Down below, the ones who had scattered now came close together again. They stood in a group and looked up in awe at Eve’s scrutinization of one of their own. She noted that they, too, were carefully dressed and groomed.

“Now I’m going to put you down,” Eve said, modulating her voice so that it was quite low. Again she put her hand on the desktop and held it there while the female slowly, almost casually, got off. She went back to her group that had not stirred this time when Eve rested her hand on the desktop.

Eve was not sure what to do next. As the tiny figures gazed up at her, and she down at them, they seemed in a standoff.

“Eve,” Adam said. He had entered the room and now stood a few meters behind her. “What is this?”

She explained about her search and how she had found this small band moaning in their odd circle.

“It could be a religious ceremony,” he commented. ‘The group were at prayer, perhaps.”

“You might be right. They seemed to be imploring, or perhaps mourning.”

“You’re interested in them, I see.”

“As a study, yes. They are strange to me.”

“Are you sure, a study? There seems to be something more to it.”

“What?”

“You seem to care about them.”

“Are we capable of caring?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Neither am I.”

“Ariel sent me to find you. She has set up headquarters at a place they call the Human Medical Facility. She dismissed the robots who were stationed there because they did not respond properly. Now she is trying to extract information from a computer devoted to medical data. She is cursing often because it is malfunctioning or has been tampered with. I am to bring you back there with me.”

“Why?”

“My opinion is that she wants to keep track of us. Derec has put her in charge while he tackles the problems of the city’s systems.”

“What if we do not choose to be in her charge? Should she necessarily have dominion over us?”

“Mistress Ariel appeared to believe you should be kept out of trouble.”

“She is so sure I will get into trouble?”

“It seems so.”

“What is the logic of that?”

“It is not necessary to analyze it.”

“I would like to.”

Eve glanced down at the desktop. The little creatures there were conferring among themselves. Their chattering sounds could barely be heard, but they seemed to contain more agitation than meaning.

“Adam?”

“Yes?”

“Let’s bring them with us.”

“That is unnec-”

“It is for research, Adam. We need to discover more in our quest to define humanity. They may help.”

She reached her hand toward the group, intending to pick up a couple of its members as delicately as she could. But the fear returned to their eyes, and they began to scatter.

“No,” she said. carefully modulating her voice so that it took on a humanlike, soothing gentleness. “I win not harm you. Adam, is there something here we can carry them in?”

He scanned the room. “I see no container of any kind.”

“Then we will carry them on this desk.”

“Eve, they could falloff.”

“We will walk slowly.”

Only Avery saw them carry the desk slowly through the city streets. He hadn’t usually paid much attention to furniture-moving robots on Spacer planets. With their strength and meticulous sense of caution, they were expert at it, able to keep their load level, never bumping the item against anything, and delivering it undamaged.

It seemed to him that robots regularly performed miracles, as a matter of course. In fact, he thought, only robots could perform miracles nowadays. Whatever capacity humans may have had for such feats was long gone.

The more he watched robots in general, the more he knew he needed to become one. And he would. He could feel himself transform more and more into a robot as the days went by. He had convinced himself there were microprocessors in all his limbs and that his senses were now controlled by sensory circuits. All he needed was the positronic brain. That would come, he was sure. He would find a way to turn the inefficient lump in his head to a perfectly functioning, spongelike, positronic entity.

In a dim back part of his mind, he recalled an old Earth story where a primitive robot had wanted a human heart put inside his body so he could be more human. Of course, he really wanted human emotion. a useless prize if there ever was one, Avery thought. The story was so vague in his memory that he could not remember whether the robot had gotten a heart. Probably it had. Earth stories could be dreadfully sentimental about such things. (He did not. of course, know it. but Timestep could dance a musical number from a film adaptation of that story. And Bogie could have told him how the tale came out.)

As Avery moved closer to the desk-toting robots, he noticed the living creatures cowering at the center of the desktop. They seemed puzzled by the city, as if they thought they had passed over into another dimension.

His excitement grew as he saw how nicely formed these tiny humans or androids were. They might be just the experimental rats he needed. The body he’d taken from the vacant lot had been too decayed by the time he’d carried it to his laboratory several levels beneath the city.

He had been able to put it through only a few tests before discarding it. Under a microscope-scanner he saw that a simple microchip had been implanted in its brain and that there appeared to be patterns of circuitry that might control the body’s movements, the way a puppetmaster gave false life to the wooden figures attached to strings.

However, nothing was conclusive. The creatures did not appear all that robotic, either. He suspected they had been genetically engineered, then activated by the implanted technology. At any rate, he was certain they were not actual laboratory-grown humans. No, they were more like dolls, formed from genetic materials but given a kind of life through robotic means. It was even possible they had a minimal awareness.

He had to find more specimens and had been seeking them out when he saw Derec’s odd robots taking that desk down a Robot City street. The runty creatures on the desktop were the specimens he needed.

The robots were of special interest to him, also. He had recognized immediately, when he saw them back at the vacant lot, that they had not been constructed from his own designs. They were definitely not Avery robots. Where had they come from, and whose design were they?

Avery nearly laughed from happiness. (Derec would certainly have been surprised to know that his father could actually laugh.) There was much to study here, and he was never happier than when he was engaged in theorizing or conducting experiments.

Watching Avery watch the robots (who, in this chain of spying, were keeping a close watch on their diminutive charges), the Watchful Eye was puzzled by the new turn of events. How, it wondered, did Avery keep appearing from out of nowhere? He seemed to have an uncommon knowledge of the labyrinthine routes through the city and particularly of the hiding places that removed him from the Watchful Eye’s surveillance.

And why were the new arrivals carrying a desk? And what were the experimental subjects (from Series C, Batch 21) doing on top of the desk?

Too many mysteries, too much disorder.

It seemed as if Derec and his cohorts had, since their arrival in Robot City, thrown much of what the Watchful Eye had done into confusion. They had, in fact, become a serious threat to his domain. It believed it should just eliminate them -but it could not. That was also a mystery to it. What was it that held it back from simply disposing of the intruders?

It sometimes appeared that it, too, had to respond to the demands of First Law, just the way a robot might. But it could not be a robot, it was sure of that. Robots could not do what it could do. Also, it knew it was different from the so-called humans who were now interfering with his design. It could not be a human, either.