None of them moved. They remained there, pointing at nothing. The electrodes at the bases of their necks reflecting the molten glow from the wrecked Master Machine. I relaxed. I rubbed the tender skin around the dummy electrodes set in my neck. It was finally over. Then a shadow moved against the wall where there should have been no movement. It lengthened and took on the shapely form of the redheaded Meta. Only now her eyes were no longer dead and expressionless. They were alive with feeling. I said, "So you are the other one. I should have guessed when you ran into the building ahead of me. But I was too busy thinking of those guards and of Chambers." She nodded. Her lips relaxed into a smile. _Two from four leaves two! But we had accomplished our mission. And outside the building, in Washington, London, New York--in every Earth city--figures on the streets, in office buildings, and at home had become motionless, poised like mechanical toys with their springs run down. Housewives, cab drivers, copter pilots, passengers, shoppers, policemen, government workers had ceased to move, had stopped functioning with the destruction of the Master Machine._ The redhead said, "It's really over, isn't it? They're stopped." She looked at the still figures, the dummy electrodes in her neck quivering in a shiver. "They can't kill any more?" I said, "It's over." "They can't destroy or move?" "Without the Master Machine, they have no power supply--nothing. And they can't kill or destroy." She walked over to look at the figures. "What went wrong? What happened to them?" I shrugged. "You can't blame them any more than you can blame a boiler that explodes or a dam that breaks. It was the human race itself that was responsible for what happened. We became lazy, careless. We built too many time saving gimmicks to do too many jobs for us." * * * * * "But the machines were designed to help us," she said. "To make life better and more pleasant." "At the beginning," I agreed, "but we didn't know where to stop. We started with labor-saving devices. We replaced ourselves in factories, offices, restaurants, stores. Still it wasn't enough. We designed robots to serve as traffic policemen, to drive cars, and to handle thinking tasks. Then we designed humanoid robots, mechanical replicas of man and woman, controlled by the computing sections of the Master Machine, activated by its power supply, able to move and talk and think. We used them as servants. We had the means to replace ourselves completely--everywhere." "Why did they turn on the human race?" she asked. I pointed to the smoldering wreck of the Master Machine in the center of the room. "Perhaps there was a weak circuit, or a tape was garbled, or a relay didn't close properly. The scientific colony on the Moon helped some of us to escape. The rest of mankind was destroyed by the robots--systematically and ruthlessly."