City

A metallic voice coughed softly and Webster looked up. A small grey robot stood just outside the doorway.

"The call, sir," said the robot. "The call you've been expecting."

***

Jenkins' face came into the plate – an old face, obsolete and ugly. Not the, smooth, lifelike face boasted by the latest model robots.

"I'm sorry to disturb you, sir," he said, "but it is most unusual. Joe came up and asked to use our visor to put in a call to you. Won't tell me what he wants, sir. Says it's just a friendly call to an old-time neighbour."

"Put him on," said Webster.

"He went at it most unusual, sir," persisted Jenkins. "He came up and sat around and chewed the fat for an hour or more before he asked to use it. I'd say, if you'd pardon me, that it's most peculiar."

"I know," said Webster. "Joe is peculiar, in a lot of ways."

Jenkins' face faded from the screen and another face came in – that of Joe, the mutant. It was a strong face with a wrinkled, leathery skin and blue-grey eyes that twinkled, hair that was just turning salt and pepper at the temples.

"Jenkins doesn't trust me, Tyler." said Joe and Webster felt his hackles rising at the laughter that lurked behind the words.

"For that matter," he told him bluntly, "neither do I."

Joe clucked with his tongue. "Why, Tyler, we've never given you a single minute's trouble. Not a single one of us. You've watched us and you've worried and fretted about us, but we've never hurt you. You've had so many of the dogs spying on us that we stumble over them everywhere we turn and you've kept files on us and studied us and talked us up and down until you must be sick to death of it."

"We know you," said Webster grimly. "We know more about you than you know about yourselves. We know how many there are of you and we know each of you personally. Want to know what any one of you were doing at any given moment in the last hundred years or so? Ask us and we'll tell you."

Butter wouldn't have melted in Joe's mouth. "And all the time," he said, "we were thinking kindly of you. Figuring out how sometime we might want to help you."

"Why didn't you do it, then?" snapped Webster. "We were ready to work with you at first. Even after you stole the Juwain philosophy from Grant-"

"Stole it?" asked Joe "Surely, Tyler, you must have that wrong. We only took it so we could work it out. It was all botched up, you know."

"You probably figured it out the day after you had your hands on it," Webster told him, flatly. "What were you waiting for? Any time you had offered that to us we'd known that you were with us and we'd have worked with you. We'd have ca1led off the dogs, we'd have accepted you."

"Funny thing," said Joe. "We never seemed to care about being accepted."

And the old laughter was back again, the laughter of a man who was sufficient to himself; who saw the whole fabric of the human community of effort as a vast, ironic joke. A man who walked alone and liked it. A man who saw the human race as something that was funny and probably just a little dangerous – but funnier than ever because it was dangerous. A man who felt no need of the brotherhood of man, who rejected that brotherhood as a thing as utterly pro vincial and pathetic as the twentieth century booster clubs.

"O.K.," said Webster sharply. "If that's the way you want it. I'd hoped that maybe you had a deal to offer – some chance of conciliation. We don't like things as they are – we'd rather they were different. But the move is up to you."

"Now, Tyler," protested Joe, "no use in flying off the handle. I was thinking maybe you'd ought to know about the Juwain philosophy. You've sort of forgotten about it now, but there was a time when the System was all stirred up about it.

"All right," said Webster, "go ahead and tell me." The tone of his voice said he knew Joe wouldn't.

"Basically," said Joe, "you humans are a lonely lot of folks. You never have known your fellow-man. You can't know him because you haven't the common touch of understanding that makes it possible to know him. You have friendships, sure, but those friendships are based on pure emotions, never on real understanding. You get along together, sure. But you get along by tolerance rather than by understanding. You work out your problems by agreement, but that agreement is simply a matter of the stronger-minded among you beating down the opposition of the weaker ones."

"What's that got to do with it?"

"Why, everything," Joe told him. "With the Juwain philosophy you'd actually understand."

"Telepathy?" asked Webster.