Jeffers gestured at the sprawled figure on the floor. "We came in here to search. We found him. Mister Vaneski opened the locker, there, for a look-see, and Mellon jumped out at him. Vaneski fired his stun gun.

Mellon collapsed to the deck. He"s in bad shape; his pulse is so weak that it"s hard to find."

Mike the Angel walked over and looked down at the fallen Medical Officer. His face was waxen, and he looked utterly small and harmless.

"What happened?" asked another voice from the door. It was Chief Physician"s Mate Pierre Pasteur. He was a smallish man, well rounded, pleasant-faced, and inordinately proud of his name. He couldn"t actually prove that he was really descended from the great Louis, but he didn"t allow people to think otherwise. Like most C. Phys. M."s, he had a doctor of medicine degree but no internship in the s.p.a.ce Service. He was working toward his commission.

"We"ve got a patient for you," said Jeffers. "Better look him over, Chief."

Chief Pasteur walked over to where Mellon lay and took his stethoscope out of his little black bag. He listened to Mellon"s chest for a few seconds. Then he pried open an eyelid and looked closely at an eye.

"What happened to him?" he asked, without looking up.

"Got hit with a beam from a stun gun," said Jeffers.

"How did he fall? Did he hit his head?"

"I don"t know--maybe." He looked at Ensign Vaneski. "Did he, Mister Vaneski? He was right on top of you; I was across the room."

Vaneski swallowed. "I don"t know. He--he just sort of--well, he _fell_."

"You didn"t catch him?" asked the chief. He was a physician on a case now and had no time for sirring his superiors.

"No. No. I jumped away from him."

"Why? What"s the trouble?" Jeffers asked.

"He"s dead," said the Chief Physician"s Mate.

17

Leda Crannon was standing outside the cubicle that had been built for Snook.u.ms. Her back and the palms of her hands were pressed against the door. Her head was bowed, and her red hair, shining like a h.e.l.lish flame in the light of the glow panels, fell around her shoulders and cheeks, almost covering her face.

"Leda," said Mike the Angel gently.

She looked up. There were tears in her blue eyes.

"Mike! Oh, Mike!" She ran toward him, put her arms around him, and tried to bury her face in Mike"s chest.

"What"s the matter, honey? What"s happened?" He was certain she couldn"t have heard about Mellon"s death yet. He held her in his arms, carefully, tenderly, not pa.s.sionately.

"He"s crazy, Mike. He"s completely crazy." Her voice had suddenly lost everything that gave it color. It was only dead and choked.

Mike the Angel knew it was an emotional reaction. As a psychologist, she would never have used the word "crazy." But as a woman ... as a human being....

"Fitz is still in there talking to him, but he"s--he"s--" Her voice choked off again into sobs.

Mike waited patiently, holding her, caressing her hair.

"Eight years," she said after a minute or so. "Eight years I spent. And now he"s gone. He"s broken."

"How do you know?" Mike asked.

She lifted her head and looked at him. "Mike--did he really hit you? Did he refuse to stop when you ordered him to? What _really_ happened?"

Mike told her what had happened in the darkened companionway just outside his room.

When he finished, she began sobbing again. "He"s lying, Mike," she said.

"_Lying!_"

Mike nodded silently and slowly. Leda Crannon had spent all of her adult life tending the hurts and bruises and aches of Snook.u.ms the Child. She had educated him, cared for him, taken pleasure in his triumphs, worried about his health, and watched him grow mentally.

And now he was sick, broken, ruined. And, like all parents, she was asking herself: "What did I do wrong?"

Mike the Angel didn"t give her an answer to that unspoken question, but he knew what the answer was in so many cases:

The grieving parent has not necessarily done anything wrong. It may simply be that there was insufficient or poor-quality material to work with.

With a human child, it is even more humiliating for a parent to admit that he or she has contributed inferior genetic material to a child than it is to admit a failure in upbringing. Leda"s case was different.

Leda had lost her child, but Mike hesitated to point out that it wasn"t her fault in the first place because the material wasn"t up to the task she had given it, and in the second place because she hadn"t really lost anything. She was still playing with dolls, not human beings.

"h.e.l.l!" said Mike under his breath, not realizing that he was practically whispering in her ear.

"Isn"t it?" she said. "Isn"t it h.e.l.l? I spent eight years trying to make that little mind of his tick properly. I wanted to know what was the right, proper, and logical way to bring up children. I had a theory, and I wanted to test it. And now I"ll never know."

"What sort of theory?" Mike asked.

She sniffled, took a handkerchief from her pocket, and began wiping at her tears. Mike took the handkerchief away from her and did the wiping job himself. "What"s this theory?" he said.

"Oh, it isn"t important now. But I felt--I still feel--that everybody is born with a sort of Three Laws of Robotics in him. You know what I mean--that a person wouldn"t kill or harm anyone, or refuse to do what was right, in addition to trying to preserve his own life. I think babies are born that way. But I think that the information they"re given when they"re growing up can warp them. They still think they"re obeying the laws, but they"re obeying them wrongly, if you see what I mean."

Mike nodded without saying anything. This was no time to interrupt her.

"For instance," she went on, "if my theory"s right, then a child would never disobey his father--unless he was convinced that the man was not really his father, you see. For instance, if he learned, very early, that his father never spanks him, that becomes one of the identifying marks of "father." Fine. But the first time his father _does_ spank him, doubt enters. If that sort of thing goes on, he becomes disobedient because he doesn"t believe that the man is his father.

"I"m afraid I"m putting it a little crudely, but you get the idea."

"Yeah," said Mike. For all he knew, there might be some merit in the girl"s idea; he knew that philosophers had talked of the "basic goodness of mankind" for centuries. But he had a hunch that Leda was going about it wrong. Still, this was no time to argue with her. She seemed calmer now, and he didn"t want to upset her any more than he had to.

"That"s what you"ve been working on with Snook.u.ms?" he asked.

"That"s it."

"For eight years?"