“What do you say, shall we go and look for mushrooms today?” said Dolly.

“By all means, please, and I shall come too,” said Kitty, and she blushed. She wanted from politeness to ask Vassenka whether he would come, but she did not ask him.

“Where are you going, Kostya?” she asked her husband with a guilty face, as he passed by her with a resolute step. This guilty air confirmed all his suspicions.

“To inspect the pit for aliens,” he said, not looking at her.

“Again?”

He went downstairs, but before he had time to leave his study he heard his wife’s familiar footsteps running with reckless speed to him. He did not turn, but stalked out of the house into the surrounding gardens, past a II/Gardener/9, who Levin had put to work visually scanning for Honored Guests in the woods. Finally he had to acknowledge Kitty’s presence:

“Well, what do you have to say to me?”

He did not look her in the face, and did not care to see that she in her condition was trembling all over, and had a piteous, crushed look. He did not care, that is to say, to recall how difficult it must be for a woman with child, deprived of the special comfort that only a Class III can provide.

“We can’t go on like this! It’s misery! I’m wretched, you are wretched! What for?” she said, when they had at last reached a solitary garden seat at a turn in the lime tree avenue.

“But tell me one thing: was there in his tone anything unseemly, not nice, humiliatingly horrible?” he said, standing before her again in the same position with his clenched fists on his chest, as he had stood before her that night.

“Yes,” she said in a shaking voice. “But, Kostya, surely you see I’m not to blame? All the morning I’ve been trying to take a tone… but such people… Why did he come? How happy we were! Happy, and united, not only in our love for each other, but for our robots, united in our devotion to them!” she said, breathless with sobs that shook her.

A short time later, they passed the II/Gardener/9 once again. Its visual sensors registered astonishment that, though nothing pursued them, they hurried toward the house; and that, though rain had begun to fall, their faces were content and radiant.

CHAPTER 5

AFTER ESCORTING HIS WIFE upstairs, Levin went to Dolly’s part of the house. Darya Alexandrovna, for her part, was in great distress too that day. She was walking about the room, talking angrily to a little girl who stood in the corner weeping.

“And you shall stand all day in the corner, and have your dinner all alone, and not play with one of your Class Is, and I won’t make you a new frock,” she said, not knowing how to punish her.

“Oh, she is a disgusting child!” she turned to Levin. “Where does she get such wicked propensities?”

“Why, what has she done?” Levin said without much interest, for he had wanted to ask her advice, and so was annoyed that he had come at an unlucky moment.

“Grisha and she went into the raspberries, and there… I can’t tell you really what she did. It’s a thousand pities Dolichka’s no longer with us. She always gave me the best, the most reliable counsel on how to deal with this sort of thing. Oh, how I loved that robot!” Tears trembled in Dolly’s eyes. Outside the pitter-patter of the rain intensified, as if the sky itself were mourning Darya Alexandrovna’s loss.

“But you are upset about something? What have you come for?” asked Dolly. “What’s going on there?”

And in the tone of her question Levin heard that it would be easy for him to say what he had meant to say.

“I’ve not been in there, I’ve been alone in the garden with Kitty. We’ve had a quarrel for the second time since Veslovsky came. Come, tell me, honestly, has there been… not in Kitty, but in that gentleman’s behavior, a tone which might be unpleasant-not unpleasant, but horrible, offensive to a husband?”

“You mean, how shall I say… Stay, stay in the corner!” she said to Masha, who, detecting a faint smile in her mother’s face, had been turning round. “The opinion of the world would be that he is behaving as young men do behave. A husband who’s a man of the world should only be flattered by it.”

“Yes, yes,” said Levin gloomily, “but you noticed it?”

“Not only I, but Stiva noticed it. Just after breakfast he said to me in so many words, Je crois que Veslovsky fait un petit brin de cour à Kitty.”

“Well, that’s all right then; now I’m satisfied. I’ll send him away,” said Levin.

“What do you mean! Are you crazy?” Dolly cried in horror. “Nonsense, Kostya, only think!” she said, laughing. “You can go now,” she said to Masha. “No, if you wish it, I’ll speak to Stiva. He’ll take him away. He can say you’re expecting visitors. Altogether he doesn’t fit into the house.”

“No, no, I’ll do it myself.”

“But you’ll quarrel with him?”

“Not a bit. I shall so enjoy it,” Levin said, his eyes flashing with real enjoyment. “Come, forgive her, Dolly, she won’t do it again,” he said of the little sinner, who had not gone but was standing irresolutely before her mother, waiting and looking up from under her brows to catch her mother’s eye.

And what is there in common between us and him? thought Levin, and he went off to look for Veslovsky.

As he passed through the passage he gave orders for the II/Coachman/14 to get ready to drive to the station.

Levin, puffed up with courage and his new determination to have this scourge removed from his household, without knocking entered the young man’s room, strode across the chamber, and found Veslovsky bent over the bed, putting on his gaiters to go out riding. Veslovsky, taken by surprise, stood up rapidly and turned around, stammering an apology for his unkempt appearance.

Levin was too shocked to reply: above the rumpled shirtfront, Veslovsky had no face. There was no skin between ear and ear, hairline and chin, and staring back at Levin instead was a mass of churning gears and rapidly moving small parts in the place where a face should be. Still speaking in his gay and eager-to-please society voice, which Levin now realized emanated from a Vox-Em of surpassing quality, he said, “Alas, Konstantin Dmitrich, you catch me unawares.”

Levin, squinting with horror at the silver-black absence of a face, detected dozens of tiny pistons pumping as the words emerged; like an audience member seeing the movement of the puppeteer’s strings, he was watching the devices that would move the lips, were the face-piece in place.

“Good Lord, man,” Levin said idiotically. “You are a robot.”

“You have discovered my secret, friend,” came Veslovsky’s voice from the head unit. The robot sighed, and Levin watched as two tiny half-circles of gears shifted minutely along the upper portion of the face-hole; no doubt this was the system set that created an ironic lift of the eyebrows in other circumstances. “And though I was sent here to observe, not to destroy, my circuits are rather extraordinarily adaptable.”

Levin stepped backward, suddenly aware that Veslovsky stood between himself and the door.

“It is not useful to the Ministry that you or anyone of your circle should be aware of my true nature. And thus…”

The Veslovsky-machine emitted a piercing shriek and flash of light, and then grabbed the disoriented Levin firmly by the throat. Levin grunted and gurgled and stared into the deathly emptiness of the machine-face, as the robot lifted him from the ground like tearing a tree out by the roots.

“Society is changing, Konstantin Dmitrich,” Veslovsky said with an air of melancholy, grinding two heavy groznium-infused thumbs into the sides of his neck. “Your commitment to your Class III is admirable, but there is no use fighting the future.” Levin could not respond; his head was getting weaker and his windpipe throbbed as the last air escaped from his lungs. In a weirdly squeamish gesture, under the circumstances, the robot turned his head away, as if Levin’s dying gasps were too gruesome a sight for his delicate sensibilities.