In the beginning there was Krug, and He said, Let there be Vats, and there were Vats.

And Krug looked upon the Vats and found them good.

And Krug said, Let there be high-energy nucleotides in the Vats. And the nucleotides were poured, and Krug mixed them until they were bonded one to another.

And the nucleotides formed the great molecules, and Krug said, Let there be the father and the mother both in the Vats, and let the cells divide, and let there be life brought forth within the Vats.

And there was life, for there was Replication.

And Krug presided over the Replication, and touched the fluids with His own hands, and gave them shape and essence.

Let men come forth from the Vats, said Krug, and let women come forth, and let them live and go among us and be sturdy and useful, and we shall call them Androids.

And it came to pass.

And there were Androids, for Krug had created them in His own image, and they walked upon the face of the Earth and did service for mankind.

And for these things, praise be to Krug.

Watchman had wakened that morning in Stockholm. Groggy: four hours of sleep. Much too much. Two hours would suffice. He cleared his mind with a quick neural ritual and got under the shower for a skin-sluicing. Better, now. The android stretched, wriggled muscles, studied his smooth rosy hairless body in the bathroom mirror. A moment for religion, next.Krug deliver us from servitude. Krug deliver us from servitude. Krug deliver us from servitude. Praise be to Krug!

Watchman popped his breakfast down and dressed. The pale light of late afternoon touched his window. Soon it would be evening here, but no matter. The clock in his mind was set to Canadian time, tower time. He could sleep whenever he wished, so long as he took at least one hour out of twelve. Even an android body needed some rest, but not in the rigidly programmed way of humans.

Off to the construction site, now, to greet the day’s visitors.

The android began setting up the transmat coordinates. He hated these daily tour sessions. The tours slowed the work, since extraordinary precautions had to be observed while important human beings were on the site; they introduced special and unnecessary tensions; and they carried the hidden implication that his work was not really trustworthy, that he had to be checked every day. Of course, Watchman was aware that Krug’s faith in him was limitless. The android’s faith in that faith has sustained him superbly through the task of erecting the tower thus far. He knew that it was not suspicion but the natural human emotion of pride that brought Krug to the site so often.

Krug preserve me, Watchman thought, and stepped through the transmat.

He stepped out into the shadow of the tower. His aides greeted him. Someone handed him a list of the day’s visitors. “Is Krug here yet?” Watchman asked.

“Five minutes,” he was told, and in five minutes Krug came through the transmat, accompanied by his guests. Watchman was not cheered to see Krug’s secretary, Spaulding, in the group. They were natural enemies; they felt toward one another the instant antipathy of the vat-born and the bottle-born, the android and the ectogene. Aside from that they were rivals for eminence among Krug’s associates. To the android, Spaulding was a spreader of suspicions, a potential underminer of his status, a fount of poisons. Watchman greeted him coolly, distantly, yet properly. One did not snub humans, no matter how important an android one might be, and at least by technical definition Spaulding had to be considered human.

Krug was hustling everybody into scooprods. Watchman went up with Manuel and Clissa Krug. As the rods rode toward the truncated summit of the tower, Watchman glanced across at Spaulding in the rod to his left — at the ectogene, the prenatal orphan, the man of cramped soul and baleful spirit in whom Krug perversely placed so much trust.May Arctic winds sweep you to destruction, bottle-born. May I see you float sweetly toward the frozen ground and break beyond repair.

Clissa Krug said, “Thor, why do you suddenly look so fierce?”

“Do I?”

“I see angry clouds crossing your face.”

Watchman shrugged. “I’m doing my emotion drills, Mrs. Krug. Ten minutes of love, ten minutes of hate, ten minutes of shyness, ten minutes of selfishness, ten minutes of awe, ten minutes of arrogance. An hour a day makes androids more like people.”

“Don’t tease me,” Clissa said. She was very young, slim, dark-eyed, gentle, and, Watchman supposed, beautiful. “Are you telling me the truth?”

“I am. Really. I was practicing a little hatred when you caught me.”

“What’s the drill like? I mean, do you just stand there thinking, Hatehatehatehatehate, or what?”

He smiled at the girl’s question. Looking over her shoulder, he saw Manuel wink at him. “Another time,” Watchman said. “We’re at the top.”

The three scooprods clung to the highest course of the tower. Just above Watchman’s head hung the gray haze of the repellor field. The sky too was gray. The short northern day was nearly half over. A snowstorm was heading southward toward them along the shore of the bay. Krug, in the next scooprod, was leaning far into the tower, pointing out something to Buckleman and Vargas; in the other rod, Spaulding, Senator Fearon, and Maledetto were closely examining the satiny texture of the great glass bricks that made up the tower’s outer skin.

“When will it be finished?” Clissa asked.

“Less than a year,” the android told her. “We’re moving nicely along. The big technical problem was keeping the permafrost under the building from thawing. But now that that’s behind us, we ought to be rising several hundred meters a month.”

“Why build here in the first place,” she wanted to know, “if the ground wasn’t stable?”

“Isolation. When the ultrawave is turned on, it’ll scramble all communications lines, transmats, and power generators for thousands of square kilometers. Krug was pretty well limited to putting the tower in the Sahara, the Gobi, the Australian desert, or the tundra. For technical reasons having to do with transmission, the tundra seemed most desirable — provided the thawing problem could be beaten. Krug told us to build here. So we found a way to beat the thawing problem.”

Manuel asked, “What’s the status of the transmission equipment?”

“We begin installing it when the tower’s at the 500-meter level. Say, the middle of November.”

Krug’s voice boomed across to them. “We’ve already got the five satellite amplifying stations up. A ring of power sources surrounding the tower — enough boost to kick our signal clear to Andromeda between Tuesday and Friday.”

“A wonderful project,” said Senator Fearon. He was a dapper, showy-looking man with startling green eyes and a mane of red hair. “Another mighty step toward the maturity of mankind!” With a courtly nod toward Watchman, the Senator added, “Of course, we must recognize our immense debt to the skilled androids who are bringing this miraculous project to fruition. Without the aid of you and your people, Alpha Watchman, it would not have been possible to—”

Watchman listened blankly, remembering to smile. Compliments of this sort meant little to him. The World Congress and its Senators meant even less. Was there an android in the Congress? Would it make any difference if there were? Someday, no doubt, the Android Equality Party would get a few of its people into the Congress; three or four alphas would sit in that august body, and nevertheless androids would continue to be property, not people. The political process did not inspire optimism in Thor Watchman.