r two years because of our orbital position.
The servos themselves were beautiful pieces of machinery and just about
as close as science had come so far to producing the pure android. Every
one of them was plastic hand-molded and of course they were equipped
with rationaloid circuits. They had to be to ferry those big cargoes
back and forth from the rock belt to Frisco. As rationaloids, Minor
Planets had to pay them wages under California law, but I'll bet it
wasn't half what the company would have to pay human pilots for doing
the same thing.

In a couple of weeks' time maybe five servos made stopovers. We kept a
close watch on them from the minute they signed the register to the time
they took off again, but they all behaved themselves. Operating on a
round-robot basis the way they did, it would take us a while to check
all of them because Minor Planets employed about forty all told.

Well, about a month before the Jovian Moons rush started we got some
action. I'd slipped into a spacesuit and was doing some work on the
CO{2} pipes outside the Io when I spotted a ship reversing rockets
against the sun. I could tell it was a Minor Planets job by the stubby
fins.

She jockeyed up to the boom, secured, and then her hatch opened and a
husky servo hopped out into the gangplank tube. I caught the gleam of
his Minor Planets shoulder patch as he reached back into the ship for
something. When he headed for the airlock I spotted the square package
clamped tight under his plastic arm.

"Did you see that?" I asked Min when I got back to the Renting Office.
"I'll bet it's the girl mech's head. How'd he sign the register?"

"Calls himself Frank Nineteen," said Min, pointing to the smooth Palmer
Method signature. "He looks like a fairly late model but he was
complaining about a bad power build-up coming through the ionosphere.
He's repairing himself right now in 22A."

"I'll bet," I snorted. "Let's have a look."

Like all spotel operators, we get a lot of No Privacy complaints from
guests about the SHA return-air vents. Spatial Housing Authority
requires them every 12 feet but sometimes they come in handy, especially
with certain guests. They're about waist-high and we had to kneel down
to see what the mech was up to inside 22A.

The big servo was too intent on what he was doing for us to register on
his photons. He wasn't repairing himself, either. He was bending over
the parts of the girl mech and working fast, like he was