He slept for an hour, which brought him to his regular time for arising, and awoke feeling the aftermath of a terrifying nightmare. He remembered himself in the grip of a gleaming mechanical monster, a lovely, frightened girl beside him. In his hand was some sort of pistol which shot out a futile beam at the ensnaring metal talons; he was high in the air of some strange world, which spread out below him.... Harry Vinson smiled grimly; the nightmare was symbolic, of course, and he wondered just what the dream had symbolized. To dream of eight years of work disappearing overnight ... dream himself captured by machinery! It might be a good idea to talk to Doc Caldwell; he could help. Harry wondered whether he might have been working too hard, then shook his head and stopped thinking about it as best he could. No man, Caldwell had said, should try to analyze his own subconscious.... The nightmare memory faded, driven out of Vinson's mind by the eagerness of watching the machine work. He made coffee, washed his cup quickly, and in another five minutes was driving out across the wide, open plain towards the building. * * * * * Narina Varada was a dark beauty, almost oriental-looking. Her features were sensitive, changing with her mood from a laughing vitality when pleased to a Madonna-like impassiveness when serious. In either case she was beautiful; and when her face reflected terror the sight of it would have moved a bronze image to compassion. But that which menaced Narina was colder than bronze and harder than cold steel. Terror and wonder were in her face now. It was one thing to avoid a machine running wild; it was something entirely different to flee from a machine guided by someone trying to run you down. In either case the machine has no attitude; it is merely the insensate tool. But when a small mobile device, built to perform a routine operation, turns from some job it is not supposed to do and drives you into a corner like a thief interrupted in his work---- That could not be endured without terror. There was no other human in sight but Narina; the machine had no human guidance that she could see. It should, then, be a simple machine that got off its tracks, out of its routine line, easily to be avoided or stopped. But this was no insensate structure of metal and glass. The act of an unguided machine is far from the sentient behavior that trapped Narina in a corner. She could see over the top, and around the sides, of the little machine. The room was filled with rack and panels, and other small devices swarmed along the aisles. Tongs and grapplers that were fashioned only to make routine replacement of parts were not replacing parts. Inexplicably, they were unfastening nuts that held the racks and the panels to the floor. They were lifting each individual bay onto dolly trucks and trundling them out into a field near the building--out where Narina could not see them.