Bodger immediately left his office in the top level of the Hive and descended directly to the barracks of the robot-teachers in Sub-Level One, thence through the lead-concrete level to the Brain-control chamber, where he put his problem, via the automatic coding-keyboard, to the Brain itself. Its answer came immediately: A step-up of the robots' disciplinary powers. * * * * * In lieu of a hickory switch, or yardstick--either one a decided menace to life in powerful metal hands--the robot-teachers were equipped with mild sonic-beams which could jog the most torpid student into instant and quaking attention, by creating a powerful muscle-spasm throughout the body. These vibratory flagella had a maximum-time limit of one-fifth of a second; longer playing of the beam would be dangerous in the extreme. The Brain suggested that, for the duration of the emergency, the robots be given full scope of this beam. Bodger agreed conditionally: While a phalanx of robots held off the mobs with the beam, the remainder of them should be equipped with Feargas nozzles and the newly developed force-field, to preclude any further incidents of anti-Hive movements from cropping up this way. The Brain instantly revoked limitation-orders regarding the sonic-beams, set in motion the manufacturing and synthesizing forces which would produce the field and the gas jets on the bodies of those robots not sent to participate in the oncoming battle outside the Hive, and then, when the single phalanx had gone out to meet the approaching mass of angry humanity, sealed over every entrance to the Hive with tight-fitting partitions of pure Helox. That this should have been the same day on which global hostility reached its peak was unforeseeable; the fact remains, however, that--forty-five minutes after the sealing of the Hive, at a time when the mobs and the beam-flashing robots were just meeting in brutal conflict--an international nuclear war of one hour's duration broke out, and at the end of that time, the only life remaining on the face of the Earth was that within the Hive, the rest of the planet being bathed in smoke, fire, and the cold flames of deadly radiation. When Bodger had returned to his office to view the battle outside through his private telescreen, where robots and mankind had met, on the scorched plateau outside the city walls, could only be discerned a pitifully few random mounds of molten slag and smoldering cinders. The Brain, seeing the devastation through the same circuits that brought the scene to Bodger's eyes, knew at once that President Frade must have perished in the holocaust, which meant that the Hive no longer possessed a first-in-command to act as a balance against Bodger's rule. It flashed on the proposition screens a demand for an immediate election of a new President, to be selected from the inmates of the Hive.