And she had gotten no further by the time Jacob returned at ten PM.

“Well, you're finally back,” she said when he came in. “What did Keymo have to offer on the hyperwave problem?”

“Very little, Miss Ariel,” Jacob said. “Neither of us could see how Key teleportation technology could be applied to modulation of hyperwave signals.”

“Did you examine the parallel dichotomy of hyperspace jump technology and discrete modulation of hyperwave? That parallel connection should provide clues to the connection between the Key and continuous modulation. Right?”

Ariel had first heard the word dichotomy on the way to Oyster World, when Jacob had used it; and she had been wanting to use it ever since. It had such a ring of erudition. Now she had played it back to him.

“You suggested only that we look for a connection between continuous modulation and Key teleportation. Neither of us could see any during a lengthy discussion which concluded only a half hour ago.”

You dummy,she thought, the creative process is primarily a matter of drawing correlations. If there is a connection between discrete modulation and jump technology, as the aliens claim, you must first ferret out and understand that connection. Then maybe you can deduce what continuous modulation is by examining Key teleportation for the parallel connection the aliens say exists there. She thought she had made that clear before he left. He, too, had heard everything the alien had said.

“Tonight, while I'm sleeping,” Ariel said, “examine everything in your memory concerning jump technology and discrete modulation of hyperwave. Go back and forth comparing the two at every point. Look for similarities. Correlate one with the other. And give me a report in the morning of all instances where you see a similarity between the two.”

“Very well, Miss Ariel.”

She retired to bed then and thought how she would like to see the full musculature of Jacob without his clothes on. And that made her feel guilty, and her longing for Derec came rushing in, the longing she had been pushing from her mind all evening that had probably brought on the unmaidenly notions concerning Jacob.

She went to sleep, and sometime during the long night, she dreamt of playing in a verdant Auroran cornfield with her personal robot as she had when she was a child, and then the robot became Jacob, and they were running and laughing as he chased her down the rows of tall green plants waving in the gentle breeze, and gradually he was no longer chasing her but waiting for her at the end of the long row, far away; yet it was not Jacob; and then she realized that Derec had come to Oyster World, and he was standing there with his arms outstretched, waiting for her. Joyfully, she ran toward him down the long rows of waving green.

She awoke, and it was morning, and she was indeed on Oyster World. But Derec was not there.

Chapter 8. The Wolf Planet

“I'm grateful you took the time to come,” Derec said.

He glanced at his companion sitting next to him in the runabout.

“Wouldn't 'ave, 'cept 'u sounded urgent,” Wolruf said.

They were heading east on Main Street toward Derec's apartment. He had just picked up Wolruf at the wolf planet's primitive spaceport at the west edge of the robot city.

Wolruf had arrived in the Xerborodezees, a Minneapolis-class hyperspace jumper that the wealthy Ariel had given the small alien the year before to speed her return home. The Xerborodezees could accommodate ten passengers, and as it turned out, it was the only way that Derec and his robotic companions were going to get off the planet. He had accidentally demolished his means of transportation when he arrived.

Wolruf was the size of a large dog with sleek, well-groomed, brown and gold fur; and she was shaped like a dog except for the fat-fingered hands and the flat face which, despite its flatness, bore unmistakable lupine characteristics.

Farther east on Main Street, a half-kilometer beyond Derec's apartment, a large pyramidal edifice-the Compass Tower-was at that moment strikingly displayed in a glowing frame, redshafted by the morning sun still hidden behind it.

“You mean Ariel,” Derec said. “I sent my call for help through Ariel.”

“'u signed it. Not Ariel. Wouldn't 'ave come if 'u 'adn't signed it, 'Situation desperate, Derec.' Goin' call 'u 'Desperate Derec' from now on.”

She gave a funny gargling bark, not a growl, more a sharp rattling gargle, as though her throat were laden with phlegm.

Derec had become so accustomed to her in times past he had forgotten that extraordinary chuckle and her uncommon treatment of Galactic Standard. The imperfections in her pronunciation of Standard had regressed somewhat during the past year on her home planet, but her rolling of the letter “r” had been almost entirely eliminated after prolonged exposure to Ariel and Derec, and that improvement seemed to be still largely in place except for a trailing burr. The left-out and chopped-off pronouns, the missing aitches, and the sibilant hiss for the “zee” sound were still evident. And the “ 'u” pronunciation of “you”-not at all an “ooh” sound, but a sort of choked and swallowed bark that masked off the initial “y”-could only come from the throat of a lupine alien, something a human was unlikely ever to match.

“I'd never label this situation desperate,” Derec said. “That's not the message I sent. I contacted Robot City on my internal monitor link, and they hyperwaved our house computer on Aurora. At least that's the routing I set up. I expected Ariel to relay my message to you, but that doesn't sound like Ariel, either. Sounds more like someone with a vital interest in this planet, which is nobody I know of.”

“Doessn't matter 'ow I 'eard. 'u succeeded, I'm 'ere. Now what's so desperate 'u've got to call 'alf across the galaxy?”

“I've got a rogue robot on my hands, Wolruf.”

“Doessn't follow the Lawss of Robotics?”

“Yes and no. It's got the laws but doesn't seem to know for sure what a human is. It's like a dam chameleon. The way I've got it figured, it changes itself to match as best it can whoever it thinks might be human at the moment.”

“Like Mandelbrot's arm?”

“Yes and no. The stuff it's made of isn't as coarse as the Robot City material. Its cells are a lot smaller than the variety in Mandelbrot's arm.

“I've got the feeling we're seeing micromolecular robotics here; and I've got no way to reprogram it. It's self-programmed and seems to imprint like a newly hatched chicken at the drop of a hat, and on anything it takes a mind to.”

“So 'ow can I 'elp?” Wolruf asked.

“It had a wolf form when I first arrived. It was the leader of a pack of intelligent wolf-like creatures which it must have thought were human. They were attacking the city's Avery robots. The wolf robot gutted one of the Averies. Robot City relayed their call for help over my internal monitor.

“When I got here, it imprinted on me, after giving me a really hard time-and I mean a really hard time. It was still humanoid when I left it this morning, and soaking up information from the city library like a second-generation Settler on a mission to Earth.”

“What iss it 'u think I can do?” Wolruf asked.

“It was wolf-like when it came into the city, after I arrived, and then it imprinted on me. Now it's coming along a little too fast, too much personality change too quickly. With your wolfish characteristics, you make a natural model for imprinting, a nice compromise between wolves and humans.”

“Amazing! Why do 'u 'umans persist in thinking of us ass wolves? There'ss a species on my world-the dongeedows-that arrr a great deal like the gorillas in 'urn ssoos, but I don't think of 'u…now wait a minute. I take that back. 'u arrr beginning to resemble a dongeedow a great deal. “