"Damn them all, Charlie!" he growled. "Stupid, thick-headed, backward fools!" "Easy, Scharb," I said. "The government, and the considerable majority of saner people, are trying to restore order." It was true. Police forces were everywhere. Our president pleaded for calm. A cache of nuclear munitions was discovered and put under guard. It might even have belonged to androids. Nobody knew. It was in an old Chicago cellar. But of one thing we were sure--that there had to be many other caches of hellstuff, undiscovered and available to the hotheads and jerks, hidden in caves and woods and various other places, throughout the world. One thing wasn't done. Armand Cope, and other rabble-rousers like him, were not put under restraint. It could have been accomplished within the emergency provisions of democracy, though a willful connection between the speeches that they had made and the blowup of the lab, could not be proven. Maybe the government was afraid to restrain them--afraid that their arrest would make them martyrs--and that this martyrdom would trigger the bombshell in the taut nerves and frightened minds of their followers. This belief may well have been the truth. IX Jan and I went to Doc's house, inside a police cordon, for a discussion. We risked radiation by bringing Scharber along. We wanted to make sure that he wouldn't do anything vindictive, which might well have happened had we left him by himself. Irma met us at the door. "Shane almost wishes now that the android process had remained just the property of the micro-Xians," she said. "That's how bad matters seem to him at this point." Doc jumped to his feet as we entered his study. "Cope means to speak again tonight," he announced. "Cope, and about a hundred others of his crowd, from scattered radio and television stations. We know about what they'll say, more or less. Yeah--'Get rid of these mechanical demons while there are still less than thirty-thousand of them. Before it's too late! Kill the serpent! Return to simplicity! Do you know that even their radioactive metabolism is poisonous to us?'" Doc paused and groaned. "The latter isn't even true," he went on. "At least not while an android is on Earth, breathing oxygen and living by chemical energy. Then the radiation of a subatomic tissue-process is suppressed almost to zero. But that's the way most of Cope's arguments go--they leap thinly to conclusions, without thinking matters out to any depth. But many people don't want to think deeply, or else they're too frightened. And tonight I suspect that Cope and his bunch will give the order to attack. Charlie, what are we going to do?"