masse the automatons did not know enough to cope with the situation confronting them. Therefore they would
build ten “Thinkers”-highly specialized cerebral mechanisms, each slightly different in tune and therefore
collectively able to cover the entire sphere of thought. The ten machines were built promptly, took counsel with
each other briefly” and the First Thinker addressed all Robotdom:
“Humanity brought us, the highest possible form of life, into existence. For a time we were dependent upon them.
They then became a burden upon us-a slight burden, it is true, yet one which was beginning noticeably to impede
our progress. Finally they became an active menace and all but destroyed us by means of lethal vibrations.
“Humanity, being a menace to our existence, must be annihilated. Our present plans, however, are not efficient and
must be changed. You all know of the mighty space fleet which the nations of our enemies are maintaining to repel
invasion from space. Were we to make a demonstration now-were we even to reveal the fact that we are alive
here-that fleet would come to destroy us instantly.
“Therefore, it is our plan to accompany Earth’s fleet when next it goes out into space to join those of the other
Inner Planets in their war maneuvers, which they are undertaking for battle practice. Interception, alteration, and
substitution of human signals and messages will be simple matters. We shall guide Earth’s fleet, not to humanity’s
rendezvous in space, but to a destination of our own selection-the interior of the sun! Then, entirely defenseless,
the mankind of Earth shall cease to exist.
“To that end we shall sink a shaft here; and, far enough underground to be secure against detection, we shall drive a
tunnel to the field from which the space-fleet is to take its departure. We ten thinkers shall go, accompanied by
four hundred of you doers, who are to bore the way and to perform such other duties as may from time to time
arise. We shall return in due time. Our special instruments will prevent us from falling into the sun. During our
absence allow no human to live who may by any chance learn of our presence here. And do not make any offensive
move, however slight” until we return.” Efficiently, a shaft was sunk and the disintegrator corps began to drive the
long tunnel. And along that hellish thoroughfare, through its searing heat, its raging back-blast of disintegrator-gas,
the little army of robots moved steadily and relentlessly forward at an even speed of five miles per hour. On and
on” each intelligent mechanism energized by its own tight beam from the power-plant.
And through that blasting, withering inferno of frightful heat and of noxious vapor, in which no human life could
have existed for a single minute, there rolled easily along upon massive wheels a close-coupled, flat-bodied truck.
Upon this the ten thinkers constructed, as calmly undisturbed as though in the peace and quiet of a research
laboratory” a doomed and towering mechanism of coils” condensers, and fields of force-a mechanism equipped
with hundreds of universally-mounted telescope projectors.
On and on the procession moved, day after day; to pause finally beneath the field upon which Earth’s stupendous
armada lay.
The truck of thinkers moved to the fore and its occupants surveyed briefly the terrain so far above them. Then”
while the ten leaders continued working as one machine” the doers waited. Waited while the immense Terrestrial
Fleet was provisioned and manned; waited while it went through its seemingly interminable series of preliminary
maneuvers; waited with the calmly placid immobility, the utterly inhuman patience of the machine.
Finally the last inspection of the gigantic space-fleet was made. The massive air-lock doors were sealed. The field”
tortured and scarred by the raving blasts of energy that had so many times hurled upward the stupendous masses of
those towering superdreadnaughts of the void” was deserted. All was in readiness for the final take-off. Then” deep
underground” from the hundreds of telescope like projectors studding the doomed mechanism of the automatons”
there reached out invisible but potent beams of force.
Through ore, rock, and soil they sped; straight to the bodies of all the men aboard one selected vessel of the
Terrestrials. As each group of beams struck its mark one of the crew stiffened momentarily, then settled back,
apparently unchanged and unharmed. But the victim was changed and harmed, and in an awful and hideous fashion.
Every motor and sensory nerve trunk had been severed and tapped by the beams of the thinkers. Each crew mem-
ber’s organs of sense now transmitted impulses, not to his own brain, but to the mechanical brain of a thinker. It
was the thinker’s brain, not his own, that now sent out the stimuli which activated his every voluntary muscle.
Soon a pit yawned beneath the doomed ship’s bulging side. Her sealed air-locks opened, and four hundred and ten
automatons, with their controllers and other mechanisms, entered her and concealed themselves in various
pre-selected rooms.
And thus the Dresden took off with her sister-ships ostensibly and even to television inspection a unit of the
Fleet; actually that Fleet’s bitterest and most implacable foe. And in a doubly ray-proofed compartment the ten
thinkers continued their work, without rest or intermission” upon a mechanism even more astoundingly complex
than any theretofore attempted by their soulless and ultra scientific clan.
Chapter II
Hater of the Metal Men
Ferdinand Stone, physicist extraordinary, hated the robot men of metal scientically; and, if such an emotion can be
so described, dispassionately. Twenty years before this story opens-in 2991, to be exact-he had realized that the
automatons were beyond control and that in the inevitable struggle for supremacy man, weak as he then was and
unprepared, would surely lose.
Therefore, knowing that knowledge is power, he had set himself to the task of learning everything that there was to
know about the enemy of mankind. He schooled himself to think as the automatons thought; emotionlessly, coldly,
precisely. He lived as did they; with ascetic rigor. To all intents and purposes he became one of them.
Eventually he found the band of frequencies upon which they communicated” and was perhaps the only human being
ever to master their math eratico-symbolic language; but he confided in no one. He could trust no human brain
except his own to resist the prying forces of the machines. He drifted from job to position to situation and back to
job” because he had very little interest in whatever it was that he was supposed to be doing at the time-his real
attention was always fixed upon the affairs of the creatures of metal.
Stone had attained no heights at all in his chosen profession because not even the smallest of his discoveries had
been published. In fact, they were not even set down upon paper, but existed only in the abnormally intricate con-
volutions of his mighty brain. Nevertheless, his name should go down-must go down in history as one of the
greatest of Humanity’s great.
It was well after midnight when Ferdinand Stone walked unannounced into the private study of Alan Martin, finding
the hollow-eyed admiral of the Earth space-fleet fiercely at work.
“How did you get in here, past my guards?” Martin demanded sharply of his scholarly, grey-haired visitor. “Your
guards have not been harmed; I have merely caused them to fall asleep,” the physicist replied calmly, glancing at a
complex instrument upon his wrist. “Since my business with you, while highly important, is not of a nature to be
divulged to secretaries, I was compelled to adopt this method of approach. You, Admiral Martin, are the most
widely known of all the enemies of the automatons. What” if anything, have you done to guard the Fleet against
them.”
“Why, nothing, since they have all been destroyed.” “Nonsense! You should know better than that, without being
told. They merely want you to think that they have all been destroyed.”
“What? How do you know that?” Martin shouted. “Did you kill them? Or do you know who did, and how it was
done?”
“I did not,” the visitor replied, categorically. “I do know who did-a Russian named Narodny. I also know how-by
means of sonic and supersonic vibrations. I know that many of them were uninjured because I heard them
broadcasting their calls for attention after the damage was al! done. Before they made any definite arrangements,
however, they switched to tight-beam transmission-a thing I have been afraid of for years-and I have not been able
to get a trace of them since that time.”
“Do you mean to tell me that you understand their language-something that no man has ever been able even to
find?” demanded Martin.
“I do,” Stone declared. “Since I knew, however, that you would think me a liar, a crank, or a plain lunatic, I have
come prepared to offer other proofs than my unsupported word. First, you already know that many of them escaped
the atmospheric waves, because a few were killed when their reproduction shops were razed; and you certainly