I nodded. Then, "But look!" I burst out, "This can't be what it looks like. He can't be a Robinc android because he's going," I gulped a fractional gulp, "to kill us. Robinc's products have the safety factor that prevents them from harming a living being, even on another being's orders."

"No," said Quinby slowly. "Remember that Robinc manufactures androids for the Empire's army? Obviously those can't have the safety factor. And Mr. Grew has apparently held out a few for his own bootleg banditti."

I groaned. "Trust you," I said. "We're chained up with a murderous android, and trust you to stand there calmly and look at things straight. Well, are you going to see straight enough to get us out of this?"

"Of course," he said simply. "We can't let Grew destroy the future of usuforms."

There was at least one other future that worried me more, but I knew there was no use bringing up anything so personal. I just stood there and watched Quinby thinking—what time I wasn't watching the android's hand hovering around his holster and wondering when he'd get his next orders.

And while I was waiting and watching, half scared sweatless, half trusting blindly in Quinby, half wondering impersonally what death was like—yes, I know that makes three halves of me, but I was in no state for accurate counting—while I waited, I began to realize something very odd.

It wasn't me I was most worried about. It was Dugg Quinby. Me going all unselfish on me! Ever since Quinby had first seen the nonsense in androids—no, back of that, ever since that first magnifiscrumptious street brawl, I'd begun to love that boy like a son—which'd have made me pretty precocious.

There was something about him—that damned mixture of almost stupid innocence, combined with the ability to solve any problem by his—not ingenuity, precisely, just his inborn capacity for looking at things straight.

Here I was feeling selfless. And here he was coming forth with the first at all tricky or indirect thing I'd ever known him to pull. Maybe it was like marriage—the way two people sort of grow together and average up.

Anyway, he said to the android now, "I bet you military robots are pretty good marksmen, aren't you?"