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It would have been different if the robots' messages had reached Grismet; he would not have had to justify himself then. But they had not, and he could not find a way to tell this cold old man of what he had learned about the robots and their unity with men. "I did it because it was the only decent thing to do." "I see," the chief said. "You did it because you have a heart."
He was completely immobile, and worst of all, he knew that above his head for six miles lay the great Grismet Ocean, with the blue mud slowly settling down encasing the cement in a stony stratum that would last till the planet broke apart. The cab driver gasped: "What the hell." His throat was so dry he could scarcely talk.
When the thoughts stopped coming in, the butcher was the first to come out of the trancelike state. "Boy," he said, "that's sure some way of sending messages. Sure beats the teledepths." The housewife snatched her meat off the counter. "Is that all you think of," she demanded angrily. "That's a terrible thing that those barbarians on Grismet are doing to those ... those people.
Obediently, the seventeen were still, and he groped some more and found another of his kind deep in an ice cave in the polar regions of Grismet. "How goes it?" he asked. The figure on Grismet lay stretched out at full length on the blue ice, his eyes closed. He answered without moving: "They discovered my radiation about an hour ago. Pretty soon, they'll start blasting through the ice."
The one on Earth felt the chill despair of his comrade and let go. He groped about again until he found the last one, the only other one left. He was squatting in the cellar of a warehouse in the main city of Grismet. "Have they picked up your trail yet?" he asked. "No," answered the one in the cellar. "They won't for a while. I've scattered depots of radiation all through the town.
Message: You are hereby notified that the committee by a vote of 17-0 has decided to rescind its order of January 18, 2214, directing the disposal of the permallium robots of Grismet. Instead, the committee directs that you remove from their confinement all the robots and put them in some safe place where they will be afforded reasonable and humane treatment.
Since his capture, his fellows on Grismet had been silent with despair, but as he knelt to close the circuit, their minds flooded in on him and he realized with a tremendous horror that there were now nineteen, that all except he had been bound and fixed in their eternal cement prisons. "We are going to have our chance," he told them. "We won't have much time, but we will have our chance."
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