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know his body chemistry.”
    â€œWhich reminds me that we’re not going back to Earth. What is the scoop? Where does Ship intend to go?”
    â€œI wouldn’t know,” said Nicodemus. “We talked off and on, of course. Ship, I am sure, tried to hold nothing back from me. I have the feeling Ship doesn’t quite know itself what it intends to do. Just go, I suppose, and see what it can find. You realize, of course, that Ship, if it wishes to, can listen in on anything we say.”
    â€œThat doesn’t bother me,” said Horton. “As it stands, we’re all tied up in the same can of worms. You for much longer than will be the case with me. Whatever the situation, I suppose I’ll have to stand upon it, for I have no other base. I’m close to a thousand years away from home, and a thousand years behind the Earth of this moment. Ship undoubtedly is right in saying that if I went back I would be a misfit. You can accept all of this intellectually, of course, but it gives you a strange feeling in the gizzard. If the other three were here, I imagine it would be different. I have the sense of being horribly alone.”
    â€œYou aren’t alone,” said Nicodemus. “You have Ship and me.”
    â€œYes, I suppose so. I seem to keep forgetting.”
    He pushed back from the table. “That was a fine dinner,” he said. “I wish you could have eaten with me. Before I go off to bed, do you think it would disaccommodate my gut if I had a slice of that roast, cold?”
    â€œFor breakfast,” said Nicodemus. “If you want a slice for breakfast.”
    â€œAll right, then,” said Horton. “There’s still one thing that bothers me. With the setup that you have, you don’t really need a human on this expedition. At the time I took the training, a human crew made sense. But not any longer. You and Ship could do the job alone. Given the situation as it is, why didn’t they just junk us? Why did they bother putting us on board?”
    â€œYou seek to mortify yourself and the human race,” said Nicodemus. “It is no more than shock reaction to what you have just learned. To start with, the idea was to put knowledge and technology on board, and the only way it could be put on board was in the persons of humans who had that knowledge and technology. By the time the ships took off, however, another means of supplying technology and knowledge had been found in the transmogs which could make even such simple robots as myself into multispecialists. But even so there would be, in us, still one factor lacking—that strange quality of humanness, the biological human condition which we still lack and which no roboticist has as yet been able to build into us. You spoke of your training robot and your hatred of him. This is what happens when you go beyond a certain point in robotic improvement. You gain good capability, but the humanity to balance the capability is lacking and the robot, instead of becoming more humanlike, becomes arrogant and insufferable. It may always be so. Humanity may be a factor that cannot be arrived at artificially. An expedition to the stars, I suppose, could function efficiently with only robots and their transmog kits aboard, but it would not be a human expedition, and that is what this and the other expeditions were all about—to seek out planets where the people of Earth could live. Certainly the robots could make observations and reach decisions and nine times out of ten the observations would be accurate and the decisions quite correct, but in that tenth time, one or both could be wrong because the robots would be looking at the problem with robotic eyes and making the decisions with robotic brains that lacked that all important factor of the human quality.”
    â€œYour words are comforting,” said Horton. “I only hope you are right.”
    â€œBelieve me, sir, I am.”
    Ship said, Horton,