pleasure in his triumphs, worried
about his health, and watched him grow mentally.

And now he was sick, broken, ruined. And, like all parents, she was
asking herself: "What did I do wrong?"

Mike the Angel didn't give her an answer to that unspoken question, but
he knew what the answer was in so many cases:

The grieving parent has not necessarily done anything wrong. It may
simply be that there was insufficient or poor-quality material to work
with.

With a human child, it is even more humiliating for a parent to admit
that he or she has contributed inferior genetic material to a child than
it is to admit a failure in upbringing. Leda's case was different.

Leda had lost her child, but Mike hesitated to point out that it wasn't
her fault in the first place because the material wasn't up to the task
she had given it, and in the second place because she hadn't really
lost anything. She was still playing with dolls, not human beings.

"Hell!" said Mike under his breath, not realizing that he was
practically whispering in her ear.

"Isn't it?" she said. "Isn't it Hell? I spent eight years trying to make
that little mind of his tick properly. I wanted to know what was the
right, proper, and logical way to bring up children. I had a theory, and
I wanted to test it. And now I'll never know."

"What sort of theory?" Mike asked.

She sniffled, took a handkerchief from her pocket, and began wiping at
her tears. Mike took the handkerchief away from her and did the wiping
job himself. "What's this theory?" he said.

"Oh, it isn't important now. But I felt--I still feel--that everybody is
born with a sort of Three Laws of Robotics in him. You know what I
mean--that a person wouldn't kill or harm anyone, or refuse to do what
was right, in addition to trying to preserve his own life. I think
babies are born that way. But I think that the information they're given
when they're growing up can warp them. They still think they're obeying
the laws, but they're obeying them wrongly, if you see what I mean."

Mike nodded without saying anything. This was no time to interrupt her.

"For instance," she went on, "if my theory's right, then a child would
never disobey his father--unless he was convinced that the man was not
really his father, you see. For instance, if he learned, very early,
that his father never spanks him, that becomes one of the identifying
marks of 'father.' Fine. But the first time his father _does_ spank him