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     hopelessly lost, less than a microbe in an ocean. He had never managed to trace the
     malfunction or make repairs, despite the captain's instructions. Being jerked rapidly into
     and out of hyperspace had burned out all the circuitry for faster-than-light
     communication. The ship had automatically broadcast a distress signal, but surrounded by
     the shock front's extreme radiation, there was little chance the signal would ever be
     heard.
    Lodovik's secret was secure enough. But his usefulness to Daneel, and to humanity, was
     over.
    For a robot, duty was everything, self nothing; yet in his present circumstance, he could
     look through the port at the effects of the shock front and speculate for no particular
     reason about physical processes. While not completely stopping his constant processing of
     problems associated with his long-term mission, he could drift in the middle of the
     bridge, his immediate needs and work reduced to nothing.
    For humans, this could be called a time of introspection. Introspection without the target
     of duty was more than novel; it was disturbing. Lodovik would have avoided the opportunity
     and this sensation if he could have.
    A robot, above all else, was uncomfortable with internal change. Ages past, during the
     robotic renaissance, on the almost-forgotten worlds of Aurora and Solaria, robots had been
     built with inhibitions that went beyond the Three Laws. Robots, with a few exceptions,
     were not allowed to design and build other robots. While they could manage minor repairs
     to themselves, only a select few specialty units could repair robots that had been
     severely damaged.
    Lodovik could not repair this malfunction in his own
    brain, if it was a malfunction; the evidence was not yet clear. But a robot's brain, its
     essential programming, was even more off-limits to meddling than its body.
    There was one place remaining in the Galaxy where a robot could be repaired, and where
     occasionally a robot could be manufactured. That was Eos, established by R. Daneel Olivaw
     ten thousand years ago, far from the boundaries of the expanding Empire. Lodovik had not
     been there for ninety years.
    Still, a robot had a strong urge to self-preservation; that was implicit in the Third Law.
     With time to contemplate his condition, Lodovik wondered if he might in fact be found,
     then sent to Eos for repair...
    None of these possibilities seemed likely. He resigned himself to the most probable fate:
     ten more years in this crippled ship, until his minifusion power reserves ran down, with
     nothing important to do, a Robinson Crusoe of robots, lacking even an island to explore
     and transform.
    Lodovik could not feel a sense of horror at this fate. But he could imagine what a human
     would feel, and that in itself induced an echo of robotic unease.
    To cap it all, he was hearing voices-or rather, a voice. It sounded human, but
     communicated only at odd intervals, in fragments. It even had a name, something like
     Voldarr. And it gave an impression of riding vast but tenuous webs of force, sailing
     through the deep vacuum between the stars-
    Seeking out the plasma halos of living stars, reveling in the neutrino miasma of dead and
     dying stars, neutrinos intoxicating as hashish smoke. Fleeing from Trantor's boredom, I
     grow bored again-and I find, between the stars, a robot in dire straits! One of those the
     Eternal brought from outside to replace the many destroyed-Look, my friends, my boring
     friends who have no flesh and know no flesh, and tolerate no fleshly ideals-
    One of your hated purgers!
    The voice faded. Added to his distress over the death of the
    captain and crew of the Spear of Glory and his odd feedback of selfless unease, this
     mysterious voice-a clear sign of delusion and major malfunction-brought him as close as a
     robot could come to complete misery.
    From his vantage in the tiny balcony apartment overlooking Streeling University,