home his wife was waiting for him. "Why did you take
so long, Wendell. I was worried sick. The radio says anti-socials are
turning wild servos loose. How could human beings do such a thing?"

"I was there. I saw it all happen." He frowned. "The crowd was so
dense I couldn't get away."

"But what happened? The way the news was broadcast I couldn't
understand anything."

He described the situation in great detail and awaited Marie's
reaction. It was even more encouraging than he had hoped for. "I
understand less than before! How could anything reactivate that
rubble? They put everything over five years old into the piles, and
the stuff's supposed to be decrepit already. You'd almost think we
were destroying wealth before its time, because if those disabled
mechanisms reactivate--" She came to a dead halt. "That's madness! Oh,
I wish High Holy Day were here already so I could get back to work and
stop this empty _thinking_!"

Her honest face was more painfully distorted than he had ever seen it
before, even during the universal pre-Rite doldrums. "Only a few more
days to go," he consoled. "Don't worry, honey. Everything's going to
be all right. Now I'd like to be alone in the study for a while. I've
been through an exhausting time."

"Aren't you going to eat?"

The last word triggered the entry of Eric, the domestic robot, pushing
the dinner cart ahead of him. "No food to-night," Hart insisted. The
shining metal head nodded its assent and the cart was wheeled out.

"That's not a very humane thing to do," she scolded. "Eric's not going
to be serving many more meals--"

"Good grief, Marie, just leave me alone for a while, will you?" He
slammed the study door shut, warning himself to display less
nervousness in the future as he listened to her pacing outside. Then
she went away.

The projector gave him a good-sized wall image to consider. He spent
most of the night calculating where he could place tiny
self-activators in the "obsolescent" robots that were to be donated by
his plant. Then he set up the instruction tapes to make the miniature
contacts. Production then would be a simple job, only taking a few
minutes, and during a working day there were always many periods
longer than that when he was alone on the production floor.

But thinking the matter out without computers was much more difficult.
Human beings ordinarily filled their time on a lower abstracting
level.

When he unlocked the study door in the m