Alvin shook his head.
“I still believe,” he said, “that the disappearance of the spaceships can’t be explained as easily as that. But to get back to the machine-do you think that the Master Robots could help us? I’ve never seen one, of course, and don’t know much about them.”
“Help us? In what way?”
“I’m not quite sure,” said Alvin vaguely. “Perhaps they could force it to obey all my orders. They repair robots, don’t they? I suppose that would be a kind of repair…”
His voice faded away as if he had failed even to convince himself.
Rorden smiled: the idea was too ingenuous for him to put much faith in it. However, this piece of historical research was the first of all Alvin’s schemes for which he himself could share much enthusiasm, and he could think of no better plan at the moment.
He walked towards the Associator, above which the robot was still floating as if in studied indifference. As he began, almost automatically, to set up his questions on the great keyboard, he was suddenly struck by a thought so incongruous that he burst out laughing.
Alvin looked at his friend in surprise as Rorden turned towards him.
“Alvin,” he said between chuckles, “I’m afraid we still have a lot to learn about machines.” He laid his hand on the robot’s smooth metal body. “They don’t share many human feelings, you know. It wasn’t really necessary for us to do all our plotting in whispers.”