“HOWEVER,” THE HIGH Commander went on, gazing at the ceiling, “circumstances change. It would once have been thought vile that a machine should be allowed to do the work of a skilled man, and the thought that a machine might do the work with more precision and greater rapidity would have been almost blasphemous.
“This case must be viewed in the same light. As we are replacing certain of our workers on our outer planets with Earth animals simply because they are capable of doing the work more cheaply, so we must recognize that the same interests of economy govern in this case.
“A computing animal, in that sense, is in the same class as a computing machine. It would be folly to waste their abilities simply because they are not human.
“There also arises the question of command. It has been
