Euler moved carefully forward over the broken ground, his legs adjusting to its irregularities.
When he saw movement ahead, he stopped to observe.
Old human-type houses had grown up on the dump. Euler's vision zoomed, and he saw they
were parodies of human habitation, mocked up from the discarded trove of the dump, with old
auto panels for windows and dented computer panels for doors and toasters for doorsteps. Outside
the houses, in a parody of a street, macabre humans played. Jerk stamp jerk clank jerk clang
stamp stomp clang.
They executed slow, rhythmic dances to an intricate pattern, heads nodding, clapping their
own hands, turning to clap others' hands. Some were grotesquely male, some grotesquely female.
In the doorways, or sitting on old refrigerators, other grotesques looked on.
These were the humots—old type human-designed robots of the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries, useless in an all-automaton world, scrapped when the old technology was
scrapped. While their charges could be maintained, they functioned on, here in one last ghetto.
Unseen, Euler stalked through them, scanning for Anderson.
The humots aped the vanished race to which they had been dedicated, wore old human
clothes retrieved from the wreckage underfoot, assumed hats and scarves, dragged on socks,
affected pipes and ponytails, tied ribbons to themselves. Their guttering electronic memories
were refreshed by old movies ferreted from D-Dump, they copied in metallic gesture the
movements of shadows, aspired to emotion, hoped for hearts. They thought themselves a cut
above the nonanthropomorphic automata that had superseded them.
Anderson had found refuge among them. He hid the skin and bone and hair of the old
protoplasmic metabolism under baffles of tin, armored himself with rusting can. His form,
standing in a pseudodoorway, showed instantly on one of Euler's internal scans; his mass/body
ratio betrayed his flesh-and-blood caliber. Euler took off, flew over him, reeled down a paralyzer,
and stung him. Then he let down a net and clamped the human into it.
Crude alarms sounded all around. The humots stopped their automatic dance. They scattered
like leaves, clanking like mess tins, fled into the pseudohouses, went to earth, left D-Dump to the
almost invisible little buzzing figure that flew back to the Scanning Place with the recaptured
human swinging under its asymmetrical form. The old bell on the dump was still ringing long
after the scene was empty.
To human eyes, it was dark in the room.
Tenth Dominant manifested itself in New Newyork as a modest-sized mural with patterns
leaking titillating output clear through the electromagnetic spectrum and additives from the
invospectra. This became its personality for the present.
Chief Scanner Euler had not expected to be summoned to the Dominant's presence; he stood
there mutely. The human, Anderson, sprawled on the floor in a little nest of old cans he had shed,
reviving slowly from the effects of the paralyzer.
Dominant's signal said, "Their form of vision operates on a wavelength of between 4 and 7
times 10-5 centimeters."
Obediently, Euler addressed a parietal area, and light came on in the room. Anderson opened
one eye.
"I suppose you know about Men, Scanner?" said Dominant.
He had used voice. Not even R/T voice. Direct, naked man-type voice.
New Newyork had been without the sound of voice since the humots were kicked out.
"I—I know many things about Men," Euler vocalized. Through the usual channel, he
clarified the crude vocal signal. "This unit had to appraise itself of many humanity-involved data
from Master Boff Bank H00100 through H801000000 in operation concerning recapture of man
herewith."
"Keep to vocal only, Scanner, if you can."
He could. During the recapture operation, he had spent perhaps 2.4 seconds learning old local