He said, “Call the turn now, Greg. They say the ship is finished. They don’t know what it is, but it’s finished. Let’s go, Greg. Let’s grab the controls right now.”

Powell said wearily, “Cut it, Mike. There’s a peculiar overripe flavor to your humor at its freshest, and the confined atmosphere here isn’t helping it.”

“Well, listen,” Donovan took another ineffectual swipe at his hair, “I’m not worried so much about our cast-iron genius and his tin ship. There’s the matter of my lost leave. And the monotony! There’s nothing here but whiskers and figures—the wrong kind of figures. Oh, why do they give us these jobs?”

“Because,” replied Powell, gently, “we’re no loss, if they lose us. O.K., relax! Doc Lanning’s coming this way.”

Lanning was coming, his gray eyebrows as lavish as ever, his aged figure unbent as yet and full of life. He walked silently up the ramp with the two men and out into the open field, where, obeying no human master, silent robots were building a ship.

Wrong tense. Had built a ship!

For Lanning said, “The robots have stopped. Not one has moved today.”

“It’s completed then? Definitely?” asked Powell.

“Now how can I tell?” Lanning was peevish, and his eyebrows curled down in an eye-hiding frown. “It seems done. There are no spare pieces about, and the interior is down to a gleaming finish.”

“You’ve been inside?”

“Just in, then out. I’m no space-pilot. Either of you two know much about engine theory?”

Donovan looked at Powell, who looked at Donovan.

Donovan said, “I’ve got my license, sir, but at last reading it didn’t say anything about hyper-engines or warp-navigation. Just the usual child’s play in three dimensions.”

Alfred Lanning looked up with sharp disapproval and snorted the length of his prominent nose.

He said frigidly, “Well, we have our engine men.”

Powell caught at his elbow as he walked away, “Sir, is the ship still restricted ground?”

The old director hesitated, then rubbed the bridge of his nose, “I suppose not. For you two anyway.”

Donovan looked after him as he left and muttered a short, expressive phrase at his back. He turned to Powell, “I’d like to give him a literary description of himself, Greg.”

“Suppose you come along, Mike.”

The inside of the ship was finished, as finished as a ship ever was; that could be told in a single eye-blinking glance. No martinet in the system could have put as much spit-and-polish into a surface as those robots had. The walls were of a gleaming silvery finish that retained no fingerprints.

There were no angles; walls, floors, and ceiling faded gently into each other and in the cold, metallic glittering of the hidden lights, one was surrounded by six chilly reflections of one’s bewildered self.

The main corridor was a narrow tunnel that led in a hard, clatter-footed stretch along a line of rooms of no interdistinguishing features.

Powell said, “I suppose furniture is built into the wall. Or maybe we’re not supposed to sit or sleep.”