# The junction just ahead of Gonzales and the sam was marked by blinking red lights. From around the corner came the sounds of scurrying small things. "What's up?" Gonzales asked. "Follow me," the sam said. "We must not cross the marker, but we can stand and watch." A large group of sams, identical to the one next to Gonzales, filled the hallway beyond. Some tried to work their way through informal mazes of furniture and stacked junk, coils of wire and angle-iron and the like; others worked to assist sams that had gotten tangled in the sections of the maze. Still others shifted pieces of the maze to one side. Amid clicking extensors and banging metal, the sams labored patiently, mostly unsuccessfully. Gonzales was reminded of old twentieth century films satirizing assembly lines, robots, machines in general. "A nursery," the sam said. "This group nears completion of its education. This"it pointed with an extensor toward the struggling robots"is the prerequisite to training. As small children must mature in their development, they must learn the essentials of perception, motion, and coordination. At the same time they memorize the ten thousand axioms of common sense, and then they can develop their linguistic capabilities; at present they have a vocabulary of approximately one thousand words of SimSpeech." "What about thinking?" Gonzales asked. "Where do they learn to do that?" "That comes later, if at all. For sams as well as humans, thinking is one of the least important things the mind does." The two watched for some time, then Gonzales said, "I don't need any company," and walked on. When he looked back, he saw the sam remained motionless, fascinated by the progress of its fellows. Gonzales returned to his small room, where a night-light glowed softly, and returned to bed. He fell asleep quickly, oddly comforted by thinking about the robots busy at their school. 8.
