“I do not know that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They danced. They communicated with me.”

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

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

“Just some anthropological factors put into the design.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He whirled upon her, fury in his eyes.

“How dare you attack me?”

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

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

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

“How?”

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

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

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

“It seems natural to me.”

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

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