A painting that alters itself, or is altered, while the artist sleeps. A computer that may be God and quacks like a duck. A basketball forward who disappears in the middle of a drive, then reappears. An evangelist who screams himself out of the moment as his wife and childrean are blown to smithereens by a bomb dropped from a balloon.The evangelist's former wife who becomes Axis Sally. A cult of computer programmers. In this robust fiction debut, Peter Plagens, the art critic for Newsweek magazine and himself a painter, has written a novel about time, perception, the nature of reality, and characters who transform themselves or are transformed as the painting is transformed. In theme and technique, Time for Robo invotes comparison with Gravity's Rainbow and Slaughterhouse Five.