It was the sounds which were his undoing. The colored lights, with their monotonous regularity, failed to rouse him. But the sounds were something else, for even as he responded to them, doing things to the control board in patterned reaction to particular combinations of particular sounds, he was struck with the wonderful variety and the maze of complexity in those sounds; a variety and complexity far beyond that of the colored lights. Thus, being something of an advanced analytic calculator and being, by virtue of his superior feedback system, something considerably more than a simple machine (though he perhaps fell short of those requisites of life so rigorously held by moralists and biologists alike) he began to investigate the meaning of the sounds. * * * * * Bert Sokolski signed the morning report and dropped it into the transmitter. He swung around on his desk stool; he was a big man, and the stool squealed in sharp protest to his shifting weight. Joe Gaines, who was as short and skinny and dark-haired as his colleague was tall and heavily muscled and blond, shuddered at the sound. Sokolski grinned wickedly at his flinching. "Check-up time, I suppose," muttered Gaines without looking up from the magazine he held propped on his knees. He finished the paragraph, snapped the magazine shut, and swung his legs down from the railing that ran along in front of the data board. "Dirty work for white-collar men like us." Sokolski snorted. "You haven't worn a white shirt in the last six years," he growled, rising and going to the supply closet. He swung open the door and began pulling out equipment. "C'mon, you lazy runt, hoist your own leadbox." Gaines grinned and slouched over to the big man's side. "Think of how much more expensive you are to the government than me," he chortled as he bent over to strap on heavy, leaded shoes. "Big fellow like you must cost 'em twice as much to outfit for this job." Sokolski grunted and struggled into the thick, radiation-resistant suit. "Think how lucky _you_ are, runt," he responded as he wriggled his right arm down the sleeve, "that they've got those little servomechs in there to do the real dirty work. If it weren't for them, they'd have all the shrimps like you crawling down pipes and around dampers and generally playing filing cabinet for loose neutrons." He shook himself. "Thanks, Joe," he growled as Gaines helped him with a reluctant zipper. Gaines checked the big man's oxygen equipment and turned his back so that Sokolski could okay his own. "You're set," said Sokolski, and they snapped on their helmets, big inverted lead buckets with narrow strips of shielded glass providing strictly minimal fields of view. Gaines plugged one end of the thickly insulated intercom cable into the socket beneath his armpit, then handed the other end to Sokolski, who followed suit.