"I don't like it," said Liam loudly, frowning.  His hands were on his hips, but his facial expression looked as if he were ready to start swinging his fists.

Now, all Martians who knew Liam were aware that this was an extremely uncommon event.  When someone as typically calm, quiet, and soft-spoken as Liam looks angry, it carries all the more weight because it is so unusual.  Therefore, those Martians present when the crop-harvesting robots were brought into Building 3, reacted to Liam's statement of disapproval by freezing, wide-eyed, and looking worried.

The Earthlings tasked with setting up the robots in Building 3, however, heard someone who they didn't really know, saying they didn't like it, and aside from thinking that this person they didn't know was acting somewhat rudely, otherwise carried on about their business.

"What's going on?" asked Olivia, who had just arrived (Harper had run to get her from another building).

"They're putting in harvester robots, in every dome," said Liam, whispering but with a vehemence that made it hard for anyone nearby to pretend they couldn't hear.

"Every dome?" asked Olivia.  "I thought we were going to test them out in one dome first?"

"Helene said we need to speed up the schedule," said Jacob.  "We double-checked them in simulations at the spaceship, to make sure they work."

"Double-checking in simulations is not the same as testing them out in one dome first," said Liam.  "It's the entire Colony's food supply.  You're experimenting with the entire Colony's food supply."

Jacob paused, uncertain.  He was not the sort to normally worry too much about other people's emotional state (not least because he was not particularly good at telling what another person's emotional state was).  But, unlike the other Earthlings in Building 3, he did already have some familiarity with Liam's personality, and he could tell that this was not a normal conversation; Liam was normally calm and quiet, almost to a fault. 

"Perhaps you should talk to Helene about it?" Jacob said, finally.

"What is the issue?" asked Helene, who had just walked in at that moment.

There was a long pause, and all present (Earthling and Martian alike) were silent.

"Liam has some concerns about the harvester robots," said Olivia.

"They were approved by Command months ago," said Helene, in a peremptory reply.  She turned her gaze away from Olivia and Liam, to look at the readout on Jacob's tablet.

"It was supposed to be tested in one dome only, first," said Olivia.

"That detail was changed, yes, but this is not a new idea," said Helene, without looking up.  "It was always listed as a possible course of action.  These harvester robots were tested rigorously before they were put on board the ship, and they have been maintained and checked out thoroughly by experts in the last week.  There is no reason for further delay."

"They have never been used on Mars," said Liam, "and this is the entire food supply of the Colony."  His voice was stern, his eyes were narrowed, and he was clenching and unclenching his fists.  Most others could not see it, but Helene's eyes did look sidelong at him for a moment, without ever turning away from the readout on the screen of Jacob's tablet.

"The laws of physics, and biology, are the same on Earth and Mars," said Helene.

"The gravity's different, the environment is different, the air supply and the soil microbiome are different," said Olivia.  "It seems like an unnecessary risk.  Why not test them in one dome, first?"

Helene looked up at Jacob, ignoring Olivia's question.

"Jacob, at the current rate, it seems like we could get all of them into action today, am I right?"

Jacob paused, unsure whether to address Liam's concerns.  He was no good at reading a room, or understanding interpersonal conflict, but he did at least know that he was not good at it.  He decided the safest course was to simply answer the question, and ignore the obvious tension between Liam and Helene.

"That's true," he said.

"Great.  Let me know when they're all turned on," said Helene, and with that, she walked past Olivia and Liam and out of Building 3.

Helene did not see, although Jacob did, that Liam was about to punch Helene when Olivia put a gentle hand on his shoulder, and he relaxed, and closed his eyes.  There followed a long silence, from everyone present, until Helene was out of the building.

"It's our food supply, our entire food supply," whispered Liam, fiercely.  "She's gambling with the life of everyone on the planet.  Or at least, all the Martians, because she knows she can just..."

He did not finish his sentence.  There followed another, longer pause.

"Look," said Olivia, "I know it seems like an unnecessary risk, but it's not worth causing an even bigger trouble.  My dad has checked these robots out thoroughly.  I trust him."

Liam opened his eyes, sighed, and looked sheepishly over at Jacob.

"I'm sorry, Jacob, it's nothing to do with you, I trust your work.  It's just that it is a different environment from where they were tested, and the stakes are very high.  If they get confused or thrown off course by some difference between here and where they were tested, it could jeapordize our entire food supply.  I just don't see why they can't be tested in one dome first."

Jacob nodded, and shrugged.  "No offense taken.  I guess they're just trying to keep up with the schedule."

Liam grimaced, nodded, and walked out.  It occurred to Olivia for a frightening moment that he might be headed after Helene to force some kind of confrontation, but that was not really Liam's style at all.  Although, this was the first time she'd ever had to stop him from punching someone, in almost twenty years together.  She turned back towards Jacob with a dejected air.  He smiled sympathetically.

"Sometimes," he said, "it's actually better to have an incompetent boss than a competent one."

Olivia paused, frowned, unhappy at the word "boss" being used for Helene; did he mean Olivia's boss, or just his boss?  But finally she asked, "Why is that?"

"A totally incompetent boss will just ask you, perhaps in private, what they need to order you to do.  That's no problem.  You tell them, and then they will publicly order you to do it, and as long as you make sure they look good to the folks above them, everybody wins.  But, if they are competent, or even just half-competent, it's trickier.  You have to give them the idea, without letting on that you are trying to suggest anything.  Then, sometimes, they will think it over and eventually order you to do that, the thing you hinted at before.  But if there's not much time, or they have already publicly committed themselves to some other idea, you just have to suck it up and do whatever the boss says."

"Actually, sometimes the incompetent boss will forget what they ordered you to do by the next day anyway, so you can just say 'yes, sir' and ignore them and in a few days circle back to it and they will order you to do something different.  You sometimes need to do this a few times before they finally give you the right order, and once they do, then you do it immediately.  But if it's urgent, or the boss is competent enough to check back the next day to make sure you did whatever they said, there's not much you can do about it."

Olivia put her face in her hands for a moment, and looked tired.  "I don't think I could manage to do all that.  I just say whatever makes sense to do, and thinking about the other person's thinking is not something I'm good at.  If I want to know what someone else thinks, I just ask them."

Jacob smiled affectionately, and nodded.  "I'm with you; that's why I prefer working on robots.  Your mother is better with all of this than I am.  But in this case, it's pretty clear.  Helene is going to check on the robots first thing tomorrow, so I'd better get them set up and running today."

Olivia nodded.  "Well, maybe I should just help you do it then.  Do you think they will run alright?"

Jacob shrugged noncommitantly, and pointed to the tablet that he had plugged into the robot in front of him.  "Almost certainly.  But who knows for sure?  Let's just do what we can.  Can you run this diagnostic on the rest of the robots in that line there?  If there is anything not ready, hopefully we can find it before it causes a problem."

"Can I help?" asked Dorothy, who had been standing silent nearby, feeling awkward and uncertain about the whole scene.  She had never seen her father so angry before.  Working on the robots seemed like a much less stressful thing to do.

"Sure," said Jacob, "I think I showed you almost every part of the process when we were on the ship, so let's show your mom that you were paying attention."

So it was that Olivia, Dorothy, and Jacob worked for another few hours in Building 3, along with a few other Earthlings (preparing the robots) and Martians (tending to the plants that would soon be tended by robots instead).  They left feeling that they had done a good day's work, in all cases.  The Martians participated in Circle, and Singing Recipes, and then ate their evening meal together.  The Earthlings went back to Building 29, and had meals (in their quarters) composed in part of freeze dried or otherwise preserved food from Earth, and in part of Martian crops (no chicken meat, that was for special occasions, and eggs were for breakfast).  Night fell on the Martian Colony.

Thus it was that no one else saw two adolescents sneak back into Building 3, after all the adults had left.

"I don't really get what we're doing here," whispered Stanley.  "There's no one here.  You can't be an anthropologist if there's no people to observe."

Mildred frowned, and thought furiously.  While the whole "anthropologist" angle had made things easier at first, it was starting to be an obstacle.  Anyway, she had a pretty good idea that at some level Stanley knew that they were actually spying, but for some reason it was her job to reframe everything for him as "anthropology", so that his nervous conscience would calm down.  She felt like dealing with your conscience should be your own job.  She had always squared up to the task of dealing with her own conscience, and kept it well under control such that it did not get in the way of getting things done.  But Eugene was no good at sneaking around, and Dorothy was spending all her time with her grandmother Sarah when she wasn't working on the robots, so helping Stanley weasel around his nervous conscience was the task before her, and Mildred set about it without complaint.

"Nonsense," she said, in a voice slightly less soft than Stanley.  She was trying to convey that there was no need to be whispering around the robots, don't be silly, but talking in a normal volume just did not seem possible right now, and anyway spies should keep their voices down, she thought.  "The robots are artifacts brought by the people we're studying, yes?  It's totally an anthropology thing to want to see how they work.  You can learn a lot about a people by studying the tools they make."

"Do you think we can figure out how robots work by watching them?" asked Stanley.  "Wouldn't it make more sense to read the controller code?  That's what actually determines what they do."

"Don't be so sure of that," said Mildred.  "They're using hardwired control circuits.  The program that designed the hardwired control circuits might be back on Earth.  Looking at how the robots behave might be the only way for us to learn about them."

Stanley and Mildred were standing at the edge of the opening between the first dome of Building 3 (which is where Circle happened and there were not actually many plants growing) and the second dome (which had some of the harvester robots in it, as well as an abundance of carrot, pepper, and tomato plants).  Stanley had been staring, wide-eyed with what looked very much like borderline terror, at the robots, but at this statement he turned towards Mildred and narrowed his eyes.

"Where did you get that from?  You never were interested in robots before."

Stench and leakage, thought Mildred, he's getting suspicious.  But then, it occurred to her that she could actually just tell the plain truth for once, which struck her as an elegant and borderline brilliant idea, given that it was not her normal course of action.

"Well of course not, but we never had robots in Building 3 before.  I read up.  I also asked Lucas about them."

"Why Lucas?  Why not Noah?  He's usually easier to understand."

Yes, thought Mildred, but Lucas just answers the question, whereas Noah starts to wonder about why you're asking it.  She wished Stanley were more like Lucas.

"I just ran into Lucas first.  Noah seems to be busy all the time since the Earthlings showed up."

Stanley seemed satisfied with this, and turned back to look at the robots.  They were going from one tiny plant to another, dipping a small probe into the soil.  They were, Mildred had been told, checking soil humidity and temperature and nutrient levels, as well as using their cameras to record each plant's current size (in order to start tracking growth rates by comparing each night's image to the one from the night before).  They also, of course, were going to remove any unapproved plants which had somehow sprouted there.  This occasionally happened when a seed of some sort from food that came from Earth made it through a person's digestive tract, into the waste treatment plant, into "new soil", and then into actual soil in Building 3.  It wasn't common, but it did happen occasionally.  Liam made sure to save such plants, a habit he had started when a boy, but these robots were not the sort to understand serendipity.

Mildred crouched down, hoping that the robots did not have infra-red vision or super hearing or some other way to detect her even when she was under the tables, and started slowly crawling on all fours towards the nearest pair of robots.  There were two, both on one side, nearest the transparent geodesic dome "wall" (where the slope of the dome touched the ground).  Stanley followed.  They moved stealthily, and Mildred was reminded of playing hide and seek in Building 3 when she (and Stanley, and Dorothy, and Eugene, and occasionally Raymond) had been half their current age.  The tables seemed much larger then, she realized.

As she approached the end of the first (long) table which the nearest robots were working at, Mildred started to wonder what her plan was.  Now, it may seem inappropriate for her to have gotten to this point before considering this question, so a brief explanation might be in order.  Mildred did not grow up in a vacuum, developing her own personality in isolation from anyone else.  She had, for as far back as she remembered, been primarily a member of a team, the "new soil crew" (even before they had invented that name for themselves).  Eugene was boisterous energy, Stanley was a knowledgeable worrier, Dorothy was a planner, and Mildred was the spark plug, the instigator.  One could be forgiven for thinking that Eugene would have played this role, but because he was always in restless motion, he didn't particularly prompt Stanley or Dorothy into taking action, because he was always going.  Once the team was at work, building something together or tearing it apart, Eugene's energy (and physical strength, relative to the other three) was useful, but it was Mildred who provided the "go" signal, because if they had looked to Eugene for it they would have been on the go all the time, and no one but Eugene had enough energy for that.

So, typically, they would discuss what should be done, Stanley would worry about what might go wrong, the others would discuss whatever Stanley had brought up, and Dorothy would gradually assemble it all into a plan.  Then, at some point, when Mildred sensed that they had talked long enough, she would say "ok, let's do it then," and they would start.  Like the time they had made a chicken racetrack, complete with grandstands for the younger children to watch from.  Or, the time they had taken unused clothing from building 20 and stuffed them to make effigies, that they arranged into scenes in the unused apartments in Building 26, so that passersby would do a double-take.  Some of them had heads, fashioned from cloth, tape, and 3d-printed plastic masks, that looked like the adults; Noah had caused a stir by saying that the one intended to look like him, looked as ugly as the real Elijah.  Or the time they made a music video to play a birthday song for Ruth, and then surreptitiously loaded it onto her tablet so that when she got up in the morning and turned it on, she would see the new soil crew dancing and singing 'happy birthday to Ruth'.  Dorothy made the plan, to address everything that Stanley said could go wrong, Eugene provided energy (and muscle power, when that was necessary), and Mildred gave them the nudge to get started already (and keep them going when it turned out to be more work and less fun than just talking about it).

But, when you have team members missing, sometimes that is when you most realize what they were doing when they were there.  No one had ever designated Dorothy as the planner, or Mildred as the instigator, or Stanley as the worrier, or Eugene as the engine; they just had naturally fallen into those roles based on what they were good at, relative to the other three.  If they had ever formally said that Dorothy was the planner, Mildred would have realized that she needed to make sure they had a coherent plan before starting things if Dorothy wasn't there to do it, but nothing was ever so formally set up.  It just turned out that, whenever Mildred felt like the others needed a push to get going (or keep going and not give up), she gave it, and that usually worked out.  The fact that it usually worked out, because Dorothy had helped them to assemble a plan out of Stanley's worrying and Eugene and Mildred's ideas, was not a thing she had really thought about consciously, until now.  She wished Dorothy was there, because Dorothy would have had a plan.

"Hey, guys, what are you doing?" came a whisper so loud it might as well have been shouting.  Mildred did not look back, to see who it was, because if she did, she would (she knew at some level) discover that it was the member of the team she was least wanting to have show up in the middle of a stealth operation.

"Eugene, keep your voice down," whispered Stanley, much more softly.

"Ok, what are we doing?" asked Eugene, in a still-too-loud whisper.

By now, thought Mildred, surely the robots have heard us anyway, so why are we still even bothering to whisper?  If they wanted to come after us, they already know that we're here.  She felt suddenly ridiculous at being underneath the table, and with a sigh moved gracefully to the side and stood up.  The robots were less then a meter away; they continued with their work, and ignored her.

Stanley also got out from underneath the table and stood up, albeit less gracefully.

Eugene also got out from underneath the table and stood up.  Whether or not he was graceful about it is kind of a moot point, as he was not attempting to be.  More relevant, is that he did not get entirely out from underneath the table before standing up.  He was also strong enough to tip the table over on its side as he rose.

The table crashed heavily on its side with a thunderous noise, scattering seedlings and soil everywhere.  The two robots turned towards the three of them.  In fact, their programming had given them standard postures, and orientations, that they would revert to whenever an error condition was encountered.  The three Martians, however, did not know this; what they saw was that the two robots, each of them considerably larger and stronger than they were, had turned towards them abruptly after Eugene's mishap.  In the heat of the moment, it looked like a hostile posture, the moment before charging at the enemy.

The new soil crew turned and ran, and did not stop until they were all back in the residential buildings, where they swore each other to secrecy and went quickly to bed, hoping against hope that they would not be found out.