's mind Laro flinched away. "If you can't talk
sense keep still."

* * * * *

In half an hour the car stopped in front of a small building which
looked something like a subway kiosk--except for the door, which, built
of steel-reinforced lead, swung on a piano hinge having a pin a good
eight inches in diameter. Laro opened that door. They went in. As the
tremendously massive portal clanged shut, lights flashed on.

Hilton glanced at his tell-tales, one inside, one outside, his suit.
Both showed zero.

Down twenty steps, another door. Twenty more; another. And a fourth.
Hilton's inside meter still read zero. The outside one was beginning to
climb.

Into an elevator and straight down for what must have been four or five
hundred feet. Another door. Hilton went through this final barrier
gingerly, eyes nailed to his gauges. The outside needle was high in the
red, almost against the pin, but the inside one still sat reassuringly
on zero.

He stared at the android. "How can any possible brain take so much of
_this_ stuff without damage?"

"It does not reach the brain, Master. We convert it. Each minute of this
is what you would call a 'good, square meal'."

"I see ... dimly. You can eat energy, or drink it, or soak it up through
your skins. However it comes, it's all duck soup for you."

"Yes, Master."

Hilton glanced ahead, toward the far end of the immensely long,
comparatively narrow, room. It was, purely and simply, an assembly line;
and fully automated in operation.

"You are replacing the Omans destroyed in the battle with the
skeletons?"

"Yes, Master."

Hilton covered the first half of the line at a fast walk. He was not
particularly interested in the fabrication of super-stainless-steel
skeletons, nor in the installation and connection of atomic engines,
converters and so on.

He was more interested in the synthetic fluoro-silicon flesh, and paused
long enough to get a general idea of its growth and application. He was
very much interested in how such human-looking skin could act as both
absorber and converter, but he could see nothing helpful.

"An application, I suppose, of the same principle used in this radiation
suit."

"Yes, Master."

* * * * *

At the end of the line he stopped. A brain, in place and connected to
millions of infinitely fine wire nerves, but not yet surrounded by a
skull, was being educated. Scanners--multitu