Then, before Aranimas could grow impatient, Derec asked the final question. “Alpha, who is your master?”

“Aranimas,” the robot replied.

Derec turned to Aranimas. “The robot’s yours now,” he said. “You will have to teach it what you want it to do, but you won’t have to show it more than once.”

Aranimas rose. “Order it to attack Wolruf,” the alien said.

“What?”

“I will not share control of this servant. Order it to attack Wolruf.”

Derec’s hesitation was calculated. He turned to the robot and said, “Pick up that brace and strike Wolruf in the head.”

Wolruf whimpered, but the robot did not move. “I may not comply, sir.”

Then Aranimas repeated the command. “Servant. Pick up the brace and strike Wolruf.”

Derec held his breath. If there was going to be a First Law conflict over treatment of the aliens, now was when it would surface.

“Yes, master,” the robot said, turning and reaching for the metal rod.

Wolruf crabbed nervously toward the door. Derec released a small sigh of relief.

“Stop, servant,” Aranimas ordered. To Derec he said, “You have done as you promised. It seems that you are worth keeping alive after all. Wolruf will find other duties for you.”

That was a wild card Derec had not expected, and he could not let it be played unchallenged. “No,” Derec said boldly. “I’m a roboticist, not a laborer. Not a Narwe. If you want to keep your new servant in good order, you’re going to keep me working here.”

“Doing what?”

“First, disassembling the other body for spare parts. Some of the patches I did on this robot are temporary. I can work on better fixes. Some of the damaged components may be repairable if I can get certain supplies.”

Derec plunged on, gathering a head of steam. “Out in the real world, there are repair technician robots which do nothing but maintain other robots. You only have one robot at the moment, so I’m your technician. You’ve seen what I can do. How long did you have those parts? How much time did you spend looking at them and figuring out nothing? Why do you want to start treating me like a particularly ugly Narwe?”

Aranimas stared, then made a hissing sound which might have been laughter. “Come, servant. We will leave the master roboticist to his work.”

It was difficult for Derec to watch Alpha walk away with Aranimas. It was even more difficult to wait patiently for some sign whether the fragile plan he and Wolruf had concocted would even pass the first threshold.

He was still isolated in his little corner of the ship. There was no way for him to know what Aranimas was doing with the robot. He did not know from one minute to the next whether his instructions to the robot were still intact. Perhaps Aranimas had only pretended to be ignorant about robots. Perhaps he had already undone all of Derec’s careful conditioning.

Even if the instructions were still intact, they could well be irrelevant. Derec had assumed that Aranimas would be so fond of his new toy that he would keep it close at hand. Everything depended on that being true. But if he was wrong, if Aranimas had simply dispatched Alpha to some far corner of the ship to perform some menial function, then his plan was foredoomed to failure. Derec would have given up the robot and gotten nothing in return for it.

Derec had work to do, some to maintain the fiction he was Aranimas’s faithful employee, some for his own purposes. He tried to make the hours pass more quickly by immersing himself in it. But work could not dull the edge of his impatience or his anxiety. Even with no clock to watch, time crawled by.

Wolruf was in and out several times the rest of that day, and even when she was gone she was never far away. He welcomed the interruptions, but he worried that Aranimas might detect the change in her working patterns and wonder why. And without Alpha to alert him to Aranimas’s approach, Derec was reluctant to talk about their evolving plot against the alien commander.

But it was not entirely avoidable. The call could come at any time, and a key problem remained unsolved. Derec knew, or thought he did, how they could disarm Aranimas. The unanswered question was how to disable him.

With surprising vehemence, Wolruf ruled out killing the Erani. Derec did not much regret it. He could not picture himself walking up to Aranimas with a club and battering him to death. But at the same time, as long as Aranimas was alive he was dangerous.

Derec first proposed a stunner, made from a recharged microcell and a few bits of wire. But there was no way to be sure that Aranimas was vulnerable to electric shocks, or to assure that the high-voltage current wouldn’t kill him.

“The chamber with the star-creatures,” Derec said abruptly. “When we passed through it, Aranimas’s eyes started to water. Do you know why? Those things are from your world. Is there something in the air there that’s not in the rest of the ship?”

“Yes,” Wolruf said. “The yellow-gas. That iss the only part of the ship wherr it iss used. The star-creatures release yellow-gas when they move.”

That would account for it, Derec thought. A digestive by-product, or some sort of chemical communication-”So the air in there is like the atmosphere of your world?”

“Yes.”

“Which means that the Erani probably can’t spend any time on your world without getting sick,” Derec concluded.

“We arr protected from the Erani temper,” Wolruf agreed.

Derec paused and considered. “You said the star-creatures were part of an experiment. Could Aranimas be trying to find a way to neutralize the gas, so that the Erani can invade?”

“It iss possible.”

“Are there samples, bottled up?”

“There is a liquid that turns to yellow-gas when freed.”

“Perfect. Get me some.”

When Derec turned in that night, he was a bundle of restless energy, and sleep did not come easily. When it finally did come, it seemed as though he closed his eyes one moment and the next someone was shaking him. He looked up to see Wolruf standing over him.

“Aranimas wants ‘u,” Wolruf said.

“Is it the robot?”

“New servant won’t listen to the boss anymore,” Wolruf said. “It just sits there.”

“This could be it, then,” Derec said, scrambling to his feet. “I’ll get my tools.”

As Derec followed Wolruf through the passageways, his anticipation and anxiety both spiraled upward. When they reached the hex junction, he stopped and caught the caninoid’s arm. “Does he expect you to come in?”

“No. Only to deliver ‘u. But I could come in and see if he sends me away-”

“No,” Derec said. “Don’t do anything out of the ordinary. I can handle the first part myself. Just wait here.”

Inside Hull A, Derec spotted Aranimas across the main compartment and picked his way around the mesh bulkheads to where the alien waited.

“The robot has malfunctioned,” Aranimas said, gesturing, “Repair it.”

The robot sat on the edge of a low counter, motionless except for his left hand, rotating slowly and aimlessly at the wrist joint. Code 3033-our location! Derec thought.

“What did you do to it?” Derec demanded, moving within arm’s reach of the robot.

“I did nothing. The mechanism ceased to obey me.”

“You must have done something.” Derec bent at the waist to peer directly into the glowing eyes. “Alpha. Acknowledge.”

“Yess, ssir,” the robot said, its words slurred and distorted.

Code 804! The key! But he had to be sure. “Alpha. Default l-A-l-B. Execute.”

The robot sat inert.

“Alpha. Default 2-C-2-D. Execute.”

Still there was no response.

“What’s wrong with my servant?” Aranimas demanded.

Stalling for time, Derec opened his small tool clutch and then the robot’s left shoulder access plate. As he peered inside, he thought the next step through. The reworking he had done on the robot’s instinct to protect intelligent life was a delicate business. It had already been stressed unexpectedly when Aranimas took possession of the robot.