of the attending Robots encountered it in an aisle, and
the cart swung automatically aside. The Robot spoke to the cart;
ordered it away; and the tone of his order, registering upon some
sensitive mechanism, whirled the cart around and sent it rolling to
another aisle section.

The strange perfection of machinery! I realized there was no line
sharply to be drawn between the inert machine and the sentient,
thinking Robots. That cart, for instance, was almost a connecting
link.

There were also Robots here of many different types. Some of them were
eight or ten feet in stature, in the fashion of a man: Migul was of
this design. Others were small, with bulging foreheads and bulging
chest plates: Larry saw this type as domestics in the palace. Still
others were little pot-bellied things with bent legs and long thin
arms set crescent-shape. I saw one of these peer into a huge chassis
of a machine, and reach in with his curved arm to make an interior
adjustment....

Migul had brought Mary Atwood and me in the larger cage, from that
burned forest of the year 762, where with the disintegrating ray-gun
Tugh had killed Harl. The body of Harl in a moment had melted into
putrescence, and dried, leaving only the skeleton within the clothes.
The white-ray, Tugh had called his weapon. We were destined very
shortly to have many dealings with it.

Tugh had given Migul its orders. Then Tugh took Harl's smaller cage
and flashed away to meet Tina and Larry in 1777, as I have already
described.

And Migul brought us here to 2930. As we descended the spiral
staircase and came into the cavern, it stood with us for a moment.

"That's wonderful," the Robot said proudly. "I am part of it. We are
machinery almost human."

* * * * *

Then it led us down a side aisle of the cavern and into a dim recess.
A great transparent tube bubbling with a violet fluorescence stood in
the alcove space. Behind it in the wall Migul slid a door, and we
passed through, into a small metal room. It was bare, save for two
couch-seats. With the door closed upon us, we waited through an
interval. How long it was, I do not know; several hours, possibly.
Migul told us that Tugh would come. The giant mechanism stood in the
corner, and its red-lit eyes watched us alertly. It stood motionless,
inert, tireless--so superior to a human in this job, for it could
stand there indefinitely.

We found food and drink here. We talked a littl