* * * * * Isolde's first stop, after her abduction, was at the house of a converter Hans knew. The converter's name was Wisprey, and he was an artist in his own right. By the time he finished with Isolde, you never would have dreamed--unless you were a Wagnerian devotee--that once upon a time she had been a bona fide reproduction of an Irish heroine in a German opera. You would have sworn, instead, that she was a Swedish-type maid of the kind Androids, Inc., specialized in, and which retailed for 2500 credits. Her flaxen hair had been drawn back into a little chignon, her period costume had been exchanged for a modern servant's outfit, and her classic features had been subtly altered to suggest sycophancy. As though that were not enough, she could scrub floors, wash dishes, cook, and darn socks. The only part of her the converter did not alter was the sealed-in unit containing her voice tapes. That, he told Hans, would have involved too intricate an operation. Besides, who cared if she sang instead of talked, anyway, as long as she could work? "That's right," Hans said. "Who cares? When they see how strong she is, they'll buy her like sixty." "Sure they will." "And she's only the first. There's lots of other big ones where she came from and I'm going to grab them off, too." He didn't grab them off, though. A week later, he fell into his blonde mistress' barbecue pit and was so drunk he couldn't get back out before he was barbecued to the bone. Before this lamentable occurrence, however, he sold his pilfered princess to an interstellar trader, and thereby launched Isolde upon her odyssey. The interstellar trader, whose name was Higgens, owned a Class B merchant ship of the old photon-ejection variety. He stored Isolde in the after-hold and left her there till his fourth planetfall--Sirius 21. Then he got her out, dusted her off, combed her hair and activated her. He led her down the gangplank and stood her on the collapsible auctioneer's block he'd set up at the ship's base. There were a number of colonists gathered around the block already, but he saved her till last, auctioning off the rest of his payload first. By the time he took her hand and led her to the center of the block, word of her presence had got around the nearby colony, and there was a near-maximum turnout. "All right," Higgens said. "She's beautiful and she's strong and she's sturdy. I don't need to tell you those things because you can see them for yourself. I'm merely reminding you of them. But what you can't see are the things she can do. So here's the way we'll work it: you name something you'd like a servant of yours to be able to do, and I'll tell you whether she can do it or not. Who's first?" "Can she cook?" a thin-faced woman wanted to know. "I knew you'd ask that one first. The answer is yes. Next?" "Can she milk a milch bront?" This time the asker was a middle-aged colonist of Dutch descent.