Primus is still reading when Helena goes to the window. She calls him over: the sun is rising. He thinks the book may contain the secret of life and may be more important than anything else. She does not understand its diagrams and, for the moment, does not want to. She wants him to see what she is seeing before the moment is gone. Eventually he leaves the table and joins her.

They entered holding hands. The old man in the laboratory was asleep; books, test tubes, and a microscope surrounded him. Primus warned Helena not to touch things. In the epilogue of Karel Čapek's R.U.R., these two are manufactured robots with bodies that can suffer and deteriorate. The people who made them are gone, and the knowledge needed to make more has been lost.

The sleeper, Alquist, is trying to recover a skill he never possessed. He was a builder, not the keeper of the formula. The burden of preserving life has fallen on him nevertheless. He scarcely allows himself rest. The book that holds Primus's attention belongs to this desperate effort to discover how anything might continue.

Helena is the robot of the epilogue, not the human woman with the same name who appeared earlier. She is experiencing sensations she cannot readily explain and worries that she may be dying. Primus tells her about a dream in which they spoke an unfamiliar language. She describes a place she has found: a cottage, an overgrown garden, dogs and puppies. A dog licked her hand. She wants Primus to come and hold the puppies and spend a day there with her.

These things are near the laboratory and yet belong to another kind of day. Alquist fears that life has no future. The two robots already have a day they want to share. Their words are inadequate to their feelings, and they still ask what they are for. When Primus calls Helena beautiful, she asks what use beauty has. Then she notices his untidy hair and smooths it, leaving her hand on his head.

The question of usefulness has not been answered. A relation is taking shape anyway. He can tell her how she appears to him; she can recognise that touching him feels different from touching someone else. The play gives them these hesitant discoveries before anyone sets a test. Their ordinary possibilities do not arrive as rewards for later nobility.

Helena laughs, and Alquist wakes. For a moment he thinks human beings have returned. He asks their names and identities, notices Helena's shyness, and moves to examine her. Primus steps forward and asks him not to frighten her. Alquist connects the laughter, embarrassment, and protectiveness. He decides to test further and orders Primus to take Helena into the dissecting room.

The command changes her position abruptly. A moment before, she was someone who could invite Primus away from a book. Now she is to be delivered by him into a room whose purpose threatens her life. Their developing intimacy has become interesting to an observer, and that interest exposes them to danger.

The order is especially disturbing because Alquist has himself been afraid of that room. Earlier, robot representatives pressed him to recover the lost knowledge, first through threats and then through promises. He repeatedly told them he did not know how. They demanded experiments on living robots. His hands shook; he understood the work as killing. After entering the adjoining room, he emerged in distress, unable to continue.

He is not an untroubled experimenter who has never felt what compulsion means. The fear of extinction has weighed on him, and his excitement at waking comes out of prolonged despair. But having endured pressure does not prevent him from passing it on when hope appears. When Primus objects, he asks whether someone else should carry out the order.

Primus first threatens to kill him. Alquist asks what future would remain if he were dead, bringing the wider emergency into their confrontation. Primus then proposes a substitution. He and Helena were manufactured on the same day. His body could serve the experiment instead. From the experimenter's perspective, that might meet the need. From his own, it would at least keep Helena out of the room.

The offer expresses real care. It also leaves the requirement intact: someone must be taken, and only the identity has changed. Helena has not been asked whether safety bought by losing him is a future she can accept. The person Primus hopes to preserve is more than a body left outside. She too has begun to imagine a shared day.

Alquist accepts the substitution. Helena cries. He notices that she can shed tears and asks what one Primus can matter among so many robots. The question sits strangely beside his wish to save life. A calculation can treat a single death as the price of preserving countless others. For Helena, the person who has just told her about his dream has no available replacement.

She offers herself instead and moves towards the room. Primus stops her. The two take turns drawing the danger onto themselves, allowing the proposed experiment to continue through successive substitutions. Watching only for the beauty of sacrifice would align us with the observer awaiting proof. Helena's desperation, including a threat against her own life, shows how little room remains for a free answer.

Then Primus changes what he says. He no longer asks to go in her place. He refuses to allow either of them to be killed. Her objection has done more than strengthen his determination to sacrifice himself: it has altered his response. Each wants the other to live, and their wishes finally meet without requiring them to nominate a victim.

Asked why, he says that they belong to each other. Here the words resist someone's removal as experimental material. They do not require Helena to submit to him. His action has just changed because of hers. Their relation has become an answer to the test, rather than something whose permission to continue awaits its results.

Alquist's large problem now faces a smaller future it cannot easily dismiss. He wants life to survive. They want the life they have begun to share. Their refusal has not restored the formula or solved the deterioration of the other robots. It has made visible a cost that was about to be imposed without their agreement.

He lets them go. After their departure, he calls them Adam and Eve. In the English version followed here, that is where the curtain falls. No children are born onstage, and no capacity to reproduce has been demonstrated. The names express an old man's renewed hope. They do not supply a report from the future.

Love has moved Alquist to release them. It should not thereby become an entrance examination for the right to live. A creature without a partner, without this language of attachment, or without a readiness to offer itself in another's place would not become suitable material by default. Nor does the happy release justify the threat that preceded it. Helena's hand was already resting on Primus's hair before Alquist woke.

The garden remains somewhere Helena has described, not a destination the play shows them reaching. They leave the room together instead of passing through the door assigned to one of them. The book's secret is still unread. Outside, the morning can now be part of a day they mean to share, rather than time waiting to be used in somebody else's next experiment.