“You don’t know its significance, I suppose?”

“I don’t.” (He would never have done with ignorance, he thought bitterly.)

“Do you mind a small lecture, then?”

“If it will help me make sense of this damned world,” blurted out Baley, “by all means.”

“Skies above!” Klorissa smiled. “I suppose we seem to you as Earth would seem to us. Imagine. Say, here’s an empty chamber. Come in here and we’ll sit down—no, the room’s not big enough. Tell you what, though. You take a seat in there and I’ll stand out here.”

She stepped farther down the corridor, giving him space to enter the room, then returned, taking up her stand against the opposite wall at a point from which she could see him.

Baley took his seat with only the slightest quiver of chivalry countering it. He thought rebelliously: Why not? Let the Spacer woman stand.

Klorissa folded her muscular arms across her chest and said, “Gene analysis is the key to our society. We don’t analyze for genes directly, of course. Each gene, however, governs one enzyme, and we can analyze for enzymes. Know the enzymes, know the body chemistry. Know the body chemistry, know the human being. You see all that?”

“I understand the theory,” said Baley. “I don’t know how it’s applied.”

“That part’s done here. Blood samples are taken while the infant is still in the late fetal stage. That gives us our rough first approximation. Ideally, we should catch all mutations at that point and judge whether birth can be risked. In actual fact, we still don’t quite know enough to eliminate all possibility of mistake. Someday, maybe. Anyway, we continue testing after birth; biopsies as well as body fluids. In any case, long before adulthood, we know exactly what our little boys and girls are made of.”

(Sugar and spice… A nonsense phrase went unbidden through Baley’s mind.)

“We wear coded rings to indicate our gene constitution,” said Klorissa. “It’s an old custom, a bit of the primitive left behind from the days when Solarians had not yet been weeded eugenically. Nowadays, we’re all healthy.”

Baley said, “But you still wear yours. Why?”

“Because I’m exceptional,” she said with an unembarrassed, unblunted pride. “Dr. Delmarre spent a long time searching for an assistant. He needed someone exceptional. Brains, ingenuity, industry, stability. Most of all, stability. Someone who could learn to mingle with children and not break down.”

“He couldn’t, could he? Was that a measure of his instability?”

Kiorissa said, “In a way, it was, but at least it was a desirable type of instability under most circumstances. You wash your hands, don’t you?”

Baley’s eyes dropped to his hands. They were as clean as need be. “Yes,” he said.

“All right. I suppose it’s a measure of instability to feel such revulsion at dirty hands as to be unable to clean an oily mechanism by hand even in an emergency. Still, in the ordinary course of living, the revulsion keeps you clean, which is good.”

“I see. Go ahead.”

“There’s nothing more. My genic health is the third-highest ever recorded on Solaria, so I wear my ring. It’s a record I enjoy carrying with me.”

“I congratulate you.”

“You needn’t sneer. It may not be my doing. It may be the blind permutation of parental genes, but it’s a proud thing to own, anyway. And no one would believe me capable of so seriously psychotic an act as murder. Not with my gene make-up. So don’t waste accusations on me.”

Baley shrugged and said nothing. The woman seemed to confuse gene make-up and evidence and presumably the rest of Solaria would do the same.

Kiorissa said, “Do you want to see the youngsters now?”

“Thank you. Yes.”

The corridors seemed to go on forever. The building was obviously a tremendous one. Nothing like the huge banks of apartments in the Cities of Earth, of course, but for a single building clinging to the outside skin of a planet it must be a mountainous structure.

There were hundreds of cribs, with pink babies squalling, or sleeping, or feeding. Then there were play rooms for the crawlers.

“They’re not too bad even at this age,” said Klorissa grudgingly, “though they take up a tremendous sum of robots. It’s practically a robot per baby till walking age.”

“Why is that?”

“They sicken if they don’t get individual attention.”

Baley nodded. “Yes, I suppose the requirement for affection is something that can’t be done away with.”

Klorissa frowned and said brusquely, “Babies require attention.”

Baley said, “I am a little surprised that robots can fulfill the need for affection.”

She whirled toward him, the distance between them not sufficing to hide her displeasure. “See here, Baley, if you’re trying to shock me by using unpleasant terms, you won’t succeed. Skies above, don’t be childish.”

“Shock you?”

“I can use the word too. Affection! Do you want a short word, a good four-letter word. I can say that, too. Love! Love! Now if it’s out of your system, behave yourself.”

Baley did not trouble to dispute the matter of obscenity. He said, “Can robots really give the necessary attention, then?”

“Obviously, or this farm would not be the success it is. They fool with the child. They nuzzle it and snuggle it. The child doesn’t care that it’s only a robot. But then, things grow more difficult between three and ten.”

“Oh?”

“During that interval, the children insist on playing with one another. Quite indiscriminately.”

“I take it you let them.”

“We have to, but we never forget our obligation to teach them the requirements of adulthood. Each has a separate room that can be closed off. Even from the first, they must sleep alone. We insist on that. And then we have an isolation time every day and that increases with the years. By the time a child reaches ten, he is able to restrict himself to viewing for a week at a time. Of course, the viewing arrangements are elaborate. They can view outdoors, under mobile conditions, and can keep it up all day.”

Baley said, “I’m surprised you can counter an instinct so thoroughly. You do counter it; I see that. Still, it surprises me.”

“What instinct?” demanded Klorissa.

“The instinct of gregariousness. There is one. You say yourself that as children they insist on playing with each other.”

Klorissa shrugged. “Do you call that instinct? But then, what if it is? Skies above, a child has an instinctive fear of falling, but adults can be trained to work in high places even where there is constant danger of falling. Haven’t you ever seen gymnastic exhibitions on high wires? There are some worlds where people live in tall buildings. And children have instinctive fear of loud noises, too, but are you afraid of them?”

“Not within reason,” said Baley.

“I’m willing to bet that Earth people couldn’t sleep if things were really quiet. Skies above, there isn’t an instinct around that can’t give way to a good, persistent education. Not in human beings, where instincts are weak anyway. In fact, if you go about it right, education gets easier with each generation. It’s a matter of evolution.”

Baley said, “How is that?”

“Don’t you see? Each individual repeats his own evolutionary history as he develops. Those fetuses back there have gills and a tail for a time. Can’t skip those steps. The youngster has to go through the social-animal stage in the same way. But just as a fetus can get through in one month a stage that evolution took a hundred million years to get through, so our children can hurry through the social animal stage. Dr. Delmarre was of the opinion that with the generations, we’d get through that stage faster and faster.”

“Is that so?”

“In three thousand years, he estimated, at the present rate of progress, we’d have children who’d take to viewing at once. The boss had other notions, too. He was interested in improving robots to the point of making them capable of disciplining children without becoming mentally unstable. Why not? Discipline today for a better life tomorrow is a true expression of First Law if robots could only be made to see it.”