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did you not, with a most accomplished robot—the finest piece of humanoid machinery that had ever been built.”
    â€œYes, we did,” said Horton. “I can remember him as if it were only yesterday …
    â€œTo you,” said Nicodemus, “it would be only yesterday. The thousand years since then are as nothing to you.”
    â€œHe was a little stinker,” Horton said. “He was a martinet. He knew three times more than we did and was ten times as capable. He rubbed it into us in his suave, sleek, nasty way. So slick about it you could never peg him. All of us hated the little sonofabitch.”
    â€œThere, you see,” said Nicodemus triumphantly. “That could not continue. It was a situation that could not be tolerated. If he’d been sent with you, think of all the friction, the clash of personalities. That is why you have me. They couldn’t use a thing like him. They had to use a simple, humble clod like me, the kind of robot you were accustomed to ordering around and who would not resent the ordering around. But a simple, humble clod like me would be incapable on his own to rise to the occasions that necessity sometimes might demand. So they hit upon the idea of auxiliary brains that could be plugged into place to supplement a cloddish brain like mine.”
    â€œYou mean you have a box full of auxiliary brains that you just plug in!”
    â€œNot really brains,” said Nicodemus. “They are called transmogs, although I’m not sure why. Someone once told me the term was short for transmogrification. Is there such a word?”
    â€œI don’t know,” said Horton.
    â€œWell, anyhow,” said Nicodemus, “I have a chef transmog and a physician transmog and a biochemist transmog—well, you get the idea. A full college course encoded in each of them. I counted them once, but now I have forgotten. A couple of dozen, I would guess.”
    â€œSo you actually might be able to fix this tunnel of the Carnivore’s.”
    â€œI wouldn’t count on it,” said Nicodemus. “I don’t know what the engineer transmog contains. There are so many different kinds of engineering—chemical, mechanical, electrical.”
    â€œAt least you’ll have an engineering background.”
    â€œThat’s right. But the tunnel the Carnivore talked about probably wasn’t built by humans. Humans wouldn’t have had the time …”
    â€œIt could be human-built. They’ve had almost a thousand years to do a lot of things. Remember what the fifty years you’ve been talking about accomplished.”
    â€œYeah, I know. You could be right. Relying on ships might not have been good enough. If the humans had relied on ships, they wouldn’t have gotten out this far by now and …”
    â€œThey could have if they developed faster-than-light. Maybe once you develop that, there would be no natural limit. Once you break the light barrier, there might be no limit to how much faster than light you could go.”
    â€œSomehow I don’t think they developed faster-than-light ships,” said Nicodemus. “I listened to a lot of talk about it during that period after I was drafted into this project. No one seemed to have any real starting point, no real appreciation of what is involved. What more than likely happened is that humans landed on a planet not nearly as far out as we are now and found one of the tunnels and are now using the tunnels.”
    â€œBut not only humans.”
    â€œNo, that’s quite apparent from Carnivore. How many other races may be using them we can have no idea. What about Carnivore? If we don’t get the tunnel operating, he’ll want to ship with us.”
    â€œOver my dead body.”
    â€œYou know, I feel pretty much the same. He’s a rather uncouth personage and it might be quite a problem to put him into cold-sleep. Before we tried that, we’d have to