A band of clear, plasticlike stuff ran round the head--it would be the eye, a band of eye that saw all ways. On the top of the head was a single round spot of the plastic, and the rest was black metal, joined, he realized, with fantastic perfection. The angle of sight was now almost perpendicular. He could see very little of the branching arms of the trunk, but what had been on the screen was enough. They were the most perfect robots he had ever seen. The ship leveled off. Steffens had no idea what to do; the sudden sight of the moving things had unnerved him. He had already sounded the alert, flicked out the defense screens. Now he had nothing to do. He tried to concentrate on what the League Law would have him do. The Law was no help. Contact with planet-bound races was forbidden under any circumstances. But could a bunch of robots be called a race? The Law said nothing about robots because Earthmen had none. The building of imaginative robots was expressly forbidden. But at any rate, Steffens thought, he had made contact already. While Steffens stood by the screen, completely bewildered for the first time in his space career, Lieutenant Ball came up, hobbling slightly. From the bright new bruise on his cheek, Steffens guessed that the sudden climb had caught him unaware. The exec was pale with surprise. "What were they?" he said blankly. "Lord, they looked like robots!" "They were." Ball stared confoundedly at the screen. The things were now a confusion of dots in the mist. "Almost humanoid," Steffens said, "but not quite." Ball was slowly absorbing the situation. He turned to gaze inquiringly at Steffens. "Well, what do we do now?" Steffens shrugged. "They saw us. We could leave now and let them quite possibly make a ... a legend out of our visit, or we could go down and see if they tie in with the buildings on Tyban IV." "_Can_ we go down?" "Legally? I don't know. If they are robots, yes, since robots cannot constitute a race. But there's another possibility." He tapped his fingers on the screen confusedly. "They don't have to be robots at all. They could be the natives." Ball gulped. "I don't follow you." "They could be the original inhabitants of this planet--the brains of them, at least, protected in radiation-proof metal. Anyway," he added, "they're the most perfect mechanicals I've ever seen." Ball shook his head, sat down abruptly. Steffens turned from the screen, strode nervously across the Main Deck, thinking. The Mapping Command, they called it. Theoretically, all he was supposed to do was make a closeup examination of unexplored systems, checking for the presence of life-forms as well as for the possibilities of human colonization. Make a check and nothing else. But he knew very clearly that if he returned to Sirius base without investigating this robot situation, he could very well be court-martialed one way or the other, either for breaking the Law of Contact or for dereliction of duty.