rom the robot's vocabulary;
equality was the rule on Mark's hunk of rock. Then he dubbed the robot
Charles, after a father he had never known.

As the years passed, the air pump began to labor a little as it
converted the oxygen in the planetoid's rock into a breathable
atmosphere. The air seeped into space, and the pump worked a little
harder, supplying more.

The crops continued to grow on the tamed black dirt of the planetoid.
Looking up, Mark could see the sheer blackness of the river of space,
the floating points of the stars. Around him, under him, overhead,
masses of rock drifted, and sometimes the starlight glinted from their
black sides. Occasionally, Mark caught a glimpse of Mars or Jupiter.
Once he thought he saw Earth.

Mark began to tape new responses into Charles. He added simple responses
to cue words. When he said, "How does it look?" Charles would answer,
"Oh, pretty good, I guess."

At first the answers were what Mark had been answering himself, in the
long dialogue held over the years. But, slowly, he began to build a new
personality into Charles.

Mark had always been suspicious and scornful of women. But for some
reason he didn't tape the same suspicion into Charles. Charles' outlook
was quite different.

* * * * *

"What do you think of girls?" Mark would ask, sitting on a packing case
outside the shack, after the chores were done.

"Oh, I don't know. You have to find the right one." The robot would
reply dutifully, repeating what had been put on its tape.

"I never saw a good one yet," Mark would say.

"Well, that's not fair. Perhaps you didn't look long enough. There's a
girl in the world for every man."

"You're a romantic!" Mark would say scornfully. The robot would pause--a
built-in pause--and chuckle a carefully constructed chuckle.

"I dreamed of a girl named Martha once," Charles would say. "Maybe if I
would have looked, I would have found her."

And then it would be bedtime. Or perhaps Mark would want more
conversation. "What do you think of girls?" he would ask again, and
the discussion would follow its same course.

[Illustration]

Charles grew old. His limbs lost their flexibility, and some of his
wiring started to corrode. Mark would spend hours keeping the robot in
repair.

"You're getting rusty," he would cackle.

"You're not so young yourself," Charles would reply. He had an answer
for almost everything. Nothing involved, but an