"But I'm afraid-"
"So am I," Forester whispered urgently.
"That's why I want to keep the project safe.
Our missiles can smash those ships.
If that isn't enough, I can modify them to reach Wing IV.
To wipe out that relay station, and stop every mechanical unit it controls.
So don't betray the project, sir!"
"I don't know." The president chewed his parchment lips, trembling with the torture of doubt.
His vague eyes went longingly to the room where the unmasked mechanical was waiting, but at last he gasped impulsively, "All right, Forester, we'll keep your weapon - though I know we won't need it.
Go ahead with the necessary modifications to mount three missiles against Wing IV, and keep your staff alert to launch them if anything goes wrong."
His large Adam's apple jerked nervously.
"But I trust Steel!"
They went back to the outer room.
"-approaching spacecraft are our own," that small black machine was murmuring musically.
"They are sufficiently protected against any unwise attack your primitive warcraft might make against them, but they carry no offensive weapons.
They have come from Wing IV to bring our service, if you choose to let them land."
The Defense Authority voted a few minutes later, with the chief of staff indignantly abstaining, to suspend the antimechanicals statutes in this national emergency, and to open the spaceports to the craft from Wing IV.
Forester hurried away from that damp underground room, tired and alarmed and vaguely ill, to look for a dose of bicarbonate.
Chapter TEN
THE IMPERTURBABLE mechanism which had been Major Steel dictated the sweeping articles of a proposed agreement between the people and the humanoids, which would become final in sixty days if ratified by a vote of the people.
At noon, with that same competent device standing by to prompt him, the old president stood tottering before a battery of new cameras to announce the coming of the mechanicals.
Forester had found his bicarbonate, and a hotel room.
He had soaked out his chill and his aching fatigue in a hot tub and napped for two hours, and he awoke with his brooding unease gone. He even felt hungry again.
Calling room service, he ate while he listened to the president's broadcast.
The promised service of the humanoids was still an unknown quantity, but his first mistrust had been swept away by relief that the decision was made, with the terrible might of his own project still intact.
Mark White's hate and fear began to seem absurd, and he felt something of Ironsmith's bright eagerness to see the new mechanicals.
He saw the ships from Wing IV landing that same afternoon.
Returning in a staff car to his official aircraft, he had the driver pull off the highway where it ran near the spaceport, so that he could watch.
One enormous interstellar vessel was already down, looming immense above the tall, familiar interplanetary liners, which now stood humbly along the edges of the field, towed hastily out of the way.
"Well, sir!" the awed driver whispered.
"Ain't she big!"
She was.
The thick concrete aprons had shattered and buckled under the weight of that black hull, which towered so high that a white tuft of cumulus had formed about its peak.
Peering upward until his neck ached, Forester watched gigantic valves lifting open, and long gangways sliding down, and the hordes of humanoids start marching out to establish their service to mankind.
Tiny against the scale of their colossal craft, the new mechanicals were all identical, nude and neuter, quicker and sleeker than men, graceful and perfect and tireless.
The sun shimmered blue on their dark hastening limbs, and glittered on their yellow brands.
They spread out across the broken concrete by the busy thousands, innumerable.
The first scouts of that dark army came to the high wire fence around the spaceport, near where Forester had stopped.
They began cutting it down, deftly slicing through the heavy mesh with small tools, and neatly piling the sections. Swarming about the task in ever greater numbers, they began to remind him of some social insects.
They worked silently, never calling to one another - for they all were parts of the same ultimate machine, and each unit knew all that any of them did.
Watching, he began to feel a vague impact of terror.
For they were too many.
Glinting with bronze and frosty blue, their hard black bodies were too beautiful.
They were too sure, too strong, too swift.
Unlike any actual insects that he had ever watched, they wasted no time and no effort.
They worked as one, and they made no blunders.
Mark White's apprehension of them seemed better founded now, and he was suddenly grateful for the president's decision to save Project Thunderbolt.
"Let's go!" He tugged at the staring driver's sleeve, and his voice was a husky whisper, as if he were already afraid for the humanoids to hear.
"Drive on - fast!"
"Right, sir."