She giggled and blushed as the Stop-captain stamped triumphantly away, having gotten in his last masculine word.

“Father, give me hope.”

The E’telekeli was gentle. “I can give you almost anything from this world, but you are talking about the world of the sign of the Fish, which none of us controls. You had better go back into the everyday life of our cavern and not spend so much time on your devotional exercises, if they make you unhappy.”

She stared at him. “It’s not that. It’s not that at all. It’s just that I know that the robot, the rat and the Copt all agreed that the Promised One would come here to Earth.” A desperate note entered her voice. “Father, could it have been Rod McBan?”

“What do you mean?”

“Could he have been the Promised One, without my knowing it? Could he have come and gone just to test my faith?”

The bird-giant rarely laughed; he had never laughed at his own daughter before. But this was too absurd: he laughed at her, but a wise part of his mind told him that the laughter, though cruel now, would be good for her later on.

“Rod? A promised speaker of the truth? Oh, no. Ho — ho — ho. Rod McBan is one of the nicest human beings I ever met. A good young man, almost like a bird. But he’s no messenger from eternity.”

The daughter bowed and turned away.

She had already composed a tragedy about herself, the mistaken one, who had met “the prince of the word,” whom the worlds awaited, and had failed to know him because her faith was too weak. The strain of waiting for something that might happen now or a million years from now was too much. It was easier to accept failure and self-reproach than to endure the timeless torment of undated hope.

She had a little nook in the wall where she spent many of her eating hours. She took but a little stringed instrument which her father had made for her. It emitted ancient, weeping sounds, and she sang her own little song to it, the song of E’lamelanie who was trying to give up waiting for Rod McBan.

She looked out into the room.

A little girl, wearing nothing but panties, stared at her with fixed eyes. E’lamelanie looked back at the child. It had no expression; it just stared at her. She wondered if it might be one of the turtle-children whom her father had rescued several years earlier.

She looked away from the child and sang her song anyhow:

When she finished, the turtle-child was still watching. Almost angrily, E’lamelanie put away her little violin.

I know a lot even if I don’t feel like talking about it and I know that the most wonderful real man in all the planets came right down here into this big room and talked to these people because he is the man that the long silly girl is singing about because she does not have him but why should she anyhow and I am really the one who is going to get him because I am a turtle child and I will be right here waiting when all these people are dead and pushed down into the dissolution vats and someday he will come back to Earth and I will be all grown up and I will be a turtle woman, more beautiful than any human woman ever was, and he is going to marry me and take me off to his planet and I will always be happy with him because I will not argue all the time, the way that bird-people and cat-people and dog-people do, so that when Rod McBan is my husband and I push dinner out of the wall for him, if he tries to argue with me I will just be shy and sweet and I won’t say anything, nothing at all, to him for one hundred years and for two hundred years, and nobody could get mad at a beautiful turtle woman who never talked back…

The herald called,

“His audacity, the Chief of Thieves, is pleased to report to the Council of Thieves!”

An old man stood, very ceremoniously, “You bring us wealth, Sir and Chief, we trust — from the gullible — from the weak — from the heartless among mankind?”

The Chief of Thieves proclaimed,

“It is the matter of Rod McBan.”

A visible stir went through the Council.

The Chief of Thieves went on, with equal formality: “We never did intercept him in space, though we monitored every vehicle which came out of the sticky, sparky space around Norstrilia. Naturally, we did not send anyone down to meet Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons, may the mild-men find them! whatever those ‘kittons’ may be. There was a coffin with a woman in it and a small box with a head. Never mind. He got past us. But when he got to Earth, we caught four of him.”

“Four?” gasped one old Councillor.

“Yes,” said the Chief of Thieves. “Four Rod Mc-Bans. There was a human one too, but we could tell that one was a decoy. It had originally been a woman and was enjoying itself hugely after having been transformed into a young man. So we got four Rod Mc-Bans. All four of them were Earth-robots, very well made.”

“You stole them?” said a Councilor.

“Of course,” said the Chief of Thieves, grinning like a human wolf. “And the Earth government made no objection at all. The Earth government simply sent us a bill for them when we tried to leave — something like one-fourth megacredit ‘for the use of custom-designed robots.’ ”

“That’s a low honest trick!” cried the Chairman of the Guild of Thieves. “What did you do?” His eyes stared wide open and his voice dropped. “You didn’t turn honest and charge the bill to us, did you? We’re already in debt to those honest rogues!”

The Chief of Thieves squirmed a little. “Not quite that bad, your tricky highnesses! I cheated the Earth some, though I fear it may have bordered on honesty, the way I did it.”

“What did you do? Tell us quick, man!”

“Since I did not get the real Rod McBan, I took the robots apart and taught them how to be thieves. They stole enough money to pay all the penalties and recoup the expense of the voyage.”

“You show a profit?” cried a Councilor.

“Forty minicredits,” said the Chief of Thieves. “But the worst is yet to come. You know what Earth does to real thieves.”

A shudder went through the room. They all knew about Earth reconditioners which had changed bold thieves into dull honest rogues.

“But, you see, Sirs and Honored Ones,” the Chief of Thieves went on, apologetically, “the Earth authorities caught us at that, too. They liked the thief-robots. They made wonderful pickpockets and they kept the people stirred up. The robots also gave everything back. So,” said the Chief of Thieves, blushing, “we have a contract to turn two thousand humanoid robots into pickpockets and sneakthieves. Just to make life on Earth more fun. The robots are out in orbit, right now.”

“You mean,” shrilled the chairman, “you signed an honest contract? You, the Chief of Thieves!”