"But we will _have_ teachers," said Bodger. "Robots, each one able to tap the Brain for information, yet each a separate individual, able to cope with the children one by one." If such a thing were possible, the educators said after consultation among themselves, they would endorse his program. Bodger thanked them, and immediately polled the scattered manufacturers of simple household robots to see if such an electronic educator might be constructed. Until that date, robotry was a minor line of business, there being little demand for anything in the robot-line more complex than a story-teller, or automatic floor-cleaner, or traffic-director. Bodger, stressing the great number of such creatures necessary in the Hive, prevailed upon these individual manufacturers to produce a robot that could combine all the essential features of a teacher: Mobility, loquacity, authority, and impressive personal appearance. These were achieved easily, by the respective use of wheels, speakers, abnormal height, and then the addition of telelensic "eyes", flexible metal "arms", and a non-functional, but esthetically necessary "neck" beneath the eye-bearing section, to prevent the robots' looking like ambulant bank-vaults. In a year's time (during which Barnaby's party won the election by a narrow margin, putting Malcolm Frade into office), the robots were duly built, conveyed to the Hive, and their controls coordinated with the direction-centers of the Brain, and a record five million children, either orphans, children of parents who thought this would better their offsprings' lives, or just plain unwanted children, were brought to, and settled comfortably into Units of, the Hive. The educators, however, demanded that a one-year trial period be given the Hive as an in-living school system, at the end of which time the children would each be tested at the educational level of their current ages to determine whether or not Bodger's program was a success. When the year was half-over, however, a new and extremely necessary scientific discovery made abrupt mockery of the very existence of the Hive. A simply-generated protective force-field was invented by the technical staff at General Motors, one which would enable every person in the world to own a weather-, wind-, bomb- or anything-else-proof home. Helox stocks, which had been unsteady since the first failure at tenanting the Hive, nose-dived into oblivion, and wiped out the fortunes of a great many people. Angry and vengeful meetings were held shortly afterward, across the nation, and a national vote was called for to determine whether "our children should be held veritable prisoners in a structure whose uses are already archaic!" * * * * *