Martian and Terran prospectors who searched for
minerals. Later on, a few rude mining communities sprang up under
plastic airdromes, but never came to much. Argon City was such a
place.

I wonder if you can comprehend the loneliness, the hollow futility of
our plight. Fifty thousand skilled workmen with nothing to do. Some of
the less adaptable gave up, prostrating themselves upon the bare rocks
until their joints froze from lack of use, and their works corroded.
Others served the miners and prospectors, but their needs were all too
few.

The overwhelming majority of us were still idle, and somehow we
learned the secret of racial existence at last. We learned to serve
each other.

This was not an easy lesson to learn. In the first place there must be
motivation involved in racial preservation. Yet we derived no pleasure
out of the things that make the Builders wish to continue to live. We
did not sleep; we did not eat, and we were not able to reproduce
ourselves. (And, besides, this latter, as I have indicated, would have
been pointless with us.)

There was, however, one other pleasure of the Builders that intrigued
us. It can best be described as a stimulation produced by drenching
their insides with alcoholic compounds, and is a universal pastime
among the males and many of the shes.

One of us--R-47, I think it was (rest him)--tried it one day. He pried
open the top of his helmet and pouted an entire bottle of the fluid
down his mechanism.

Poor R-47. He caught fire and blazed up in a glorious blue flame that
we could not extinguish in time. He was beyond repair, and we were
forced to scrap him.

But his was not a sacrifice in vain. He had established an idea in our
ennui-bursting minds. An idea which led to the discovery of Moon Glow.
My discovery, I should say, for I was the first.

Naturally, I cannot divulge my secret formula for Moon Glow. There are
many kinds of Moon Glow these days, but there is still only one B-12
Moon Glow.

Suffice it to say that it is a high octane preparation, only a drop of
which--but you know the effects of Moon Glow, of course.

How the merest thimbleful, when judiciously poured into one's power
pack, gives new life and the most deliriously happy freedom of
movement imaginable. One possesses soaring spirits and super-strength.

Old, rusted joints move freely once more, one's transistors glow
brightly, and the currents of the body race about with the minutest
resistance