His voice took a darker turn. “No food, no warm cave to sleep in, no family. ” Maverick’s voice dropped to a breathy whisper, as if he had finally become aware that he was talking to himself. “Let’s face it, lad. We’ve been on the run too long. We-l have got to find a pack to join. ” He thought back on the winter he’d just lived through and shuddered involuntarily. “I’ve got to find a pack soon. ” Taking a deep breath, he dug his paws into the loose gravel and started up the side of the mountain. Smallface, the lesser of the two moons, was just rising. He had a lot of climbing to do before Largeface rose.

Halfway up the slope, he surprised a feeding whistlepig. The stupid little furball tried to hide in plain sight; scrabbling and clawing, Maverick fell on it and bit its head off with one snap of his long, toothy jaws. The meat was tough and nearly tasteless, but he carefully chewed and swallowed each bite.

Excluding carrion, it was the first meal he’d eaten in three days.

Robotic Law potentials danced and capered in Basalom’s positronic brain like fireflies on hyperdrive. Impulses and reactions chased each other through his circuits, laughing riotously as molecular relays burst open and slammed shut like hallway doors in an old comedy routine. As much as a robot can be said to enjoy anything, Basalom was beginning to enjoy the incredibly complex nets of conflicting potentials that wove themselves inside his brain. Now, with the latest news just in from the scanning team, an entirely new dimension was added to his decision matrix, imparting a wonderful sense of energy to his cognition circuits. The potentials glittered in his mind like an Auroran filterbug’s web on a dewy morning.

Dr. Anastasi was not going to like the scanning team’s report.

First and Second Law conflicts skirmished in his brain, fighting for priority. Each time his decision gate flip-flopped, the stress register escalated. When the register hit 256, the accumulated potential was shunted to ground through his optical perceptor membrane actuator.

In simpler terms, he blinked.

Dr. Anastasi finished her business in the Personal and emerged into the companionway. Basalom blinked once more to clear his stress register and then addressed his mistress.

“Dr. Anastasi? The scanning team reports finding no trace of Learning Machine #1. ”

“What?”

Again, a surging clash of potentials! How could he obey the implied Second Law command to repeat and clarify the message without violating the First Law by insulting her intelligence?

Basalom settled for slowing his voice clock rate by ten percent and augmenting his speech with “warm” harmonics in the two-kilohertz range. “For the past eight hours, the scanning team has worked outward in an expanding radial pattern from the landing site. Within the limits of their equipment, they have not been able to find any evidence of Learning Machine #1’s existence. ”

Dr. Anastasi ran a hand through her hair. “That’ s impossible. It was powered by a cold microfusion cell. Even if the learning machine was completely destroyed, they still should be able to pick up residual neutron radiation from the power pack. ” Then a thought crossed her mind, and she frowned. “Unless Derec… ”

She shook her head. “No, a coincidence like that would strain credulity. The scanning crew must have made some mistake. ” She turned and started up the companionway toward the bow of the ship. “Well? Come along, Basalom. ”

Basalom was almost disappointed. His lovely, complex decision matrix resolved to simple Second Law obedience, and he dutifully fell in behind.

To minimize the effect of stray radiation from the ship’s engines on delicate equipment, the scanning team’s cabin was located in a blister on the underside of the uttermost bow of the ship. To get to the blister, Basalom and Dr. Anastasi had to leave the cargo bay laboratory, walk the entire length of the living quarters, and then drop down one level to the low-ceilinged companionway that ran beneath the bridge. For the last ten meters, they had to pull themselves along handholds through a narrow, zero-gravity access tube.

Along the way, to keep his mind busy, Basalom reopened his human viewpoint simulation file. He had more observations to add to the file and more data to correlate. In particular, Basalom wanted to record an effect that he had noticed twice before: That Dr. Janet, when given information she did not like, would insist on traveling to the source and verifying the information herself.

This must be a corollary effect of having a purely local viewpoint,Basalom decided. Dr. Anastasi would rather believe that a severe failure has occurred in her information gathering systems than accept unpleasant information.

Basalom logged, indexed, and stored the observation. Someday 1 will meet robots who have been observing other humans in a similar fashion. Perhaps then we will be able to integrate our data and formulate fundamental laws of human behavior.

Perhaps someday,Basalom repeated. But given the way Dr. Anastasi shunned human society, it was not likely to be any time soon.

Puffing with exertion and the indignity of it all, Dr. Anastasi pushed off the last handhold in the access tube and floated into the scanning blister. A moment later Basalom followed; he immediately noted that the four robots that made up the scanning team were still jacked into their consoles. He fired off a quick commburst suggesting that they turn around and look sharp. Slowly, awkwardly, the four robots began disconnecting their umbilical cables, detaching themselves from their consoles, and switching over to their local senses.

Looking at the squat, blocky machines, Basalom felt a surge of the positronic flux that he identified as a feeling of superiority. The scanning team robots were plain metallic automatons designed expressly for work in zero-G. They had ungainly, boxlike bodies, no heads to speak of, and in place of proper arms and legs, eight multi-jointed limbs that ended in simple metal claws. Since the bulk of their sensory data was routed through the scanning consoles, they came equipped with the bare minimum of human-interface hardware: one audio input! output membrane and a pair of monochrome optics on stalks. The effect, Basalom decided, resembled nothing so much as a quartet of giant softshell crabs.

Strike that.Basalom ran a quick cross-reference through his metaphor library. Make that, they look like giant lice.

Dr. Anastasi was still waiting patiently for the scanning team to finish disconnecting themselves, so Basalom allocated a few microseconds for comparative analysis. They are crude, functional devices. 1 have a humanoid configuration. human-like limbs, and an acceptably human face.

They are little more than human-friendly front-ends for the machines that they are connected to. 1 am intelligent. perceptive, and equipped with refined sensibilities.

Verily, 1 am molded in the image of my Maker!

Then a new, unknown potential surged through Basalom’s circuits, and he reevaluated the results of his analysis.

Still, they are my positronic brothers, and 1 must help them elevate themselves if 1 can.

Basalom didn’t realize it, but he had just become the first robot in history to be condescending.

The last of the scanning robots finished disconnecting itself from its instrument console. As one, the four robots rotated their sensory turrets to “face” Dr. Anastasi.

When she was sure she had their attention, Janet began issuing commands. “Eyes, Ears, Nose, and Throat! Report!” As soon as that last word left her lips, Basalom anticipated the cacophony that would result from a literal interpretation of that order and jumped in on the commlink. Override, he squirted out to the scanning robots. Report sequentially.