name until I saw you. I recognized you from
your picture."

Fitzhugh smiled, which merely served to wrinkle his face even more.

Mike the Angel spent the next several minutes feeling the man out, then
he went on to explain what had happened with Snookums out in the foyer,
which launched Dr. Fitzhugh into an explanation.

"He didn't want help, of course; he was merely conducting an experiment.
There are many areas of knowledge in which he is as naive as a child."

Mike nodded. "It figures. At first I thought he was just a
remote-control tool, but I finally saw that he was a real,
honest-to-goodness robot. Who gave him the idea to make such an
experiment as that?"

"No one at all," said Dr. Fitzhugh. "He's built to make up his own
experiments."

Mike the Angel's classic face regarded the wrinkled one of Dr. Fitzhugh.
"His own experiments? But a robot--"

Fitzhugh held up a bony hand, gesturing for attention and silence. He
got it from Mike.

"Snookums," he said, "is no ordinary robot, Commander."

Mike waited for more. When none came, he said: "So I gather." He sipped
at his black coffee. "That machine I saw is actually a remote-control
tool, isn't it? Snookums' actual brain is in Cargo Hold One of the
_William Branchell_."

"That's right." Dr. Fitzhugh began reaching into various pockets about
his person. He extracted a tobacco pouch, a briar pipe, and a jet-flame
lighter. Then he began speaking as he went through the pipe smoker's
ritual of filling, tamping, and lighting.

"Snookums," he began, "is a self-activating, problem-seeking computer
with input and output sensory and action mechanisms analogous to those
of a human being." He pushed more tobacco into the bowl of his pipe with
a bony forefinger. "He's as close to being a living creature as anything
Man has yet devised."

"What about the synthecells they're making at Boston Med?" Mike asked,
looking innocent.

Fitzhugh's contour-map face wrinkled up even more. "I should have said
'living _intelligence_,'" he corrected himself. "He's a true robot, in
the old original sense of the word; an artificial entity that displays
almost every function of a living, intelligent creature. And, at the
same time, he has the accuracy and speed that is normal to a cryotron
computer."

Mike the Angel said nothing while Fitzhugh fired up his lighter and
directed the jet of flame into the bowl and puffed up great clouds of
smoke which obscured his face.

While the