*

Nobody was in sight. By itself, that was not so very odd--the
automatized factory had never had very many persons in it. But
Burckhardt remembered, from his single visit, the endless, ceaseless
busyness of the plant, the valves that opened and closed, the vats
that emptied themselves and filled themselves and stirred and cooked
and chemically tasted the bubbling liquids they held inside
themselves. The plant was never populated, but it was never still.

Only--now it _was_ still. Except for the distant sounds, there was no
breath of life in it. The captive electronic minds were sending out no
commands; the coils and relays were at rest.

Burckhardt said, "Come on." Swanson reluctantly followed him through
the tangled aisles of stainless steel columns and tanks.

They walked as though they were in the presence of the dead. In a way,
they were, for what were the automatons that once had run the factory,
if not corpses? The machines were controlled by computers that were
really not computers at all, but the electronic analogues of living
brains. And if they were turned off, were they not dead? For each had
once been a human mind.

Take a master petroleum chemist, infinitely skilled in the separation
of crude oil into its fractions. Strap him down, probe into his brain
with searching electronic needles. The machine scans the patterns of
the mind, translates what it sees into charts and sine waves. Impress
these same waves on a robot computer and you have your chemist. Or a
thousand copies of your chemist, if you wish, with all of his
knowledge and skill, and no human limitations at all.

Put a dozen copies of him into a plant and they will run it all,
twenty-four hours a day, seven days of every week, never tiring, never
overlooking anything, never forgetting....

Swanson stepped up closer to Burckhardt. "I'm scared," he said.

They were across the room now and the sounds were louder. They were
not machine sounds, but voices; Burckhardt moved cautiously up to a
door and dared to peer around it.

It was a smaller room, lined with television screens, each one--a
dozen or more, at least--with a man or woman sitting before it,
staring into the screen and dictating notes into a recorder. The
viewers dialed from scene to scene; no two screens ever showed the
same picture.

The pictures seemed to have little in common. One was a store, where a
girl dressed like April Horn was demonstrating home freezers. One was
a s