transistors."

Their sporadic conversation lapsed; it was exacting work and they could remain for only a limited time under that lethal radiation. Then, almost sadly, Gaines said, "Looks like the end of the road for M-75."

"Oh?" Sokolski came over beside him and peered through the violet haze of his viewing glass. "He's an old timer."

Gaines slid an instrument back into the pouch of his suit, and patted the robot's rump. "Yep, I'd say that capacitor was good for about another thirty-six hours. It's really overloading." He straightened. "You done with the board?"

"Yeah. Let's get outta here." He looked at his tab. "Time's about up anyway. We'll call a demolition unit for your pal here, and then rig up a service pattern so one of his buddies can repair the board."

They moved toward the door.

-75 watched the two men leave and deep inside him something shifted. The heavy door closed with a loud thud, the sound registered on his aural perceptors and was fed into his analyzer. Ordinarily it would have been discharged as irrelevant data, but cognizance had wrought certain subtle changes in the complex mechanism that was M-75.

A yellow light blinked on the control panel, and in response he moved to the board and manipulated handles marked, DAMPER 19, DAMPER 20.

Even as he moved he lapsed again into brooding.

The men had come into the room, clumsy, uncertain creatures, and one of them had done things, first to the other two robots and then to him. When whatever it was had been done to him, the blackness had come again, and when it had gone the men were leaving the room.

While the one had hovered over the other two robots, he had watched the other work with the master control panel. He saw that the other servomechs remained unmoving while they were being tampered with. All of this was data, important new data.

"M-11 will proceed as follows," came the sound from nowhere. M-75 stopped ruminating and listened.

There was a further flood of sounds.

Abruptly he sensed a heightening of tension within himself as one of the other servos swung away from its portion of the panel. The throbbing, hungry segment of his analyzer that awareness had severed from the fixed function circuits noted, from its aloof vantage point, that he now responded to more signals than before, to commands whose sources lay in what had been the section of the board attended by the other one.

The tension grew within him and became a mounting, rasping frenzy—a battery overcharging, an overloading fuse, a generator growing hot beyond its capacity. There began to grow within him a sensation of too much to be done in too little time.

He became frantic, his reactions were too fast! He rolled from end to middle of the board, now back-tracking, now spinning on his single wheel, turning uncertainly from one side to the other, jerking and gyrating. The conscious segment of him, remaining detached from those baser automatic functions, began to know what a man would have called fear—fear, simply, of not being able to do what must be done.

The fear became an overpowering, blinding thing and he felt himself slipping, slipping back into that awful smothering blackness out of which he had so lately emerged. Perhaps, for just a fragment of a second, his awareness may have flickered completely out, consciousness nearly dying in the crushing embrace of that frustrated electronic subconscious.

Abruptly, then, the voice came again, and he struggled to file for future reference sound patterns which, although meaningless to him, his selector circuits no longer disregarded. "Bert, M-75 can't manage half the board in his condition. Better put him on the repairs."

"Yeah. Hadn't thought about that." Sokolski cleared his throat. "M-11 will return to standard function."

M-11 spun