The conflict was like a knife slicing him apart inside. What if he made a grandstand gesture now? It would be much worse perhaps than merely being sent into the Wards for a little mental working over. He would be found guilty of sabotage, tried by the Commander's kangaroo court martial, found guilty of being a traitor to his country, a foreign agent probably. He would be placed inside a gas chamber on a stool and a little gas pellet would be dropped on his lap. And anyway, aside from his own punishment, would it be morally right? Maybe I'm the one who is crazy, he thought. Maybe it's hell out there, reduced to God knew what kind of social chaos. Maybe we're about to win. Maybe we're about to lose. Maybe as bad as it is, it's the best one could expect during the greatest crisis. He went inside, and took the elevator down one floor into the lead-lined Pit. He walked up to the control panel and looked through the thick layers of shielding transparent teflo-nite into the Pit, watching the Monster indirectly through the big lenticular screen disc above the control panel. * * * * * The Monster stood in the lead-lined Pit, inactive, as it had been inactive for months. And even before that, during the months when Lewis was learning to control the Monster until it seemed an extension of his own nervous system, its work had become useless, due to unobtainable documents and personnel, not to mention lack of communication with other research centers. The Monster was part of a general plan to compensate for the out-lawing of A- and H-bombs. The most deadly conceivable compromise. The Pit was a deadly sea of radioactivity in which only a mechanical robot monster could work. Outside the Pit, Lewis directed the Monster whose duty was the construction of drone planes. A few had been built, but they weren't quite effective, and now it was impossible to go on with the experimentation. The parts were all there. Everything was there except certain vital classified documents that could not be cleared into this particular Project. Thousands of drone planes were to have been built, and perhaps were being built in some other Project, but not in this one. Thousands of drone planes with raw, un-shielded atomic engines, light and inordinately powerful with an indefinite cruising range, remote controlled, free of fallible human agency, loaded with bacteriological bombs, the terrible gas known as the G-agent, and in addition, loaded 'spray' tanks that would spew deadly gamma rays and neutrons over limitless areas of atmosphere. Lewis moved his hands over the sensitive controls, and through the lenticular disc, watched The Monster respond with the delicate gestures of a gigantic violinist. The Monster was a robot, ten times bigger than Cardoza's barkeep, and when Lewis moved his hands, the Monster moved its own huge mandibles as its electro-magnum, colloid brain, picked up Lewis' mental directions.