"What's the latest on the storm?" Stan asked.

Gill looked up, his long melancholy face half in a green glow from the ready lights on his control panel. On the screen above him, data waves danced in long wavering lines, the numbers changing with a rapidity that would defy the computational abilities of any but a synthetic man with a math coprocessor built into his positronic brain. Gill was such a man, and his computational abilities were enhanced by the rock-steadiness of his mind, which was not subject to the neurotic claims of love, duly, family, or country. Yet he was not completely emotionless. It had been found that intelligence of the highest order presupposes and is built upon certain fundamental emotional bases, of which the desire to survive and continue is the most fundamental of all. The designers of artificial men would have liked to have stopped there. But the uncertain nature of the materials they were using—in which minute differences in atomic structures eventually spelled big differences in output, as well as the inherent instability of colloidal structures—made this impossible. Gill was standard within his design parameters, but those parameters expressed only one part of him.

"The storm is abating," Gill said. "There's been a twenty-percent diminution in the last half hour. Given the conditions here, I think that's about the best we're going to get. In fact, it's apt to get a lot worse before it gets better."

"Then let's get on with it," Stan said. He turned to Norbert, the big robot alien, who still crouched patiently in a corner of the lander. Mac the dog, growing impatient, whined to be put down, and Norbert obliged. The dog investigated the corners of the little lander and, finding nothing of interest, returned to curl up at Norbert's taloned feet.

"You ready, Norbert?"

"Of course, Dr. Myakovsky. Being robotic, I am always ready."

"And Mac?"

"He is a dog, and so he is always ready, too."

Stan laughed, and remarked to Julie, "I wish now I'd had more time to talk with Norbert. His horrible appearance belies his keen intelligence."

"You are responsible for my appearance, Dr. Myakovsky," Norbert said.

"I think you're beautiful," Stan said. "Don't you think so, Julie?"

"I think you're both pretty cute," she said.