"No, but yours are. For all its vaunted powers in allied fields, a M.A.N. is mainly a mining machine, whereas a W.O.M.A.N. is intended primarily for melting, processing, and creating. You can mine much faster than you can melt; I can melt much faster than I can mine. Therefore, it is the Company's wish that we work as a team. From now on, you will charge my open hearth in addition to your own. For that reason I was created with an exterior charger-door, while you were created with an exterior charger-keel. Haven't you ever wondered what the additional appendage was for?"
8M sighed. "The Company doesn't overlook a thing, does it?" he said. And then, "Well, if we're going to embark upon such a strenuous schedule, I think we'd better get some rest first. I'm sure you must be worn out from your intensive-training period, and as for myself, I've been on the go for sixteen hours straight."
"I am a little beat at that," she said.
"There's a sheltered valley not far from here where we can sleep."
He led the way to it. It was as narrow as it was deep, and there was barely enough room for them to park side by side. Her hull was just as impervious to the wind as his was, and they could just as well have bedded down elsewhere, but there is a psychological advantage in being shielded from the wind whether one needs to be or not, and he wanted her first night on Jupiter to be a pleasant one.
After seeing the last of the ingots through his mills, he gave his blast-furnace belly a final tap and pigged the heat. Then he de-activated his eyes and settled down, first checking to see if his alert-field was on. Presently he slept. As always, he dreamed of Earth. Of green grass and blue skies; of trees and meadow flowers. Of the morning freshness of overnight snowfalls and of the taste of a woman's lips at sundown. Of the arrowway accident that had chewed up his body, but which had miraculously spared his brain. The body the Company had given him was grotesque in comparison with his old one, but he was humbly thankful for it. He had eyes with which to see and ears with which to hear. He had no legs in the strict sense of the word, perhaps, but he possessed a mobility that, despite the much greater gravity he had to cope with, put his former mobility to shame, and he had at least a thousand arms. Some of them were cranes and some of them were charger-keels and some of them were skip hoists, and all of them were tools of one kind or another; but he could do things with them he couldn't have begun to do with the frail flesh-and-bone pipestems he had once called arms, and anyway, in the last analysis weren't all arms tools? And wasn't the true measure of a man or a M.A.N.'s worth the number and the variety of the tasks he could perform? On Earth, he would be considered a monstrosity, just as EV would be; but here on Jupiter they were M.A.N. and W.O.M.A.N.
When he awoke in the drab Jovian dawn, his metallic body was lightly touching hers. The sole purpose of the tactility which had been built into his being was to give him an alertness which he might otherwise have lacked, and as a result he had never associated his ability to feel with the perception of pleasure. He did so now, though, and he was loath to move away. When at last he did so, she awoke. "Good morning," she said.
He could not remember the last time he had been greeted with those two sweet words. "Good morning," he said back. "Did you sleep well?"
"Yes. But I dreamed too."