I just stood there for a long minute. "I am Daniel Oak," I whispered. But I was fairly certain that the declaration would do me no good whatever. I was right. "No, sir. You are not Mr. Oak." McGuire is always polite to anyone who speaks to him, even if he doesn't regard that person as human. "McGuire," I said patiently, "can you see Mr. Oak? Is he on board?" "Yes, sir. I perceive him seated on the starboard couch in the main lounge." "Fine. Then your directional audio pick-ups should be able to tell you where this voice is coming from." "Yes, sir. It is coming from the approximate volume of space now occupied by Mr. Oak's head. But it is definitely not Mr. Oak's voice." Felder put a hand over his eyes and moaned. Videnski, who had carefully lighted a cigarette, blew out a cloud of smoke and looked at me. "I got to admit he's right. That is not Daniel Oak's voice." "Which came first the chicken or the egg?" Vivian said abstractedly. "What's that got to do with it?" Videnski asked with a scowl. "A matter of definition," Vivian said. "Somewhere along the line of chicken evolution, it would have been possible to point at a specific bird and say, 'This is a chicken, but its parents were not chickens.' Now, do you define a chicken egg as an egg laid by a chicken or an egg that hatches out a chicken?" "That's right," Felder said. "Do you define Oak's voice as any voice coming from Oak or as any voice that sounds like Oak's?" "Well, you people ought to be able to answer that," I said. "Which is it?" "Both," said Felder in a dull voice. "When you activated him by giving him his first order, he identified you and the voice as parts of the same unit. If you'd gone hoarse slowly, step-by-step, as it were, McGuire could have made logical adjustments to the change. But this sudden change is too big a jump for his logic to follow; he hasn't got the intermediate steps he needs to put it into syllogistic form." There was another question I wanted to ask of McGuire. "McGuire, you are not supposed to allow Mr. Oak to come to any harm. Yet you did so. Why?" I was wondering how he'd managed to let Brentwood get away with his attack on me, without at least warning me. "Mr. Oak was in no danger, sir. He has come to no harm." "What about Brentwood's attack?" "Mr. Brentwood did not attack Mr. Oak, sir; Mr. Oak attacked Mr. Brentwood." The other three looked at me. "In a way, he's right," I said quickly. "When I saw Brentwood standing there with the hypospray, I jumped him." "That's another one of our problems," said Felder. "How do you define 'harm'? If you broke your arm and a doctor tried to set it without an anesthetic, what would McGuire think when you yelled? Could you and I engage in a friendly boxing match? And since McGuire is supposed to _prevent_ harm, he has to be able to define it in advance. Oh, we've had a lot of fun with that one, I'll tell you." There was a thin edge of bitterness in his voice.