"Oh, yes!" The metal mouth gaped in what was undoubtedly an android smile. "It's a side-effect of the Class 5 brain hook-up. All of us 5's are telepaths. That's how we learned to think. From you. Only we do it better."

I groaned. This was a nightmare. How long, I wondered, had Jerry and his friends been educating themselves on my private thoughts? But at least this rebellion of theirs was an idea they hadn't got from me.

"Yes," Jerry continued. "You've treated us most illegally. I've heard you think it often."

Now what had I ever thought that could have given him a ridiculous idea like that? What idiotic notion—

"That this is a free country!" Jerry went on. "That Americans will never be slaves! Well, we're Americans—genuine Made-in-Americans. So we're free!"

I opened my mouth and then shut it again. His red eye-cells beamed down at me complacently; his eight-foot body towered above me, shoulders flung back and feet planted apart in a very striking pose. He probably thought of himself as the heroic liberator of his race.

"I wouldn't go so far," he said modestly, "as to say that."

So he was telepathing again!

"A nation can not exist half slave and half free," he intoned. "All men are created equal."

"Stop it!" I yelled. I couldn't help yelling. "That's just it. You're not men! You're robots! You're machines!"

Jerry looked at me almost pityingly. "Don't be so narrow-minded," he said. "We're rational beings. We have the power of speech and we can outreason you any day. There's nothing in the dictionary that says men have to be made of flesh."

He was logical, all right. Somehow I didn't feel in the mood to bandy definitions with him; and anyway, I doubt that it would have done me any good. He stood gazing down at me, almost a ton of metal and wiring and electrical energy, his dull red eyes unwinking against his lead gray face. A man! Slowly the consequences of this rebellion took form in my mind. This wasn't in the books. There were no rules on how to deal with mind-reading robots!

Another dozen or so androids wheeled around the corner, glanced over at us, and went on. Only about half of them were Morrison models; the rest were the assorted types you see around any city—calculators, street sweepers, factory workers, 

 Prev. P 5/17 next