They're not robots!_"

The robed man was suddenly on his feet, face livid.

"Han!" cried Virginia Merrick, "Not that way!"

"This is my affair now, Virginia. I'll handle it in my own way!" the
Director said.

"Remember the mob outside!"

Merrick turned agate-hard eyes on his wife. Presently he looked away
and said to the Prophet. "Now I will show you the real Creche!"

* * * * *

There were robots everywhere--blank-eyed, like sleep walkers. They
reacted to commands. They moved and breathed and fed themselves. Under
rigid control they performed miracles of intuitive calculation. But
artificiality was stamped upon them like a brand. They were _not_
human.

In the lowest vaults of the Creche, Merrick showed the Prophet the
infants. He withheld nothing. He showed him the growing creatures. He
explained to him the tests and signs that were looked for in the
hospitals maintained by the World State and the Council of Ten. He let
him watch the young ones taking their Primary Conditioning. Courses of
hypnotic instruction. Rest, narcosynthesis. Semantics. Drugs and words
and more words pounding on young brains like sledgehammer blows,
shaping them into something acceptable in a sapient world.

In other chambers, other age groups. Emotion and memory being moulded
into something else by hypnopedia. Faces becoming blank and
expressionless.

"Their minds are conditioned--enslaved," Merrick said bitterly. "Then
they are primed with scientific facts. Those techniques we discussed.
_This_ is where they come from, Prophet. From the minds of your
despised androids. Only will is suppressed, and emotion. They are
shaped for the sociography of a sapient culture. They mature very
slowly. We keep them here for from ten to fifteen years. No human
brain could stand it--but _theirs_ can."

Truth dangled before his eyes, but Erikson's mind savagely rejected
it. The pillars upon which he had built his life were crumbling....

The two men stood in a vast hall filled with an insidious, whispering
voice. On low pallets, fully a score of physically mature androids lay
staring vacuously at a spinning crystal high in the apex of the domed
ceiling.

"--you had no life before you where created here to serve Man the
master you had no life before you were created here to serve Man the
master you had--" the voice whispered into the hypnotized brains.

"Don't look up," Merrick warned. "The crystal can catch a hu