“ Agreed. For our purposes, we can treat them as nearhumans. Now we have a new question: How can we best serve them?”

“That information is unavailable,” Gamma said.

Beta considered the question. At the same time, not all of his energies were focused on the question; at a lower level in his brain, he sensed the joyous flow of harmonious potentials that came from finally having a clearly delineated problem to work on. “We must study the local environment,” he said at last. “Send out observer robots to study the local inhabitants in their native habitat. Obtain chemical analyses of the substances that are important to their well-being. ”

“Agreed,” Alpha and Gamma said together.

“Above all,” Beta continued, “we must allocate all available resources to linguistic studies. We must establish verbal communications with them. ”

“Agreed. ”

Alpha stepped back and looked first to Beta and then to Gamma, with a warm glow in his eyes. “Friends, I cannot tell you how satisfied I am with the progress we have made in this meeting. Now, at last, we can fulfill the final goal of our mission. ”

“I have the greatest confidence in the mission,” Central said.

Alpha spit out a message at the maximum rate his commlink would allow. “Meeting adjourned!” Switching their leg motors into high speed mode, the three supervisors hurried from the hall as fast as dignity would allow.

The assault team leader licked his lips nervously, as if punishment could be inflicted by hyperwave. “Yes, Master?”

Aranimas fixed the figure on the viewscreen with a glare from both eyes. “I am still waiting for your report. How many robots have you taken? Have you been able to capture the traitor Wolruf, or the human Derec?”

The assault team leader’s right eye twitched rapidly, and he licked his lips again. “Actually, Master, we have encountered some, ah, difficulties, and, ah-”

Aranimas leaned in close to the video pickup, and dropped his voice to its most forceful pitch. “How many robots have you taken?”

With a fearful glance at his portable communicator, the team leader blurted it out. “None, Master. ”

“What?”

The team leader smiled helplessly. “We arrived too late. They’re all gone. That static we intercepted was the sound of every last robot on the planet teleporting out. Apparently the natives-they call themselves Ceremyons-could not tolerate the robots. So the robots left. ”

Aranimas spat out several choice curses in his clan’s dialect. When he’d recovered some control, he glared at the viewscreen again. “Did they leave any artifacts? Buildings, parts, or tools?”

“Sort of. ” The team leader turned his video pickup around to capture what he was seeing: a vast lake of liquid metal, crowned with two intersecting parabolic arches. The resolution was poor, but the arches appeared to be jets of silver liquid. “The natives say it’s a work of art; they call it ‘Negative Feedback. ’” He turned the video pickup back on his face again.

Aranimas grumbled and rolled his eyes in counter-rotating circles. “One more chance, then. Have you located the traitor, or the humans?”

The team leader’s expression brightened. “Yes, Master. ”

Aranimas waited a few seconds. When no further information was forthcoming, he said, “Where are they?”

“They left orbit three days ago and are headed in the general direction of Quadrant 224. ”

Aranimas grumbled again. “Not what I was hoping for. But very well, collect your team and return to the ship. ”

The team leader licked his lips once more and again blinked nervously. “Actually, Master, we have a little problem with that. ”

Aranimas’ pale face flushed green with anger. “What now?”

“The natives are soaring creatures; they obtain lift by inflating their bodies with large amounts of raw hydrogen. ”

“So?”

“While attempting to extract information, I ordered the shuttle gunner to hit one of the natives with a low-wattage beam. I expected merely to burn the native; instead, it exploded with considerable violence. ”

“And the shuttle was damaged?”

“Not exactly, Master. ”

“ Not exactly?”

“Master, the surviving natives have sealed the shuttle inside some kind of impenetrable force globe. It doesn’t appear to be damaged, but we can’t get to it. Could you send the second shuttle to extract us?”

Aranimas’ heavy eyelids popped wide open, and his face turned a deep, angry green. “Bumbling fool! You can rot there for all the times you have failed me!” He slammed a bony fist down on the horseshoe console, blanking the team leader’s face off his viewscreen. “Scanners! There is a ship in Quadrant 224; find it for me. Helm! Prepare to leave orbit immediately, maximum speed. ” Orders given, he blanked all the screens except one, and through that screen stared out at the glistening starfield in Quadrant 224. Somewhere out there, perhaps one of those tiny points of ninth-magnitude light, was the quarry he had been chasing for so long.

“I swear,” he whispered, talking solely to himself, “I have not come this close only to be cheated again. ”

Ariel was in one of her cold and silent moods again. Derec tried to strike up a conversation over breakfast, but all he managed to do was irritate her more.

“Look, Ari,” he said, “I know how you feel about losing the baby. I lost my whole life. When I woke up in that survival pod on the surface of that asteroid-”

A look of fury flashed into Ariel’s eyes, and she fired a buttered scone straight at Derec’s face. “Will you shut up about that stupid asteroid! “

He ducked the pastry and tried his most soothing voice. “But honey, my amnesia is”

“Old news! You’ve been telling me about your frosted amnesia and that crummy little asteroid for the last three years. Don’t you have any other stories?”

“Well, no, honey. The amnesia-”

“Aagh!” She threw another scone at Derec and this time caught him right between the eyes.

By the time Derec finished wiping the butter off his face, Ariel had locked herself in the bedroom. He briefly considered trying to reason with her through the closed door, and then realized that discretion was the better part of valor. Leaving her sulking in their stateroom, he decided to take a stroll around the upper deck of the good ship Wild Goose Chase.

The stroll went almost as badly as the breakfast. Within minutes Derec was thoroughly lost. As he wandered blindly through the great salons and companionways that simply hadn’t been there the night before, the temptation to use his internal commlink to call for help grew very strong.

. Derec resisted. Frost, he thought angrily, for once r m going to figure out this mouse-maze myself! Pausing to visualize the latest floor plan of the deck, he thought once more about what a remarkable-and disturbing-ship it was.

Try as he might, Derec could not get used to the idea that he wasn’t aboard a ship so much as he was inside an enormous robot. To make matters worse, the Wild Goose Chase was no ordinary robot, but rather one of his father’s incredible cellular creations, constructed of the same amorphous robotic “cells” as Robot City itself. Back in Robot City, Derec had slowly come to accept that the city constantly rearranged its architecture to suit the perceived needs of its human inhabitants. But out here, in space-far out in space-there was something terribly unnerving about the idea of having nothing between himself and the vacuum except a ship’s hull that changed shape like a Procyan jellyslug on a hot day.

For example, three days before, when they’d left the planet of the Ceremyons, the Wild Goose Chase had been reasonably ship-shaped: long, narrow, and linear, with the control cabin in the nose and the planetary drives in the stern. As soon as they’d cleared the atmosphere, though, the ship had decided to shorten the walking distance between the bridge and the engine room by reconfiguring itself into a thick, flattened disk not unlike an enormous flying three-layer cake. Derec had found being locked inside a Personal during that first transformation to be a terrifying experience. Of course, thought Derec, it was for my own good. There was probably nothing but space on the other side of that door.