There was a sound outside the computer chamber. It reassembled itself and waited for Derec to enter.

Ariel slammed her fist against the keyboard, making it bounce and slide backward. “There’s no help in this Frosted computer,” she yelled. “It isn’t functioning any better than anything else around here.”

Wolruf, who had been reacquainting herself with the layout of the medical facility, studying scanning systems and trays of medical instruments, came to Ariel and asked, “Iss something wrrong?”

Her gentle tone and phrasing calmed Ariel down. Wolruf’s kindness, as well as her directness, would always make her a good friend.

“Something’s wrong, all right. I ask this computer for suggestions on how to treat Avery, and it tells me to give him two aspirins and put him to bed.”

Wolruf squinted at the screen. “Doess it rreally rrecommend that? Perhapss-”

“No, Wolruf, it didn’t say that in so many words. It’s just that no matter how hard I try to track a hypothesis, the computer leads me to a dead end or loops me back to some sector I’ve already seen. All of its essential information has apparently been cached away somewhere in inaccessible data banks.”

Ariel was about to turn back to the computer and fight the damned machine again when an abrupt sound from outside the room startled her. Wolruf’s head turned toward the noise.

“What was that?” Ariel said, standing up, looking around for a weapon to use to repel invasion.

“Someone iss outside,” Wolruf said, wrinkling her nose.

The noises on the other side of the door did sound something like footsteps, Ariel thought, but of someone moving very slowly and with a very heavy tread. She nodded to Wolruf, signalling her to open the door while Ariel moved to the other side, ready to react to an attack if it came.

When the door opened, it revealed a somewhat bent Adam Silverside, his back to the room, his arms clutching his end of a desk that would have sold for a pretty penny back on Aurora. Ariel had seen one like it in her mother’s home, and Juliana Welsh bought only the most expensive items. Her money went into self-indulgent luxuries or to finance fanatics with crazy schemes, like Dr. Avery and his grand city-forming experiment.

As Ariel went to the doorway, she saw Eve on the other end of the desk, standing straight on a lower stair and holding her end of the piece of furniture aloft. They smoothly eased the desk into the room and gently set it on the floor. For the first time Ariel saw the group of tiny people on the desk’s surface.

“Where’d you find these?” she asked. Eve told her about her adventures in exploring the city.

“Are they the same as the ones in the vacant lot?” she asked Eve.

“We cannot be certain,” Eve replied. “Perhaps you could help us figure that out.”

Ariel smiled. “God,” she said, “just what I need. Another impossible problem dumped in my lap.” She saw that Eve was about to speak and anticipated her. “No, I know that you have dumped nothing in my lap. We humans have some outlandish ways of phrasing our thoughts, especially when we are miserable. No, Eve, I am not miserable; I am just exaggerating. And I’ll explain the virtues of exaggeration to you some other time, thank you very much.”

On the desktop the tiny figures were surveying the room. There was a strange sadness in their eyes, as if they saw at once that there was no easy escape

Derec had not been near the central core of the computer for some time. It had changed in some way, but he was not sure how. Still encased in thick transparent plastic, the intricate mechanisms inside looked like the work of several abstract expressionists painting in a number of styles. It definitely did not look like the workings of a computer.

He walked to the side of the shell and put his fingertips against its surface. They came away with a thin layer of dust on them. He scowled, puzzled but-with everything else that had been going wrong-not surprised. Before, this environment had always been kept pristine. There had been robots housed here whose only job was maintenance. Where were they now?

Walking around the enormous chamber, he found several small floor-level robot niches meant for the kind of function-robots that computer room janitors were. Some of them still had maintenance robots snuggled inside, but clearly they were now inoperative. If he had had time, he would have scheduled them for repair, but the repair shops were no doubt just as inoperative at present. Functionless cleaning robots would have to wait their turn in the line of the many anomalies to be dealt with.

Returning to Mandelbrot, he held up his dirty fingertips without speaking. Behind Mandelbrot, Bogie and Timestep stood silently. Well, not completely silent. Timestep’s toes beat out a soft slow tap rhythm on the metal flooring.

Pointing toward the computer, Derec said, “Well, guys, I’m going inside. You wait here, but if you sense me in any trouble, remember the First Law.”

“You need not remind me,” Mandelbrot said.

“I know, I know. Sorry if I hurt you.”

“How could you hurt me? That is outside the-”

“I spoke out of turn. Just give me good backup, hear?”

Without waiting for any of the robots to question his colloquially expressed order, Derec walked up the steps to the platform that led to the computer chamber entrance and pushed a red button set in the door. Fortunately, the button still worked, and the door slid open.

The button was the only mechanism that did work, however. After he went through the doorway, the heat lamps did not come on, the sprayers did not send a full body spray of compressed air over his body to remove dust. He would have to enter the chamber in a contaminated state. That probably didn’t matter, since from all evidence the chamber was probably contaminated already.

In order for him to enter farther, the wall in front of him should slide open. With nothing working right, it of course did not. He recalled, however, that there was a manual override located just beside the outer door. He had to fumble around in the dark for a moment to find out. When he did, it at least worked. The wall slid open.

Now he entered what to him seemed like a shadowy world. In the dimness the computer’s shapes (he recalled circuitry, microprocessors, tubing, synapse wiring and other electronic marvels from his first visit here) seemed ghostly, unreal. He needed light. The manual override for the inner-room functions was nearby, he knew, and he groped for it. Before he found it, his hand briefly brushed against the outside of the Watchful Eye’s haven, which it had reshaped into an innocent-looking storage cabinet, a good disguise as long as the human did not decide to inspect its contents. Although detecting the touch, it felt no danger yet from Derec and remained still.

Derec’s manipulation of the override produced only partial light, but enough to see that not only was the main computer malfunctioning, it appeared to be covered with a strange kind of dark green moss.

The Watchful Eye perceived the bitterness in Derec’s whispered curse. It had known the moss, even if it had been conceived on the spur of the moment, had been a good idea.

Bogie wished he could discuss his dilemma with Timestep but they could not converse privately, either out loud or by comlink, because of the presence of Mandelbrot. He had no way of knowing whether or not Mandelbrot could eavesdrop in either way, but there was no point in taking a chance.

The problem that Bogie felt just now had to do with allegiance. He sensed that the Watchful Eye was close by, somewhere inside the transparent shell, perhaps near Derec. If one of them were to attack the other, what would be his duty? he wondered. His allegiance had been to the Watchful Eye until the arrival of Derec and the others. The First Law said to protect the human, but would that interfere with his loyalty to the Watchful Eye? It would help if Bogie had actually seen the Watchful Eye, who said it was human, yet did not act especially human and never referred to itself as of masculine or feminine gender. If it were human, had it displaced Derec in Robot City’s ruling hierarchy? Could he allow Derec to harm the Watchful Eye? Must he come to Derec’s defense if the Watchful Eye attacked him?