Clinton Madarian, the successor to Susan Calvin at US Robots, who has just retired, initiates a project to create a "feminine" robot, which not only has female physical characteristics but will, it is hoped, have a brain with "feminine intuition". After several failures, JN-5 (aka Jane) is produced and the company plan to use it (her) to analyse astronomical data at the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona to calculate the most likely stars in the vicinity of Earth to have habitable planets. This will allow the most effective use of the hyperspace drive to explore those stars.

Madarian and Jane go to Flagstaff but are killed and destroyed respectively in an aircrash on the way back. Desperate to know what, if anything, Jane had discovered, US Robots calls Susan Calvin in. She solves the problem using her own version of feminine intuition - a combination of careful information gathering and astute psychological reasoning. The title of the story is thus highly ironic.