"It's like a hunger," she said.

"Perhaps we had best conclude this session now."

Their clothing was dry again. A bird began to sing.

"No, wait! Pleasel HI be careful. I want to see morethings."

"There is always the next visit," said Render. "But Isuppose we can manage one more. Is there somethingyou want very badly to see?"

"Yes. Winter. Snow."

"Okay," smiled the Shaper, "then wrap yourself in thatfur-piece...."

The afternoon slipped by rapidly after the departure ofhis patient. Render was in a good mood. He felt emptiedand filled again. He had come through the first trial without suffering any repercussions. He decided that he wasgoing to succeed. His satisfaction was greater than hisfear. It was with a sense of exhilaration that he returnedto working on his speech.

"... And what is the power to hurt?" he inquired ofthe microphone.

"We live by pleasure and we live by pain," he answered himself. "Either can frustrate and either can encourage. But while pleasure and pain are rooted inbiology, they are conditioned by society: thus are valuesto be derived. Because of the enormous masses of humanity, hectically changing positions in space every daythroughout the cities of the world, there has come into^ necessary being a series of totally inhuman controls upon•^ these movements. Every day they nibble their way intonew areas—driving our cars, flying our planes, interviewing us, diagnosing our diseases—and 1 cannot evenventure a moral judgment upon these intrusions. Theyhave become necessary. Ultimately, they may prove salutary.

"The point I wish to make, however, is that we areoften unaware of our own values. We cannot honestlytell what a thing means to us until it is removed fromour life-situation. If an object of value ceases to exist,then the psychic energies which were bound up in it arereleased. We seek after new objects of value in which toinvest this—mana, if you like, or libido, if you don'tAnd no one thing which has vanished during the pastthree or four or five decades was, in itself, massivelysignificant; and no new thing which came into being during that time is massively malicious toward the people ithas replaced or the people it in some manner controls. Asociety, though, is made up of many things, and whenthese things are changed too rapidly the results are unpredictable. An intense study of mental illness is oftenquite revealing as to the nature of the stresses in thesociety where the illness was made. If anxiety-patternsfall into special groups and classes, then something ofthe discontent of society can be learned from them. KarlJung pointed out that when consciousness is repeatedlyfrustrated in a quest for values it will turn its search tothe unconscious; failing there, it will proceed to quarryits way into the hypothetical collective unconscious. Henoted, in the postwar analyses of ex-Nazis, that thelonger they searched for something to erect from theruins of their lives—having lived through a period ofclassical iconoclasm, and then seen their new idealstopple as well—the longer they searched, the furtherback they seemed to reach into the collective unconsciousof their people. Their dreams themselves came to takeon patterns out of the Teutonic mythos.

"This, in a much less dramatic sense, is happening today. There are historical periods when the group tendency for the mind to turn in upon itself, to turn back, isgreater than at other times. We are living in such a periodof Quixotism, in the original sense of the term. This isbecause the power to hurt, in our time, is the power toignore, to baffle—and it is no longer the exclusive property of human beings—'*A buzz interrupted him then. He switched off the recorder. touched the phone-box.

"Charles Render speaking," he told it.

"This is Paul Charter," lisped the box. "I am headmaster at Dilling."

"Yes?"

The picture cleared. Render saw a man whose eyes wereset close together beneath a high forehead. The foreheadwas heavily creased; the mouth twitched as it spoke.

"Well, 1 want to apologize again for what happened.It was a faulty piece of equipment that caused—"

"Can't you afford proper facilities? Your fees are highenough."

"It was a new piece of equipment. It was a factorydefect—"

"Wasn't there anybody in charge of the class?"

"Yes, but—"

"Why didn't he inspect the equipment? Why wasn'the on hand to prevent the fall?"

"He was on hand, but it happened too fast for him todo anything. As for inspecting the equipment for factorydefects, that isn't his job. Look, I'm very sorry. I'mquite fond of your boy. I can assure you nothing like thiswill ever happen again."

"You're right, there. But that's because I'm pickinghim up tomorrow morning and enrolling him in a schoolthat exercises proper safety precautions."

Render ended the conversation with a flick of his finger. After several minutes had passed he stood andcrossed the room to his small wall safe, which was partlymasked, though not concealed, by a shelf of books. Ittook only a moment for him to open it and withdraw ajewel box containing a cheap necklace and a framedphotograph of a man resembling himself, though somewhat younger, and a woman whose upswept hair wasdark and whose chin was small, and two youngsters between them—the girl holding the baby in her arms andforcing her bright bored smile on ahead. Render alwaysstared for only a few seconds on such occasions, fondlingthe necklace, and then he shut the box and locked itaway again for many months.

Whump! Whump! went the bass. Tchg-tchg-tchga-tchg,the gourds.The gelatins splayed reds, greens, blues, and godawfulyellows about the amazing metal dancers.

HUMAN? asked the marquee.

ROBOTS? (immediately below).

COME SEE FOR YOURSELFl (across the bottom,cryptically).

So they did.

Render and Jill were sitting at a microscopic table,thankfully set back against a wall, beneath charcoal caricatures of personalities largely unknown (there being somany personalities among the subcultures of a city offourteen million people). Nose crinkled with pleasure,Jill stared at the present focal point of this particular subculture, occasionally raising her shoulders to ear level toadd emphasis to a silent laugh or a small squeal, becausethe performers were just too human—the way the ebonrobot ran his fingers along the silver robot's forearm asthey parted and passed....

Render alternated his attention between Jill and thedancers and a wicked-looking decoction that resemblednothing so much as a small bucket of whiskey soursstrewn with seaweed (through which the Krakenmight at any moment arise to drag some hapless shipdown to its doom).

"Charlie, I think they're really people!"

Render disentangled his gaze from her hair and bouncing earrings.

He studied the dancers down on the floor, somewhatbelow the table area, surrounded by music.

There could be humans within those metal shells. Ifso, their dance was a thing of extreme skill. Though themanufacture of sufficiently light alloys was no problem,it would be some trick for a dancer to cavort so freely—and for so long a period of time, and with such effortlessseeming ease—within a head-to-toe suit of armor, without so much as a grate or a click or a clank.

Soundless ...

They glided like two gulls; the larger, the color ofpolished anthracite, and the other, like a moonbeam falling through a window upon a silk-wrapped manikin.

Even when they touched there was no sound—or ifthere was, it was wholly masked by the rhythms of theband, Whump-whump! Tchga-tchg!Render took another drink.

Slowly, it turned into an apache-dance. Renderchecked his watch. Too long for normal entertainers, hedecided. They must be robots. As he looked up againthe black robot hurled the silver robot perhaps ten feetand turned his back on her.