Short Science Fiction

Red

Red is the restless, imaginative son of an Industrialist, quick to name a stranger 'Slim' and quicker to claim a private world before the adults wake. He craves the circus life and believes the strange animals he has trapped can buy his way in, but his secrecy and his petty theft of chopped meat expose a boy testing how far charm can carry him. His friendship with Slim, sealed in the dewy grass before sunrise, sets the whole story in motion.

Slim

Slim is the Astronomer's son, newly arrived and eager for the quick, unquestioning friendship Red offers. Where Red is all swagger and scheme, Slim is cautious, honest, and quietly desperate to give the right answer; he follows Red to the barn even as something in him recoils from the caged, gesturing creatures. His loyalty — and his inability to lie well — becomes the hinge on which the boys' secret swings.

Walter Sills

Sills works alone in a dirty hole of a laboratory, scraping by on occasional analyses while lesser men take easy industrial posts. His discovery of Ammonaline has brought him halfway to a Nobel Prize, and he guards the straw-colored liquid with the fervor of a man who has nothing else. His hunger for recognition — and his willingness to gamble on one more experiment — drives the story toward its dangerous bargain.

Eugene Taylor

Taylor is Sills's younger, cheerier foil — a man with no money and no worry about it, who teases his friend's bald head and gloomy outlook while genuinely marveling at the ammonium amalgam trick. His easy exuberance and his grab for the Ammonaline flask mark him as both audience and accomplice. He matters because his skepticism and appetite for risk pull Sills's private obsession out into the world.

Humphrey Carl Laszlo

Laszlo is the grandson of a Hungarian defector, thickset and balding, soft-spoken in a way that makes his scowl more alarming. He serves as Lynn's comforting receptacle for complete knowledge of robotics, certain he knows approximately where 'They' are. When Breckenridge presses him on twenty-five years of missing conferences and unvisited laboratories, his professional confidence begins to crack — and with it, the assumption that robots could never pass for human.

Ralph G. Breckenridge

Breckenridge is the interrogator in the room, methodical and unimpressed by credentials, pressing Lynn and Laszlo on the twenty-five-year silence in robotics conferences on both sides. Where Lynn wants reassurance, Breckenridge wants the truth, and he delivers it with a confidence that turns the atmosphere heavy. His refusal to accept the official picture forces the story's central question into the open: how would anyone know?