“Well-glad to meet you. Finally.”

“I’m the only daughter of Juliana Welsh, of the planet Aurora.” She watched for his reaction.

“Should that mean something to me?”

“I thought you might have heard of her-she’s extremely wealthy. Lots of people have.”

Derec shrugged.

“My mother was the biggest patron of a man called Dr. Avery. Have you heard of him?”

“Dr. Avery. You know, I think I have…his name sounds familiar. What about him?”

“Dr. Avery was the brain behind all this.” She waved a hand, indicating the entire planet. “Robot City is his. And my mother’s money got it started.”

Derec’s heart began to pound. Dr. Avery. He had sat in the man’s office and used his terminal; now he had a name to go with the vague, limited information. Someone had been in that office shortly before he had; he had found a recently discarded food container.

“Whew. You really were keeping a secret, weren’t you?” He spoke more sympathetically. “What was he doing? Why did he build it?”

“From what Mom said, I think he was a famous architect. She called him a visionary. He was also eccentric, and used to argue with everyone. Robot City was a place where he could test his theories. “

“I get it. Here’s this…genius, I suppose, with all these outlandish ideas that no one can handle. So he wants to try out his experiments without interference, and your mother finances him.”

Katherine-now Ariel-nodded. “She gave him enough to get started, with the understanding that his project would have to be self-supporting after a certain point. Since that was part of his experiment, he didn’t object. And of course the robots are always very efficient. “

“He wanted to create an ongoing, self-sufficient city?”

“With a fully functioning society.”

“Where is he now?”

“He vanished a long time ago. Just went off somewhere. I suppose he’s dead, but Mom said he’s so strange that you just never know.”

“And he left behind an entire city of robots running on their original programming.” Derec shook his head. “Well, that clears up more than you think.”

“Like what?”

“When the microbes from the blood of…of the dead man set off the automatic shapechanging in the city, this entire community went berserk because its programming made an interpretation that no human would have made.”

“In other words,” said Ariel, “something went wrong and Dr. Avery wasn’t around to fix it. He wanted an ideal experimental environment and he didn’t quite get it.”

“When you put it that way, though, he came pretty close. If he had stayed here, he might have kept it going the way he wanted.”

“There’s something else.” She looked at her hands, and started playing with her fingernails. “I’ve been banished from Aurora. I can’t go back. “

“You’vebeen banished? How? I mean, what for? Did you break a law or something? Are you a criminal?”

She gave a wry sneer. “I wish. I’d be a lot better off. Derec, I’m-sick.”

“The chronic condition you’ve mentioned.” He spoke gently, allowing her whatever leeway she wished in such a personal matter.

“Oh, don’t worry. You’re in no danger. You can’t get it from just being around me.” She laughed bitterly. “I had an affair. I guess it was, you know, a rebellion against my mother and all her fancy friends. They all expected me to be such a good little girl and grow up to be just like them.” It was her turn to start pacing.

Derec waited patiently.

“The guy was a Spacer from, I don’t know, some other planet. He was just traveling through, you might say, and he was long gone by the time I found out he’d contaminated me.”

“Couldn’t your mother help? With all her money and everything?”

“Ha! They don’t have any cure on Aurora-or maybe anywhere. Besides, this wasn’t just a matter of getting sick and getting well. On Aurora, this is a deadly sin. My mother bought a ship and outfitted it for me, complete with a couple of robots as aides. Getting away was the best I could do.”

“Your mother made quite a contribution, at that. You left Aurora in style, at least.”

“I can’t complain about that.”

“And after you left?”

“I told myself I was looking for a cure, but I don’t know if I really believe there is such a thing. But I did decide not to waste any time!”

Derec felt a prickling along the back of his neck. “What do you mean, not waste any time?”

“Derec, I…I’m going to die of this!” And suddenly she was crying, scared and vulnerable in a way he had never seen before.

He hesitated just a moment, and then went to her, holding her-awkwardly at first, then gently as she relaxed against him and really began to sob.

He was dumbfounded. This flood of information seemed to short-circuit his attention, and left him simply staring at the floor without thoughts as she cried in his arms. He had to sort out what he could-that she was Ariel, not Katherine, and that she was not, right now, the confident and sharp-edged older girl he had known her to be.

She was Ariel Welsh, banished from her home planet, trapped on Robot City, and infected with a deadly disease.

He turned her gently by the shoulders and led her into her room. First he sat with her on the bed, still uncertain of what to do. Then, after her sobs had grown fainter, she squeezed his arm affectionately and pulled away to stretch out on the bed. He rose, patted her on the shoulder shyly, and went out, closing her door behind him.

Derec sat at his computer console for a long time without turning it on. His own amnesia suddenly seemed like a fairly manageable problem. Yet the urgency of getting her off Robot City, and perhaps to some medical help, was greater than ever.

He doubted that the robots could help with a disease, at least in the short term. Even so, he started calling up various medical subjects on the central computer, in case Dr. Avery had left anything useful.

Actually, he found quite a bit of medical information pertaining to humans, but nothing that hinted at an ability to find cures for new diseases. The computer did have a list of vaccines, cures, and treatments for diseases he recognized-common ones that would have been available on Aurora. He also found a great deal of advanced material on surgery, organ regeneration, and other treatments for injuries. Overall, however, the library was oddly lacking, as though Dr. Avery, or at least somebody, had just grabbed information and entered it without checking it. For instance, there was no introductory reference on anatomy as such, or on psychology. Derec suspected that the eccentric Dr. Avery had been so involved with the frontiers of science that he had neglected to supply fundamental knowledge. After all, the robots had no particular need for this subject. He also remembered that the library on the planetoid where he had first met these Avery robots had been oddly selected.

At dinner time, he took a break and knocked lightly on Ariel’s door. When she did not answer, he peeked inside and found her sleeping soundly. He made dinner for himself and returned to the computer.

The only information he could find pertaining to human anatomy regarded external appearance. This came from the positronic brains of the robots, rather than any specific entry into the computer. They could only obey the Three Laws of Robotics if they could identify humans when they came into contact with them, so he was not surprised to find this. When he saw the addendum beneath it, however, he sat up straight in his chair.

The computer noted five alien presences in Robot City. He supposed that meant humans, as the likelihood of sentient nonhuman aliens was very slim. There simply weren’t enough of them, and he decided that the central computer would surely have made more of the matter. Nor would it ever again interpret microscopic human parasites as alien presences. Non-Avery robots could conceivably be here, of course, but he was sure that the significance of reporting these presences was to warn the local robot population that humans were here. Their presence would bring the Laws into consideration, while the arrival of other robots would not.