made this city. You fix it.”

Rubbing his hands together eagerly, Avery went to the keyboard. He was already tapping keys before he sat down.

“Now, Watchful Eye, and I hope you get a less mouth-filling name very soon,” Derec said, “I want to be sure of everything. I need to be completely in connection with the computer. I order you to relinquish any link, except that of a normal Robot City robot, you may still have with the computer. But, before you do, let me ask you this one question. Can you get rid of the gook that’s allover the computer?”

Derec gestured toward the mosslike substance that was even thicker now, layers of it hiding most of the machine’s workings.

“Yes, I can.”

“Do it.”

The moss seemed to melt. But, unlike melting substances, there was no residue collecting under it. It merely disappeared, leaving the computer as it was, and in fact much shinier.

“Now, Watchful Eye, relinquish any computer link.”

“It is done,” it said immediately.

Derec, intent on regaining control over his chemfets, did not notice at first what was going on in the new robot’s face. There was much less Bogie in it. For a moment there was a suggestion of Derec, and then there was no face at all.

“What’s happening with it?” Ariel asked.

“I wish I knew.”

Slowly, the Watchful Eye’s body changed shape, but this time it did not change into anyone, did not imprint on anyone. It merely became bloblike, a roundish, amorphous being with stubby legs and little else that was recognizable, except for a single eye on its upper surface. The Watchful Eye, perhaps, Derec thought.

“Is that what it normally looks like?” Ariel asked.

“Watchful Eye, is that the shape you were in when you arrived on this planet?”

A mouth appeared below the eye, apparently just so it could answer Derec’s question.

“Yes, in nearly every respect. I did not have legs until I needed them, then I grew them.”

The Watchful Eye backed away on its short legs from Derec and Ariel. It needed to get into its haven.

Leaning against the compartment where it had hidden the haven, it activated the lock mechanism, keyed to its presence, and the door sprung open. From inside the haven, an ovoid-shaped thing rolled out. The Watchful Eye touched it with one of its legs, and it came open. It crawled inside and the seams of the ovoid thing sealed.

“What is that?” Ariel said.

“The capsule it came here in, I suspect,” Derec answered. “The capsule my mother may have sent here, the way she perhaps dispatched the capsules Adam and Eve arrived at their planets in. The ‘eggs,’ as they called them.”

“Your mother? Why do I always feel I’ve missed something?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll explain. Let’s tend to Wolruf first.”

CHAPTER 20

THE SECOND CONFRONTATION

“Well, my friend,” Derec said to Wolruf, after she came to, “we owe you a solid vote of thanks.”

“Forr what, ‘u think?”

“Your holding action with the Watchful Eye. A successful mission if there ever was one. I told you to keep him occupied so we could get here. You did. Therefore, thank you.”

“From me, too,” Ariel said. “Even from him.” She pointed toward Avery, whose fingers were furiously flying around the keyboard.

“I can thank her myself,” Avery said, the kind of grouch in his voice that they had become used to.

“Yes,” Ariel said, “but would you?”

“Under the right circumstances.”

“Do those circumstances come around often?”

“Not often.”

“I thought so.”

Ariel made Wolruf stand up and walk around to make sure she was all right. There was no Wolruflike spring to her walk, but otherwise she seemed normal.

When she was satisfied with Wolruf’s condition, Ariel walked to the capsule where the Watchful Eye still lay, an unmoving blob.

“Snug fit,” she said. Derec looked puzzled. “I mean, the way our Watchful Eye fits so neatly into its egg. Must be very constricting and claustrophobic when traveling through space.”

“At that time it’s not aware of its surroundings. Adam told me he and Eve came to consciousness only after they’d landed. From what it said, I suspect the same was true for this one, too.”

“Well,” she said, stretching her arms and yawning, “what’s next?”

“With what?”

“Well, on the immediate level, I’d like something to eat. I’m starving. And I’d like to sleep for three days. And I’d like to arrange a tap dance recital for Timestep and maybe the partner he mentioned. But what I’d really like to know is what are we going to do with our Watchful Eye here?”

“I’ve got some ideas,” Avery said.

“I’ll just bet you have,” Ariel said. “But keep them to yourself for now, okay?”

“Your girlfriend’s touchy,” Avery remarked.

Ariel glared at Avery but was too tired to attempt further repartee with him. She wished she had a capsule like the Watchful Eye’s to crawl in and shut out the world.

“Well,” she said to Derec, “what about the Eye?”

“I don’t know. If we’d had more success with Adam and Eve, I’d have a better idea. This one may be our chance to find out more about these robots. On the other hand, it might be too corrupted by its flirtation with power to provide the—”

“Flirtation with power? You sound like you swallowed a textbook on improving verbal skills.”

“Sorry.”

“He’s been spending too much time with me,” Avery said as he stared at a schematic diagram on the view-screen. “He’s picking up my tendency toward the bon mot.”

“You betcha,” Ariel said. “So, Derec, you’re not sure what to do with the Eye?”

“That’s about it. We’ll question it, observe it, give it a chance to explain itself, but I can’t figure out any more than that at this moment.”

“Hey, we’ve had a busy day.”

“That iss a true sstatement if I everr hearrd one,” Wolruf observed.

Derec walked over to his father and stood behind him. The man’s fingers moved so fast they blurred from time to time.

“Is Mandelbrot handling things all right at his end?” Derec asked.

“Excellently. For a robot he’s exceptionally skilled at computer operation.”

“I schooled him in it.”

“Should have known. Old Earth saying: Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; those who shouldn’t, think they are those who can; those who should, generally fake their way through college.”

“What does that mean?”

“Maybe I didn’t get it right.”

For a while Derec watched his father labor in silence. He could discern the effectiveness of the work Avery and Mandelbrot were doing by the way his chemfets had resumed their active and comfortable functioning. He felt as if he could just lean against a wall, shut his eyes, and blend with the chemfets as they moved along his bloodstream.

He asked his father the question he could not stop thinking about. “Could you arrange for me to meet my mother?”

Avery’s fingers stopped suddenly and rested on the middle row of the keyboard. Derec could tell he was carefully formulating his answer. He knew his father well enough by now to realize that he composed his utterances, even those that appeared to be spoken spontaneously.

“The proper question, son, is would I arrange it? And, you know, in one of my foolish sentimental moments, of which I have few, practically none, I might arrange it. Fortunately for me, I don’t have to struggle with my conscience about it. I haven’t a snowman’s idea of where she is or how to find her.”

Derec walked away. Avery called after him, “Derec?”

“Yes?”

“You might not like her. I don’t.”

“I’ll take the chance.”

“I could have predicted you’d say that.”

Derec saw Adam and Eve standing in the doorway. He wondered how long they had been frozen in position there, watching.

“Adam? Eve?”

They ignored him. Their attention was clearly focussed on the capsule.

This was the moment he had feared, and it had come too soon.

They entered the room, walking past Wolruf, past Ariel. They were holding hands, and Derec wondered where in Frost’s name they had learned to do that. Ariel came to Derec and held onto his arm.

They came to a stop by the capsule. Releasing Eve’s hand and reaching down, he flipped a toggle located near the capsule’s seam. A control panel slipped out of the tip of the egg-shaped container. Adam manipulated a number of switches, and the egg began to glow. Derec could feel heat emanating from it. There was a faint humming sound coming from the inside of the capsule. The seams separated, and the Silversides got their first glimpse of the Watchful Eye, who immediately began to stir. It rolled out of the capsule and came to rest in front of Adam and Eve.

“You are us,” Adam said.

“We are you,” Eve said.

The Watchful Eye was so bloblike now that Derec had not missed the presence of a head on the body. Now a head appeared to rise out of the middle of the blob, in the area where the eye had been. The eye had disappeared and, in its place, as facial features became discernible, there appeared two eyes, both closed. When it had fully formed, its eyes opened and Derec saw it had the features of Adam on its face. Adam-as-Derec. Then the surface of its body started to undulate as it gradually formed itself into the humanoid state. As it became more and more humanoid, it stood up on two legs and sprouted normal-length arms.

As it became more and more like Adam, Adam started to change, too. In a moment he looked more like Avery than Derec.

Derec realized it could be difficult keeping track of these chameleons without a scorecard.

“I am you, the both of you,” the Watchful Eye said. “But who are we?”

“That we will have to find out,” Eve said.

Eve’s Ariel face had a suggestion of Derec in it. Adam changed to caninoid shape, a mimicry of Wolruf. The Watchful Eye made a try at Wolruf, too. Its Wolruf was less delineated, less convincing as a copy, than Adam’s. Eve became an effective Wolruf, too. Wolruf came and stood beside them, and Derec wondered if, should he close his eyes and then open them to find the quartet had shifted positions, he could tell which one was the true Wolruf. Well, that couldn’t happen. Whatever other miraculous transformations they could achieve, they could not simulate fur, nor could they imitate very well the normal coloring of the beings they imprinted on. A moment later, Adam resembled Derec with a caninoid overlay, the Watchful Eye looked like Avery doing his impression of Bogie, and Eve was simply looking like Ariel again.

On Derec’s part, on Ariel’s part, neither was sure what was making them uneasy. However, in the past they had both felt a sense of danger from the two Silversides, and now there were three. Three of them chatting together, as if they had so many questions to ask of each other, of themselves, of the worlds where they had been dropped so unceremoniously—and probably speculating about the havoc they could wreak if given half a chance.

Avery, who had been too busy with the computer to notice the Silversides’ entrance, turned around in his chair and finally saw the curious trio. He smiled.

“The situation is replete with challenges,” he said.

“For whom?” Derec said.

“Them or us?” Ariel said.

“Them. Us. Whatever, it’s quite wonderful.”

The three shape-changing robots, apparently oblivious to the remarks of the others, joined hands in a humanlike way and began to walk out of the computer chamber.

“Should we follow them?” Ariel asked.

“Let them go,” Derec said. “We’ve got too much to do.” Avery returned to the computer.

“Message from Mandelbrot,” he said without turning around. “Seems the Supervisors are all active again, out of the meeting room and starting to function like gang busters. Systems are running more efficiently. Robots are coming out of their holes and crowding the streets like usual. The city is returning to normal. What do your chemfets tell you, Derec?”

“What you’ve reported. They’re more active than normal. I think the crisis is definitely over.” He glanced toward the doorway the Silversides and the Watchful Eye had gone through. “The city’s crisis, anyway.”

His gaze stayed on the doorway for a short while. Then, his chemfets surging through his bloodstream, he returned to the task of putting Robot City back into order.

ROBERT THURSTON

Robert Thurston has been writing science fiction and fantasy since the early 1970s, after attending the second and third Clarion SF Writing Workshops. When the first collection of stories from Clarion was published, his story “Wheels” was awarded first prize. The story later became the basis for his novel, A Set of Wheels. All in all, he has published fourteen novels and novelizations, including Alicia II, Q Colony, and Robot Jox. More than thirty of his short stories and novelettes have appeared in various magazines and anthologies. He lives in New Jersey with his wife Rosemary and their children, Jason and Charlotte.