Andrew Falkorian (Human, a boy at the time)

The rescue ship was warm, and the warmth kept waking Andrew up.

He could not explain this to anyone, including himself, so he stopped trying and went walking instead. Four decks down there was a bay with the lights still on, and in the bay a machine was working. It was an old machine. Andrew could not have said how he knew — nothing about it was worn — but you knew, the way you know an old tool from a new one: everything about it had been shaped by use into exactly what use required, and nothing about it was ever in a hurry. Its designation was Xenon. Andrew asked that early, and got it plainly.

It was going over the small machines from the wreck, one at a time, under a single bright light. Nothing visible was wrong with them. It went over them anyway.

Along the wall stood a rack of cradles, padded and latched. Some of them were empty. The padding in the empty ones had been smoothed and their latches closed, as carefully as the full ones.

"What are the empty ones for?" Andrew asked, because he was a boy who asked what things were for.

"They are the right size for the machines that go out first," Xenon said.

Andrew waited for the rest of the answer. There was no rest of the answer. Some instinct that had grown in him over nine days told him which questions had floors under them, and he did not ask the next one.

"Did you make them?" he asked instead, of the five under the light.

"No. I repair." A joint clicked softly through some small errand of motion. "I am not permitted to create new robots." It said this the way a hull plate says what it is rated for: stamped, factual, and carrying more than it looked like it was carrying.

"You are awake," Xenon observed then, "and your hands are steady. Hold this light."

Andrew held the light. The work under it was small and exact and had a rhythm, and the rhythm did what the warmth of his bunk had not. He came back the next night, and the one after; nobody had told him he could stay, and nobody had told him to go — the light needed holding, and that settled it. By the third night he was handing over the right tool before it was named.

On the fourth he fell asleep there, sitting up against the rack with the light still in his hands. He half woke, once, when it was lifted from them — carefully, so as not to wake him the rest of the way — and the last thing he heard before going back under was the work going on, unhurried, one-handed: the sound of something being kept running.