Fran. Fran?”

Berti said, “Our conditioning was most effective. Fran, it actually loves you. Remarkable.”

She didn’t smile now. She couldn’t. There was no feeling at all, never had been. All false. Nothing now but cold awareness of power.

He felt weak and dizzy. A hazy outline moved toward him. Berti. “I still regret seeing you die. You’re interesting. A peculiarly interesting experiment. If I had time—almost fifty years of trial and error to create you, Rolly.”

“A good job, too,” said the woman. “Though we did take an awful chance, making it so rational. It might have solved the enigma of its own existence.”

Berti shook his bald head. “We had to make it human so it would be sympathetic. Emotional. No human was ever able to solve the enigma of himself. We can’t either, Fran. Or can we?”

From a far hazy distance, he saw Berti’s head turn back, his pouting lip thrust out, his shiny head reflecting the cold light.

“And you never suspected at all that you were a robot, Rolly? Just a lot of electrons and polarizable cells, eh? Remarkable. But then, the last thing a robot would ever realize would be that it was a robot, I suppose.”

Roland shut his eyes. He was tired. He wanted to sleep. He wanted to forget about the imaginative creature he had known for a time as Frances, too.

“We gave you a heavy overload of romanticism and sentimentalism. So you would be glad to die for Frances, for humanity. But you needed logic with it, and that was a very delicate balance to establish. All that work to construct a machine that was to function only a few hours. And your allotted time is about up, Rolly.

@  

“We misled you by omission only, Rolly. Our purpose wasn’t humanity. We needed you to destroy World Brain, not for humanity. But for us. World Brain restricted our development, kept us from defeating the Martians by shielding atomic power. Rolly, the Underground was a race of mutants that developed after the Atomic War. Humanity never knew about us. Homo-superior. We’ve developed the same degree above mere human intelligence that the Martians have. We’re their equals; that’s why we could fight them. They outnumbered us, though, that’s why we had to have your help. You have all the human attributes, Rolly. You want to know what qualities the next step above human is, don’t you?”

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