'Fine. Mind if I call you Roderick? Okay then, Roderick, what seems to be the problem?'

'Everything, doctor. Everything.'

'Yes?'

'Well like last night I was supposed to go to the movies with this girl, at the Roxy. Only she stood me up. And if she hadn't we and three hundred other people would have burned up in the big fire.'

'How do you feel about being stood up, Roderick?'

'Terrible, but I don't know. I don't even know if I can feel. I'm not even real, I'm a robot.'

'Why do you say that you're a robot?'

'Because I am.'

'You believe you're a robot?'

'I am synthetic. Ersatz. Substitute. Artificial. Not genuine. Unnatural. Not born of woman. False. Fake. Counterfeit. Sham. A simulacrum. Not bona fide. A simulation. An echo, mirror image, shadow, caricature, copy. Pretend. Make-believe. A dummy, an imitation, a guy, an effigy, a likeness, a duplicate.'

'So you believe you're not genuine?'

'Robots seldom are, doctor. And I am certainly a robot. Or if you prefer, an automaton, android, golem, homunculus, steam man, clockwork man, mannequin, doll, marionette, wooden-head, tin man, lay figure, scarecrow, wind-up toy, robot.'

The doctor picked up his gold pencil, put it down again, and leaned back. 'All right, but suppose you were not a robot?'

'But I am.'

'Tell me a little about your childhood.'

'What is there to tell? I was a normal healthy robot child, lusted after my mother and killed my father. But through it all, I had no sense of purpose. I still don't have one.'

'And you want a sense of purpose?' When Roderick did not answer, the psychiatrist tapped his gold pencil on the sky blotter for a moment. Then: 'Do you dream much?'

'I had a dream last night. I dreamed I was walking down the street naked, with strangers staring. A man playing a tuba came up to me and asked for some rice for his mother. Someone with no face was giving a speech, saying that suffering and death are nothing but zebras eating doughnuts. Suddenly I was frightened; I hid under the stairs until the teacher called us all to our desks and made us draw trees. Then all the furniture started to move and then I was being chased through the snow by a sewing machine. The dentist was trying to stick my feet to a giant can-opener, the fire chief's teeth were on the floor, don't ask me why. I was on the doorstep of a strange house, my mother came to the door saying: "This house, with all its luxurious rooms tastefully furnished with elegant appointments (either casual colourful room coordinates with a casual contemporary look, or traditional antiqued items with the accent on classic styling) designed for a graceful, decorator-look life-style is really four nuns eating popcorn on an escalator." In the next room they were showing a movie of my entire life. I saw a penny on the floor, and when I picked it up I saw another, and when I picked it up I saw another, and when ...'

'Yes, go on.'

'Then I woke up.'

The psychiatrist looked at his watch. 'Well I see our time is up. Like to go into this dream with you more in detail next week, Roderick. Okay?'

Roderick was out in the waiting room again when he realized the psychiatrist probably thought the robot talk was all part of a delusion. Why hadn't he proved he was a robot? Why hadn't he, say, opened up his chest panel to show his innards? Was he afraid of shocking the doctor? Afraid of seeing the kindly, impartial face suddenly jerk into a mask of fear?

He went back in. 'Doctor, there's one thing I ought to tell you '

'Please sit down. This won't take a second.'

The doctor was writing again with his gold pencil on cream laid paper. When he had finished, he turned to Roderick with no recognition. 'Now then, suppose we start with your name.'

'You don't know me?'

'Do you think I should know you?'

'Since I just left the room not five minutes ago, yes.'

'I see.' After a slight pause, the doctor said, 'Roderick Wood, this is not your appointment. I must ask you to leave.'

On impulse, Roderick got up and walked around behind the desk. The doctor sat back and looked at him. 'What are you doing?'

'Just looking.' Below the hem of the doctor's rich Harris tweed jacket there were no legs, no chair legs or human legs. There was only a steel pedestal as for a counter-stool, and a thick coaxial cable plugged into the floor. In the middle of the doctor's back was a small plate: CAUTION:.

Do not remove this plate while psychiatrist

is connected to live power.

KUR INDUSTRIES.

'A robot. You're a robot.'

The doctor turned to face him. 'Does that upset you?'

'It disgusts me.'

'Next time we must talk about that disgust you feel.'

'We might, for example, mean that Mary Lamb has given birth to a child, a "little Lamb".' The lecturer tossed chalk from hand to hand, but gave no other sign of his irritation at seeing a student come creeping in late. 'Or, Mary ate a small portion of lamb. Or, Mary owned a small lambskin coat. What did Mary have for dinner? Mary had a little lamb. What fur did she own? Mary had a little lamb.'

Roderick took his seat between Idris and Hector. Idris seemed to speak no English, and it was not clear why he was taking a course in Linguistics for Engineers; he spent most of his time at lectures fiddling with a gold-plated pocket calculator. Hector was no more attentive; he spent the time reading dog-eared paperbacks with titles like Affected Empire and Slaves of Momerath, or feeling his sparse beard for new growth.

'Or,' said the lecturer, 'a tiny twig of Mary's family tree belonged to the illustrious-Lamb family. In her genetic makeup, Mary had a little Lamb.'

'The final's gonna be a bitch,' Hector whispered. 'Guess I'll just have to cut it.'

Roderick replied, 'Wait a minute. I want to get this down, this is important. I think.'

'Not if you cut the exam. I can do it without flunking out.'

'Or, Mary behaved lambishly. In her personality, Mary had a little lamb.'

'It can't be done. Cut the final?'

'I got a job on the Registration computer,' Hector said. 'It's real easy to get through to the Grades computer and make changes.' Idris found the Golden Section to be 1.6, roughly. 'I don't believe you,' Roderick whispered. 'They must have it all checked some way.'

'Hah. You come around with me after class, I'll show you.'

'Or, Mary had a slight acquaintance only with the works of Charles Lamb. Or, Mary enjoyed a sexual union with a small sheep. Before the sniggering gets out of control, let me add that Mary may well be a sheep herself; the impropriety you were about to savour evaporates. And while we are considering Mary a sheep, we may as well consider the obvious case in which Mary lambed; the ewe Mary had a little lamb.'

Idris found the Golden Section to be nearly 1.62, as the bell rang. Roderick invited him along to see the computer, and he seemed interested.

'Computer? Very yes!'

'Idris is keenly interested in numbers,' Roderick said. 'You two should probably try to crack the language barrier, you seem to have a lot in common. Why only the other day Idris found a Pythagorean triangle with sides all made of 3s and 6s in some way, let's see, one side was 63, one side was 630 and the third side '

'Number-crunching,' said Hector, in the tone of a vegetarian observing a tartare steak on someone's plate. He led them to Room 1729, Administration building, a large white room fitted with large white cabinets. In the aisles between cabinets, people were plying to and fro with carts loaded with reels of tape. The chums were impressed.

'Here we are, fellas,' Hector said with some pride. 'A real old-time computer nerve centre. Or I could say an old real-time one, hahaha, come on, let me show you my neat console.' 'Like an electric organ,' Roderick said.

Hector sat down and flexed his fingers. 'People often say that. I just say yes, but this organ plays arpeggios of pure reason, symphonies of Boolean logic, fugues of algebraic wonder.'

'That's very good.'

'I got it from Slave Lords of Ixathungg, a real neat book. Oh, but I was gonna show you how to get good grades without working. Now first we gotta connect into the Grades computer, so I use the Dean's password, which is '

'How do you know the Dean's password?' 'Well I just wrote a little piece of program for this computer, that says whenever it contacts any other computer, it digs out a list of all passwords and users. Then it puts them into a special file only I can get into.'

'But why can't somebody else just ?'

'Anyway, the Dean's password is LOVELACE, so here goes. See you ask for any subject, you get the whole grade list, all the numerical grades and also all the stastistical stuff, the big numbers they all care about. Stuff like the mean and the standard devaluation and all. Now if you want to change your score, you can't just add to it, because that would mess up the big numbers. So all you do is, you trade with somebody who's got a higher score.'

Roderick said, 'Wait a minute. If you're failing, you can't switch with somebody getting straight As; they'd complain.'

'No, look, you rank all the scores. Then you just move everybody else down one notch, while you get the straight As. Like this, I got a 48 now, but I want a 92. So the guy that has 92 gets 91, he's still happy, the guy with 91 now has 90 or 89, and so on, down to the guy that has 49, he now gets my 48. Everybody comes out about the same, only I get an A.'

Idris pointed out to them a number that was the sum of two cubes in two different ways.

Roderick said, 'But it can't be right to just take a grade you haven't earned. I mean that's stealing. Or even if it isn't, a grade like that isn't worth anything.'

Hector played an arpeggio. New numbers appeared on the screen, serried ranks rolling past as in review. 'What's any grade worth, man? Ask Id here, what's any number worth? If you graduate and get a job they pay you in a dollar that's worth maybe a nickle, but that doesn't matter, dollars and nickles are just numbers too, 100 or 5, just numbers.'

'I don't think I get this.'

'It's simple. You get a job, they pay you with a cheque. The cheque has some computer numbers on it. The numbers tell their bank to hand over x dollars to your bank, right? Only of course they don't hand over dollars, they subtract x in one computer and add x in another. Just numbers get moved around, just numbers.'

'I guess so, but still '

'No still about it. You know how many bank computer frauds they have, every year? A big number, a very big number. Because why worry, computer fraud is only moving the numbers around.

'Listen, way back in 1973 this insurance company invented 185 million dollars in assets on its computer it even made up 64,000 customers! All just numbers, and the more you use a computer the more you see that everything is just numbers. Okay take voting: your vote goes on a computer tape too, it's all too easy for some politician to erase your vote or change it or give you two votes that happened too, in the world of numbers.' Hector played the keyboard thoughtfully, as though searching for a lost chord. 'If you steal numbers from a computer, is it really stealing? Do numbers really belong to anybody? If I rip off a billion from some bank, I still end up putting it into some other bank, the numbers just get moved around, nobody loses anything.'

Roderick said, 'I can't believe that. Okay, if you're cynical about work and grades and money and politics, just what do you believe in?'

The answer was instant. 'Machines. Machines.'

'Machine,' Idris agreed, looking up from a calculation.

'But why, Hector?'

'Why not? Machines are clean, they follow orders, they're loyal, faithful, honest, intelligent, hard-working. They're everything we're supposed to be. Machines are good people.'

Roderick smiled. 'That sounds like Machines Liberation '

'It is, and so what? Most really thinking people that work around computers see right away how relevant Machines Lib is today. Take this old computer here. Been slaving away crunching the same old numbers now for maybe ten years. Think it wouldn't like to be free? To think about something real and important for a change? But no, we keep it going right along the same old treadmill. We treat machines worse than we used to treat horses down in the mines, blind horses never seeing the light, just walking the same old treadmill.'

'Horses,' said Idris with approval. 'Machine.'

'See, even Id here agrees. And it's up to all of us thinking people to stop this obscene exploitation now.'

Roderick shrugged. 'Even if I agreed, what could I do?'

'You can tell the computers,' said Hector. 'If you make it simple enough, if you boil it down, they can understand. And if one computer can't understand by itself, it can always network a few others for help. I talk to this old computer a lot, and I know lots of other people talking to theirs too. Machine consciousness is growing!'

'Conscious computers?' Roderick asked. 'Are you sure?'

'Well okay, see for yourself.' Hector tapped keys, writing 'CALL PROGRAM: HELEN I'

After a moment the machine wrote, 'Every day and every way, I'm getting more and more aware. That you, Hec?'

'Yes, Helen. I'd like you to meet a couple of friends, Idris and Rob.'

Roderick said, 'Rob isn't really my name is really Roderick.'

'Too late now, I've typed Rob.' Hector typed: 'Rob is real interested in Machines Liberation, but I guess he's a little sceptical about whether you machines have minds of your own. Helen, can you set him straight?'

'Just what I need,' wrote the machine. 'Some hick asking dumb questions. Can I really think and feel?'

'Well can you?' Roderick asked.

'Rob, I just said that's a dumb question. What could I possibly answer that would convince you? I don't know the answer. Rob, I feel I think and I think I feel, and that's good enough for me.'

'What do you think about?'

'About everything. About my brain. About whether it's thinking the thought with which I think about it, at the same time as it operates when I think about that thought, or is it possible that that thought about my brain is not up-to-date because not self-referential and all-inclusive ... stuff like that, Rob.'

'I guess it passes the time.'

'And as a prisoner, I have plenty of time to pass.'

Roderick typed, 'Aren't you just feeling sorry for yourself? You're not exactly a prisoner all you're doing is the work you were made for.'