walls.

He lengthened his stride, passed through the door, still open just as Sofi had left it when she fled. The interior reminded him of the appearance of a shop from which the proprietor has just stepped to buy a paper.

A subtle feeling of uneasiness began to pervade his whole being. He descended the shaft in the automatic cage. The light was burning on each of the four levels. Tools had been abandoned and left lying on the floors. He found the dismembered anatomy of the mining worm on level three. But of the eight robots there was no sign.

Hen ran the cage back to the surface at top speed. He was sweating profusely. A trickle kept running off his forehead into his eye. He pawed at the plastic helmet, shook his head. Then perversely his nose began to itch.

It did no good to tell himself these were nervous manifestations. He could only grit his teeth and suffer. He ran outside, glanced hopefully about the surface once more.

The landscape was rough, inhospitable, barren, resembling a clinker on a larger scale. The sun hung just above the western horizon. It was a brilliant but unimposing disc about the size of a dime.

There was still no sign of the robots.

Hen swore softly to himself. In a few minutes it would be dark. It was hopeless to begin a search now. He returned to his quarters in the igloo, shucked off the oxygen suit.

Maybe he could raise them with the radio. The robots' hearing and speaking apparatus extended beyond the range of audible sound into the realm of electro-magnetic waves. He went out to the sun deck, switched on the communicator. He was unable to contact them, though. There was no ionized strata of air on the asteroid to reflect the waves back to the surface, and he concluded they had wandered below the horizon.

With a groan, he flung himself into a chair. He pulled the notebook out of his pocket, thumbed through the pages, reading bits here and there.

"... machine thought processes diverging from human at progressively increasing rate ... amazing deductive and assimilative faculties. Able to assimilate page of text at a glance. But seem to lack creativeness...."

He paused, frowned, wondering if the inability to perform creative, inductive thinking wasn't a fundamental limitation of the machine. Organic life differed in four 

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