I was away for a week. I had fled to my secret retreat in the Ozark Mountains—fled from Kay. It was a small cabin, a study and laboratory that I had built for myself, for moments of solitude and thought, when the world of men weighed heavily upon me. Jack and Kay did not know of this place.
I had to think—think.
But my thoughts all led to the same conclusion—a conclusion forced on me by Kay. She had made it clear that a robot mind, knowing of but lacking the capacity for human love, must live only in a bitter loneliness. Think of yourself as the only human being on Mars, among utterly alien beings. Beings with intelligent minds but strange bodies and strange customs. You would know true loneliness.
And loneliness closed in on me, relentlessly.
My solitude was broken one day by a visito
