"Y-you're not dead?" Martin inquired shakily.
"I'm not even alive," the robot murmured. "The way you'd understand it, that is. Ah—thanks for the jolt."
* * *
Martin stared at the robot with the wildest dawning of surmise.
"Why—" he gasped. "Why— you're a robot!"
"Certainly I'm a robot," his guest said. "What slow minds you pre-robots had. Mine's working like lightning now." He stole a drunkard's glance at the desk-lamp. " F(t) —I mean, if you counted the kappa waves of my radio-atomic brain now, you'd be amazed how the frequency's increased." He paused thoughtfully. " F(t)," he added.
Moving quite slowly, like a man under water, Martin lifted his glass and drank whiskey. Then, cautiously, he looked up at the robot again.
" F(t) —" he said, paused, shuddered, and drank again. That did it. "I'm drunk," he said with an air of shaken relief. "That must be it. I was almost beginning to believe—"
"Oh, nobody believes I'm a robot at first," the robot said. "You'll notice I showed up in a movie lot, where I wouldn't arouse suspicion. I'll appear to Ivan Vasilovich in an alchemist's lab, and he'll jump to the conclusive I'm an automaton. Which, of course, I am. Then there's a Uighur on my list—I'll appear to him in a shaman's hut and he'll assume I'm a devil. A matter of ecologicologic."
"Then you're a devil?" Martin inquired, seizing on the only plausible solution.