“Is this your station?” asked Pirx.

The robot’s glass eyes rotated in opposite directions in 180-degree sweeps, lending the flat metal face a look of even greater vacuity.

“Sealant pre-prepared… two, six, eight pounds… can’t see too well… cold…”

The voice issued not from the head but from the robot’s breastplate.

The cat, curled into a ball, contemplated Pirx from its perch on the robot’s shoulder.

“Seal-ant prepared…” Terminus continued to grunt, accompanying his words now with a scooping and shoveling of the hands—the preliminary gesture of a procedure well known to Pirx: the sealing of radioactive leaks. As the rocking of the oxidized trunk gained momentum, the black cat hissed and clawed the metal plating, then lost its balance and bolted down, brushing Pirx’s leg in flight. The robot appeared not to notice. The words had stopped, but not the hands, whose movement became more and more convulsive, residual, a mute echo of his words, until finally grinding to a halt.

Pirx glanced up at the reactor wall, its surface scarred and fossillike, riddled all around with the dark stains of cement patches, then back at Terminus. He must have been as old as the ship itself, maybe older. His right shoulder didn’t match his left, there were welding scars on his hips and thighs, and the treated metal around the seams had taken on a gray-blue luster.

“Terminus!” He hollered as loudly as if he were addressing a deaf man. “Report to your station!”

“I hear and obey. Terminus.”

The robot retreated, crablike, to his sanctuary and began squeezing inside to the sound of crushing metal. Pirx’s gaze swept the room in search of the cat; it was nowhere to be seen. He climbed back up the stairs, sealed the airtight door behind him, and rode the elevator up to the navigation room on the fourth deck.