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corner of the rod’s grip-tread; he was alive but seriously injured, and plainly in great agony.
    Watchman selected four of the beta onlookers and ordered them to transport the dead ones to the control center for identification and disposal. He sent two other betas off to get a stretcher for the injured one. While they were gone he walked over to the surviving android and looked down, peering into gray eyes yellow-rimmed with pain.
    “Can you talk?” Watchman asked.
    “Yes.” A foggy whisper. “I can’t move anything below my middle. I’m turning cold. I’m starting to freeze from the middle down. Am I going to die?”
    “Probably,” Watchman said. He ran his hand along the beta’s back until he found, the lumbar neural center, and with a quick jab he shorted it. A sigh of relief came from the twisted figure on the ground.
    “Better?” the alpha said.
    “Much better, Alpha Watchman.”
    “Give me your name, beta.”
    “Caliban Driller.”
    “What were you doing when the block fell, Caliban?”
    “Getting ready to go off shift. I’m a maintenance foreman. I walked past here. They all started to shout. I felt the air hot as the block came down. I jumped. And then I was on the ground with my back split open. How soon will I die?”
    “Within an hour or less. The coldness will rise until it gets to your brain, and that will be the end. But take comfort: Krug saw you as you fell. Krug will guard you. You will rest in the bosom of Krug.”
    “Krug be praised,” Caliban Driller murmured.
    The stretcher-bearers were approaching. When they still were fifty meters away, a gong sounded, marking the end of the shift. Instantly every android who was not actually hoisting a block rushed toward the transmat banks. Three lines of workers began to vanish into the transmats, heading for their homes in the android compounds of five continents, and in the same moment the next shift began to emerge from the inbound transmats, coming out of leisure periods spent in the recreation zones of South America and India. At the sound of the gong Watchman’s two stretcher-bearers made as if to drop the stretcher and rush for the transmats. He barked at them; and, sheepishly, they hustled toward him.
    “Pick up Caliban Driller,” he commanded, “and carry him carefully to the chapel. When you’re done with that you can go off shift and claim credit for the time.”
    Amid the confusion of the changing shift, the two betas loaded the injured android on the stretcher and made their way with him to one of the dozens of extrusion domes on the northern perimeter of the construction site. The domes served many uses: some were storage depots for materiel, several were kitchens or washrooms, three housed the power cores that fed the transmat banks and the refrigeration tapes, one was a first aid station for androids injured on the job, and one, in the heart of the irregular clutter of gray plastic mounds, was the chapel.
    At all times two or three off-duty androids lounged in front of that dome, seemingly idle, actually functioning as casual sentries who would prevent any womb-born one from entering. Sometimes journalists or guests of Krug came wandering this way, and the sentries had various deft techniques for leading them away from the chapel without actually provoking the forbidden clash of wills between android and human. The chapel was not open to anyone born of man and woman. Its very existence was unknown to any but androids.
    Thor Watchman reached it just as the stretcher-bearers were setting Caliban Driller down before the altar. Going in, he made the proper genuflection, dropping quickly to one knee and extending his arms, palms upward. The altar, resting in a purple bath of nutrient fluids, was a pink rectangular block of flesh that had been synthesized precisely as androids themselves were synthesized. Though alive, it was scarcely sentient, nor was it capable of sustaining its life unaided; it was fed from beneath by constant