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fallacious proof, he was not content merely to refute him, but had to take him to the mat; pencil in hand, he meticulously built his mathematical model and polished Krull off with a glee that seemed motivated less by self-vindication than by a desire to prove the cosmographer an arrogant ass. But Krull wasn’t arrogant, only touchy, no more and no less so than anyone whose ambition and abilities were not evenly matched.
    Pirx, who was a captive audience for such scenes—unavoidable since they shared a living space measuring forty meters square, divided by partitions with next to no sound insulation—knew he would be made a scapegoat. And he was right. Not daring to show Massena he was a sore loser, Krull made Pirx bear the brunt of his frustration, and in a way that was typical of him: except when circumstances demanded otherwise, Pirx was given the silent treatment.
    When that happened, he was left with only Massena for company, and he might have actually become pals with this clear-eyed, dark-haired man, except that Massena was high-strung, and Pirx had always had trouble with high-strung types, deep down distrusting them. And Massena had his tics: his throat needed constant examining, a twinge in his joints meant a change in the weather (not one of his prognostications had ever come true, but that didn’t stop him from making more); he complained of insomnia and made a point of scrounging pills every night, pills that he never took but placed beside his bunk, the next morning swearing to Pirx—who read till all hours and could hear the man snoring peacefully away—that he hadn’t slept a wink, and apparently believing it. Otherwise, he was a topflight specialist, a whiz of a mathematician, and a born programmer. He was also in charge of the computerized, unmanned surveying program now under way. He even made a hobby of it, working on one of these programs in his spare time, which rankled Krull no end: the man did his job so well and so quickly that he actually had time to spare, and he couldn’t be reproached for neglecting his duties. Massena was all the more valuable in that, paradoxically, their planetary mini-expedition included not a single certified planetologist; Krull was anything but.
    It was as remarkable as it was distressing, the degree to which, with no special effort on anyone’s part, relations between three basically normal, ordinary individuals could become so embroiled in those rocky barrens that were the southern tableland of Iota Aquarius.
    To the team belonged one other member, a nonhuman one—the afore-mentioned Aniel, a nondigital robot, one of the latest Earthside jobs to be developed for fully automated land probes. That Massena was there as a cyberneticist was an anachronism—because of a regulation which provided that where there was a robot, there had to be a repairman. Now, regulations, as everyone knows, are seldom updated, and this one was ten years obsolete, since, as Massena himself was often heard to quip, the robot stood a greater chance of repairing him than vice versa: not only was it infallible, it was also medically programmed. Pirx had long ago observed that a man could be judged better by his behavior toward robots than toward his fellow man. Pirx belonged to a generation born into a world of which robots were as natural a part as spaceships, though acceptance of robots was tainted with vestiges of irrationality. There were those, for example, more easily infatuated with an ordinary machine—with their own car, say—than with a thinking machine. The era of unbridled modular experimentation was waning, or so it seemed, and construction was now limited to two types: the narrowly specialized and the universal. Only a fraction of the latter were human-shaped, and only because, of all the models tested, those patterned on nature proved the most functional under conditions simulating planetary exploration.
    Engineers were never gratified to see their products manifest the kind