Someone else shouted, “Lucius, come back here! Mandelbrot, stop him!” Metallic feet pounded away down the corridor.

Another pair of hands reached out to hold him, these ones warm and human, and he found himself looking into Janet’s whitened face. She looked worse than he felt. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Oh Wendell, I’m sorry.”

“I am too,” he said automatically, and was surprised to realize the words were true, but about what he had no idea.

The computer’s voice woke Derec out of a sound sleep. “Master Derec, wake up. Master Derec.”

“Mmmm?” was all he could manage at first. After the elation of figuring out his mother’s name had faded, he’d realized how long he’d been without sleep and he had ordered a bed made for him right there in the study. He’d hoped that his new discovery would trigger memories of his past, and he’d supposed that sleeping on it would be the best way to integrate that knowledge into whatever subconscious switching network controlled memory, but now, even in his groggy state, he knew it hadn’t worked. He suspected he’d slept too soundly for that. He’d been out before his head hit the pillow, exhausted, and he didn’t feel any different now.

“Wake up,” the computer said again. “Your father has been located.”

That sped the waking process a bit. He sat up and shook his head, stood, and staggered over to the terminal. “Caffeine,” he said as he sat down, and a moment later the desk delivered a cup of steaming black coffee. “Show me where he is,” he said between gulps.

The screen lit to show Avery standing between two unfamiliar people. No, one should be familiar, Derec realized. That had to be his mother. Janet. Again he reached for the cascade of memories that should have been there, but nothing responded to the new stimulus.

That was her, though. It had to be. Then that other person wasn’t a person at all, but her humaniform robot, the one Wolruf had chased northward from the lab. Evidently they had come back together this time. And brought Avery with them? That certainly seemed to be the case. Now that he looked, Derec could see that they were holding onto him, evidently making sure he didn’t get away. Or was that-? No. Avery clutched his right wrist, and he had no hand below it. They were supporting him; that was it. But none of the three was doing anything about his injury! They were instead watching something out of the monitor’s view to the right.

“Pan right,” Derec ordered, and the view slid left in the screen. As it panned he saw Ariel standing in the doorway of what Derec could now see was indeed the lab where he’d revived the robots, and she was also looking intently down the corridor.

The objects of their attention slid into view: four robots-Mandelbrot, Adam, Eve, and Lucius-locked in battle.

They were a blur of motion. It was hard to tell who was on which side-hard even to tell who was who amid the constantly shifting shapes. Only Mandelbrot remained the same from moment to moment. At first it seemed that he fought against the other three, struggling to hold them all captive while they twisted and flowed out of his grasp, but it gradually became apparent that he and two of the others were all three trying to contain only one robot.

“Give me sound,” Derec said, and suddenly his study echoed with screeches and thuds and a peculiar ripping noise that Derec realized was the sound of robot cells being tom free like Velcro fasteners. The robots had changed tactics now; instead of trying to contain their captive-a task as impossible as stopping a flood with their hands-they began tearing him apart. Mandelbrot was doing the most damage. His rigid left arm moved like a piston, his hand pulling free chunks of silvery robot and flinging them away to splash against the walls and ceiling. The other two robots took over the job of flailing at the constantly shifting amoeba their captive had become, pulling off its arms when it tried to grow around them and forcing it back toward Mandelbrot and destruction.

At last Mandelbrot exposed his target: the robot’s egg-shaped microfusion power pack. When he wrenched that free, the struggle instantly ceased. He backed away with the power pack in his hand, and the other two robots flowed back into their normal shapes: Adam the werewolf and Eve the silvery copy of Ariel. The third robot remained a much-diminished, ragged-edged tangle of appendages on the floor. It had undoubtedly been Lucius they’d destroyed. Somehow that didn’t surprise Derec.

Then the implications of what he had seen soaked in, and he spilled coffee all over his desk. Swearing, but not at the spill, he leaped to his feet, knocking over his chair in his haste, and ran from the apartment. His father was hurt. His mother had come out of hiding. And there could only be one reason for the battle he had just witnessed: Lucius had injured a human being. He had directly violated the First Law of Robotics.

Wolruf was talking with the wolf when she felt the forest shudder beneath her feet.

“What I want to know,” she’d been in the process of saying, “is whether or not your desire to serve ‘umans is stronger in the immediate case, or over the long term. Do you think ahead to w’at your ‘elp might do to your masters’ civilization, or do you just follow your laws case by-what was that?”

The wolf had flinched, too, just as the forest had seemed to do. Now it said, “Involuntary response. A robot has just injured a human.”

“ W ’ at?”Wolruf felt her hackles rise. That was supposed to be impossible.

The wolf looked into the forest and spoke as if echoing a news broadcast, as it probably was. “The robot Lucius has inflicted non-fatal damage to the human Wendell Avery. Lucius has been deactivated, but all units are alerted to watch for aberrant behavior among other robots. All units must run a diagnostic self-check immediately.” The wolf turned its head to look up at Wolruf. “I must comply,” it said, and it froze like a statue.

Wolruf glanced around at the forest, wondering if she should use the opportunity to make her escape. Of all the times to be out in the forest with a robotic wolf, this was probably the worst. If some rogue idea were circulating around, some new thought that could actually allow a robot to override the Three Laws, then Wolruf couldn’t think of a much worse place to run afoul of it than here with a robot who had already convinced itself that injuring animals was all right.

She forced herself to stay put. It had been Lucius and Avery involved, not this robot before her. Wolruf had lived around robots long enough to know that they seldom-if ever-did anything without a reason, and if ever a robot had a reason to harm a human, Lucius was the one. Scary as the precedent might be, the wolf didn’t have a motive. No matter how much she worried about the long-term damage robots could do to a civilization, Wolruf didn’t think she was in any danger now.

She waited impatiently for the wolf robot’s consciousness to come back on line, in the meantime listening to the occasional chirps and cries of the forest’s real occupants. Quite a few of them were genuine, by the sound of it. Quite a few of the plants were, too. The fresh, clean aroma of growing things was a constant delight to a nose too often idle in the city.

That was a good argument in favor of robots right there, Wolruf realized. They had repaired a planet-wide ecosystem in only a few months, with much more careful attention to detail than she or her entire society could achieve. Wolruf’s home world needed such attention, and soon. Most of the forests there were already gone, as were the wide open spaces and the clean lakes. Centuries of industrialization had left scars that would probably never heal on their own. Even accounting for the difficulties inherent in working around an existing population, robots would probably be able to repair it all in a few years, or decades at the longest.