Automation. Robots took the place of clerks and mechanics in the factories. Machines could remember ten thousand times as many facts as the most efficient human and apply those facts without error. There was dislocation and unrest, but eventually the economy settled down just as it had in the First Industrial Revolution. And then the Great Idea that was so obvious and yet so long delayed. Automation in government. Millions of accurate data on tape to determine the need for a new law or change in the old one. No Senator or Representative could hope to match knowledge with such a device. But the one impregnable argument held for many years: This was mere machine calculation. You couldn’t depend for lawmaking on an operation in which no judgment was involved. Human beings had to be governed by human beings. There was no other way. But finally this limitation, too, was overcome. Marcroft’s invention of the judgment circuit made it possible to construct a machine capable of duplicating human thought. The chain was complete. The changeover was almost painless. Automation, conscription, emergency regulation had been with the world so long that it had become the normal way of life. Here at last was a device that could, without error, direct a man’s life in the most useful channels, and do it for _all_ men on the globe, without favoritism or bias. Here at last was the millennium for which all the prophets and seers had searched. Only a few, like Rick Theron, felt, burning within them, aching remnants of something that was not satisfied or taken into account by the Machine. IV Rick Theron had never been away from the farms before in his life and his first sight of the shining city of Sanlou almost took his breath away and made him forget momentarily his hate and his resolution to defy the Machine. His longing for the fields and ranges, the patient cattle and green crops dimmed a trifle. He hadn’t known a city could be beautiful, too. The plane dropped from the sky almost at the base of its outermost tall building. Only then was he aware that the Watch Police had been observing him closely for a long time. The plane rolled to a stop. “Okay. This is it, farmboy,” one of them said. “Let’s go in and get the manure cleaned off your feet for the last time.” There was no clear impression of what followed immediately--a thousand blurred details of registration, identification, movement through pleasing corridors and rooms, a complete physical examination that included everything but a count of his body cells. Then, at the end of the day, a moment of rest in the chambers of the Orientation Officer to whom he had been assigned. The man was tall, like Rick. He had lighter hair, but a countenance that was no less rugged, as if he knew what it was to work with his hands under the open sky.