ISAAC ASIMOV’S

ROBOT
CITY

Book 1: ODYSSEY

MICHAEL P.

KUBE-McDOWELL

Copyright © 1987

For all the students

who made my seven years of teaching time

well spent,

but especially for:

Wendy Armstrong, Todd Bontrager, Kathy Branum, Jay & Joel Carlin, Valerie Eash, Chris Franko, Judy Fuller, Chris & Bryant Hackett, Kean Hankins, Doug Johsnson, Greg LaRue, Julie Merrick, Kendall Miller, Matt Mow, Amy Myers, Khai & Vihn Pham, Melanie & Laura Schrock, Sally Sibert, Stephanie Smith, Tom Williams, Laura Joyce Yoder, Scott Yoder

And for

Joy Von Blon, who made sure they always had something good to read.

— MICHAEL P. KUBE MCDOWELL

MY ROBOTS

by ISAAC ASIMOV

I wrote my first robot story, “Robbie,” in May of 1939, when I was only nineteen years old.

What made it different from robot stories that had been written earlier was that I was determined not to make my robots symbols. They were not to be symbols of humanity’s over-weening arrogance. They were not to be examples of human ambitions trespassing on the domain of the Almighty. They were not to be a new Tower of Babel requiring punishment.

Nor were the robots to be symbols of minority groups. They were not to be pathetic creatures that were unfairly persecuted so that I could make Aesopic statements about Jews, Blacks or any other mistreated members of society. Naturally, I was bitterly opposed to such mistreatment and I made that plain in numerous stories and essays—but not in my robot stories.

In that case, what did I make my robots?—I made them engineering devices. I made them tools. I made them machines to serve human ends. And I made them objects with built-in safety features. In other words, I set it up so that a robot could not kill his creator, and having outlawed that heavily overused plot, I was free to consider other, more rational consequences.

Since I began writing my robot stories in 1939, I did not mention computerization in their connection. The electronic computer had not yet been invented and I did not foresee it. I did foresee, however, that the brain had to be electronic in some fashion. However, “electronic” didn’t seem futuristic enough. The positron—a subatomic particle exactly like the electron but of opposite electric charge—had been discovered only four years before I wrote my first robot story. It sounded very science fictional indeed, so I gave my robots “positronic brains” and imagined their thoughts to consist of flashing streams of positrons, coming into existence, then going out of existence almost immediately. These stories that I wrote were therefore called “the positronic robot series,” but there was no greater significance than what I have just described to the use of positrons rather than electrons.

At first, I did not bother actually systematizing, or putting into words, just what the safeguards were that I imagined to be built into my robots. From the very start, though, since I wasn’t going to have it possible for a robot to kill its creator, I had to stress that robots could not harm human beings; that this was an ingrained part of the makeup of their positronic brains.

Thus, in the very first printed version of “Robbie” (it appeared in the September 1940 Super Science Stories, under the title of “Strange Playfellow”), I had a character refer to a robot as follows: “He just can’t help being faithful and loving and kind. He’s a machine, made so.”

After writing “Robbie,” which John Campbell, of Astounding Science Fiction, rejected, I went on to other robot stories which Campbell accepted. On December 23, 1940, I came to him with an idea for a mind-reading robot (which later became “Liar!”) and John was dissatisfied with my explanations of why the robot behaved as it did. He wanted the safeguard specified precisely so that we could understand the robot. Together, then, we worked out what came to be known as the “Three Laws of Robotics.” The concept was mine, for it was obtained out of the stories I had already written, but the actual wording (if I remember correctly) was beaten out then and there by the two of us.

The Three Laws were logical and made sense. To begin with, there was the question of safety, which had been foremost in my mind when I began to write stories about my robots. What’s more I was aware of the fact that even without actively attempting to do harm, one could quietly, by doing nothing, allow harm to come. What was in my mind was Arthur Hugh Clough’s cynical “The Latest Decalog,” in which the Ten Commandments are rewritten in deeply satirical Machiavellian fashion. The one item most frequently quoted is: “Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive/Officiously to keep alive.”

For that reason I insisted that the First Law (safety) had to be in two parts and it came out this way:

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Having got that out of the way, we had to pass on to the second law (service). Naturally, in giving the robot the built-in necessity to follow orders, you couldn’t forfeit the overall concern of safety. The second law had to read as follows, then:

2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

And finally, we had to have a third law (prudence). A robot was bound to be an expensive machine and it must not needlessly be damaged or destroyed. Naturally, this must not be used as a way of compromising either safety or service. The Third Law, therefore, had to read as follows:

3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Of course, these laws are expressed in words, which is an imperfection. In the positronic brain, they are competing positronic potentials that are best expressed in terms of advanced mathematics (which is well beyond my ken, I assure you). However, even so, there are clear ambiguities. What constitutes “harm” to a human being? Must a robot obey orders given it by a child, by a madman, by a malevolent human being? Must a robot give up its own expensive and useful existence to prevent a trivial harm to an unimportant human being? What is trivial and what is unimportant?

These ambiguities are not shortcomings as far as a writer is concerned. If the Three Laws were perfect and unambiguous there would be no room for stories. It is in the nooks and crannies of the ambiguities that all one’s plots can lodge, and which provide a foundation, if you’ll excuse the pun, for Robot City.

I did not specifically state the Three Laws in words in “Liar!” which appeared in the May 1941 Astounding. I did do so, however, in my next robot story, “Runaround,” which appeared in the March 1942 Astounding. In that issue on line seven of page one hundred, I have a character say, “Now, look, let’s start with the three fundamental Rules of Robotics,” and I then quote them. That, incidentally, as far as I or anyone else has been able to tell, represents the first appearance in print of the word “robotics”—which, apparently, I invented.

Since then, I have never had occasion, over a period of over forty years during which I wrote many stories and novels dealing with robots, to be forced to modify the Three Laws. However, as time passed, and as my robots advanced in complexity and versatility, I did feel that they would have to reach for something still higher. Thus, in Robots and Empire, a novel published by Doubleday in 1985, I talked about the possibility that a sufficiently advanced robot might feel it necessary to consider the prevention of harm to humanity generally as taking precedence over the prevention of harm to an individual. This I called the “Zeroth Law of Robotics,” but I’m still working on that.

My invention of the Three Laws of Robotics is probably my most important contribution to science fiction. They are widely quoted outside the field, and no history of robotics could possibly be complete without mention of the Three Laws. In 1985, John Wiley and Sons published a huge tome, Handbook of Industrial Robotics, edited by Shimon Y. Nof, and, at the editor’s request, I wrote an introduction concerning the Three Laws.

Now it is understood that science fiction writers generally have created a pool of ideas that form a common stock into which all writers can dip. For that reason, I have never objected to other writers who have used robots that obey the Three Laws. I have, rather, been flattered and, honestly, modern science fictional robots can scarcely appear without those Laws.

However, I have firmly resisted the actual quotation of the Three Laws by any other writer. Take the Laws for granted, is my attitude in this matter, but don’t recite them. The concepts are everyone’s but the words are mine.

But, then, I am growing old. I cannot expect to live for very much longer, but I hope that some of my brainchildren can. And to help those brainchildren attain something approaching long life, it is just as well if I relax my rules and allow others to make use of them and reinvigorate them. After all, much has happened in science since my first robot stories were published four decades ago, and this has to be taken into consideration, too.

Therefore, when Byron Preiss came to me with the notion of setting up a series of novels under the overall title of Robot City, in which “Asimovian” robots and ideas were to be freely used, I felt drawn to the notion. Byron said that I would serve as a consultant to make sure that my robots stay “Asimovian,” that I would answer questions, make suggestions, veto infelicities, and provide the basic premise for the series as well as challenges for the authors. (And so it was done. Byron and I sat through a series of breakfasts in which he asked questions and I—and sometimes my wife, Janet, as well—answered, thus initiating some rather interesting discussions.)

Furthermore, my name was to be used in the title so as to insure the fact that readers would know that the project was developed in conjunction with me, and was carried through with my help and knowledge. It is, indeed, a pleasure to have talented young writers devote their intelligence and ingenuity to the further development of my ideas, doing so each in his or her own way.

The first novel of the series, Robot City Book 1: Odyssey, is by Michael P. Kube-McDowell, the author of Emprise, and I am very pleased to be connected with it. The prose is entirely Michael’s; I did none of it. In saying this, I am not trying to disown the novel at all; rather I want to make sure that Michael gets all the credit from those who like the writing. It is my role, as I have indicated, only to supply robotic concepts, answer (as best I can) questions posed by Byron and Michael, and suggest solutions to problems raised by the Three Laws. In fact, Book Two of this series will introduce three interesting new laws concerning the way robots would deal with humans in a robotic society, a relationship which is the underpinning of Robot City.

In nearly half a century of writing I have built up a name that is well known and carries weight and I would like to use it to help pave the way for young writers by way of their novels and to preserve the names of older writers by the editing of anthologies. The science fiction field in general and a number of science fiction practitioners in particular have, after all, been very good to me over the years, and the best repayment I can make is to do for others what it and they have done for me.

Let me emphasize that this is the first time I have allowed others to enter my world of robots and to roam about freely there. I am pleased with what I’ve seen so far, including the captivating artwork of Paul Rivoche, and I look forward to seeing what is done with my ideas and the concepts I have proposed in the books that follow. The books may not be (indeed, are bound not to be) exactly as I would have written them, but all the better. We’ll have other minds and other personalities at work, broadening, raising, and refocusing my ideas.

For you, the reader, the adventure is about to begin.

CHAPTER 1

AWAKENING

The youth strapped in the shock couch at the center of the small chamber appeared to be peacefully sleeping. The muscles of his narrow face were relaxed, and his eyes were closed. His head had rolled forward until his chin rested on the burnished metal neck ring of his orange safesuit. With his smooth cheeks and brush-cut sandy blond hair, he looked even younger than he was—young enough to raise the doorman’s eyebrow at the least law-abiding spaceport bar.

He came to consciousness slowly, as though he had been cheated of sleep and was reluctant to give it up. But as the fog cleared, he had a sudden, terrifying sensation of leaning out over the edge of a cliff.

His eyes flashed open, and he found himself looking down. The couch into which the five-point harness held him was tipped forward. Without the harness, he would have awakened in a jumbled heap on the tiny patch of sloping floor plate, wedged against the one-ply hatch that faced him.

He raised his head, and his darting eyes quickly took in the rest of his surroundings. There was little to see. He was alone in the tiny chamber. If he unstrapped himself, there would be room for him to stand up, perhaps to turn around, but nothing more ambitious. A safesuit helmet was cached in a recess on the curving right bulkhead. On the left bulkhead was a dispensary, with its water tube and delivery chute.

None of what he saw made sense, so he simply continued to catalog it. Above his head, hanging from the ceiling, was some sort of command board with a bank of eight square green lamps labeled “P1,” “P2,” “F,” and the like. The board was in easy reach, except that there appeared to be no switches or controls for him to manipulate. In one corner of the panel the word MASSEY was etched in stylized black letters.

Apart from the slight rasp of his own breathing, the little room was nearly silent. From the machinery which filled the space behind his shoulders and under his feet came the whir of an impeller and a faint electric hum. But there was no sound from outside, from beyond the walls.

Thin as it was, the catalog was complete, and it was time to try to make something of it. He realized that, although he did not recognize his surroundings, he was not surprised by them. But then, since he could not remember where he had fallen asleep, he had carried no expectations about where he should be when he awoke.

The simple truth was he did not know where he was. Or why he was there. He did not know how long he had been there, or how he had gotten there.

But at the moment none of those things seemed to matter, for he realized—with rapidly growing dismay and disquiet—that he also did not know who he was.

He searched his mind for any hint of his identity—of a place he had known, of a face that was important to him, of a memory that he treasured. There was nothing. It was as though he was trying to read a blank piece of paper. He could not remember a single event which had taken place before he had opened his eyes and found himself here. It was as though his life had begun at that moment.

Except he knew that it had not. He was nota crying newborn child, but a man—or near enough to one to claim the title until challenged. He had existed. He had had an identity and a place in the world. He had had friends—parents—a home. He had to have had all of that and more.

But it was gone.

It was a different feeling than merely forgetting. At least when you forget something, you have a sense that you once knew it—

“Are you all right?” a pleasant voice inquired, breaking the silence and making him suddenly tense all his muscles.

“Who are you?” he demanded. “Where are you? Where am I?”

“I am Darla, your Companion. Please try to remain calm. We’re in no immediate danger.” The voice, coming from the command panel before him, was more clearly female now. “You are inside a Massey Corporation Model G-85 Lifepod. Massey has been the leader in spacesafety systems for more than . . . ”

While Darla continued on with her advertisement, he twisted his head about as he reexamined the compartment. I should have known that, he thought. Of course. A survival pod. Even the name Massey was familiar. “Why are there no controls?”

“All G-series pods have been designed to independently evaluate the most productive strategy and respond appropriately.”

Of course, he thought. You don’t know who’s going to climb into a pod, or what kind of condition they’ll be in. “You’re not a person. What are you, then? A computer program?”

“I am a positronic personality,” Darla said cheerfully. “The Companion concept is the Massey Corporation’s unique contribution to humane safety systems.”

Yes. Someone to talk to. Someone to help him pass hours of waiting without thinking about what it would mean if he weren’t found. The full picture dawned on him. All survival pods were highly automated. This one was more. It was a robot—presumably programmed as a therapist and charged with keeping him sane and stable.

A robot—

A human had a childhood. A robot did not. A human learned. A robot was programmed. A robot deprived of the core identity which was supposed to be integrated before activation might “awake” and find he had knowledge without experience, and wonder who and what he was—

Suddenly he bit down on his lower lip.

How does a robot experience sensor overload? As pain?

When he tasted blood, he relaxed his jaw. He would take the outcome of his little experiment at face value. He was human. In some ways, that was the more disturbing answer.

“Why have you done harm to yourself?” Darla intruded.

He sighed. “Just to be sure I could. Do you know who I am?”

“Your badge identifies you as Derec.”

He looked down past the neck ring and saw for the first time that there was a datastrip in the badge holder on the right breast of the safesuit. The red printing, superimposed on the fractured black-and-white coding pattern, indeed read DEREC.

He said the name aloud, experimentally: “Derec.” It seemed neither familiar nor foreign to his tongue. His ear heard it as a first name, even though it was more likely a surname.

But if I’m Derec, why does the safesuit fit so poorly? The waist ring and chest envelope would have accommodated someone with a much stockier build. And when he tried to straighten his cramped legs, he found that the suit’s legs were a centimeter or two short of allowing him to do so comfortably.

I certainly was shorter once—maybe I was heavier, too. It could be my old suit—one I wouldn’t have used except in an emergency. Or it could be my ID, but someone else’s suit.

“Can you scan the datastrip on the badge?” he asked hopefully. “There should be a photograph—a citizenship record—kinship list. Then I’d know for sure.”

“I’m sorry. There’s no data reader in the pod, and my optical sensors can’t resolve a pattern that fine.”

Frowning, he said, “Then I guess I’ll be Derec, for now.”

He paused and collected his thoughts. To know his name—if it was his name—did nothing to relieve his feelings of emptiness. It was as though he had lost his internal compass, and with it, the ability to act on his own behalf. The most he could do now was react.

“All of the pod’s environmental systems are working well,” Darla offered brightly. “Rescue vessels should be on their way here now.”

Her words reminded him that there was a problem more important in the short run than puzzling out who he was. Survival had to come first. In time, perhaps the things he did know would tell him what he had forgotten.

He was in a survival pod. His mind took that one fact and began to build on it. When he shifted position in his harness, he noted how the slightest movement set the pod to rocking, despite the fact that its mass could hardly be less than five hundred kilograms. He extended an arm and let the muscles go limp. It took a full second to fall to his side.

A hundredth of a gee at best. I’m in a survival pod on the surface of a low-gravity world. I was in a starcraft, on my way somewhere, when something happened. Perhaps that’s why I can’t remember, or perhaps the shock of landing—

There was no window or port anywhere in the pod, not even a hatch peephole. But if he couldn’t see, perhaps Darla could.

“Where are we, Darla?” he asked. “What kind of place did you land us on?”

“Would you like me to show you our surroundings? I have a limpet pack available.”

Derec knew the term, though he wondered where he had learned it. A limpet pack was a disc-shaped sensor array capable of sliding across the outer surface of a smooth-hulled space craft—a cheaper but more trouble-prone substitute for a full array of sensor mounts. “Let’s see.”

The interior lights dimmed, and the central third of the hatch became the background for a flatscreen projection directed down from the command board overhead. Derec looked out on an ice and rock landscape that screamed its wrongness to him. The horizon was too close, too severely curved. It had to be a distortion created by the camera, or a false horizon created by a foreground crater.

“Scan right,” he said.

But everywhere it was the same: a jumble of orange-tinged ice studded with gray rock, merging at the horizon into the velvet curtain of space. He could see no distinct stars in the sky, but that was likely to be due to the limited resolving power of the limpet, and not because of any atmosphere. The planetoid’s gravity was too slight to hold even the densest gases, and the jagged scarps showed no signs of atmospheric weathering.

In truth, it looked like a leftover place, the waste of star-and planet-making, a forgotten world which had not changed since the day it was made. It was a cold world, and a sterile one, and, in all probability, a deserted one.

Formerly deserted, he corrected himself. “Moon or asteroid?” he asked Darla.

“No matter where we are, we are safe,” Darla said ingenuously. “We must trust in the authorities to locate and retrieve us.”

Derec could foresee quickly growing weary of that sort of evasion. “How can I trust in that when I don’t know where we are and what the chances are that we’ll be found? I know that this pod doesn’t have a full-recycle environmental system. No pod ever does. Do you deny it?” He waited a moment for an answer, then plunged on. “How much of a margin did the Massey Corporation decide was enough? Ten days? Two weeks?”

“Derec, maintaining the proper attitude is crucial to—”

“Save the therapist bit, will you?” Darren sighed. “Look, I know you’re trying to protect me. Some people cope better that way—what they don’t know and all that. But I’m different. I need information, not reassurance. I need to know what you know. Understand? Or should I start digging into your guts and looking for it myself?”

Derec was puzzled when Darla did not answer. It dawned on him slowly that he must have presented her with a dilemma which her positronic brain was having difficulty resolving—but there should have been no dilemma. Darla was obliged by the Second Law of Robotics to answer his questions.

The Second Law said, “A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.”

A question was an order—and silence was disobedience. Which could only be if Darla was following her higher obligation under the First Law.

The First Law said, “A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”

Darla had to know how small the chance of rescue was, even within a star system, even along standard trajectories. And Darla knew as well as any robot could what sort of harm that fact could do to the emotional balance of a human being. The typical survivor, already terrorized by whatever events brought him into the lifepod, would respond with despair, a loss of the will to live.

It made sense to him now. Of course Darla would try to protect him from the consequences of his own curiosity—unless he could make her see that he was different.

“Darla, I’m not the kind of person you were told to expect,” he said gently. “I need something to do, something to think about. I can’t just sit here and wait. I can deal with bad news, if that’s what you’re hiding. What I can’t take is feeling helpless.”

It seemed as though she were prepared for his kind too, after all, but had only needed convincing that he was one. “I understand, Derec. Of course I’ll be happy to tell you what I know.”

“Good. What ship are we from?” he asked. “There’s no shipper’s crest or ship logo anywhere in the cabin.”

“This is a Massey Corporation G-85 Lifepod—”

“You told me that already. What ship are we from?”

Darla was silent for a moment. “Massey Lifepods are the primary safety system on six of the eight largest general commercial space carriers—”

“You don’t know?”

“My customization option has not been initialized. Would you care for a game of chess?”

“No.” Derec mused for a moment. “So all you know how to do is shill for the manufacturer. Which means that we probably came from a privately owned ship—all the commercial carriers customize their gear.”

“I have no information in that area.”

Derec clucked. “In fact, I think you do. Somewhere among your systems there has to be a data recorder, activated the moment the pod was ejected. It should tell you not only what ship we came from and where it was headed, but what’s happened since. It’s time to find out how smart you really are, Darla,” he said. “We need to find that recorder and get into it.”

“I have no information about such a recorder.”

“Trust me, it’s there. If it wasn’t, there’d be no way to do postmortems after a ship disaster. Are you in control of the pod’s power bus?”

“Yes.”

“Look for an uninterruptible line. That’ll be it.”

“Just a moment. Yes, there are two.”

“What are they called?”

“My system map labels them 1402 and 1632. I have no further information.”

Derec reached for the water tube again. “That’s all right. One will be the recorder, and the other is probably the locator beacon. We’re making progress. Now find the data paths that correspond with those power taps. They should tell us which one is which.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t.”

“They have to be there. The recorder will be taking data from your navigation module, from the environmental system, probably even an abstract of this conversation. There ought to be a whole forest of data paths.”

“I’m sorry, Derec. I am unable to do what you ask.”

“Why?”

“When I run a diagnostic trace in that portion of the system, I am unable to find any unlabeled paths.”

“Can you show me your service schematic? Maybe I can find something.”

The icescape vanished and was replaced by a finely detailed projection of the lifepod’s logic circuits. Scanning it, Derec quickly found the answer. A smart data gate—a Maxwell junction—was guarding the data line to the recorder. The two systems were effectively isolated. Similar junctions stood between Darla and the inertial navigator, the locator beacon, and the environmental system.

This is all very odd, Derec thought. It wasn’t surprising that there was a lower-level autonomous system regulating routine functions. What was strange was how Darla was locked out of getting any information from it.

Coddling frightened survivors required tact and discretion. But robots were strongly disposed toward an almost painful honesty. Perhaps it had proven too difficult to program a Companion to put on a happy face while keeping grim secrets. Lying did unpredictable things to the potentials inside a positronic brain.

And there were Third Law considerations as well. The Third Law went, “A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.”

How would a robot balance its responsibility to preserve itself with the increasing probability of its demise? It was as though the designers had concluded that there were things Darla was better off not knowing, and thrown up barriers to prevent her from finding out. They had kept her ignorant of herself, and even of her ignorance.

There was a disturbing parallel in that to Derec’s own situation. Is that what happened to me? he wondered. He had hoped almost from the first that his loss of memory was the consequence of whatever disaster had put him in the lifepod, perhaps along with the shock of a hard landing on this world.

Now he had to ask whether such selective amnesia could be an accident. He had read the schematic easily, but he could not remember where or why he had acquired that skill. Obviously he had some technical training, a fact which—if he survived—might prove a useful clue to his identity. But why would he remember the lessons, but not the teacher? Could his brain have been that badly scrambled?

Yet reading the schematic was a complex task which clearly required that his mind and memory be unimpaired. As well as he could judge, his reasoning was measured and clear. If he were in shock or suffering from a concussion, wouldn’t all his faculties be affected?

Perhaps this wasn’t something that had happened to him. Perhaps, as with Darla, it was something that had been done to him.

Derec grimaced. It was unsettling enough looking at the blank wall of his past, but more unsettling to think that hiding behind that wall might be the reason why it had been built.

By this time Darla had grown impatient. “Have you found anything?” Darla asked with a note of anxiety.

Blinking, Derec looked up at the status board. “The recorder’s tied in through a Maxwell junction. The junction won’t pass through to the recorder anything it doesn’t recognize, which is why you can’t find it with a trace. And why we’re not going to be able to read it through you. But there has to be a data port somewhere, probably on the outer hull—”

At that moment, the whole pod lurched and seemed to become buoyant. Derec had the sensation that it was no longer in contact with the frozen surface of the asteroid. “What’s going on?” he demanded.

“Please stay calm,” Darla said.

“What is it? Have we been found?”

“Yes. I believe we have. But I am unable to say by whom.”

Derec gaped openmouthed for a moment. “Put the exterior video up again! Quickly!”

“I am becoming concerned about your level of agitation, Derec. Please close your eyes and take several deep breaths.”

“I’ll do no such thing,” he said angrily. “I want to see what’s going on.”

There was a moment’s hesitation, and then Darla acquiesced. “Very well.”

The sight that greeted Derec’s eyes made his breath catch in his throat. The limpet’s cameras were no longer trained on the horizon, but down at the ground. A half-dozen machines, each different from the next, were arrayed around the pod. The largest was taller than a man, the smallest barely the size of a safesuit helmet. The tiny ones hovered on tiny jets of white gas, while the larger ones were on wheels or articulated tracks.

He could also see a portion of some sort of cradle or deck which seemed to be centered below the pod. And all of them—the machines, the cradle, and the pod—were moving, proceeding along together toward some unknowable destination like some sort of ice-desert caravan.

“What’s going on?” he demanded of Darla. “Can you identify them? Did they make any contact with us?”

“The device below us appears to be a cargo sled. I have no information on the other mechanisms.”

Derec reached for his helmet and unsnapped the catch holding it in place. “I’m going out. I’m not going to let us be hijacked like this with no explanation.”

“Leaving the pod would be too dangerous,” Darla said. “In addition, you will lose a minimum of four hours’ oxygen opening the hatch.”

“It’s worth it to find out what’s going on.”

“I can’t allow that, Derec.”

“It’s not your decision,” he said, reaching for the harness release with his free hand.

“I am sorry, Derec. It is,” Darla said.

Too late, Derec realized that a Massey Companion was equipped to calm a distraught survivor not only verbally, but chemically. The dual jets of mist from either side of the headrest caught him full in the face, and he inhaled the sickly sweet droplets in the gasp of surprise.

Derec had barely enough time to be astonished at how quickly the drug acted. Both his arms went limp, the right falling well short of the harness release, the left losing its grasp on the helmet. His vision rapidly grayed. As though from a distance, he heard dimly the sound of the helmet hitting the floor. But between the first bounce and the second, he drifted away into the silent darkness of unconsciousness, and saw and heard nothing more.

CHAPTER 2

UNDER THE ICE

For the second time in one day, Derec awoke in strange surroundings.

This time, he was lying flat on his back staring up at the ceiling. There was a sour taste in his mouth and an empty, growly sensation in his stomach. He lay there for a moment, remembering, then sat up suddenly, his muscles tensed defensively as he looked about him.

As before, Derec was alone. But this time he found himself in more domestic surroundings—a four-man efficiency cabin, three meters wide by five meters long. The bed he had been lying in was a fold-down bunk, one of four mounted on the side walls. To his right as he sat on the edge of the bunk was a bank of storage lockers of assorted sizes. To his left was a closed door.

That damned Darla, he thought fiercely.

Though what he saw around him struck a vaguely familiar chord, Derec dismissed it as meaningless—there was a tedious sameness to all modular living designs. A more important question was whether the cabin was part of a work camp on the surface of the asteroid, tucked away somewhere inside a speeding spacecraft, or somewhere else he couldn’t imagine. The cabin itself offered no clue. Nor could it tell him whether he had been rescued or captured.

Glancing down at himself, he saw that he was no longer wearing the safesuit. His torso and legs were covered by a formfitting white jumpsweat, the sort of garment a space worker would wear inside his work jitney or augment.

It was clean and relatively new, but there was some wear on the abrasion pads at heel and knee and waist. It might have been what he was wearing under the safesuit, or—

“The suit,” he said with sudden dismay.

He jumped to his feet and looked around wildly. There was only one locker large enough to hold a safesuit. It was unlocked, but it was also empty. He went through the other lockers mechanically. All were empty.

No, they were more than empty, he decided. They looked as though they’d never been used.

Derec felt a twinge of panic. If he didn’t find the suit, he would never learn whatever information the datastrip on its name badge had to offer. And he had to find Darla as well, or lose the irreplaceable data stored in her event recorder.

Half afraid that he would find it locked, Derec crossed to the door and touched the keyplate. The door slid aside with a hiss. Outside was a short corridor flanked by four doors. The corridor was deserted, the other doors all closed.

To Derec’s left, the corridor terminated in a blank wall. The other end was sealed by an airlock, suggesting that the four rooms formed a self-contained environmental cell. Through the small window in the inner pressure door he caught a glimpse of another corridor lying beyond.

“Hello?” Derec called. There was no answer.

The door facing him was labeled WARDROOM. Inside, he found a table large enough to seat eight for a meeting or a meal, a compact autogalley, and a sophisticated computer terminal and communications center.

Derec ran his fingertips across the surface of the table, and they came away clean, without even a coating of dust. The status lights on the galley told him that the unit was in Extended Standby, which meant that its food stores had been irradiated and deep-frozen. No one had eaten here for some time.

Was it all for him? Was that why it was unused? Or was he a surprise visitor in an empty house?

He switched the galley to Demand status, and a timer began counting down the two hours it would take to bring it on line. But when he tried to activate the com center, it demanded a password.

“Derec,” he offered.

INVALID PASSWORD, the screen advised him.

He had only the most infinitesimal chance of guessing a truly random password. His only chance was if a lazy systems engineer had left one of the classic wild-card passwords in the security database. “Test,” he suggested.

INVALID PASSWORD.

“Password,” Derec said.

INVALID PASSWORD. ACCESS DENIED.

From that point on, the center ignored him. The silent-entry keypad was disabled, and nothing he said evoked any response. Apparently the center had not only rejected his passwords, but blacklisted him as well. The systems engineer had not been lazy.

Returning to the corridor, Derec briefly checked the other two rooms. One was another cabin, mirror-image to the one in which he had woken up. The other, labeled MECHANICAL, contained several racks of lockers and what appeared to be maintenance modules for environmental subsystems. Both rooms were as tidy and deserted as everything else Derec had seen since waking.

That left only the airlock and the mysteries beyond it to explore. The inner door bore the sonograph-in-a-circle emblem which meant VoiceCommand. “Open,” he said, and the inner door of the hatch cracked open with the ripping sound of adhesion seals separating. Derec stepped into the tiny enclosure and the door closed behind him. Peering through the window of the outer door, Derec could see no reason why the airlock was even there. The corridor beyond looked little different than the one he was leaving. “Cycle,” he said.

The inner door closed behind him, the momentary surge of pressure on his eardrums telling him it had sealed. “Warning. There is a reduced-pressure nitrogen atmosphere beyond this point,” the hatch advised him. “Please select a breather.”

“Nitrogen?”

Only then did Derec notice the small delivery door in the side wall. Inside he found several gogglelike masks made of gray plastic. Selecting one, he saw that the mask was meant to fit over the middle third of his face, like a pair of wraparound sunglasses that had slipped down his nose. The breather’s “straps” were hollow elastic tubes that met behind his neck. A flexible gas delivery tube led from there to the cartridge pack, which was small enough to strap to the upper arm.

When he put the breather on, however, he could not make the bottom edge of the mask seal against his upper lip to keep out the outside air. With the gap, the breaths he drew would be a mixture of free nitrogen and oxygen from the breather.

Belatedly, Derec realized that that was intentional. It was an arrangement that not only reduced the size of the cartridge pack, but also left his sense of smell unimpeded. A clever bit of engineering, with a minimalist flavor.

“Ready,” Derec said.

“Warning: reduced gravity beyond this point,” the hatch advised him.

“I hear you,” he said as the outer door began to open. Nitrogen? Low-G? he wondered as he stepped out. Where am I? What’s going on?

There were no immediate answers. It was cold—cold enough to bring a flush of color to his cheeks. The chill seemed to radiate equally from the ceiling and floor, though they were both made of an insulating synthetic mesh.

Standing there just outside the pressure hatch, Derec could hear a cacophony of machine noises—hissing, rumbling, grinding, squealing. But the drop in pressure, which distended his eardrums, made it seem as though he were trying to hear through a pillow. Aside from the fact that there was activity somewhere, he got nothing useful out of what he heard. He could not tell what kinds of machines he was hearing, or what they were doing.

Determined to follow the sounds to their source, he started down the corridor—or tried to. He ended up flat on his face on the cold decking, uninjured but chastened. Collecting himself, he tried again, this time pulling himself along the corridor by the center handrail.

Thirty meters ahead, the corridor opened into an enormous low-ceilinged chamber. Derec gaped as he took in its dimensions. It suggested armories, playing arenas, open-plan factories. He forced a yawn and swallowed hard, and the pressure in his left ear equalized. Yes, those were definitely machine noises. But what kind of machines, doing what kind of work?

Between the cold and low gravity, Derec concluded that he was still on the asteroid where his lifepod had crashed. From the structure of the chamber, he concluded that he was most probably underground.

More important, he was not alone. There were robots moving among the stacks and aisles—dozens of them, of a half-dozen varieties. But in another sense, he was alone, for there were no other people. There were not even any handrails in the aisles to make the chamber human-accessible. The chamber belonged to the robots by default. What task they were so busily attending to, he could not divine.

The nearest of the robots, a squat boxlike unit with a single telescoping arm, was only a few dozen meters from Derec. As Derec watched, it plucked a fist-sized component from a rack, stowed it in a cargo basket, and retracted its manipulator arm. Its mission apparently accomplished, the robot started away, coasting on a cushion of air from under its venturi skirt.

“Stop!” Derec called out.

But the robot continued on, seemingly deaf to Derec’s command. On impulse, Derec released the handrail and went in pursuit. But in the asteroid’s minimal gravity field, it was like trying to run with both legs asleep. He was perpetually off-balance, his slippered feet failing to give him the traction he expected. When he came to his first ninety-degree turn, he went sprawling, scattering a rack of small chromium cylinders.

Not even the racket from his spill slowed the robot’s retreat. It continued on toward what appeared to be a lift shaft—a circular black pit in the floor and a matching one in the ceiling, linked by four chrome guide rods.

“How am I supposed to catch you?” he complained, climbing to his feet. “I can’t fly.”

There had to be a better way, and looking more closely at two robots heading down the aisle toward him, Derec saw what it was. Unlike the picker, the man-sized robots were built on standard three-point ball-drive chassis—like three marbles under a bottle cap. Ball-drive chassis were standard in clean environments because they offered complete freedom of movement. The drawback: here, with the reduced friction due to the low gravity, the drive balls should do more spinning than pushing.

But each large robot had a second ball-drive chassis mounted at the top of a telescoping rod. Pushing against the ceiling, the second chassis provided the necessary pressure for the dual drives to grab. Like the bumper cars at a revival carnival, each robot needed to be in constant contact with both surfaces to operate.

Derec realized that he could use that trick, too. The ceiling was low enough that he could push against it with his fingertips while standing flat-footed. “Hand-walking,” as he dubbed the technique, he could have caught the picker.

Now he waited to see what the two approaching robots would do about him. They stopped short of where he stood and began to restore order where he had fallen down, deftly using their three-fingered grapples to replace the cylinders on the shelving. He waited, wondering if they would notice him. They did not.

“I’m in danger,” he called to them. “I need your help.”

The two robots continued their housekeeping, apparently oblivious to his presence. He drew closer and examined the nearer of the two as it worked. It had normal audio sensors, but no evidence of a vocalizer. In short, it was mute. It could not answer.

But there had to be some higher-level robots in the complex, ones capable of recognizing him for what he was and responding to his needs. The pickers and custodians he’d crossed paths with could hardly be working without supervision.

Likewise, the E-cell he awoke in couldn’t be the only structure for humans within the complex. Somewhere there was a management team, programmers, supervisors. There was no such thing as a completely autonomous robot community.

Thinking that there had to be a way to call the control room from the E-cell, Derec started back. As he did, he saw a sight that brought him up short. A tall humanoid robot was standing at the end of the corridor to the E-cell, studying him.

They stared at each other for a long moment. The robot’s skin was a gleaming pale blue, a vivid declaration of its machine nature. Its optical sensors were silver slits in its helmet-like head, lacking the customary red tracking marker which telegraphed when the robot was looking in your direction. Even so, there was no doubt in Derec’s mind that he was the object of the robot’s rapt and unnaturally focused attention.

The robot was the first to move, turning away and disappearing into the corridor, hand-walking with easy coordination. Derec followed as quickly as he was able, but by the time he reached the corridor, the robot was already inside the airlock. It took no more than fifteen seconds for Derec to reach the outer hatch and pass through into the E-cell. Even so, when he stepped out into the inner corridor, the robot was already emerging from the wardroom, its business apparently finished.

“I’m in danger,” Derec said. “I need your help.”

“False assessment: you are not now in danger,” the humanoid robot said. “Should you be in danger, help will be provided.”

The robot took one step toward the pressure hatch, and Derec moved to place himself in its path.

“I’m not letting you leave here until you tell me where I am and what I’m doing here,” Derec said sharply.

The robot’s answer was nonverbal but perfectly clear. Stepping closer, it grasped his shoulders firmly but gently and moved him out of the way. Then it walked with smooth strides past him to the hatch.

“Open,” it said.

Feeling helpless, Derec let the robot go, then turned to see if he could discover what it had been doing in the wardroom. Only two things had changed since Derec had left. The galley was still counting down to full Demand status, but the selector was now showing a short list of selections that were already available. Derec himself had set that change in motion.

It was the other change that the robot was responsible for. The screen of the com center was no longer blank. In bright red letters, it reported: MESSAGE TRANSMITTED.

It was then that Derec knew for certain that he was alone on the asteroid. The fact that there was an environmental cell deep under the surface implied that there had once been at least a temporary human presence here. But this little world was in the hands of the robots now, and he was a trespasser. What message they had sent about him, and to whom they had sent that message, there was no telling.

CHAPTER 3

THE ROBOTS’ MISSION

Derec took the time for a meal, which he needed, and a shower, which he did not. But the shower provided him with something to do while thinking, and he had a lot to think about. His presence, his identity, the cause and reason for his memory impairment were as troublesome as ever. And after his excursion, he had a new mystery. Why were the robots behaving so strangely?

Derec asked himself under what circumstances a robot might refuse to answer his question, which amounted to refusing to obey his orders. Within his understanding of the Laws of Robotics, Derec could think of only two, both illustrated by his experience with Darla: because it did not know the answers, or because it had been instructed previously not to reveal them.

Precedence did count for something with robots. A robot ordered by its owner to service a flyer would not leave that job to search for a neighbor child’s missing cat—unless it was the owner, not the child, who made the request. A carefully worded command would hold up against anything but a counterorder rooted in a First Law situation. If the robots had been told not to talk about what they were doing, nothing Derec could do would make them disobey.

Before he dressed, he searched his body for clues to who he was. He found no scars large enough that he would expect to remember when and how he acquired them. He bore no tattoos or skin ornaments, wore no rings or jewelry.

The only distinctive mark he seemed to bear was inside, in the things that he knew. Somewhere, sometime, he had received advanced training in microelectronics. He had more than a passing understanding of robotics and computers. Was that commonplace, a standard curriculum for someone his age? He thought not. And if not, it might be the trail that he could follow to rediscover himself.

The com center was continuing its intransigence, still ignoring his input, still mockingly displaying the words MESSAGE TRANSMITTED. But there was one door that hadn’t yet been slammed in his face. Donning a breather and a spare cartridge pack, Derec left the E-cell to explore the rest of the complex.

Derec began by creating a mental map of the great chamber, assigning arbitrary compass points with the E-cell as his reference for south. The chamber seemed to be roughly rectangular, longer north to south than east to west by a factor of two or more. He started hand-walking northward down the same corridor the custodian robots had used, counting his paces as he went.

Five hundred paces later, his arms were tired and the north wall seemed no closer. Stopping to rest, he surveyed the robot population of the chamber. He tallied seventeen of the humanoid robots, none of which were nearby. Among the nonhumanoid robots, he identified five different types: the pickers, the custodians, a large cargo handler Derec dubbed a porter, some multi-armed micro-assemblers, and an armored robot with oversized grapples whose function he could not guess.

Most of the robots he encountered were moving purposefully through the aisles, carrying out their assignments. But toward the north end of the chamber, Derec spotted a small army of robots standing inert and deenergized, waiting to be called into action. All the varieties were represented among the reserves except for the humanoid robots.

The robot stockpile was Derec’s clue to understanding where he was. The chamber seemed to be primarily a collection of spare parts. True, he had spotted a cluster of injection and extrusion machines in one area, a battery of laser welders in another, a chip-burning shop in a third, all apparently in full-time use. But all those operations were apparently maintenance related.

Whatever they’re doing here, they’re on a very heavy duty cycle—possibly even continuous operations, he told himself. Zero down-time could only be bought with a large-scale repair and maintenance operation. And that high price was only worth paying when time mattered more than money.

There was a steady stream of robot traffic on the lifts located at intervals through the chamber, and the obvious next step was to find out where they were going. Giving up his plan to walk the length of the chamber, Derec headed for the nearest lift.

Like the breather, the lifts were clearly the product of a unique approach to engineering. To Derec, they looked like something either unfinished or nonfunctional. They were also more proof that the complex had been designed with robots alone in mind. No human would have ridden one voluntarily.

The shaft was a vertical boring three meters in diameter, its sides lined with the same synthemesh as the chamber ceiling. Peering out over the edge and down, Derec glimpsed a deep shaft lit at regular intervals by stationary blue glows, which he assumed marked other levels. The shaft seemed to extend much farther down than up. Above the great chamber—which he had begun to think of as the warehouse—he counted only seven levels, while below it he could see at least twenty levels before the traffic in the shaft obscured what might lie beyond.

A descending lift platform on the nearest guide rod obliged Derec to duck back out of the way. The platform, a square grid a meter on a side, reached the floor level and stopped as though waiting for him.

While it waited there, traffic kept moving on the other three guide rods. Watching the robots board and disembark, Derec saw that while the lift was in operation, the robots were clamped to the platforms magnetically. He wondered how he would be able to keep his balance and footing without that assistance. There were no railings to grab on to, and the guide rod itself appeared to be electrically live.

Personal considerations aside, he could not help but admire the engineering aesthetics of the lift. It was a clean and focused solution to the problem of moving the maximum amount of traffic in the minimum time and space, a solution fully integrated with the requirements of the colony.

But clever as the system was, Derec was not eager for a ride in the dark on an open platform above a seemingly bottomless pit. Still, it was that or go back to the E-cell. He swallowed hard once and stepped carefully out onto the waiting platform.

“Up,” he said.

“Level, please?”

“Uh—Level Two.”

Singing a high-pitched song, the car began to climb swiftly. He stood with his arms crossed over his chest and his legs spread wide. Keeping his vision focused upward toward the nearest of the blue glows, he tried not to look at the shaft walls sliding swiftly by.

The platform flashed through several other levels before gradually slowing to let him off. The glimpses he caught of them prepared him for what awaited him on Two. When he stepped off the lift, he was standing at the crossroads of two low-ceilinged tunnels, each six meters wide. The walls, floor and ceiling were covered with the ubiquitous off-white synthemesh. The air was colder than ever, cold enough to make him hunch his shoulders and bury his hands under his arms.

Though the immediate vicinity of the lift was brightly lit by the blue floodlights, the tunnels themselves were illuminated only by dim yellow lamps set at intervals in the ceiling. Each was barely bright enough to mark its own position and make a tiny pool of yellow light on the floor of the tunnel.

The distant ends of the intersecting tunnels were invisible, the lines of ceiling lamps receding into infinity in both directions. The tunnels could be kilometers long, even tens of kilometers for all he could tell.

Have they honeycombed this entire asteroid? Derec wondered. Thousands of levels—shafts a hundred kilometers deep—could this be a mining operation?

But he could not understand why anyone would go to the trouble to mine an asteroid from the inside. The cutters on a prospecting ship could slice all but the densest nickel-iron asteroids into bite-sized chunks for the leviathan processing centers. No ore Derec knew of was worth the expense of tunnel-and-shaft mining on this scale. Even with the energy-and-raw-materials economics which applied with robot labor, it would have to be something a hundred times more precious than the rarest element—unless the value of secrecy was part of the equation.

Who am I dealing with? Derec wondered. Newly sobered, he stepped back onto the lift.

“Level Three,” he said.

The next two levels were just as silent and finished-looking as Two. Derec could notdecide whether they were finished-waiting-to-be-used, like the spare parts in the great chamber, or finished-and-abandoned.

But Level Five was another story. The rumble of heavy machinery assaulted his ears even before the platform reached the lighted zone. When he stepped off the lift, he could feel rolling, low-frequency vibrations in the floor and ceiling of the tunnel.

I’m getting closer, he thought. Now—which way? The sound surrounded him, offering no clue as to which of the tunnels had the most promise.

While he stood there equivocating, a double platform arrived and disgorged a porter robot. On impulse, Derec climbed onto its half-full cargo pad. He was counting on its ignoring him, as the picker had. He was not disappointed. Neither cradling him in its arms nor trying to dislodge him, the porter started down the south tunnel.

For the first two minutes of the ride, wind noise and the whine of the robot’s own mechanisms masked the distant work noise. But before long Derec could sort the separate elements: irregular thumping sounds like muffled explosions, a highpitched grinding that made his skin crawl, and a steady background rumble that suggested great masses of rock and ice being moved about.

Presently the end of the tunnel came in sight as a black patch in the distance. Shortly after, Derec began to detect a whiff of ammonia in the air. The moment he did, another piece of the puzzle fell into place.

He had wondered from the start why the complex outside the E-cell was filled with nitrogen. The robots did not require it. Strictly speaking, robots did not require an atmosphere at all. And keeping the complex sealed and pressurized had to be more complicated than simply opening it to space.

But maintaining a standard two-gas atmosphere in the proper proportions through the vast complex was even more complicated. Derec had concluded that the nitrogen atmosphere and “open” breathers were a compromise between the inconvenience of full pressure suits and the complexity of a dual-gas E-system. The nitrogen allowed humans to speak and hear normally and to move about without safesuits, without the fire and explosion risk posed by free oxygen.

But Derec had overlooked something important. The ices which made up a large fraction of the asteroid’s bulk were not water, but compounds like methane and ammonia. The mining processes would inevitably release them as gases into the work area, where they might react with the high energies and circuits of the mining machinery or with each other.

I should have seen it sooner, he thought. Without an atmosphere comprised of some relatively inert gas, there would be no way to dilute the unwelcome compounds or efficiently flush them out. So of course, an atmosphere. Of course, nitrogen. The atmosphere accommodated a human presence, but was not primarily for human convenience.

The porter slowed as they neared the end of the tunnel, and Derec took that opportunity to jump off. Ahead of him were several robots, gathered near the end of the tunnel, and the gateway to what he presumed was the work chamber. Through the gateway he caught glimpses of a ragged rock wall, equipment booms, and an occasional flash of bright light.

The gateway itself was an enormous boxlike machine which filled the tunnel flush to the walls, floor, and ceiling. The only path through to the work chamber was a narrow walkway between columns of bright green chemical storage tanks. That was where he had to go.

As Derec drew closer, he saw that the gateway was actually crawling slowly forward. Like some mechanical larva, the gateway was burrowing through the asteroidal mass and leaving a finished tunnel in its wake. Everything—the raw material of the walls, the covering of reinforcing synthemesh, even the overhead lamps—was being handled in one continuous operation. The gateway was a four-surface paving machine.

But Derec’s real interest was in the excavation beyond. He stepped up onto the gateway and threaded his way between the shoulder-high cylinders, aware as he did that one of the humanoid robots was following him. There was a strong draft through the walkway, from the tunnel to the chamber beyond. Even so, the odor of ammonia was almost strong enough to make him gag.

At the forward end, the narrow walkway widened into a control cabin, where two humanoid robots sat behind a bank of transparent panels looking out into the excavation chamber that surrounded the gateway on three sides. Derec stopped a few steps short of the ramp into the excavation and tried to sort out the functions of the equipment that filled it.

The uncut face of the asteroidal material was some thirty meters away. A two-headed boom cutter was working it, one boom bearing rotary grinders, the other microwave lasers. They moved back and forth like weaving cobras, and the ice and rock wall crumbled before them.

The lasers seemed to be doing most of the damage. Suddenly released from its icy glue, loose rock sloughed off the face with a cracking sound. More resistant deposits were gouged off by the rotating teeth of the grinder. The gases boiling off the face were being sucked into the wide-mouthed exhaust vents that loomed over the work face.

As he studied the work rig, a metallic hand touched his shoulder.

“You may not enter the processing zone during operations,” the robot said.

The robot’s edict stirred a flash of annoyance. “I will if I want to,” Derec snapped back over his shoulder.

The robot tightened its grip pointedly. “You may not enter the processing zone during operations,” the robot repeated. “Untrained personnel are to be considered at risk.”

Shrugging off its touch, Derec turned his back on the robot and looked once more into the excavation. Like the gateway, the mining unit was slowly advancing toward an ever-receding rock face. The motion brought the jumble of loose rock within reach of scuttling scooper arms, which funneled it up a ramp to an enormous hopper. A pair of high-sided conveyors carried material away from the hopper, one to the left and one to the right. While on the conveyor it passed through an N-ray station, an X-ray station, and a magnetometer.

From that point on, things got confusing. It was as though after having gone to all that trouble to mine the asteroid, the robots had forgotten to sort out the part of it they wanted to keep.

Some of the tailings were diverted to a spur conveyor, run through a crusher, and then used as the raw material for the fifteen-centimeter thick walls of the tunnel. To Derec’s astonishment, the rest was carried to the back wall of the work chamber, reunited with the captured methane and ammonia, and built up into a wall of ice and rock again. The excavation never got any larger.

But what about the tunnel? Derec wondered. They have to be taking something out—

Closer study showed him otherwise. The empty volume of the ever-lengthening access tunnel meant only that the asteroidal material surrounding it was being replaced in a more compressed state than it was in when mined. Nothing was being extracted. Nothing was being carried away for later refining or shipment.

It just didn’t make sense.

The depletion alarm on Derec’s first cartridge pack began to sound, and he transferred the delivery tube to the backup. He would have to leave soon or risk dying of nitrogen poisoning before he could return to the E-cell. But it was hard to tear himself away from the incomprehensible sight of a dozen robots and a few million dollars worth of heavy equipment engaged in a task as senseless as trying to dig a hole in water. And how many other excavations just like this were underway elsewhere in the complex? Ten? Fifty? Five hundred?

Trying to understand, Derec focused his attention on the robots. Three of the armored type patrolled the hopper, breaking up snags with their grapples. A fourth stood on a small platform under the booms of the cutter, shattering oversized rocks as they fell from the face with blasts from its chest-mounted laser. Two humanoids stood at the N-ray stations, intently studying the scanning screen.

Derec’s guardian angel was still standing within arm’s reach behind him, and he turned and sought the robot’s eyes. “What are you mining here?” he demanded. “What’s the point of all this?”

But the robot said nothing, gazing back with its expressionless eyes.

“Get out of the way,” Derec said disgustedly, and the robot stepped aside into the control booth to let him pass.

His annoyance spilling over into anger, Derec stalked down the narrow walkway and jumped down to the tunnel. It was then he realized his mistake: there were no porter robots there to carry him back to the lift.

“I need a ride,” Derec said sharply to the nearest humanoid robot. “Can you tell me when the next porter robot will be making a delivery?”

“What is your need?”

“I need a ride.”

“That is not an approved allocation of resources.”

Derec did not even bother to argue. Turning away, he stalked away northward, his mind unsettled, churning with unconnected thoughts. He felt as though the answer to all his questions was already in his grasp, except he couldn’t recognize it. How did it all add up? What was wrong with the picture?

As he hand-walked along the tunnel, his thoughts kept carrying him back to the robots. There was something about the way they behaved, the way they worked together. Throughout the complex, all the routine, repetitive jobs were being done by the nonhumanoid robots. The blue-skinned humanoid robots were supervisors, trouble-shooters, technicians, repair specialists. But they could have just as easily done the repetitive jobs as well, even tending the front line in the excavation. Instead, there were a half-dozen specialized varieties, porters and pickers and miners that didn’t act like robots at all—

Derec stopped short and turned to stare back down the tunnel toward the excavation. Of course. Of course. The picker and the custodians, the tenders and the porters weren’t specialized robots working with the blue robots. They were tools being used by the blue robots. Their intelligence was limited—perhaps not even positronic in nature. The real intelligence resided in the humanoid robots, which might well be more sophisticated than any Derec had previously known of.

But why were they all here?

Derec thought of all the levels, all the tunnels that had already been bored out, all the mass of the asteroid still waiting undisturbed. Could he have stumbled on an industrial test site? It might explain much—the secrecy, the distinctive stamp of the unknown designer, the unending but pointless excavation.

Focus on the robots, Derec told himself. The tasks they’re handling themselves are the ones they consider critical—

In a flash of memory, he saw the two humanoid robots tending the scanning instruments on the conveyor line, and suddenly Derec knew. The realization staggered him, and yet there was no pushing the notion away once it had formed in his mind.

The robots weren’t mining the asteroid at all. They were sifting it. They were searching for something, something lost or buried or hidden, something so unique and valuable that it was worth any price, any effort.

What that something was, Derec could not imagine. And just at that moment, he was not sure that he ever wanted to find out.

CHAPTER 4

YOU CAN’T GET THERE

FROM HERE

It was a very long way back to the lift. How fast had the porter gone when carrying him to the excavation? Forty kilometers per hour? Then the shaft lay ten kilometers away. Sixty? Then a fifteen-kilometer hike awaited him, at a thousand strides, a thousand arm-swings to a kilometer. Even in a gravity field this weak, that was asking a lot from his body.

He did not turn back only because he was sure that the Supervisors, as he had begun to think of the humanoid robots, knew where he was and how much oxygen he had. At some point the two changing variables would intersect at a value which said that he was in danger, and they would send a porter to fetch him and whisk him back to the E-cell.

Each time he saw a robot coming toward him, or heard one closing on him from behind, he began to anticipate relief for his weary arms and legs. But each time, the robot sped past without even slowing. He considered trying to stop a porter by blocking the tunnel, but the only porters that came by were burdened with a full load of chemical tanks or machine parts. There was no room for him.

Because there was no choice, Derec pressed on. For a time he tried counting the yellow ceiling lamps to prove to himself that he was making progress, but his mind wandered and he lost count. There was a terrible sameness to the tunnel, with its unrelieved stretches of white. It seemed as though he were caught in limbo, trapped on a subterranean treadmill.

As it turned out, he was not wrong in thinking that the Supervisors were aware of him. But he was quite wrong about the form their help would take.

He had sat down to rest, his back against the west wall, when a picker came racing up and stopped half a meter away. From its cargo basket it plucked a pair of fresh cartridge packs, laying them at his feet. Before he could react, it backed up, pivoted, and raced away. The timing was so perfect that the pack Derec was using began to sound its depletion alarm just as the picker vanished from sight in the distance.

“Consistent,” he said crossly, addressing the absent Supervisors as he swapped the depleted packs for the new ones. “You’ve done as little as possible to help me right from the start. And this really is the very least you could do.”

Hours later, he reached the E-cell with barely enough energy to fold down one of the bunks before he collapsed in it. He was asleep in minutes, his body claiming its rest. But his troubles pursued him even in his dreams, which were full of silent blue robots moving through dark places ripe with the cold scent of danger.

When he awoke, Derec began to think about escaping. For it was clear now that the most likely message for the Supervisor to have sent was something on the order of, “We have an intruder. What shall we do with him?” And Derec did not like most of the possible answers to that question.

He did not think the Supervisor robots, independent as they might be, were capable of killing him. The First Law was too deeply rooted in the basic structure of a positronic brain. To remove it or tamper with it was to guarantee trouble, up to and including complete intellectual disintegration.

But the recipient of the message was probably human, and therefore quite capable of using violence in service of his or her self-interest. They would want to know how he had discovered the installation, and what he had wanted there, and he would have nothing to tell them.

Perhaps they would accept that at face value, and help him return to wherever he had come from. But considering the circumstances, the stronger possibility was that they would insist on answers. Derec sensed that it would take a long time to convince them he had none. Even so, afterward they would want to make sure that he could never tell anyone what he had stumbled on.

No, he did not want to wait around for the Supervisors’ masters to arrive. The key to escaping was Darla. The pod’s thrusters were almost certainly rated for a much stronger gravity field than the one the asteroid boasted. If so, then there should be more than enough fuel remaining to lift off the asteroid again and put some distance between it and himself—if only he could convince Darla of the wisdom of that act.

But first, he had to find her. Measuring from memory, Derec suspected that the pod was too large to have been brought down the lift. The robots must have removed him from the pod somewhere on the surface—inside an entry dome, perhaps—and left the pod behind.

So he began by riding the lift in search of the place where he had been brought into the asteroid. It turned out to be called Level Zero. At the top of the lift shaft a disclike pressure door scissored out of the way to allow the platform to pass, and the lift carried Derec up into a high-ceilinged circular room a hundred meters across.

Most of the chamber was filled with neatly aligned rows of machines—buglike augers and borers, tracked carriers, and flying globes like the one Derec had seen when the robots were carrying him and his pod away. On the far side of the room, a steep ramp enclosed by a transparent material led up and out onto the surface.

There was a Supervisor there as well, seated at a control station with its back to Derec. Though it gave no such sign, Derec was sure the robot was aware of his presence.

Stepping off the lift, Derec began to wander among the idle machines. This must be some of the equipment that was used to survey the outer crust of the asteroid, he thought. The flying globes were probably scanning platforms, while the other machines could be used to dig up any promising sites.

It seemed just as obvious to Derec that the surface survey was complete. It was not only the appearance of the machines that led to that conclusion. Searching the surface first made sense. Why even begin the underground excavation before you were sure that the object of your search wouldn’t be turned up by a much faster and far less complicated aerial survey?

But Derec was less interested in sorting out the remaining mysteries about this world than he was in finding Darla and saying good-bye to it. A quick catalog of the chamber turned up no sign of the pod or of his safesuit. But he did find a rack with three pearl-white augmented worksuits. They were too large for use in the lower levels or to allow him to climb into the pod if he found it, but he could still use one for an excursion to the surface.

Moving behind the nearest suit, Derec grabbed the crossbar and vaulted himself feet first through the access door on the back. As he settled in the saddlelike seat, he felt the feedback pads snugging up against his feet. He inserted his arms into the suit’s arms, and the controllers for the external manipulator came into his hands. A sloping display screen reflected the status of the suit’s systems on the bubblelike canopy before him.

“Close and pressurize,” he said, and the access door began to swing shut. He tried raising his arms, and the suit stirred in smooth response. At last, a little power, he thought.

But when he turned to head for the ramp, he found a Supervisor barring his way. “The surface is a restricted area,” the robot said.

Derec heard the words through a speaker at his ear and halted his advance. Probably the augmented suit was more than a match for a Supervisor, or would be in the hands of a skilled operator. But Derec did not want a fight. He only wanted answers.

“Tell me where I can find the survival pod I came here in,” Derec said.

“You do not have authorization to leave the community.”

“That’s where it is, isn’t it? On the surface. That’s where you hid it. What did you do, put my suit back in it after you took it off me?” Derec demanded. “I’m going out. If you don’t want to be damaged you’d better get out of the way.”

The robot did not move. “The survival pod is not on the surface,” it said.

Considering the way the Supervisors had been treating him, that was a generous answer. But Derec wanted more. “Either I go looking on the surface, or you show me where the pod is. Those are the only choices.”

There was a brief pause before the robot responded. When the answer came, it was a welcome surprise. “I will show you the pod.”

“Are we going outside, or down below?”

“Down.”

Derec still wanted to go to the surface. He had hopes of being able to use the stars and sky to determine at least in general terms where the planetoid was located—what kind of star it was orbiting, and whether the planetoid was independent or part of a planetary system. But until he found the pod, none of that mattered, so Derec could afford to be a gracious victor.

“Thank you,” he said. “If you’ll wait just a moment, I’ll put this suit back.”

But Derec did not get to enjoy his victory for long. The Supervisor took him back down to the warehouse level and led him through the maze toward the east wall. As they swung around the molding section and its high rack supply cache, the robot stopped short.

“Here.”

But Derec could see no pod. All he could see was a large open area with rows of assorted components neatly arrayed on the floor. “Where?”

With a sweeping motion of his arm, the Supervisor repeated, “Here.”

That was when Derec took a closer look at the hardware laid out before him and realized the truth. The pod was there, just as the Supervisor said. But it was in a thousand pieces, lying on the floor like a giant jigsaw puzzle. The robots had disassembled it down to fundamental components. Derec could recognize but a few—curved plates that had been part of the hull, several thruster bells, and, a few meters from where Derec stood, the lenses from the seven green lamps on the command console.

“No,” he cried out despairingly. “Why did you do it?”

“It was necessary to determine that the search objective was not concealed within the pod.”

“And my safesuit? Did they tear that apart, too?”

In answer, the Supervisor led Derec into the maze and showed him his suit, lying in several dozen pieces. The fabric had been separated from the binding rings, the environmental systems stripped out of the chest unit. Even the helmet had been disassembled.

“I’m surprised that you didn’t tear me apart, too,” he said bitterly as he looked at it.

“Please explain the reason for your surprise,” the robot said. “It is impossible for a robot to harm a human. Have you not been informed of this fact?”

“Nevermind,” Derec said with a sigh. “I was being sarcastic.”

“Sir?”

“Humans don’t always mean what they say. Haven’t you been informed of that fact?” After a moment, he added, “But you did search me, didn’t you?”

“Yes. While you were unconscious, you were subjected to a full-body magnetic resonance scan,” the robot replied.

Derec almost laughed at the absurdity of it. “It figures,” he said. “I suppose having you put the suit and pod back together is out of the question.”

“Nothing may take priority over the primary directive.”

“What about all those spare robots sitting up north doing nothing? You could activate a few of them.”

“The tasks would require not only Assemblers but the supervision of a Systemist. All Systemists are fully scheduled under the current duty cycle.”

“I guess that means no,” Derec said. He looked across the expanse of parts that once was a spacecraft and sighed. “Do you have a name of some kind?”

“I am Monitor 5.”

“Why are you talking to me, Monitor 5?”

“I perceived that you were stressed. While stressed, humans frequently derive benefit from communication.”

Derec snorted. “I guess that’s one way to say it. Then tell me, Monitor 5—do you robots know what you’re looking for?”

“I may not reveal any information about my mission here.”

“What about me? Are you allowed to tell me what you know about me?”

“What do you wish to know?”

“The event recorder in the survival pod—did they find it?”

“I was not part of that work unit. I will consult Analyst 3.” The robot paused. “Yes. A data recorder was located.”

“Did it tell you what ship I came from? How I got here? Anything?”

“The recorder had not been initialized. The recording disk was blank.”

Stunned, Derec looked down and away to hide his expression from the robot. His gaze fell on the pile of fabric from his suit, and he knelt down and began to sift through it. “There was a datastrip on my suit—”

“Yes. It was a test strip. It contained no personal data.”

Letting the fabric fall from his hands back to the floor, Derec slowly stood. “A test strip?”

“They are quite common. They are used in calibrating a data reader’s scanner.”

“But it said Derec—”

“Yes. The leading manufacturer of such readers is Derec Data Systems.”

Derec felt the strength go out of his legs. “Then you don’t know who I am, either.”

“No. We do not know who you are.”

“And that message you sent about me? What did it say?”

“I did not send the message. One moment while I consult Analyst 17.” The robot paused. “Analyst 17 believed that due to your irrational behavior, you would come to harm or endanger the primary objective unless continually supervised. Therefore he sent a message requesting that you be rescued.”

“He made that decision on his own?”

“Analyst 17 felt that the threat was of sufficient magnitude to transcend the prohibition regarding communications.”

“Prohibition from who? Who’s in charge here? And who’d he send the message to?”

“I may not—”

“—reveal any information about your mission here, yes.” Grimacing, Derec closed his eyes and tried to shut out the world.

“Are you ill?” Monitor 5 asked, concerned.

“No,” Derec said in an unsteady voice. “I’m just back to square one again, that’s all.”

CHAPTER 5

REPLY

Dispirited, Derec retreated to the E-cell, his illusion of being even partially in control of his own fate destroyed. There was no chance of his reconstructing the pod himself. He might leave the community using one of the augmented worksuits, but there was no way he could leave the asteroid. It seemed that all he could do was stay out of the robots’ way and wait for whoever Analyst 17 had signalled to respond.

As though the robots had decided that he needed something to keep him occupied and safely out of their way, Derec found the wardroom com center unlocked and displaying the word “READY.” When Derec touched the “Help” key, a short menu popped up on the screen. It offered him a choice between something called Scratchpad and a library index.

Scratchpad proved to be a cross between a notebook and an engineer’s sketch pad. He amused himself for a while with its graphics capabilities by drawing a map of the part of the complex he knew firsthand. The system made it easy for him, converting his unsteady movements with the tracer into straight lines, copying duplicate sections, performing fills and rotations.

When drawing deteriorated into doodling, Derec shifted mental gears and decided to make a diary of what had happened since he had awoken in the pod. But his first entry was self-conscious and self-indulgent, and he ended his log with a short sarcastic note:

Dear Mom,

I got no friends here. Can I come home?

Embarrassed by his own self-pity, Derec purged the Scratchpad memory and pushed his chair away from the terminal. But the terrible feeling of separateness which underlay the thought was not so easily banished. Without family, friends, an ally of any sort, Derec’s little world was a lonely place.

The book-film library was Derec’s last defense against maudlin thoughts. Scanning the directory, he was struck by the unusual mix of entries. There was a whole subdirectory of texts from Earth’s Classical Age, including a few whose authors or titles Derec was intrigued to discover he recognized: Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, Newton’s Principia, Darwin’s The Origin of Species.

Another large subdirectory consisted of architectural drawings and photographs. Again, a few names struck chords in Derec’s memory—Mies van der Rohe, Buckminster Fuller, Frank Lloyd Wright. But when he asked the system to sample those files at one image every few seconds, he found the images were of places that he could not remember ever being and structures he could not remember seeing. It left him wondering why he knew the names in the first place.

Conspicuously absent was any sort of current technical reference on such topics as microelectronics, robotics, process design, and the like. Derec assumed that they were in a separate technical library not available to him.

But there were other sections which under other circumstances would probably have appealed to him—a biography of robotics pioneer Susan Calvin; Genesis, Marvin Eller’s anecdotal history of twentieth-century computer science; a screenful of titles on astronomy and astrography.

But Derec was not interested in being educated, or in anything that required thinking. He wanted to be a spectator to someone else’s problems, to disengage his mind and surrender himself to the spell of the storyteller.

Yet when he turned to the fiction subdirectory, he found the pickings sparse. Aside from a few interactive mysteries and a half-dozen text novels, all of which would require too much work on his part, Derec’s choice was limited to the world of theater. Faust, Waiting for Godot, Daedalus and Icarus, Sweeney Todd—the titles meant nothing to Derec. But Shakespeare he knew, and Shakespeare was well represented on the list.

Feeling a need for laughter, Derec chose the comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Then he retreated to a comfortable chair, propped his feet up on the conference table, and let the recording carry him away to ancient Greece, to a woods near the city of Athens, where hemight amuse himself with the love-crossed confusion of human and fairy kings, and the pranks of the devilish sprite Puck.

“Up and down, up and down,” Puck vowed. “I will lead them up and down. I am feared in field and town. Goblin, lead them up and down—”

In the middle of Puck’s declamation, Derec heard the unmistakable sound of the inner door of the airlock opening. He came to his feet as a Supervisor entered the wardroom and crossed toward the com center.

“What do you want?” Derec demanded, following.

The robot ignored Derec. “Priority interrupt,” the robot said to the com center. The screen went black and the speakers silent.

PASSWORD?

The robot’s fingers flew over the keypad in a blur, but nothing appeared on the screenexcept the instruction PROCEED.

Without hesitation, the robot began to hammer at the keys again. Even standing only an arm’s length away, Derec had no clue to what the robot was entering. The steady staccato of keyclicks lasted perhaps twenty seconds—three or four hundred characters. Then the robot raised his hand and stepped back.

MESSAGE TRANSMITTED, the screen acknowledged.

“Resume,” the robot said, and turned to go.

“Cancel,” Derec said, moving quickly to place his body between the robot and the door. “Identify yourself.”

“I am Analyst 9.”

“What’s happening? What did you just do?”

“Please stand aside,” Analyst 9 said. “I have urgent duties elsewhere.”

“The last time one of you was in here, it was to send a distress message. What’s up now? Is aship here? Is that it? I have a right to know what’s going on—”

For an answer, Analyst 9 raised his arm and pushed Derec firmly out of the way. He stumbled back toward the conference table and sat down hard in one of the chairs.

“Do not interfere,” the Supervisor said, and left the room.

Though his shock at the robot’s physical treatment of him slowed him for an instant, Derec scrambled to his feet and followed.

Out in the chamber, Derec found frenzied activity bordering on chaos. Dozens of porter and picker robots were streaming off the lifts, as if some massive exodus were underway. Scores more were scurrying through the aisles gathering up components and carrying them toward the west wall and the recycling smelter located there.

To Derec’s astonishment, instead of depositing what they held and turning back to get more, the pickers and porters queued up at the smelter carried their burdens directly into the heart of the smelter and never appeared again. For some reason, the robots were systematically destroying selected items in their storehouse—and themselves at the same time.

Distracted by the parade of suicidal robots, Derec had lost track of Analyst 9. Now, as he scanned the chamber to try to find it, he saw something else extraordinary. There were no Supervisors anywhere in the warehouse. The various manufacturing centers were standing silent and abandoned.

On a hunch, Derec fought his way through to the lift and commandeered a platform to carry him up to Level Zero. There he found a gathering of twenty Supervisors. They were standing motionless in a circle, with hands linked as though in some sort of direct conference.

They took no notice of his arrival, and so Derec crossed the room to where two other Supervisors sat at the giant command console.

“Monitor 5?”

“Yes, Derec,” one of the robots said with a nod of acknowledgment.

“Can you tell me what’s happening?”

“Surface sensors have detected a large spacecraft approaching. The trajectory and velocity profile indicate that it will match orbit with this planetoid.”

“I’m going to get off this rock?” Derec exulted. “Praise the stars!”

“There is a sixty-eight percent probability that the ship intercepted the distress signal. However, there is only a nine percent probability that the ship is here to rescue you.”

That news jolted Derec back to earth. “Intercepted? They aren’t the people you were calling?”

“No, Derec.”

“Who are they, then? What do they want?”

“The ship is currently unidentified.”

“Is that why all the robots downstairs are going crazy?”

“I cannot answer that question now,” Monitor 5 said. “I may be able to tell you more shortly.”

“What should I do?”

“Wait.”

“Great. How long?”

“Not long,” Monitor 5 said, standing. “Excuse me. The Analysts are calling for me.”

Crossing the room, Monitor 5 joined the conference circle. He stood there with them for perhaps two minutes, then the circle broke apart. Most of the Supervisors headed for the lift. Two of them, including Monitor 5, came to where Derec stood.

“I have been appointed to communicate with you,” Monitor 5 said.

“Appointed?” The robot’s choice of word confused Derec.

“By default,” the robot admitted. “None of the Analysts feel comfortable dealing with a human.”

“Are you telling me that they haven’t been talking to me because they don’t want to? They don’t know how?”

“With few exceptions, their experience has been exclusively with other robots. I have been chosen because of my previous success in communicating with you,” Monitor 5 said.

“Is that another exception?” Derec said, indicating the robot standing just behind Monitor 5.

“I am accompanied by Analyst 17.”

“Ah—we’ve met—sort of.”

“Analyst 17 is here to assist me,” Monitor 5 said. “Please, Derec. There are important matters to discuss, and there is very little time.”

“Then get started.”

“Thank you. The Analysts are agreed thatthe approaching ship is a threat to the security of our operation. The possibility of discovery was anticipated by those who placed us here. Our instructions for such a circumstance are to destroy ourselves and this facility. Certain preliminary steps are already underway—”

“The robots at the smelter.”

“Yes. All proprietary technology must be destroyed and the excavation rendered unusable. This directive was impressed on us at the highest level of necessity and urgency. We must comply. However, your presence was not anticipated.”

“What do I have to do with it?”

“As long as you are present, we are not able to fulfill our directive, since to destroy the complex would kill you. Even to destroy ourselves would leave you unprotected. Therefore, for us to carry out our directive, it is necessary for you to leave.”

“I’ve been ready to leave since I got here. Just show me the way.”

Analyst 17 spoke up at that point. “Unfortunately, since leaving the community also represents a significant risk to your life, we are unable to assist you in doing this and are in fact obliged to prevent it.”

“So you’re not going to put my pod back together? My safesuit?”

“No.”

“This is crazy.”

“On the contrary, it is fundamentally logical,” Analyst 17 said. “If we protect you, you will almost certainly die, which we cannot allow. If we fail to protect you, you may survive, but you will be placed in grave danger, which we cannot allow.”

Derec looked from Monitor 5 to the Analyst in disbelief, then back again. “So what are you going to do with me?”

“Nothing,” Monitor 5 said. “No action is possible. If we help you to escape, we will be placing you in danger. But if we prevent your escape, we will also be placing you in danger.”

Derec was starting to get lost in the convolutions of the conversation. “Is that what you want me to do? Escape?”

The robot hesitated. “We want you to remain safe and unharmed.”

It seemed as though the robot were tiptoeing through a logical minefield. “What if I do leave?”

“When we discover that you are gone, we will have to pursue you.” It hesitated again. “However, until you are returned to our care the remainder of the community will be free to pursue the next highest priority directive.”

“In other words, if I escape, the First Law is no longer a factor. You can go ahead and destroy yourselves in good conscience.”

“That is essentially correct,” said Analyst 17, “though I must warn you there is a danger if you continue to discuss it.”

Derec ignored the warning. “Escape to where?”

“We cannot consider that question,” Monitor 5 said.

“Well, I can, and I don’t like the answer!” Derec snapped. “I’ll tell you what I intend to do—as soon as that ship is close enough to pick up the signal from a suit transmitter, I’m getting into one of those augments over there and going up to the surface to ask them to save me from you.”

“We could not allow that.”

“So what am I supposed to do? Go wander around on the surface until my air runs out? This is nuts. How can you even ask me to do such a thing?”

“Derec, I must repeat, there is a danger—,” Analyst 17 began.

“We have not asked you to do anything,” Monitor 5 said. “We have simply outlined for you the consequences of actions you may choose to take.”

“You may not be asking, but you’re dropping some loud hints,” Derec said. “You’re telling me that if I want to go kill myself, you’ll look the other way. I don’t understand how this whole conversation can even be taking place. What’s wrong with all of you?”

Monitor 5 answered. “I am following a highly conditional logic path proposed by Analyst 17—”

“So that’s why he’s really here.”

“—in which the uncertainty of your fate is modified by your own volitional acts to a positive value weighed against the high probability of harm due to inaction.”

“In other words, you talked yourself into it,” Derec said. “Well, you haven’t talked me into it. Your prime objective and your security don’t mean a thing to me. Do you think it’s important to me if you can’t destroy yourselves? I don’t care if that ship belongs to your worst enemy.

“In fact, I’m beginning to think that if they’re your enemy, that makes them my friend. I’m not going anywhere. And I’m sure as hell not going to go kill myself to get you off the hook.”

The robots were apparently not willing to let it go at that. When Derec left Level Zero, Analyst 17 followed. It took a different lift, and when they reached the warehouse level, it studiously trailed several steps behind him. But there was no question that he was under surveillance.

It did not make sense that immediately after asking him to escape, the robots would set a bloodhound to dog his heels. But since he had no intention of doing what the robots wanted, it hardly mattered if he understood. He could safely ignore his shadow.

The warehouse was still a hive of chaotic activity, and Derec retreated from it to the quiet of the E-cell. He thought Analyst 17 might content itself to watch and wait outside, since the cell had only one exit. But the robot came inside as well, and when Derec entered the wardroom, it followed him in and took a seat at the opposite end of the conference table.

At first, however, Derec barely noticed the robot’s entry. The video from a sky camera somewhere on the surface was being displayed on the com center screen. It showed a small, distant orange sun and a field of dim stars in which Derec saw no immediately recognizable patterns. A dark backlit hulk was moving across the star background, growing perceptibly larger as it closed on the asteroid. It was still too far away to show a distinctive profile, but it was clearly a massive spaceship of some kind.

“More propaganda?” Derec asked.

“The Analysts agreed that you have a right to know the source and current status of the threat.”

“Do you think I’m going to see that thing up there and panic? It won’t work. This isn’t much, but it’s home. I’m not leaving.”

The robot made no reply, and remained silent while Derec went to the autogalley and assembled a lunch. When he came back with it and sat down, he soon became painfully conscious of the robot patiently watching him.

“Whose side are you on, anyway?” Derec asked between mouthfuls.

“Clarify.”

“What are you doing here? I thought you wanted me to skip out. But I couldn’t make a move without you knowing about it.”

“Your conversation with Monitor 5 forced him into recognizing a First Law conflict.”

“You mean his little self-deception fell apart?”

“Monitor 5 is now deeply concerned that you may attempt to escape and harm yourself in the process or as a consequence. To relieve that potential and allow Monitor 5 to return to his duties, I offered to watch you.”

“What about you? Did I make your logic bomb blow up, too?”

“No.”

“So you’re not here to stop me,” Derec said, pushing his plate away. “You’re here to make sure no one else stops me.”

“Your observations are irrelevant to the situation. You have stated your intention to remain in our care.”

“Right.” Derec glanced up at the screen. The ship was still a dark shape without texture, but it now filled fully a third of the frame. “But I still think you expect me to start getting worried and make a move. Well, to show you just how worried I am, I’m going to go in the other room to take a nap,” Derec said, standing. “If you decide to come along, all I ask is that you pick out your own bunk. There isn’t room in mine for two.”

CHAPTER 6

A ROCK AND

A HARD PLACE

Analyst 17 did not follow, and Derec did not nap. He lay on his bunk and stared at the ceiling, trying to regain perspective.

The robots’ predicament was real and substantial. It was not only the matter of being frustrated in their attempt to fulfill their Second Law obligations to their master. They were tiptoeing along the edge of a First Law chasm, a paradox capable of paralyzing not only individual robots, but the entire community. He was their first obligation, and yet there was nothing they could do for him but beg him to save himself.

If it were not so serious, it would be laughable. It was as though a person suffering from hiccups had asked a friend, “Please surprise me.” How could he catch the robots off guard, even with Analyst 17’s collaboration?

On top of which, the whole idea of escaping was absurd. Without help from the robots, he couldn’t possibly reassemble the pod before the ship arrived. And even if he could, there was no way it could run from the approaching ship.

If he continued to think of both the robots and the strangers as enemies, there were no solutions to the equation. Only by assuming that the strangers were coming to help him, or would be willing to help him even if they had other purposes there, could he envision a way out. He could wait until the ship was in orbit, then go to the surface in an augment and radio to them for help.

Just then the bunk shuddered under him, and he sat bolt upright. He thought for a moment that he hadn’t felt it, or experienced the sudden start which sometimes comes just before dozing off. But then another tremor shook the room, and he could no longer think it was an illusion. He jumped to his feet and ran across to the wardroom.

Analyst 17 was still sitting there as Derec had left him. “What’s happening?” Derec demanded.

“We are under attack,” the robot said, gesturing toward the com center.

Derec stared at the screen. The ship had tacked to a position where half of its sunward side was visible, allowing Derec to see details for the first time. What he saw confused him. The ship seemed to have been not designed, but collected. It looked more like a space junkyard than a dangerous raider. But raider it was.

Just in the part Derec could see clearly, there were eleven distinct hulls, as well as a tangled matrix of connecting structures. There were ships old enough to be in a museum and others new enough to be a shipwright’s showpiece. Sleek transatmospheric profiles nestled against the cylinders and grips of deep-space haulers. All across the mass of the ship, small red and orange lights were blinking on and off.

“Who are they?” Derec whispered.

“Unknown.”

“Well, didn’t they hail us? What do they want?”

“There was no signal on any frequency commonly used for communication.”

Derec felt another vibration through the floor. “What kind of weapons are they using?”

“The ship’s armament appears to consist primarily of phased microwave lasers.”

“And what do we have to fight back?”

“The community has no weapons.”

“What?” Derec demanded.

The robot’s answer was patient and calm. “It is highly probable that the ship contains humans. We would not be permitted to use weapons against them.”

Derec stared at the robot, then at the screen. Unlike in careless fictions, there were no stabbing beams of brilliant light to betray the energies pouring down from the radar ship. There were only the winking lights, and the ground moving under Derec’s feet. “Are we in danger?”

“Yes.”

“How much?”

“The ship began its attack in the area of our only permanent surface installation, the antenna farm located 170 degrees east of the primary shaft—”

“These vibrations we’re feeling are from that far away?”

“Yes. The primary assault was successful and communications are out. A number of tunnels in the region have apparently collapsed. Firing pattern now appears to be random. The ship is currently in a nearly synchronous orbit with a slippage of two degrees per minute.”

“So in less than ninety minutes they’ll be overhead.”

“That is correct.”

It was obvious to Derec that he could wait no longer to act. If the ship breached the complex’s pressure envelope while he was still in the E-cell, he would never get out. The breathers couldn’t keep him alive in a vacuum.

And there was another danger, just as acute—that the power would be interrupted or the lifts disabled, and he would be trapped on the warehouse level. Even in low gravity he did not think he could climb up a lift shaft by hand.

Not that running about on the surface in an augment was as attractive a proposition as it had been a short time ago. The chances were that he would be taken not for a prisoner trying to escape but for an enemy to be destroyed. Even so, dying buried in the icy heart of the asteroid was infinitely less appealing than dying out in the open.

“This logic path that you devised—am I correct in thinking that you and Monitor 5 are the only Supervisors who were able to follow it without hitting a First Law conflict?”

“Yes.”

“Why? Why you?”

“My experience with human beings has provided me with a more sophisticated perspective on their nature and behavior.”

“You’ve had contact with other humans? Besides me?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“I am not permitted to say,”

Dead end. “Are the other robots even aware of what you asked me to try to do?”

“No.”

“How were you going to destroy the complex?”

“The material used to line all the tunnel walls contains an explosive. Once all the other Supervisors have been destroyed, the last Monitor and Analyst will together transmit the trigger signal. The resulting explosion should cause the entire excavated portion of the asteroid to subside.”

“I see,” Derec said. Great, he thought to himself. If I stay in the complex, the raiders will bring it down on my head. If I leave, the robots will blow it up under my feet.

Unless—

Unless there was some way to get off the surface, some source of thrust adequate to give him and his augment escape velocity. Considering the weakness of the asteroid’s gravity, escape velocity did not amount to much. He could probably put a ball in orbit just by throwing it as hard as he could. The leg servos of the augmented suit were likely powerful enough to permit him to literally jump clear.

Unfortunately, the safety regs on augment design required governors on the leg servos to prevent someone from trying exactly that. But what engineers had joined together, tinkerers could tear asunder—

At that moment, a bright flare seemed to appear on the body of the ship, and an instant later the energy beam burned out the eyes of the camera unit relaying the picture. Another camera some distance away took over, and the low angle at which it was focused showed not only the ship but the bilious clouds boiling off the surface where its weapons were trained.

The sight spurred Derec to action. “There doesn’t seem to be any escape for any of us,” he lied, wearing his best look of resignation. “I guess there’s nothing else for me to do but go prepare to die. I would be grateful if you could grant me privacy while I carry out the appropriate rituals.”

The lie passed. “I do not fully understand the purpose of such rituals,” the robot said, “but I will respect your privacy.”

Derec did not need long to put his rapidly developing plan in motion. Returning to his cabin, he swept up the pillows off two of the bunks, then ran to the airlock with them cradled in his arms.

“Open.”

The sound of the inner seal opening brought Analyst 17 out of the wardroom, but by then it was too late. Derec stepped inside the lock, and the door closed behind him.

“Cycle,” he said, fumbling with the straps of a breather.

When the outer door opened, he draped the pillows over the bottom sill of the hatch and then stepped out over them. Just as Derec had expected, the pillows kept the outer door from sealing, interrupting the cycle and imprisoning the robot inside. He did not know how long it would hold, whether there was some way for the robot to override the lock system, and he did not wait around to find out.

The line at the smelter included Supervisors, but they took no notice of him as he passed by. He rode the lift up to Level Zero, where he discovered that Monitor 5 had been busy taking precautions against his return. Two of the augments were missing, vanished as though they had never been there. The third was wedged against the wall by one of the tracked carriers, which in turn was barricaded in place by a four-legged auger unit.

He did not think the suit was damaged—tampering with safety equipment would almost certainly invoke the First Law—but it was going to take a little getting to. And part of the problem would be Monitor 5. The robot was seated at the console when Derec arrived, and rose and started for Derec the moment he stepped off the lift and placed it on standby.

Their paths intersected when Derec was a few meters short of the carrier. “The surface is a restricted area,” the robot said.

“I know that,” Derec said, circling and staying out of reach of the robot’s hands. “This equipment is improperly stored. I’m going to take care of it.”

But Monitor 5 was not going to be put off that easily.

“You may not leave. You are in no danger here,” it said, reaching for him.

Derec backed away and scrambled up the steps into the enclosed operator’s station. “Wrong. If I stay here, I’ll be killed when the ship destroys the station.”

“We will protect you.”

Derec wasted no time or breath arguing the point. “You can’t even protect yourselves,” he said, and slammed and locked the door.

The operator’s interface was standard, and the functions of those few controls which weren’t were clear at a glance. He touched the power switch, and the display came alive with information on the vehicle’s status. The most important item was near the bottom:

POWER CELL. . . . . .100,000 Kw . . . OK

The robot was politely knocking on the window and trying to attract Derec’s attention, but Derec ignored it. With a touch on one of two small joysticks in the armrest at his right hand, Derec unshipped the small crane which lay crosswise behind the control cab.

Since the controls had been designed primarily for robots with their fine motor control, Derec found them a little touchy. But the crane was semi-automatic, so when he had managed to swing the boom out over the backend of the carrier and bring the auger in range of the crane’s camera, all he had to do was say, “Pick it up.” The crane handled the rest.

Monitor 5 seemed slow to realize what was happening. Derec couldn’t decide if that was because it was still experiencing some internal conflict, or if he was just seeing the difference between a Monitor and an Analyst. But when Derec lifted the auger off the floor of the chamber and began to swing it out of the way, the robot suddenly became agitated.

“Analyst 17 was in error,” it said, grasping the door latch and shaking violently. “Derec—you cannot escape. You cannot leave. I am required to protect you. I am responsible.”

Saying nothing, Derec used the dangling mass of the auger to brush the robot away from the side of the carrier and back it toward the wall. The robot’s protestations went up in volume, but Derec did not stop until he had gently pinned the robot against the wall ten meters to the left of where it had done the same to the augment.

“Reverse slow,” Derec said, and the carrier crawled away from the wall. “Stop. Standby.”

He jumped out and ran to the augment. As he wrestled the suit away from the wall, Monitor 5 was struggling to extricate itself. It was a race Derec had to win.

Finally the access door was clear, and Derec levered himself inside. At that moment, Monitor 5 clambered to the top of the auger, free from its makeshift prison. But it was too late to stop him. The access door was closing to seal Derec in the suit.

“Power on,” he said.

His next objective was the open control cab on the other side of the carrier, meant for use by workers in augments. But before he could reach it, Monitor 5 was again trying to block his way.

“I don’t want to harm you,” Derec said. “You can’t stop me. You’ve done your duty by trying. Now stand aside.”

“You are attempting to commit suicide. I am not required to comply with your orders under these circumstances.”

“I’m trying to save myself,” Derec said. “If you really want me to live, you’ll step aside and give me a chance.”

“I will take you to a safe place within the community—”

“There are no safe places here!” Derec shouted. “Don’t you understand?”

“I cannot allow—”

“I can’t stand here and debate it,” Derec said. “I’m sorry.”

As he spoke, he swung the right grapple of the suit in a sweeping arc that caught the robot in the neck and sent it sprawling. But Derec had barely taken three steps when it was back again, clawing at the suit’s emergency panel.

This time Derec reached down and grabbed the robot’s right leg, upending it and dropping it on its back. Catching its ankle with the other grapple, Derec pinched down hard until he heard the sounds of metal crumpling. When he released his grip, the robot’s leg was crippled, the foot frozen at an odd angle.

Derec climbed into the open cab unimpeded. As he backed the carrier away from the wall and turned it toward the ramp, he saw Monitor 5 still lying on the floor where he had left it, vainly trying to repair the damage Derec had done. It’s slitlike scanners followed Derec and the carrier across the chamber.

It was still watching him, its gaze somehow forlorn and somehow accusing, when Derec drove the carrier up through the lock and out onto the surface.

CHAPTER 7

FRIEND OR FOE

After his time underground, it seemed strange to have the infinite open sky of space overhead. The sun, a tiny orange disk, hung low in the sky. Barely twenty degrees above the horizon, it cast long shadows into the depressions. The sky was bright with stars, but no planets declared themselves to Derec’s eye.

He did not know how long it would take to make the modifications to the augment. He only knew that the raider ship’s orbit was bringing it closer, and he had to be done before it arrived. He knew too that the robots would be pursuing him in a short-sighted effort to protect him. It was as though the jaws of a vise were closing on him. Somehow he had to squirm away or die.

He only drove far enough over the rugged, frozen terrain to separate himself from the potential target of the complex entrance. Then he parked the carrier half in shadow on a valley floor and started off on foot across the frozen wastes. Though he was sacrificing speed in giving up the carrier, the vehicle almost certainly contained a tracking transponder that would lead the robots right to him.

As soon as he was on foot, he began looking for the right place to hole up while working on the suit. He did not need sunlight for what he had to do, since the augment had its own worklamps. A shadowed hollow, a darkened crevice, a pitch-black ice cave—any of those would hide him without hindering his efforts. But the better hidden he was, the less warning he would have about the approach of the robots or the raiders. There was no having it both ways.

While Derec hiked across the frozen terrain and equivocated, he used the augment’s omnidirectional radio to send a series of distress calls. Derec did not know if the signals would carry over the horizon to the raider, and he feared that they would lead the robots to him. But he had to try, had to give the raiders a chance and a reason to save him.

“Clear channel, code 1. To all ships: pilot marooned, requires pickup. Respond if in range. To all ships—”

Eventually Derec settled on a fissure in an ice cliff that faced back the way he had come. From there, he had a fair view of the terrain, except for what was blocked by the larger crags and mounds. And he had a clear view of the sky from the horizon on the northwest to the horizon on the northeast.

“Diagnostic library,” he said.

The lower half of the bubblelike viewport turned opaque and a list of subsystems appeared on it in bright yellow letters. He scanned down the list quickly.

“Motive systems.”

One of the items near the middle of the list flashed twice, and then the entire list was replaced by another. In the same manner, Derec worked his way through the help screens until the circuit and logic paths of the subcontroller filled the half-display with a maze of fine tracings. Derec studied the system carefully, his lips pursed into a frown.

“Frost,” he muttered finally.

It was as he had feared. The governor was not a physical device that could be readily disconnected. It was a feedback loop in the leg servo circuits. The loop told the suit controller, “Do not allow the force applied by the drivers to exceed a force of x number of dynes persecond.” Small forces applied quickly were acceptable, as were large forces applied slowly. But large forces applied quickly, which was what he needed, were forbidden.

If he had had more time, there might have been a chance to reprogram the subcontrollers. But under the circumstances, it would have to be radical surgery. Fortunately, augments were designed to be field-repairable, a practice which had saved more than one laborer’s life.

The various “hands” which the augment could use were located in bulging closures on the suit’s thighs. Derec selected an illuminated micromanipulator for the right, and a spotweld laser for the left.

Just then the ground under and around him shook suddenly, bringing a minor avalanche of slow-falling particles down on the crown of the suit. “Clear,” he ordered. The bubble became a window again, revealing to Derec a chilling sight. The attacking spacecraft had climbed above the western horizon. It was still firing randomly, still carving out a path of destruction on the asteroid’s surface. Time was running out.

“Shut down subsystem twenty-four.” That was it: he was committed. With the leg controllers powered down, Derec could no longer walk.

The modifications included burning through three circuit traces and fusing a fourth to a neighboring circuit as a shunt. Accuracy with the tiny laser was absolutely critical. A misfire could destroy enough circuits to cripple the augment permanently.

With the help of the augment’s pointing guide, Derec completed the work on the right leg without mishap. But by the time he was ready to start on the left, the vibrations from the more powerful explosions were more than strong enough to disturb his aim. As he stood trying to outguess the shaking ground, a familiar voice intruded:

“Derec, please listen. Derec, you must stop. This is madness—”

Two hundred meters away on the slope of the mound due north of him was a robot. It was Monitor 5, waving its arms and advancing directly toward where Derec stood. It was walking easily, with no sign of the damage Derec had inflicted on its leg.

In the same glance, Derec saw that the reason the shaking was stronger was that the raider ship was much closer, more nearly overhead than he had expected. Once again he was trapped between the raiders, who would rescue him by killing him, and the robots, who would kill him by rescuing him.

“Go away!” Derec hissed.

“Derec, you must return to the compound. You are in danger here.”

The raider ship seemed to have taken notice of the robot, for the plain between Monitor 5 and the cliff where Derec stood suddenly came under a barrage of pinpoint laser impacts.

These were not the high-intensity weapons which were shaking the ground, and mercifully, the gunners did not seem to be targeting Derec. But the surface in this area was nearly all ice, and volatile. One blast boiled away the top of the mound behind the robot. Another gouged a deep trench between the robot and Derec.

Derec did not think that would stop Monitor 5, and he was right. The robot scrambled down into the trench before the billow of gas could even dissipate, and Derec lost sight of it.

He could not afford to worry about the robot. Setting his jaw determinedly, Derec went back to work on the left subcontroller. Using the body rigidity and autocontrol of the augment to the fullest, he made short work of it. The three unwanted circuits vaporized in tiny puffs of atomic metal. The two parallel traces melted and merged into one.

“Derec!” Monitor 5 called suddenly. “It’s here! In the ice! I’ve found it!”

Derec looked up. The firing had stopped, and there was no sign of the robot. “Close the panels,” he said, then tongued the radio switch. “Monitor 5, go back to the installation. There’s nothing you can do for me out here.”

Just then, a metallic arm appeared above the lip of the trench, the hand clutching a small silver object. A moment later Monitor 5 struggled out of the trench. Starting toward Derec, Monitor 5 raised the silver object triumphantly overhead in one hand.

“The key is here, Derec. You must take it—”

The robot’s triumph did not last long. The raider ship was now a great ominous mass directly overhead. Monitor 5 had barely taken a step when the laser fire started up again. Red targeting beams danced like spotlights on a stage on the ice around it.

For a moment it seemed as though the robot was going to escape destruction. Then, a dozen strides from the foot of the cliff, a laser tracked a fiery line across the robot’s torso. An instant later, Monitor 5 disappeared in a silent explosion, all blue-green flame and disintegrating metal.

Disappeared—but not completely. The explosion sent pieces flying in all directions. One of the largest, spinning so rapidly Derec could not tell what it was, came cartwheeling toward him. As it struck the ground and skidded to a stop, Derec saw what it was: Monitor 5’s right arm, from the shoulder joint to the fingers.

And still gripped tightly in those fingers was the shining silver object—a rectangle perhaps five centimeters by fifteen centimeters, the size of a remote controller or a memory cartridge.

Could this be the object that the robots were so obsessively searching for all this time? If so, then why had Monitor 5’s last act been to try to give it to Derec?

For a moment Derec hesitated. To retrieve the object was an additional risk in an enterprise which was already too risky. But he knew that it was impossible for him to simply leave it lying there. Ripping the specialized end effectors from the augment’s arms, Derec slapped the general-purpose grapples back in place.

“Power up system twenty-four,” he snapped, and the sole red lamp on the augment’s status board turned to green.

His descent down the slope to where the arm rested was a controlled fall at best. With the leg servos jimmied, Derec could not control a walking gait. But he got there all the same, seizing the arm and the artifact in his right hand and locking the grapple.

Gathering his feet under himself, Derec glanced upward to gauge the distance and angle to the raider ship. He lifted his feet on the control pads, and the suit went into a crouch. He jammed his feet down hard, and the powerful legs of the augment kicked out with all their unrestrained might. Like a tiny spacecraft, the augment launched itself from the surface, carrying Derec toward a rendezvous with the raider ship.

One way or another, I’m coming aboard—

Suddenly the entire surface of the asteroid seemed to shudder and rise up in a convulsion. The robots had triggered their self-destruct at last, and the explosion sent a hailstorm of fragments blasting outward like space shrapnel.

Almost immediately, the weapons pods of the raider ship sprang to life. At first Derec thought that they were aiming at him, trying to get him before he was lost in the deluge of ice and rock boulders which had erupted from the asteroid. Then it seemed as though the gunners were targeting the debris itself, the smaller and faster-moving bits of which were already overtaking him.

Whichever was their goal, the net effect was the same: when he was within about a hundred meters of the nearest part of the ship and beginning to scan for a place to latch on with his free hand, the entire bubble faceplate of the augment lit up with a blue light that crawled in all directions like something alive.

Derec’s limbs went numb and his senses went wild. He had only enough time to think Not again! before the light faded and darkness took him away once more.

Despite all the tumult which had surrounded him as he had lost consciousness, Derec came back to awareness calmly and easily. He could not say how long he had been unconscious, but it had to have been more than a few minutes. He was no longer outside the alien ship. For that matter, he was no longer in the augment. Instead, he was lying on his back on hard decking, staring up at a ceiling filled with small doors.

Propping himself up on his elbows, Derec surveyed his surroundings. He was in a narrow room, almost a corridor. The long walls were covered with more doors—storage bins?—and there was an exit at each end—or at least a tall metal ellipse which might be an exit.

Derec did not spend much time wondering about the exits or the contents of the storage bins. A large animal covered with mottled brown and gold fur squatted on its haunches nearby, watching Derec. It reminded Derec of a dog, like an undersized Saint Bernard with the alert eyes of a wolf. But the face was too flat, the ears too high and pointed, and the forelegs ended not in paws but in grayskinned sausagelike fingers.

Whatever it was, he had never seen anything like it before. Moving slowly so as not to alarm the creature, Derec sat up. When he did, the creature sidled forward a step and cocked its head.

“Arr ‘u aw right?” it asked in a guttural voice.

Derec could not have been more surprised if the creature had suddenly molted and turned into a butterfly. Not only speech, but Standard—however curiously accented—

I—I think so,” he stammered.

“That iss good,” the creature said. “Aranimas will be pleased. ‘Ee did not want ‘u ‘armed.”

“The best way to guarantee that is not to shoot at people.”

“Eff we ‘ad been shooting at ‘u, we would ‘ave ‘it ‘u,” the alien said with a tooth-bearing grimace that might have been a smile or a threat display.

Though that message was garbled, other body language was coming through more clearly. The alien’s crouch struck Derec as a posture from which it could spring quickly. Seated, he was at a disadvantage both in agility and reach, a fact which he felt keenly when he met the alien’s gaze. Their eyes were on the same level, but Derec felt threatened, intimidated.

Still moving slowly, Derec felt for the wall behind him and hauled himself to his feet. The alien’s only reaction was to rise with him. When both were standing, the tips of the alien’s ears reached only to Derec’s chest, and the psychological comfort that went with being the taller shifted to Derec.

“What are you?” he demanded.

“ ’Urr friend,” the alien said. “What morr do ‘u need to know?”

“There’s a hundred forty colonized worlds, and there’s nothing like you on any of them.”

“Wherr I come from therr arr two ‘undred colonized worlds, and nothing like ‘u on any of them,” the alien said, grimacing again. Thistime, the circumstances seemed to call more clearly for a smile, and Derec decided that’s what it was. “Come. Aranimas iss waiting.”

“Who is Aranimas?”

“Aranimas iss ship’s boss. ‘Ull see,” the alien said, turning away and starting toward the far door.

“Wait,” Derec called. “What’s your name?”

The alien stopped and turned. It opened its mouth and out poured a torrent of sounds not in any human alphabet—like a growl punctuated with a sibilant hiss and sounds like bubbles popping. Then the alien smiled-grimaced. “Can say?”

Derec shook his head sheepishly. “No.”

“Thought not. Come, then. Not wise to keep Aranimas waiting.”

Taking a brisk loping pace, the alien led Derec through three more compartments identical to the one he had awakened in. Derec wondered briefly about the mismatch between his escort and the design of the ship they were in. The overhead storage bins were far above Derec’s head; he doubted if he could reach them even by jumping. Unless the caninoid alien were as agile a climber as a terrestrial primate, it would need a ladder to get to their contents.

Efficient use of space—terrible ergonomic design, Derec thought critically.

They came to a tiny hexagonal room barely large enough for both of them to stand in. It seemed to be a hub between intersecting corridors, since each wall framed an identical door. The alien paused for Derec to catch up, then continued on through.

“Where do the other doors lead?”

“Can’t tell ‘u,” the alien said cheerfully.

Beyond the hub, the interior of the ship had a different character. There were just as many walls and small spaces, but the walls were either of a coarse mesh, almost more like fencing, or had large windowlike cutouts. Together the mesh and the cutouts provided long lines of sight and the feeling not of small spaces but of a large busy one.

The largest space within this deck seemed to be straight ahead. Peering over the alien’s shoulder, Derec caught glimpses of what seemed to be a control center, and of a figure seated at the console with its back to them. There was something familiar and human about the figure, and something wrong and disturbing at the same time.

As soon as the caninoid led him into the control center, Derec knew why he was getting mixed messages, and who—or what—the storage corridors had been designed for. The alien sitting at the console was decidedly humanoid, and Derec could describe him in very human terms—a slender build, thin neck, almost hairless head, pale skin.

But even sitting down, Aranimas was as tall as Derec, and he had the arm span of a condor. The entire horseshoe-shaped console, easily three human arm spans wide, was within his comfortable reach.

Beyond and above Aranimas was a huge curved viewing screen on which eight different views of the asteroid’s surface were being projected. Superimposed on most of them were blue-lined targeting grids and small characters Derec took to be numbers. Some of the characters were changing constantly, and others seemed to change in response to Aranimas’s hands moving over the console and to the endless pattern of explosions and groundslides on the surface.

“Praxil, denofah, praxil mastica,” he was saying, apparently into a microphone. “Deh feh opt spa, nexori.”

Derec took a step forward. “Aranimas?”

The alien turned his head slightly to the left, and a chill went through Derec. The lizardlike eye that peered back at him was set in a raised socket on the side of Aranimas’s head. From behind, Derec had mistaken the eye bumps for ears.

“Sssh!” the caninoid alien said nervously, grasping Derec’s hand and pulling him back. “Don’t interrupt the boss. ‘E’ll talk to ‘u when ‘e’s ready.”

Aranimas turned back to his work and resumed speaking. Derec had the impression that he was issuing orders, chiding, prodding, reprimanding, assigning targets and grading gunners. There was nothing moving on the surface and nothing stirring below, and yet the carnage went on.

After a few minutes of watching, Derec could no longer restrain himself. “There’s nothing down there anymore,” Derec blurted. “They blew it all up. What are you doing this for?”

“Prrractice,” Aranimas said. His voice was high-pitched and he trilled the “r” sound.

It went on for another ten minutes that way, millions of watts of energy expended uselessly against an inert and lifeless world. Then Aranimas ran a fingertip along a row of switches, and the screens went blank.

“Rijat,” he said, and turned his chair to face them. “What is your name?”

“Derec.” Only one of Aranimas’s eyes was trained on him; the other glanced around randomly. Derec could not imagine what it would be like to view the world that way. Did the alien’s brain switch back and forth between the two inputs, like a director choosing a camera shot? Or did it somehow integrate the two images into one?

“This device you used to attack my ship,” Aranimas continued. “What was it?”

“An augmented worksuit—altered to allow the leg servos to operate at full power. But I wasn’t attacking you. I was escaping.”

Aranimas’s other eye pivoted forward and focused on Derec. “Were you a prisoner?”

“I was stranded on the asteroid in a survival pod. The robots found me and then wouldn’t let me go. I had to steal that equipment from them to get away.”

“And where did you come from before you were stranded?”

“I don’t know,” Derec said, frowning. “I can’t remember anything before that.”

“Don’t lie to ‘im,” the caninoid whispered. “It makes ‘im angry.”

“I’m not lying,” Derec said indignantly. “As far as I can tell, five days ago I didn’t exist. That’s how much I know about who I am.”

While Derec spoke, Aranimas reached inside the folds of his clothing and extracted a small golden stylus. Seeing it, the caninoid cringed and turned half away.

“Oh, no,” it whined. “Too late.”

Aranimas pointed the stylus at Derec’s side, and a pale blue light began to dance over the entire surface of Derec’s hand. He screamed in pain and dropped to his knees. It was as though he had trust his hand into a raging furnace, except that no skin was being destroyed and no nerve endings deadened. The pain just went on and on, sapping his strength until even the screams caught in his throat, too feeble to free themselves.

“I know something of the rules of governing robots and humans,” Aranimas said calmly while Derec writhed on the floor. “Humans build robots to serve them. Robots follow human direction. If you were the only human on this asteroid, then it follows that the robots here were under your command, and serving your purpose.”

Aranimas tipped the stylus ceilingward, and the blue glow vanished. The pain vanished with it, except for the memory. Derec lay on his side and sucked in air in great gasping breaths.

“I will know who you are and what you know about the object you brought aboard,” Aranimas said quietly. “To end the pain, you need only tell me the truth.”

His face as emotionless as his trilling voice, Aranimas pointed the stylus at Derec once more.

CHAPTER 8

TEST OF LOYALTY

At some point, it ended. But by that time Derec was in no condition to know clearly why Aranimas had interrupted his torture. He had only a vague awareness of Aranimas’s going away, and of being dragged away from the control center by the caninoid.

Unable to either resist or help, he was taken to another section of the subdivided compartment and laid on a thinly padded board. He lay there drifting in and out of consciousness, sometimes aware of the caninoid crouching solicitously beside him, sometimes aware of nothing but his own confusion and fatigue.

In one of his lucid moments he became aware that the alien was holding a cup of clear liquid for him, and struggled up on one elbow.

“ ’U bettrr tell Aranimas what ‘e wants to know,” the caninoid whispered as it offered the cup.

Derec tipped his head forward and reached for the cup. His right hand trembled uncontrollably, so he had to use his left to steady the cup as he sipped at the cool liquid. It was sweet, like a thin honey, and bathed his ravaged throat with relief.

“How tough do you think humans are?” he croaked. “If I knew anything I’d have told him in the first five minutes. If he keeps this up he’s going to kill me. Why won’t he believe me?”

The caninoid glanced nervously around before answering. “Do ‘u know Narwe?”

Derec could not tell if the name was of a species or an individual, but it did not matter to his answer. “No.”

“Aranimas knows Narwe. Narwe ‘ass to be forced to be honest. If ‘u ask Narwe a question, it will lie or pretend it doesn’t understand or hass forgotten. Hurt Narwe enough and it always tell.”

“I’m not a Narwe!” Derec protested weakly. “Is he too stupid to see that?”

“Aranimas thinks ‘u use the Narwe trick,” the caninoid said. “Besides, Aranimas iss very angry.”

“Why is he angry at me? I didn’t do anything to him.”

“When Aranimas iss angry, everyone in trouble,” the alien said. “Gunners werr not supposed to destroy robot nest.”

“They didn’t. The robots did it themselves.”

“Doesn’t matter. Aranimas wanted to capture robots to work forr ‘im.”

Derec closed his eyes and laid back. “I’m afraid there won’t be much to capture.”

“Aranimas went to see what salvage team brought back,” the alien said. “Eff truly not much, ‘e’ll be worse when ‘e comes back.”

“Can’t you help me?” Derec pleaded. “You believe me, don’t you?”

“Not my job to believe or not believe,” the caninoid shrugged. “Can’t ‘elp.”

With a sigh, Derec lowered himself back to a reclining position and closed his eyes. “Then he is going to kill me, because I don’t have anything to tell him. And maybe that’s just as well.”

The caninoid reclaimed the cup from Derec’s hand and stood up. “Perfect Narwe thought. Don’t let Aranimas ‘ear ‘u.”

Dozing, the first Derec knew of Aranimas’s return was when the alien seized him by the arm and hauled him roughly to a sitting position.

“It’s time to stop playing,” Aranimas said. “I grow impatient.”

“That was playing?” Derec said lightly. “You people have some funny ideas about games. Remind me not to play cutthroat eight-card with you.”

At that, the caninoid, crouching in a doorway a few meters away, closed its eyes and began to shake its head. Aranimas’s answer was to reach inside his clothing for the stylus.

“Wait,” Derec said quickly, holding up a hand palm out. “You don’t need that.”

“Have you decided to share your knowledge after all?”

“I always was willing to. You just didn’t want what I had to offer.”

“I will know who you are and what you know about the object you brought aboard,” Aranimas said.

Derec slid off the edge of the bench and found his feet. Aranimas still dwarfed him, but even so, he felt better standing. “The fact is, you know as much as I do about who I am, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you knew more than I do about the silver box. But there is something I know more about than you do, and that’s robots. How did your prospecting go?”

One of Aranimas’s eyes cast a baleful glance in the direction of the caninoid, which hunched its shoulders and retreated from the doorway. “They brought back fragments only,” Aranimas said. “Your robots were very efficient about destroying themselves.”

“They weren’t my robots,” Derec said. “But why don’t you show me what you have?”

Aranimas lowered his arms to his side and slowly massaged his knees with his hands while he weighed Derec’s proposition. “Yes,” he said finally. “That will be a good test of your intentions and usefulness. I will have you build me a robot.”

Derec’s face paled. “What?”

“If you truly do not know who you are, then you have no loyalties or obligations to any other master. When you have built me a robot servant I will know that you have accepted your place serving me.”

Derec knew better than to pick that moment to make a noble speech about freedom and choice, but he still could not simply accept Aranimas’s terms. “What if I can’t build you a robot out of what you have? I said I knew a lot about them. I didn’t say I could manufacture one out of good intentions. I need certain key parts—”

“If you fail, I will know that you are either unreliable or have no usefulness to me at all,” Aranimas said, “and that I should not waste valuable consumables keeping you alive.”

Derec swallowed hard. “What are we waiting for? Show me your inventory.”

Aranimas had not been minimizing the problem when he termed what the scavengers had recovered from the asteroid “fragments.” I would have said scrap, he thought as he stood in the ship’s hold surveying the raiders’ paltry booty. The largest intact piece was the one Derec himself had brought aboard—Monitor 5’s arm. The next largest was a Supervisor’s knee joint. Chances were that it was from Monitor 5 as well.

No other piece was bigger than the palm of Derec’s hand: a badly scorched regulator, an optical sensor with a cracked lens, bits of structural forms like shards of broken pottery. There were no positronic brains and no microfusion powerpacks—the two absolutely indispensable items.

And all the Crown’s horses and all the Crown’s men couldn’t put the robots together again, he thought. “Is this all you have?” he asked with a heavy heart.

Mercifully, it was not. In one of the storage corridors, he was shown two tall lockers, each of which contained a nearly intact robot.

“I see this isn’t a new hobby of yours,” Derec said, stepping forward to examine the collection. The new robots were of a familiar domestic design. He would know more about where they had come from and what they had been used for when he used a microscanner on the serial number plates found at various sites on the robots’ bodies. Clearly, though, he was not the first human the raiders had encountered.

There seemed to be enough good parts to make about one and a half robots. One of the robots was headless, and the mounting circle on the neck was twisted and deformed. That told Derec something about the circumstances under which the robots had been acquired.

More important at the moment, it meant there was only one positronic brain. But there was no guarantee that it was functional. The upper torso of the other robot was torn open at the chest as though by some sort of projectile weapon, and the right shoulder area was rippled as though it had been seared by intense heat. Not only did that hold out little hope for the key components located in the torso, but it also virtually guaranteed that the brain’s powerdown had been anything but orderly.

But at least there was something to work with, and an outside chance, at least, of success. Derec stepped back from the lockers and turned to look up at Aranimas.

“So what do you have in the way of an engineering lab around here?” he asked with a breeziness that was more show than real. “I’m ready to get to work.”

Aranimas nodded gravely. “I will give you that opportunity.”

Answering Derec’s query about a place to work meant going deeper into the confusing maze of the raider ship. Unlike when he had been inside the asteroid, Derec found it impossible to retain any sense of direction. There were too many turns, too short sight lines, and too few absolute references. Once he lost track of where he was in relation to the command center, it was over.

Despite being lost, Derec was still collecting useful information with every step. He learned that different parts of the ship had slightly different atmospheres, and the storage corridors acted as interlocks between them. In one section, something in the air made Derec feel as though a furry ball were caught in his throat. In another, yellowish tears ran from Aranimas’s eyes. Only the caninoid seemed at home in all the atmospheres.

The ship was not only a maze, but a zoo as well, featuring at least four species. Derec sawfive of Aranimas’s kin, all of high rank to judge by the activities Derec saw them engaged in. Curiously, the caninoid seemed to be the only one of his kind aboard.

Most numerous were the gaunt-faced Narwe, several of whom had been recruited by Aranimas to carry the robot parts. The Narwe were short bald-headed bipeds with gnarled skull ridges like false horns, which made them look fierce and formidable. But it was clearly only protective coloring, for Aranimas and the caninoid alike cuffed and bullied the Narwe without fear.

The fourth species was the most interesting and the most elusive. Inside the compartment where Aranimas’s eyes began to tear, Derec caught a glimpse of a strange five-limbed wall-clinging creature not unlike a giant sea star. It retreated as they approached, and was gone from sight by the time they reached the spot.

Fascinated as Derec was by the parade of alien biologies, he was also concerned about having so casual a contact with them. He knew that his own body was host to a rich biotic community: bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites. He did not know just how different the aliens were from him. He hoped they were wildly different. The more similar their fundamental structure was to his, the greater the risk that his symbiotes could endanger them or theirs endanger him.

He could only hope that Aranimas had either taken precautions or determined that no precautions were necessary. He based that hope on the fact that the raiders had evidently had some previous contact with humans. The scavenged robots and the aliens’ command of Standard proved that.

But that was another mystery for his lengthening list. Derec was positive that human beings had never crossed paths with even one intelligent alien lifeform, much less with four of them. To understand interplanetary politics, he had to know history and economics, but not xenobiology.

Did the raiders’ presence mean that he was far out on the fringes of human space? Or had knowledge of the contacts been made a state secret, meant only for those with a need to know? Were the raiders pirates, prospectors, or pioneers? Had they perhaps come looking for the same thing the robots had been looking for? And having found it, were they carrying him toward their home, or his?

They were questions with serious consequences. Tensions were high enough between Earth and the Spacers without any random factors to jumble the picture. An attack of the sort Derec had already witnessed, directed against one of the many human worlds with no planetary defense net, could bring on war.

Which brought Derec back to the silver artifact. If it was as important as the robots’ search for it implied, if it was powerful enough or important enough for the raiders to come after it, then it was too important and too powerful to be left in the raiders’ hands. As much as he hated to be thinking about anyone’s problems but his own, Derec had an obligation to try to reclaim it for humanity.

Mercifully, the lab was located in a section with a normal atmosphere, though the air was a bit warm and dry. While Aranimas settled into a chair and supervised the Narwe’s arrangement of the robot parts on the open areas of the floor, Derec browsed the workbench and wall racks with the caninoid at his elbow to answer questions. By the time he finished, the Narwe were gone.

“Explain each step as you perform it,” Aranimas said, crossing his arms as though settling in.

“Do you intend to sit there and watch?”

“I intend to learn what you know.”

“Then I hope you’re a patient sort,” Derec said.

“According to your story, it took you only a short time to convert an article of clothing into an escape propulsion system,” Aranimas said. “This should require even less time, since you only need to turn a robot into a robot.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Derec said, throwing his hands in the air. “I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do it at all, much less in an hour or two.”

“Explain the problem,” Aranimas said.

Derec bit back a laugh. In the hopes of loosening the noose Aranimas had around his neck, Derec had been rehearsing complaints that the equipment in the lab was ill suited, too crude, anything to lower Aranimas’s expectations.

But his dismay was real, not manufactured. He had prepared himself for instruments designed for nonhuman hands, to having to have one of the raiders at his elbow coaching him. But he had not been prepared to do without what he thought of as the basics.

“The problem is you don’t have the right tools,” Derec said. “I need a diagnostic bench, an etcher, micromanipulators—There’s nothing in here that would even pass for a chip mask or circuit tracer—”

Even as he spoke, he realized that he should not have been surprised. Aranimas would not be so curious about robots, would not need to have Derec repair them, if the culture which he represented were capable of making them. The fact that the raiders employed gunners instead of autotargeting systems should have tipped him off that their computer technology was deficient.

Aranimas stood. “Such tools as are available will be brought to you. Describe what you need to Rrullf”—Aranimas’s shortened version of the caninoid’s name was almost pronounceable—”and she will bring them to you or take you to them.”

She? Derec cast a surprised glance at the caninoid. Interesting.

“Thank you,” he said to Aranimas, and started to turn away. As he did, a thousand bees settled between his shoulder blades and began to sting him wildly. Gasping, his knees buckling, he grabbed for the edge of the workbench to keep from collapsing on the floor. He did not need to see to know that Aranimas had the stylus trained at the middle of his back.

“Do not make the mistake of trying to deceive me,” Aranimas said coldly as the pain held Derec firmly in its grip. “I may be ignorant of your art, but I am not foolish.”

“I—I—”

“Save your words of apology,” Aranimas said as the bees flew away. “Show me results.”

Doubled over the workbench, Derec turned his head in time to see Aranimas return the stylus to whatever hidden pocket was reserved for it. Clearing the phlegm from his throat, he nodded weakly. “Right, boss.”

When Aranimas was gone, the caninoid’s face twisted into its macabre grin. “ ’Urr lucky Aranimas wants robots so bad. Otherwise I guess ‘u be dead now.”

“Thanks for the cheery thought,” Derec said. “What exactly does he want them for?”

“Can’t ‘u figure? Aranimas wants to replace Narwe with robots. Aranimas iss sick of Narwe crying scenes.”

“Do the Narwe know what he has in mind?”

“Narwe been on best behavior since the boss told them,” the caninoid said cheerfully. “What ‘u need to work?”

But Derec had been thinking about something else. The caninoid was treating him in a way that could only be called friendly, and was the best prospect for an ally aboard the raider ship besides. If they were going to be working together, it was time for Derec to stop thinking of the alien as it. Or even she.

“First things first. I can’t say your name even as well as Aranimas does—”

“Thass pretty low standard.”

“—but I have to call you something. Can you live with Wolruf?”

“Iss not my name, but I know who ‘u mean when ‘u say it.”

“That’s all I wanted. Wolruf, I’ve got some fine print to read. What can you find me to read it with?”

“I get ‘u something,” she promised.

The magnifying scanner that Wolruf came up with was an inspection instrument of some sort. It had a display screen rather than an eyepiece, a fixed focus, and a tiny field of view. But the incident lighting at the aperture highlighted perfectly the fine grooves of the serial number engraving, making up for all the other shortcomings.

With Wolruf peering over his shoulder, Derec scanned the fifteen lines of data. “Do you read Standard, too?”

“No,” Wolruf said. “Tell ‘u a secret—I learn Standard so I not ‘ave to lissen to Aranimas mangle my language.”

Derec laughed, and the sound startled Wolruf. “What I’m looking at is one of the robot’s identification gratings. It’ll tell me several things that will help me fix the damage the manufacturer, the model, the date of initialization, any customization parameters,” he said breezily.

He went on like that awhile longer, loading his explanation with as many technical terms as he could in the hopes of appearing to be open and cooperative while actually explaining nothing. He did not mention that if the robot were from Earth, the grating would also tell who owned it, or that the three cryptic lines of symbols at the bottom of the screen were the programming access codes and the initialization sequence, the keys that would allow him to do more than merely repair the robot, but to alter its programming.

“What does it say?”

“This one is a Ferrier Model EG,” Derec said, scanning. “Customized for valet service.” And personal defense, he added silently. A bodyguard robot. “Initialization date, Standard Year ‘83—”

Then he scanned a few words ahead and was struck dumb.

“What is it?” Wolruf asked. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” Derec managed to say. “The robot was registered on Aurora.”

“That iss one of ‘urr worlds?”

“Yes.”

“Iss that important?”

“No,” Derec said. “Let’s look at the other one.” But it was important, and his hands were trembling as he took the scanner in them and rose from his seat. He remembered Aurora. He remembered the World of the Dawn. Not the things that everyone knew—that it was the first Spacer world and long the preeminent one, that it was home to the highly regarded Institute of Robotics from which most advances in robotic science had emerged.

No, like a ray of light sneaking past the black curtain, Derec remembered Aurora as a place he had been: glimpses of a spaceport, a parklike city, a pastoral countryside. He was connected with it in some way, some way strong enough that the word alone had the power to break through the wall separating him from his past.

At last, he knew something about himself. He had been to Aurora. It was not much of a biography, but it was a beginning.

CHAPTER 9

ALLY

Without a diagnostic board or even a computer at his disposal, Derec had no choice but to activate the robot and rely on its own self-diagnostic capabilities. But before he could get even that far, he had a jigsaw puzzle to assemble.

The headless robot was an EX series, but the differences did not affect the parts Derec needed to borrow to make the EG whole. The active systems—as opposed to the merely structural—of any mass-produced robot were modular and standardized. It would not have been possible to produce them economically any other way. So the kidney-sized microfusion powerpack of the EX was a plug-compatible replacement for the damaged one inside the EG.

But the powerpack’s mounting cradle, which contained the interface for the primary power bus, had also been damaged by the fight which had downed the robot. Regrettably, the cradle had not been designed for field replacement, and it seemed to be attached to every other component inside the EG’s torso—and not by convenient micromagnetic fields. The manufacturer had settled for the less costly alternative of sonic welds.

Lacking the proper tools, swapping the cradles was a challenge. He practiced on the damaged cradle inside the EG, then used his hard-won expertise to transfer the undamaged one into the vacancy. That alone took more than two hours. But when he was done, it took less than two minutes to swap powerpacks.

Unfortunately, that did not end the matter. In all Ferrier models, the basic data library used by the robot was contained in removable memory cubes placed in a compartment just behind its “collarbone.” The robot’s extensive positronic memory was reserved completely for the business of learning from experience.

From the manufacturer’s standpoint, that arrangement meant that the positronic brains did not have to be specialized according to the robot’s function. From the owner’s viewpoint, it meant that their investment was protected against obsolescence or changing needs.

But from Derec’s perspective, it meant trouble. The headless robot had five cube slots, four of them occupied. For the EG, the numbers were seven and five. But the two empty slots and three of the occupied ones had been caught in the same blast that had damaged the power cradle.

There was no repairing them and no replacing them. But what was worse was that Derec was bound to use one of the two functional slots for the standard Systems cube, without which the robot would know nothing about its own structure and operation. He had five cubes packed full of data and logic routines, and he could only use one of them at a time. Eventually he settled on the Mathematics cube, concealing the Personal Defense cube for possible use at some future time.

Derec’s inventory of visible damage to the robot included severed cables that would render the right arm paralyzed and a frozen gimbal on one of the dual gyroscopes. But with power and the working library restored, there was only one truly critical part left to see to: the positronic brain.

In appearance, the brain was a three-pound lump of platinum-iridium. In function, it was the repository for the fundamental positromotive potentials governing the robot’s activity, for the temporary potentials which represented thought and decision, and for the pathways which represented learning.

What Derec was hoping was that the fundamental pathways had not been randomized, as could happen if the brain had been exposed to hard radiation. There was no hope for the robot’s experience base. The backup microcell, used to refresh the pathways while the robot was being serviced, had long since been exhausted and the pathways had long ago decayed. The robot would remember nothing of its previous service. But if the brain was undamaged, it should function normally when reinitiated.

Just like me—

Given the equipment available, the only way to test the condition of the positronic brain was to activate the robot and test it. For obvious reasons, that was dangerous. At one point in the history of robotics, robots had been designed to shut down when they detected any internal error conditions. But several hundred years of progress in robotics design had produced a different philosophy built around fault-tolerance and self-maintenance. He could not be sure what would happen.

By the time he was ready to find out, Wolruf had either grown bored or was obliged to go tend to some other duty. That was a fortunate turn, since when the robot was activated, it would be facing a situation that no robot had ever faced before. It would have to decide whether Aranimas and Wolruf were “human” enough that it was required to protect them and obey their orders.

Since robots were as a rule literal-minded to a fault, it should not have been a problem. Aranimas was clearly an alien, despite his superficially humanoid appearance. Wolruf was even more so.

Those who manufactured robots did not ordinarily limit the definition of a human being, but left it as broad as possible. A power plant worker in a max suit did not look human, but a robot would obey its order. Robots were not, could not be, completely literal. They did not judge merely on appearance. A three-year-old child was human, yet a robot would frequently decline its orders.

It was possible that the programming which permitted those distinctions would find some fundamental identity between the aliens and Derec. If there was any way of preventing that, Derec was determined to do so. Because of the First Law, the robot could not be used against him. But if the robot could be persuaded that the aliens were not entitled to protection under the First Law, he might be able to use the robot against Aranimas.

With some trepidation, Derec pressed the power reset. A moment later, all of the robot’s joints except those in the damaged arm stiffened. Its eyes lit up with a red glow that pulsed rhythmically.

“Alpha alpha epsilon rho,” Derec said, repeating the sequence of Greek letters which had appeared on the ID grating. “Sigma tau sigma.”

There was a brief pause, and then the robot’s eyes began to glow steadily. “My default language is Galactic Standard, Auroran dialect,” it said. “No other language banks are currently available. Is that acceptable, sir?”

Derec broke into a smile. After his frustrations with the robots on the asteroid, it was a pleasure to be addressed civilly again. “Auroran Galactic is fine.”

“Yes, sir. Who is my owner, sir?”

“I am,” Derec said. “You are never to acknowledge that to anyone. But if you ever receive conflicting orders from myself and another, my orders are always to take precedence.”

“Yes, sir. By what name may I call you, sir?”

For some reason, Derec resented having to supply the robot with his meaningless, casually adopted name. “Derec,” he said finally, unable to think of an alternative.

“Yes, sir. To what name would you like me to respond?”

Derec suppressed a bitter laugh. Who am I to tell you your name, when I can’t even tell myself mine? “So long as you are the only one on this ship, Alpha is name enough.”

“Thank you, Derec. During my power-on self-test I detected a number of error states. Would this be a convenient time to review them?”

“In a moment,” Derec said. “Can you scan this compartment?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are there any spyeyes here with us?”

“I detect no active sensors of any sort, Derec.”

“Good. Listen closely. I need to tell you something about what’s happening. You and I are on board a spaceship populated by hostile lifeforms. These lifeforms are a potential threat to both of us. Until I tell you otherwise, you are to immediately enter a passive wait-state any time we have company or I leave the lab.”

“I understand. You do not wish them to know that I am functional.”

“That’s right.”

“Is it possible that these wait-states will be of extended duration, sir?”

“It is.”

“Then may I ask if there are any problems to which I may devote myself during those periods?”

“I’m sure we’ll find some,” Derec said. “Right now, the problem is getting you in shape. Let’s have the first anomaly off your error list.”

The first that Derec knew of Wolrufs return was when the robot stiffened suddenly and its eyes went black. A few seconds later, the caninoid entered the lab and crossed to where Derec was seated. She stood at Derec’s elbow and peered briefly into the exposed inner mechanisms of the robot, then turned to him. She seemed less animated than she had been earlier.

“Aranimas would like a report on ‘urr progress.”

“You can tell Aranimas that I have reason to hope I’ll have a robot for him in a few days.”

“ ’Ow many days?”

“I don’t know,” Derec said, laying down the pen he had been using as a probe. “I also don’t know how much it’ll be able to do. I’ve replaced a few damaged components. Right now I’m trying to do something with the servo linkages for the right arm, which are really a mess. Was it you people who roughed up these robots, or did you find them this way?”

“Can’t say,” Wolruf said, and headed for the door. “I tell Aranimas.”

“Hold on a moment,” Derec said, standing. “You can also tell him that I don’t work around the clock. I need time to rest and a place to do it.”

“Rest ‘ard to get on Aranimas’s ship,” Wolruf said, gesturing toward the floor. “Sleep ‘ere.”

That was not an entirely unhappy prospect, since Derec had already determined that he had some privacy there. “What about a pillow, some kind of cushion?”

The caninoid made a sort of whistling sound that Derec read as a sigh. “I get ‘u something,” she said, and started to go.

“Am I going to be allowed to eat?” he called after her.

The sigh was a wheeze this time. “I get ‘u something.”

“Tell you what, Wolruf,” Derec said, drawing closer. “Why don’t you show me where the food is kept, so I can get it myself when I’m hungry? That’ll save you some running around on my account.”

Wolruf wrinkled her cheeks in surprise, then frowned. “Aranimas wants ‘u working, not running errands. Thass my job.”

“You’ve got enough things to do without all the extra work I’m creating,” Derec said on a hunch. “If Aranimas makes a fuss, I’ll tell him I insisted. If I’m going to do my best work, I’m going to need to get out of that lab from time to time just to clear my mind.”

Cocking her head, Wolruf considered. “Okay. I show ‘u.”

“Great. Ah—one more thing.” The thought of an alien Personal was an unpleasant one, but he was suddenly aware that there was some urgency. “I have—um—excretory needs. Do you also—ah—is there—”

Wolruf laughed, a sound like purring. “Of course. Come, I show ‘u that, too.”

There seemed to be fewer aliens afoot in the ship at that hour, which started Derec wondering about the sleep cycles observed by the various species aboard. The curiosity stayed in his mind while Wolruf showed him the Personal, identified to him the three foods in the pantry considered safe for him, and escorted him back to the lab. By that time, he was certain that she was fatigued, and when she left him, he was certain that it was for an appointment with a bed.

There was no lock on the lab door. There was no Narwe guard to note his comings and goings. The opportunity was there, if he wanted it. Wolruf would not disturb him. Perhaps Aranimas was now sleeping as well. Derec could scout the layout of the ship, snoop in some of the hundreds of storage bins he had seen.

Or perhaps Aranimas was waiting for a report from Wolruf, and might soon be coming to check Derec’s progress personally. Or perhaps he never slept. Perhaps his mind was structured in a way that he did not need the periodic “dumpings” dreams represented, his metabolism clocked at a steady pace rather than cycling through active and passive periods.

The uncertainty stilled Derec’s impulse to go exploring, at least for a time. Turning to the food he had carried back with him, he gnawed at a few of the thick crackerlike biscuits, ate most of the fatty mottled-blue paste, sipped at the honey juice. Though his taste buds regarded it all with suspicion, none of it alarmed his stomach.

When he was done, his own fatigue was pressing in on him. He placed Alpha in a wait-state, then unrolled the thin cushion in an open spot of floor and stretched out. The cushion did little to make the floorplates less hard. He supposed that Aranimas, slender as he was, would have found it entirely suitable. But Derec turned restlessly from back to side to stomach in a fruitless quest for a comfortable position.

How long had it been since he had slept? Thirty hours? Forty? He had started the day a reluctant prisoner of the robots, and now he was an even more reluctant prisoner of the raiders. I really should go snooping, he thought. He could not let the opportunity pass. Perhaps the absence of a guard was an oversight that would be corrected tomorrow.

I’ll just lie here for an hour or so, he told himself, make sure that Aranimas isn’t going to show up, give Wolruf a chance to settle in. Then it’ll be safe. I can rest a little while. This poor excuse for a bed is too hard to sleep on anyway—

He was wrong. One moment he was closing his eyes against the uncomfortably bright light which he had not been told how to douse. The next, he was rubbing sleep out of those eyes, gingerly stretching sore muscles, and bemoaning his own foul breath. The room was in semidarkness, but Wolruf was crouching in the doorway, silhouetted against the well-lit corridor.

“Iss it done yet?” Wolruf asked brightly.

“Eat space and die,” Derec growled, and threw the nearest rock-sized bit of robot scrap in Wolruf’s direction. The caninoid snatched it neatly out of the air and threw it back in one motion.

“No thanks,” she said with a curled-lip grin. “I already ‘ad breakfast.”

Though there was running water in the Personal, there was no provision for a shower or bath. Derec settled for sponging himself off, though there were no blowers and the only toweling available was harsh and scratchy. By the time he emerged, Wolruf was nowhere in sight. Derec wondered if she had perhaps stopped by only to waken him and would not be coming back.

Thinking that it wouldn’t take him long to get tired of the fare, he carried another meal of biscuits, cheese, and honey back to the lab. Settling at the workbench, he resumed work on the robot’s right arm. The electrical connections were sound, but the servo linkages were damaged beyond Derec’s ability to repair. His efforts to do so only made things worse. Whatever skill he had was cybernetic, not electromechanical.

“Alpha, I don’t think I can fix your arm. I’m wondering if you can, with your good arm. I could get a mirror so you could see inside—”“I am sorry. Without a Robotech cube in my library, my abilities in this area are limited to diagnosis only, sir.”

“I figured as much,” Derec said. “But it never hurts to ask.”

“Sir, I detect a deactivated robot in the room. Perhaps it would be possible to salvage the appropriate parts from its mechanism to repair me.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to do,” Derec said gruffly. “I can’t do it, not without micromanipulators. Besides, there’s some structural damage in the shoulder mount, which isn’t replaceable.”

Sighing, Derec pushed himself back from the bench and crossed to where his paltry inventory of robot parts lay spread out on the floor. As it had many times before, his gaze fell on Monitor 5’s arm. For the first time, he picked it up and examined it closely.

“I guess you’re just going to have to make do with one wing,” he said. “There’s a lot of it going around.”

The robot made no reply. Derec turned the Monitor’s arm over and tried to flex the elbow. It resisted—consistent with the fact that the hand had been locked in a literal death grip on the silver artifact.

Consistent, Derec realized with a sudden shock, except that the arm contained no joints. Not at the elbow, not at the wrist, not at the knuckle. Oh, the elbow was bent at an obtuse angle, the wrist twisted slightly, the fingers curled. But insofar as he could tell from looking at it, the arm was incapable of movement.

There were any number of syntheskin coverings which would flex and wrinkle realistically while masking joints. But this was no covering. It was rigid to the touch and absolutely seamless, like a plastic casting. Puzzled, Derec carried it back to where the robot sat.

“What magnification are your optical sensors capable of?”

“Only a limited amount, sir—one hundred power.”

“At what resolution?”

“That would vary with the distance of the object being observed, sir. The maximum resolution is approximately ten micrometers.”

“That’s better than I can do with that thing,” Derec said, nodding toward the inspection scanner. “See what you can tell me about the structure of this arm.”

“Sir, I am not knowledgeable in this area.”

“You can see and you can describe. I’ll settle for that at the moment.”

“Yes, sir. May I hold the limb?”

Derec surrendered the arm, and the robot held it at eye level in its rock-steady grip. “At ten power, the surface is undifferentiated. Increasing magnification now. Granularity becoming evident. There seems to be a regular pattern. Pattern resolving now into hexagonal planar surfaces. Maximum magnification.” The robot paused for a fraction of a second. “The surface appears to consist of twelve-sided solids in close association.”

“What?”

“The surface appears—”

“I heard you. Look at another spot.”

The robot turned his head slightly to the left. “I observe the same pattern.”

“The end,” Derec snapped. “Look at the end, where it broke off.”

“The surface is much more irregular, but it is made up of the same dodecahedral units.”

“All the way through?”

“Yes, Derec.”

Derec stood staring, dumbfounded. What the robot had described suggested a completely new approach to robotic design—not an evolution, but a revolution. It sounded as though the Supervisor robots had been built—no, it couldn’t be.

“Kill your right shoulder control bus,” Derec snapped.

“The circuits are now inert,” the robot said.

Derec separated the three-conductor control wire from the damaged right arm and threaded it out through the opening where he had been working. He touched the connector to the stump end of the Supervisor arm, and it clung there as though it belonged.

“Activate the control circuit. Send a command to bend the elbow.”

Almost instantly, the disembodied Supervisor arm slowly began to flex. “Look at the joint,” Derec demanded. “Tell me what’s happening.”

“The changes are taking place more quickly than my scan rate allows me to observe,” the robot said. “However, I infer that the dodecahedrons are undergoing some type of directed rearrangement.”

“Flowing into a new shape. The material of the arm is transforming itself.”

“Those descriptors are imprecise but consistent with my observations. The technical term for such reorganization is morphallaxis.”

Derec felt for his chair and sat down shakily. The Supervisors had been built out of billions of tiny crystalshaped modules—a cellular structure. Each had to contain kilometers of circuit connections, megabytes of programming. It was the cells that were the robots. The robots were more like organisms.

What a feat of engineering they represented—the essence of a robot in a package a few microns in diameter. Properly programmed, they could take on any shape. A Supervisor was an infinity of specialized forms held within one generalized package.

As he marveled, Derec was reminded of something he had not thought about for several days. The cellular design bore the same distinctive stamp that the asteroid colony’s lifts and environmental system had. Superficial simplicity—achieved on the strength of hidden complexity. Elegance of design, novelty of approach. It was another brush with the minimalist designer, and it gave Derec one more reason to seek to escape from the raiders.

Because somehow, somewhere, he had to meet the designer.

CHAPTER 10

MORE THAN SEMANTICS

After a short break for a late lunch of the same monotonous foods, Derec set about installing the cellular arm in place of the robot’s original limb.

It was not an easy task, requiring both structural and functional marriages between two wildly divergent technologies. Derec worried about the functional link first, and not only because he expected it to be the tougher challenge. If the robot could not control the new arm, there was no point in going to the trouble of attaching it.

But the cellular arm apparently used the standard command set and carrier voltages. Though there was no evidence of any contacts or wiring in the stump end, the arm responded no matter where Derec attached the control bus.

Experimenting, he found that the arm responded even if he attached the control bus to the skin of the forearm, the palm of the hand, even the tips of two fingers. It seemed as though the cellular microrobots were smart enough to accept the command input from any location and channel it to the appropriate sites.

Once attached, the arm responded not only to all the robot’s basic motor commands, but even to some novel commands. With coaching from Derec, the robot was able to “think” an additional joint onto his arm between the elbow and wrist. In another test, Derec asked the robot to try to modify the cellular thumb and forefinger into long, slender microclamps.To his delight and amazement, it could. With the right command codes, the material of the arm seemed to be infinitely malleable.

But no matter how Derec prepared the mounting ring the arm was connected to, the right shoulder joint remained weaker than the left was or the original had been. At one point, the cellular arm broke loose completely when the robot tried to lift an object weighing less than twenty kilos. Even after he reattached it, Derec had doubts it would withstand the stresses of, for instance, a brawl.

“Looks like you’re going to have one strong arm and one smart one,” he told the robot. “Try not to forget which is which.”

“It is not possible for me to forget, sir.”

“This isn’t an off-the-shelf replacement,” Derec said sternly. “Until you’ve burned what it can do and can’t do into your pathways, you be careful with it. And never let anyone but me see you doing tricks with it, understand?”

While Derec was talking, the robot went rigid and its eyes dimmed. Derec knew what that meant, and fell silent. A moment later her heard the soft padding of Wolruf’s footsteps in the corridor. It was becoming a familiar sound, for it was Wolruf’s third visit to the lab that day. Aranimas, apparently occupied with the duties of “ship’s boss,” had managed only two.

Like the previous visits, this one was casual. Wolruf had no messages for him and no burning curiosity about what he was doing with the robot. It was almost as though she was using checking on him as an excuse to avoid other work, or trying to cultivate his friendship. But Derec kept up his guard. Wolruf was Aranimas’s lieutenant, no matter how sympathetic she might seem. Even her concern for him while he was being tortured, he had decided, was nothing more than a good cop, bad cop stage show meant to speed his surrender.

As before, Wolruf stayed but a few minutes, then continued on to some other task. As soon as she was out of earshot, the robot reanimated.

“I understand, sir,” it said, as though there had been no interruption.

“The next time you have to go down like that, you might spend your time trying to analyze the arm’s command set. Can you do that?”

“I can try, sir. It should be possible to separate those command codes which are valid from those which are nulls. However, I will have to be fully functional to test the valid codes and determine their function.”

“Let’s wait on that until we know we’re going to have some privacy.” He paused a moment to decide what he needed doing next. There was still the matter of reprogramming the robot, but that was also a job which required some assurance of privacy. The best opportunity seemed to be during shipboard night, which was also the best time to explore the ship.

Too much to do, too little time, Derec thought. But if he was going to make better use of the night hours than he had last night, he needed to be better rested. “Alpha.”

“Yes, Derec.”

“What time is it?”

“I do not know what time it is, since my temporal register has not been reset since I was deactivated. However, it has been fourteen decads since reinitialization.”

Decads were units of Auroran decimal time, Derec recalled. “I’m going to take a nap. Wake me in a Standard hour.”

“Yes, sir.”

But it was Aranimas, not the robot, who woke him.

“Are you finished? Is my servant ready?” he demanded, looming over Derec like some long-limbed water bird.

“Not yet,” Derec said sleepily, sitting up. He noted with satisfaction that the robot was standing inert by the workbench. It, at least, had not been taken by surprise.

“Then why do you rest? To keep me waiting?”

“I rest so I don’t get so tired that I make a mistake that’ll damage the robot,” Derec said. “Maybe your kind doesn’t have that need, but humans do.”

Aranimas did not take offense at Derec’s tone. “I have observed that humans are even less efficient than Narwe. You would make very poor workers, wasting one third of your time in rest.” He turned his back on Derec and went to where the robot stood. “But then perhaps that is why you have invented such machines, which labor in your service tirelessly. How is it done?”

“What do you mean?” Derec asked, coming to his feet.

“What is the source of energy?” Aranimasasked, tracing a line down the robot’s torso with his long fingers.

Derec knew that being evasive or pretending ignorance would only anger the alien. “A microfusion powerpack,” he said. “There’s one on the bench there, just to the left of the scanner.”

Aranimas picked up the damaged powerpack and studied it. “So small. How days’ service does it contain?”

“It depends on how hard the robot is working. The fuel capsule is good for several hundred days of light duty, like domestic service. A laborer would obviously need refueling more often.”

“Remarkable,” Aranimas said, returning the powerpack to the bench. One of his eyes seemed to focus briefly on the transplanted arm, then swung back toward Derec. “You are making progress?”

“I am.”

“How long until you are ready to activate it?”

“I’ll be ready to start testing its systems tomorrow or the next day. How soon it’ll be ready will depend on how much is wrong.”

Aranimas seemed to accept that. “The first job of this robot will be to help you make more robots.”

Frowning, Derec stepped forward. “How many more?”

“We will begin with fifty.”

Derec wondered if that figure represented the number of Narwe on board. He briefly enjoyed the thought of Aranimas replacing his browbeaten crew with an array of obedient robots, only to discover that, at a word from Derec, he couldn’t command them at all. But he could not kid himself or allow Aranimas to entertain unreasonable expectations.

“I don’t think you understand the complexity of these machines,” Derec said. “They’re not something you put together as a hobby, no matter how good a materials lab you have. And frankly, this isn’t a very good one. I’ll probably be able to get this robot put together and keep it repaired. But if you want fifty robots, you’re going to have to look somewhere else for them. I’m not magician enough to pull positronic brains or microfusion cells out of a hat.”

“If you had not destroyed your robot colony—,” Aranimas said, his voice rising.

“I told you before, the robots did that on their own,” Derec insisted. “But that doesn’t mean you’re stuck. You take this ship to any Spacer world and you’ll find millions of robots. And you won’t have to steal them, either. Robots are a major trade item between the worlds. Any one of them would be happy for a new customer.”

That was not entirely true, of course. It was highly doubtful the Spacers would willingly turn over examples of their most advanced technology to an alien race, and even if they were willing, there was the problem of what Aranimas could offer as payment. But if Derec could make Aranimas believe it was the truth, coax him to take the ship to a human world, he would at least have succeeded in alerting them to the aliens’ existence, and possibly have laid the groundwork for his own release.

“If commerce is so welcome, why did your robots destroy themselves?”

“Because you came in firing your weapons and declared yourself an enemy,” Derec said. “If you’d come in as a friend, it would have been different. Take me to your navigator. I’ll help him set a course for the nearest Spacer world.” And find out where we are in the process, he added silently.

“I will evaluate the options,” Aranimas said, moving toward the corridor. “In the meantime, you will continue your work. I will return tomorrow to see my robot activated.”

The reprogramming could not be postponed any longer, Derec decided, He did not think Aranimas would return soon. He would have to hope that Wolruf would not, either.

Unfortunately, Derec did not have the equipment to alter the robot’s programming directly, which would have been risky anyway. Since it was intimately bound up in the Laws of Robotics, the robot’s definition of what a human was comprised some of the most crucial and most deeply engraved patterns within its brain. What needed doing would have to be done more indirectly.

“Alpha,” he said. “Did you scan the organism that was just here?”

“Yes, Derec.”

“And earlier today, did you scan another type of organism visiting the lab?”

“Yes, Derec.”

“What’d you think of them?”

“I have no previous knowledge of humans of this type—”

That was the kind of response Derec had been fearing. “Stop. They’re not humans.”

“Sir, I am aware that my data library is not complete. However, I am unable to categorize them in any other fashion unless you can provide me with evidence for your assertion.”

“Compare their appearance with mine.”

“Sir, I acknowledge that there are numerous anomalous differences. However, those differences fall in areas where the definition of a human has a wide latitude, such as skin color and covering, dimensions, and vocal timbre. The similarities are in more fundamental areas such as bilateral symmetry, bipedal locomotion, oxygen respiration—”

“They are humanoid, as you are. But they are not human.”

“I note your assertion, sir, but I am unable to confirm it.”

Derec understood that he was not being called a liar. When it had no independent knowledge, a robot would ordinarily accept the word of a human as gospel. But a robot was under no obligation to accept a human’s claim that it was raining when its own sensors told it otherwise.

This was not that clear-cut an issue, but the robot was biased toward a generous definition of what a human was. Otherwise there was the danger of a robot’s being used as an assassin by the simple step of persuading it that its target was not a human. Derec understood, but even so was annoyed. “I suppose that if they had twelve arms and belched fire when they talked, you might believe me.”

“Sir, in the matter at hand the morphological considerations are not primary in my analysis.”

“Explain. What are the discriminators?”

“Sir, I base my conclusion on the observation that the organisms called Aranimas and Wolruf are intelligent beings capable of independent reasoned thought.”

“How do you know?”

“Sir, you carried on a dialogue with each of them. Although humans on occasion talk to nonanimate objects and may give the appearance of carrying on a dialogue with certain animals, I perceived your discussions as having a qualitatively different character.”

“Are you saying that because I treated them as human, you have to think of them that way?”

“Where there is uncertainty, as thee may be when a human wears a costume or disguise, I am obliged to use such cues as are available. Your behavior created a strong presumption that Aranimas and Wolruf are human.”

“I talk to you the same way I talked to them. Does that make you a human?”

“No, Derec. I am a robot, a technological artifact. To the degree that I may seem to be human, it is only because I have been designed to do so in order to more easily interact with humans.”

Derec was growing frustrated. “Tell me this, then. How do you tell the difference between a robot and a human at a distance?”

“Sir, just as I have an operational definition of that class of organisms called humans, I also have one of that class of objects called robots. It is ordinarily possible to distinguish between the two based on the characteristics they do not have in common. It is not a perfect system, however, and may be fooled, as by a humaniform robot of the type developed by Dr. Han Fastolfe.”

Derec had to concede the point to the robot. If only I could show it skin scrapings from the three of us—but if Aranimas or Wolruf happened to have a cellular structure, I’d be no better off. It might even decide its right arm is human—

“Robot, are Spacers, Settlers, and Earthpeople all human?” he asked suddenly.

“Yes.”

“Have you personally observed every member of those groups?”

“No, Derec. There are approximately eight billion Earthpeople, five billion Spacers, and—”

“If you have not observed them individually, how is it you are able to classify them all as human?”

“Spacers and Settlers are descendants of the original human community on Earth,” the robot replied. “Therefore, any individual correctly identified as a Settler or Spacer cannot be other than human.”

“Why is that?” Derec asked, though he knew the answer.

“They share a phylogenetic relationship. The offspring of a human must be human.”

“In other words, what really counts is biology-the genes and DNA humans carry in their cells.”

“Yes.”

“And the guidelines that are built into your definition of a human are simply shortcuts to make it unnecessary for you to subject everyone you encounter to a biological assay. The final criterion is DNA.”

“That is correct, Derec.”

“But you have no way of examining a person’s DNA directly.”

“No, sir.”

“Fine. You said that each of the anomalies in Aranimas’s appearance fell within the acceptable parameters for natural variation and mutation.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I ask you to calculate the probability that all of Aranimas’s anomalies would appear in a single organism.”

The robot scarcely hesitated. “The probability is extremely small.”

“And for Wolruf?”

“The probability is somewhat higher, but still on the order of one chance in ten to the fifteenth power.”

“In other words, there is less than a one in ten thousand chance that a mutation this extreme would have arisen once in all of human history. And here there are two of them, not only alive at the same time but in the same place, and both as different from each other as they are from me.”

“It is quite remarkable. No doubt further study of these individuals would be of great benefit.”

Derec sighed exasperatedly. “Listen, my thick-headed robot friend. Stop thinking one step at a time. Isn’t the probability that an independently evolved lifeform might be bipedal, bilateral, and oxygen-breathing greater than the probability that these creatures are mutant humans? Can’t Aranimas and Wolruf be intelligent without being human?”

“Yes, that is possible.” The robot paused, a sign of great activity in its positronic pathways. “However, since no independently evolved intelligent lifeforms are known, it is difficult to assign a probability to a specific form.”

“I challenge your premise,” Derec pounced. “Why are most robots humanoid?”

“Higher robots are humanoid because it is a successful generalized design and because—”

“The other reasons don’t matter,” Derec said. “Apply that standard to the question of Aranimas and Wolruf.”

Again the robot paused before answering. “My positromotive potentials are extremely high on both sides of the question,” it said at last. “I believe this state may be similar to that which a human describes as confusion.”

“Get to the point. What’s the verdict?”

“It is my tentative conclusion that Aranimas and Wolruf are not human.”

“You are not obliged by the First Law to protect them or the Second Law to obey them?”

“No, Derec.”

“Good,” he said with relief. “You can live. Now listen closely. I have some important instructions for you concerning our alien hosts—”

CHAPTER 11

TAMPERING

Within the greater world of the raider ship, Derec had been confined to one small island. As he prepared to begin his nocturnal wanderings, that island consisted of the route from the lab (in what he thought of as Hull L) to the dispensary and Personal (in Hull D). Linking the ends of the trail were two sections of storage corridor forming a short transfer tunnel between the hulls. And that was all Derec knew.

He did not know where the lab was in relation to Aranimas’s command center, though he felt certain that it was some distance away. For that matter, he did not know the way to any of the other places he had been—the hull where he had seen the star-creatures, the corridor in which he had awoken, the hold from which the salvage team had operated, the section of lockers where the robot parts had been stored. He did not know where Wolruf slept, or where the fifty Narwe were most likely to be found.

The corridor to the dispensary was also the only part of the ship which he had explicit permission to be in. Aranimas had not forbidden him to roam farther afield, but neither had he invited it. It seemed to Derec as though it might be some kind of test. The problem was, he didn’t know whether he would fail through action or inaction: by exploring, or by staying close to home.

In the end, Derec set aside his uncertainties with the thought that it was always better to know more than to know less. If Aranimas found out and objected, Derec could always offer the excuse that he was scouting for places and tasks to test the robot.

The ranks of closed lockers in the transfer tunnel had been gnawing at his curiosity for nearly two days, and he started by opening all that were within his reach. He did not know exactly what he had expected to find, but the fact that more than half the lockers were empty came as a surprise.

Those that were full contained some recognizable objects, such as bolts of the cloth from which the Narwe clothing was made, replacement electrodes for the microwelder in the lab, and vacuum-sealed food stores. A few of the lockers were either jammed or locked—Derec could not determine which.

Just as he was finishing in the section closest to the dispensary, one of the false-horned Narwe entered through the single side door. Startled, Derec jumped guiltily, then froze. Without making any sign of acknowledgment Derec could recognize, the alien turned its back and left by the lab-end door, saying nothing.

Alone again, Derec felt foolish, for he had every right to be there and the alien had seen nothing incriminating. But his heart raced as though he had been caught by Aranimas himself. He was not worried about the Narwe trying to stop him, since he was confident that he could be at least as intimidating as Wolruf.

But there was always the chance a Narwe, perhaps hoping to curry favor, would carry a tale to Aranimas and bring him investigating. Since Derec did not want to give Aranimas reasons to mistrust him, he decided he would have to forego rummaging through the lockers, at least as long as there were still Narwe afoot. It was the one activity his excuse would not cover.

Derec next took up a fuller exploration of the two hulls he had ready access to. Three doors down from the Personal in Hull D, he found a compartment containing five deep-cushioned chairs arrayed in a circle and facing inward. At the center of the circle was a pale white globe mounted on a black cylindrical base. The globe was so large that Derec’s arms could reach barely halfway around.

But finding did not mean understanding. For all he could divine, the globe could as easily be a religious totem as a communications device, and the compartment as easily a sanctuary as a bridge.

And there was no point in risking his position just to multiply his ignorance. So for the second time in half an hour, Derec altered his strategy. All that mattered was rediscovering the route back to Hull A—Aranimas’s quarters—and to Hull T, where the transfer bay and perhaps his augment could be found. Nothing else was of any consequence whatsoever.

There were five exits from the deck of Hull D, two from Hull L, and two from the transfer tunnel. He considered simply taking one and following it wherever it led, but he did not trust himself to find his way back.

Instead, he worked at expanding the boundaries of his known world slowly. Each time he opened a new door and started off on an unfamiliar corridor, he would turn left and then left again as soon as possible in the hopes of returning in a loop to some part of the world he knew. Only when he had memorized each of those additions would he take a branch off a branch.

The first time, his strategy worked. The side door in the transfer tunnel led him, three turns later, to Hull L, one deck down from the lab. Despite the fact that he sighted two Narwe along the way, the success gave him a rush of confidence.

But then it began to get messy. The other exit from the lab level of Hull L went on through seven sections with no side branches. Possibly it went on still farther, but Derec would never know, since he grew timid and turned back.

One of the exits from Hull D led down a sloping ramp into a weapons turret occupied by one of Aranimas’s kin and a Narwe—another hasty retreat. Another, farther aft, led to one of the hexagonal junction points. He chose a door at random and found himself in another junction.

There was just no way around it. The ship was an impenetrable maze, its key elements linked in a hopelessly inefficient and disorderly manner. Derec could think of only two explanations for it. One had to do with defense. The arrangement probably served to disguise the crucial targets, and was certain to frustrate intruders.

The other explanation was that the ship was just what it appeared to be—a jury-rigged mishmash of ships that had never been intended to be joined together.

Whichever was the case, Derec was on the verge of concluding that the ship was too complex for him ever to hold its plan in his head, when he felt a queer momentary sensation of being turned inside out. The moment he felt it, he started back toward the laboratory, his jaw set in a grim expression. He wanted to believe it was only a moment of dizziness, a sign of creeping fatigue, but he could not.

For the feeling was nothing new to Derec. It was a Jump, that oddly incomprehensible, almost mystical, momentary transition through hyperspace that transferred a ship and all it contained from one point in space to another, light-years away. Wherever they had been, they were somewhere else now. Far away from the asteroid base—far away from any ship that might have been en route there to rescue him.

He should have guessed that the raiders had Jump technology, for the design of the ship would never have stood up to any sort of conventional propulsion. But he had not, and the discovery jolted him, bringing back full force the feeling of powerlessness that he had felt in the robots’ custody.

No one’s going to find me now, he thought despairingly. Not if I live to be a thousand—

The lab was empty except for the robot when Derec reached it.

“Alpha.”

“Yes, Derec.”

“Did you monitor a Jump a short time ago?”

“No, Derec. Since the reflexes of my positronic brain are so much faster than yours, robots do not experience the disorientation common among humans.”

“Then you can’t tell me anything about it—how far we might have Jumped.”

“Without knowing the power curve of the vessel’s drive, I would not have been able to interpolate from the duration of the Jump in any case,” the robot said. “However, that does not rule out secondhand evidence concerning our destination.”

“What secondhand evidence? Where did you get it?”

“Sir, Aranimas and Wolruf held a discussion about this in my presence.”

“When?”

“This evening, less than one decad ago. It was my impression that they had come here to find you, but in your absence lingered to examine me. Wolruf described the work she had observed you doing, told how my position varied each time she visited, and pointed out to Aranimas several of my access ports and described what lay under them.”

“I thought she was spying on me,” Derec fumed. “What else happened?”

“Aranimas seemed disturbed that you were absent without supervision, and ordered Wolruf to watch you more closely in the future—”

“Get to the point. Where are we? Where are we going?”

“I was forced to make certain inferences from what I heard, but I believe we are making an inbound approach to a site where Aranimas expects to obtain a large quantity of additional robots.”

“Repeat the relevant part of the conversation.”

“Yes, Derec.”

The voices were so faithfully duplicated that if Derec closed his eyes he would have sworn Aranimas and Wolruf were in the room with him.

“We’ave been away from Mrassdf a long time,” said Wolruf. “The Narwe arr restless for their ‘ome ‘erds. Even I grow weary from time to time. Iss it truly necessary to go to another ‘uman nest?”

“I will not go back empty-handed,” Aranimas said.

“ ’U have the jewel, this robot, and more besides. ‘U have exceeded ‘ur promises to Wiwera. Surely enough glory will flow from those accomplishments—”

“It is not for discussion,” Aranimas said curtly. “I will have robots to serve me. The human Derec said that there would be robots at any human world, that they would trade with us if we come in peace. We will allow them to think we come in peace and then take what we need. Then, and only then, will we set course for Mrassdf.”

Wolruf’s voice took on a pleading, whining tone. “The Narwe are truly worthless ones, there can be no doubt. But if we were to lose the jewel in hand while reaching for a bit of glass—”

The robot interrupted himself. “At this point, Aranimas produced a weapon I cannot identify and pointed it at Wolruf. It seemed to cause Wolruf great distress.”

Then it continued in Aranimas’s voice. “You disappoint me, Wolruf. I thought you had more vision than that. Without the robots, I will have to surrender that jewel to Wiwera when we return—which I have no intention of doing. Better that you and I are turned to atoms here than to give up the key to such as Wiwera.”

The robot fell silent, and Derec found himself with nothing to say. One more stop, and the raiders were going home with their treasure. Where that stop was, there was no guessing. There were hundreds of Spacer facilities scattered over hundreds of light-years. It could be a Customs station lying between Settler and Spacer territory, a mining or processing center, or even one of the research complexes. It might be staffed with humans, humans and robots, or robots alone.

It didn’t matter. He would never see it.

Aranimas would use him—his knowledge, his voice, perhaps even his image—to gain entry to the installation. And when the alien’s business there was done, the ship would leave for Mrassdf, where Derec was destined to be nothing better than a slave, and perhaps nothing more than a curiosity.

The realization of his impotence shattered Derec. He had taken the lone road and done everything he could by himself. He had schemed and blustered and fought and finagled his way past each succeeding challenge.

But the challenge now facing him seemed insurmountable. Sometime within the next few days, he had to escape—from a ship in which he could not yet even find his way around, from a jailer whose capabilities he had not yet fully gauged, to a refuge whose promise of safety was more hopeful than real.

The fight drained out of him as he confronted the bleak possibilities. Aranimas had all the advantages. He would have Derec watched constantly while they were docked at the installation—if they docked at all. And Derec could not move sooner, for he could never hold the ship. He was outnumbered eighty to one by the crew.

All Derec had was the robot, and that was not enough. I can’t do it, he thought despairingly. But I can’t just give up—

The conflicting thoughts chased each other through his mind, neither gaining the advantage. Weary and confused, he retreated to the far side of the room and huddled there against the base of the wall.

I’ve got to have help, he realized at last. I’ve got to stop trying to do it all myself—got to trust someone. It’s that or resign myself to living the rest of my life on an alien world—

And then it came to him that there was someone else on board who was just as alone, just as helpless, who might take not only comfort but courage from a companion. Someone, in fact, who had already proclaimed herself Derec’s friend.

If she’ll help, Derec thought, we just might do it, at that—

An hour of waiting had slipped by. Reinvigorated by hope, Derec’s attention had wandered from watching the doorway to playing with the pieces of the puzzle.

“ ’Ur back,” a gruff voice intruded.

Derec raised his head and looked toward Wolruf. “I went walking. You’ve been looking for me, haven’t you?”

“Aranimas was looking for ‘u,” Wolruf corrected. “‘U stay ‘ere now, okay?”

“Is he coming back?”

“Boss iss resting now. ‘E’ll come to see ‘u in the morning. Best ‘u be ‘ere,” Wolruf said, turning away.

“You got in trouble with Aranimas because I was gone, didn’t you?” Derec called after her.

The caninoid stopped, looked back, and shrugged.

“I’m sorry,” Derec said. “I put you in a bad position.”

“Iss nothing new. I put myself therr enough.”

Derec smiled. “Tell me something, Wolruf. What are you doing here? Why are you working for someone like Aranimas?”

“Too long a story to explain.”

“You’re not on board by choice, are you.”

“Too complicated to explain.”

“I’ve got the time—and I really want to know.”

Wolruf hesitated, then advanced a few steps into the room. “Should go sleep,” she said gruffly.

“Why not do what you want to instead of what you ought to?”

Crouching an arm’s length away, Wolruf grinned. “That the secret of ‘ur success?”

It took longer than it should have to sort out the story. Wolruf had never had to talk about her home and life to someone who did not know the thousand and one things that a person living within a culture knows without thinking. Again and again, Derec had to ask her to go back and fill in some clarifying detail.

Beyond that, there were language problems, as some of what Wolruf was trying to convey ran up against the limits of her Standard vocabulary. At other times she seemed to be talking around some fact or idea that she did not feel comfortable disclosing.

Piecing together what he heard and filling in a few of the blanks on his own, Derec gained a reasonably coherent answer to his question. Despite Wolruf’s boast of two hundred inhabited worlds, the crew of the ship was from a single solar system. Aranimas’s kind—the Erani—and the Narwe lived on the second planet, Mrassdf, which by Wolruf’s description was a hot, windswept, unpleasant world. Wolruf’s kind—the name was just as unpronounceable as Wolruf’s own—and the elusive star-creatures were from the temperate fourth planet.

The relationship between the Narwe and the Erani was like that between sheep and their shepherds, except that the Narwe were more intelligent and physically adept than sheep. But the comparison was still apt. The Narwe vastly outnumbered the Erani, but the Erani—aggressive, inventive, acquisitive—were completely dominant.

The relationship between the two worlds was rather more complex, and Derec did not completely understand it. Neither planet seemed to have a unified government. That might have been the only thing that kept them from going to war, for there clearly was a basic antipathy between them. Despite that, there was active commerce between the worlds. At the center of it were trading companies operatedoperated by several factions of Erani and goods produced by several families of Wolruf’s people.

Wolruf would not talk much about Aranimas in particular, but he seemed to be a younger member of one of the more powerful Erani factions. Derec gleaned that somehow Wolruf’s family had run afoul of Aranimas’s trading company.

“My service on this mission lifts the dhierggra from my family,” she explained.

The dhierggra, Derec determined after much questioning, was equivalent to a blacklist—while it was in effect, no Erani would deal with the family. That made Wolruf, in essence, an indentured servant—a slave, working off her family’s debt.

“Why were you chosen?”

“I am youngest, least valuable to my family.”

Derec did not want to rush to judge an entire culture on one story from one member, but he found himself getting angry over the injustice. “Is that why Aranimas treats you the way he does? Is that part of the deal, that he gets to push you around?”

“That iss the Erani way. They treat everyone so.”

“Not each other,” Derec said. “That’s what makes it wrong.”

It was then that Derec realized that somewhere in the course of the conversation, something unexpected had happened. He had drawn Wolruf out selfishly, calculating. It was just another angle to exploit. But as he had listened to her, his false sympathy for her plight became real empathy for her pain. She was a victim, just as he was.

But she seemed uncomfortable with his concern. “Not ‘ur trouble.”

“Wolruf—you said you were my friend. Let me be yours.”

“What do ‘u mean?”

“Aranimas is working you like a slave and abusing you like an animal. It doesn’t have to be that way. We can put a stop to it, together.”

“How?”

“I have a tool,” he said, nodding toward the robot. “And I have some ideas. But I need you to tell me some things—about Aranimas, and about how this ship is controlled.”

Wolruf looked uncomfortable, and Derec was afraid that he had gone too fast and frightened her. “You want the jewel back,” she said.

Honesty was an imperative. “I do.”

“ ’U will take it and leave me to face Aranimas.”

Derec shook his head emphatically. “I do have to get away. I can’t let Aranimas take me back to Mrassdf. But if I can’t leave you in a better situation than you’re in now, I’ll take you with me. Wolruf—we’re the only ones who can help each other. If we don’t try, then we deserve what happens to us.”

The caninoid met Derec’s questioning gaze unblinkingly. “That iss true. Okay—friend. Less try.”

There seemed to be something in the biology of Wolruf’s kind which sharpened the imperative for sleep and rejuvenation. It was almost as though there was within them a metabolic switch which, once tripped, told them in no uncertain terms that the primary energy fund had been exhausted and it was time to withdraw.

A half-hour after they began talking, with only some of Derec’s questions answered and their plan barely sketched out, Wolruf’s alarm went off. Her eyes narrowed to slits, her breath took on a sour tang, and her fur lay flat and seemed to lose luster.

Though he still had many urgent questions, Derec did not even get a chance to try to coax her to stay. With no more explanation than a muttered “must sleep,” she rose and was gone.

Wolruf’s departure made Derec suddenly aware of his own weary limbs. But there was one further task he had to see to before he could think about curling up on the thin mattress.

The robot was waiting where it had settled after completing Derec’s last order several hours ago, but that was no surprise. There had been an unnatural passiveness to the robot’s behavior ever since Derec had activated it, a passiveness above and beyond the wait-states he had prescribed. A normal robot had a variety of duties it attended to without external direction, following the default orders built into it for its primary function: domestic, laborer, engineer, and the like.

The robot’s initiative had apparently fallen victim to the burned-out memory cubes and the cold powerdown. But it still had the Second Law, and so it sat and waited patiently for the words from Derec that would give it something to do.

Derec’s first act was to pull the Mathematics cube and replace it with the Personal Defense cube. The additional pathways in the PD cube would enhance the robot’s sense of impending harm and its anxiety to act to prevent it. But they would also suppress the robot’s normal inclination to protect him from immediate, concrete risks without regard to the consequences of doing so. The First Law did not have any exceptions built into it for taking well-intentioned gambles; the PD cube provided them.

“Alpha,” Derec said when he was done. “My previous instructions for you to go into a wait-state when one of the aliens approaches are now cancelled. But where possible, you are still to avoid revealing the unique capabilities of your right arm.”

“I understand, Derec.”

“I am now going to give you a block of instructions which will not become operative until you hear the initiate code. The initiate code, which must come from me, is the question, ‘Who is your master?’ The disable code is the word ‘Aurora.’ ”

“I understand, Derec.”

“Begin instruction block. You will answer the initiate code with the reply ‘Aranimas.’ You’ll go with Aranimas wherever he wishes you to go. You are to follow his orders except where they conflict with the First, Second, or Third Laws or this instruction block. You will not follow orders given by Wolruf or any other nonhuman member of the crew. You will not accept any additional orders from me unless preceded by the disable code. You will respond to informational inquiries from Wolruf or myself. However, you will not relate, replay, or in any way communicate to Aranimas this conversation or any other conversation with me which he did not witness.”

“Clarification. You wish for Aranimas to believe that I am completely in his service?”

“Suspend. I do,” Derec said. “If he’s going to get any use out of you, he’s going to have to teach you about the ship. Anything you learn will help us escape.”

“I understand the necessity for intelligence, sir,” the robot said. “But if I am to protect you I must remain at your side.”

Derec had expected the objection—PD circuits made robots more argumentative. “Since Aranimas is in command of this ship, he is the real threat to me. Only his actions or his orders can harm me. By remaining close to him, you will be best able to protect me.”

“I understand, sir.”

“All right. Resume. There are two things that we particularly need to know. A valuable object came aboard with me, a metallic rectangle, silver color, about five by ten centimeters. I think it’s the same object Aranimas called the key, and Wolruf the jewel. It’s apparently valuable and powerful. We need to know where it is.”

“Yes, Derec. I will be particularly alert for clues to this object’s whereabouts.”

“The other thing we need to know is what Spacer facility we’re heading for and when we’re going to get there. If we wait too long to move, Aranimas will have us locked up somewhere to keep us out of his hair while he’s stealing robots.”

“That would be a prudent precaution.”

“Which means that Aranimas will probably think of it,” Derec said. “If you learn where the key is located, you are to wait one decad and then simulate a Code 804 malfunction. If you learn where we are headed or when we are to arrive, you are to wait fifteen centads and then simulate a Code 3033 malfunction. End instruction block.”

Though he knew what he hoped would happen from that point onward, Derec stopped there. Verbal instruction-in-advance was a tricky enough matter, requiring the skills of a semanticist with the foresight of a seer. He did not wish to saddle the robot with excessively specific and possibly useless orders.

Much work and intelligence had gone into designing the PD library cube. Derec would have to trust that, when the time came, Alpha would grasp the situation and do what was required.

CHAPTER 12

MUTINY

Despite how little of the night was left when Derec was done, he slept well and awoke rested, with his head clear and his spirits up. He began clearing one end of the room as though to make a stage, determined to put on a good show. Presently, Aranimas arrived with Wolruf in tow.

Derec did not have a Handbook of Robotics with its extensive diagnostic interrogatory, but he knew the main lines of questioning used to test the various positronic functions.

“If the daughter of a woman with red hair owns two dogs and the father of a boy with a broken leg is unemployed, what day does the barber give shaves?”

Wolruf hooted at that one, and Aranimas looked puzzled. But the robot calmly answered, “It is not possible to determine the answer from the information given.”

“What is the value of hex 144C times 16F2?”

“Hex 1D1B7D8.”

“Touch your right index finger to the middle of your forehead.”

The robot complied.

“State the Rayleigh law of magnetic permeability—”

For fifteen minutes, Derec peppered the robot with commands and questions, less to impress Aranimas with the robot’s abilities than to underscore his own competence. He did not want Aranimas thinking that with the robot operational, he, Derec, was now expendable.

Then, before Aranimas could grow impatient, Derec asked the final question. “Alpha, who is your master?”

“Aranimas,” the robot replied.

Derec turned to Aranimas. “The robot’s yours now,” he said. “You will have to teach it what you want it to do, but you won’t have to show it more than once.”

Aranimas rose. “Order it to attack Wolruf,” the alien said.

“What?”

“I will not share control of this servant. Order it to attack Wolruf.”

Derec’s hesitation was calculated. He turned to the robot and said, “Pick up that brace and strike Wolruf in the head.”

Wolruf whimpered, but the robot did not move. “I may not comply, sir.”

Then Aranimas repeated the command. “Servant. Pick up the brace and strike Wolruf.”

Derec held his breath. If there was going to be a First Law conflict over treatment of the aliens, now was when it would surface.

“Yes, master,” the robot said, turning and reaching for the metal rod.

Wolruf crabbed nervously toward the door. Derec released a small sigh of relief.

“Stop, servant,” Aranimas ordered. To Derec he said, “You have done as you promised. It seems that you are worth keeping alive after all. Wolruf will find other duties for you.”

That was a wild card Derec had not expected, and he could not let it be played unchallenged. “No,” Derec said boldly. “I’m a roboticist, not a laborer. Not a Narwe. If you want to keep your new servant in good order, you’re going to keep me working here.”

“Doing what?”

“First, disassembling the other body for spare parts. Some of the patches I did on this robot are temporary. I can work on better fixes. Some of the damaged components may be repairable if I can get certain supplies.”

Derec plunged on, gathering a head of steam. “Out in the real world, there are repair technician robots which do nothing but maintain other robots. You only have one robot at the moment, so I’m your technician. You’ve seen what I can do. How long did you have those parts? How much time did you spend looking at them and figuring out nothing? Why do you want to start treating me like a particularly ugly Narwe?”

Aranimas stared, then made a hissing sound which might have been laughter. “Come, servant. We will leave the master roboticist to his work.”

It was difficult for Derec to watch Alpha walk away with Aranimas. It was even more difficult to wait patiently for some sign whether the fragile plan he and Wolruf had concocted would even pass the first threshold.

He was still isolated in his little corner of the ship. There was no way for him to know what Aranimas was doing with the robot. He did not know from one minute to the next whether his instructions to the robot were still intact. Perhaps Aranimas had only pretended to be ignorant about robots. Perhaps he had already undone all of Derec’s careful conditioning.

Even if the instructions were still intact, they could well be irrelevant. Derec had assumed that Aranimas would be so fond of his new toy that he would keep it close at hand. Everything depended on that being true. But if he was wrong, if Aranimas had simply dispatched Alpha to some far corner of the ship to perform some menial function, then his plan was foredoomed to failure. Derec would have given up the robot and gotten nothing in return for it.

Derec had work to do, some to maintain the fiction he was Aranimas’s faithful employee, some for his own purposes. He tried to make the hours pass more quickly by immersing himself in it. But work could not dull the edge of his impatience or his anxiety. Even with no clock to watch, time crawled by.

Wolruf was in and out several times the rest of that day, and even when she was gone she was never far away. He welcomed the interruptions, but he worried that Aranimas might detect the change in her working patterns and wonder why. And without Alpha to alert him to Aranimas’s approach, Derec was reluctant to talk about their evolving plot against the alien commander.

But it was not entirely avoidable. The call could come at any time, and a key problem remained unsolved. Derec knew, or thought he did, how they could disarm Aranimas. The unanswered question was how to disable him.

With surprising vehemence, Wolruf ruled out killing the Erani. Derec did not much regret it. He could not picture himself walking up to Aranimas with a club and battering him to death. But at the same time, as long as Aranimas was alive he was dangerous.

Derec first proposed a stunner, made from a recharged microcell and a few bits of wire. But there was no way to be sure that Aranimas was vulnerable to electric shocks, or to assure that the high-voltage current wouldn’t kill him.

“The chamber with the star-creatures,” Derec said abruptly. “When we passed through it, Aranimas’s eyes started to water. Do you know why? Those things are from your world. Is there something in the air there that’s not in the rest of the ship?”

“Yes,” Wolruf said. “The yellow-gas. That iss the only part of the ship wherr it iss used. The star-creatures release yellow-gas when they move.”

That would account for it, Derec thought. A digestive by-product, or some sort of chemical communication—”So the air in there is like the atmosphere of your world?”

“Yes.”

“Which means that the Erani probably can’t spend any time on your world without getting sick,” Derec concluded.

“We arr protected from the Erani temper,” Wolruf agreed.

Derec paused and considered. “You said the star-creatures were part of an experiment. Could Aranimas be trying to find a way to neutralize the gas, so that the Erani can invade?”

“It iss possible.”

“Are there samples, bottled up?”

“There is a liquid that turns to yellow-gas when freed.”

“Perfect. Get me some.”

When Derec turned in that night, he was a bundle of restless energy, and sleep did not come easily. When it finally did come, it seemed as though he closed his eyes one moment and the next someone was shaking him. He looked up to see Wolruf standing over him.

“Aranimas wants ‘u,” Wolruf said.

“Is it the robot?”

“New servant won’t listen to the boss anymore,” Wolruf said. “It just sits there.”

“This could be it, then,” Derec said, scrambling to his feet. “I’ll get my tools.”

As Derec followed Wolruf through the passageways, his anticipation and anxiety both spiraled upward. When they reached the hex junction, he stopped and caught the caninoid’s arm. “Does he expect you to come in?”

“No. Only to deliver ‘u. But I could come in and see if he sends me away—”

“No,” Derec said. “Don’t do anything out of the ordinary. I can handle the first part myself. Just wait here.”

Inside Hull A, Derec spotted Aranimas across the main compartment and picked his way around the mesh bulkheads to where the alien waited.

“The robot has malfunctioned,” Aranimas said, gesturing, “Repair it.”

The robot sat on the edge of a low counter, motionless except for his left hand, rotating slowly and aimlessly at the wrist joint. Code 3033—our location! Derec thought.

“What did you do to it?” Derec demanded, moving within arm’s reach of the robot.

“I did nothing. The mechanism ceased to obey me.”

“You must have done something.” Derec bent at the waist to peer directly into the glowing eyes. “Alpha. Acknowledge.”

“Yess, ssir,” the robot said, its words slurred and distorted.

Code 804! The key! But he had to be sure. “Alpha. Default l-A-l-B. Execute.”

The robot sat inert.

“Alpha. Default 2-C-2-D. Execute.”

Still there was no response.

“What’s wrong with my servant?” Aranimas demanded.

Stalling for time, Derec opened his small tool clutch and then the robot’s left shoulder access plate. As he peered inside, he thought the next step through. The reworking he had done on the robot’s instinct to protect intelligent life was a delicate business. It had already been stressed unexpectedly when Aranimas took possession of the robot.

If he were to release the robot from its instruction block and order it to move against Aranimas, that would create a Second Law obligation to break the First Law. His careful adjustments might come apart under the stress, and the robot would freeze up in a way Derec would not be able to repair.

He did not want to take that risk. It was much more straightforward for the robot to act in obedience to the First Law than in defiance of it. But that meant it was necessary to provoke Aranimas into an attack.

“It looks like a failure of the volitional initiator,” Derec double talked. “If two contradictory impulses reach it on the same pulse, it can set up a standing wave in the oscillator. It’s almost always the owner’s fault. What did you ask it to do?”

“I did nothing wrong, I was explaining the functions of the equipment in this section when its hand began to twirl foolishly that way.”

“Don’t lie to me,” Derec said. “I should have known that a race as backward as yours couldn’t cope with sophisticated machinery—”

“You are worse than the Narwe,” Aranimas snarled. “You do not have the good sense to know when you are in the service of a true superior.” As he spoke, his hand moved toward the gap in his robelike blouse.

“Aurora!” Derec shouted.

But the robot had begun to move even before Derec uttered the word, the First Law overcoming the strictures of the instruction block. The race between Aranimas’s reflexes and the robot’s was no contest. Before the stylus had even cleared the folds of Aranimas’s robe, the robot had grabbed the alien’s wrist with its right hand and plucked the stylus from his grasp with its left.

“Release me!” Aranimas squalled shrilly. He squirmed and fought, but could not free himself from the grip of the single mechanical hand.