"See if you can rotate the fourth dial on the left, on my chest."
But the dial moved with no result. There was no impulse being sent to motivate the big machine.
Lunatic thoughts raced through Comstock's now addled brain. He wondered what vice The Grandfather would have to adopt in order to be cured.
"Don't get panicky," The Grandfather said. "It's only my body mechanism that has been affected. In my top desk drawer there is a pair of pliers. Get them."
Obeying, Comstock saw, in the desk drawer next to some tools, a metal memorandum pad. Scrawled on it he read the idea that had held back his world for five centuries. It said, "All or most diseases can be cured, if the very moral people of a very moral civilization are forced to perform actions which they consider immoral." After this statement there were two more words. These, The Grandfather had evidently never considered objectively. The two words were, True? False?
But Comstock did not pause to think about the statement too much. Instead he grabbed the pliers and asked what he was to do with them.
"Unfasten the rivet that holds my head in place," the robot instructed.
Obeying the command was very difficult, Comstock found, for a variety of reasons. First, he had an ingrained feeling that what he was doing was the height of blasphemy, and then, when he controlled this conditioned reflex, he found that time and rust had almost frozen the rivets in place.
He was sweating by the time he had unfastened all the necklace of rivets.