wer. Something they hadn't
checked, that had been left on. There was just enough current-leakage
from the units in the robots to keep the receptors active for forty
years. The supervisor-robots had gone active, and they had activated
the rest. Once on, cutting the current from the control tower wouldn't
turn them off again.

"Put the switch in again, Anse; the damage is done and you won't make
it any worse."

When the screens came on, he looked around from one to another. The
two supervisors, big ovoid things like the small round ones they had
used in repairing the power reactors the first day, were circling
aimlessly near the roof, one clockwise and the other counterclockwise,
dodging obstructions and getting politely out of each other's way. At
lower altitude, a dozen assorted worker-robots were moving about, and
more were emerging from cells at the end of the building. Sweepers,
with rotary brooms and rakes, crablike all-purpose handling robots, a
couple of vacuum-cleaning robots, each with a flexible funnel-tipped
proboscis and a bulging dust-sack. One tiling, a sort of special job
designed to get into otherwise inaccessible places, had a twenty-foot,
many-jointed, claw-tipped arm in front. It passed by and slightly over
the tower, saw Clyde Nichols, and swooped toward him. With a howl,
Nichols dived under one of the large machines between two production
lines. A pistol went off a couple of times. That would be Jerry Rivas.
Nobody else bothered with a gun on Koshchei, but he carried one as
some people carry umbrellas, whether he expected to need it or not and
because he would feel lost without it.

That he took in at one glance. Then he was looking at the control
panels. The switches and buttons were all marked for machine-control
in different steps of power-unit production. That was all for the big
stuff, powered centrally. There weren't any controls tor lifters or
conveyers or other mobile equipment. Evidently they were handled out
in the shop, from mobile control-vehicles. He did find, on the
communication-screen panel, a lot of things that had been left on. He
snapped them off, one after another, snapping them on when a screen
went dark. There were fifteen or twenty robots, some rather large, in
the air or moving on the floor by now.

"We can't do anything here," he told Anse. "These are the
shop-cleaning robots. They were the last things used here when the
place closed down, and the two supervisors were pr