ock, when a thousand people suddenly
tried to run. A score of people were trampled under foot. Two or three
of the Robots ran into that next block--ran impervious to the many
shots which now were fired at them. From what was described as slots
in the sides of their iron bodies they drew swords--long, dark,
burnished blades. They ran, and at each fallen human body they made a
single stroke of decapitation, or, more generally, cut the body in
half.

The Robots did not attack the fire engines. Emboldened by this,
firemen connected a hose and pumped a huge jet of water toward the
Tugh house. The Robots then rushed it. One huge mechanism--some said
it was twelve feet tall--ran heedlessly into the firemen's
high-pressure stream, toppled backward from the force of the water and
very strangely lay still. Killed? Rather, out of order: deranged: it
was not human, to be killed. But it lay motionless, with the fire hose
playing upon it. Then abruptly there was an explosion. The fallen
Robot, with a deafening report and a puff of green flame, burst into
flying metallic fragments like shrapnel. Nearby windows were broken
from the violent explosion, and pieces of the flying metal were hurled
a hundred feet or more. One huge chunk, evidently a plate of the
thing's body, struck into the crowd two blocks away, and felled
several people.

At this smashing of one of the mechanisms, its brother Robots went for
the first time into aggressive action. A hundred or more were pouring
now from the vacant house of the absent Tugh....

* * * * *

The alarm by ten o'clock had spread throughout the entire city. Police
reserves were called out, and by midnight soldiers were being
mobilized. Panics were starting everywhere. Millions of people crowded
in on small Manhattan Island, in the heart of which was this strange
enemy.

Panics.... Yet human nature is very strange. Thousands of people
started to leave Manhattan, but there were other thousands during that
first skirmish who did their best to try and get to the neighborhood
of Patton Place to see what was going on. They added greatly to the
confusion. Traffic soon was stalled everywhere. Traffic officers,
confused, frightened by the news which was bubbled at them from every
side, gave wrong orders; accidents began to occur. And then, out of
the growing confusion, came tangles, until, like a dammed stream, all
the city mid-section was paralyzed. Vehicles were aba