th horror. "Bert, let's get going. I
don't like this--"

All of a sudden Geiger counters in the room began their deadly
conversation, a rising argument that swooped in seconds from a low
mumble to a shouting thunder-storm of sound. Gamma signals hooted, the
tip off cubes on either side of the maze entrance became red, and the
radiation tabs clipped to their wrists turned color before their eyes.

Then they were staring for what seemed like an eternity, utterly
overwhelmed by its very impossibility, at a sight they had never
imagined they might ever see: a pile servomech wheeling silently
around the last bend in the maze and straight toward them.

Sokolski had sense enough to push the red emergency button as they
fled past it.

* * * * *

The command sequence fulfilled, M-75 turned away from the repaired
board. He sensed again that disconcerting shift of orientation as he
faced the light-studded panel. Once more he was moving in quick
automatic response to the flickering lights, once more his big chest
was belching and grumbling and buzzing instantaneous un-thought
answers to the problem data flashing from the board.

But now he remained aware that he was reacting, and conscious also
that there had been times when he did not respond to the board. The
moment to moment operation of the controls occupied only a small
portion of his vast electrical innards. So, as he rolled back and
forth, flicking controls and adjusting levers, doing smoothly those
things which he could not help but do, the rest of his complex,
changing faculties were considering that fact, analyzing, comparing it
to experience and memory, always sifting, sifting. It was not too long
before he came to a shocking conclusion.

Knowing that the sounds that had set him to working on the repair
pattern had first disassociated him from the dictatorship of the
blinking lights; remembering exultantly that supreme moment of
complete freedom; shocked by its passing; remembering that its passing
like its coming, had followed a set of sounds: there was only one
possible conclusion that could be derived from all of this.

He located, in his memory banks, the phrase which had freed him from the
board, and he traced its complex chain of built-in stimulus-response down
into the heart of his circuitry. He found the unit--or more accurately, he
found its taped activating symbol--that cut him from the board.

For a moment he hesitated