was still beside his
chair, waiting for dismissal. He gave it an instruction to summon the
cleaning robots and sent it away. He could as easily have summoned them
himself, or let the guards who would be in checking the room do it for
him, but maybe it made a robot feel trusted and important to relay
orders to other robots.

Then he smiled again, this time in self-derision. A robot couldn't feel
important, or anything else. A robot was nothing but steel and plastic
and magnetized tape and photo-micro-positronic circuits, whereas a
man--His Imperial Majesty Paul XXII, for instance--was nothing but
tissues and cells and colloids and electro-neuronic circuits. There was
a difference; anybody knew that. The trouble was that he had never met
anybody--which included physicists, biologists, psychologists,
psionicists, philosophers and theologians--who could define the
difference in satisfactorily exact terms. He watched the robot pivot on
its treads and glide away, trailing steam from its coffee pot. It might
be silly to treat robots like people, but that wasn't as bad as treating
people like robots, an attitude which was becoming entirely too
prevalent. If only so many people didn't act like robots!

He crossed to the elevator and stood in front of it until a tiny
electroencephalograph inside recognized his distinctive brain-wave
pattern. Across the room, another door was popping open in response to
the robot's distinctive wave pattern. He stepped inside and flipped a
switch--there were still a few things around that had to be manually
operated--and the door closed behind him and the elevator gave him an
instant's weightlessness as it started to drop forty floors.

When it opened, Captain-General Dorflay of the Household Guard was
waiting for him, with a captain and ten privates. General Dorflay was
human. The captain and his ten soldiers weren't. They wore helmets,
emblazoned with the golden sun and superimposed black cogwheel of the
Empire, and red kilts and black ankle boots and weapons belts, and the
captain had a narrow gold-laced cape over his shoulders, but for the
rest, their bodies were covered with a stiff mat of black hair, and
their faces were slightly like terriers'. (For all his humanity,
Captain-General Dorflay's face was more like a bulldog's.) They were
hillmen from the southern hemisphere of Thor, and as a people they made
excellent mercenaries. They were crack shots, brave and crafty fighters,
totally uni