tain 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 meanin