BRONTE’S EGG
by Richard Chwedyk

There is an old house at the edge of the woods about sixty kilometers out from the extremes of the nearest megalopolis. It was built in another century and resembles the architecture of the century before that one. In some ways it evokes the end of many things: the end of the road, the end of a time, the end of a search (which the house has been, and on occasion it still is). But it is also a good place for beginnings, a good place to begin a story about beginnings—as good as any and better than most. 
And it began at dawn. 
As the first hint of daylight entered the large second floor bedroom where the saurs slept in a great pile, Axel opened his eyes and whispered, “Yeah!” 
There was stuff to do and he was ready. 
He pulled himself out from under Agnes’s spiked tail and Rosie’s bony crest and horns, then over Charlie’s big rear end, almost stepping into Pierrot’s gaping mouth. He pressed, prodded and pushed his way until he could lift up the blanket and make a straight dash to the window. He hopped onto a wooden stool and from there climbed up another step to the box-seated window ledge. His little blue head moved left to right like a rolling turret as he stared out at the wall of trees past the yard, silhouetted against the brightening sky. 
The sun is coming! And the sun is a star! And it’s spinning through space! And we’re spinning through space around the sun! And—there’s stuff to do! 
“Stuff to do!” he whispered, hopped back to the stool and then to the floor. 
Axel looked back at the sleep-pile. It was a great, blanket-covered mound. Except for the breathing, a few grumbled syllables and occasional twitches, none of the other saurs stirred. They were good sleepers for the most part—all but Axel. Axel could run about all day long from one end of the old Victorian house to the other, and when sleep time came and the saurs gathered themselves into a pile, he would shut his eyes—but nothing happened. His mind kept running. Even when he did manage to drift off, his dreams were of running, of traveling in speeding vehicles, like interstellar cruisers. And even if he wasn’t moving, he dreamed of motion, of stars and planets and asteroids, of winds and birds and leaves in autumn. The whole universe was whirling and spinning like an enormous amusement park ride. 
He’d been to an amusement park once, so long ago he couldn’t distinguish it anymore from the rest of life. 
He had no need to creep out of the room. The thump-thump-thump of his big padded feet disturbed no one. His tail in the air didn’t make a sound. He ran past the room of the big human, Tom Groverton. The human ran and ran all day long too, cleaning and feeding and keeping the saurs out of trouble—but he got tired and slept almost as hard as the saurs. 
Axel headed down to the first floor. Descending human stairs should have been difficult for a bipedal creature only forty centimeters tall, but he flew down them with ease. There were so many things to do today! The universe was so big—that is, sooooo big! How could anyone just lie about when the sky was already lighting up the world? 
No way! Axel thumped the floor with his tail. Space and Time and Time and Space! The Universe is one big place! 
He’d learned that from the computer. 
The computer was on a desk in the dining room, or what had been the dining room when the house was just a place for humans, before it became a shelter for the saurs. The desk sat over by the east-facing window. The computer was old in many respects, but the old computers were often more easily upgraded, and as long as they were linked to all the marvelous systems out there in the world past the porch and the yard, there was nothing this old model couldn’t do. 
“Yeah!” 
Axel rolled a set of plastic steps up to the desk and dashed straight up until he stood before the huge gray monitor—huge to Axel, at least. 
“Hey! Reggie!” Axel addressed the computer by name. 
The computer could be voice-activated and voice-actuated. The brain box chirped at Axel’s greeting and the screen came to life. Icons were displayed in the corners and along the top, one of them being the Reggiesystems icon: “Reggie” himself, the light green seahorse-or-baby-sea-serpent thing, with its round black eyes and orange wattle that drooped down his jaw like a handlebar mustache. 
The icon dropped to the center of the screen and grew until it was almost half the height of the screen. The figure of Reggie rotated from profile to head-on and in a smooth, slightly androgynous voice he spoke: 
“Reggie is ready.” 
“Hiya!” Axel waved a forepaw and smiled, mouth opened wide, revealing all his tiny, thorn-like teeth. 
“Good morning, Axel” said Reggie. “What can Reggie do for you today?” Reggie always referred to himself in the third person. 
“A whole bunch of stuff!” Axel stretched his forepaws far apart. “Important stuff! Fate of the universe stuff! Really truly big important stuff!” His head bobbed with each exclamation. 
“Where would you like to begin?” Reggie said with patience. 
Axel looked sharply to one side, then the other. “Don’t know! I forgot. Wait!” He nodded vigorously. “The screensaver! Show me the screensaver!” 
The icon’s head seemed to jiggle slightly, affirmatively, as if acknowledging the request. Reggie disappeared and the screen darkened to black. Axel drew his paws together in anticipation. 
A bright speck appeared in the center of the darkness. It grew until it flickered gently, like a star, then grew some more until it looked as big as the sun. 
It was the sun—as it might look if you were flying through space, directly toward it. It filled the screen until it seemed you were in imminent danger of crashing right into it. 
“Aaaaaaaahh!” Axel screamed with delight. 
The sun moved off to the right corner of the screen, as if you were veering away and passing it by. Darkness again. Another bright speck started to grow in the screen’s center: Mercury, the closest planet to the sun. It was followed by Venus, then the Earth, and Mars, and Jupiter—all the way through the solar system until a pudgy oblong bump rolled past odd-wise and all that was left on the screen were hundreds, thousands of bright specks, changing their positions at differing speeds, as you might see them if you were flying through space. 
“Yeah!” cried Axel. “Yeah!!” 
Through the haze of the Oort Cloud, then out past the solar system, the stars kept coming and coming until you could make out a bright little smudge, like a smeared thumbprint in luminous paint. 
It was a galaxy! Another galaxy! 
“Yeah!” shouted Axel. “Yeah yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah YEAH!” 
The galaxy grew in size until you could just about make out some of the more individuated members of the star cluster. Axel cheered them on. 
“Yes! Galaxies! Let’s go!” 
The screensaver cycle was over and it was back to the beginning: the little speck grows into the sun, then the planets, then the far off galaxy—
Axel watched it all again, and then one more time before Reggie interrupted his reverie. 
“There was something else you wished Reggie to do?” 
“Ohhhh. That’s-right that’s-right that’s-right!” Axel kept his eyes on the moving stars. He remembered someone from the dream he’d had during his brief sleep: he couldn’t remember who, but it was someone he wanted to talk to. “I gotta send a message!” 
“And where do you wish to send the message?” 
Still looking at the screensaver, he said, “To space!” 
Reggie took an instant longer than usual to reply. “Space, as an address, is not very specific. Are there any particular coordinates in space to which you wish your message directed?” 
“What are coordinates?” Axel kept looking at the stars. 
The screensaver blinked away. In its place appeared numbers from top to bottom: numbers with decimal points and superscripted degree signs—
“Coordinates,” Reggie said, “are a way to divide space by increments, so that one can more accurately determine which part of space one is looking at or to which section one might want to direct a message.” 
“Ohhhhh.” 
Reggie scrolled the numbers upward. Axel gaped at them, partly perplexed at the notion of numbers as directions, partly in awe at the sheer volume of them. Numbers, decimal points, degree signs—space was threatening to become an impenetrable wall of numbers. If he thought about it any more his head would heat up and explode. 
“That one!” Axel pointed with his left forepaw. “I’ll take that one!” 
The numbers stopped scrolling. “Which one?” asked Reggie. 
“That one!” He pressed the forepaw to the glass screen, then tapped against it adamantly. 
The numbers were so small—and his forepaw so big in comparison—that Reggie could still not discern which coordinate Axel had chosen. Reggie highlighted one of the numbers in bright red. 
“This one?” 
“Yeah! That’s it!” In truth it wasn’t. But the red highlighting was distracting to Axel, whose choice of number was already purely arbitrary. Facing a wall of numbers, one seemed as good as another. “Send it there!” 
“What kind of message?” Reggie asked. “Vocal? Alphabetical characters? Equations?” 
“Like, maybe radio,” Axel said. “Or whatever you’ve got that’s faster, like micro-tachy-tot waves, or super-hydro-electro-neutrinos.” 
“One moment,” said Reggie. “At what frequency?” 
“Frequency? Just once is okay.” He rubbed a little spot just under his jaw. 
A machine, even one as sophisticated as this Reggiesystems model, is not given to sighing, though one might imagine this model had many occasions to do so. What Reggie did was increase his pauses and slow down his speech delivery. 
“What is meant by ‘frequency,’ Axel—“ Reggie explained it all carefully. Axel faced another wall of numbers and made another choice—exactly the same way he’d made the first. 
The numbers disappeared and the screensaver images returned. Axel watched it as avidly as if he’d never seen them before. 
“Reggie has reserved time on the radio telescope at Mount Herrmann. The message can be sent at 13:47 our time this afternoon, when their first shift team breaks for lunch.” 
“Wow!” Axel’s head reared back. “Thank you, Reggie. Thank-you-thank-you-thank-you!” 
“Reggie still needs one more piece of information.” 
“What’s that?” 
Very slowly, Reggie said, “The message, please.” 
“Oh, right!” Axel tried to remember the message he’d worked out during the night, as he’d peeked out from under the blankets and stared out through the window—at the rectangle of indigo speckled with pinpoints of light—and imagined all the “space guys” out there. Space and Time and Time and Space—They might look like Axel: blue theropods with coal-black eyes, tiny forepaws and clumpy feet—but without the long scar down his back; or they might look like one of the other saurs—miniature tyrannosaurs or ceratopsians or long-necked sauropods or crested hadrosaurs. Or they might look like human guys, or birds, or jellyfish, or clouds—
“What is the message?” Reggie asked. 
“Okay-okay-okay. The message—“ Axel held out the last syllable as long as he could to buy a little more time. “—is—it’s—‘Hiya!’” 
“That is the message?” 
“Yeah.” 
“The complete message?” Reggie didn’t often emphasize his adjectives that way. 
“I don’t know. Is that enough? What else should I say?” 
Reggie paused long enough to formulate an appropriate answer. “You may say as much or as little as you like, but it is customary to tell the recipient of a message who you are.” 
“Why?” 
It may just have been a function of the old hard drive (technology had long since moved past the use of them), but Axel heard a strange, almost nervous, clicking coming from inside the brain box. 
“Because the recipient might possibly—for some reason completely unknown to Reggie—want to send a message back to you, in reply.” 
“Heyyy—“ Axel imagined the screensaver running backward—you could do that if you looked at it hard enough—back through space the other way. “Space guys! Yeah!” 
“You may also want to tell them a little about yourself,” Reggie suggested. “Where you live. What you do. Where you come from—just to be friendly.” 
“Ohhh! Yes! Got it! Yes! I can say—‘Hiya! I’m Axel, and I live in this big house and I’m here with all my friends. We’re saurs, you know, all of us except for the human who brings us food and cleans up stuff. His name is Tom. But we’re saurs! 
“’Saurs are like dinosaurs. They were these really big guys who lived a long time ago and went extinct. We’re supposed to look like them except we’re smaller and we don’t have the scary parts. 
“’We came from a factory that was like a laboratory too, and we were made out of living stuff—you know, biology. 
“’They made millions of us and sold us to humans as toys. All these human guys who made us made big, big money and drove around in giant bankmobiles and wore top hats and had houses a thousand times bigger than this place. But then they had to stop selling us. 
“’Turned out we were smarter than we were supposed to be, and lived longer. This lady from the Atherton Foundation said we weren’t toys at all but real-real-real things that were alive and they shouldn’t be selling us. 
“’But we kept getting cut up and run over, or the kids who owned us stepped on us or threw us out of windows. Or the parents who bought us drove us to the woods and left us there—or they stopped feeding us and stuff like that. So after a while there weren’t many of us left. 
“’People started to believe the Atherton lady. They set up a bunch of houses for us and that’s how we got to live here. 
“’We do all sorts of stuff the guys who made us didn’t think we could do, like think and feel and live longer than three years. My buddy Preston writes books. My other buddy Diogenes reads all the stuff in the library. And the Five Wise Buddhasaurs, who don’t say anything but they play this stuff that sounds like music sometimes. And Agnes is this stegosaur with plates on her back and spikes on her tail and she knows all about humans and what’s wrong with them. She’s twenty-five years old, so she must know everything. Doc is smart too, but he’s nice! 
“’The guys who made us said we couldn’t make eggs because we don’t have the right parts and stuff, but we can do that too! Not me, but like Bronte and Kara—female guys. The humans aren’t supposed to know, except for Tom and Dr. Margaret—she’s the lady who comes every week to make sure we’re not sick or dead. I’m not supposed to know either because they think I can’t keep a secret, so don’t tell the other space guys about this, okay? 
“’And when I finish this message, I’m gonna build Rotomotoman. He’s this cool robot I dreamed about last night. Reggie’s gonna help me, because Reggie’s the very-best-smartest whole computer in the world. Then I’m gonna get on a starship and travel all through time and space and save the universe and crash into supernovas and get sucked into wormholes.’” 
Axel took a long, necessary breath, then said to Reggie, “Is that okay?” 
“Under the circumstances,” Reggie said, “Your message is—exceptional.” 
“Wow!” 
“It is, however, customary to ask after the well-being of the recipient of the message, and to close the message—“ 
“Oh, oh, I know! I know! So I’ll say, ‘Hope you’re okay. Your friend, Axel.’ Like that, right?” 
“The message will be sent as you dictated it,” Reggie replied, “with a few grammatical corrections.” 
“All right!” Axel leapt up. “A message to space! Thank you, Reggie! Oh, thank-you-thank-you-thank-you-thank-you!” 
“You are very welcome, Axel,” said Reggie. Then, with what one might interpret as a trepidatious pause—and with careful attention to pronunciation—he asked, “Now, please explain to Reggie, what is a Ro-to-mo-to-man?”
Tom Groverton stood at the door of the room where the saurs slept. Eyes half open, hair still mussed, a middle button of his shirt undone, he said the word “breakfast” clearly but not too loudly and stepped back as the little ones ran past him. 
The bigger saurs rose slowly: grunting, grumbling and stretching. The triceratops named Charlie always had a little trouble righting himself. He braced up against his mate, Rosie, until his hind legs were reasonably straight. The two gray stegosaurs, Agnes and Sluggo, went through a ritual that resembled push-ups—hind legs first, then forelegs up slowly with a sliding sort of motion. 
Hubert and Diogenes, the two biggest theropods—each over a meter and a half tall—helped the other big guys, like Sam and Dr. David Norman. Tails really do help. 
Diogenes leant a forepaw to Doc, the light brown tyrannosaur with a “tricky” left leg. 
“Thank you, my friend,” Doc said, his eyes barely visible under his thick lids. “Each day it seems to get a little harder.” 
“It does for everyone,” said Tom Groverton from the doorway. 
Doc nodded. “But not quite the same way for everyone. You were a little one once, who grew into an adult. We saurs were engineered. We were ‘born’ with our eyes open. What growth we experienced is beyond memory. The little ones stay little and the big ones were always big.” 
“Either way, we grow old,” Tom insisted. 
“Until we grow cold.” Doc smiled serenely. “Or perhaps you can say we wear out instead.” 
“So do we.” 
As Hubert and Diogenes folded up the blankets and covers, Tom walked over to the wheeled, bassinet-sized hospital bed in the center of the room. Upon it was a figure who was recognizably a saurian and recognizably a theropod, but whose limbs—all of them—were missing and whose tail was a crushed-looking stump. Several long-healed scars criss-crossed his abdomen and where his eyes should have been were empty sockets. 
“Good morning, Hetman,” Tom said to the figure on the bed. “How are you feeling?” 
“Not so bad.” Hetman’s voice was faint and raspy, always a little more so in the morning. “I had an odd dream. Odd, but pleasant.” 
“What was it?” Doc asked, resting his forepaws on the bed railing. 
“Very odd. Very odd indeed.” Hetman turned his head toward the voices. “Can you imagine me riding on a horse’s back?” 
“I can, old friend.” Doc closed his eyes. “Like Zagloba, the Cossack—rebellious, reckless, full of life—riding with incomparable skill.” He opened his eyes again and smiled. “It must have been a splendid dream.” 
Hubert and Diogenes stood at the bed railing, ready to move Hetman downstairs to breakfast. 
“Like some help?” Tom offered. 
“They can manage.” Doc spoke for them. Hubert and Diogenes were quite literate and articulate but spoke only when necessity dictated. “Thank you all the same, but you better get downstairs before Jean-Claude and Pierrot get impatient. You remember yesterday.” 
The day before, Jean-Claude and Pierrot chanted “Meat! Meat! Breakfast Meat!” until even the little ones who ate nothing but soy pellets and oatmeal shouted along. 
Tom nodded. He looked at the other saurs who had still not gone down to breakfast: Agnes, Sluggo, Kara, Preston and Bronte. All of them were looking up at Tom except for Bronte. The bright green apatosaur was gazing in the direction of Hetman’s bed. 
Tom gave them an asymmetrical grin before leaving the room. “Well don’t wait too long.” 
When he was gone, Hetman whispered, “Check the egg! I twisted in my sleep last night. I’m afraid I may have hurt it!” 
Hubert turned Hetman gently on his side and lifted his pillow as Doc watched. Under the pillow was a pale yellow egg, no more than a few centimeters long. 
“It’s fine,” said Doc. 
“Don’t let Doc pick it up,” said Agnes. “The clumsy oaf.” 
“My dear Agnes, I had no intention.” 
Sluggo had already run over to retrieve a tiny cardboard box stuffed with cotton, hidden behind the chest near the window, where the blankets and covers were kept. He pushed it back along the floor with his snout. Diogenes picked up the egg and carefully placed it in the little box. 
Agnes nudged past Sluggo and examined it, almost sniffing it, in search of the slightest possible fracture. “I guess it looks okay.” 
Kara butted Agnes with her head. She was an apatosaur, but her head was big—and hard. “Let Bronte see. It’s her egg, after all.” 
“Oh. Right.” Agnes stepped back and let Bronte timidly press in. 
As Bronte stared, a set of three tiny furrows took their place on her forehead. She worried, she pitied, she pondered, all at once as she took in the egg’s contours and slightly rough surface. She held her breath and stared. 
They all did, gathered around the cardboard box, except for Hetman, who listened as carefully as the others watched. 
“The shell looks so frail,” whispered Sluggo. 
“Are you an idiot?” said Agnes. “Have you touched it? It’s like granite. She won’t have the strength to break through that shell.” 
“Or he,” Doc suggested. 
“What do you know?” Agnes grumbled. 
“What do any of us know?” 
Agnes grumbled again, but left it at that. 
None of them knew if the time was soon for the first hairline cracks to form on the shell—for the little creature who might be within to break through the calcium walls of her prison and her protection—or his. Now. Later. Or ever. 
Agnes’s egg had had a yolk and a fetal sac, but no infant. So had Kara’s. Bronte’s first egg had contained a tiny, almost shapeless thing that never moved and never showed any signs that it could have moved, like some little plastic charm in the center of a bar of soap. The saurs had sealed that one carefully in a little plastic box and buried it in the garden. 
In the past few months they had combed every database they could find with any bit of information about egg-laying creatures. They knew about ostriches and cobras, platypuses and echidnas. They even read about dinosaurs—the “real” ones, the ones who had lived millions of years before. It helped them guess at what might—or what should—happen, if anyone could have guessed that this could happen at all, which no one had. 
Bronte had even practiced with bird eggs Sluggo found out in the yard, eggs that had fallen out of nests in the trees. They hatched successfully, but who knew if the egg of a saur was anything like the egg of a sparrow? 
“It needs heat,” said Bronte, who spoke rarely, and then only in a whisper. 
“Sit on it,” said Agnes. “Gently.” 
“It’s too frail,” said Sluggo. 
“Put it by the window, in the sun,” said Kara. 
“Too much,” Agnes replied. “You might boil it. Then, what if it clouds up in the afternoon?” 
“We might ask Tom,” Sluggo suggested meekly. “Or Dr. Margaret.” 
“No!” Agnes thumped her tail on the floor. “It’s not their business! It’s our business! Besides, they won’t know any better than we do. And besides that besides, if it gets out that we’re producing eggs the humans out there will go into a panic. They’ll stick us in labs again and examine us and try to work out what went wrong. Or they’ll just round us up and exterminate the whole lot of us.” 
“They—they wouldn’t do that,” said Sluggo. The words didn’t come out with quite the certainty he intended. 
Agnes sailed on the energy of her own bleak visions. “They might even decide they like the eggs and make us sit in pens and lay them like chickens! They’ll boil, scramble and fry them!” 
“No!” Bronte and Sluggo gasped almost in unison. 
Kara simply butted Agnes again. “Shut up!” 
“Mark my words!” Agnes gave each syllable blunt, apocalyptic emphasis. “You can’t trust humans! They say one thing then do the other. They want the whole damn place for themselves. They want everything. Everything! They’re greedy and sneaky and creepy and they kill things for pleasure! They screw up everything then go around and look for more things to screw up!” 
“That’s true,” said Preston, who for all the thousands of words he’d written, bent over a keyboard, tapping away with his four digits, rarely spoke more than a dozen words in a month. “After all, they made us.” 
“What kind of a joke is that?” Agnes’s spiked tail swept the air in a short arc. 
“Tom isn’t like that,” said Sluggo. “Dr. Margaret isn’t like that.” 
“They aren’t now.” Agnes lowered her tail. “But they can turn on you just like that! It’s all that meat. It poisons their brains and they go crazy. That’s why you always have to keep your eyes on them.” 
“Dr. Margaret doesn’t eat meat,” Sluggo reminded her. “She’s an herbivore.” 
“A vegetarian, you mean,” said Doc. 
“Oh, shut up! Who asked you anyway?” Agnes sneered at Doc. 
“Who asked you?” said Kara. “We were talking about the egg.” 
“What we need,” said Doc, resting a forepaw on Bronte’s back, “is patience. We must be careful and observant. This egg may not hatch, my dear. But if it doesn’t we will learn more and know better next time.” 
“Someday,” Kara whispered, “one will hatch.” 
“I hope so.” Doc patted her consolingly. “But as much as I hate to say this, it may also be possible that—in our genetic idiosyncrasies—we may be only capable of performing half the job.” 
“Oh, who died and made you king?” Agnes turned away in disgust—or perhaps to hide her pained expression momentarily. 
Doc smiled and gently said, “Sweet Agnes, pay no attention to me, then. I am just a lame old fool who knows nothing except that he loves all his good friends here assembled.” 
“You old windbag!” Agnes backed away. “As if I trusted carnosaurs any better than humans! You’re all filled with baloney!” 
“Nevertheless,” said Hetman, his weak voice belying his proximity, “I have a feeling this one will hatch. Just a feeling, but they’re about all I have left.” 
“Hetman,” Agnes said after an embarrassed pause, “I didn’t mean you when I said that about carnosaurs. I—I get carried away sometimes.” 
“Do you?” Kara snorted. 
“If you didn’t get carried away,” said Hetman, “I’d fear I’d been spirited off to another house in the night. Don’t apologize for being Agnes, Agnes.” 
She responded with a rumble—this time from her stomach. A moment later, Doc’s stomach made a stuttered purr, like the starting up of an old internal combustion engine. 
“Breakfast,” said Kara. 
Hubert and Diogenes nodded and pushed Hetman’s bed toward the door, where they nearly collided with the blue blur of a breathless theropod. 
“Preston! Hey! Preston!” 
Axel slowed himself just long enough to shout a hurried “Hiya!” to Hetman, Hubert and Diogenes, then he charged on, coming to a halt as he slid broadside into Agnes. 
“Uff! Will you watch it!” Agnes barked. “Isn’t it enough—“ 
“Sorry-sorry, Agnes. Preston! Preston! Can I have—“ 
His attention was drawn to the cardboard box, and its contents. 
“Heyyy!” Axel took a careful look inside. “There it is!” 
Doc nodded. “There it is.” 
He looked around at the others and pointed to the box. “That’s the egg!” he said, as if they might not know yet. 
“Indeed,” said Doc. 
“Know what that means?” Axel continued. 
“No,” Agnes sighed impatiently. “What does that mean?” 
“Someone’s been having SEX!” 
“Oh, shut up!” Agnes shouted. “You don’t know a thing about it!” 
“Yes-yes-yes-yes! I learned all about it from the Reggie! I saw ‘Animal Mating Practices and Habits,’ ‘Barnyard Babies,’ ‘From Sperm to Germ’—or something like that, and—and I saw ‘Angelique Blows Her Birthday Candles.’” 
“Shut up! Shut up!” Agnes’s back plates clicked with the tremor of her tail smacking the floor. “Are you completely—“ 
“Axel,” said Doc, “not that I want to distract you, but you came up here to ask Preston something, didn’t you?” 
“Yes! Right! Yes!” Axel stepped over to Preston. “Can I have five thousand dollars?” 
Agnes gasped. “What!” 
“Five thousand dollars. That’s all. And, and then they’ll build him! They really will! They already made up the diagrams and ski-mats and stuff! Reggie showed them what I wanted!” 
“And what’s that?” asked Agnes. “A working brain?” 
“I’ll show you! Come on!” He took a few inaugural steps toward the door. “Come on!” 
“’Him,’” Doc said with his best deliberation, in an effort to get Axel to slow down and explain. “You said ‘him.’ And ‘they.’ You said ‘they’ too. Who is ‘him’? And who are ‘they’?” 
“Rotomotoman, Doc! It’s Rotomotoman! Rotomotoman!” Axel beckoned with his forepaw. “Come on!” 
Doc wasn’t sure if this was supposed to be an answer to one question, or two, or to no questions at all. The more he tried to decipher what Axel said the more his stomach rumbled. 
Agnes shut her eyes and raised her back as far as it would go. “Why? Why us?” 
“I—I think we better go along with him,” Doc said, “if we’re ever going to find out what this ‘Roto-man’ thing is.” 
“Roto-moto-man!” Axel corrected him, then said it again more quickly, as if the mere saying of the name was a kind of sheer delight. 
“He’s flipped,” Agnes said. “What hold he’s had on sanity—“ 
“It hurts nothing to see what’s got the little fellow so excited.” Doc took a step toward the door. 
“Little fellow,” Agnes spat the words out and turned to Bronte. “Little fellow!” 
“Come-on-come-on-come-on!” Axel shouted from the doorway. 
Preston picked up the box with the egg and, hearing no objections from the others, followed Axel. Bronte kept to Preston’s side, as close to the egg as possible, with Kara on the other side. Doc limped along with Sluggo while Agnes, furiously reluctant, brought up the rear. 
By the time the entourage reached the stairs Axel was already at the bottom. Looking up and waving. 
“Hurry up!” he shouted, as if they were missing the last total solar eclipse for the next fifty years. 
“Patience,” said Doc, as he and the others boarded the lift. “Patience. We’re coming.” 
The lift was an adaptation from the “human days” of the house and was originally built to carry a wheelchair up and down the stairs. Now it was a simple flatbed platform that transported the saurs who were too small, too lame or too tired to climb up or down between the two floors. Speed was never part of its design or of its renovation. To Axel, it was agony watching the others come down on the lift, like being forced to watch the tide go out. 
When the lift came to a halt, Doc and the others had barely gotten off before Axel raced on to the dining room and up the plastic stairs to the computer. 
“Come-on-come-on-come-on!” 
“We can see the screen from here,” Doc said, as the group settled a meter or so back from the desk. “Show us whatever it is you want us to see.” 
“Reggie,” Axel said to the screen, “display Rotomotoman.” 
The monitor screen displayed a gray background and light blue grid lines. A snatch of music played, something with a bouncy tempo and a lot of horns. A metallic gray figure appeared on the screen—a cylinder topped with a hemisphere. Just above the line where the cylinder met the hemisphere were two white circles with two smaller black circles inside them, like cartoon eyes. The cylinder rested on four small circles that one could suppose were wheels or casters, and attached at its sides were two articulated rods that one could imagine were arms. At the end of each rod was a flat, rectangular plate, out of which sprung five digits, one set off thumb-like from the others. The retinas of the presumed eyes shifted slightly from left to right, as if the figure were surveying the scene around itself. 
“Go!” cried Axel. 
The figure rolled off to the left of the screen, followed by horizontal “speed” lines and a cartoon dust cloud left behind. It reappeared, this time rolling in from the left and disappearing to the right side of the screen. It rolled from left to right, right to left, left to right again, as Axel chanted: 
“Ro-toh Moto-Man! Ro-toh Moto Man! 
Ro-toh Moto-Man! Ro-toh Moto Man!” 
Before the saurs became completely dizzy watching this relentless back and forth motion, the grid lines were replaced on the screen by a simple cartoon street scene, with houses, sidewalks, trees, bushes, lawns and fences. Rotomotoman remained still now while the speed lines and changing background lent him the illusion of motion. 
A chorus of voices joined the musical accompaniment. 
The melody was simple enough, like a theme from an old television program from the middle of the last century, cannily synthesized by Reggie: 
”He’s our man! Ro-to-moto Man—“ 
Axel sang along, staring at the screen, completely enthralled. 
”He’s our man! He’s not from Japan—“ 
Doc looked at Preston. Kara looked at Bronte. Sluggo looked at Agnes. 
“Japan?” he asked. 
Agnes shook her head. She stood in front of the box with Bronte’s egg where Preston had placed it on the floor, as if to shield the egg from the sight. 
The “theme song” continued: 
”Whaa-at a man! 
It’s none other than that Ro-to Moto Man!” 
“But,” Bronte whispered to Doc, “it’s not a man at all.” 
“It’s not even—“ but Doc couldn’t go on. 
The verse repeated, while Rotomotoman, up on the screen, crashed through a brick wall. He raced down a busy street while a flashing red light rose out of the top of his hemisphere-head. He extended himself on thin metal legs. His cylindrical body also extended, something like a telescope, until Rotomotoman could see through second- and third-floor windows. By the end of the second verse, little flashes of flame were shooting from one of the digits of his right “hand,” as if it had turned into a machine gun. 
By end of the song, Rotomotoman was holding at bay a group of “bad guys” who wore traditional snap-brim caps and black masks over their eyes. Their arms were raised in surrender. Round, bulging bags with dollar signs printed on them lay on the floor where the bad guys had dropped them. A policeman with the appropriate badge, gun and club saluted Rotomotoman before taking custody of the villains. Rotomotoman modestly returned the salute. A man in a dark suit, a monocle and top hat—presumably a bank president—shook Rotomotoman’s metal hand—the same one from which bullets had been firing earlier. 
The screen faded. 
The saurs stood there, gaping in silence, wide-eyed, stunned and dumbfounded. 
“See?” Axel trotted down the plastic steps. “Wasn’t that great? Wasn’t that the neatest-greatest thing you’ve ever seen?” 
Doc, struggling for a politic response, was the first to speak. “Axel,” he asked sympathetically, “have you been getting enough sleep?” 
“Axel,” Agnes said quietly but firmly, “are you nuts?” 
“I saw it in a dream!” Axel insisted. “If I dreamed it, I was sleeping!” 
“I wish I were dreaming,” said Kara. 
“But these guys can make a real one!” Axel continued. “A real-real-real Rotomotoman! I asked Reggie and he found a company that makes—what did he call them? Prototypes!” 
Bronte, in her whispering voice, said “Roto-prototypes.” 
“Proto-motoman,” Preston mumbled. 
“We should disconnect Reggie,” Agnes said. “Right away.” 
“So—they can build him!” Axel turned to Preston. “And they can send him here! And—and it costs five thousand dollars. So can I have it, Preston, please? Please-please-please?” 
Agnes made a sound that started like a cough and ended like a gag. “Five thousand dollars for a trashcan on wheels! A trashcan on wheels that crashes through walls! A trashcan that’ll run around and crush us until we’re flat as pancakes! A trashcan with a revolving red light flashing on his head and bullets shooting out of his fingers!” 
“Yeah!” said Axel. “Isn’t he neat?” 
“Axel—“ Doc started, but Agnes cut him off. 
“Axel, look around. Do you see any walls around here that need to be smashed through? Do you see any saurs that need to be flattened out? Do you see anyone that needs to be riddled with bullets?” 
“Won’t do that! Won’t do that!” Axel raised his forepaws. “Reggie said we shouldn’t ask for that. No bullets, no smashing. He’s gonna have sense—like, a sensing system so he won’t squash anybody!” 
“In other words,” Agnes said, “a trashcan that rolls back and forth, endlessly and uselessly. For five thousand dollars!” 
“Not a garbage can!” Axel admonished her. “Rotomotoman! He’ll be mine! I made him up! Reggie helped but I made him up!” His voice took on a pleading tone. “He won’t smash anything! He’ll be our friend!” 
“He won’t shoot anything?” Sluggo asked. 
Axel shook his head. “Rotomotoman is good.” 
“It’s good you made Rotomotoman,” Bronte said. “That was very clever of you. But—“ 
“You did a very nice job,” Kara added. “Very well done. But—“ 
“You are a deranged idiot and probably insane,” said Agnes. 
“Thank-you-thank-you-thank you.” Axel bowed to each of them. 
“But perhaps,” Doc ventured, “it would be better for everyone—“ Axel turned to him. 
Doc pointed to the computer. “—if your Rotomotoman limited his activities just to that screen.” His stomach rumbled—another call to breakfast. “You can still play with him as you wish. Rotomotoman can smash through whatever he likes as long as he remains on the screen.” His stomach now made an “urrrr” sound, distinct from the other noise. 
Axel looked carefully at Doc. 
He continued. “You can assuage the rancor of sweet Agnes here and relieve the apprehensions of the rest of us.” 
Axel kept staring, saying nothing. 
“Axel? Are you listening?” 
“Yes.” Axel nodded. “Do it again.” 
Doc cleared his throat. “Do what again?” 
“Make your stomach go ‘urrrrrr’ like that.” 
Doc took a deep breath. “I meant, did you listen to what I said?” 
“Sure. What was it?” 
Agnes thumped her tail against the floor. “He said that there’s no way in hell that we’re ever going to agree to have that metal trashcan in this house!” 
Axel’s jaw dropped and his eyes grew wide. One could almost feel the theropod’s heart sinking. “But, but—I made him up! I did!” 
He looked at Kara, Bronte and Sluggo—he couldn’t bear to look at Agnes. “It’s not what Rotomotoman does! It’s that he is! Do you see? I’ve got to make Rotomotoman!” 
“I see that Preston would have to have lost his mind to waste five thousand dollars on a useless, dangerous piece of junk!” said Agnes. 
“Axel,” Doc said with great sympathy, “Preston here writes books all about great star captains, mighty armies and flying cities, but he doesn’t have to build prototypes of them or march them through the halls of our little abode.” He patted Axel on the head. “We can’t build everything we imagine.” 
Axel stepped away, head lowered, and turned to Preston. 
“Is that true, Preston? Is that how you feel?” 
It was always difficult to gauge Preston’s feelings. He spoke so little, and what he wrote in his books presented so many points of view it was difficult to figure which ones might be his own. He smiled at his companions, a little more to one side of his mouth than the other. 
“I think what Axel has done is creative and—amusing,” he said in his soft tenor voice. 
“Amusing?” Agnes replied. “I suppose a direct hit from a missile would have you in hysterics!” 
Preston put his hand on Axel’s head and led him to the plastic stairs, up to the computer. The other saurs, with the exception of Agnes, were speechless. 
“Preston!” she cried. “What are you doing?” 
Axel and Preston kept going without reply. 
“Preston, you’re not—you wouldn’t dare! 
At the top of the stairs, standing before the computer, Preston said, “Reggie?” 
“Reggie is ready,” the computer replied. 
“Please connect me to my bank.” 
“Preston!” Agnes wailed. “You’ve gone nuts too? Preston!” 
“What will Tom say?” Sluggo asked Doc. 
“I suppose Tom will have to deal with it. As we all will.” 
Preston leaned over and said right into Axel’s ear, to make sure he heard, “Remember, no machine guns. No death rays. No crashing through walls. No squashing little ones. No speeding.” 
“Yes-yes-yes-yes-YES!” Axel wrapped his forepaws around Preston’s leg. “Whatever you say! Oh, thank-you-thank-you Preston!” 
The transfer of funds to the prototype company went smoothly. It had long ago ceased to be strange for non-humans to hold bank accounts. The idea that banks thought in terms of anything but accounts and their activities belongs to the generation of our fore-parents. Preston’s financial holdings were hardly remarkable except for their size, as were the accounts held by some other saurs—like Alphonse, who often won money on radio quiz programs—and Doc, who had a trust fund from a former “owner.” 
Axel’s excitement set the plastic stairs wobbling as the two came down from the desk. 
“Oh, thank you, Preston! Thank-you-thank-you-thank-you-thank-you! You are the best-best, most wonderful perfect greatest friend in the whole complete universe! Thank you thank you you YOU!” 
“Is anyone in here planning to have breakfast?” Tom Groverton stood behind them, arms folded and head tilted. “Now that everyone else has finished?” 
“Breakfast-breakfast-breakfast!” Axel dashed out past Tom. “Come on, Preston! My best-best friend! Let’s have breakfast!” 
“Sorry for the delay,” Doc said to Tom, “but we had a little business to take care of.” 
“Business?” 
“I’ll explain later,” Doc said. “I think it will take a little time.” 
“Don’t ask me,” Agnes shook her head wearily, “I don’t think I ever want to eat breakfast again.” 
Bronte carefully covered up the egg with a swath of cotton before Preston picked up the box and headed for the kitchen. 
“What’s that? Another egg?” Tom asked. 
Agnes raised her tail and stared severely at Bronte. 
“Y-yes,” Bronte said nervously, looking from Kara to Agnes. “Sluggo found it the other day. A crow’s egg, I think. It-it’s rather big.” 
“Well,” Tom said, bending down and rubbing Bronte just above the little furrows on her brow, “best of luck. You’re a first-rate egg-hatcher. You’ll do a fine job.” 
“Thank you.” the words came out as a rasp, as if her mouth was very dry. 
She followed Preston out of the room, just behind Kara and Sluggo, slowly heading for the kitchen. Doc walked with his head down, attempting the difficult gesture of rubbing his head with one of his short forepaws. His stomach rumbled again. 
“After breakfast.” He sighed. “After breakfast.” 
Agnes narrowed her eyes and stared up at Tom. 
“You just mind your own damn business!” she said, and followed the others out of the room. 

At dawn the next day, when Axel crawled out from the sleep pile and ran downstairs, he heard muffled sounds coming from the living room and noticed that the big video screen was still on. 
Hubert had turned off the video just before sleep-time—Axel distinctly remembered. Maybe the video had gone on by itself—or was there another saur who decided to get up even earlier than Axel? He hurried over to investigate. 
In the middle of living room, about the same place where the saurs sat when they watched the video, was a lone frog—a frog!—about the size of a softball; pale green with a pattern of gray, blotty spots all over. 
Next to the frog was the remote control pad the saurs used to change programs. He, or perhaps she, sat very still, head turned to the screen. But the frog must have heard Axel approaching. Before he could get any closer the amphibian slapped the remote pad with his left forepaw. The video clicked off and the frog hopped over to the couch by the window, then up onto the cushions. 
“Hey! Where ya goin’? Hey!” 
Axel ran after the frog, but not fast enough. In seconds the frog was up on the back of the couch, onto the window ledge and—flooop!—out the window and out of sight. 
Axel climbed up after him—or her. He looked out into the yard, still dark in the early morning shadows, then back at the video screen. 
“Wow!” He whispered. “A frog who can watch TV!” 

After breakfast—and after most of the saurs had made their morning visit to the litter room—Doc found a spot of sunlight near the big window in the dining room and pushed the plastic box he used as a stool there. It was a good place to sit and feel a little warmth, and it still afforded him a view of the video screen, where he could see a fat man and a thin man, both in ill-fitting bowler hats, trying to move a piano up a ridiculously long flight of stairs. The piano movers monopolized his attention until the hats started to remind him of the head of Rotomotoman and he looked elsewhere for contemplation. 
Little saurs were grouped in front of the Reggiesystem computer. Doc could hear them learning what the principal exports of Ghana were. On the other side of the room, the Five Wise Buddhasaurs were sitting on the couch, running their plastic horns through a synthesizer, playing something fast and wildly rhythmical that they referred to as “Chinese” or “Dizz” music. To his left, Kara was sitting with Hetman, reading to him from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. She had the book propped up against the back of a straight wooden chair and she carefully turned the pages with her snout. 
Other little ones were using the small, battery-powered wheeled platforms called skates to get from one end of the house to the other. On the far end of the living room, the stegosaur pair, Zack and Kip, were playing with Jean-Claude and Pierrot, the theropod tyrannosaurs, a game using checker pieces whipped across the floor with their tails, like hockey pucks. The game was called “Hit ‘Em Hard” until a red stegosaur named Veronica got hit a little too hard by a stray checker. Then Agnes declared the game should be changed to “Not So Hard.” 
In the library, Diogenes and Hubert busied themselves shelving and re-shelving books for the saurs who perused them, whether they could read them or not—fascinated by pictures, colophons, shapes and even the smell of the paper and binding. 
Over the noise of the “Dizz” music and the tinny accompaniment of the hapless piano movers on the video, Doc could hear Agnes shouting to someone on a skate, “Hey! Slow that down! What d’you think you’re doing? Racing?” 
The world was in order—for the moment. Doc closed his eyes and basked in the warmth. What there was to worry over, he thought, could wait. 
“Hey Doc!” 
Doc opened his eyes. Axel stood before him. 
“Guess what I saw this morning?” 
Doc trembled. “Not another robot, was it?” 
“Nooo!” Axel waved the notion away with his forepaw. “It was a frog! In here! He was watching the video! 
“Yes, Axel.” Doc tried to smile. “And what he was watching?” 
“I didn’t see, but I heard news-guy-type voices, like when they talk about stocking markets and underwater volcanoes.” He looked up at Doc, who was glancing back at the video screen: the fat man was wailing and the piano was rolling down the stairs. 
“You don’t believe me, do you?” Axel said. 
“My friend, I remember when you warned us of the giant tidal wave bearing down on us. And I remember you telling us that the Army of Northern Virginia was camped outside on the driveway. There were the Saracen hordes riding their horses through the woods—I remember that too. And who can forget the battle-cruisers from Alpha Centauri firing their photon rays at the power lines?” 
“But that was playing,” Axel insisted. “This was a real-real frog-guy!” 
“Axel,” Doc patted him on the head, “I believe that you saw a frog here this morning. But the rest I’d rather leave as a matter of conjecture.” 
Doc closed his eyes and went back to his basking, but the spot of sunlight had shifted by then. He pushed his stool over a bit to recapture it. 
Axel, however, wondering over the meaning of “conjecture,” moved on. 
Kara and Hetman were close by. She was reading the passage from the novel where Clarence describes to Harry Morgan the trap laid by King Arthur against Sir Launcelot. 
“Lancelot?” Axel forgot about the frog for an instant and asked Kara, “Where? Where’s Lancelot?” 
“Laun-celot,” Kara said. “The name is Sir Launcelot. He isn’t anywhere. He’s a character in this book.” 
“Ohhh.” Axel remembered Lancelot, but not Launcelot. Lancelot wasn’t a character, he was a saur—a buddy—long-long-long ago. Axel tried to remember more, but the harder he tried the more he forgot. 
“Hey!” he said to Kara, as Lancelot faded back from his memory, “Guess what I saw this morning?” 
And he told them all about the frog who watched the video. 
He told Bronte, sitting with her egg. He told Tyrone and Alfie and the other saurs gathered around the Reggiesystem computer. He told Hubert, Diogenes, Charlie, Rosie and the Five Wise Buddhasaurs, but none of them believed him. 
He even told Tom Groverton, once he finished cleaning up in the kitchen. Tom sat down on the floor and explained to Axel why he couldn’t have really seen a frog in the living room. 
“You know that the house and the grounds are covered by a security system.” Tom ran his hand over the blue saur’s back. “It’s heat and motion sensitive. If anything enters the security zone that’s not one of us, it sets off an alarm.” 
“Like when the cat got in and tried to eat Symphony Syd.” Axel said. “Or that raccoon that scratched Agnes.” 
“Exactly. A long time ago. And since then the system’s been improved. So how can a frog enter the grounds without setting off the alarm?” 
Axel glanced back at the window where he had seen the frog make his escape. “He must be a really smart frog.” 
Tom showed Axel the security system log on the Reggiesystem, indicating that nothing had even touched the security perimeter the night before, at least nothing bigger than a moth. 
“Maybe Reggie knows that he just came here to watch the video and that he wasn’t here to hurt anyone.” 
“I don’t think Reggie works that way, Axel.” 
“Why not?” 
Tom opened his mouth as if to speak, then erased the action with a shake of his head and tugged on one end of his droopy mustache. 
“Okay. Let’s say Reggie did that. Since there seems to be some question about the objective reality of this creature, Reggie figured it was okay for the frog to come in and watch the video.” 
“So you think the TV frog’s not an objectionable reality.” 
That look came over Tom’s face again and again he went for that end of his mustache. “Okay. Let’s leave it at that. The frog is not an objectionable reality.” 
“Then you don’t mind TV Frog coming in and watching the video?” 
“TV Frog?” 
“That’s what I’m gonna call him.” 
“Well,” Tom patted Axel on the head, “as long as he’s not stealing anything, or hurting anyone, and as long as he shuts off the video before he goes, like you said he did, I don’t mind.” 
A few saurs—some of the little guys, Sluggo, Hetman—believed him, or at least said they did. 
And Geraldine came out of the cardboard box she called her “lab” and told Axel that she believed him too. 
“He’s not a real frog,” she said in her soft, tinny voice. “He’s from a planet on the other side of the galaxy. He’s made a little tunnel through space-time to get here.” 
Axel took this in without question and concluded: “Wow!” 
“Don’t pay attention to her,” Agnes cautioned him. “She’s making fun of you. She makes fun of everyone. She thinks we’re all stupid.” 
“You all are stupid.” Geraldine said, then returned to her lab. Axel watched the box until the flickering lights coming from inside worried him. Tom put those fire extinguishers nearby for a reason. 
“Maybe you need to sleep some more, Axel.” Preston counseled him. “Maybe you’re dreaming in the daytime because you don’t sleep enough.” 
But that night, Axel stayed behind when the other saurs went upstairs to sleep. He hid behind the couch and waited until the frog hopped through the window onto the back of the couch, then to the seat of the couch, then to the floor. He hopped to the center of the room and slapped the remote pad with his left forepaw. 
The screen flickered on, and the frog watched—all night long, occasionally slapping the remote pad to change the program. 
He watched old films and talk shows. He looked at nature programs and documentaries about automobiles and the wars of the previous century. He watched a chorus of dancing girls sing the praises of bottled water and a man on a weather program talk for a whole hour about cloud patterns. It put Axel to sleep. 
But the frog watched on. He seemed comforted by the images, as if they were relieving him of a great anxiety, or perhaps he was just grateful for the light, for that sense of life moving from moment to moment without threat or danger that the video provided. 
“TV Frog” left at dawn, but came back the next night and the night after that. 
Axel resolved not to disturb the frog. In the morning, as Axel ran past on his way to the Reggiesystem computer, he would call out, “Hiya, TV Frog!” and leave it at that. 
But by the end of the week, as Axel ran past, TV Frog lingered long enough on the window sill so that Axel could see him, in silhouette, raising his left forepaw as if in greeting before hopping out the window to wherever TV Frogs went in the daytime.
When the crate containing Rotomotoman finally arrived, all the saurs gathered to watch as Tom Groverton opened it in the center of the living room. 
The crate was enormous. Even Diogenes had to get up on his toes to peer inside. Axel climbed up on his shoulders, expecting to see Rotomotoman inside just as he envisioned him, fully charged and ready to go. 
What Axel actually saw was about a dozen batches of components wrapped in vinyl bags and cushioned with packing foam. 
Along with a copy of the invoice were several sheets of paper filled with very tiny type and headed with big bold letters: 

“Some assembly required.”

As everyone knows, “some” is a relative word. The creation of the Grand Canyon took “some” time and the formation of matter at the instant of the Big Bang required “some” assembly. 
Tom carefully took the components out of the crate. As the pieces slowly collected on the floor, Agnes looked them over, frowning and sniffing. 
“Hmph! Looks like they sent you the trash instead of the trashcan!” 
“He’s all in pieces,” Bronte whispered, looking from one component to the next. 
“Did he fall apart?” asked Rosie. 
“They forgot to put him together,” Charlie observed. 
Diogenes bent over so that Axel could climb down and survey his unassembled creation. He stood with his mouth agape, looking slightly appalled and definitely overwhelmed. 
“We’re in luck,” Agnes whispered to Doc. “With all these pieces, it’ll take months for him to put it together.” 
“If he manages to put it together at all,” Doc replied. “Not that I doubt the little fellow’s enthusiasm and determination, but his attention does tend to wander.” 
“Then we’ll gather up the pieces and throw them in the cellar, or put them out with the trash, where they belong!” 
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Doc said in his deep whisper. “I really don’t want to see the little fellow despondent or disappointed.” 
“No, you want that big hunk of metal rolling over your toes every ten minutes!” 
Axel wandered around the unassembled Rotomotoman not unlike an accident investigator surveying the wreckage of a train or a jet. He looked up at Tom Groverton. 
“What do we do now?” 
“That’s up to you, Axel.” 
The other saurs watched silently as Axel took another turn around the components. 
Tibor—the brooding, runt-size apatosaur—came up to the crate with a crayon in his mouth and quickly scrawled on it: “Tibor’s Imperial Winter Palace—do NOT throw out, by order of Tibor.” 
Axel pointed to a dome-shaped piece of metal and said to the others, “Look! That’s his head! And this other part here—“ he slapped the cylinder which was the largest piece taken out of the crate “—that’s his body! Those are his wheels in that bag over there! Those rods in that other bag are his arms! And this—“ He held up a large white disk which contained a dark, intricate retina in its Plexiglas frame “—this is one of his eyes!” He held it up between his forepaws and against his chest and approached one section of the circle of saurs. The retina rolled around inside the larger disk as if the disembodied eye was scrutinizing the room. 
The saurs retreated a few steps. Alfie hid his head against Tyrone’s chest. 
“Don’t be afraid! It’s Rotomotoman! Rotomotoman is good!” 
With the retina rolling back and forth, right to left, along the bottom perimeter of the disk, the smaller saurs were unconvinced. 
“You’ll see, when I put him together!” 
Axel sang the “Rotomotoman Song” and tried to get the other saurs to sing it with him, but as they looked over the pile of parts they appeared justifiably unenthused. 
“Beware of any trashcan with its own theme song,” Agnes trudged away with the hope that this was the last she would see of Rotomotoman. 

The contents of the crate were moved into the same workroom upstairs where Preston wrote his novels and Alphonse sent out his quiz and contest entries. It was also where Geraldine kept her cardboard “lab” and, at another desk, Tibor hid in his cardboard “castle.” 
Axel walked around the still-wrapped components laid out on the floor in a kind of random formation, a kind of “Metal Henge.” 
In the center of the formation he turned around and around until he was in danger of making himself dizzy. 
“Where do I start?” 
Preston handed Axel the several pages of tiny type that came in the crate. “Try to read this over all the way through once—at least once. Then read each section and do what it tells you and don’t go any farther until you finish what it tells you to do.” 
“Okay. How do you do that?” 
Preston shut his eyes and summoned his patience with a great sigh. 
“We’ll read the instructions together.” He sat down next to Axel, took the instructions and held them out where both of them could see. “To paraphrase Aristotle, ‘First things first.’” 
After reading through the instructions twice together, and after addressing Axel’s occasionally pertinent interruptions, Preston arranged the components or sets of components in a circle around Rotomotoman’s main cylinder. 
“You’ll start here,” Preston pointed to a little black box that contained a quantity of intricate circuitry. “You put that into the cylinder where the instructions tell you, then you move to the next piece, and the next piece, clockwise. That way you can keep track of what goes first and what goes next. When you get all the way around the circle—and as long as there are no parts left over—Rotomotoman should be completely assembled and ready to go.” 
“Wow!” Axel walked around the main cylinder and looked at all the surrounding parts. “When do you think we’ll be finished?” 
Preston shrugged and shook his head. “The sooner you get started the sooner you’ll be done.” He made sure to stress the “you” in that statement. 
“Yeah!” Axel looked up at the ceiling as if he could stare straight through it. 
Preston looked at Axel. For the first time in years he took notice of the long scar down his back, then followed Axel’s gaze. He gently put his forepaw on Axel’s head. He had been looking at the stars through that ceiling for many years himself. 
“You’ll do fine,” he said softly. “Just fine.” 

The discipline of doing one thing at a time was almost too much for Axel to comprehend, but he was undeterred. His energies—which were capable of flying off in a dozen directions at once—were for once singly directed to the task of assembling Rotomotoman. 
It wasn’t quite high-energy physics, or as the saying went in another century, “rocket science.” The most detailed aspects of circuitry and data systems had been assembled at the company that produced the prototype. But each set of components had to be linked to another set, and those to another set. A had to plugged into B, and B had to be slipped inside C, and so on. 
Axel worked until long past sleep-time that first night, and did not join the other saurs when exhaustion finally took him. He curled up next to Rotomotoman’s dormant head. 
“It won’t be long,” he said to the polished metal dome, placing his forepaw in the place between where Rotomotoman’s eyes would eventually go. “I’ll have you all put together in no time.” 
The next day, he started after breakfast and only stepped away from the work for lunch, dinner, trips to the litter facilities and two times when he asked the Reggiesystem for explanations and advice. 
Doc, with great economy, managed to explain to Axel the saurian techniques for manipulating certain tools designed for human hands, specifically the screwdriver and the adjustable wrench. 
By the time the other saurs were wrapping up their daily routines and heading up to the sleep room, Axel had made it through the circle of components Preston had laid out from twelve o’clock (the first piece) to three o’clock. 
It took all of the following day for Axel to get from three o’clock to five. He didn’t go downstairs to eat, but Sluggo brought food up to him. 
“He’d finish faster if we helped him,” Sluggo told Agnes, as she peeled a strip of rind from an orange. 
“So?” she asked. “That’s his own damn problem. I didn’t ask for that rolling trashcan to be brought here. Besides,” she mashed up a piece of orange with her teeth, “the longer he works on that thing, the longer he isn’t knocking around here jumping off the couch and screaming about holes in time and space or tidal waves or some damn frog sneaking in and watching the video.” 
“He might get sick,” Sluggo insisted. 
“Well, what if he does? We’ve got more important things to worry about.” 
She motioned to where Bronte and Kara stared with worried expressions into the little cotton-filled box. 
“It’s been too long,” Bronte whispered. “A bird’s egg would have hatched by now.” 
“It’s not a bird’s egg,” Kara said. “It’s your egg. And we just don’t know how long it might take.” 
“Too long.” Bronte bent down and with slightest pressure touched the egg with her snout. “Too long.” 

By sleep-time, Axel had made it to seven o’clock on the circle of parts. The components were joined together, but they had to be placed inside the main cylinder. Together, they weighed much more than Axel could possibly lift, or even drag. And by this time Axel’s head was filled with numbers and letters: Bs and Ds and Cs and Qs floated around like tadpoles in a pond; he looked at the joined components, but all he could see was a wall of binary numbers. 
Still, he made the effort, grabbing on to one end with his forepaws and pulling mightily. 
It wouldn’t budge. 
He went around to the other side and pushed. The assemblage remained immobile. He kept pushing. 
He pushed until Sluggo came by. 
“You need to sleep,” he said. 
“First,” Axel said breathlessly, “I have to get this stuff,” he took several deep breaths and patted the block of components, “into that thing—“ His voice trailed off as he took more deep breaths and weakly pointed at the cylinder. 
They both pushed, but all they could manage to do was polish the floor under their feet. 
“Get some rest,” Sluggo said when they finally gave up. “We’ll think of something in the morning.” 
“Think,” Axel mumbled deliriously. “Think think think! I have to think!” 
“Sleep first,” Sluggo said, and nudged him toward the door. 
Axel went along like a prisoner being led back to his cell. 
The sleep-pile looked a little like a circus under a collapsed tent. The saurs were already all gathered under the blankets, except for Hetman in his little bed, just next to the pile. 
Sluggo lifted the blanket up at one end to look for Agnes and Axel crawled in with him. It was impossible to make his way in without stepping on someone and eliciting responses like, “Hey! Watch it!” “Ooof!” and “Your foot’s on my crest!” He climbed around from one end of the pile to the other, paying little attention to the ruckus he caused, but he couldn’t find a place that seemed comfortable. 
“Think think think!” 
He lifted up the blanket, crawled out and headed straight to Hetman’s bed, climbing over the railing and getting in next to him. 
“Hetman! Hetman!” 
“Yes, Axel,” Hetman whispered in his raspy voice. 
“Okay if I sleep here?” 
“You’re very welcome to sleep here, Axel.” 
“I didn’t mean to wake you, if I did. Did I wake you?” 
“No,” said Hetman, who was often haunted by pains old and new, though he refused any strong drugs to help him sleep. “It hasn’t been a good night.” 
“Is the egg under your pillow?” 
“Yes it is. Poor fellow,” he said, referring to the egg. “I hope he is sleeping better inside his little shell—or she. But perhaps it can’t be called sleep if you haven’t yet awakened.” 
“Sluggo said I should sleep, but I have to think too. There’s all this inner stuff I have to get into Rotomotoman, but it’s all put together and too heavy to move.” Axel rolled a little closer to Hetman. “Did I tell you yet about Rotomotoman?” 
“At least twenty times, Axel, but tell me again. I enjoy hearing you tell me about the wondrous Rotomotoman. Whisper it, though, this time. We needn’t wake the others. And maybe it would be best if you left out the Rotomotoman song.” 
Axel did just as Hetman requested, starting all the way back, from the dream to the “inner stuff,” careful to leave out the theme song, though he really-really did want to sing it. 
As Hetman hoped, Axel fell asleep as he listed the catalog of parts: Motor Assembly A to Relay Systems Response Assembly B, Relay Systems Response Assembly B to Motor Systems Response Assembly C—and so on. Axel’s voice trailed off after he mentioned that Thermostat Assembly F attached to Carrier Drawer F1. 
Hetman stared up at the unchanging darkness. The house was silent except for the occasional grunts and snores from the sleep-pile. He might manage a little sleep too before dawn, if he could just get a little question out of his mind—
What does a Rotomotoman need with a thermostat? 

Axel slept harder than he had at any time before: he slept past dawn. For once he was not at the window to glimpse the last light of the stars (if it were a clear night) and the first light of the sun (if the day was similarly clear). 
Instead, he was lost in a dream of Rotomotoman roaming about the house. The strangest thing about the dream to Axel was that Rotomotoman, with his round head, looked very much like a big soft-boiled egg sitting in a cup. It occurred to Axel that in some ways Rotomotoman was his egg—but instead of needing the pieces to come apart, he needed to put them together. 
Together! 
He sat up, awake. Put them together! He looked around and the room was already filled with sunlight. Hetman lay beside him, asleep at last, but the sleep-pile was gone—everyone was gone, the blankets put away. 
He climbed out of Hetman’s bed and ran to the workroom just in time to see Diogenes and Hubert lowering the assembled components into the uprighted cylinder. 
Not only that, but the wheels were attached to the bottom, the arms attached to the sides: listless, but attached. 
Nearby, Doc rested on his little box, screwdriver still held between his forepaws. 
A crowd of saurs, mostly little ones, was gathered around them, watching and chattering. The Five Wise Buddhasaurs sat up on the top of a set of plastic stairs, to get the next best view to the ones Geraldine and Tibor had from their respective desktops. 
Agnes had the assembly instructions spread out in front of her. 
“Okay, next to the motor assembly junk is that other junk.” 
“The battery pack?” Doc asked. 
“That’s what I said, you dimwit! You’re going to need the gray cable and the two blue cables that are in that little bag.” 
Tyrone and Alfie opened the bag and brought the cables to Agnes. 
“Hey!” Axel said. Everyone stopped and turned to him. 
“Don’t look at me!” said Agnes. “It wasn’t my idea! I can’t help it if everyone in this house has gone completely insane.” 
“Sluggo mentioned to us this morning the trouble you were having,” Doc said, putting the screwdriver down. “We thought a little help might get the project moving along.” 
“But, but—“ Axel moved closer. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the cylinder. It was still headless, but it had wheels and arms, and it looked nothing like a soft-boiled egg anymore. 
He glanced at the circle of parts: nine o’clock. Three quarters of the parts were gone. 
“Guys—I can’t—I don’t know—“ 
“Oh, shut up!” said Agnes. “Go down and get your breakfast. Tom’s waiting for you. Then get back up here and help us out.” 
To Diogenes and Hubert, she said, “Now that that thing is loaded and Axel is up, get Hetman downstairs and come straight back. I want the lid put on this trashcan today! Tomorrow at the latest!” 
Agnes left nothing else to say. Axel ran downstairs. Diogenes and Hubert left the room looking back over their shoulders. Agnes noticed Doc staring at her with his most serene smile. 
“What the hell are you looking at?” she said. 
“I am looking at a marvel, my dear—at a kind of brief miracle. I am looking at Agnes in a good mood.” 
“You’ll be looking at a spiked tail meeting your face if you don’t move your butt off that box and get to work!” 
With that encouragement, Doc picked up the screwdriver and returned to the cylinder without further comment, but unable to remove the grin from his face. 
About this time, in the world out past the yard and beyond the trees, a buzz was starting. 
As best as anyone could tell, the buzz began in the offices of the radio telescope at Mount Herrmann. Apparently, a message had been sent to certain coordinates from someone who went by the name of “Axel” and was addressed to “space guys.” There was nothing particularly extraordinary in that, as the telescope operators had been accepting messages for many years as part of a promotional and public relations program to aid in the funding of their research, which included a search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. 
What started the buzz had to do with the content of the message, of a certain reference to “making eggs.” And since address of the sender was one of the houses operated by the Atherton Foundation for surviving saurs, it presented a rather astounding possibility. 
The rumor could have been a prank, a mistake, a misunderstanding. But there were a number of important persons in the bioengineering community who were not sleeping well and would not sleep very well until the mystery was cleared up. And the bioengineering community was an important group of persons who held a great deal of sway in many circles. They did not bear sleeplessness well. 
And so a call was made to Ms. Susan Leahy, the grandniece of Hilary Atherton herself, who was then in charge of the foundation. 
“They want answers,” she said to Tom Groverton over the phone. “Or I should say they want assurance, if you know what I mean.” 
“They want to send someone over to inspect the house,” Tom replied. 
“Our charter allows us to legally restrain them, but I’m afraid that would only stir up more controversy. The Office of Bioengineering Standards has never approved of our autonomy and would like nothing better than to challenge it.” 
“So they’re coming,” Tom said. 
“I’ll be with them. And I want Dr. Pagliotti there too,” she said, referring to Dr. Margaret. “I won’t have them pushing their way around, but I’m afraid they have to search everywhere to their satisfaction to see that the saurs aren’t producing their own eggs. If they find anything that makes them think otherwise, they’ll file to do further research, and that will get us into a battle I’d much rather avoid.” 
“I understand,” said Tom. 
“I know you do. You’ll tell the saurs. Let them know we’re coming.” 
“Yes. It’ll be good seeing you again, at least.” 
“I only wish it was under less stressful circumstances. You do a wonderful job, Tom. And the saurs never fail to surprise me.” 
“Then you won’t be disappointed this time, Susan. I can assure you.” 

By sleep-time the workroom was empty of everyone but Axel—and Rotomotoman. 
The faint traces of moonlight coming through the window endowed everything in the room with a kind of ashen, metallic hue. The circle of components was gone. In their place stood Rotomotoman, just under a meter and a half tall, set upon four sturdy wheels and his narrow, rod-like arms down at his sides. His large, round eyes, set against the curvature of his head, were fixed in an expression perhaps best described as dementedly earnest—a fitting reflection of his creator. When seen in connection with the first horizontal seam of the cylinder, a dozen centimeters below them—a seam that suggested a mouth—those eyes also betrayed a certain perplexity, as if Rotomotoman might be thinking to himself an incomplete expression of surprise in the vein of “What the—!” 
A cable connected him to a wall outlet, charging his battery. That was all he needed—with the exception of downloading some delicate software into his brain—before he could come to life. 
Axel stood transfixed, staring up at him with undiluted awe. 
“It’s real,” he whispered. “Real-real-real.” 
“You should get some sleep,” said Doc. He’d come into the workroom at Sluggo’s request, when Axel could not be found in the sleep-pile. “It won’t do to have you falling asleep tomorrow, at the moment of your triumph.” 
“Look at him!” Axel pointed up at Rotomotoman. “Isn’t he the greatest thing you’ve ever seen? The most stupendous, marvelous, fantastic, greatest thing you’ve ever seen?” 
“I’ve seen quite a lot of him, my friend, in these past few days.” Doc’s forepaws were still sore from handling all the human tools. His foot still hurt a little from when it got wedged under the cylinder while he was attaching the last of the wheels—but it was the foot of his weak leg anyway; the addition to his limp was barely noticeable. “But yes,” he put his forepaw on Axel’s shoulder, “it is—impressive.” 
“I couldn’t have done it without all you guys helping me. I have the best-greatest friends in the whole universe!” 
“It’s your creation, don’t forget. Without you, your Rotomotoman would not exist, would it?” 
“I don’t know,” Axel said, seriously pondering the question. “It’s like now I feel like—like he always was, you know? And all I did was, like—“ 
“Like what?” 
“Like, recognize him! Like, there’s all this real stuff in one place and all this could-be-real stuff in another place, like behind a window. Did you ever see one of those gumball machines that’s got stuff other than gumballs in it? Like shrunken heads and rubber spiders and stuff? That’s what it’s like—like Rotomotoman was in one of those gumball machines and I turned the handle and got him out!” 
“Now I know you need some sleep, my friend. You’re talking like a Platonist. Or even worse: a Jungian.” 
“What’s that?” 
Doc patted his head. “It’s a kind of person who needs a great deal of sleep. Come along. When Axel sounds profound it’s a strong hint that one is either dreaming or should be dreaming.” 
Doc led Axel out of the workroom with a series of tugs. Only after they turned the corner and entered the hallway would Axel stop looking back at Rotomotoman. 
But then Axel stopped in his tracks, struck with an idea. 
“Hey!” He gestured to Doc and headed for the staircase. “Now I can show you!” 
“It’s far too late, little fellow, to show me anything—“ 
“No-no-no-no! Come on!” Axel trotted a few steps ahead, then looked back at Doc. “But quiet!” He held one digit of his forepaw up. “Ssshh!” 
Axel crept down one stair, and then another, and then another. Even at this slow pace, Doc found it hard to follow. His bad leg made it hard for him to take stairs, up or down, at any pace. He held to the round, vertical balusters of the handrail and inched himself along until it occurred to him that he still hadn’t been given a good reason for putting himself through this exertion. 
“Axel, would you mind—“ 
“Ssshh! Just a little farther.” His whisper was louder than Doc’s appeal. “One more step!” 
Doc had to put his weight on his bad leg to descend the next step. He winced, but caught himself before he cried out. 
“There! See?” Axel whispered. “Can you see?” 
Doc could see nothing. He reached for the next baluster, putting himself in an awkward angle, almost hanging over Axel. He raised his tail to counterbalance his weight. If he slipped a mere centimeter he would topple headfirst down the rest of the stairs. But at last he could make out what Axel was pointing to: a light coming from the living room. 
The light changed color and intensity with quick little flickers and flashes, as if the video screen was still on. 
Not “as if”—it was on! 
“See?” Axel whispered, more successful this time in keeping his voice down. “It’s TV Frog! I told you he was really there! He’s really-really-really there!” 
“Axel,” Doc felt his grip slipping on the baluster. “It’s much more likely that someone forgot—“ He couldn’t finish the sentence, since it was he who turned off the video that night. 
“Maybe,” Doc muttered, “a technical thing. A ‘glitch,’ as they say. A malfunction in—“ 
A voice with the range and volume of a train horn sounded above them: 
“Hey! What the hell’s going on down there!” 
In the fraction of a second between Doc hearing Agnes’s voice and his forepaws slipping from the baluster, Doc could distinctly see the light go off in the living room, as if someone had slapped the “off” square on the remote pad. 
After that, he saw nothing, but distinctly felt himself in gravity’s clutches as first he tumbled over Axel, then tumbled again and tumbled again. 
He shut his eyes for what seemed like a moment, but when he opened them the lights were on. He was looking up at Axel and several other saurs, including Kara and Sluggo—Tom Groverton was there too—all standing over him with worried expressions. Tom ran his hands over Doc’s back and abdomen, checking for broken bones, no doubt. 
“I’m all right,” Doc said several times, and after Tom examined him carefully he even believed it. Bruises, muscle pains, but nothing worse. Agnes, still at the top of the stairs, kept berating him for “skulking around in the dark like a goddamn idiot!”—which was akin to having a bad ringing in the ears—Doc had lived with that before. 
“Ohhh, Doc! I’m sorry-sorry-sorry!” Axel repeated it until it became a litany. “I didn’t mean—I wanted you to see—that it was TV Frog! It really was! I’m soooo sorry-sorry-sorry!” 
“I followed along of my own choosing, Axel.” Doc tried to reach for Axel’s forepaw but, falling short, weakly waved to him. “It must have been funny to watch. A good pratfall, had there been an audience.” 
As Tom helped him back up the stairs and into the sleep room, Doc couldn’t help thinking about the light in the living room. Not that he could believe in TV Frog any more than he had before, but there was something—something—very strange about that video screen being on when no one could have turned it on. And as he leaned his head back against the little cushion Kara brought for him, it was that thought, more than any bumps or bruises, that kept him up for the better part of the night. 

Rotomotoman was ready—almost. 
The saurs gathered in the workroom. Most of them were on the floor, surrounding—at what they believed was a safe distance—the figure of Rotomotoman that towered over them. Others were perched on Preston’s desk and others yet were on the desk set across from it. 
None had ventured up to where Geraldine and Tibor kept their separate abodes, but they too were quite literally out of their boxes to view the great moment. Tibor even wore his “hat,” which was really a green piece of concave plastic with a little rim. It looked ridiculous on his head but Tibor insisted it was quite regal and dashing, especially when he wore it at a jaunty tilt. 
Rotomotoman was attached by cable to the hard drive of Preston’s computer. No one knew how long the download would take, but when it was finished Rotomotoman would come to life. Axel, standing next to his creation, tried to count down the seconds, but he lost his place several times and had to start over. 
“Attention!” Agnes called out from her place near the door. “Attention! Keep back! When this piece of junk goes berserk there’s no telling who will be crushed under its wheels! All saurs must keep back!” 
Only Sluggo paid attention to her, and that was only to get her to stop shouting. 
Tom Groverton was there too. No one noticed, though, that he was standing next to the two fire extinguishers he’d placed next to Geraldine’s lab. 
Axel gave up on the countdown and started to chant: “Go! Go! Go! Rotomotoman! Go! Go! Go! Rotomotoman!” 
Some of the other saurs picked it up. “Go! Go! Go! Rotomotoman!” 
Others joined in. “Go! Go! Go! Rotomotoman!” 
Even the saurs who didn’t speak squeaked and chirped to the rhythm of the cheer. 
“Go! Go! Go! Rotomotoman! Go! Go! Go! Rotomotoman!” 
“Attention all saurs! Keep back! When the piece of junk goes berserk—“ 
“Go! Go! Go! Rotomotoman! Go! Go! Go! Rotomotoman!” 
“—will be indiscriminately crushed under—“ 
Rotomotoman jerked very slightly, hardly a movement at all. The download was finished. A faint hum and whir emanated from his mechanical innards. His hemisphere head turned slightly to the left and the pupils of his huge eyes followed the same general direction, then started back slowly to the right, taking in the whole scene. 
The chanting stopped. Even Agnes held off her shouted warnings. 
It is hard to imagine a more startled expression on a piece of machinery, if one can imagine an expression on a piece of machinery at all. The eyes had much to do with it, looking like enormous versions of the eyes that adorned toys and dolls in years long past—but much more active, animated, in fact. Those eyes and the mouth-like seam in his cylinder-torso created an expression: surprise, panic, astonishment. 
He surveyed the ninety-odd dinosaur-looking creatures staring up at him—and one human, with arms folded, leaning back against a desk, smiling with apparent admiration. 
Rotomotoman raised his arms in a gesture of surrender and recoiled right into Preston’s desk. 
The liquid-gray display screen on his torso—his only means of communication—filled with exclamation points, question marks and other strange symbols that may even have been incomprehensible to other rotomotomen, if any existed. 
“See?” Agnes shouted. “Just as I told you! The monster is ready to pounce! Back away!” 
But Rotomotoman just froze in that posture until Axel approached him on the back of the large brown triceratops named Dr. David Norman. Dr. Norman lowered his head and Axel dismounted. He walked straight up to his creation with his left forepaw upraised. 
“Hiya! I’m Axel!” 
Rotomotoman stared down at the small blue creature. He lowered one of his arms and bent the joint that approximated the elbow of the other. His display screen cleared of symbols, except for five characters of simple, recognizable alphabet and punctuation: 
“Hiya!” 
Many of the saurs cheered. Tom Groverton put his hands together and applauded. 
Agnes nudged Preston and muttered, “You sure there aren’t any machine guns in those fingers?” 
“Positive.” 
“No flame throwers or lasers?” 
“You saw the instructions yourself. Rotomotoman is weapon-free. He does have a rotating red flashing light that comes out of the top of his head, but as you can see he hasn’t had cause to use it yet.” 
Agnes grumbled. “He still looks like a trashcan made up for Halloween!” 
“Hey! Guys!” Axel said, as if the other saurs might not know yet, “I want you to meet your new friend! This is Rotomotoman!” 
Rotomotoman held his metal hand horizontally just above his eyes: a salute to the assembly, with “Hiya!” still on his display screen. More cheers greeted him. 
“Come on!” Axel coaxed his metal friend away from the desk. “A little this way! Follow me!” 
Words appeared on his display screen: first “Axel,” then “follow.” 
Rotomotoman complied with each direction, if a little tentatively. His software may have overly cautioned him about running over little ones, but he cast his gaze downward and thoroughly surveyed the floor, checking to make sure no one was underfoot. If a meter-and-a-half tall cylinder rolling on four wheels could be described as moving “daintily,” it would describe Rotomotoman just then. 
Axel led him to the door of the workroom. Rotomotoman—making no sound but an efficient, high-pitched whir—saluted the door. The word “door” appeared on his display screen. He followed Axel down the hallway, holding his salute all the way to the lift platform, where he stopped cold. 
Rotomotoman didn’t seem confident that he could keep his balance on the flatbed lift, with its guardrails set no more than a few centimeters high. Axel coaxed him on with the assurance that the lift moved so slowly he would be in no danger—and with the assistance of Diogenes and Hubert pushing from behind. With “Help!” replacing “Hiya!” on his display screen, Rotomotoman held so tightly to the staircase wall he left a trail of grooves in it, but everyone was too excited to notice them. 
As he rolled from the platform to the floor he cast his gaze upward as if in thanks to some heavenly Rotomotogod. 
“Look over here, Rotomotoman!” Axel said, pointing to the living room. “That’s where the video is.” 
Rotomotoman saluted the video screen. His own screen alternated the words, “Video” and “Hiya!” 
“Over in that room is where we eat!” 
Rotomotoman saluted the dining room. “Dining room—Hiya!—Dining room—“ 
He saluted everything that Axel showed him, including the computer, the plastic stairs, the bookcases and the Five Wise Buddhasaurs’ plastic saxophones. And all their names were printed out on his display screen, each punctuated with the same greeting. 
“I suppose this question should have come up long ago,” Doc asked the ecstatic Axel, while Rotomotoman saluted the lamp table, the couch and a broom Tom had left leaning by the living room window, “but just what exactly is Rotomotoman supposed to do?” 
“Rotomotoman is here to protect good guys from the bad guys!” 
“Well,” Doc sighed deeply and patted Axel’s head, “may your labors be few.” 

The notion of “bad guys” was not entirely forgotten by Doc as Tom Groverton gathered all the saurs around in the library later that afternoon. In the back of the room—standing at attention, of course—was Rotomotoman, his creator proudly at his side. 
“They’ll be here tomorrow, and they’ll be looking for eggs,” Tom said, his hands folded loosely as he sat on a little stool in the center of the room. 
“Tell them to mind their own damn business!” Agnes shouted back. 
“That would be fine,” Tom said, “if we could. But these folks have rescinded their so-called ‘proprietary rights,’ based on a certain definition of what you guys are. And as you know they’ve been looking for loopholes ever since they agreed to the Atherton Foundation’s proposal. Your intelligence, your emotional capacity, your longevity—it’s baffled them for years. They have the support of a certain portion of the scientific community who’d like very much to make you the subject of study. And they want desperately to find out what they did, well, ‘right,’ so to speak, when they designed you. Generating eggs might change the deal if they find out. I mean—“ Tom cleared his throat, “if they find any.” 
“Any what?” Doc asked in a whisper. 
Tom smiled. “That’s the spirit. I won’t ask any questions and you won’t tell me any lies—other than the ones you may already tell me.” 
“Why, Tom!” Doc said, his heavy eyelids raised as far as they would go. “What makes you think we’d tell you any lies?” 
Tom ignored the remark. “Remember, I’ll be here. Dr. Margaret will be here and even Ms. Leahy will be here to make sure these folks don’t do anything out of line. But they will be thorough, and we can’t really stop them, because we want to show them that we have nothing to hide.” 
“We have nothing to hide,” Doc said. 
“Exactly.” Tom stood up. “Now, I have some things to do upstairs before I start dinner. But there’s one more thing: it might be a good idea to keep Rotomotoman in the background when they come. We don’t want to hit them with more than they can take.” 
“What did he mean by that?” Axel asked as Tom left the room. 
“He means that our visitors tomorrow are unprepared for your genius,” said Doc. 
“Genius!” Agnes marched up to Axel. “Spelled the same as ‘idiot!’ This is all your fault! Sending messages to ‘space guys!’ You’re the one who should be locked up! Not Bronte!” 
“Bronte!” Axel gasped. “Who wants to lock up Bronte?” 
“No one said anything about locking up Bronte!” Kara looked over at Bronte, whose concern about her egg had done little to steady her nerves for the meeting. Now she was trembling. 
“What do you think they’ll do?” Agnes continued. “They’ll take her off to a laboratory and stick her with needles and cut her up to find out how she did it!” 
A cry of alarm rose from the surrounding saurs. Memories of past injuries and dangers became acutely tangible even to the smallest and simplest of them. 
“Don’t listen to her,” Kara said to Bronte. “Agnes is overreacting as usual. No one’s going to take you away.” She turned angrily to Agnes. “Can’t you ever keep your mouth shut? We’re all in a panic when we need our heads about us!” 
“They’ll take the egg away, won’t they?” Bronte stammered. “Like the scientists in the video we saw once, climbing into nests and stealing the eggs of rare birds.” 
“No one’s going to do that here,” Preston put his hand on Bronte’s back. He could feel her shivers. “We’ll think of something.” 
“I’m sorry, Bronte,” Axel said, his face never before looked so long and mournful. “I didn’t know this would happen.” 
“It’s not your fault,” said Bronte, her nubby teeth grinding at her lower lip. “You were just—just being Axel.” 
“That’s the whole damn problem right there!” Agnes said. 
“Maybe Rotomotoman can help us now,” Axel said in a low voice. 
Rotomotoman, in the back of the room, saluted at the mention of his name. 
“Listen,” Agnes barked at Axel, “I don’t want to hear one more word about Rotomotoman! Space guys! Electric trashcans! Frogs watching the video! If I hear anything more from you...“ 
Agnes was interrupted by a voice that had so far not entered the discussion. It came back from the little bed over by the window, and in a low, raspy voice. 
“Axel is right,” said Hetman. 
“What?” Agnes was ready for verbal battle, and the words “Axel is right” set her back plates upright, but they were spoken by the one saur she would not assail. “What did you say?” 
“I said, Axel is right. Something Axel told me a few nights ago has kept me up thinking and—I could be wrong, but—Axel, do you still have the assembly directions for your Rotomotoman?” 
“They’re with Preston’s stuff, up by the computer,” he said. 
“Bring them down here, and hurry! We have stuff to do!” 
“Stuff to do!” Axel ran upstairs without hesitation. 
“The rest of you,” Hetman continued, “I want you to look very carefully at the sections on that sheet which refer to the Thermostat Assembly F and Carrier Drawer Assembly F1. Perhaps I’m completely wrong, but I think we’ve been overlooking something remarkable about that creation of Axel’s.” 

When the big car arrived the next morning, Axel was at the window, up on the little lamp table, scouting. 
“Huuuu-mans!” He announced to the others. “They’re here! And they’re in a bad guys car!” 
The long dark limousine had an official seal from The Office of Bioengineering Standards on the side door. It stopped right in front of the house and out came three strangers, Dr. Margaret and Mrs. Leahy. Of the strangers, there was a young African-American, impeccably dressed in a topcoat and dark suit; a gray-haired Caucasian, much more casually dressed, in an unbuttoned leather jacket and a dark T-shirt; a young Asian-looking woman with very short canary-colored hair, wearing a plaid workshirt and a denim jacket. 
Ms. Leahy led the way. Tom met the little group out on the porch. 
“I’m really sorry about this,” she said as she shook Tom’s hand. Susan Leahy was trim and efficient as always, and she was starting to let the gray come into her hair. She was one of those eccentrics who still wore glasses, though hers were rimless. “You’ve told them what this is all about, didn’t you?” 
“Yes, they know.” 
She nodded and turned to the three persons who were to search the house. 
“Okay, folks, you know the rules. You can search everything, everywhere, but if anything you do seems to be upsetting or traumatizing the saurs, I or Dr. Pagliotti here will have to ask you to back off. This is Tom Groverton.” She put her hand on his shoulder. “Any questions you may have I’m sure he’ll be glad to answer. We want to cooperate fully, but you have to understand that we have to act in the best interest of the saurs.” 
The young African-American, Dr. Phillips, nodded politely to Ms. Leahy. “We’ve done this kind of work at other houses. I can assure you we’ll be as non-disruptive as we possibly can.” 
Dr. Margaret, who had seen some of the saurs’ eggs herself, came up to Tom and gripped his hand. She wore a white jacket that looked a little like a short lab coat, and for once her long brown hair wasn’t tied back. She didn’t say a word but searched his expression for any sign of what she might expect. 
Tom could only shrug. Anything can happen, he seemed to say, but don’t get worried yet. 
“You know,” Ms. Leahy said, “it’s nice to have an excuse to come here and visit some old friends.” 
Axel was still standing at the window, waving to her. 
She waved back. “Hiya!” 
When the group entered the house, some of the saurs stopped to watch them, cautiously and curiously. The smaller saurs went on with their business, moving from room to room on skates, getting their computer lessons, a brief game of Not So Hard, or watching the video. 
“Attention humans!” Agnes announced from atop a lamp table near the door. “Attention all humans! It’s time to SHAPE UP!” 
“Don’t mind Agnes,” Ms. Leahy told the officials. “She greets most humans that way.” 
“Humans!” Agnes continued, “It’s time to SHAPE UP! You’ve been running things stupidly for too long! It’s time to STOP BEING STUPID!” 
“So here’s the little guy who’s caused all the ruckus.” Ms. Leahy went straight to Axel. 
“Miss Lay-hee! Miss Lay-hee! Howya doing? What are you doing with the bad guys?” 
Ms. Leahy carefully picked him up and perched him on her shoulder. “Important stuff, Axel. Want to see?” 
“Yeah!” 
She made sure she had a safe grip on him and that he wouldn’t slip, even with all his excited gesticulations. “So what’s all this about you sending messages to space?” 
“Yeah!” said Axel. “Reggie and me! We sent a message to the space guys and told them all about us!” 
The three investigators gathered around to listen to the conversation. The young woman, Dr. Yoon, took out a pocket computer to record it. 
“And have you heard anything back from the ‘space guys’ yet?” 
“Yeah! Maybe! At least I think that’s why TV Frog is here! He comes at night and watches the video, but no one’s seen him but me! Doc almost saw him but he fell down the stairs! He’s okay, though. Doc, I mean, but TV Frog’s okay too. Anyway, I think TV Frog just wants us to think he’s here because he can’t sleep. But Geraldine said he was really sent by the space guys, because they know to drill holes in time and space!” 
Ms. Leahy looked at the three investigators. 
“Well, here’s your source for the egg story.” 
Dr. Yoon slipped the computer back into her pocket. 
“And who’s that over there?” Mrs. Leahy pointed to the metal cylinder with the hemisphere head, standing out of the way, just to the left of the video screen. 
“That’s Rotomotoman! I built him myself! Well, Reggie helped me, and Preston, and Doc, and Agnes, and a lot of the other guys. But I thought him up all by myself!” 
Rotomotoman was motionless. His display screen was empty. His left arm was listless at his side but his right arm was raised in a salute. It was hard to say what he might have been saluting—his right eye looked off to his left and his left eye looked off to his right. 
The investigators looked over Rotomotoman carefully. They even took his head off and inspected the components. Some of the saurs got very quiet and even Agnes briefly desisted from her shouted exhortations. 
“What is it supposed to do?” the man in the leather jacket, Mr. Chase, asked Tom. 
“Ask the inventor.” He pointed to Axel. “You can talk to them, you know.” 
“He fights bad guys and protects the good guys!” Axel offered without waiting to be asked. 
“Doesn’t look like he can fight any bad guys in his shape,” Dr. Yoon said as she re-secured Rotomotoman’s head. 
“I—I forgot to plug him in last night!” Axel looked over at Doc, sitting on his little box, nodding almost imperceptibly. Then he looked to Agnes, who waved her tail threateningly. 
“I’ve got to charge him up! He’ll be okay tomorrow!” 
“The kitchen is this way,” Tom said to Dr. Phillips, “but I’m afraid the only eggs you’ll find are in the refrigerator.” 
The investigators looked anyway—very carefully. They looked into every cabinet and along the baseboards and around the ceilings. They went through the cellar and the litter room, the living room, the dining room and the library. They looked behind all the books on the shelves. Dr. Margaret wouldn’t let them look under Hetman’s pillow, but she took the pillow out herself and let them inspect it. 
“If the lady and gentlemen wish to look under the mattress,” Hetman said, “they are welcome to do so.” 
“If I may?” Dr. Phillips said in an apologetic voice and did his work as quickly as possible. Before he moved on, he said “Thank you,” to Hetman, came back and added, “Thank you—sir.” 
“You’re very welcome.” 
They searched all the rooms upstairs and even went up into the attic, where the saurs had their “museum,” made up of all the things friends and former “owners” had left them over the years: toys, paintings on construction paper, knick-knacks and little articles of clothing. The investigators found several egg-shaped things, made of glass and plastic, but not one real egg. 
Mr. Chase’s attention was drawn to a little charm on one of the shelves, a gold-plated Star of David on a slender chain. He picked it up to examine more closely. 
“Put it back!” Agnes, who had followed them up into the Museum, shouted at him. 
“Is this yours?” Mr. Chase asked her. “It’s very pretty.” 
“None of your damn business! Put it back!” 
Agnes harangued the investigators all the way down from the attic. 
“Foo! Humans! War mongers! Animal eaters! Planet spoilers! G’wan! Beat it! Scram!” 
“Adamant, isn’t she?” Mr. Chase said to Dr. Margaret. 
“You’re upsetting her,” Dr. Margaret replied. 
“Sounds to me like she’s upsetting herself.” 
“Didya hear?” Axel, still perched on Ms. Leahy’s shoulder, whispered to her. “He called Agnes an ant!” 
Ms. Leahy held her finger up to her lips. “Ssshh. Maybe he meant ’aunt.’” 
When the investigators reached the sleep room they were approached by a pale green hadrosaur who, after some deliberation, shouted to them, “Yar-woo?” 
“No! No!” Agnes coached the hadrosaur. “That’s not what I told you to say!” 
The hadrosaur tried again: “Yar-woo!” 
“No! ‘Foo!’ You’re supposed to say ‘Foo!’” She smacked her tail against the floor. 
“Foo?” 
“Forget it! Just forget it!” 
“Foo!” The hadrosaur smiled and walked away. 
In the closet of the sleep room, Mr. Chase found a little cardboard box with wadded-up cotton inside. Nestled in the cotton was a tiny egg. 
“Here’s something,” he said to his colleagues, who were searching in other parts of the room. 
“Hey! Put that back!” Agnes shouted. “That’s not yours!” 
Mr. Chase held up the egg and inspected it carefully. It had a blue tint to it, and was no bigger than the first joint of his thumb. 
“It’s a bird’s egg,” Bronte walked up to Mr. Chase nervously. “A robin’s, probably. Sluggo found it in the yard. Sometimes we try to hatch them—as if they were ours.” 
She looked up at Dr. Yoon and Dr. Phillips. “If they do hatch, we feed the little bird until it’s old enough. Tom can sometimes find another nest in the yard and put it back. Sometimes the older birds accept him.” Her voice was trembling now. “It’s—it’s just sort of a thing we do.” 
Dr. Phillips took the egg and held it up to the light from the window. “Looks like a robin’s egg to me.” 
“That’s what she said!” Agnes stood next to Bronte. “Now beat it! G’wan! Scram!” 
“Is this when they pull their guns out?” Axel whispered to Ms. Leahy. 
“They don’t have guns,” she answered. 
“I thought they were bad guys!” 
“Well, not really. Not that kind, at least.” 
Dr. Yoon, with arms folded, glanced at Agnes and said to her colleagues, “It may be that their eggs and the robin’s eggs are almost alike. We better take it in.” 
“No!” Bronte gasped. 
Ms. Leahy bent down and put her hand gently on Bronte’s back. “Must you?” She asked the investigators. 
“We have to know,” Dr. Phillips put the egg back into its box. “I can give you all sorts of reasons, but the answer simply boils down to this: we have to know.” 
“Hear that?” Agnes shouted to the other saurs. “He said ‘boil!’ I told you they were going to eat them!” 
“Please,” Kara said to the investigators. “It really is a robin’s egg. Honest. Don’t take it away.” 
Dr. Phillips bent down and spoke to Bronte, resting the box carefully on his knee. “We won’t hurt it. We just need to know what it is. It’s a very simple procedure and we can have it back to you in a day or so.” 
“What if it hatches?” Bronte asked. “You’ll take care of the little bird? You won’t just—pitch it?” 
“If that’s what happens, I’ll take care of it.” He reached out and touched the little furrows on her brow. “I promise.” 
Dr. Phillips put the cardboard box into a little specimen bag, but left the bag open. Dr. Yoon made some notes with her pocket computer. Saurs filled the room. None of them spoke, not even Agnes, but they all looked at the investigators, who did their work quickly and tried not to look back. 
“They may not be bad guys,” Ms. Leahy whispered to Axel, “But I’ll bet you that right now they don’t feel like good guys.” 
She, along with Tom and Dr. Margaret, followed the investigators back out to the limousine, but in the living room she noticed Doc, still sitting on his plastic box, staring out toward the window as if deep in thought. 
She put Axel down and kissed him on the snout. “I’ll see you later,” she said. “Gotta talk to my old buddy over there.” 
Ms. Leahy knelt down next to Doc and hugged him. “My old friend. Forgive me for not stopping to talk to you.” 
“You were busy, I know. There is nothing to forgive.” 
“I’ll come back soon. For a real visit. We’ll sit on the porch and talk of Cicero and Democritus and St. Augustine.” 
“Cicero.” Doc smiled. “’Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’” He looked out toward the front door, where the limousine waited. “Not bad for a tiny, manufactured brain, eh?” 
“It’s not how much brain you’ve got, but how you use it.” 
She hugged him again and Doc reciprocated as best he could with his short forearms. 
She whispered: “Is there any real reason to worry?” 
Doc shook his head. “We’ll be fine, for now.” 
When she stood up, Ms. Leahy could see the motionless metal cylinder of Rotomotoman saluting her. She returned his salute, bid farewell to the others and walked out to the limousine. 
On the porch, Dr. Margaret asked Tom, “What will you do now?” 
“I think I’ll sit out here for a while.” 
She put her hand on his shoulder. “That’s not what I meant.” 
“It’s not really my call. It’s theirs.” He gestured back to the house with his thumb. 
“What are they doing in there?” 
The horn sounded from the limousine. 
Tom walked Dr. Margaret to the limousine. “Come back tonight.” 
He took her hand and squeezed it gently. She got into the limousine and he watched it until it was out of sight, past the trees. For a few more minutes he sat on the bench on the porch, then got up and looked through the living room window. 
Rotomotoman, back in motion again, had rolled out to the center of the room. The saurs were gathered around him in a circle. Tom could hear a faint mechanical buzzing and a high-pitched beep come from the metal cylinder. At the same moment, a section of the odd little robot, defined by nearly imperceptible seams in his cylindrical torso, slid out like the drawer of a desk. 
Tom couldn’t see what was inside, but he knew what it was. Bronte was the closest to the drawer, peering in with sad, hopeful eyes. 
Then she opened her mouth as if to gasp. 
She spoke to the others and they all moved in even closer, trying to get a peek inside. Tom couldn’t hear a word of it, but he didn’t have to. 
Axel, perched on Hubert’s back to stare into the little drawer, shouted out, “It moved! I saw it move!” 
Tom went back to the bench. His coming in now would just create more nervous commotion and probably start Agnes shouting again. 
There would be plenty of time later to consider all the implications. The investigators, back-tracking through their information, might request a look at the schematics of Axel’s metal friend and discover Rotomotoman’s very practical function as an incubator. 
But then, Reggie may have anticipated that too, and devised a little camouflage for it. Never underestimate the Reggiesystem, Tom learned long ago. 
After all, Reggie too was a kind of human-made life form, and like the saurs had developed in his own way. 
For now, though, the moment belonged to the saurs, especially Bronte, the mother-to-be. 

That night, Axel descended the stairs as stealthily as he could manage, in search of TV Frog. But the living room was dark, the video turned off. For a moment he thought that TV Frog must not have come, but he turned around and saw the illuminated screen of the Reggiesystem computer in the dining room, and before it sat TV Frog, visible in silhouette. The plastic stairs were placed in front of the desk, just behind where TV Frog sat with an old-fashioned clicker mouse, which he slapped with his left paw just as he’d slapped the video’s remote pad. 
TV Frog seemed to be clicking through a set of files, text on the right side and pictures on the left. Axel couldn’t make out any of it, so he crept up the steps to get a closer look. 
The pictures weren’t very pleasant to look at: emaciated creatures with agonized expressions, bruised, battered, and scarred. Gaping mouths, hollowed eyes, muscles tensed with pain—
They were saurs, all of them. 
These were the official files of the Atherton Foundation, all of their cases, with photos taken of the saurs when they were first found or brought to them. 
Axel recognized some of them—Zack, Kip, Charlie, Hetman—Oh! Hetman! How did he ever make it? He barely looked alive. He—
The words got all tied up in Axel’s head. If he looked at the pictures, at least he didn’t have to think about them. But how could he not think about them after looking at all the faces, all the pain—
And then he saw a photograph of a small, blue theropod, exhausted, lying on his side, head twisted back as if he could hardly raise it—one black, expressionless eye was visible, staring upward. A second photo showed a long, straight cut down his back, infected and swollen. 
The cut was the same length as the scar down Axel’s back. 
Axel felt as if the desk dropped out from under him—and the floor, the house, everything—as if he was falling through time and space. 
“Space and Time and Time and Space—“ 
Whirling and spinning like an amusement park ride, but only the really, truly scary parts, and no one was there with whom he could share the elation and danger. 
A boy, the one he’d been purchased for, had cut him open, goaded on a bet, to see if he had mechanical parts or biological organs. “Not like he’s an animal,” the boy had said. “Just a thing. Don’t matter what anyone does to him.” 
But the boy said “him,” like he was someone—
And Lancelot was there! Lancelot, his buddy! The two of them were purchased together, and they lived with the boy and his family. “Buddies forever, Lancelot and Axel, Axel and Lancelot—“ 
But Lancelot was all cut open, spread out on the floor, screaming, pleading, “Please! Stop! Help me! Kill me! Stop!” 
And Axel had shouted too. “Don’t! Don’t hurt him! Stop it!” 
A grown-up interrupted the impromptu dissections. Axel had run, with all his strength. He’d run, hidden himself, bled. With no food, with all his energy and muscle spent, he slipped into a hole on the edge of a construction site and waited to die, like Lancelot. 
Axel remembered what that upward-turned eye in the photograph was looking at. 
It had been night. The stars were out, and they were everywhere. 
“Space—“ said Axel. He put his forepaw on TV Frog’s smooth back. It shuddered like an unbalanced engine. 
“It was all space and big and perfect and endless. And even though I was small, I felt as big as space. I felt as big as the universe.” 
TV Frog clicked the mouse and the monitor screen went dark. 
“That’s what I should have asked the space guys about,” Axel told him. “What I wanted to ask before I forgot. I wanted to ask if they knew any way to bring Lancelot back, or do something, so that he wouldn’t be dead.” 
TV Frog just sat there. Still shuddering. His eyes looked immeasurably deep and sad. 
“I guess they couldn’t, huh?” 
Whether or not he could answer, TV Frog didn’t, which seemed like a kind of answer in itself. 
Axel and TV Frog stood in front of the computer, and after a while the monitor clicked on again. 
The screen filled with stars 
This time, when the screensaver reached the end of the cycle, with the smeared thumbprint galaxy just in view, it seemed to go a little farther. The galaxy filled the whole screen. 
“You know, Reggie says the universe is one big place!” 
TV Frog’s eyes bobbed down into his head in a kind of affirmative gesture. 
“I came down to ask if you wanted to come upstairs and see what’s happening. It’s the biggest thing that’s ever happened here. The biggest thing that’s ever happened anywhere!” 
TV Frog didn’t move. 
Axel bent down and tugged at TV Frog’s forepaw. “It’s okay! No one will see you there! They’re all looking at the egg!” 
Axel kept tugging and urging until TV Frog turned away from the computer. 
“We’d better hurry! It’s almost ready to hatch!” 
But TV Frog propelled himself slowly, one cautious ‘flop’ at a time. 
“Come on! No one will see you! I promise!” 
All the way down from the desk, across the floor and up the stairs to the second floor, with Axel leading, TV Frog moved on: flop, pause, flop, pause, flop. 
They peered around the doorway into the sleep room. All the saurs were gathered around Rotomotoman, situated in the center of the room. He, like everyone else, was staring into his incubator drawer, his pupils cast at an awkwardly downward angle. Bronte stood closest to the drawer, along with Kara, Agnes, Doc and Preston. The only sounds in the room were the soft purr of Rotomotoman’s machinery and the anticipatory breathing of every creature in the room. 
Sitting in the back, as far out of the way as they could situate themselves, were Tom Groverton and Dr. Margaret. They were holding hands, which Axel thought especially fascinating. He tapped TV Frog and pointed to them. 
“Look at that!” he whispered. “I’ll bet they’re learning how to make eggs too!” 
He kept staring at the humans until he heard a kind of chiming sound coming from Rotomotoman. A disk-shaped part at the top of his head slid away and up from the cavity rose a flashing, rotating red light—just as Axel had designed it. 
A word flashed on Rotomotoman’s display screen: “Ready!” 
The little drawer opened. 
The quiet sighs of awe and pent up relief from everyone gathered around sounded a little like a low, deep chord from some great church organ. 
“Come on! Let’s get a closer look!” Axel reached over to tap TV Frog again, but there was no one at his side now. 
TV Frog was gone. 
“Hey!” 
Axel wanted to go look for him, but his curiosity about the egg proved the greater draw. Axel crept up to the incubator drawer and told himself he’d find TV Frog later. 
He gently pushed through the thick crowd of saurs. Charlie grouched at him until Rosie reminded him that it was Axel who was responsible for Rotomotoman. They let him through, and Axel climbed up on Hubert’s back, where he could easily see into the drawer. 
The first few hairline cracks had already appeared on the surface of the shivering egg. A piece of the shell dropped away and from that breach popped a little pink head at the end of long neck. 
No one looked more surprised than Rotomotoman, whose huge disk-eyes implausibly seemed to grow larger at the sight. 
The tiny hatchling’s eyes were shut at first, but its mouth was open and it made a little sound, a “Gack!” like a clearing of its throat. 
Diogenes, who in all his years at the house had never been heard to utter more than a few words, turned to Hetman’s bed and whispered, “Did you hear?” 
Hetman nodded. “Thank you, that I lived long enough to hear it.” 
Then he (or she) opened his (or her) eyes. 
The small, black, glistening orbs seemed instantly focused. The hatchling looked over the top of the drawer and seemed to see everyone and everything. 
Bronte bent down and caressed the little creature with her snout, then tapped away another piece of the shell to free it more. 
“It’s hard to say,” Doc looked at the hatchling, “since he’s without precedent, as far as we know, but he looks like a healthy little fellow to me.” 
“Little fellow?” Agnes snapped. “Can’t you see it’s obviously female? Obviously intelligent? Obviously smarter than any carnosaur could ever hope to be?” 
“Don’t start,” said Kara. “It’s not the time to fight.” 
“What will happen now?” Bronte asked Kara. “Will she grow? Will she change and mature? Will she learn to do all the things we do?” 
“Who knows?” said Kara. “We’ll learn as we go along.” 

“It won’t stay a secret for long,” said Charlie, rubbing his nasal horn against the floor. “Those humans in the big car know more than they’re saying. They wouldn’t have taken Axel’s story so seriously if they didn’t.” 
“That they figure it out isn’t what matters,” Agnes said. “It’s what they’ll do when they know.” 
“Which we can’t predict,” said Preston, smiling at the little pink creature in the incubator drawer. “And this isn’t the time to try.” 
All this time Axel, balanced on Hubert’s back, kept trying to get the hatchling’s attention, waving excitedly with one forepaw while holding to Hubert’s neck with the other. 
“Hiya! Hey! Up here! Hey! Hiya!” 
The tiny pink sauropod looked up at Axel. 
“Gack!” 
“Hiya Gack! I’m Axel!” 
“That’s not her name!” Agnes waved her tail. “Moron!” 
Kara nudged her and shook her head. “We’ll sort it out later.” 
When Axel climbed down, Preston put his forepaw on his head and said, “We need to thank you. You—and Reggie.” 
Axel looked up at Preston. “Don’t forget Rotomotoman!” 
“Yes, Rotomotoman too.” 
Rotomotoman stared down and saluted the hatchling, the red light on his head still rotating, as the word “Gack” flashed on his display screen. 
Axel looked around the sleep room and noticed that Sluggo was up on the box seat under the window, looking out. 
“Hey!” Axel hopped up and joined him. It was his favorite spot, after all. “Whatya doing up here?” 
“I—I just wanted to look up at the stars. I don’t know why. The egg—and everything—I feel scared and I don’t know why. Or I do—but I’m still scared. I just needed to look up at the sky and see the stars.” 
“Me too.” Axel put his forepaws up against the glass. “The moon and the planets and the stars and the galaxies are all spinning through space! And we’re spinning through space too! It’s a fact!” 
“When I look up at the stars,” Sluggo said, “I feel—I don’t know—I feel—“ 
“As big as the universe!” Axel said. 
“Yes. That’s it. As big as the universe.” 
“It’s a good night for looking,” Axel gazed at the moon, his mouth wide open. “It’s the biggest, best universe in the whole world!” 
Agnes might have disputed him, and if not there were many others who would, but it wasn’t in Sluggo to argue. He had only one universe to judge from, just as he had only one egg to judge from, but the both of them in their different ways seemed pretty remarkable. 
And so, in an old house at the edge of the woods, far from the nearest megalopolis, Axel and Sluggo looked out from the window of the sleep room, up at the stars. 
“Look at that!” Axel pointed to a luminous streak, razor thin, cutting a diagonal line across the night sky. 
“A shooting star!” Axel nudged Sluggo. “Do you see it?” 
“Yes,” Sluggo answered. 
The shooting star was there for a few seconds, then disappeared. 
“Wasn’t that neat?” Axel said. 
“Yes, but—“ Sluggo looked over at Axel, then out the window again. 
“What?” 
“Aren’t shooting stars supposed to shoot down? That one was going up!” 
“Heyyyy!” Axel rubbed the spot just under his chin. “That’s right!” 
The two of them kept looking out at the sky—the waiting universe before them and the new world behind, as good as any and better than most—but that was the only upward-shooting star they saw that night.