just that you have to deal with human beings."

"Oh," Sam said. "Now it comes. You know, for a minute I forgot who you were. I forgot you were the greatest living authority on robots. I was thinking of you as my boyhood chum, good old Joe. You're beyond that now, aren't you?"

"Beyond my adolescence? I hope so, though very few people are." Joe looked at Sam squarely. "Every man wants a perfect wife, doesn't he?"

Sam shrugged. "I suppose."

"And no human is perfect, so no man gets a perfect wife. Am I right, so far?"

"Sounds like it."

"Okay." Joe tapped Sam's chest with a hard finger. "I'm going to make a perfect wife." He tapped his own chest. "For me, just for me, the way I want her. No human frailties. Ideal."

"A perfect robot," Sam objected.

"A wife," Joe corrected. "A person. A human being."

"But without a brain."

"With a brain. Do you know anything about cybernetics, Sam?"

"I know just as much about cybernetics as you know about people. Nothing."

"That's not quite fair. I'm not sentimental about people, but it's inaccurate to say I don't know anything about them. I'm a person. I think I'm—discerning and sensitive."

"Sure," Sam said. "Let's drop the subject."

"Why?"

"Because you're talking nonsense. A person without faults is not a person. And if—it or he—she were, I don't think I'd care to know him or her or it."

"Naturally. You're a sentimentalist. You've seen so much misery, so much human error, so much stupidity that you've built up your natural tolerance into a sloppy and unscientific sentimentality. It happens to sociologists all the time."

"Joe, I'm not going to argue with you. Only one thing I ask. When you—break the news to Vera, break it gently. And get her back to the Center as quickly as you 

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