Take our android, for example. Her name is Kelly Watchman, and her specialty is vacuum-core excavation.

Kelly is probably about ninety years old, judging by her vat number, which is someplace around fifteen thousand. (They’re up over a million now, aren’t they?) But, being an android, she doesn’t age at all, and so she looks about nineteen. A very sexy nineteen, naturally; if you’re going to make artificial human beings, you might as well make good-looking ones, the android companies say, and I quite agree. Kelly is highly decorative, and goes around the ship wearing next to nothing at all, or sometimes less. Since an android doesn’t have any more sex life than the Venus de Milo, Kelly doesn’t stop to consider the effect that all those jiggles and curves might have on normal human males who keep bumping into her in corridors. Not me, incidentally: the first day Kelly stripped down I noticed that she doesn’t have a navel, and that turned me off thinking of her as a real woman. I mean, there’s no reason why an android ought to have a navel, but even so I can’t help visualizing her as a kind of rubber doll that walks, and I don’t have any romantic interest in walking rubber dolls no matter how lifelike and voluptuous they may be. Some of the others, though—

Well, I’m off the track, and maybe my prejudices are showing a little, since a lot of people do find androids desirable. The important thing is that Kelly Watchman is aboard this ship because she’s a member of a downtrodden minority, not because she’s an outstanding vacuum-corer operator.

She can’t be an outstanding vacuum-corer operator.