Sofi said, "Ask them if they found anything!" Her voice was eager.
Hen narrowed his black eyes, ignored her. He said to R-7 over the transmitter, "Go back to work at once."
"But you don't work, father."
Hen felt a surge of uncertainty. The robots were too delicately receptive to expect to keep them in ignorance. Their perceptions were infinitely more sensitive than man's. Even on this asteroid there were too many factors involved to regulate their environment. He had tried to implant science without revealing the greater implication of science. But language was too faulty a tool. There was the girl, too—headstrong, excitable, hyper-thyroid. It was amazing how faithfully the robots tended to reflect her emotional instability.
How much of the robots' erraticness originated in Sofi's inexact thinking?
He said, "Everything has to work."
"Why?"
"Man either produces the needs of his body or he dies," he explained with growing irritability. The conversation was progressing further and further out of hand. "In your case, it's fuel and repairs. Without them you would terminate."
"But we have those here, father. Why should we work for you or the girl?"
That was it—the ultimate question which he had foreseen and which he could neither avoid nor answer. It was impossible to explain the complicated social system in which man, the disinherited, exchanged his labor for a small percentage of the articles he produced. But the robots were self sufficient.