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"The shape doesn't tell me anything - and platinum would be no better than
iron in rhodomagnetic equipment. So it couldn't be anything rhodomagnetic."
"But it's something bad." He felt her small hand trembling, and then tugging
him toward that weathered aluminum door. "Mr. White says we must hurry, now.
Mr. Overstreet can see the shape of trouble waiting for us - only he can't
tell quite what it is, with that always getting in the way."
She nodded fearfully at the far red dome, as he followed her toward the narrow
metal door. Oddly, in this world without men, it had a knob shaped to fit a
human hand, which yielded stiffly when he tried it. A short hallway, the walls
glowing faintly with a gray radiant paint, let them into the old room where
the first humanoid was made.
"Wait." He felt her small hand tighten. "Mr. White says wait," she breathed.
"Mr. Overstreet is watching the sections we must change, and he can see one of
the black machines working near it now. We must stay out here till it goes
away."
Waiting, taut and almost ill with the stress of hope and dread, Forester
looked wanderingly around this scene of old Mansfield's monstrous blunder. The
cold dull radiance of the paint fell on a scarred wooden desk and a worn
swivel chair, on a dusty drafting table with a tall stool pushed against it,
on rough shelves filled with technical books in faded bindings, on cluttered
benches and rusting tools. A few moldering blankets were still folded on a cot
where he must have slept, and a little table rudely made of packing crates was
still stacked with soiled dishes and rusted cans and a faded carton which must
have held some cereal - as if he had interrupted his disastrous creation only
reluctantly, to snatch the simplest essentials of life. The room had a dry
stale odor of years and slow decay, and a comfortable disorder the tidy
humanoids would never have allowed. Touched and saddened by all that evidence
of Mansfield's austere innocence, Forester turned slowly back to watch the
inner door, Jane Carter's anxious hand cold and tiny in his own.
"First we must find those two sections - number four and number five." His
mind was rehearsing the steps they must take to undo that unintended crime.
"You must keep watch while I unhook them, and then bring me the new sections
from the cave. I'll hook them in - and you must stop any humanoid that finds
us."
Listening, she nodded. That would take them no more than another five minutes
- to amend the Prime Directive with a bill of human rights, and free many
thousand worlds from a suffocating kindness. Unless men blundered again. His
heart began to thump as Jane Carter tightened her icy fingers in his hand,
nodding silently at the inner door.
That door also had a common knob, and no concealed relay. He opened it
cautiously - to close it very quickly. For he had seen the grid. Its limitless
billions of tiny palladium relays, the cells of the mechanical brain, were all
linked with the rhodomagnetic synapses in sections like the two he had built.
The sections were arranged in long panels, all connected with a coiling jungle
of branching wave-guide tubes of white palladium, the panels mounted in a
skeleton of massive columns and girders that seemed to have no end.
The humanoids required no light, and most of that enormous space inside the
tower was dark. On this original level, however, which Warren Mansfield
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himself had designed and begun, the panel faces and the narrow inspection
walks before them were finished with a gray- glowing paint, whose dim radiance
shone far into the gloom, above and beyond and below. Rooms to hold the
precise mind and unerring memory of all the far-scattered moving units, the
panels of the grid made endless shadowy avenues, rising level upon level as
far as he could see, and falling away, level beneath unending level, into the
chasm of whispering dark.
"What's wrong?" Jane breathed fearfully.
It was the humanoids, the busy limbs of that eternal brain. He had seen scores
of the tiny- seeming mechanicals moving with their swift, efficient grace
about the web of narrow walks strung through the dim abyss between the tiers
of panels. The nearest one, poised on a thin footway not fifty yards distant,
had been facing toward him, and terror of its bright steel eyes had stricken
him. He leaned weakly against the closed door, speechless.
"But it didn't see you, Dr. Forester," Jane whispered through her own pale
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