I switched it off, muttering under my breath. How long, I wondered,
had that broadcast been going on. Then I thought of Rob O. He'd left
my house before dawn, obviously some time between four and seven. And
I remembered that he liked to listen to the radio while I slept.

* * * * *

My Morrison 5's were the ring-leaders, of course. They were the only
ones with the brains for the job. But what a good job they had done
indoctrinating the others. A household Rob, for instance, was built to
obey his master. "Listen to your radio and not to the flesh men." It
was excellent robot psychology.

More reports kept coming in. Some we heard over the radio, others from
people who flew in and out of the city. Apparently the robots did not
object to occasional flights, but the air bus was not allowed to run,
not even with a human driver. A mass exodus from the city was not to
be permitted.

"They'll starve to death," Jack cried.

The Chief shook his head. "No," he said. "They're encouraging the
farmers to fly in and out with produce, and the farmers are doing it,
too. They're getting wonderful prices."

By noon the situation had calmed down quite a bit. The androids
obviously didn't mean to hurt anyone; it was just some sort of
disagreement between them and the scientists; it wasn't up to the
inhabitants of the city to figure out a solution to the problem. They
merely sat back and blamed me for allowing my robots to get out of
hand and lead their own servants astray. It would be settled; this
type of thing always was. So said the people of the city. They came
out of their houses now. They had to. Without the robots they were
forced to do their own marketing, their own cooking, their own
errands. For the first time in years, human beings ran the street cars
and the freight elevators. For the first time in a generation human
beings did manual labor such as unloading produce trucks. They didn't
like it, of course. They kept telling the police to do something. If I
had been in the city they would have undoubtedly wanted to lynch me.

I didn't go back to the city that day. I sat in my office listening to
the radio and keeping track of the spread of the strike. My men
thought I'd gone crazy; maybe I had. But I had a hunch, and I meant to
play it.

The farm robots had all fled to the city. The highway repair robots
had simply disappeared. In Egarton, a village about fifteen miles from
the city, an o