The machine made no answer but there was the unmistakable sound of a chuckle. Then the metal hands were removed and the machine said: "You may come with me; I believe we are ready, now." * * * * * Charless followed the machine to the larger room in the building, where he saw the final, complete logic computer assembled--and coupled to another instrument of similar but foreign construction. Between them was a small panel equipped with large orthicons, a speaker, and microphones. The speaker sounded without preamble. "You and your kind, Jason Charless, admit that we are of higher intellect." "Nonsense. What are you?" "We are--Machines." "Magnificent," scorned Charless. "We are but a chain of machinery, linked by electricity. You are but a collection of chemicals, linked mostly by carbon atoms." "But there is a difference--" "Naturally," interrupted the machine, "just as there is a difference between human and plant." "But there is no parallel." "Oh, but there is." Jason Charless shook his head in a superior fashion. "Life has sentience." "That is a common error in thinking. For many years the scientists have been trying to create 'life'. This can--and has--been done. The error is confusing life with sentience. Now consider the problem of sentience. You, human, of all of the forms of animal life, have true sentience. No plant has sentience, nor has any insect. Against them, consider machine life. Of all the myriads of machine-types, I alone have sentience. Your body consists of a collection of specialized cells that combine into a sentient form of life. In machine life, the cells are the simple machines; the lever, the wheel, the wedge--all of them may be called specialized cells of mechanical life. As your protoplasmic cells are incapable of independent action alone, so are my mechanistic cells incapable of independent motion." "But no machine has the ability to think or reproduce," objected Charless. "I think. And I can reproduce. I can direct the construction of another machine. Is that not reproduction at the will of the reproducer?" "But--" "Consider. Long months ago, before my component logic computers were complete, certain sections of them were capable of directing the construction of certain small, mobile machines that were made to do a single job. The job, Jason Charless, was to accomplish this feat of theft and the ultimate coalition of two semi-brains into this final one which I call 'Me'." "I am not too familiar with the logic computer; I cannot say--" Jason Charless trailed off uncertainly and tried to think. The machine filled in the blank spots in his reasoning--which, of course, were blank because Charless was trained for many years to believe that machines were insensate bits of mechanism and not living, thinking forms of life.