City

Still alien by all other standards, the second tale strikes a more familiar note than did the first. Here, for the first time, the reader gains an impression that this tale might have been born about a Doggish campfire, a situation unthinkable so far as the first tale is concerned.

Here is voiced some of the high moral and ethical concepts which the Dogs have come to value. Here, too, is a struggle which a Dog can understand, even though the struggle does reveal the mental and moral deterioration of its central character.

For the first time, too, a character emerges which has a familiar ring – the robot. In the robot Jenkins, first introduced in this story, one comes to know a character which for thousands of years has been a puppish favourite. Jenkins is regarded by Tige as the real hero of the legend. In him he sees an extension of Man's influence beyond the day of Man's disappearance, a mechanical device by which human thought continued to guide the Dogs long after Man himself was gone.

We still have our robots, valuable and lovable little contraptions that exist for one purpose only – to furnish us with hands. Throughout the years, however, a Dog's robot has become so much a part of him that no Dog now regards his robot as a thing apart.

Tige's insistence that the robot is an invention of Man, a heritage that our race carries forward from Man, has been sturdily attacked by most other students of the legend.

The idea that the robot may have been fashioned and given to the Dogs as an aid to the development of their culture, Bounce believes, is an idea which must be summarily ruled out by the very virtue of its romanticism. It is, he contends, a story device on the face of it and as such must necessarily be suspect from the first.

There is no way now of knowing how the Dogs evolved a robot. Those few scholars who have given some time to a study of the development of robotry, point out that the highly specialized use to which the robot is put does indeed argue that it was invented by a Dog. To be so specialized, they argue, the robot must necessarily have been invented and developed by the race for whose particular use it is so singularly fitted. No one other than a Dog, they contend, could have done so good a job on so intricate a tool.