"He was a good Solarian."
Baley said, "You've called this place a farm and you've mentioned children. Do you bring up children here?"
"From the age of a month. Every fetus on Solaria comes here."
"Fetus?"
"Yes." She frowned. "We get them a month after conception. Does this embarrass you?"
"No," Baley said shortly. "Can you show me around?"
"I can. But keep your distance."
Baley's long face took on a stony grimness as he looked down the length of the long room from above. There was glass between the room and themselves. On the other side, he was sure, was perfectly controlled heat, perfectly controlled humidity, perfectly controlled asepsis. Those tanks, row on row, each contained its little creature floating in a watery fluid of precise composition, infused with a nutrient mixture of ideal proportions. Life and growth went on.
Little things, some smaller than half his fist, curled on themselves, with bulging skulls and tiny budding limbs and vanishing tails.
Klorissa, from her position twenty feet away, said, "How do you like it, Plainclothesman?"
Baley said, "How many do you have?"
"As of this morning, one hundred and fifty-two. We receive fifteen to twenty each month and we graduate as many to independence."
"Is this the only such institution on the planet?"
"That's right. It's enough to keep the population steady, counting on a life expectancy of three hundred years and a population of twenty thousand. This building is quite new. Dr. Delmarre supervised its construction and made many changes in our procedures. Our fetal death rate now is virtually zero."
Robots threaded their way among the tanks. At each tank they stopped and checked controls in a tireless, meticulous way, looking in at the tiny embryos within.
"Who operates on the mother?" asked Baley. "I mean, to get the little things."
"Doctors," answered Klorissa.
"Dr. Delmarre?"
"Of course not. Medical doctors. You don't think Dr. Delmarre would ever stoop to - Well, never mind."
"Why can't robots be used?"
"Robots in surgery? First Law makes that very difficult, Plainclothesman. A robot might perform an appendectomy to save a human life, if he knew how, but I doubt that he'd be usable after that without major repairs. Cutting human flesh would be quite a traumatic experience for a positronic brain. Human doctors can manage to get hardened to it. Even to the personal presence required."
Baley said, "I notice that robots tend the fetuses, though. Do you and Dr. Delmarre ever interfere?"
"We have to, sometimes, when things go wrong. If a fetus has developmental trouble, for instance. Robots can't be trusted to judge the situation accurately when human life is involved."
Baley nodded. "Too much risk of a misjudgment and a life lost, I suppose."
"Not at all. Too much risk of overvaluing a life and saving one improperly." The woman looked stem. "As fetal engineers, Baley, we see to it that healthy children are born; healthy ones. Even the best
gene analysis of parents can't assure that all gene permutations and combinations will be favorable, to say nothing of the possibility of mutations. That's our big concern, the unexpected mutation. We've got the rate of those down to less than one in a thousand, but that means that, on the average, once a decade, we have trouble."
She motioned him along the balcony and he followed her.
She said, "I'll show you the infants' nurseries and the youngsters' dormitories. They're much more a problem than the fetuses are. With them, we can rely on robot labor only to a limited extent."
"Why is that?"
"You would know, Baley, if you ever tried to teach a robot the importance of discipline. First Law makes them almost impervious to that fact. And don't think youngsters don't learn that about as soon as they can talk. I've seen a three-year-old holding a dozen robots motionless by yelling, 'You'll hurt me. I'm hurt.' It takes an extremely advanced robot to understand that a child might be deliberately lying."
"Could Delmarre handle the children?"
"Usually."
"How did he do that? Did he get out among, them and shake sense into them?"
"Dr. Delmarre? Touch them? Skies above! Of course not! But he could talk to them. And he could give a robot specific orders. I've seen him viewing a child for fifteen minutes, and keeping a robot in spanking position all that time, getting it to spank-spank-spank. A few like that and the child would risk fooling with the boss no more. And the boss was skillful enough about it so that usually the robot didn't need more than a routine readjustment afterward."
"How about you? Do you get out among the children?"
"I'm afraid I have to sometimes. I'm not like the boss. Maybe someday I'll be able to handle the long-distance stuff, but right now if I tried, I'd just ruin robots. There's an art to handling robots really well, you know. When I think of it, though. Getting out among the children. Little animals!"
She looked back at him suddenly. "I suppose you wouldn't mind seeing them."
"It wouldn't bother me."
She shrugged and stared at him with amusement. "Earthman!"
She walked on again. "What's all this about, anyway? You'll have to end up with Gladia Delmarre as murderess. You'll have to."
"I'm not quite sure of that," said Baley.
"How could you be anything else but sure? Who else could it possibly be?"
"There are possibilities, ma'am."
"Who, for instance?"